Clarke Garrett examines the differing responses of Catholics and Protestants and the resulting disturbances. Roderick Phillips describes the wide variation in provincial response to the revolutionary assembly's family reform measures. He traces the different reactions of urban and rural residents to such legal measures as liberalization of divorces, secularization of birth, death, and marriage registrations, and inheritance reform. Peasants in central France were already engaged in total revolution when Joseph Fouche arrived there in late 1793. Nancy Fitch argues that Fouche was formed by his encounter with indigenous peasant radicalism as much as the peasants were influenced by his rhetoric of a new political culture. Donald Sutherland, summarizing scholarly debate on the subject, argues that, in the final analysis, the Revolution itself was tragically and profoundly alien to many French men and women in 1789.

A wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the question 'How did the French Revolution become thinkable?'.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.

Excerpt from Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution I h'ave been requested to revise and collect into one volume the half-dozen Essays which I contributed to the Quarterly Review' on the earlier period of the French Revolution and I am the more willing to do so, because I believe those Essays contain a good deal of curious, and what is rarer and of more importance, authentic, informa tion on that subject that is not, as far as I know, to be found in any single publication. My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken; it naturally made a great im pression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This text reasserts the Marxist view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Based mainly on articles published in the journal Historical Materialism it challenges the still dominant revisionist view of the French Revolution. It serves to restore the close tie between the history of the Old Regime and the Revolution. It demonstrates that the rise of a bourgeois capitalist class has a long history dating back to the sixteenth century. Moreover, it shows that the Revolution itself played a large role in strengthening the bourgeoisie politically and economically while bringing about the unification of financial and productive capital. Indeed, it shows that the rising of the masses during the Revolution, viewed by revisionism as economically regressive, in fact helped to bring about the consolidation of capitalism.