Reform and Revolution in France

Every year thousands of items of literature about the French Revolution appear in print. Even scholars of the period find the task of choosing what to read and what to discard a daunting exercise. For teachers and students the challenge can be insurmountable. The present book has been written with the needs of the latter firmly in mind. It knits together a considerable amount of research, often of a fairly unyielding or inaccessible character. The aim is to provide an account of the gestation of the French Revolution which is both up-to-date and satisfying in its range of vision.

Studies of the turbulent history of late eighteenth-century France are prone to suffer from two shortcomings in particular. They tend either to begin, or to end, in 1789, thereby placing ‘old’ and ‘new’ regimes in two water-tight compartments. Moreover, a tendency to emphasise political explanations and narratives at the expense of socio-economic factors has become apparent of late. Of course there are good, even telling, arguments to support these perspectives. This book makes no claim to redirect the thrust of modern scholarship. On the other hand, it does seek to balance arguments envisioning a total rupture in 1789 with evidence of continuity. Similarly, a conscious effort is made to link together the socio-economic and the political legacies of Bourbon absolutism. Only by this route does it seem possible to explain why the outcome of the crisis was not reform ‘from above’, but full-blown revolution.