In 1978, French historian François Furet announced that “the French Revolution is over,” by which he meant that the heated debates in France over the meanings of the Revolution, evident throughout the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth century, were at an end. Passions had cooled so sufficiently, Furet thought, that the historiography of the Revolution could pass from its long “commemorative” phase, dominated since 1917 by programmatic Marxist interpretations, to a more dispassionate, analytical approach. Since then, of course, historians in France and the anglophone world have vehemently debated the Furet thesis. While most of them have been willing to discard the idea that 1789 represented the triumph of a rising bourgeois class over a superannuated aristocracy, George Taylor's new book on the London and Paris stages in the Revolutionary period still situates theatrical production on both sides of the Channel within the context of a politically and economically ascendant bourgeoisie. Taylor argues that “new material circumstances created new audiences and new ideological opinions” (2) on the stages of both capitals during this sixteen-year period. Ultimately, however, the rise of Gothic melodrama by the time of Napoleon's self-coronation in 1804 was “reactionary;” the genre's Romantic emphasis on the “absolute self,” at the expense of holistic links among the self, the body, and the community, betrayed the failure of the Revolutionary spirit felt in both countries in 1789. Theatregoing after 1800, according to Taylor, became an exercise in “alienation,” allowing disaffected audiences to mourn a revolutionary moment that had yielded to oligarchy in Britain and Napoleonic authoritarianism in France.