The Significance of the French Revolution
11:00 a.m., Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Professor David Bell gave a very brief overview of the events of the Revolution, related them to significant developments in the political philosophy of the period, and compared them to the events of the American Revolution.

Dr. David Bell holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2005, he was a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has published two principal books: Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford University Press, 1994), which won the Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which won the Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association. In early 2007, Houghton Mifflin will publish his new book The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It.