The established theory of the French Revolution, put forward in a broad sense at the time by the actors in the revolutionary drama, expanded into a general historical theory by the historians of the French Restoration, and taken for granted in most of the work that has since been done on the history of the revolution, is put in clear and concise language by one of the greatest of French historians of this century. ‘The revolution’, writes Georges Lefebvre, ‘is only the crown of a long economic and social evolution which has made the bourgeoisie the mistress of the world.’ M. Albert Soboul, in an excellent précis of the history of the revolution, repeats Lefebvre's formula in almost the same words. He makes it more explicit, however, when he adds that though this idea was first proclaimed clearly by the bourgeois historians of the Restoration, they failed to see the essential fact. This was ‘that the revolution is explained in the last analysis by a contradiction between the relations of production and the character of the productive forces’. With such views we seem to be at the opposite extreme from that represented by those historians who tried, if unavailingly, to take the meaning out of history. Lefebvre and M. Soboul seem to be putting almost too much meaning back into it, when they reduce the greatest happening in modern history to the deterministic operation of an historical law.