1. The most classical analysis can be found in Guizot's lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1828-1829. See François Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe (Paris, 1928), partially reprinted in Historical Essays and Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). [BACK]

2. François Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France , 2d ed. (Paris, 1824), p. 16. [BACK]

3. F.-A. Mignet, Introduction, Historie de la Révolution française, de 1789 jusqu'en 1814 (Paris, 1824). [BACK]

5. I have written at length on this matter in Marx et la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), translated into English as Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). [BACK]

6. One finds the aristocratic class content of the absolutist state scattered throughout twentieth-century Marxist historiography. For example: Boris Porshnev, Les soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963), translated from the Russian: Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, la politique et l'histoire (Paris: PUF, 1959); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974). [BACK]

7. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). [BACK]

8. For example with Emmanuel Sieyès, Essais sur les privilèges (Fall 1788) and Qu'est-ce qne le Tiers-Etat? (January 1989), or Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790). [BACK]

9. I am thinking in particular of the books of Albert Mathiez dedicated to Robespierre and his role in the Terror. For example, Robespierre terroriste (Paris: La renaissance du livre, 1921) or Autour de Robespierre (Paris: Poyot, 1926). [BACK]

10. Benjamin Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel et de la nécessité de s'y rallier (Paris, 1795), recently republished with a Preface by P. Raynaud in the Collection Champs (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). [BACK]

11. Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (Paris, 1856). [BACK]