Reviews for Napoleonic Europe (1799-1815) (SparkNotes History Note)

The average rating for Napoleonic Europe (1799-1815) (SparkNotes History Note) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-23 00:00:00 Karen Rubino Two edited volumes on the French Revolution this week. I think edited volumes might be a necessity for the French Revolution. All historians do with this revolution is fight over it. You've got to engage with the fight. You can't just read one monograph and think, we'll that's it...I've got a handle on the revolution now. The Kates book (I read the 2006 edition) is useful for outlining the fundamental historiographic debate. First you had your basic Marxist interpretation - the bourgeois and the lower classes rose up and overthrew the nobles, giving the lower class some class consciousness and giving the capitalist bourgeois the state. Then you have people rejecting the Marxists, arguing that the bourgies hadn't invented capitalism yet, they didn't have any middle class consciousness, and anyway it was really hard to distinguish the nobles from the bourgies at the time. Then you have revisionists to the revisionists, who say well really, come on, even if the middling classes didn't KNOW they were bourgeois capitalists, that doesn't mean the revolution on the whole wasn't a bourgeois capitalist revolution. And you have people arguing about the terror, and what it meant to the revolution, and other people asking what about gender, did anything really change for women in revolutionary France, etc. So does that sound like fun, or did I write bourgeois so many times that you got a headache? If you are going to claim some knowledge of the revolution, you really do need to deal with these arguments.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-09 00:00:00 Daniel George This text is useful as an exploration of different methodologies/approaches to the study of history. Some of the assumptions made in Kates's introduction read as very dated for 21st century academic study though this is understandable considering it was written in 1998. The self-importance of the historian focused on France reads as part of the death knell of late 20th century academia and can be connected with the ways in which the humanities have desperately been trying to reinvent themselves in the early 21st century. Some of the essays make for interesting reading - particularly Part IV with the focus on gender and (post)colonial study. Overall, this is a good text for anyone looking for an overview of some of the key controversies of historical discourse in the mid to late 20th century. If you're not interested in the study of the French Revolution, it can still serve as a useful resource for examples of different lenses with which to view (Euro-centric)history.