Gary Kates reconstructs the history of the Cercle Social, a group of writers and politicians who wielded considerable influence during the French Revolution and whose pioneering interest in women's rights and land reform made their club one of the most progressive in Revolutionary Paris. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The economic history of revolutionary France is still a neglected area in studies of the Revolution of 1789. Whilst some attention has been given to the condition of the peasants, the urban working classes and the financial crisis of the Ancient Régime, there has been a general tendency to regard economic factors as external and somewhat peripheral to the truly political nature of the Revolution. This book is designed to redress the balance, providing a clear, accessible, and thought-provoking guide to the economic background to the French Revolution. Professor Aftalion analyses the policies followed by successive revolutionary assemblies, examining in detail taxation, the confiscation of church property, the assignats, and the siege economy of the Terror. He shows how decisions taken in 1789 by the Constituent Assembly inevitably led to a deepening financial and economic crisis, and to increasingly radical and disastrous policies. The study is important also for its exposure of many of the economic fallacies propounded both at the time by many Frenchmen and later by many modern historians.

Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791 plunges students into the intellectual and political currents that surged through revolutionary Paris in the summer of 1791. As members of the National Assembly gather to craft a constitution for a new France, students wrestle with the threat of foreign invasion, political and religious power struggles, and questions of liberty and citizenship.

Collating key texts at the forefront of new research and interpretation, this updated second edition adds new articles on the Terror and race/colonial issues, and studies all aspects of this major event, from its origins through to its consequences.

Lynn Hunt and Jack R. Censer's The French Revolution and Napoleon provides a globally-oriented narrative history of events from 1789 until the fall of Napoleon. It emphasizes the global origins and consequences of the French Revolution and explains why it is the formative event for modern politics. The book integrates global competition, fiscal crisis, slavery and the beginnings of nationalism with the more traditional emphases on human rights and constitutions, terror and violence, and the rise of authoritarianism. This global approach then enables the authors – two world-renowned scholars in the field – to clearly illustrate how the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire changed all the political givens for Europe, the Americas, North Africa and parts of Asia as well. Including numerous illustrations and maps, end-of-chapter questions, timelines and primary source document extracts for analysis in each chapter, this book is essential reading for all students of modern European history who want to understand the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire in a truly global context.

In the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and France appeared to be on a path towards tolerance, pluralism, and civil liberties. A mere four years later, the country descended into a period of political terror, as thousands were arrested, tried, and executed for crimes of expression and opinion. In Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution, Charles Walton traces the origins of this reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that while early advocates of press freedom sought to abolish pre-publication censorship, the majority still firmly believed injurious speech--or calumny--constituted a crime, even treason if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or sacred collective values, such as religion and civic spirit. With the collapse of institutions responsible for regulating honor and morality in 1789, calumny proliferated, as did obsessions with it. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech led to the radicalization of politics, and eventually to the brutal liquidation of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to rebuild society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794. With its emphasis on how revolutionaries drew upon cultural and political legacies of the Old Regime, this study sheds new light on the origins of the Terror and the French Revolution, as well as the history of free expression.

This 1989 analysis of the urban trades of eighteenth-century France lays the foundations for studies of the workshop economy in modern European history.

It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what The Jacobin Republic Under Fire offers.".

The French Revolution remains the most examined event, or period, in world history. It was, most historians would argue, the first “modern” revolution, an event so momentous that it changed the very meaning of the word revolution, from “restoration,” as in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, to its modern sense of connoting a political and/or social upheaval that marks a decisive break with the past, one that moves a society in a forward, or progressive, direction. No revolution has occurred since 1789 without making reference to this first revolution, and most have been measured against it. One cannot utter the date 1789 without thinking of revolution, and so significant were the changes unleashed in that year that it has come to mark the dividing line between early modern and late modern European history Kings This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on the causes and origins; the roles of significant persons; crucial events and turning points; important institutions and organizations; and the economic, social, and intellectual factors involved in the event that gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this period.

Historians have often either ignored Anacharsis Cloots (1755-1794) or considered him deranged because he claimed to be the 'orator of the human race' and devised a 'universal republic' based on the 'sovereignty of the human race'. This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots's written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism. The introduction suggests how 18th-century French cosmopolitanism was a new philosophical tradition, but was composed of several themes, which the book then analyses in Cloots's writings. The first chapter provides a brief overview of his life. The second chapter explains why he called himself orator and wrote pamphlets, and why contemporary readers should not discard this as non-philosophical. Having established Cloots's writings as constituting a philosophical system, the following chapters explores it through the themes laid out in the introduction. First, the concept of reason and his understanding of science. Second, the paradigm of natural law and the role of nature in moral and political thought. Third, the conception of humanity and individuals in nature and society. Finally, republicanism and its principles. The last chapter summarizes the elements of Cloots's cosmopolitan republicanism and opens a research programme to other political thinkers in the age of Atlantic revolutions for historians and political theorists.