Inventing the French Revolution `: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century / Edition 1

by Keith Michael Baker

Overview

In this volume, Keith Baker, arguably the leading expert writing in English on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, collects together a range of his essays on this subject published in journals in recent years. The essays include historiographical studies of the treatment of the topic by French and other historians as well as important case studies on the political vocabularies characteristic of the ancien régime and the revolutionary periods. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies on one of the central themes in modern European history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521385787
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/26/1990
Series:	Ideas in Context , #16
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	738,083
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.10(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution; Part I. French History at Issue: 2. Memory and practice: politics and the representation of the past in eighteenth-century France; 3. Controlling French history: the ideological arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau; 4. A script for a French revolution: the political consciousness of the abbé Mably; Part II. The Language of Politics at the End of the Old Regime: 5. French political thought at the accession of Louis XVI; 6. A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige; 7. Science and politics at the end of the old regime; 8. Public opinion as political invention; Part III. Toward a Revolutionary Lexicon: 9. Inventing the French Revolution; 10. Representation redefined; 11. Fixing the French constitution; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Keith Baker is undoubtedly one of the most creative historians working on the intellectual history of 18th century France...Anyone working in this field should listen carefully to what he has to say." Colin Lucas, Balliol College, Oxford

"[Professor Baker's] is an original and brilliant analysis of the central types of political discourse of the waning ancien régime." François Furet, University of Chicago

"Overall, these essays are stunning for their insight, clarity, and interpretive power....rich, complex, and challenging." Nathanael Greene, History

From the Publisher