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

by Keith Michael Baker

• ISBN13: 9780521385787
• ISBN10: 0521385784
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-01-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 r_gime and the revolutionary periods. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies on one of the central themes in modern European history.

Author Biography

Keith Michael Baker is professor of history at Stanford University.

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.