1. The first manned balloon flight took place over Paris on 15 October 1783, when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier ascended in a balloon made by Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. Pilâtre de Rozier later ascended in balloons of his own making, as did several other French aeronauts. Henry Dale, Early Flying Machines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 12–18. [BACK]

2. In the process of gaining independence from Denmark, Norway, as “a free, independent, and indivisible kingdom,” was united with Sweden under the same king; only in 1905 did it get its own king. [BACK]

3. Historians differ somewhat in their dating of the beginning of the Reign of Terror; the beginning date used here is taken from Jean Tulard, Jean-François Fayard, and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris: Laffont, 1987), pp. 1113–14. The authoritative body count, 16,594, is that of Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 26. [BACK]

4. Regimes subsequent to the Revolution revived licensing and censorship with varying degrees of restrictiveness, but the guild system and the internal customs network were dead. [BACK]

5. For population figures for Europe: Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1978), p. 18. For population figures for France: R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 966; Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 14, 179; B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (New York: Facts on File, 1975), p. 30. For population figures for Paris: Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 17–20; Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 181–82. [BACK]

6. This procedure is modeled on Max Weber’s methodology of the “ideal type.” For an explanation of this methodology: Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949). For an example of its use: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958). [BACK]

7. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), pp. xxii–xxiii. [BACK]

8. Nicola Zingarelli, Il Nuovo Zingarelli: Vocabolario della lingua italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1988), p. 2155. One can see very clearly in Benvenuto Cellini how virtù in the Italian Renaissance sense of “will power” may have evolved into “virtuoso” in the modern sense (in English, French, German, and Italian) of “a person with masterly technique or skill in the arts.” In his autobiography, Cellini frequently uses the word virtù to mean “will power,” and the word virtuoso to mean “a person with will power.” He also frequently shows himself exercising great virtù in this sense, advancing his own claim to be a Renaissance virtuoso. He exercised this virtù especially in his artistic practice, where his acquisition of great technical skill in goldsmithery and sculpture made him a virtuoso in the modern sense. [BACK]

9. William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York: American Heritage, 1969), p. 1432; A. Rey and J. Rey-Debove, eds., Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (Paris: Le Robert, 1988), p. 2084. [BACK]