From Deficit to Deluge

by Kaiser, Thomas E.; Van Kley, Dale K.

• ISBN13: 9780804772815
• ISBN10: 0804772819
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-01-20
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

From Deficit to Delugetakes stock of shifts in scholarly investigation of the origins of French Revolution. During the last decade, scholars have moved beyond "revisionist" historians of the 1970s, who highlighted the monarchy's degeneration into despotism, to explore related conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and colonial policy. In this book, seven established authorities explore some of these critical intersections, and together they make clear the role that unresolved tensions in these realms played in the essentially political narrative told by post-Marxian revisionist historiography. While each chapter ofFrom Deficit to Delugefocuses upon one site of contention--fiscal, social, religious, diplomatic, ideological, and colonial--they all help to explain how long-standing structural problems of the Old Regime caused a fairly "normal" fiscal crisis to metastasize into a revolution. As the editors show in their introduction and conclusion, the growing democratization of politics sparked by the monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve the fiscal crisis put these wide-ranging problems at the epicenter of political debate, thereby sapping the foundations of royal authority and the social hierarchy.

Author Biography

Thomas E. Kaiser is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He co-authored Europe, 1648-1815: From the Old Regime to the Age of Revolution (2004). Dale K. Van Kley Professor of Early Modern Europe History, Ohio State University, has authored several books, most recently the Religious Origins of the French Revolution. From Calvin to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1560-1791 (1996).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Financial Origins of the French Revolution	p. 37
The Social Origins of the French Revolution Revisited	p. 67
The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560-1791	p. 104
From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution: The Court and French Foreign Policy, 1787-1789	p. 139
Enlightenment Idioms, Old Regime Discourses, and Revolutionary Improvisation	p. 165
Gender in Pre-Revolutionary Political Culture	p. 198
Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution	p. 220
Conclusion: From Old Regime to French Revolution	p. 249
Notes	p. 271
Index	p. 323
Contributors	p. 343
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