I’m embarrassed by how little I know about the French Revolution. I mean, I thought I knew more than I did. I suppose one can never really know enough about an event as epochal as the French ...

David A. Bell teaches French history at Princeton. His “Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Two hundred twenty-six years after ...

Rewarding strong-stomached readers with a riveting tale, Antoine de Baecque’s Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution (Routledge) limns the era at a visceral level. True, bodies are ...