This book provides a synthesis of the most recent scholarly literature on the diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. On the basis of that synthesis, and current theoretical writing on major modern revolutions, the book argues that the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the dramatic developments of the subsequent ten years, were attributable to the interacting pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions. The book furthermore contends that the Revolution of 1789–1799, reconceptualized in this fashion, needs to be placed in the larger contexts of 'early modern' and 'modern' French history and modern 'progressive' sociopolitical revolutions. In staking out these positions, the book offers a unique interpretation of the French Revolution, one that dissents from both the Marxian socioeconomic orthodoxy of earlier times and mo
This study aims to update a classic of comparative revolutionary analysis, Crane Brinton's 1938 study The Anatomy of Revolution. It invokes the latest research and theoretical writing in history, political science and political sociology to compare and contrast, in their successive phases, the English Revolution of 1640–60, the French Revolution of 1789–99 and the Russian Revolution of 1917–29. This book intends to do what no other comparative analysis of revolutionary change has yet adequately done. It not only progresses beyond Marxian socioeconomic 'class' analysis and early 'revisionist' stresses on short-term, accidental factors involved in revolutionary causation and process; it also finds ways to reconcile 'state-centered' structuralist accounts of the three major European revolutions with postmodernist explanations of those upheavals that play up the centrality of human agency, revolutionary discourse, mentalities, ideology and political culture.
This study aims to update a classic of comparative revolutionary analysis, Crane Brinton's 1938 study The Anatomy of Revolution. It invokes the latest research and theoretical writing in history, political science and political sociology to compare and contrast, in their successive phases, the English Revolution of 1640–60, the French Revolution of 1789–99 and the Russian Revolution of 1917–29. This book intends to do what no other comparative analysis of revolutionary change has yet adequately done. It not only progresses beyond Marxian socioeconomic 'class' analysis and early 'revisionist' stresses on short-term, accidental factors involved in revolutionary causation and process; it also finds ways to reconcile 'state-centered' structuralist accounts of the three major European revolutions with postmodernist explanations of those upheavals that play up the centrality of human agency, revolutionary discourse, mentalities, ideology and political culture.
