SUNDRIES: An eighteenth century newsletter

IMAGE COLLECTIONS: Imaging the French Revolution

This site - "Imaging the French Revolution" - not only offers (a handful of) images from the Revolution, but includes discussions about the whole presentation and effect of images:

The University of California's escholarship site offers full modern scholarly works for free, many to the public. The ones I've listed below are only a small selection, mainly those from the Early Modern Era or including that period among others:

I was surprised, in searching this list's archives, to see no mention of Darline Gay Levy, whom I first discovered as the author of The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet: A Study in Eighteenth Century French Politics. Simon Schama is only one of many people to praise this work: "Until fairly recently Linguet has been written off as, at best, an eccentric curiosity, too quirky to have had any serious influence on the direction of old-regime politics. A splendid biography by Darline Gay Levy has done the most to rescue him from this obscurity."

Well, up to a point.

For those who don't know this work, it is as much a study of political ideas as it is a biography. Primarily of Linguet's of course, but those were so paradoxical that they touched on others on all sides.

As it turns out she's also co-edited two other works that look interesting: Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795 and The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, and given her own imprimatur to Cynthia A. Bouton's The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society:

A principal merit of this lucidly written, intelligently argued study is that it focuses our attention on community politics in pre-revolutionary France. Cynthia Bouton shows how, during a period of political and economic crisis, rioters formulated and satisfied their demands for food at fair prices. At the same time, they redefined community boundaries and allegiances and renegotiated community power relations, while reshaping individual and collective consciousness in the process.
Darline Gay Levy, New York University

There's also some bilingual dictionaries and more. The one wrinkle is that, unlike even French sites, they're finicky about accents and require input like "e/" for an accented e.

Sure handy otherwise though.

I thought for a moment this week I had found a connection between Simon-Henri Linguet, one of my subjects of study, and the Burneys et al, but it seems that the French word "linguet", which also refers to various mechanical components:

had a slang meaning as well (clearly some form of burglar's tool).