The French Republic

The French have a particular fondness for ‘encyclopaedias’ and ‘dictionaries’ of historical events. For the most part, these are aimed squarely at a student audience. Publishers know that they have a captive market in the army of lycéens revising for nationwide baccalauréat exams and (a rather smaller number of) students preparing grande école entrance exams or the dreaded agrégation. The target audience usually means that these books prioritise accessible synthesis over historiographical originality. Occasionally, as with François Furet and Mona Ozouf’s famous Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988), they make a mark on academic scholarship, but it is much more common for them to be consigned to library shelves for the benefit of hundreds of overworked students. It is hardly surprising, then, that this should have been exactly what happened to Christophe Prochasson and Vincent Duclert’s remarkable Dictionnaire critique de la République, published by the educational press Flammarion in 2002. It ran to 1,300 pages, contained 200 articles by over 100 experts, and represented some of the sharpest scholarship in the field. No-one was ever likely to read it from start to finish, but it served its function exceptionally well: it was an outstanding reference tool and simultaneously made a scholarly contribution to a civic debate surrounding republicanism that has run through French politics since the early 1980s. Nevertheless, it was not an obvious candidate for an English edition. There is not the same tradition of encyclopaedias in the English-speaking world and few British or American publishers would normally be willing to subsidise the cost of so much translation without knowing that there was a vast audience of potential readers. Clearly, Edward Berenson and Cornell University Press were acutely aware of this problem. Their solution was to use the original French volume as little more than a starting-point. They reused twenty entries from the French volume but they also supplemented these with twenty newly-commissioned articles by English-language scholars. The end result is a modest 300-page book that is much closer to an edited volume than a pedagogical tool

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