Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850

by Jonathan Sperber

Providing a continent-wide history, this major survey covers the key political events of this turbulent period. Jonathan Sperber also looks at lives of ordinary people and considers broad social and economic developments. In particular he examines the relationships between the different revolutionary movements, showing how the French Revolution of 1789 set patterns which recurred over the following sixty years.

Genres: History, European History, Modern

486 pages, Paperback

First published June 8, 2000

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One interesting point this books makes is that ideological tags like "conservative" or "liberal" didn't mean the same thing back then as they do now. There has been a certain amount of semantic drift, which must be taken into account.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won't be finishing this book. Not because of the information, but because of the punctuation.

Frankly, the author has a love of punctuation that is excruciating and makes most paragraphs read like I need a secret decoder ring to understand them.

I read well - I read quickly and easily; I have a broad vocabulary; I'm excellent at comprehending and retaining what I'm reading. I read college history textbooks for fun.

But this one has stymied me. Nearly every paragraph in this book has at least one sentence with 5 or more commas, often used in multiple ways in the same sentence. Commas are used to create lists, to add clarifying or additional information to a statement, to isolate the year when writing out a date & in other ways I'm not bothering to spell out here.

Sperber includes all three of those uses in a single sentence. Frequently. And his lists are not single word lists, so the reader isn't certain until the end of the sentence if it's a list or clarifying information. Sometimes, he has two sets of lists in one statement, which is also not helpful.

The sentence that has prompted this review included 7 commas (used in all 3 of the ways mentioned), a colon, a set of parentheses and a set of quotations around a single word - which is the first time I've noticed him doing that and it isn't clear why that word is isolated in such a way.

I'm having to read every paragraph 2-3 times to actually understand it.

I'm done. I'm 150 pages into it and I'm calling it done.

[Manuel Martins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Military History, especially in regards to Napoleonic tactics, has serious errors - line infantry kept being the standard in the period, they did not fight in columns (????) while in the field. Only light infantry skirmishers had looser formations and they certainly didn't go marching in a straight column at line infantry. Looking at an era painting for more than 10 seconds would prove Sperber wrong. I'd also like to know where he got the idea of armies living off the land only after the Napoleonic period and Ancien Regime armies being dependent on supply wagons: as far as I know, soldiers lived off looting and pillaging since the Classical Era and he proves himself wrong when he mentions a critical factor of Napoleon's defeat in Russia was his incapacity to keep supply wagons safe while having no way to feed themselves by looting.

Apart from that, Political and Social History is well synthesized. The military part definitely irked me though.

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

idc this is going on my 2023 goodreads goal

[Kori Lumsden]

Read for my Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century history class