It is perhaps significant that friends of Richard Cobb should have been anarchical enough to fail to publish these essays on the occasion either of his sixty-fifth birthday (already passed) or of his retirement from the Chair of Modern History at Oxford (still to come). However, it is also appropriate that this publication does not encounter any of the festivals connected with a festschrift. This is not a festschrift in the ordinary practice of that institution. There hangs about such publications a suspicious odour of the notice nécrologique with its pious sanctification. Richard Cobb is a busy and productive historian to whose scholarly activity and influence the passing of birthdays and the occupancy of a professorial chair are irrelevant. These essays do not seek formally to celebrate a career, or to perfume the passage of time. Rather they are an attempt to make a coherent and significant contribution to the understanding of a period of French revolutionary history.

One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from this collection of essays is the importance of the Thermidorean and Directorial period, still, despite much valuable recent research, a relatively under-developed region of French Revolutionary studies. It has long been established that it was during this period that the foundations were laid for some of the policies – in education and monetary reform for example – which were to be pursued more vigorously under Napoleon. Not so much emphasis has been placed on the importance of popular resistance during the later 1790s against those policies initiated by the revolutionary bourgeoisie long before 1794: the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the war with Europe, a more individualist economic programme.