A NEW WORLD BEGINS IS THE PRODUCT OF FIFTY YEARS SPENT STUDYING and teaching about the French Revolution, and it would be impossible to name all those who have helped shape my understanding of the subject. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, with whom I took an undergraduate course on social and political philosophy in the revolutionary year of 1968, first showed me that the Revolution was more than a simple demonstration of the rightness of liberty and equality, introducing me to the conservative critiques of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald. A succession of distinguished French historians, from Jacques Godechot, François Furet, and Daniel Roche during my years of graduate study to scholars of my own generation, such as Jean-Clément Martin, Marcel Dorigny, and Pierre Serna, welcomed me to their seminars and introduced me to the many conflicting ways in which the most controversial event in their country’s history can be interpreted. My good friend the late Pierre Rétat and I shared a common passion for the study of the era’s press, and I am saddened that his recent passing means that he will not be able to see this book.
It has been my good fortune to be part of an extraordinarily talented cohort of English-speaking historians of the subject, as well as specialists from Germany, Italy, Israel, and other countries, many of whom have also become friends. It would truly not be possible to mention all of those from whose varied insights I have profited, but a few deserve special mention. In the 1970s, I learned vital lessons about research from fellow graduate students such as Michael Sibalis, who took me on daring expeditions into the back rooms of the French Archives nationales (National Archives) in quest of card indexes that were officially off limits to readers. Patrice Higonnet’s unique perspectives on the subject have challenged me to refine my own views since my student days at Harvard. Lynn Hunt, who was beginning her long career at Berkeley when I was finishing my dissertation there, has been an inspiration throughout my career, and her support was crucial in getting this project off the ground. Keith Baker was an invaluable source of support in the early phase of my career. Timothy Tackett’s exemplary scholarship and intellectual integrity are, I hope, reflected in these pages. I owe special gratitude to Jack Censer, with whom I have debated the French Revolution for almost half a century. He read the manuscript carefully and offered many valuable suggestions. My agent Lisa Adams provided invaluable guidance on courting publishers, and Basic Books editors Dan Gerstle, Brandon Proia, and Lara Heimert have been excellent partners in moving the project toward completion. As much as I owe to my fellow scholars, the interpretation of the Revolution offered in this book is, for better or for worse, my own. Unless otherwise indicated in the notes, so are the translations from French sources.
I began the project that resulted in this book during a year at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina, in 2012–2013, and its timely completion was greatly assisted by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Program fellowship in 2017. Other institutions that have supported my research on the French Revolution over the years include the Newberry Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Council for European Studies, and the University of Kentucky. Like all historians of the French Revolution, I owe a debt of gratitude to innumerable librarians and archivists, particularly the staffs of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), the Archives nationales (National Archives), the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (Historical Library of the City of Paris), the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the University of California Libraries, and the W. T. Young Library of the University of Kentucky. Completing this project left me in awe of the wealth of digitized resources now accessible on this subject, so it seems appropriate to also thank the invisible staffs of the Bibliothèque nationale’s Gallica project, the Internet Archive, Google Books, and the Hathi Trust, among others.
In 2005, when my father, the historian of philosophy Richard H. Popkin, died, I inherited the letters he wrote to my grandmother during my childhood. In one of them, written during my first stay in France in 1953, when I was four years old, he describes trying to satisfy my curiosity about what happens to people after they die by taking me to see Napoleon’s tomb in Paris’s Invalides church. Whether or not that experience subconsciously sparked my interest in the era of the French Revolution, I certainly owe much of my passion for history and scholarship to his example. My mother, Juliet Popkin, was not a published author, but she loved books and constantly urged me to perfect my writing. For two decades, she ran a small independent literary agency, and nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to help promote this project. Both of my parents’ commitment to books owed much to the example of my father’s mother, Zelda Popkin, author of thirteen novels and an autobiography. Her book-lined apartment in Manhattan was a veritable shrine to literature. I have not imitated her writing routine, which consisted of sitting down at her typewriter at 9:00 a.m., working steadily until 1:00 p.m., and then pouring herself a double glass of scotch, lighting another of her innumerable cigarettes, and relaxing for the rest of the day, but she, like my parents, has been in my mind as I have worked on A New World Begins, which is dedicated to my three book-loving ancestors.