“My dear philosopher, doesn't this appear to you to be the century of revolutions?” So wrote Voltaire to d'Alembert, his fellow apostle of enlightenment and reform, on 16 September 1772. The remark was more pregnant than either of them would know. Within a few years, their compatriots were to be seized with a passion to create a new society whose ramifications went far beyond anything the Enlightenment philosophers could have imagined. Novel ideas and impulses, radically different modes of political practice and social organization, unprecedented forms of civic and military mobilization, were to sweep out from Paris across Europe once the French set out in 1789 to make the world anew.

In doing so, they gave a profoundly new meaning to the ancient notion of revolution, a meaning destined to transform world history and touch the lives of all nations. Representing their actions to the world as “The French Revolution,” the French imagined a radical break with the past achieved by the conscious will of human actors, an inaugural moment for a drama of change and transformation projected indefinitely into the future. Initiated by a single people, its meaning had necessarily to be extended to all. The revolutionaries saw themselves at the conjuncture of eternity and immediacy, with the fate of all humanity hanging on their every deed. Revolution became an act of universal significance, imbued with meaning for all humankind. It became a moral obligation, inscribed in the logic of human history.