William Doyle (historian)

William Doyle FBA (born 1942) is a British historian, specialising in 18th-century France, who is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition, 1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018).

He is one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, 1775–1790.

He is also professor emeritus of history at Bristol University, a fellow of the British Academy and a trustee of The Society for the Study of French History.

Published works

• Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime (St. Martin's Press, 1975)
• The Old European Order 1660–1800 (Oxford University Press, 1978)
• Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1980; 3rd edition, 1992)
• The Ancien Regime (Macmillan, 1986)
• The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1989; second edition, 2002; third edition, 2018)
• Venality: the Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Macmillan, 1999)
• The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• Aristocracy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Napoleon at Peace (Reaktion Books, 2022)