A fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A NY Times cloth bestseller. 200 illustrations.

    

    

    He begins with the relatively peaceful physical and cultural environment of Paris and the provinces, describing attitudes and institutions that existed long before the Revolution and persisted long after it had finished: the structure of Paris, the corporations, guilds, academies, and salons of the city, the rural landscape and its work routine and festivals. He next deals with intellectual movements in the century surrounding the Revolution: the secular, anti-Christian enlightenment, from which the revolution borrowed heavily; neoclassicism as expressed by Jean-Antoine Houdon, Etienne-Louis Boullee, and Jacques-Louis David; the bourgeois drama of such individuals as Louis-Sebastien Mercier; and the cult of sensibility, which slid into terror and horror at the end of the century in the hands of the marquis de Sade and Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. The third part of the book deals with the culture of the Revolution itself. Kennedy shows that this decade was one of disruption- of the church, academies, libraries, universities, and royal and ecclesiastical monuments. But reorganizations and creations also ensued, two examples of which were the National Institute, which came from a restructuring of the academies, and the Louvre, which emerged from a period of art confiscation and vandalism.The French Revolution--the Great Revolution, the Great Fear, the Great Terror--has come to assume mythic proportions. This book, published in the bicentennial of the Revolution, sorts out the contradictory evidence and provides a fascinating perspective on the grandeur of the era and its cultural legacy.