When trying to recapture a past time, its events, experiences, thoughts and feelings, historians used to conjure up a Spirit of the Age. This romantic concept has since been replaced by the more objective analysis of belief systems and their expression as ideology and culture. Within a generation of the Revolution, Marx posited a causal relationship between the social realities of economic power and the conceptual superstructure of politics, law, religion and art. This simple equation of base and superstructure has long been problematised, but it would be extremely foolish to reject Marx's essential argument about the dialectical relationship between cultural production and economic circumstances: ‘Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., … Developing their material production and their material intercourse, [they alter], along with this their real existance, their thinking and the products of their thinking.Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’.

Yet the idealist thesis, the subject of Marx's attack — that concepts determine progress — was precisely that which had inspired the Enlightenment, and had been adopted by the Romantics in their belief that the individual imagination can encompass all possible experiences. I have endeavoured throughout this book to argue for the influence of circumstance over agency and that the process of Revolutionary events was far from what had been originally envisaged by those involved. Indeed, there was a very disturbing disjuncture between good intentions and evil effects.