The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

The historian writing about the French Revolution in 2001 faces an odd situation, because the long struggle of the Classicists and Revisionists has died down, in part because there are so few Classical historians of the French Revolution still active. That truce is puzzling in some ways, because the Revisionists, although they drove the Classicists from the field, never succeeded in creating a synthesis of their own. Now the old quarrel has moved to the wings; the new historiography of the French Revolution, both in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, has shifted into cultural evolution. [This book] offers a synthesis of the events, but one that integrates material from these different historiographical schools with a careful look at many of the original documents. -Pref