Andress, David 1969–

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Andress, David 1969–

(David Robert Andress)

PERSONAL: Born 1969. Education: University of York, B.A. (with honors), 1990, D.Phil., 1995.

ADDRESSES: Office—University of Portsmouth, Milldam, Burnaby Rd., Portsmouth, Hampshire PO1 3AS, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, lecturer, 1994–99, senior lecturer, 1999–2002, principal lecturer in modern European history, 2002–. Member, Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

MEMBER: Royal Historical Society (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Institut des Hautes Études de la Sécurité Intérieure prize, 1996, for doctoral thesis; research grant, Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, 1999; grant for support of monograph publication, Scouloudi Foundation, 2000; overseas conference grants, British Academy, 2001, 2005.

WRITINGS:

French Society in Revolution, 1789–1799 ("New Frontiers in History" series), Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 1999.

Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution, Boydell Press (Rochester, NY), 2000.

The French Revolution and the People, Hambledon & London (New York, NY), 2004.

The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution, Little, Brown (London, England), 2005, published as The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of chapters to anthologies, including History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, edited by J. Arnold, K. Davies, and S. Ditchfield, Donhead Publishing, 1998; The French Experience from Republic to Monarchy, 1793–1824: New Dawns in Politics, Knowledge and Culture, edited by M.F. Cross and D. Williams, Macmillan, 2000; Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, edited by I. Halfin, Frank Cass, 2002; Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, edited by M. Crook, A. Forrest, and W. Doyle, Ashgate, 2004; and Conspiracy and the French Revolution, edited by P. Campbell, T. Kaiser, and M. Linton, Manchester University Press, in press. Contributor to scholarly periodicals, including French Historical Studies and Cultural and Social History. Member of the editorial board, French Historian; referee for French Historical Studies and French History; coeditor of the H-France scholarly e-mail discussion list.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A project about "melodramatic imagination" in late eighteenth-century France; a study of late eighteenth-century France, for Oxford University Press.

SIDELIGHTS: David Andress is a British historian who specializes in the history of the French Revolution. His first book, French Society in Revolution, 1789–1799, "is one of the better short treatments of the French Revolution," according to History: Review of New Books contributor Eric A. Arnold, Jr. In this title, Andress provides an overview of the historiography of the French Revolution, showing how both social historians and political culture historians evaluate the events of the conflict.

Andress's second book, Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution, takes its title from an event that happened in Paris on July 17, 1791. On that date a group of republicans met on the Champ de Mars, a Paris street later to become the site of the Eiffel Tower, to draw up a petition. After a series of events that are still hazy to historians, troops from the Paris National Guard fired into this crowd, killing up to fifty people. Despite the book's title, Andress is more concerned with the causes of and reactions to the massacre than to the mystery of what happened during the event itself. Specifically, he attempts to show that the republicans of July 17 were not merely members of the lower socioeconomic classes playing out a role assigned to them by the bourgeois leaders of the revolution, but instead were politically aware men and women acting of their own volition. "Discovering what the revolutionary crowd really thought, and just how politically sophisticated it was, is a fascinating—and ambitious—project," Munro Price remarked in the English Historical Review. "This is a nuanced, multilayered analysis from which scholars of the Revolution, particularly those interested in its early stage, will benefit," Michael P. Fitzsimmons wrote in a review for the Journal of Modern History. "Andress is to be congratulated for broadening our understanding of a pivotal event."

The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (originally published in Britain as The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution) expands on the history covered in Massacre at the Champs de Mars, taking the story of the French Revolution from the attempted flight of King Louis XVI in 1791 through the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. These years included the Reign of Terror (1792–94), the period in which the French Revolution turned into a bloody and chaotic civil war in which countless people were killed on the suspicion of being counterrevolutionaries. The Terror has generally been considered by historians to be a dysfunctional display of paranoia and senseless violence, but Andress takes issue with this view. He argues that France was in a true state of civil war and that counterrevolution was a real and present danger, even if the mass murders of the Terror were a gross overreaction to the threat. This is "a bracing historical reassessment," concluded a Publishers Weekly critic, while a Kirkus Reviews contributor deemed the book a "meticulous, readable account of the French Revolution's poisonous politics." "Andress has managed, with high organisational skill and scholarly care, to weave together telling details of persons, places and events with convincingly articulated interpretive themes," Robert Stewart Castlereagh concluded in the Spectator, adding that "all the while the narrative unfolds in its dramatic intensity. His book is a tour de force."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 15, 2005, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, p. 16.

Contemporary Review, October, 2005, review of The Terror: The Civil War in the French Revolution, p. 251.

English Historical Review, April, 2002, Munro Price, review of Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution, p. 483.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 1999, Eric A. Arnold, Jr., review of French Society in Revolution, 1789–1799, p. 25; fall, 2004, review of The French Revolution and the People, p. 29.

Journal of Modern History, March, 2003, Michael P. Fitzsimmons, review of Massacre at the Champ de Mars, p. 169.

Journal of Social History, fall, 2002, Casey Harison, review of Massacre at the Champ de Mars, p. 200.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2005, review of The Terror, p. 1118.

Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2005, review of The Terror, p. 42.

Spectator, August 6, 2005, Robert Stewart Castlereagh, "Protecting the Infant Republic," review of The Terror, p. 38.

Sunday Times (London, England), June 19, 2005, Andrew Roberts, review of The Terror.