Historians may be forgiven for supposing that great events must have great causes; their status as professional investigators of the past demands as much. Fortunately, few serious students of the French Revolution have ever doubted the proposition. The events of the 1790s seem to mark a watershed between the old world and the new and they cry out for a major effort of explanation. This book joins many others in seeking to clarify the circumstances that produced the upheaval of 1789. Stated simply, it is about the transition from ‘administrative’ to constitutional monarchy in France between 1774 and 1791. Few things are as simple as they appear, however, and the present volume also puts forward an argument spurred by the scholarly discussions which marked the bicentenary of the French Revolution.

After three decades of research along pathways strewn with discarded theories, the enquiry into the origins of the French Revolution stands at the crossroads, unsure in which direction to proceed. Signposts beckon enticingly towards the ‘political’, the ‘social’ and even the ‘cultural’, but it is far from clear where they will lead. The old certainties sustaining the social or, more often, the socialist interpretation have crumbled amid a welter of new research which has yet to be welded into a constructive alternative. Teachers and even textbook writers find themselves in the uncomfortable position of relying on elderly models of causality which they know to have been undermined in detail.