Compelled To Witness: Women's Memoirs of the French Revolution - Softcover

"Marilyn Yalom shows us the underside of the French Revolution as seen up close through women's eyes. It is a view that we don't often get and one that is absolutely essential to understanding the impact of that still troubling event." -LYNN HUNT Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. Author of The Family Romance of the French Revolution "History is made up of seating arrangements: hence Marilyn Yalom's view of the French Revolution from the women who rocked the cradle of the Dauphin, stood guard while Marie-Antoinette shed her body linen before ascending to the guillotine, and stuck their necks out as insurgents is both rare and riveting. Acting as a literary medium with a latter-day feminist eye, Yalom breathes life into these women memoirists and weaves their miniature epics of personal survival into the larger pageant of French history. A wonderful book." -GAIL SHEEHY Author of The Silent Passage "Marilyn Yalom is to be congratulated for having focused our attention on the value of women's French Revolutionary memoirs, for understanding women's experiences of revolutionary upheaval, and for interpreting women's central roles in communicating those experiences across generational boundary lines." -DARLINE GAY LEVY Associate Professor of History, New York University "A major contribution to women's history. Thanks to Marilyn Yalom, an American, we French now discover ancestors who have been unknown to us, each with her own role - modest or eminent - played during the maelstrom of the French Revolution." -ÉLISABETH BADINTER École Polytechnique de France Author of Unopposite Sex "Yalom uses her expertise to provide a thoughtful feminist analysis of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed. . . A unique contribution to historical studies." -Publishers Weekly "This masterfully crafted book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the French Revolution. . . Scholars and students alike will benefit from this important volume." -Library Journal "A fascinating study that conveys, as few other accounts have, how differently French women, as opposed to their male counterparts, view the costs of liberty, equality and fraternity." -MARY MACKEY San Francisco Chronicle "Not only gives us a vivid and fresh picture of the French Revolution; it inspires us to rethink the old truism about history being written by the victors. History's victims write too, but their accounts sound different-less glorious and much more like the way we imagine things really happened." -FRANCINE PROSE "Yalom's book is accessible and thoughtful, and it has performed valuable service to historical memory by focusing attention on a class of material too often disdained by historians of the revolution, both male and female." -DORINDA OUTRAM American Historical Review

Marilyn Yalom was decorated as an Officier des Palmes Académiques by the French Government, and is the author of several popular nonfiction books, including How the French Invented Love: 900 Years of Passion and Romance, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen. A former professor of French literature, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, Yalom was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins.