About "French Reflections"

Welcome to my Substack! I hope you will subscribe. This newsletter is entirely free, and I promise not to flood your Inbox with random musings and rage-posts. The principal purpose is to let interested readers know about my writings—something I used to rely on Twitter for—although I may also post occasional links to things that I find noteworthy.

A little bit about me, for those who haven’t come across my work before. I’m a historian at Princeton University, and my main focus is on French history and the “Age of Revolution” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I’m also the Director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. My most recent book was Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in 2020. I write frequently for general interest publications, most often The New York Review of Books and The Nation. You can find out more about my work on my website, davidavrombell.com, which includes information about my books and links to over a hundred essays and reviews.

My newest publication, in the November 28 issue of The Nation, is a review essay on Carolyn Eichner’s excellent short history of the Paris Commune.

I am a devotee of Rebecca West’s classic essay “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” published in the first issue of The New Republic in 1914, and I’ve practiced what she preached on more than one occasion. In that spirit, I welcome critical comments and suggestions here—even harsh ones (although not ad hominem or obscene, please).