<i>Life in Revolutionary France</i> . Edited by Mette Harder and Jennifer Ngaire Heuer <i>Life in Revolutionary France</i> . Edited by HarderMette and HeuerJennifer Ngaire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 424 pp., ill.

Judging from this sparkling collection, the current state of historiography of the French Revolution is healthy indeed. Social and cultural history has come a long way since Norman Hampson’s pioneering A Social History of the French Revolution, first published in 1963 (and still in print). The sixteen contributors include both established and emerging scholars, twelve of them women, heavily concentrated in the USA and the UK, with solitary contributors from Canada, New Zealand, and France itself. In their engaging overview of the volume, the editors Mette Harder and Jennifer Ngaire Heuer avoid grand statements about their aims beyond offering ‘a collection of stories of individual and collective experience’ to illuminate the sensations of daily life (p. 12), although they suggest surprisingly that the Revolution ‘anticipated later regimes’ “totalitarian” intrusions into people’s everyday existence’ (p. 2). They also eschew conventional narrative approaches, instead grouping the eclectic contributions around three broad themes. The first is on revolutionary identities and spaces (Jill Maciak Walshaw on rural politics; Laura Talamante on women in Marseille; Hannah Callaway on landlords and tenants in Paris; Christopher Tozzi on the army; Abigail Coppins and Heuer on French Caribbean prisoners of war in Britain). Part Two, on revolutionary justice, has an overview by Claire Cage, then closer studies of surveillance, by Ralph Kingston; prostitution, by Clyde Plumauzille; and the ‘right to health’, by Sean M. Quinlan. The final section, on revolutionary experience, practices, and sensations, ranges widely through discussions of food, by E. C. Spary; Anglo-American imaginings of violence in France, by Ashli White; a broad survey of religion, by Jonathan Smyth; miniature paintings done in prisons, by Sophie Matthiesson; and the lives of parents and children, by Siân Reynolds. This original and illuminating collection will be a rich resource for students and, with its extensive notes and reference, for researchers looking for the current state of our knowledge in multiple fields. Every contribution is accompanied by an illustrative primary source, all well-chosen and sometimes captivating. In Callaway’s words, ‘information about daily life in the past can come from unexpected sources’ (p. 82), in her case from detail in disputes about tenancy agreements when landlords emigrated. There are two limitations to the collection. One is that, while the editors are well aware that many historians now highlight the Thermidorians’ post facto creation of ‘the reign of Terror’ out of the haphazard crisis measures of 1793–94, in general the contributors adhere to time-worn conceptions of ‘the Terror’ as deliberate state policy made ‘the order of the day’ by Jacobin ‘architects’. The second is more important: after Walshaw’s probing chapter, the 85 per cent of French people who inhabited France’s small towns and villages disappear from the stage. There are innovative studies of working women in Marseille, Caribbean prisoners of war in Britain, and the children of prominent revolutionaries, but the collection is otherwise confined to Paris. Nevertheless, this is an outstanding, often brilliant, collection which deserves recognition and frequent consultation for its refreshing insights into the myriad worlds of revolutionary experience.

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