I’m trying to accumulate some personal accounts, articles, and books on what the life and culture in French Revolution Paris was like for those in the city. Less focus on the big pivotal leaders and more on the common people. It’s for a story I’m writing so the more personal the better. I’ve got enough reading on the revolution as a whole (for my book) and am now just trying to get a better understanding of the life and culture of people during that time.
And sadly I do not speak or read French so ideally they sources in or translated to English. Thank you very much!
An interesting contemporary source for life in Paris during the Revolution is Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Le Nouveau Paris (published 1798). An English translation in two volumes from 1800 exists with the title New Picture of Paris.
Mercier enjoyed a huge succes with his voluminous work entitled Tableau de Paris, which was published in 12 volumes in 1782-88. That work described life in Paris in the final years of the ancien régime, based on the experiences of the author on the streets of the city and in the homes of Parisians themselves.
After the most tumulteous events of the Revolution, not least including the Terror, Mercier revisited the genre in his Nouveau Paris, which in many respects continously compares the huge differences in daily life in Paris in the late 1790's to when he wrote the Tableau, and as such is a very interesting eyewitness account of how, for better and worse, the Revolution had also "revolutionised" daily life in Paris in just a decade, as written by an experienced journalist and author.