If this study is essentially correct, the French Revolution began in 1789 as the result of a convergence in the Gallic kingdom of statist geopolitical and sociopolitical needs rooted deeply in the past. On the one hand, Bourbon statesmen were long mesmerized by the vision of a France not only perdurably secure in the endless competition of the European states but also uniquely positioned to achieve greatness on both the high seas and the Continent. On the other hand, the policy makers who sought to realize this vision found, as time went on, that pursuing it forced them to sponsor a kind of domestic change that was ever more difficult to square with the social and political tenets undergirding the ancien regime. By 1789, the French crown was irretrievably undone by its coalescing failures in the foreign and domestic realms: that is to say, its failure to achieve anything remotely approaching its historic goals abroad and its failure to maintain control over rising sociopolitical expectations at home that, paradoxically, owed much in the first place to the crown's very pursuit of international greatness.

Although the unfolding of the Revolution itself lies manifestly outside the purview of our inquiry, we cannot help noting how deep a shadow was cast over the sanguinary French landscape of 1789–99 by the historical forces that had so long conditioned developments in the old regime. This is emphatically not to posit an unbroken continuity extending from prerevolutionary days to and through the epochal period of the Revolution.