Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity--the home, the workplace, and the street--Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a "fragile" society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

    Throughout his book, Kropotkin ties his interpretation of the course of the revolution to the continuous stream of popular action, which he sees as beginning long before the revolution itself. Volume One of The Great French Revolution illustrates clearly the regenerative power of the mass of the people and passes on an important message to future generations and future revolutions.

    In this shocking and controversial book, Reyanld Secher argues that the massacres which resulted from the conflict between patriotic revolutionary forces and those of the counter-revolution were not the inevitable result of fierce battle, but rather were premeditated, committed in cold blood, massive and systematic, and undertaken with the conscious and proclaimed will to destroy a well-defined region, and to exterminate and entire people. Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Secher argues that more than 14 percent of the population and 18 percent of the housing stock in the Vend�e was destroyed in this catastrophic conflict.Secher's review of the social and political structure of the region presents a dramatically different image of the people on the Vend�e than the stereotype common among historians favorable to the French Revolution. He demonstrates that they were not archaic and superstitious or even necessarily adverse to the forward-looking forces of the Revolution. Rather, the region turned agains the Revolution because of a series of misguided policy choices that failed to satisfy the desire for reform and offended the religious sensibilities of the Vend�ans.Using an array of primary sources, many from provincial archives, including personal accounts and statistical data, Secher convincingly argues for a demythologized view of the French Revolution. Contrary to most twentieth-century academic accounts of the Revolution, which have either ignored, apologized for, or explained away the Vend�e, Secher demonstrates that the vicious nature of this civil war is a key element that forces us to reconsider the revolutionary regime. His work, available for the first time in English, provides a significant case study for readers interested in the relationships between religion, region, and political violence.