Histoire des Girondins Reading Order

Histoire des Girondins (History of the Girondins, 1847) by Alphonse de Lamartine is the most influential work of popular French historical writing of the nineteenth century and one of the factors that made the Revolution of 1848 possible — a vast, passionate, politically charged history of the Girondin faction in the French Revolution, covering the decade from 1789 to Thermidor and depicting its protagonists (Vergniaud, Brissot, Buzot, Mme Roland) as tragic heroes destroyed by the Terror. Lamartine wrote it as a liberal politician trying to rekindle the republican spirit of 1789 and distinguish it from the Terror — the Girondins as the Revolution's good side, the Jacobins as its corruption. The book was accused of historical inaccuracy from the beginning (Michelet demolished it on scholarly grounds), but it was extraordinarily readable and was reprinted and translated throughout Europe; Marx and Engels both read it and argued about it. It directly contributed to the revolutionary atmosphere of 1848, and Lamartine himself rode its wave into government. It is now read as a document of Romantic historiography — the history-as-epic-narrative tradition that Michelet, Carlyle, and Macaulay also represented.