Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Bailey Stone uses recent scholarship on the diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century revolutionary France to examine the outbreak of the French Revolution and the dramatic developments of the subsequent decade. Stone finds events of the period attributable to the interacting pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions. He contends that the Revolution of 1789-1799 needs to be viewed in the larger contexts of "early modern" and "modern" French history and modern "progressive" sociopolitical revolutions.