Patrice Higonnet

Historian

Contact Information
Phone: (617) 495-4303 x206
E-Mail: higonnet@fas.harvard.edu


Biographical Statement

Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard. He has written on seventeenth-century painting; eighteenth-century diplomacy; nineteenth-century French deputies, American nationalism, French immigrants to America, French rural life; and Vichy (1940-1944). His Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles (1981) is a study of Jacobin politics. Sister Republics (1988) compares the French and American Revolutions. Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins in the French Revolution (1998) considers the genesis and evolution of Jacobinism during the French Revolution. His Paris: Capital of the World (2002, with a French edition in 2005 and a forthcoming Chinese edition) deals with the history of the French capital from 1750 to 1940. His Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism American History appeared in 2007. He is currently working on a survey of the French Revolution (The Sleep of Reason.) His biography of Marie Antoinette’s architect Richard Mique who designed her toy farm at Versailles, La Mort de Mique, le destin tragique de l’architecte de Marie Antoinette, will appear in November.