Peter McPhee

France in 1914 was in many ways almost completely different from how it was in 1789. In the 1780s France was an ‘agrarian pre-capitalist society’ in which the ‘location of most industry and the sources of power and most wealth were rural’. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a capitalist society in which ‘an urban, bourgeois and republican culture had become as hegemonic as had been that of the Church and the aristocracy under the ancien régime’. The second edition of Melbourne academic Peter McPhee’s remarkable book, A Social History of France 1789–1914, explains why and how this occurred.

Peter McPhee and Charles Sowerwine, internationally renowned historians of modern France, are both professors of history at the University of Melbourne. Their latest books are what might be termed generalist surveys that provide an extensive overview of modern French history, but in ways that are never predictable and always highly readable. The events of the French Revolution are familiar to many, but McPhee also makes accessible to non-specialists the most contested themes of the Revolution without losing the narrative thread. He brings to the fore the personalities – major and minor, urban and provincial, sympathetic and unsympathetic – that shaped, and were shaped by, these tumultuous times. He has an ear for the ‘voices’ of the Revolution and, while drawn more to some than others, he gives all a fair hearing.

‘He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.’ Thus Donna Merwick invites us into this sad and instructive tale about the colonial Dutch world of North America.