Introduction

The causes of the French Revolution have been debated endlessly. During the twentieth century this led to the adoption of two successive orthodoxies. First came that associated with Georges Lefebvre and historians of a Marxist persuasion. They claimed that the Revolution was the achievement of a rising ‘bourgeoisie’ determined to challenge the social pretensions and political dominance of the nobility. It represented a ‘turning point’ in history, a ‘decisive’ moment, bringing about the final, and much-delayed, ending of the feudal system. The way was open for the development of capitalism. Subsequent efforts to set the Revolution within a broader chronological context led to a questioning of its significance as a historical event, however. Although, clearly, the revolutionaries had sought to remove some of the institutional obstacles to the development of a market economy, it appeared that in 1815 France was not so very different from France in 1789. It remained an essentially pre-industrial society dominated by a landed élite. It was only during the nineteenth century, as the pace of socio-economic change accelerated, that a fundamental social transformation occurred. Even then, the complex of developments associated with industrialisation evolved far more gradually in France than in either Britain or Germany.