Upcoming Releases

Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse, 1789-1802 by Marion Loffler

Release Date: July 15, 2012

Publisher: University of Wales Press

The French Revolution inflamed public opinion in Wales just as it did throughout the world. Welsh Responses to the French Revolution delves into the mass of periodical and serial literature published in Wales between 1789 and 1802 to reveal the range of radical, loyalist, and patriotic Welsh responses to the Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. This anthology presents an English-language selection of poetry and prose published in the annual Welsh almanacs, the English provincial newspapers published close to Wales’s border, and the three radical Welsh periodicals of the mid-1790s, all alongside the original Welsh texts. An insightful introduction gives much-needed context to the selections by sketching out the printing culture of Wales, analyzing its public discourse, and interpreting the Welsh voices in their British political context.

Napoleon and the Revolution by David P. Jordan

Release Date: August 21, 2012

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Napoleon was much more than a warlord consumed by vanity and ambition. He was the very spirit of the militant Revolution. Virtually everything he did during the fifteen years of his preponderance was derived from and linked to the French Revolution. Much of his hold over contemporaries was his embodiment of the aspirations as well as the boundless energy of the Revolution. Even his enemies, foreign and domestic, were fascinated by the man and uniformly saw him as 'the Revolution on horseback'. He fought off vengeful reactionary powers long enough for the Revolution to sink deep and permanent roots in France. The Allies who finally defeated Napoleon found it impossible to undo his subversive work - the genii of the Revolution was out of the bottle, and for good. Through his incessant table talk and dictated autobiography he focused the attention of posterity, inculcating his version of himself, events, and their significance.

Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789-1792 by Ambrogio Caiani

Release Date: August 31, 2012

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

The experience, and failure, of Louis XVI's short-lived constitutional monarchy of 1789-1792 deeply influenced the politics and course of the French Revolution. The dramatic breakdown of the political settlement of 1789 steered the French state into the decidedly stormy waters of political terror and warfare on an almost global scale. This book explores how the symbolic and political practices which underpinned traditional Bourbon kingship ultimately succumbed to the radical challenge posed by the Revolution's new 'proto-republican' culture. While most previous studies have focused on Louis XVI's real and imagined foreign counterrevolutionary plots, Ambrogio A. Caiani examines the king's hitherto neglected domestic activities in Paris. Drawing on previously unexplored archival source material, Caiani provides an alternative reading of Louis XVI in this period, arguing that the monarch's symbolic behaviour and the organisation of his daily activities and personal household were essential factors in the people's increasing alienation from the newly established constitutional monarchy.