This study sets developments within the frameworks both of their unstable social, political and intellectual world and of the official and independent institutions of art.

Lonard Bourdon: The Career of a Revolutionary, 1754-1807 illustrates the ways in which one individual was affected by and influenced the long and turbulent course of the French Revolution. It also rescues an active, intelligent and interesting man from a prolonged period of scholarly neglect and redeems his reputation from being perceived as a particularly cruel revolutionary terrorist. Sydenham follows Bourdon’s political career from the final days of the old monarchy through Bourdon’s active participation in the Revolution. Bourdon was always aware that political development must be accompanied by educational change, and his lifelong interest in education is an integral part of his story. Bourdon left remarkably few personal papers. During the painstaking exploration for details of his life, several critical as well as unfamiliar events of the period have been illuminated, suggesting that similar misrepresentations of many other relatively unknown French revolutionaries have distorted current understanding of this period, crucial to the growth and development of modern democracy.

Who were the Jacobins and what are Jacobinism's implications for today? In a book based on national and local studies--on Marseilles, Nîmes, Lyons, and Paris--one of the leading scholars of the Revolution reconceptualizes Jacobin politics and philosophy and rescues them from recent postmodernist condescension. Patrice Higonnet documents and analyzes the radical thought and actions of leading Jacobins and their followers. He shows Jacobinism's variety and flexibility, as it emerged in the lived practices of exceptional and ordinary people in varied historical situations. He demonstrates that these proponents of individuality and individual freedom were also members of dense social networks who were driven by an overriding sense of the public good. By considering the most retrograde and the most admirable features of Jacobinism, Higonnet balances revisionist interest in ideology with a social historical emphasis on institutional change. In these pages the Terror becomes a singular tragedy rather than the whole of Jacobinism, which retains value today as an influential variety of modern politics. Higonnet argues that with the recent collapse of socialism and the general political malaise in Western democracies, Jacobinism has regained stature as a model for contemporary democrats, as well as a sober lesson on the limits of radical social legislation.

Where, how, by whom and for what were the first museums of contemporary art created? These are the key questions addressed by J. Pedro Lorente in this new book. In it he explores the concept and history of museums of contemporary art, and the shifting ways in which they have been imagined and presented. Following an introduction that sets out the historiography and considering questions of terminology, the first part of the book then examines the paradigm of the Musée des Artistes Vivants in Paris and its equivalents in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second part takes the story forward from 1930 to the present, presenting New York's Museum of Modern Art as a new universal role model that found emulators or 'contramodels' in the rest of the Western world during the twentieth century. An epilogue, reviews recent museum developments in the last decades. Through its adoption of a long-term, worldwide perspective, the book not only provides a narrative of the development of museums of contemporary art, but also sets this into its international perspective. By assessing the extent to which the great museum-capitals – Paris, London and New York in particular – created their own models of museum provision, as well as acknowledging the influence of such models elsewhere, the book uncovers fascinating perspectives on the practice of museum provision, and reveals how present cultural planning initiatives have often been shaped by historical uses.