A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution

"There is an autobiographical dimension to this. Back in 1989, I was a very young professor at the University of Athens, and I was invited to participate in the events in France on the bicentennial of the French Revolution. There was a big world congress at the Sorbonne at which I spoke. There were two dictionaries published on that occasion. One of them was the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution . It is not an exhaustive dictionary, but a series of essays, which develop a critical perspective on the major controversies related to the history of the French Revolution . It was very important for me and for my own work, and I even wrote a book entitled, The French Revolution in south-eastern Europe , in which I tried to take some of those concepts and ideas and apply them to what was happening in Greece and the Balkans. I always wished we could have something like that book covering the Greek Revolution. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Back in 2017 the president of the Hellenic Culture Foundation , my colleague at the university, Constantine Tsoukalas, asked me what I thought the Foundation might do to commemorate the bicentennial of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution. I said, let’s try to do a Critical Dictionary like the French one. Tsoukalas supported the idea enthusiastically and we began working on the project back in 2017. We managed to get together a group of about 40 contributors and the work was accepted by Harvard University Press and it was published officially on 25th of March 2021, exactly on the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution. It is a volume of 800 pages very nicely produced and illustrated. The whole philosophy has been to be pluralist. For my dictionary I tried to get all the Greek universities involved, not just the University of Athens, and to get all the foreign specialists who could contribute to be in it. My instruction to all contributors was to take the conventional view in their particular subject, and then ask whether it could be confirmed, or should be revised. That’s the idea of the critical dictionary. It is not there to serve any ideological purpose or orthodoxy, but it tries to be pluralist and inclusive. I don’t think that there is a major issue or subject,which is absent. We don’t have individual entries on people or on particular events, but the various protagonists of the revolution are discussed in broadly focused chapters such as diplomats, military leaders, civilian leaders, clergymen, and so on, and we have a chapter, which is one of the longest in the book, on women—what happened to women and what women did in the revolution."