a while since I wanted to write a little note on the historiography recent French revolution - something like a "contingent history of the Revolution, which does not seek to prove the inevitability of the sequences, but instead emphasizes the chaotic events on the contingencies on the competition between rival powers, etc.. It would find Jean-Clément Martin, for example, or the new edition of Volume 2 of the New history of contemporary France in Points Seuil, where Roger Dupuy replaces a volume of Mark Bouloiseau actually dated in its analysis.
crashing down in rack my bookstore lannionaise usual, a little biography of Louis XVI by Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret I expected, given the reputation of the author, to be able to complete this series - the figure of King and its ambiguities n ' is in fact not without importance in the new approach of the Revolution, far beyond the cliches about the ineptitude of Louis XVI by tossing events.
Alas, alas, alas, three times: the book is mediocre at best, a sort of Mallet and Isaac without the panache. A work order, probably written in a few weeks, and whose author has not clearly not bother to proofread: sentences back as shown in various chapters, commas are unreadable until the sarabande certain phrases ... The most beautiful: the last paragraph of the text can be found sporting a mysterious sentence and totally out of context: The kings of France are represented in color. It took me a while to understand that the sentence should be part of an earlier version of the legend of the Bourbon genealogy presented in the Annex, on the next page ...
Content is sadly in keeping. Enough to make a mediocre conference for any inter-university age, perhaps, but a book? A historian confirmed not only honored to publish this kind of thing. And the French publishers show once again their ineptitude. It's a pity given the smallness of the place given to the story (true) on the book market, a bad book published in condemning the lack good book could have been done seem to instead.
Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret Louis XVI, 1754-1793: The reign interrupted , Tallandier / RMN, 2002 (reprinted in Pocket, 2006).
