The notion that the ills of ancien-régime France could be attributed to defects in her institutions of government is as old as the Revolution itself. Unversed in the sophisticated theories of socio-economic causation that have gripped the imaginations of historians in more recent times, contemporaries tended to blame the ‘constitutions’ of states when seeking an explanation for civil commotions. Enlightened writers taught that ideas alone were capable of setting the world to rights, and what better arena for a demonstration of the corrective power of ideas than the business of government. In any case, the world of real politics seemed to offer unprecedented scope for renewal in the 1770s and 1780s. The intervention of France in the American colonists' revolt against Great Britain relayed garbled messages concerning ‘representation’ and the right of consent to taxation to every corner of Europe. And such messages fused with domestic pressures which were also nudging Old World monarchies in the direction of institutional reform. Political economy – the science of measurement and mobilisation of the wealth of nations – issued from these preoccupations and served to redouble interest in the functions and responsibilities of government. When Arthur Young ventured upon his travels in France, he did so in the hope of determining ‘the connection between the practice in the fields and the resources of the empire’.