C. Jones, A. Fairfax-Cholmeley, and S. Macdonald (éd.), The Letters of The Duchesse d'Elbeuf. Hostile Witness to the French Revolution

The Letters of The Duchesse d'Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment:

By Colin Jones, Simon Macdonald, and Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley

The recently-discovered letters of the wealthy counter-revolutionary aristocrat, the duchess d’Elbeuf, offer a vivid and exciting new eye-witness account of the French Revolution and the Terror from the vantage point of a hostile witness to revolutionary change based at the very heart of Paris.

A new, untapped source (unpublished, newly-discovered manuscript)

Offers an unusual counter-revolutionary perspective, hostile witness on the French revolution

A real-time account that offers new insights into the French Revolutionary Terror in Paris and the provinces 

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Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Duchesse d’Elbeuf before 1789
The Duchesse d’Elbeuf’s Revolution
The hôtel d’Elbeuf and the Paris political world
Paris and Moreuil, 1788-91
Flirting with emigration, 1791-92
Paris under terror
The end of the line
The Text: form, style and genre
Note on the text

LETTERS AND NOTES
SECTION 1: 1788–89
SECTION 2: 1790
SECTION 3: 1791
SECTION 4: 1792
SECTION 5: 1793–94

APPENDIX: Other d’Elbeuf letters, 1793-4

List of Persons Mentioned
Sources and Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Illustrations and Maps
Index

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Colin Jones is Professor Emeritus, Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor, University of Chicago. He is the author of many books on French history, most recently Versailles (Head of Zeus, 2018) and The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Simon Macdonald is an Associate Lecturer in Modern European History at University College London. His research focuses on transnational and cultural history, with particular reference to the French Revolution. He is the co-editor, with Pascal Bastien, of Paris et ses peuples au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020).

Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley is Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of several articles on Revolutionary justice and the Terror during the French Revolution and he also researches the eighteenth-century transatlantic via Revolutionary connections between France and Saint-Domingue/Haiti.

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The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.