History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1294–1337, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00448.

Origins of the French Revolution

Gail Bossenga*
The College of William and Mary

Abstract
There is at present no comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the French
Revolution. Because of the fragmented state of the argument, this article explores
several perspectives that have influenced research on the Revolution’s origins
including Alexis de Tocqueville’s view of the state; research on the politics of the
court at Versailles and the parlements; fiscal origins by institutional economic
historians; and cultural approaches, including the analysis of the public sphere by
Jürgen Habermas. It concludes that the collapse of the Old Regime was the result
of a variety of converging causes, many of which had deep roots in the institutional
structure of the old regime. The state itself generated institutional contradictions
by both reinforcing privilege and implementing policies that undercut privilege in
the quest for greater administrative efficiency. Ministerial incompetence combined
with new forces, including enhanced international pressure from efficient British
war finance and the growing appeal to public opinion, made reform increasingly
difficult and created conditions favorable to revolution when the state went bankrupt
in 1789.

The debate over the origins of the French Revolution has been both a
fruitful and frustrating one. At present, no comprehensive explanation for
the coming of the Revolution exists, and given the fragmentation of not
only the field of French history, but history in general, it is unlikely that
one will emerge. The historiography has been influenced by a wide range
of factors: contemporary political changes including the fall of Communism
and the rise of feminism; the critique of Marxist categories of historical
analysis; the interest generated by cultural modes of inquiry including
anthropology and linguistics; and the more mundane, but equally important,
disagreements fostered by conflicting interpretations of empirical evidence.
Although these trends have contributed stimulating perspectives to the
debate, they have also made it difficult to create an overarching narrative
that brings together insights from multiple perspectives and prioritizes causal
factors.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the interpretation that held out the promise of
an integrated perspective on the origins of the Revolution was the Marxist
one, and, in particular, the position advanced in the work of Georges
Lefebvre and Albert Soboul.1 According to the Marxist interpretation, the
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1295

genesis of the Revolution could ultimately be traced to the conflict between

social classes, which were defined by a group’s position in the mode of
production. In 1789 the dominating class, the nobility, whose power was
rooted in a ‘feudal’, agrarian mode of production, was overthrown by a
rising bourgeois class, whose fortunes were tied to the development of a
new ‘capitalist’ economy based in trade and manufacture. The French
Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in the specific sense that it brought
a capitalist bourgeoisie to power and created a juridical framework – i.e.,
free trade and representative democracy – that would protect its interests.
Revisionist historians soon pointed out a variety of empirical problems
with this view. One was the question of leadership. The men of the Third
Estate, largely lawyers and lesser officeholders, could described as bour-
geois in a general sense, but for the most part, they were not merchants and
manufacturers with a vested interest in the growth of capitalism. Most
members of the Third Estate, furthermore, put their money in safe,
non-capitalist sorts of investments – land, offices, and rentes (annuities and
bonds) – rather than in banking, manufacturing, or trade. Meanwhile, a
small, but critical, number of wealthy, well-connected nobles could be
considered capitalists: they invested heavily in enterprises like metallurgy,
glassmaking, military supply, and so forth. Owing to the destruction of
French commerce during the wars unleashed in 1792, furthermore, the
Revolution appeared to hurt the development of commercial capitalism, at
least in the short run.2 Thus, it did not appear that the primary significance
of the Revolution was to bring to power a capitalist bourgeois class,
even if it could be said that the bourgeoisie, defined in a wider, non-
Marxist sense of a professional middle class, did acquire a greater voice in
political affairs. Exposing the political stakes in the debate, the polemical
French historian, François Furet, decried the Marxist interpretation as a
‘revolutionary catechism’ that had ‘its ancestors, its traditions, its canon, and
its vulgate’.3
While revisionist historians were busy dismantling a class-based inter-
pretation of history, historical sociologists were debating another issue related
to a Marxist perspective: the degree of autonomy of the state. If political
power was an outgrowth of a class’s position in the mode of production,
then was the state simply the handmaiden of the dominating class? One
important theorist, Theda Skocpol, emphatically stated no, and contended
that states had independent interests that might come into conflict with the
elite. Rather than looking to the rise of capitalism, Skocpol stressed the
importance of international rivalry and war in the state system as a cause of
revolution. Using a comparative perspective, she argued that states like
France, Russia, and China, whose internal structures could not meet the
demands placed on them by war, faced bankruptcy, collapse, and revolution.
The most important result of revolution was not the rise of a new class, but
the consolidation of a stronger, centralized, and modernized state that could
compete effectively once again in world affairs.4
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1296 . Origins of the French Revolution

Bailey Stone deepened the analysis of French geopolitics as a cause of

revolution. Although agreeing with much of Skocpol’s approach, he observed
that she did not give enough importance to cultural and ideological factors.
By 1789, according to Bailey, the French state could only succeed in
international competition if it opened up governmental positions, notably
the aristocratic army officer corps, to merit and talent: ‘the Revolution’s
origins lay above all in the need of France to harness its people’s aspirations
and talents to its geopolitical and other statist requirements’.5 T. C. W.
Blanning’s synthetic work on The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787 – 1802
explored how war both created conditions for the Revolution and shaped
its trajectory down to Napoleon.6 From the perspective of great power
politics, the conclusion seemed to be: ‘No war, no revolution’.Viewed in
this way, the collapse of the old regime had less to do with the rise of
capitalism than with the need of the state to revamp its institutions and to
mobilize the resources of its citizens in order to win, and pay for, war.
The revisionist attack on the Marxist interpretation was more successful
in opening up issues for debate than in advancing a new interpretation of
the causes of the Revolution. Historians were left to ponder questions such
as: if ‘class’ in the Marxist sense was not the best way to define social groups
in the old regime, what definition should be used? How should the domain
of the ‘social’ itself be defined?7 What was the role of the state? If the state
was not a servant of the dominant class, how should it be characterized? If
cultural norms cannot be reduced to the interests of particular classes, and
if ideas cannot be correlated to material interest in a consistent fashion,
then how should historians study the cultural and ideological origins
of the Revolution? Finally, how much weight should be given to impersonal
‘structural’ conditions as a reason for revolution, and how much to the
intentions of historical actors and the contingent nature of events?
Given the breadth of these questions, it is hardly surprising that scholars
have taken a wide variety of approaches and borrowed from a number of
disciplines to explore them. Rather than one overarching interpretation of
the origins of the Revolution, there has tended to be multiple perspectives,
which are not necessarily incompatible with one another but tend to remain
partial: cultural origins, religious origins, financial origins, political origins,
geopolitical origins, and even a renewed Marxist plea for classic ‘social’
origins.8 Historians also face the question of how to reconcile long-term
origins, which tend to be structural in nature, with short-term origins,
which emphasize the contingent nature of specific events and decisions by
individuals.
This article cannot address all of these issues. Instead, it will take several
theoretical perspectives that have influenced the work of historians and
explore how they have contributed to our understanding of the Revolution’s
origins. By identifying critical questions and goals for study, theoretical
frameworks guide historical research. They help scholars to decide what to
put into their work and what to leave out. Although none of the current
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1297

frameworks provides a comprehensive explanation of origins, several have

been particularly important in stimulating research. Among these are: Alexis
de Tocqueville’s work on the state; the renewed interest of British historians
in the politics of the court and parlement; research on the Revolution’s
financial origins by institutional economic historians; and cultural approaches
including the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, the study of sexuality, and analysis
of the ‘public sphere’, the latter stimulated by the work of Jürgen Habermas.

The Problem of the State

An understanding of the state in the old regime is critical to assessing the
origins of the Revolution. The bankruptcy of the government and calling
of the Estates General was the most direct trigger of the Revolution, and
arguably the most important consequence of the Revolution was to redefine
the nature and operation of state sovereignty by removing it from the king
and vesting it in the ‘Nation’. Yet trying to provide a coherent theory of
the ‘state’ in the old regime, and its role in creating the conditions for
revolution, has proved to be a difficult task. According to one Marxist
perspective, elaborated by Perry Anderson, the so-called ‘absolutist’ state
formed an alliance with the privileged nobility in order to subjugate and
extract rents from the peasantry.9 Directly opposed to this view has been a
long line of ‘liberal’ historians who saw the state primarily as a progressive
force that opposed aristocratic privileges which blocked reform of the
state. As these historians emphasize, the monarchy’s attempt to impose a
more egalitarian system of taxation led to vitriolic battles between the nobility
and royal government and ultimately helped to precipitate the final fiscal
crisis of 1787–88 that provoked the calling of the Estates General.10 Because
of its opposition to reform, the nobility, and not the royal government,
stood largely to blame for the bankruptcy and collapse of the old regime.
Both of these perspectives offer insights into the old regime, yet neither
can be considered correct. One historian who offered a more complex view
of the state that transcended these dichotomies, although not completely,
was the nineteenth-century man of letters,Alexis de Tocqueville. In L’Ancien
régime et la Révolution, not only did Tocqueville provide a subtle analysis of
the independent importance of the state in shaping social relationships and
habits, he offered an alternative, institutional framework for looking at social
groups, the ‘corporate group’ instead of the socio-economic ‘class’.11
According to Tocqueville, the Revolution represented the culmination of
the process of centralization. Since the Middle Ages, France had been
organized into corporate bodies – guilds, towns, magistracies, provinces,
and the like – that possessed privileges guaranteeing their liberties and
empowering them to run their own affairs. Gradually, however, various
agents of the monarchy, notably the intendants, had started to take over the
work of corporate groups, thus eliminating the possibility for meaningful
participation in the political life of the nation. By abolishing corporate groups
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and their privileges in the name of equality, the Revolution completed the
process of centralization and thereby turned the French citizenry into an
undifferentiated mass of like-minded individuals.
One historian who recognized the importance of Tocqueville was François
Furet, who proposed a re-examination of Tocqueville’s work as one possible
antidote to the Marxist ‘catechism’. Despite Furet’s appeal, however, no
Tocquevillian ‘school’ on the origins of the Revolution emerged. Furet’s
observations on the role of language of the Revolution proved to have far
more impact than his appeal to bring Tocqueville back in, although he did
update his earlier work on Tocqueville by writing an important introduction
to a new English translation of Tocqueville’s Old Regime and the Revolution.12
One reason for the failure of a distinct Tocquevillian approach may be
that Tocqueville’s analysis of the old regime was simultaneously too simple
and too complex to become a blueprint for research. On the one hand,
Tocqueville argued that the motor process of the old regime and Revolution
was administrative centralization. Officials of the crown, in particular the
king’s men in the provinces, the intendants, steadily siphoned power away
from local, privileged corporate groups so that even small decisions like
repairing a parish church required royal intervention. Because Tocqueville
believed that privileges of local corporate bodies were repositories of liberty
where the French learned habits of independence, the government’s actions
undermined the most important base of freedom in the old regime. Even
the Enlightenment, a supposed school for liberty, was tainted by the
centralizing process. Because French subjects, including those of elite status,
could not participate in the work of government, they turned to the ‘men
of letters’ who were politically inexperienced and offered abstract, fanciful
theories about political rights that stood no chance of actually taking root. As
a result, when the Revolution actually broke out, Frenchmen were unable
to institutionalize liberty in a meaningful sense and ended up with a powerful
government that rode roughshod over civic liberties instead.
Tocqueville’s picture of centralization was, undoubtedly, overstated. For
a variety of reasons, corporate groups remained vital in running the state
and could often be found working with intendants on local administrative
issues.13 Furthermore, the precocious nature of centralization seemed to
obviate the need for the Revolution. If centralization was already so advanced
in the old regime, why was the Revolution necessary? Why did not the
state simply continue to evolve along the same centralizing lines until the
corporate regime just withered away? The seeming lack of a causal
mechanism, like the Marxists’‘class conflict’, offered little explicit direction
to researchers.
On the other hand,Tocqueville’s analysis had a more complex side, one
which attracted Furet and others. Tocqueville emphasized unconscious
habit, rather than the systematically developed ideas of the great thinkers,
as a powerful source of human motivation. He thus presaged a kind of
cultural analysis favored by many historians today. Yet Tocqueville did not
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1299

center his attention on what scholars today call ‘discourses’ (see below p. 21),
but on institutions, whose resources, rules, and patterns of membership
molded human behavior and ideas, often in ways that historical actors did
not even perceive.
One of Tocqueville’s central preoccupations was to explore how an
egalitarian revolution could emerge out of a society founded on rank,
privilege, and hierarchy. The central actor in this story was the monarchy,
whose policies set off contradictory institutional processes. The crown did
centralize institutional networks in certain respects, as noted above. But, the
crown also unleashed decentralizing impulses. Most notably, it repeatedly
sold venal offices in government posts and thereby seriously undercut the
process of unification by parceling out government functions to the highest
bidder. Far from allying with the privileged elite as a class, furthermore, the
monarchy divided it and played sectors of the elite off one another. This
was done, in part, by multiplying privileges that became dissociated from
their original functions. The government’s oscillation between centralizing
tendencies that undermined privilege and decentralizing measures that
reinforced other dimensions of privilege gave rise to a ‘group individualism’
in which social groups were seemingly as concerned about their prerogatives
as ever, but, in fact had become more homogenous in outlook as a whole.
In this way, as Furet observed in his essays on Tocqueville, the French
monarchy had surreptitiously created the conditions for a modern,
individualistic society in an old regime still obsessed with rank and status.
Contradictory government policies, institutional habits only dimly
recognized, and unanticipated outcomes thus characterize Tocquevillian
analysis. The historian drawn most explicitly to this mode of thinking has
been David Bien, who has studied the effects of venality of office and
institutional splits within the elite in some detail. Bien has suggested that
the monarchy’s own sale of offices, many which conferred a title to nobility
over time, both dramatically increased the number of nobles in France and
made it impossible for royal ministers to reform society. Because under the
terms of the sale of offices privileges like tax exemptions became part of an
officeholder’s property, such privileges could not be eliminated unless the
government reimbursed officeholders for the investment in their offices. The
failure of reform, therefore, was not simply a result of the selfishness of
privileged groups like the parlements, but was also a rather predictable result
of the wider contradictions created by the monarchy itself. As for the idea
of ‘group individualism’, Bien proposed that democratic practices inside
corporate groups during the old regime laid the conditions for modern
democracy, once the external trappings of corporate bodies were destroyed
in the Revolution.14
Several students of David Bien have continued to work from an
institutional perspective with Tocquevillian overtones. Michael Kwass has
provided a detailed examination of royal taxation on privileged elites in
Normandy and the ensuing politicization; Hilton Root has argued that royal
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1300 . Origins of the French Revolution

policies shored up Burgundian village communities in the quest to maintain

the rural tax base; Gail Bossenga has looked at how contradictory royal fiscal
policies in Lille stymied reform and helped to lay the foundations for the
revolutionary repudiation of privilege; Raef Blaufarb has explored how both
venality and the influence of the court at Versailles frustrated effective reform
of the army officer corps and led to demoralization within its ranks before
the Revolution; and Jay Smith has illuminated the centrality of the concept
of ‘honor’ and how this hierarchical notion underwent a process of
nationalization among military reformers. Although no overarching narrative
links these diverse studies, all point to ways in which the interaction of the
state and institutionally defined social groups helped to create the conditions
from which the Revolution and the notion of egalitarian, participatory
citizenship emerged.15

High Politics: Versailles and the Parlements

The social interpretation of the Revolution provided little incentive for
studying high politics of the royal government. Since the ‘real’ political
struggle was supposedly between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, attention
was directed to studies of social mobility or investment patterns, and not to
relations between the government and elite. In recent years, the work of a
number of historians has changed that. In particular, several British historians
have focused their attention on the politics of the court of Versailles,
especially how factions of courtiers vied for favor and influence and the way
in which royal ministers had to navigate among them. This approach – with
its emphasis on ministerial management of factions and place-seeking at
court – has much in common with Sir Lewis Namier’s work on English
politics in the eighteenth century, so much so that several historians have
dubbed this as the ‘Namierite’ approach to the old regime.16
One useful outcome of this perspective has been to shift scholarly attention
away from that bugbear of the old regime, bureaucracy, and toward the
very important, but severely neglected, institution of the royal court at
Versailles. In many respects, the court – which consisted of both the king’s
household and his council – was the true heart of the Bourbon state. British
historians have not been the first to call attention to the importance of the
court. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of the ‘patrimonial state’, in which
the state was analyzed as an outgrowth of the king’s household, Norbert
Elias presented a stimulating thesis of the court as a system of power
orchestrated by Louis XIV. By expanding an intricate system of court
etiquette, the Sun-king honored the social privileges of the great nobility,
but simultaneously made the whole system revolve around the glory of the
king. Over time, however, court etiquette trapped the Sun-king and his
successors alike, so that this elaborate system could not be discarded or
reformed without calling into question the king’s own power base itself.17
A valuable recent addition to the literature has been Jerome Duidaen’s
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comparative study of the Bourbon and Habsburg courts in Versailles and

Vienna, which calls our attention to the slow pace at which domestic aspects
of the court became separate from administrative ‘bureaucratic’ ones.18 In
fact, the continued interpenetration of household and administrative affairs
meant that courtiers and members of the royal family held great informal
power simply by virtue of their access to the ear of the king, the source of
sovereign authority. Because the court was so integral to the structure of
the Bourbon patrimonial state, this kind of state could never fully attain
bureaucratic rationality. Often bureaucratic procedures developed from the
routinization of earlier domestic practices and relationships. The network
of intendants, for example, grew out of faction-based patron-client relations
at court and always retained an aspect of clientalism, even as the intendants’
duties became more extensive, depersonalized, and legally established over
time.19 Regarded from a patrimonial perspective, then, the Revolution
represented a significant break with the past, and not a simple intensification
of administrative centralization, as Tocqueville suggested.20
The recent British political study of the court has been based in empirical
research on ministerial careers and institutional dynamics.21 Although the
genre of biography had earlier been pushed to the side by more structural,
social studies of the old regime, the British study of the court placed renewed
emphasis on uncovering the details of ministers’ lives in order to understand
decision-making. This has been a welcome addition to understanding a
political system whose operation rested so heavily on the king’s personal
sovereignty and, hence, his personality and choice of ministers. Another
important characteristic has been to show how factional rivalries at court
could spill over into the politics of the parlement of Paris and feed hostility
between royal ministers and the sovereign court. William Doyle, who was
instrumental in developing the early revisionist approach to the social
interpretation of the Revolution, also helped to open up this kind of political
analysis in an early article on the Maupeou coup of 1771, in which he argued
that serious conflict between the monarchy and parlements was not endemic
to politics in the eighteenth century, but developed primarily as a result of
ministerial rivalries at Versailles.22 Overall, this line of study has been
interested in showing how a combination of ministerial divisions, factions
at court, and periodic ministerial mismanagement of the parlement of Paris
weakened the king’s legitimacy and undercut opportunities for reform,
thereby making the monarchy vulnerable to revolution. In a recent collection
of essays on the Origins of the French Revolution edited by Peter Campbell,
this kind of political analysis figured prominently, although not exclusively.23
Campbell has taken the broadest political approach to the problem of the
court, making it the touchstone for defining the nature of the Bourbon
state.24 In his monograph, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720 –
1745, Campbell asked how the institutions at the heart of the Bourbon
monarchy operated under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in order to try to figure
out why they were unable to do so 1789. Campbell is dismissive of claims
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that the eighteenth-century state had evolved into a centralized administrative

monarchy. Patronage, family ties, and ownership of high-level venal offices,
complemented by connections to court financiers, were the keys to power.
Given his acute awareness of the limitations that factionalism, ministerial
rivalries, negotiations with the parlements, continual endebtedness, and
eventually public opinion imposed on the king’s sovereignty, it is
understandable why Campbell eschews the use of the term ‘absolute
monarchy’ or ‘absolutist state’ to describe this regime. Instead, he calls the
old regime a ‘baroque’ state (and occasionally a ‘patrimonial’ one), defined
as ‘a socio-political entity whose structures were interwoven with
society’. Although this state may have looked strong, it was ‘in fact
deceptively weak and ill-suited to the challenges of increasing fiscal needs
and ideological opposition’. The reason for the unraveling of the regime
was not the result of an outside force like the Enlightenment or the rise of
a new class like the bourgeoisie. Rather it stemmed from the internal rivalries
at the heart of the state itself: ‘politically, the dissolution of the regime began
at the centre’.25 Two trends bode particularly ill for monarchical stability:
ideological opposition in the form of Jansenism, a dissident movement in
the Catholic church outlawed by Louis XIV, and the emergence of the new
force of public opinion. Both themes have become central in a wider debate
on revolutionary origins.
Julian Swann’s reaffirms this line of thinking in his cogent analysis of the
Parlement of Paris in the latter part of Louis XV’s reign. He sees turning
points such as the Maupeou coup of 1771 and the Revolution itself as the
product of both personal ineptitude and structural constraints: like the
Revolution, the Maupeou coup was a ‘short-term accident with long-term
causes’.26 During Louis XV’s reign, radical rhetoric about national rights
pioneered by a handful of determined Jansenists became incorporated into
the routine parlementary language; war finance increased the influence of
the parlements which approved loan packages and new taxes; ministers were
willing to impugn the reputation of the king for their own advance; courtiers
plied the king with mistresses in an attempt to gain influence; and Maupeou’s
restructuring of the parlements opened up a ‘Pandora’s box’ of constitutional
theories. The events and controversies surrounding Louis XV, who ‘never
ruled’, thereby seriously weakened the institution of monarchy.
Swann thus repudiates the idea that Maupeou’s action against the
parlements was a show of royal strength, quite the contrary. For Swann, this
act was essentially a miscalculation of massive proportions on Maupeou’s
part. It can be pointed out that Maupeou’s remodeled parlements did operate,
although only temporarily and in part by using clients of Maupeou to staff
the Parisian court. The original parlements recalled by Louis XVI,
furthermore, were initially chastened and complacent, until the mid-1780s.27
Yet the very victory of Maupeou, Swann implies, demonstrated to the
parlementaires and the public that dramatic, permanent institutional change
was needed to curb ministerial ‘despotism’. No longer was it possible for
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the parlements to claim that they effectively represented the ‘Nation’: after
this ‘all the magistrates could do was carry the flame for the Estates General’.28
Thus, an unintended consequence of Maupeou’s apparent triumph was a
permanent upping of the rhetorical ante, thereby ensuring that future
conflicts would revolve around demands for far stronger constitutional
controls.29
As the work of Hardman on Louis XVI and Munro Price’s analysis of
the royal minister, the comte de Vergennes, show, Louis XVI never
transcended the structural problems embedded in the system that he
inherited; in fact, his attempts to escape them may have only compounded
his problems. Appalled by his grandfather’s [Louis XV’s] philandering, Louis
XVI wanted to be a good king, and began his reign with the pledge ‘no
new taxes, no bankruptcy’. But the only way that he knew of to assure his
strength was to make sure that no other minister became too strong. Thus,
although his intentions were different, the result was similar: ministerial
scheming, chronic ministerial changeover, and failure to coordinate royal
policies.
The structural pressure points within the ‘baroque’ state remained all
too familiar. Because the court of  Versailles was an aristocratic household
writ large, the informal power of women and family members was ever
present. Although under Louis XVI no mistress had a hand in effecting
policy, unlike the active role of Madame de Pompadour in the previous
reign, eventually Marie Antoinette came to fulfill this role. Louis XVI’s
ministry became split between two hostile, rival partis, one of the king and
one of the queen. In addition, although lower rungs of the administration
were developing bureaucratic accountability, ministers and other high-
ranking venal officeholders at the center continued to regard their depart-
ments as their own fiefdoms, so that the controller general could never gain
control over the spending of huge portions of the government, including
such expensive enterprises as the royal navy.30 Participation in the War of
American Independence, meanwhile, had left the government heavily
endebted and more dependent on the parlement of Paris to rubber-stamp
new taxes and loans.
At any moment, structural pressures could turn into crises with ripple
effects throughout the system, and this happened all too frequently,
particularly from the mid-1780s on. Ministers undercut one another. Because
Vergennes was afraid that Necker, who was financing French participation
in the American war, would become too powerful, he contributed to the
scheming that brought down Necker. Likewise, because the minister
Breteuil, head of the Maison du roi (the king’s household) felt isolated several
years later, he actually tried to undercut passage of the loans that Calonne
was trying to float in the mid-1780s. Courtiers always had to be appeased.
In 1783, Calonne was chosen to be controller general, in part to placate
powerful courtiers. Yet the parlement also had to be coaxed continually
into cooperating with the royal government. Unfortunately for the royal
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government, many members of parlement hated Calonne. Eventually the

antagonism between Calonne and the parlement drove Calonne to call the
Assembly of Notables to rubber-stamp loans for the nearly bankrupt
government. Many historians regard this move as the opening salvo of the
Revolution, the so-called ‘prerevolution’.31
The cogent analyses of court politics showed how deeply embedded
structural problems, like unsupervised departmental spending and chronic
war-related debts, were greatly compounded by ministerial bungling and
factionalism. The latter, particularly rivalries of courtiers, were so routine
under Louis XV and Louis XVI that they might be considered structural
elements of the patrimonial state. The result was that royal allies were
frequently left hanging at critical moments and the legitimacy of the
monarchy was repeatedly called into question. Rather than being
characterized by a process of progressive evolution, the state in the old
regime, it could be argued, was typified by ‘involution’, whereby the
opposing interests of different sectors of the state folded in on themselves
and made reform, or even stable government, difficult. The origins of the
Revolution, then, become located largely within the heart of the patrimonial
state itself.
The British political approach to the old regime, which at its best blends
recognition of structural trends with close attention to the personality and
choices of those in power, is an important addition to the discussion of the
genesis of the Revolution. How the internal politics of the court is related
to wider cultural issues is not always clear, and the role of discourses in
framing the thought of social actors is dismissed, in some cases unfortunately
so. Maupeou’s radical restructuring of the parlements, for example, may
rightly be attributed to ministerial strategizing gone dramatically awry, but
to justify his actions Terray resorted to a readily recognized ‘administrative’
discourse which cast his policies as a kind of beneficial rationalization under
monarchical tutelage. A stronger sense of the growing power of public in
opinion in the old regime might have led Price to examine more fully the
importance that the comte de Vergennes placed upon controlling the book
trade.32
The study of the court has also added new insights into the social
interpretation of the nobility. The Marxist interpretation had cast nobles as
conservative opponents of the rising, liberal bourgeoisie, but this perspective
was hard-pressed to explain the existence of liberal nobles, who, despite
their ancient and distinguished pedigrees, joined the reform-minded
Committee of  Thirty that campaigned for vote by head in the Estates
General. The revisionist work of Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret turned the
Marxist thesis on its head by presenting wide evidence for the liberalism of
the court nobility, which he attributed in large part to the nobles’ progressive
participation in capitalist enterprises such as coal mining, glassmaking,
and government-chartered trade companies. Chaussinand-Noagaret’s view
of the court nobility, however, failed to explain why some court nobles
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1305

remained very conservative and others retreated from liberal positions as the
Revolution progressed. Recently, Gail Bossenga has challenged the idea
that the capitalist enterprises in which court nobles invested represented
modern, progressive, forms of capitalism. Rather, these activities invariably
formed part of a privilege-laden, monopolistic, and seigneurial or
state-controlled kind of ‘court capitalism’, which would hardly be likely to
give rise to liberal noble politics.33
It would seem, therefore, that noble liberalism had more to do with
political settings than capitalistic ones. Vivian Gruder’s studies of the
Assembly of Notables have breathed new life into the study of this revived
institution. According to Gruder, members of the high nobility were
genuinely interested in reforming the state and carving out a new role for
political participation among the elite.34 By contrast, British court historians
Daniel Wick and Rory Browne have argued that self-interest played an
important role in leading court nobles to embrace liberal reforms. Tired of
being cut from the spoils at court, which had become monopolized by Marie
Antoinette’s clients, the Polignacs, members of a number of very prestigious,
wealthy, and ancient nobles houses decided to cast their lot with reform and
a new, base of power, independent of the court. ‘The society of Thirty’,
contended Wick, ‘represented the fusing of two anti-governmental and
anti-ministerial traditions among the nobility: the “outs” at Court and the
[parlementary] union des classes’.35 Whether for reasons of self-interest or
altruism, the politics of court nobles helped to ensure that by 1789 the court
had ceased to function as an independent unit and its factions were
transmuted onto the wider national battles of the Revolution and
counter-Revolution.

Institutional Economic History and French Finances

While English historians were deciphering politics at court, a group of
economic historians turned to the study of French finances from the
perspective of comparative institutional economics. This perspective
stemmed, in part, from the work of Douglas North, who was interested in
assessing what gave rise to the superior economic performance of European
countries like the English and Dutch, rather in examining than the origins
of the French Revolution per se. According to North, standard neoclassical
models of economic growth did not look at ‘transaction costs’, that is the
cost of acquiring information, enforcing contracts, securing property rights,
and the like. These costs were strongly influenced by institutions that
enforced ‘rules of the game’, which groups in a society agree to follow, or
are coerced to accept. Of all the institutions structuring society, one in
particular, the state, played a pivotal role. The structure of the state
determined the security of property rights, which, in turn, established a
baseline for economic growth. If the state was arbitrary, it would seize
property through taxation, monopolies, or other predatory practices. If the
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1306 . Origins of the French Revolution

state was weak, it would not be able to protect investments or enforce

contracts. Thus, the form of the state, in particular its legal system and fiscal
policy, was essential to setting transactions costs that shaped economic
performance. North argued that Spanish and French economic achievement
lagged behind the British and Dutch, because the former had high taxes and
inefficient policies like venal offices.36
In 1989 Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article that
quickly became a reference point for the debate on the relationship between
representative institutions and low-cost public finance. By placing the British
Parliament in charge of debt servicing, they argued, the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 transformed the British government into a trustworthy or ‘credible’
borrower and thereby allowed it to mobilize massive amounts of credit at
low interest. Whereas absolute monarchs could repudiate debt contracted
for the needs of the state on their own sovereign authority, members of
Parliament had little incentive to do so, since they were elected by creditors
of the state. This symbiotic relationship between creditors of the state and
Parliament lay at the heart of the so-called ‘financial revolution’ of Britain.
Because lenders were no longer worried about default, no default premium
had to be calculated into the cost of a loan. British rates of interest on bonds
dropped to between 3 and 4 percent in the eighteenth century, and Britain
was able to finance its wars – fought mainly against France – through
relatively inexpensive loans.37 The obvious point of comparison to the
credible commitments of the British Parliament, of course, was the ‘absolute’
monarchy of France, whose representative body, the Estates General, had
not met since 1614 and whose bankruptcy in 1788 led to the Revolution.
The debate in institutional economics, then, revolved around to what degree
fiscal policies in France, including its reputation as a non-credible borrower,
created the conditions for a revolution.
These questions were not entirely new. As historians including David
Bien, William Doyle, and John F. Bosher, had shown, the French govern-
ment faced a number of important structural problems that helped to lock
it into a long-term cycle of high interest rates and institutional rigidity from
which it could not escape.38 Tax privileges of various sorts, first of all,
hindered the government’s ability to increase taxes of many kinds. In
particular, any new taxes levied on the privileged elite were bound to provoke
political protest by the parlements. Second, lacking adequate tax revenues
to service its war loans, the monarchy was forced periodically to default,
which confirmed its reputation as an untrustworthy borrower. The result
was to confirm the monarchy’s fate of borrowing at high interest rates.39
In addition, because the French state had neither a public bank, like the
Bank of England chartered by the Parliament, to issue loans nor a Parliament
to back up loans, another whole level of intermediaries existed in France to
advance money to the monarchy and to generate a degree of trust among
lenders. One set of intermediaries consisted of privileged administrative
bodies, like the City of Paris, the Assembly of the Clergy, and provincial
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1307

estates whose credit was regarded as more worthy than that of the
monarchy. A second set consisted of high-level financiers involved in tax
collection, including the corporation of the Farmers General, tax farmers
who bid for the right to collect indirect taxes for the king, and the Receivers
General, who owned venal offices and transmitted direct taxes to the royal
government. A third group consisted of privileged venal officeholders in
the judiciary and administration that had nothing to do with finance per se,
but that the monarchy squeezed from time to time in various sorts of
disguised forced loans. The result of all of these intermediaries was that the
mobilization of credit was inextricably linked to groups with strong vested
interests in the status quo and the maintenance of privilege. The credit
system, furthermore, reinforced administrative decentralization, because
each group that advanced the king money had a set of revenues earmarked
to service these loans, and tax officials treated the revenues flowing through
their coffers as part of their own little fiefdoms that no one else, even
ministers in the royal government itself, could touch. Any attempt to
centralize and make the fiscal operation of the monarchy more efficient
immediately ran up against the interests of powerful, privileged intermediaries
that supplied the royal government with credit.
From an economic, institutional perspective, then, the French Revolution
was a product of deeply ingrained political obstacles to raising taxes and
lowering the cost of credit. That in itself is hardly controversial. More
contentious is the issue of whether the French fiscal system was so ineffective
that only a revolution could solve its structural problems, and why, when
France had slogged its way through so many previous crises, 1788 –89 was
the one that ended in repudiation of the whole fiscal system. In his article,
‘Was There a Solution to the Fiscal Crisis of the Ancien Regime?’ Eugene
White argued that the financial crisis of 1788 was predominantly a short-term
problem, and that Louis XVI’s ministers could have defaulted in 1788, just
as they had so often in the past, rather than resorting to the drastic measure
of convoking the Estates General.40 The work of other historians, however,
suggests that political conditions and cultural expectations had changed
enough since the crown’s last repudiation of debt in 1771 that Louis XVI
no longer regarded default as an option.
One of the problems in evaluating the financial system of the old regime
was that some elements were evolving and modernizing, while others
remained rigid and archaic. In his important study of the finances of the
Seven Years’ War, James C. Riley offered evidence for both the changing
nature and perception of royal debt. According to Riley, the monarchy
gradually decreased its reliance on forced loans from venal officeholders after
1713 and turned to a system of voluntary lending mediated by the market
for long-term credit. (It should be noted here that long-term credit was
most affected by the movement toward voluntary lending through the sale
of bonds and annuities; short-term lending was still mediated by tax farmers
and receivers owning venal offices.) The move toward voluntary lending
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1308 . Origins of the French Revolution

made the issue of credibility more acute, because lenders could withhold
their money if political conditions were unfavorable. Already in the 1750s
and 1760s royal officials in the government were counseling the king to
honor royal debts rather than to treat them with aristocratic nonchalance. A
central preoccupation of the royal government, therefore, became how to
avoid default on its debts and become a credible borrower. One solution,
argued Riley, was that finance ministers advised the monarchy to issue life
annuities whose interest payments expired when the life specified in the
contract ended. Although this might seem to be a logical solution to bringing
down the debt, because as people died the interest owed to them would
disappear, in fact, this was a very expensive policy which compounded the
problem of French endebtedness. Life annuities paid out very high interest
rates in the short term, 9 –10 percent. As a result, this kind of borrowing
put enormous, immediate pressure on the government, and after the Seven
Years’ War the government was forced to suspend interest payments in
1771, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the government’s best intentions.
Riley suggested that part of the problem of the French was that French
finance ministers (controller generals) were not bankers or financiers, but
were chosen for political reasons and lacked the skill to find the best kind
of loans for the royal government. Other historians have rejected the thesis
of the incompetent controller general. Velde and Weir demonstrated that
French interest rates in the eighteenth century corresponded closely to what
the market demanded and remained high because a default premium was
factored into them.41 In any case, it does appear that the royal government
was attempting, albeit unsuccessfully, to honor its debts from the mid-century
on.
If the turn toward voluntary lending on markets was one sign of moder-
nizing tendencies within the French absolute monarchy, measures to expand
that lending public were another. Philip Hoffman, Giles Postal-Viney, and
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal demonstrated that notaries, who sold over half of
the initial emission of the monarchy’s long-term securities (rentes), developed
sophisticated techniques to match up lenders with borrowers. By the 1780s
approximately 60 percent of the government’s rentes were held outside of
Paris by provincials and foreigners.42 As a result, not only members of the
middle class, but even artisans, seamstresses, servants, and wage earners had
become creditors of the French monarchy.43 By 1789, creditors of the French
state formed a socially diverse, transnational, politically aware body, who
kept abreast of French government policies by reading internationally
distributed newspapers like the Gazette de Leyde.44
The expansion and politicization of the lending public meant that default
had wider political ramifications. David Weir has shown, for example, that
Louis XV’s government wooed middle-class Parisians to buy tontines, a form
of life annuity with highly attractive rates. Terray’s suspension of payments
in 1771 politicized this relatively new group of lenders and prepared the
Parisian bourgeoisie ‘for mobilization in defense of their interests in the fiscal
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1309

crisis of the 1780s’.45 Thomas Luckett has traced monetary crises in the old
regime and shown how these were frequently related to royal financial
policy. He concludes that by the mid-eighteenth century, a financial public
had become ‘a force that the Crown had to take account of. By refusing to
lend to the king at a moderate rate of interest, it could effectively paralyze
all the operations of the state’. The political history of eighteenth-century
France thus became dominated by attempts to preserve ‘public confidence’
in financial policy. Maintaining confidence was certainly not the strong
point of the government by the end of the old regime. In the 1780s, no less
than three controller generals fell during credit crises that shook both
governmental and mercantile circles. Luckett concludes that even if
businessmen did not actively direct the movement of the Revolution, the
new financial public still passively played a determining role ‘by granting or
refusing its confidence to the policies of different administrations’.46
Complementing the growing savvy of the lending public was the evolving
role of the parlements. As Kathryn Norberg pointed out, at the time of the
Maupeou coup and Terray’s default in 1771, public opinion was not strongly
developed enough to counter the government’s arbitrary measures, and calls
to convoke the Estates General were only beginning to be heard. The drastic
restructuring of the parlements by Maupeou, however, taught the members
the sovereign courts, and the public, that it was imperative to have a stronger
institution, with an institutional base independent of the monarchy, to check
royal ministerial ‘despotism’. By 1788, the parlements were far more insistent
in their demand for the Estates General, and the ideology of the rights of
the Nation had become commonplace. ‘The key here is politics’, stated
Norbert, ‘. . . Financial problems became entangled with political problems
and a simple request for a loan involved liberty, sovereignty, and the natural
law’.47
Thomas Sargent and François Velde have queried whether France did
not miss opportunities for creating national representation earlier in its
history. During the Regency after Louis XIV’s death, there was talk in court
circles of calling for an Estates General to deal with the Sun-king’s massive
war debts.48 In his comparative analysis, Public Debt and the Birth of the
Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688–1789, David Stasavage argued
cogently that it even if an Estates General had been called in 1716, a wider
culture of accountability did not exist in France at this time and hence an
Estates General would most likely have simply authorized a default, just as
absolute monarchs had in the past.49 Critiquing North and Weingast’s
argument, he states that it was not simply the presence of a lone institution,
such as the British Parliament, that created confidence in lending, but a
broader commitment to financial stability, including a durable two-party
system.
A final, and important, tension inside the modernizing system of French
credit was between long-term credit, increasingly organized by voluntary
lending on public markets, and short-term advances supplied primarily by
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1310 . Origins of the French Revolution

court-connected financiers and tax farmers, known as the Farmers General,

who collected indirect taxes and administered state-sanctioned monopolies.
The short-term credit system, as noted above, formed an essential element
of court capitalism. The financiers associated with this system had con-
solidated their grip over time through the advance of funds, the purchase
of offices, the negotiation of favorable leases, the provision of kick-backs to
powerful courtiers, and even the provision of mistresses to the dissolute
king, Louis XV (the notorious Madame de Pompadour). Administratively,
as John Bosher has emphasized, the separate accounts of these financiers
made the financial system unwieldy, expensive, and virtually impossible to
control from the center. As important, the system virtually locked into place
taxes, like the salt tax (gabelle) or tariffs between provinces, that secured
advances from the General Farm.
Periodically there were attempts to reform the system. One goal of such
reform was greater administrative efficiency. In order for a finance minister
to gain the knowledge and power to control spending from the center, venal
offices would had to be bought out and leases with the Farmers General
renegotiated. A subtext of fiscal reform, however, was the battle between
two kinds of financial networks: Protestant bankers tapping international
capital markets as opposed to traditional French Catholic financiers,
sometimes dubbed la finance, who were firmly entrenched at court. The
Scottish Protestant John Law was the first person to attempt to destroy the
system of la finance with his ‘system’, which crashed and allowed court-based
financiers and venal officeholders to reassert their control.50 The next serious
assault on the system was by the Genevan banker, Necker, who not only
borrowed enormous sums for the royal government on international money
markets but also abolished many high-level venal financial offices in an
attempt to streamline costs and create a rational hierarchy of subordination
among officials. Necker’s fall brought back la finance in full force, but the
attempt to rationalize the royal Treasury and abolish excessive numbers of
venal offices was taken up, once again, by the finance minister Loménie de
Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, on the eve of the Revolution. Significantly,
it was the failure of short-term credit, controlled by court financiers, that
forced Brienne to call the Estates General.
Was this crisis of short-term credit deliberately created? It is possible. In
his wide-ranging study of venality in the old regime,William Doyle observes
that,
the financiers must also have known, from Brienne’s own published intentions,
that his medium-term objective was to eliminate anticipations, their stock-in-
trade, even as he proceeded to abolish the venal offices which gave them access
to royal funds. Why should they prop up a minister committed to their
destruction? In this sense, it was venal vested interest [of la finance] that dealt the
Ancien Régime its final blow.51
The failure of the French credit system in 1788, then, seemed to be a product
both of the politicization of a the new lending public outside the government
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1311

and the central government’s own ambivalence about continuing a system

of short-term credit resting on venality and tax-farming. By introducing
efficiencies and centralizing measures, officials like Necker and Brienne
could help to convince the lending public of the government’s credibility
and thereby mobilize credit more inexpensively. Yet rationalization also
entailed alienating court-connected financiers who had strong vested interests
in the status quo, and who still were essential to keeping the monarchy
financially afloat up until the Revolution. Reforming officials did not found
a way out of this dilemma.
The other major defect of the French financial system was its limited,
inequitable, inefficient tax base. Although the image of the over-taxed
French subject often been evoked to explain the origins of the Revolution,
an article by economists Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien challenged this
idea. Citing the heavy taxes imposed on England, they argued provocatively
that France was not characterized by too much taxation, but too little,
taxation.52 Although for some areas like heavily burdened Paris this was not
true, there is reason to believe that the weight of taxation was not beyond
the capacity of French subjects.53 More important were regional disparities,
arbitrariness in assessment, and lack of political participation.
Obstacles to increasing the tax base were varied. One problem was
simultaneously cultural and technical: the royal government lacked the
information to assess wealth accurately, and subjects believed that they had
the right to guard this knowledge closely. As Mireille Touzery’s careful
study shows, the royal government wished to rationalize the assessment of
the taille by by placing tax collection under paid professionals reporting to
the intendant and by creating new tax rolls based on land surveys and
personal declarations of land revenues. All attempts failed miserably. The
idea that taxpayers should reveal the state of their private finances to the
government, ‘le secret de leur famille’, created a furor, and venal officeholders
in the cour des aides, the court that heard financial cases, launched blistering
attacks on the intendants who would oversee the reform. In the end, the
government’s effort did have unintentional results. Although the measure
failed, it still contributed to promoting a vision of an administrative society
based in individualism, property-ownership, and technical expertise rather
than the traditional principles of corporate identity and status.54
A second, and notorious, obstacle to raising taxes was privilege. Privileges
were both geographic and social in nature: they were attached to cities and
provinces, as well as to different forms of social status. Although privilege
was justified in part by medieval principle, many privileges, such as those
attached to venal offices, were products of the development of the state
itself. Beginning with the last of Louis XIV’s wars, the enormous cost of
military conflict forced royal ministers to try to find ways to end fiscal
exemptions and to challenge the principles on which a society of privilege
had previously been erected. Direct taxes such as the capitation, dixième, and
vingtième were levied on privileged groups, although the clergy successfully
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1312 . Origins of the French Revolution

resisted these taxes, and provincial estates negotiated payments through lump
sums, or abonnements, that left them in charge of overseeing collection.
How successful the monarchy was in undercutting old tax exemptions is
debated. An older article by C. B. A. Behrens opened up the debate by
arguing that by the end of the old regime the French nobles bore as heavy,
or even heavier, tax burden than the English gentry. Guy Chaussinand-
Nogaret, by contrast, argued that nobles were still able to use their influence
to reduce their level of taxation. ‘As for my taxes’, observed the duc
d’Orléans,‘I always arrange things with the intendant’.55 Recently in a recent
case study of Normandy, Michael Kwass agreed that the crown’s policy did
actually make a difference in forcing the privileged elite to pay new direct
taxes. The imposition of these taxes, furthermore, was accompanied by
innovations that enhanced the authority of the intendant, and the taxes were
justified by bureaucratic notions like utility, rather than by reference to social
status. Kwass also charts how stormy protests by the parlement over taxes,
as well as an outpouring of writings on ‘political economy’ that preached
the virtues of financial reform, were critical to transforming French ‘subjects’
into ‘citizens’ who claimed the right to participate in politics.56 Although
calculating the proportion of tax paid by the privileged on the eve of the
Revolution is difficult, Joël Félix estimated it at between 10 and 12 percent
of their net income. In addition, members of the privileged elite also paid
many kinds of indirect taxes levied on foodstuffs, drink, legal transactions,
and the like.57 Although new direct taxes did not tap the resources of
privileged groups in proportion to their income, they were not insignificant,
and they did break the implicit contract between the monarchy and the
social elite whereby the government honored tax exemptions in return for
political quiescence. Battles over these new taxes meant that the government
tried to finance wars from credit, which as we have seen carried high interest
rates, whenever possible.
A third, and less noticeable, constraint on royal taxation was the age-old
idea that new taxes could only be levied during wartime and that during
peace, extraordinary taxes should be repealed and the king should ‘live of
his own’. Because a greater proportion of expenses for war were paid by
credit which fell due after a war, this put the royal government into a
bind. The government had to convert massive amounts of floating debt into
funded long-term debt, which called for continued higher taxes, but
traditional principles prevented it from doing so during peacetime. Timothy
Le Goff documented one royal strategy to circumvent this problem. Drawing
on the British establishment of ‘sinking funds’ whereby specified government
revenues were earmarked to amortize debt, the controller general Machault
convinced the parlement of Paris to create a new direct tax, the vingtième,
to set up a caisse d’amortissment to pay off debt from the War of the Austrian
Succession. In fact, although some government debt was retired through
the new caisse, its real purpose was to stabilize short-term credit so that the
government could continue to issue new loans and prevent interest rates
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1313

from skyrocketing. Needless to say, the parlement of Paris felt that the royal
government had duped them into approving a new tax. The problem only
grew worse. The enormous cost of the Seven Years’ War completely
overwhelmed government resources. The caisse d’amortissement in 1749 had
only had to deal with 212 million livres, whereas in 1764 it confronted debts
of 1120 million livres with revenues that had actually decreased slightly. The
partial bankruptcy of Terray in 1771 was the predictable result.
By contrast, the British Parliament approved new indirect taxes to fund
debt stemming from its wars. Britain thus paid for its wars with credit backed
by higher taxes; France paid by credit followed by default. Because Terray’s
default made borrowing more expensive, the loans contracted by Necker
to pay for French support of the American War of Independence were
generally life annuities carrying high rates of interest, which the French
economy simply could not absorb. Significantly, Necker, who enjoyed a
reputation as a wonder worker, was able to borrow large sums without
significantly increasing taxes during the war. The monarchy paid in another
way, however: by losing its traditional shroud of secrecy and becoming
subject to public scrutiny when Necker published his famous compte
rendu. After Necker’s fall and debts from this war started rolling in, the
government faced rising peacetime deficits of alarming proportions. Between
1783 and 1786 Calonne was forced to borrow 488 million livres at an average
interest rate of 7.34 percent in order to fund floating debt from the war. As
Félix concludes,‘since credit was so expensive, the crisis was inevitable’.58
Calonne, as noted earlier, was not on good terms with the parlement of
Paris, which held the right to approve new taxes and loans. Calonne’s
decision to try to sidestep the parlement by convoking an Assembly of
Notables ended up further politicizing French subjects and finally led to
Calonne’s own fall and the recall of the Notables. The parlements once
again became the key to approval of higher taxes. In 1787, in a manner
somewhat reminiscient of Maupeou’s coup, the royal government launched
a ‘reform’ of the parlements, which reduced their jurisdiction and created
a Plenary Court over the whole system. This time around, provincial protest
and calls for the Estates General were far more insistent, and the government’s
ability to borrow money on the money market was more strongly influenced
by the state of public opinion.
In the end, it appears that it was the convergence of multiple pressures
in 1788 that forced the bankrupt royal government to call the Estates
General. Some aspects were fortuitous, such as the poor state of the harvest.
Others stemmed from an intensification of traditional political disputes or
rivalries that made governance difficult, and still others from new strategies
and pressures, like a greater reliance on public lending and the rise of public
opinion, that made it governance through closed, monarchical centered
networks ever more difficult. Short-term credit dried up; the Assembly of
the Clergy denied the royal government’s request for additional monies on
top of its traditional ‘free gift’; the parlements denounced ministerial
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1314 . Origins of the French Revolution

despotism and called for consent to taxation by representatives of the ‘nation’;

pamphlet literature, some of it generated by self-serving speculators like
Mirabeau, argued that royal debt was actually a national debt and hence
could only be guaranteed by representatives of the nation itself. Politically,
it had become impossible for the monarchy to default and still to reproduce
the traditional institutional order; citizens from various sectors no longer
were content to take their losses and continue on.

Cultural History, the ‘Linguistic Turn’, and the Public Sphere

The calling of the Estates General was, in one sense, a return to an age-old
institution and hence hardly an assault on tradition. In another sense,
however, it came to provide an essential institutional and conceptual
alternative to the idea of royal sovereignty, on which the old regime had
been constructed. How did new ways of conceptualizing the political and
social order emerge within the old regime itself? Without such alternatives,
there would be no incentive to try to change the social order. A revolution,
quite simply, would be impossible. The Marxist interpretation tended to
see the realm of ideas as expressions of more deeply rooted material interests
that were predictable in nature: a conservative nobility faced a liberal and
enlightened bourgeoisie. During the early wave of revisionism, historians
practicing a social history of ideas showed that this was not necessarily the
case. Members of the nobility sponsored salons, for example, where ideas
associated with the Enlightenment flourished, and urban nobles subscribed
to the Encyclopédie, the so-called ‘Bible’ of the Enlightenment, in far greater
numbers than did merchants and manufacturers. Cultural history did not
really break free and assert the independence of the intellectual realm from
underlying material interest, however, until the shift in the historical
profession toward the ‘literary turn’ and the analysis of ‘discourse’. The result
was to inspire a new generation of historians to examine how a new order
became thinkable.
Whereas social historians, whether Marxist or revisionist, had tended to
examine how social situations conditioned mental outlooks, cultural historians
reversed the equation: cultural constructs also influenced, or even deter-
mined, social practice. Cultural historians were not interested particularly
in how the ideas of great thinkers like Rousseau were diffused throughout
society. Rather, they sought to identify the more anonymous, impersonal
currents of thought whose genesis could not always be pinpointed at any
particular moment. They were also interested in how audiences with their
own habits and preconceptions adopted or discarded ideas for their own
purposes or in ways consistent with their own way of thinking.‘Reception’,
as one of the most influential cultural historians, Roger Chartier, stated,
‘always involves appropriation’.59
One source of inspiration for the study of habitual and anonymous cultural
trends was Michel Foucault’s idea of the ‘discourse’. A discourse, according
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1315

to Foucault, was a set of interconnected statements that defined what was

‘true’, that is, what was permissible, appropriate, and possible within any
given society. These discourses, it was argued, shaped the behavior of social
groups from the beginning, because without such cultural guidance, action
became nonsensical. Although cultural historians rejected Foucault’s tendency
to obliterate the role of agency in discursive analysis, the importance of
language in structuring thought provided a welcome stimulus to the study
of how power was legitimated and how cultural expectations created and
reinforced certain modes of conduct.60
Keith Baker has been a leading practitioner of discourse analysis of the
old regime. For Baker, social practice was not determined by one overarching
discourse, but was conditioned by multiple, interacting ones. In a
well-known article, he argued that the old regime was characterized by three
discourses, of justice, reason, and will, each of which lent different inflections
to the meaning of sovereignty. Justice was associated with the parlements’
defense of the rights and duties associated with the traditional social hierarchy,
whereas reason was more often espoused by ministerial reformers seeking
to rationalize the social order by curbing the role of privilege and diversity
of legal practices. During the Revolution, the discourse of will, which was
identified with Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty, triumphed and
pointed the revolutionaries in the direction of the Terror. More recently,
Baker has also offered perspectives on discourses of republicanism and
‘society’ that went beyond this original trio.61
Although Baker stated that this approach did not ‘seek to privilege a
conceptual realm of discourse over the “realities” of social life’,62 he did not
lay out clearly a theory of how social practice might transform discursive
meaning. Critics have observed that an overemphasis on the study of isolated
discourses runs the danger of ascribing too much internal consistency to
them and of distorting their role in history. ‘Meaning did not come
prepackaged in pre-revolutionary discourses’, stated Robert Darnton in a
study of the ‘best-sellers’ of the old regime, but emerged through the process
of debate by groups with contrasting agendas and choices by individuals
with differing personalities.63 Yet, it might also be said that individuals usually
resort to familiar legitimizing tropes when attempting to persuade others of
the validity of their causes. A tension – perhaps a useful one – always remains
between the innovative quality of historical agents and the ongoing
reproduction of culture through discursive formulation.
Historians searching for cultural origins of the Revolution, therefore,
have generally not been interested in tracing the diffusion of ideas from the
pens of a few prolific philosophes. Rather they hoped to uncover the far more
complex formation of authoritative discourses that allowed sections of society
to envision alternative forms of social organization and political power. One
strategy has been to explore how keywords such as the nation, citizen, virtue,
utility, patriotism, and society both shifted in meaning over the course of
the eighteenth century and were invoked far more frequently in debate.
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1316 . Origins of the French Revolution

One result has been a new appreciation for how the social hierarchy was
subtly reformulated over time. Perhaps what is most interesting is that this
redefinition did not have to occur through confrontational opposition, noble
honor as opposed to bourgeois merit, for example. Rather, groups at the
bottom of the social hierarchy were also assimilated into categories previously
reserved for those at the top. Terms originally describing the superior qualities
of nobles were enlarged to encompass the positive attributes of commoners
as well.
Marissa Linton, for example, traced how the word virtue, with its origins
in ancient classical republicanism, Christian theology, and royal and
aristocratic superiority, came to be associated with humanitarianism and the
political activity of the common person. As a result, virtue could be used
to justify the rights of citizens as a whole.64 Jay Smith investigated the
complex relationship between the idea of honor, which traditionally had
been used to justify the prerogatives of the nobility in a hierarchical,
rank-ordered society, and the idea of merit and patriotism. As his work on
the aristocratic army officer corps illustrated, the aristocratic idea of honor
became assimilated into the higher ideal of the nation, so that honor
could be attributed to any courageous, loyal soldier. His book on Nobility
Reimagined further explored the instrumental and regenerative value of the
appeal to patriotism. Nobles realized the importance of forging a unity of
purpose among all good Frenchmen in defense of the country, particularly
after French defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Yet combining the honor of
the nobility with the virtue of civic service also created a dilemma. Since
patriotic virtue was reputedly available to all steadfast citizens maintaining
the nobility’s social distinction became problematic. Even though nobles
did not necessarily see a contradiction between aristocratic honor, privilege,
and patriotic loyalty, others could begin to demand why, if all men were
being mobilized for national service, the hierarchical organization of the old
regime rewarded some far more than others for comparable effort.65
The role of the bourgeoisie also takes on a different quality when viewed
through the lens of eighteenth century. Traditionally, commerce was seen as a
base, profit-seeking, self-interested activity. A positive discourse of commerce,
one in which commercial activity was granted intrinsic worth, could not
simply develop as an offshoot of the rise of merchants, a relatively devalued
social group. The whole idea of the place of commerce in the nation, its
stature, merit, and desirability, would have to be reevaluated. One strategy
for doing this by associating commerce with the highest values of the old
regime: the glory of the monarchy and the strength of the state. The rise of
the science of ‘political economy’ also helped to create new standards for
social worth, since utility, defined and demonstrated by personal
accomplishments and not inborn honor, became the basis for evaluating
one’s contribution to the state. Yet for many critics, commercial activity
remained distasteful. Social critics denounced the effect of commercially
produced ‘luxury’ on social mores, and believed that too much self-interested
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1317

concern for acquiring wealth could undercut the martial vigor of the nation.66
There was also a strong concern that the values of commercial republicanism,
such as the Dutch Republic was built on, were not compatible with the
principles of an absolute monarchy, including the diversity of social ranks
which culminated in aristocratic valor and, ultimately, royal glory. What
contemporaries perceived as civic virtues, therefore, were not necessarily
synonymous with those associated with the bourgeoisie, which remained
tainted by its association with making profits. Rather, positive social traits
were placed in the theoretically universal category of ‘citizen’ that
transcended particularistic social distinctions associated with hierarchical
rank. As Sara Maza pointed out, the overlapping categories of patrie, family,
and humanity, all of which submerged social distinctions in the name of a
wider community, were also frequently invoked. In this sense it would be
difficult to label the culture of the Revolution as ‘bourgeois’, because the
revolutionaries aspired to transcend both corporate and class divisions through
a more elevated identity in the nation.67
Just as the idea of honor became democratized, so did the idea of the
‘nation’ and the ‘patrie’. In the seventeenth century, the king had incarnated
the nation; during the Enlightenment, as Edmond Dziembowski’s detailed
analysis revealed, king, nation, and patrie became dissociated and the latter
two entities came rhetorically to possess their own rights.68 Although in
some instances a liberal patriotism arose in opposition to absolutist tendencies
of the monarchy, in other cases officials of the French government themselves
helped to promote patriotic mobilization in order to spur French citizens
to sacrifice for the Seven Years’ War, a policy which had the unintended
effect of validating the nation independently of the monarch. Although
David Bell also linked the rise of French nationalism to war, he is also
interested in exploring the relationship of the idea of the sovereign nation
to a process of both of secularization and sacralization. The idea of a
sovereign nation, he argued, was only possible once the origin of political
authority was no longer conceived in divine terms. The Revolution was
secularizing in this respect, but the project of national unification also made
the nation the object of a patriotic cult, which drew upon a long tradition
of Catholic ritual.69
Almost completely ignored in both Marxist and early revisionist
interpretations, the role of religion has become more fully integrated into
narratives of revolutionary origins than ever before. The polity in the old
regime was a ‘confessional’ state in which kingship and membership in the
state were defined through adherence to Catholic orthodoxy. Religious
dissent thus had the potential to challenge both the terms of legitimacy and
foundational aspects of the state’s organization. It comes as no surprise, then,
that the attempt of the royal government to suppress Catholic dissidents
known as Jansenists unleashed enormous conflict in the old regime. The
disruptive influence of Jansenism was partly jurisdictional in nature. When
persecution of Jansenist priests intensified in the 1750s, these clerics turned
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1318 . Origins of the French Revolution

to a small, but very committed, core of Jansenist magistrates and lawyers in

the parlement of Paris to defend them. Through astute jurisdictional
wrangling, Jansenists in the parlement successfully wrested control over these
cases from ecclesiastical courts and ended up ordering the Catholic hierarchy
to give the sacraments to the dissidents. In the process, Jansenist magistrates
mobilized thousands of sympathetic Parisians to support their cause.
Historians including Dale Van Kley and Jeffrey Merrick have argued that
the battles over Jansenism had far wider repercussions than jurisdictional
issues. The battles spurred the formation of constitutional claims implying
that the parlement of Paris had a legislative role virtually on par with that
of the monarchy. As Van Kley argued, Jansenist jurists also transferred ideas
drawn from medieval conciliarism – the claim that authority inhered in the
entire body of the faithful and not in the public person of the pope – to the
political arena as a way to justify the ultimate authority of the ‘nation’ over
the king. Owing to their austere view of the transcendence of God, Jansenists
were unwilling to deify the monarch, as some other Catholic apologists had
rather eagerly done. Instead, the conflict helped to ‘desacralize’ the French
monarchy and make it easier, ultimately, to transfer sovereignty from the king
to representatives of the nation. Although the Jansenist cause died out with
the dissolution of its sworn enemy, the Society of Jesus, in 1762, its legacy
lived in through its absorption into the wider patriot cause that emerged
following Maupeou’s radical reorganization of the parlements.70 Finally, an
unintended consequence of the jurisdictional wrangling against ecclesiastical
courts was increased control of the state over the church, a development
that in some ways paved the way for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.71
Perhaps the most influential inspiration for politico-cultural analysis has
been the work of Jürgen Habermas on the rise of public opinion and the
formation of the ‘public sphere’.72 Offering a way to explore the intersection
of social change and cultural critique, Habermas’s theory was appealing to
both social and cultural historians. According to Habermas, the definition
and organization of what was ‘public’ was transformed in the eighteenth
century on three levels. First, whereas the absolute monarch had earlier
claimed to embody the public realm in his person, in the eighteenth century
the ‘state’ as a bureaucratically organized public entity independent began
to appear. Second, a ‘public sphere’ began to develop outside the state,
which operated in the intermediate area between formal governmental
activity and the private lives of individuals. This public sphere was made
possible by infrastructural changes, including new patterns of communication,
markets, increased literacy, newspapers, and the horizontal sociability of
salons and coffeehouses. New organizational networks allowed individuals
to come together to discuss issues of common interest, which facilitated the
formation of public opinion judging affairs of state. Third, an intimate sphere
characterized by psychological subjectivity and emotional ties within the
family emerged. The aristocratic lineage and grand household began to
retreat both in social practice and as a cultural norm, and sentimental bonds
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1319

within the conjugal family were held up as a model for domestic life.
Eventually, one of the most important consequences of the Revolution was
to abolish the closed politics of the absolute monarchy and to institutionalize
the power of public opinion inside the state itself by establishing elections
and constitutional guarantees of freedom of thought, speech, and the press.
Neither an appreciation of public opinion nor the study of new forms of
sociability were unique to Habermas. Tocqueville had stated that
The King still used the language of a master but in actual fact he always deferred
to public opinion and was guided by it in his handling of day-to-day affairs.
Indeed, he made a point of consulting it, feared it, and bowed to it invariably.73
In Interpreting the French Revolution, Furet had looked back to Augustin
Cochin’s discussion of new forms of associational life, including clubs, literary
societies, and Masonic lodges, as harbingers of a new kind of democratic
sociability that operated outside a hierarchical ‘society of orders’ and that
eventually culminated in Jacobinism.74 It was Habermas’s interpretation,
however, that provided the jumping off point for the largest number of
studies, not only in French history, but European and American as well. In
fact, so much was published that, as one historian noted, Habermas’s once
specific historical concept was close to ‘dissolving into mush’.75
One reason for both the fruitful and mushy nature of research was that
public opinion could be studied as both an ideal legitimating public activity
and a sociological phenomenon involving concrete social and institutional
transformations. As an ideal, public opinion became an alternative to the
absolute monarchy’s claim to be the sole judge and mediator of politics in
the old regime. As Keith Baker argued, public opinion developed ‘as an
abstract category of authority, invoked by actors in a new kind of politics
to secure the legitimacy of claims that could no longer be made binding in
the terms . . . of an absolutist political order’. Mona Ozouf likewise observed
that the public opinion became a kind of a ‘tribunal’ to which aggrieved
parties could appeal if royal institutions did not appear to render justice.76
In its normative role, then, public opinion appeared to be a rational, unitary,
and veracious form of authority. By the end of the old regime, even Louis
XVI was pushing divine right aside and embracing the normative role of
public opinion: ‘I must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong’.77
In actual practice, however, as discussed below, public opinion was subject
to all kinds of manipulation and was hardly an impartial mechanism for
determining policy.
A second direction for research invigorated by Habermas’s work was the
investigation of new patterns of sociability and communication, which, it
was argued, were of central importance in undermining the status divisions
enshrined in the old regime. Historians took a fresh look at salons, which
ostensibly provided an arena in which the elite could bracket hierarchical
status relations and exchange ideas as part of a community of equals.78 Others
looked at the intersection of the public sphere and a European-wide
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1320 . Origins of the French Revolution

‘consumer revolution’, which helped to demote the role of aristocratic

patronage in promoting cultural activity and allowed individuals to acquire
cultural artifacts – theater tickets, paintings, or fashionable dress – through
purchase on the market. In the process, the prerogatives of rank were
diminished, and consumers became habituated to the practice of judging
the worth of objects.79 The robust growth of the press, meanwhile, made
possible a critical reading public international in scope and likewise allowed
writers to live from the sale of their works, rather than off a patron’s
largesse.80 In fact, the importance of the consumer revolution, which made
so many objects available to middle-class buyers, led Colin Jones to argue
that the question of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution, dismissed by revisionism,
should be reopened.81
Habermas’s placement of sentimental domesticity and psychological
subjectivity at the core of his wider structural transformation made gender
relations an integral component of his analysis, although Habermas has been
criticized for ignoring the role of women in the public sphere itself.82 In
some cases, women did carve out a place in emerging public sphere. Nina
Gelbhart has shown how three intrepid female editors ran a successful
newspaper that informed readers of controversial issues and supported the
right of women to pursue careers in the public realm. Dena Goodman argued
that salons provided women with new opportunities for participation in
intellectual endeavors; in fact, by hosting salons women made important
contributions to the scope and direction of the Enlightenment. She also
turned her attention to the way in which the writing of letters in the intimacy
of the private sphere contributed to the gendered subjectivity of women.83
Joan Landes painted a less optimistic view of the opportunities for women
afforded by the emerging public sphere. A number of thinkers associated
with the Enlightenment, Rousseau in particular, believed that the entrance
of women into public affairs corrupted the political process, because women
could use their sexuality to influence matters of state. Hence, female courtiers
and salonieres alike were tarnished by their femininity. The Revolution
consolidated the misogynist equation of masculinity and public authority
by excluding women from the benefits of citizenship, although women
were praised for their domestic role as patriotic, Republic mothers.84
Although not necessarily inspired by Habermas’s work, the history of the
body and pornography has offered additional insights into the changing
nature of public and private realms in the old regime. Because of the
interpenetration of domestic and official affairs at court, and because the
body politic was incarnated in the person of the monarch, libelles impugning
the bodily functions of the king and court nobility were not only personal
insults but political statements. As Antoine de Baecque has shown, the sexual
and procreative activities of the king were the subject of diplomatic missives,
and Louis XVI’s initial inability to consummate his marriage created an
image of an impotent ruler that haunted him long after Marie Antoinette
had given birth to their first child. The scandal-mongering and pornographic
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libelles launched against Louis XV’s many mistresses in some of the

‘best-sellers’ of the old regime, argued Robert Darnton, were an important
force in the delegitimizing the monarchy.85 The extent and availability of
these libelles is a matter of debate among historians. Vivian Gruder argued
that depictions of Marie Antoinette’s incestuous liaisons and orgies flourished
only after the Revolution began, whereas Chantal Thomas contended that
virulent attacks occurred from the time of her first pregnancy in 1777.86
Certainly, for a variety of reasons, Marie Antoinette became a lightening
rod for criticism against the regime, although some of this hostility, like the
Diamond Necklace affair, appears to have been an outgrowth of factional
politics at court and mud-slinging by the elite, rather than by deep-seated
animosity of the populace in general.87
Many critiques have been levied against Habermas’s applicability to the
situation of the old regime. Retaining elements of a Marxist perspective,
Habermas had argued that the groups and patterns of sociability responsible
for the formation of public opinion were primarily bourgeois in origin and
implicitly secular in outlook. Yet scholars have shown how the lower strata
of French society had communication networks that contributed to the
formation of public opinion, and dissident Jansenists were some of the earliest
people to issue a direct appeal to the ‘public’ as an impartial judge of their
cause.88 Habermas, furthermore, had asserted that the new forms of sociability
giving rise to public opinion developed outside the closed politics of the
monarchy. In part that was true. Yet as the work of Antoine Lilti showed,
one critical form of sociability, that of the salons, remained deeply entwined
with the hierarchies of the court nobility, a situation that helped to explain
Rousseau’s aversion to it.89 In addition, the more historians studied the actual
operation of public opinion, the more that they found that royal ministers,
courtiers at Versailles, and the parlements, were often the ones appealing
to and orchestrating public opinion.90 The exiled minister Choiseul, for
example, sponsored one of the most successful libelles of the pre-
revolutionary decade, the Fastes of Louis XV (1782), which characterized
the court as debauched, effeminate, and corrupt.91 The extensive role of
government officials in sponsoring widespread, published attacks on other
members of the court challenged not only Habermas’s interpretation, but
also Robert Darnton’s classic ‘Grub Street’ thesis, which argued that frustrated
writers excluded from the literary establishment earned their keep and
exacted their revenge by writing violent libelles against the upper crust.92
Work on public opinion, like that of court politics, thus challenged a view
of the origins of the Revolution that pitted the action of excluded,
unprivileged outsiders against privileged insiders, and presented a more
complex view of division at the center of the government itself.
Censorship remained central to the politics of the absolute monarchy.
There continued to be a firm belief among many ministers that it was the
job of the monarchy to decide what subjects should know. There were
some royal officials, however, who believed that allowing open discussion
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of government policy was essential to creating a stronger, patriotic state.

Robin Ives discussed how a group of officials surrounding the influential
intendant du commerce, Jacques-Claude-Marie Vincent Gournay, supported
a whole series of publication on royal financial and economy policy, which
was aided by the lax censorship of the time under Chrétien Lamoignon de
Malesherbes, director of the book trade between 1751 and 1763. Later, after
conservatives in the royal administration seized and prohibited many
publications, some liberal officials argued that the financial ministry of the
government, the contrôle-général, should have the right to license its own
publications. Some parts of the government, in other words, should enjoy
immunity from other parts.93
In fact, legal immunities punctuated the political landscape of the absolute
monarchy throughout France and allowed pockets of legal freedom to persist
despite the monarchy’s official policy of secrecy and censorship. The
privileges of the parlement of Paris were one of the reasons that this corporate
body played such an important role in fanning the flames of public
opinion. As Sara Maza showed, legal briefs, or mémoires judiciaires, prepared
by lawyers for the parlement were not subject to censorship, a situation that
allowed lawyers to turn these documents into a potent vehicle for publicizing
judicial cases and asking the public to judge the validity of their causes. These
briefs drew on the newly forming sentimental language of the intimate
familial sphere to make judgments about affairs of state and reduced complex
issues to seemingly clear moral choices between the aggrieved ‘little person’
and the ‘high and mighty’ superiors, or the ‘courageous everyman’ and the
‘corrupt establishment’.94 Remonstrances issued by the magistrates were also
free from government oversight and started to be published around mid-century.
As for the Jansenists in the parlement, who played such a large role first in
printing tracts in support of their own cause and later in defense of the wider
patriot cause, this would not have been possible without the help of Adrian
le Paige, who was protected by the prince de Conti. Lay prior of the Temple
of the Order of Malta, Conti enjoyed judicial invulnerability in a privileged
territory known as the Temple and allowed Le Paige to set up printing
presses that could not be infiltrated by the Parisian police.95
The development of public opinion in France, as it turned out then, was
neither a force that arose solely from infrastructural trends, nor was it
generated by outsiders (mainly ‘bourgeois’) against the closed politics of
the monarchy. It was a development stimulated and enlarged in part by
the institutional networks attached to the monarchy itself, and it was
characterized socially by multiple publics, even if the ideal of a unified norm
still remained. Perhaps this is not so surprising. Habermas’s interpretation
depended on a growing separation between ‘civil society’ and the ‘state’, in
which ‘society’ critiqued the ‘state’. Yet the French baroque or patrimonial
state before 1789 never had clear cut divisions between these two realms.
In practice, a kind of disputational politics had always operated inside the
absolute monarchy itself, whether generated informally and domestically by
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rival factions living at court or formally by corporate bodies like the

parlements that were established and sanctioned by the king. Thus the actual
formation of public opinion had a peculiar genesis, growing up partly in
opposition to the monarchy and partly within its depths. Some members of
government endorsed secrecy; others tried to manipulate public opinion.
Some worked valiantly to make publicity a principle of government, and
still others used legal privileges to do battle with those parts of the govern-
ment that they opposed. Of course, through this all, French subjects were
being taught by various authorities that they had a right to participate in
government and even to serve as its judge. Habermas’s work itself cannot
be considered a valid description of how a new kind of public politics was
created in the old regime and Revolution, but the kinds of questions he
posed – about the nature and definition of the ‘public’, the effect of public
opinion, and of the attempt of the revolutionaries to institutionalize public
control of government through elections and constitutional freedoms –
certainly remain important to an understanding of the origins of the
Revolution and the operation, or failure, of democratic forms of government
thereafter.
This overview cannot do justice to the complexity of the issues and
literature on the origins of the Revolution. It does show that the collapse
of the monarchy was the result of many converging strands – financial
difficulties, internal political rivalries, court politics, attacks on royal
legitimacy, parlementary opposition, public opinion, and appeals to new
principles for political participation, including citizenship, virtue, the patrie,
and the nation. Many of these trends had very deep roots in the institutional
complexion of the old regime that went back to practices consolidated by
Louis XIV, or even further. Yet new forces, notably efficiency in war finance
of the English and Dutch and the structural transformations associated with
the rise of a critical public, intensified pressures on the monarchy, amplified
old problems, and in some cases provided new outlets for mobilization. Old
options thus were progressively either politicized or closed off, and ministers
experimented with new ones, like the appeal to public opinion, or even the
calling of an Assembly of Notables, a direct admission by the monarchy that
overhauled political institutions were needed. These vitriolic debates, and
even downright muckraking, provided the context in which older notions
of the social hierarchy and royal legitimacy were upheld, challenged, and
transformed, not simply by the great thinkers, but by individuals in myriad
institutions both inside and outside the government. The discursive fields
through which people processed their experiences were not rigid, static
determinants of thought, but far more fluid conceptual resources that allowed
people to respond to challenges and to innovate within their parameters.
Both nobles and bourgeois, for example, could consider themselves ‘patriotic’
citizens.
In the end, it is doubtful that historians will ever agree on the exact reasons
why the old regime fell. The interlocked nature of the problems of the old
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1324 . Origins of the French Revolution

regime – a state built on an amalgam between public and private affairs, the
far-reaching financial practices like venality that consolidated this blending,
the deeply rooted vested interests generated by this state through longstanding
networks of patronage and privilege, the clivages at court, the attacks on royal
legitimacy, and the new pressures to which the system was being subjected
– suggest to this reviewer that the growing inequities, inefficiencies, and
stakes generated by the institutional network of the old regime could only
be overturned through revolution. But, like so many issues pertaining to
the origins of the Revolution, that is a matter of debate.

Short Biography
Gail Bossenga’s research has explored the origins of the French Revolution,
in particular its fiscal, political and institutional dimensions. Her work has
appeared in journals and books including the Journal of Modern History,
Annales, économies, sociétés, et civilizations; 1650 – 1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and
Inquiries in the Early Modern Era; The French Nobility and the Eighteenth Century:
Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay Smith; and The Short Oxford History
of France, Vol. 4, An Ancien Régime: France 1660 –1789, ed. William Doyle.
Her book, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille
(Cambridge University Press, 1991) argued that institutional contradictions
generated by state policy created the conditions for municipal revolution.
Currently she is completing a book on the origins of the French Revolution
for Palgrave Press. Before coming to the College of William and Mary,
where she presently teaches, Bossenga taught at the University of Kansas in
Lawrence. She received a B.A. from Calvin College in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor.

Notes
* Correspondence address: 115 Hempstead Road, Williamsburg, VA 23188, USA. Email:
gmboss@wm.edu.
1 Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1947); Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787–1799, trans. Alan
Forrest and Colin Jones (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1975).
2 Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1964); George Taylor,‘Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American
Historical Review, 72 (1967): 469–96; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth
Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985); Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, trans. R. R. Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), Part 2, ch. 7. The standard revisionist account is William Doyle, Origins
of the French Revolution, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1980]). Another useful
analysis of the problem of class conflict is T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Aristocrats
versus Bourgeois? (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987).
3 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), 82.

4 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1325
5 Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 213. On the role of ideological factors in Skocpol’s
interpretation see also William H. Sewell, Jr.’s stimulating critique, ‘Ideologies and Social
Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985): 57–85, and
Theda Skocpol, ‘Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction
of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985): 86–96. See also Bailey
Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), which is more interested in the process of the Revolution than its genesis.
6 T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s

Press, 1996).
7 For example, Gwynne Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London: Routledge,

1993) 112, stated that ‘My principal criticism of the contribution made by revisionists over the
past two decades . . . concerns the way in which they have ignored or down-graded the importance
of the social question during the 1790s’.
8 The most recent call for a return to Marxism is Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France,

1789–1815 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2006).

9 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974).
10 For example, Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Alfred Cobban,‘The Parlements

of France in the Eighteenth Century’, History, 35 (1950): 64 –80, reprinted in his Aspects of the
French Revolution (London: Cape, 1969): 62–82.
11 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and Revolution, eds. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio,

trans. Alan Kahan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998 –2001). For Furet’s first essay
on Tocqueville, Interpreting the French Revolution, 132–63.
12 Ibid. Furet’s introduction was republished in Robert M. Schwartz and Robert A. Schneider

(eds.), Tocqueville and Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime in Honor of David D. Bien (Newark, DE:
University of Delaware, 2003). On Furet and language see Lynn Hunt,‘Review essay on François
Furet, Penser la Révolution française’, History and Theory, 20 (1981): 313–23.
13 A useful overview of recent literature on the intendants is François-Xavier Emmanuelli,

‘L’intendance dans l’enseignment et la recherche en France aujourd’hui’, Revue d’historique de droit

français et étranger 80 (2002): 77–85. As Emmanuelli observes, current studies have documented
instances of cooperation and ‘co-administration’, as well as rivalry, between the intendant and
local corporate bodies like the parlements and municipal governments. See also his Un Mythe de
l’absolutisme bourbonien: L’Intendance du milieu du XVIIe siècle à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
(Aix-en-Provence: Publications Université de Provence, 1981); Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of
Absolutism (London: Longman, 1992).
14 David Bien, ‘Manufacturing Nobles: The Chancelleries in France to 1789’, Journal of Modern

History, 61 (1989): 445–86; Bien,‘Les Sécretaires du Roi: Absolutism, Corps and Privilege under
the Ancien Régime’, in Ernst Hinrichs, Eberhard Schmitt, and Rudolf Vierhaus (eds.), Vom Ancien
Regime zur Französischen Revolution. Forschungen und Perspektiven (Göttigen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1978), 153–86; Bien,‘Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege
under the Ancien Régime’, in Keith M. Baker (ed.),The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1987), 87–114; Bien,‘Old Regime Origins of Democratic Liberty’, in Dale Van
Kley (ed.),The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23–71.
15 Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 200); Hilton Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations
of French Absolutism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Gail Bossenga, The Politics
of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
Raef Blaufarb, The French Army 1750–1820: Careers, Merit, Talent (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002); Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service and the Making of
Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
See also the articles in Tocqueville and Beyond and the review of this work by Keith Baker on
H-France Review, 5/137 (Dec. 2005), http://h-france.net/vol5reviews/baker.html.
16 Rory Browne, ‘Court and Crown: Rivalry at the Court of Louis XVI and Its Importance in

the Formation of a Pre-Revolutionary Aristocratic Opposition’, D.Phil. diss. (University of Oxford,

1991), vii; Dale Van Kley, ‘Pure Politics in Absolute Space: The English Angle on the Political
History of Prerevolutionary France’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997): 754–84.
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1326 . Origins of the French Revolution
17 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983);
see also Roger Chartier’s remarks in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 184–6. On Weber’s conception of the
‘patrimonial state’ see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978),
2: 1006–110.
18 Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals: 1550–1780

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

19 See, for example,Vivian Gruder, The Royal Provincial Intendants (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press,1968), 40 –70; Sara E. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de
Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV’s Government, 1650–1715 (Rochester, MN: University of
Rochester Press, 2004).
20 Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770–1850

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

21 As Julian Swann states, ‘In order to understand the behaviour of the Parlement, however, it is

necessary to leave the disembodied world of “discourse” behind, and return instead to the
personalities, social and institutional background, and arguments of the magistrates themselves’.
Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754 –1774 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 366.
22 William Doyle, ‘The Parlements of France and the Breakdown of the Old Regime, 1771–

1788’, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970): 415–58.

23 Peter Campbell (ed.), The Origins of the French Revolution (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2006), see Campbell’s introduction; ‘Decision-Making’ by John Hardman, and ‘The
Paris Parlement in the 1780s’ by Campbell.
24 Peter Campbell, ‘Old Regime Politics and New Interpretation of the Revolution’, Revolution

and Modern Studies, 33 (1989): 1–20.

25 Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720 –1745 (London: Routledge,

1996), 4, 5, 23.
26 Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris, 362.
27 See Joël Félix, Le Magistrats du parlement de Paris, 1771 –1790 (Paris: Sedopols, 1990); Doyle,

‘Parlements of Paris’.
28 Swann, Politics and the Parlement, 367.
29 On the wider intellectual debate during the Maupeou coup see Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou

Coup: A Study in the History of Libertarianism: France, 1770 –1774 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 1985), who concluded that structurally France emerged from this period
the same as before, but in terms of political culture it came out ‘a different nation. The most
striking difference was in the way the literate elite were thinking about the political and social
problems of their country’ (297). On continuity of arguments under Maupeou into the
pre-Revolution, and the imprint of judicial Jansenism and royalist dévôt ideology throughout, see
Dale Van Kley, ‘New Wine in Old Wineskins: Continuity and Rupture in the Pamphlet Debate
of the French Pre-revolution 1787–90’, French Historical Studies, 17 (1991): 447–65; on changes
in the legal profession see David Bell, ‘Lawyers into Demagogues: Chancellor Maupeou and the
Transformation of Legal Practice in France 1771 –1789’, Past and Present, 130 (Feb. 1991): 107 –
41. See also the special issue edited by Keith Baker on ‘The Maupeou Revolution’, Historical
Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 18 (1992).
30 The classic study of this problem is John R. Bosher, French Finances: From Business to Bureaucracy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

31 Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788, trans. Wesley D. Camp (Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press, 1977).

32 For both of these points see David Bell’s remarks in ‘Review Article: How (and How Not) to

Write Histoire Evénementielle: Recent Books on Eighteenth Century French Politics’, French Historical
Studies, 19 (1996): 1169–89. On Vergennes and the book trade see Robert Darnton, ‘Reading,
Writing and Publishing’, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 191–6.
33 Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility; Gail Bossenga, ‘A Divided Nobility: Status, Markets,

and the Patrimonial State in the Old Regime’, in Jay M. Smith (ed.), The French Nobility in the
Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1327

University Press, 2006), 43 –76, or a longer version, with more attention to French finances, see
Bossenga, ‘The Patrimonial State, Markets, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, in 1650–
1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 2 (2005): 443–509. For insight into
the nexus between court connections and markets see Gwynne Lewis, The Advent of Modern
Capitalism in France, 1770–1840: The Contribution of Pierre Francois Tubeuf (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993); George Taylor coined the term ‘court capitalism’ in his ‘Types of Capitalism in
Eighteenth-Century France’, Economic History Review, 311 (1964): 479–97.
34 Vivian Gruder, ‘Paths to Political Consciousness: The Assembly of Notables of 1787 and the

“Pre-Revolution” in France’, French Historical Studies, 13 (Spring 1984): 323–55; Gruder, ‘A

Mutation in Elite Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 56 (1984): 598 –634; Gruder, ‘The
Society of Orders at its Demise: The Vision of the Elite at the End of the Ancien Régime’, French
History, 1 (1987): 210–37.
35 Daniel L. Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-Intentioned Men: The Society of Thirty and the French

Revolution (New York, NY: Garland, 1987), 99; Wick, ‘The Court Nobility and the French
Revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 13 (1980): 263–84. See Browne, ‘Court and Crown’ and
his ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited: The Rohan Family and Court Politics’, Revolution
and Modern Studies, 33 (1989): 22–40.
36 Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, NY: Norton, 1981).
37 Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution

of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Journal of Economic

History, 49 (1989): 803–32.
38 William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1996); Bien, ‘Manufacturing Nobles’; Bien, ‘Les Sécretaires du Roi’; Bien, ‘Offices, Corps,
and a System of State Credit’; Bien,‘Old Regime Origins of Democratic Liberty’; Bosher, French
Finances.
39 Economic historians François R. Velde and David R. Weir have shown that the premium

added to bonds for risk of default in France made the interest rate at least two percent higher than
in England in ‘The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746 –1793’, The
Journal of Economic History, 52 (March 1992): 1–39.
40 Eugene N. White, ‘Was There a Solution to the Fiscal Crisis of the Ancien Régime?’, Journal

of Economic History, 49 (1989): 545–68.

41 Velder and Weir,‘Financial Market’, 3.
42 Philip T. Hoffman, Giles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political

Economy of Credit in Paris: 1600–1870 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
43 Mark Potter and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, ‘Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates

of Burgundy, 1660–1789’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997): 594–606; Clare Crowstone,

Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France (1675–1791) (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001), 378–9; on Parisian servants and the place of public credit in the consumer
revolution more generally, Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the
l8th Century, trans. Marie Evans (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 82–5.
44 Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 130–1.

45 David R. Weir, ‘Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–

1789’, Journal of Economic History, 44 (1989): 97.

46 Thomas Luckett, ‘Crises financières dans la France du xviii siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et

contemporaine, 43/2 (1996): 290–1, 292.

47 Kathryn Norberg,‘The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution

of 1789’, in Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (eds.), Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative
Government: 1450–1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 255.
48 Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde, ‘Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution’,

Journal of Political Economy, 103 (1995): 474–518.

49 David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain,

1688–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

50 On Protestant bankers see Hubert Luethy, La Banque protestante en France, 2 vols. (Paris:

S.E.V.P.E.N., 1959 –61). On John Law see Edgar Faure, La banqueroute de Law (Paris: Gallimard,
1977); Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policymaker (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997); Thomas Kaiser, ‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-Century
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1328 . Origins of the French Revolution

France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit’, Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991): 691 –
722.
51 Doyle, Venality, 150. Brienne later reflected in his memoirs that he did not know whether the

failure of the financiers to come through was a result of ‘difficult circumstances or bad faith, or
the intrigue in which they felt themselves involved’. Egret, Prerevolution, 182. For the wider context
of this problem see Bossenga,‘Markets and the Origins of the French Revolution’.
52 Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, ‘Taxation in Britain and France: 1715 –1810’, Journal of

European Economic History, 5 (1976): 601–50.

53 See Richard Bonney, ‘France, 1494 –1815’, in his edited collection The Rise of the Fiscal State

in Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–76, especially 147–8.
54 Mirelle Touzery, L’invention de l’impôt: la taille tarifée 1715–1789 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire

économique, 1994). On the idea of family secrecy see also Richard Bonney, ‘Le secret de leur
famille: The Fiscal and Social Limits of Louis XIV’s dixième’, French History, 7 (1993): 383–416.
55 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret,‘Le Fisc et les privilegiés sous l’Ancien Régime’, in Ecole française

de Rome. La fiscalité et ses implications sociales en Italie et en France au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Rome:
Ecole française de Rome, 1980), 191–206.
56 Kwass, Privalege and the Politics of Taxation.
57 Joël Félix, ‘The Financial Origins of the French Revolution’, in Peter Campbell (ed.), The

Origins of the French Revolution (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 47.
58 Ibid., 59.
59 Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 19.
60 Notably Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the discourse on Language, trans. A.

M. Sheridan Smith (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1972). On linguistic and discursive analysis see
Jack Censer, ‘Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after
the Bicentennial’, French Historical Studies, 22 (1999): 139 –67; Hunt, ‘Review essay on François
Furet’; Ronald Schecter, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in R. Schecter (ed.), The French Revolution: The
Essential Readings (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 9–14.
61 Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),

in particular ch. 5, ‘French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI’, 109–27. See also
Baker, ‘Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of
Modern History, 73 (March 2001): 32 –53; Baker, ‘Enlightenment and the Institution of Society:
Notes for a Conceptual History’, in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema (eds.), Main Trends in
Cultural History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994): 95–102.
62 Keith Baker, ‘Introduction’, in K. Baker (ed.), The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford:

Pergamon Press, 1987), xiii. Baker, however, always was concerned with examining the social
context in which discourses were produced, and, as Schecter noted Baker was influenced by the
‘Cambridge School’ of linguistics which ‘asserts that language not only describes; it acts as well’.
See Schecter,‘Editor’s Introduction’, 15.
63 R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton,

1995), 178.
64 Marissa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan,

2001). She also provides useful comments on a number of debates in ‘The Intellectual Origins of
the French Revolution’, in Campbell (ed.), Origins of the French Revolution, 137–159.
65 Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2005); also see Smith, Culture of Merit.

66 For all of these trends see Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce in Old-Regime French

Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). Clark also draws attention to the influence of
Dutch commercial republicanism in certain French circles. The fear over loss of martial virility
was evident in the debate over commercial nobility. See Jay Smith,‘Social Categories, the Language
of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over Noblesse Commerçante’,
Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000): 339–74. For the burgeoning literature on political economy,
see Simone Meyssonnier, La Balance et l’horloge: La genèse de la pensée libérale en France au XVIIIe
siècle (Montreuil: Editions de la Passion, 1989); Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de
l’économie politique (XVII–XVIII siècles) (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences
sociales, 1992), Perrot, ‘Nouveautés: L’économie politique et ses livres’, in Henri-Jean Martin
and Roger Chartier (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française,Vol. 2, Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830 (Paris:
Promodis, 1984), 240–57; Catherine Larrère, L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1329

universitaires de Paris, 1992). On luxury see ch. 2 of Sara Maza, The Myth of the French
Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750 –1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003); John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the
French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering the
World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-Century
France’, Representations, 82 (2003): 87 –116; for eighteenth-century critics of luxury, Henry C.
Clark, ‘Commerce, Sociability, and the Public Sphere: Morellet vs. Pluquet on Luxury’,
Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998): 83–103; Renato Galliani, Rousseau, le luxe, et l’idéologie nobiliaire
(Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1989).
67 Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, ch. 2. For two views of the relationship of the idea of the

citizen to the social hierarchy see Colin Jones,‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social
Change’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1991), 69
–118; Gail Bossenga,‘Monarchy, Status, Corps: Roots of Modern Citizenship in the Old Regime’,
in Robert Schwarz and Robert Schneider (eds.), Tocqueville & Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime
In Honor of David Bien (University of Delaware, 2003), 127–54.
68 Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance

anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1998).

69 David Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2001).

70 The work of Dale Van Kley has been particularly important in creating an interest in religious

origins and desacralization. See, most recently, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From
Calvin to the Civil Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). On the continuing
influence of Jansenist motifs down to the Revolution see, for example, Van Kley, ‘The Estates
General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s
ruling of September 25, 1788’, Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989): 1–52; Van Kley,‘The Religious
Origins of the Patriot and Ministerial Parties in Pre-Revolutionary France’, in Thomas Kselman
(ed.), Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 173–236. See also Catherine Maire, ‘L’eglise et la nation
du dépôt de la vérité de la dépôt des lois. La trajectoire Janséniste au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales, e.s.c.
(1991): 1177–205; Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth
Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). For a different perspective
on desacralization, J. I. Engles, ‘Beyond Sacral Monarchy: A New Look at the Image of Early
Modern French Monarchy’, French History, 15 (2001): 139–58. Jeffrey Merrick argues that Jansenism
was critical to disengaging the conscience from French citizenship in ‘Conscience and Citizenship
in Eighteenth-Century France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 21 (Fall 1987): 48–70. On the support
of middle-class Parisians for Jansenism see David Garrioch,‘Parish Politics, Jansenism and the Paris
Middle Classes in the Eighteenth Century’, French History, 8 (Dec. 1994): 403–28.
71 On the relationship of Gallicanism and Jansenism to the civil constitution see Van Kley’s remarks

in ‘The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560 –1791’, in Robert Campbell (ed.),
Origins of the French Revolution, 188–90.
72 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

73 de Tocqueville, Old Regime and the French Revolution, 174 –5, qtd. in Harvey Chisick, ‘Public

Opinion and Political Culture in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, The
English Historical Review 18 (Feb. 2002): 48.
74 ‘Augustin Cochin: The Theory of Jacobinism’, in Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution,

164–204.
75 Ruth Bloch, ‘Inside and Outside the Public Sphere’, William & Mary Quarterly, 62 (2005):

99–106.
76 Keith Baker, ‘Public Opinion as Political Invention’, in Inventing the French Revolution

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 172; see also his ‘Politics and Public Opinion
under the Old Regime: Some Reflections’, in Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (eds.), Press and
Politics in Prevolutionary France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Mona Ozouf,
‘Public Opinion at the End of the Old Regime’, Journal of Modern History, 60 (Sep. 1988): 1–21.
77 J. Hardman, French Politics, 1774 –1789, from the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the Bastille

(London: Longman, 1995), 233.

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1330 . Origins of the French Revolution
78 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and
Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
79 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1985); Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political
Culture 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Mark Ledbury,‘The Contested
Image: Stage, Canvas, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, in Campbell (ed.), Origins of
the French Revolution, 191–218; Jennifer Jones, Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial
Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress
and Fashion in the Ancien Régime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994). For two helpful European-wide perspectives on different kinds of publics see Timothy
Blanning, The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
80 Jeremy Popkin and Jack Censer (eds.), Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1987); Jack Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment
(London: Routledge, 1994); and works of Popkin including, News and Politics; ‘Pamphlet
Journalism at the End of the Old Regime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1989): 351–67; ‘The
Pre-Revolutionary Origins of Political Journalism’, in Keith M. Baker (ed.), The French Revolution
and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 203 –22. See also S.
Haffemeyer, ‘Les gazettes de l’ancien régime: Approche quantitative pour l’analyse d’un “espace
de l’information” ’, Histoire et mesure, 4 (1997): 31 –43; Gilles Feyel, ‘La presse provincial française
dans la second moitié du dix huitième siècle: géographie d’une nouvelle fonction urbaine’, in
Bernard. Lepetit and Jochem Hoock (eds.), La Ville et l’innovation en Europe: Relais et réseaux de
diffusion en Europe, 14e–19e siècles (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
1987), 89 –111; Feyel, L’annonce et la nouvelle: La presse d’information en France sous l’ancien régime,
1630–1788 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2000).
81 Colin Jones,‘The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere,

and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996): 13–40; Jones,
‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified’.
82 Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), ch. 6.

83 Nina Gelhart, Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: Le Journal des dames

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Goodman, Republic of Letters. See also Elizabeth
C. Goldsmith and Goodman (eds.), Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Goodman, ‘Letter Writing and the Emergence of
Gendered Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Women’s History, 2 (2005): 9–37.
84 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1988).

85 Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770 –1780,

trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); de Baecque,‘Le Discours
Anti-Noble, 1787–1792’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 36 (1989): 5–28; Darnton,
Forbidden Best-Sellers.
86 Vivian Gruder, ‘The Question of Marie-Antoinette: The Queen and Public Opinion Before

the Revolution’, French History, 16 (2002): 269–98; Chantel Thomas, La Reine scélérate:
MarieAntoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989).
87 On libelles during the Diamond Necklace Affair see Sara Maza,‘The Diamond Necklace Affair

Revisited (1785 –1786): The Case of the Missing Queen’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), Eroticism and the
Body Politic (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 63–89; for court politics
see Browne, ‘Court and Crown’; Browne, ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited’. On the
trial of Marie Antoinette during the Revolution see Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie
Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’,
in Eroticism and the Body Politic, 108–30;Thomas E. Kaiser,‘Maternité et nationalité: Le Débat sur
Marie-Antoinette’, in Marie-Karine Schaub and Isabelle Poutrin (eds.), Princesses et pouvoirs politiques
en Europe (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Rosny: Éditions Bréal, forthcoming), 351–64. See also Jacques
Revel, ‘Marie-Antoinette and Her Fictions: The Staging of Hatred’, in Bernadette Fort (ed.),
Fictions of the French Revolution (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Dena
© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1294–1337, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00448.x
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 Origins of the French Revolution . 1331

Goodman, Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York, NY: Routledge,
2003).
88 On both points see Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France,

trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). See also
note 70, especially works of Van Kley, Maire, and Hudson.
89 Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard,

2005). See also the useful review by Steven Kale of Lilti’s book on H-France Review, 6/106 (Sept.
2006), http://h-france.net/vol6reviews/kale2.html, and Daniel Roche’s comments ‘République
des lettres ou royaume des moeurs: la sociabilité vue d’ailleurs’, Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine, 43/2 (1996): 293–306.
90 For example,Vivian Gruder, ‘The Bourbon Monarchy: Reforms and Propaganda at the End

of the Old Regime’, in Baker (ed.), The Political Culture of the Old Regime, 358–61; David Hudson,
‘In Defense of Reform: French Government Propaganda during the Maupeou Crisis’, French
Historical Studies, 8 (1973): 51–76; Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers, 225– 6; Keith Baker, ‘The
Ideological Arsenal of Moreau’ in Inventing the French Revolution, 59–85;Thomas E. Kaiser,‘Madame
de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power’, French Historical Studies, 19 (1996): 1025–44.
91 Popkin,‘Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime’.
92 Robert Darnton,‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-life in Literature’, reprinted in Literary

Underground of the Old Regime, 1–40. For additional perspectives see Haydn T. Mason (ed.), The
Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation,
1998).
93 Robin J. Ives,‘Political Publicity and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century France’, French

History, 17 (2003): 1–18.

94 Sara Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
95 Van Kley, Religious Origins, 140–1.

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