Introduction

This introduction explains that the book will highlight the manifold ways in which the French Revolution entered the everyday experience of ordinary people, changing the way they saw both the Revolution itself and their own lives. It briefly surveys how biography has previously factored into the history of the subject and then discusses how this volume moves in new directions: expanding the range of subjects, exploring new source material (both “ego-documents” and more unconventional sources), and carefully examining the way revolutionary practices shaped both subjective experience and the recording of it. No individual within France and its imperial formations was the same at the end of the revolutionary decade as at its beginning, and this fact serves to bring together people with wildly different backgrounds and stories.