Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
Bread, Blood & the Guillotine: 15 Gripping Books on the French Revolution
15
items The French Revolution is the ultimate power play: a bankrupt king, a hated queen, starving crowds, brilliant lawyers who became executioners, and a revolution that ended up devouring its own children. The Rest Is History podcast are deep into their F...
Sections
3
THE STORM BREAKS: HISTORIES THAT READ LIKE THRILLERS
QUEENS, REBELS & EMPERORS
FICTION FROM THE BARRICADES
THE STORM BREAKS: HISTORIES THAT READ LIKE THRILLERS
Forget dry textbooks. These are the narrative histories the podcast returns to again and again—packed with characters, cliffhangers and the decisions that turned reform into terror.
The Rest Is History's single most-recommended book on the Revolution. Huge, vivid and full of characters. This copy is a signed first edition for the collectors.
Citizens by Simon Schama (Signed First Edition)
One night in June 1791 the royal family tried to escape Paris—and failed. Tackett shows how that botched getaway set France on the road to the Terror.
When the King Took Flight by Timothy Tackett
How a revolution about liberty became a machine for killing its enemies, real and imagined. Gripping and genuinely unsettling.
The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France by David Andress
The day the Terror ended, told hour by hour. Reads like a political thriller with the guillotine as the ticking clock.
The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones
The best modern one-volume history if you want the whole story from 1789 to Napoleon in a single, readable book.
A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin
QUEENS, REBELS & EMPERORS
The Revolution was made by extraordinary people—and destroyed plenty of them too. These books follow the queen everyone loved to hate, the scandal that ruined her, the enslaved man who took the Revolution's ideals further than Paris ever dared, and t...
The book behind Sofia Coppola's film. A sympathetic portrait of a teenage queen thrown into the most dangerous court in Europe.
Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
A con trick involving a fake queen, a gullible cardinal and a fortune in diamonds. True crime that helped bring down a monarchy.
How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair by Jonathan Beckman
The Haitian Revolution's great leader, an enslaved man who beat the armies of three empires. Prize-winning and long overdue.
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh
The 1938 classic on the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue. Passionate, angry and still essential nearly a century later.
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
The man who ended the Revolution and crowned himself emperor. Published in the UK as Napoleon the Great, and Roberts makes the case for him with real energy.
Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts
FICTION FROM THE BARRICADES
Novels that put you in the crowd, the prison cell and the tumbril. A mix of the great classics and one modern masterpiece—the best way to feel what it was actually like to live through it.
Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins from schoolboys to the scaffold. Written before Wolf Hall, and every bit as good. If you read one novel here, make it this one.
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
London, Paris and the most famous ending in English fiction. The Revolution through Victorian eyes. This is the 1985 Folio Society edition, in as-new condition.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Folio Society Edition)
An English fop who is secretly rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine. Pure swashbuckling fun, and the grandfather of every masked hero since.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
Hugo's final novel, set during the bloody royalist uprising in the Vendée in 1793. Less famous than Les Mis, and just as powerful.
Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo
A young painter becomes a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal and slowly turns into a killer. Short, chilling and terribly relevant.
The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France