Peter McPhee

Peter McPhee was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Robespierre: A revolutionary life (2012); and Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016). He was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) 2003–7 before becoming the University’s first Provost in 2007–9, with responsibility for the design and implementation of the ‘Melbourne Model’. He became a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012. He is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria, the state’s peak body for history.

Peter McPhee reviews 'Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and history' by Patrice Gueniffey, translated by Steven Rendall

December 2020, no. 427 • 25 November 2020

Forty years ago, François Furet outraged the French historical establishment by proclaiming that ‘the French Revolution is over’, launching a blistering critique of the Marxist categories and politics of university historians, many of them still members of the Communist Party he had abandoned in 1959. By the time of the bicentenary in 1989, historians were in bitter dispute over the meaning a ... (read more)

Peter McPhee reviews 'A New World Begins: The history of the French Revolution' by Jeremy D. Popkin

October 2020, no. 425 • 24 September 2020

Jeremy D. Popkin, a historian at the University of Kentucky, fittingly begins his account of the French Revolution with a printer in Lexington enthusing in late 1793 about the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 in his Kentucky Almanac. The printer’s geographic distance from the events in Paris meant that his idealistic vision of the Revolution coincided with its most violent and repressive period ... (read more)

Peter McPhee reviews 'Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely' by Andrew S. Curran

May 2019, no. 411 • 22 April 2019

Andrew S. Curran recounts the only meeting between the two great philosophes Denis Diderot and Voltaire early in 1778 when Diderot, aged sixty-five, insulted Voltaire, then eighty-five, by averring that contemporary playwrights (including, by implication, the two of them) would not brush Shakespeare’s testicles if they walked between his legs. Two months later, Voltaire was dead; a few weeks lat ... (read more)

Peter McPhee reviews 'Napoleon: Passion, death and resurrection 1815–1840' by Philip Dwyer

October 2018, no. 405 • 25 September 2018

A son of the French Revolution, Napoleon embedded in French society the Revolution’s core goals of national unity, civil equality, a hierarchy based on merit and achievement, and a rural society based on private property rather than feudal obligations. To these he added the Civil Code, the Bank of France, and other reforms, but he was never able to establish a stable political regime, primarily ... (read more)