The Bicentennial of the French Revolution may have given rise to a flood of commemorative activities, but it has not left in its wake any scholarly consensus on the causation, development, and implications of that vast upheaval. To the contrary, historians barely finished with the pleasurable work of interring a Marxist view of the Revolution regnant in the first half of the twentieth century have turned their spades upon each other, all the while trying to establish their own explanations of cataclysmic events in the France of 1789–99. This book certainly does not expect to restore consensus in a field beset by such controversy, but it can at least hope to put forth some distinctive ideas on the subject. More specifically, it will contend that the Revolution broke out, and unfolded in the way it did, primarily because of competing international and domestic pressures on French governance in the late eighteenth century. By placing the revolutionary experience in such a broad spatial setting, as well as in the broadest possible temporal setting of modern world history, this book aims to present its case in genuinely “global-historical” terms.

Since this study is heavily indebted to the enormous historical and sociological literature on the revolutionary era, a few observations about the debate arising from that literature are first of all in order. We can then outline the argument that is to follow and spell out some of the capital assumptions undergirding that argument.