Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850. - Review - book review

Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850. Jonathan Sperber. Longman. [pound]17.99 p.b. 472 pages. ISBN 0-582-29446-0. This new survey is part of Longman's series, the History of Modern Europe. Professor Sperber admits that writing any history about this period, given the crazy world of modern academic censorship, can be difficult: did these revolutions, beginning with the horrors of the Parisian uprising, usher in a new age of freedom or were they examples of 'sexism', 'racism' and so on and so forth, all showing that there is nothing so out of date as dead revolutionaries.

The author eschews these wilder pitfalls and believes that this period has much in common with our own. He holds his wide-ranging text together by concentrating on major themes which include economic development, social changes, the growth in the power of the state over men's lives (for good and ill, often ill) and finally, the debate over 'political participation'. Rather sadly he refers in his introduction to the old canard about Marie Antoinett e's telling the riffraff of Pails who lacked bread to eat cake instead, without adding that it was an invention.

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