Part 23

C. H. Van Tyne, A History of the Founding of the American Republic. 2 vols. Boston, 1922, 1929. A standard work of professional historical scholarship.

C. FRANCE

A. Aulard, The French Revolution: A Political History. English translation. 4 vols., New York, 1910. The best example of official Republican history of the great revolution, by one who was in some ways a spiritual descendant of the Girondins. Leftist and anti-clerical bias.

C. Brinton, A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799. New York, 1934.

G. Bruun, Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814. New York, 1938. This book and the preceding one, volumes 12 and 13 of The Rise of Modern Europe, edited by W. L. Langer, provide a critical bibliographical guide to the period of the French revolution, and incorporate the important modern research in the field.

A. Cochin, Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie. Paris, 1921. Essential to the study of the work of pressure groups in the preparation of the revolution. Conservative bias.

P. Gaxotte, The French Revolution. English translation, New York, 1932. Perhaps the most sensible of modern works written avowedly from a point of view far to the Right--Royalist, in fact. But since almost all Americans get their knowledge of the French revolution from conventional anti-clerical Republican professors of the Third Republic, Gaxotte’s work is recommended as an antidote.

A. Lichtenberger, Le socialisme et la révolution française. Paris, 1899.

A. Mathiez, The French Revolution. English translation, New York, 1928. La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur. Paris, 1927. Mathiez was the heir of the Mountain as Aulard was of the Gironde. Mathiez is a reliable investigator of facts, and he was interested in the kind of facts we are now interested in. His generalizations are ruled by an extremely innocent version of the doctrine of economic interpretation of history. Although he indignantly denied he was partisan, he clearly belongs rather far to the Left.

D. Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française. Paris, 1933. Most of the necessary material implied in the title, conveniently assembled. Mornet has conventional French Republican notions about the role of the philosophes in the preparation of the revolution. Excellent bibliography.

F. Rocquain, The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French Revolution. English translation, abridged, London, 1894. An attempt to lessen attention on the writings of the philosophes and turn it to concrete quarrels and grievances in the last years of the old regime.

H. A. Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France. English translation, 6 vols., New York, 1876-1894. The classic attack on the revolution and all its works, written by a disappointed liberal and French patriot after the War of 1870. Still a mine of information, though its particular bias is no longer shared by many in the modern world.

D. RUSSIA

The total output of books on Russia since 1917 is enormous, and little of it measures up to the more rigorous standards academic historians like to impose. It is suggested that an intelligent reader of the following would not, however, be hopelessly misinformed about the movement, and could attempt to integrate his knowledge of what has been going on in Russia with what has gone on in other modern revolutions.

W. R. Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia. New York, 1929. A clear, factual analysis of the machinery of government. The recent constitutional changes do not seriously alter Batsell’s picture.

W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution. 2 vols., New York, 1935. A careful piece of work, written by an American with a command of Russian sources. Chamberlin is not a Communist, but save to more rigid Marxists, his work will appear reasonably detached. Good bibliography.

Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937. Lyons is an American radical whose long residence as a newspaper correspondent in Russia turned him against Stalin’s rule. When allowance is made for this bias, the book remains the best account in English of “Thermidor in Russia”--though see under Trotsky below.

James Mavor, The Russian Revolution. New York, 1928. A brief account.

L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution. English translation, 3 vols., New York, 1936 (also a single-volume edition). This will probably be Trotsky’s masterpiece. A vivid narrative, heightened by excursions into Marxist interpretation, mostly very keen and even sensible. Chamberlin and Trotsky, read together, make the best introduction possible to the study of the Russian revolution. Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, New York, 1937, is a bitter and interesting attack on the present regime in Russia, which he himself has christened “Thermidorean.”

S. and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 2 vols., New York, 1936. For American readers, this is probably the best and most persuasive defense of the present regime in Russia, and may be recommended as an antidote to the writings of disenchanted liberals and angry Trotskyites. But it is a very soft and academic book, and the Webbs are surely at least as much doctrinaires as others who have written on Russia.

II. The Wisdom of the Ages

The formal study of revolutions as a part of the science of sociology is a very recent thing. But revolutions are not new, nor is serious thinking on revolutions new. From Plato and Aristotle on one can collect a very valuable set of remarks on different phases of revolution, mostly from books not primarily concerned with revolutions. We have not here attempted to do more than give a random sample of what might be done with this sort of thing. Most of the men we have chosen to cite below were not purely intellectuals in anything like the modern sense, and it would seem that, unsystematic though this section of our bibliography is, it contains more wisdom about revolutions than our fourth section, in which we list a few contemporary works formally concerned with the sociology of revolutions. Most contemporary writers on matters sociological are of course intellectuals.

Plato, The Republic, especially Books VIII and IX.

Aristotle, Politics. Book V is the famous discussion of revolutions, but the whole work, and especially Book II, is almost as pertinent.

Polybius, History. Book VI contains the well-known account of the reasons for Roman political stability, which by contrast throws a good deal of light on our subject, political instability.

Thucydides, History. Book III, 82.2 begins one of the best clinical reports ever written on what we have called the crisis of revolutions.

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Almost every chapter contains something of use for the student of revolution. Book I, Chapters XXV and XXVI, are especially recommended for the light they throw on differences between revolutions like those of England and France and those of contemporary Turkey or Italy.

Sainte-Beuve, “Le Cardinal de Retz,” in Causeries du Lundi, vol. 5, especially the passage beginning “ces pages de ses Mémoires qu’on pourrait intituler: Comment les révolutions commencent.” The interested reader may well wish to follow this up by reading De Retz’s own memoirs, which are easily available in numerous editions in French. There is an English version in Everyman’s Library.