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Books Like Histoire des Girondins
Best books to read after Histoire des Girondins by Lamartine
Lamartine's passionate 1847 popular history of the Girondin faction in the French Revolution — the work that helped trigger 1848 and made him briefly head of government. Now read as a document of Romantic historiography: history as epic narrative, with portraits of Vergniaud, Mme Roland, and Charlotte Corday as tragic heroes.
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Buy on AmazonThe French Revolution
by Thomas Carlyle
The major English counterpart — Carlyle's 1837 epic prose history of the Revolution from a very different ideological position but with the same epic-biographical approach and literary ambition.
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Buy on AmazonHistory of the French Revolution
by Jules Michelet
Michelet's massive scholarly counterpart (1847-53) — published in the same years as Lamartine's Girondins, and more historically accurate while equally passionate; the contrast between the two is the contrast between partisan epic and scholarly passion.
- 3Buy on Amazon
The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
The popular fiction that drew on the same Romantic historiography of the Revolution — the Girondins-as-heroes narrative that Lamartine popularized became the template for much Romantic historical fiction about the Terror.
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Buy on AmazonA Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens read Carlyle's history closely, but the sentimental rescue plot of A Tale of Two Cities draws on the same tradition of sympathetic portraits of Terror victims that Lamartine established.
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Buy on AmazonCitizens
by Simon Schama
The best modern equivalent — a narrative history of the Revolution that treats it as a literary drama with individual protagonists, in the tradition Lamartine and Carlyle established.
- 6Buy on Amazon
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
by Karl Marx
Marx's 1852 analysis of how the Second Republic failed — the historical sequel to what Lamartine's Girondins prepared; Marx explicitly responds to the Romantic historiography Lamartine represented.
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Buy on AmazonMemoirs of Madame Roland
by Marie-Jeanne Roland
The primary source — Mme Roland's own memoirs written in prison before her execution, which Lamartine used and which are the most important document behind his portrait of her.
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Buy on AmazonRaphaël
by Alphonse de Lamartine
The autobiographical novel published the same year — reading the two together shows the range of Lamartine's 1847-49 productivity and the contrast between his political and personal writing.
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