1. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 1-2.

2. Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution (London, 1910), p. 2. The lectures were originally given by him in 1895.

3. I owe this translation of the term dérapage , a key concept in the work of François Furet, to George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987), p. 21.

4. J. Holland Rose, A Century of Continental History, 1780-1880 (London, 1895), p. 1.

5. Richard Cobden, 1793 and 1853 in Three Letters (London, 1853), pp. 51-52.

6. H. Sybel, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1795 bis 1800 (Duesseldorf, 1870).

7. François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris, 1965). The British historian Alfred Cobban had launched the first attack in 1955, but Anglo-Saxon skepticism was only discovered in France ex post facto.

8. M. Gauchet, "Les lettres sur l'Histoire de France de Augustin Thierry," in Les Lieux de Mémoire , Vol. II ^* , La Nation , ed. Pierre Nora, p. 271.

9. Dr. Wilhelm Friedrich Volger, Handbuch der allgemeinen Weltgeschichte , II, ii: Neueste Geschichte (Hanover, 1839), p. 240.

10. I cite the translation, presumably by the editor, in Walter Simon, ed., French Liberalism 1789-1848 (New York, 1972), pp. 139-143.

11. Jacques Solé, La révolution en questions (Paris, 1988), p. 337.

12. Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime , tr. M. W. Patterson (Oxford, 1947), p. 217.

13. Gauchet, "Les lettres," p. 273.

14. The greater radicalism of the French Revolution, compared to the English, he ascribed to the fact that the Normans, faced with Anglo-Saxon resistance on the basis of their own institutions, enjoyed a less absolute domination than the Frankish conquerors. Thus one might say that British compromise was to prevail because structured resistance to "the Norman Yoke" had never ceased.

15. Simon, ed., French Liberalism , p. 108.

16. Ibid., pp. 140-141.

15. Simon, ed., French Liberalism , p. 108.

16. Ibid., pp. 140-141.

17. Cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, "Revolution in the Theory of Karl Marx," in Bernard Chavance, ed., Marx en perspective (Paris, 1985), pp. 557-570.

18. Guizot in Simon, ed., French Liberalism , pp. 110, 112-113.

19. Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1847), 1: 121.

20. "Pierre Chaunu, a conservative historian, a decade ago denounced the Terror as 'a French-French genocide' that anticipated the mass killings of the 20th century."

New York Times , 15 September 1988, p. A4: "For Lovers of Turmoil, Here Comes 1789 Again."

21. De Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime , trans. M. W. Patterson (Oxford, 1947), p. 176.

22. Goldwin Smith, "The Invitation to Celebrate the French Revolution," The Living Age 178 (1888): 602-612.

23. De Tocqueville, Recollections , ed. J. P. Mayer (New York, 1949), p. 2. The author's phrase is "la classe moyenne."

24. "Dass ein grosses Volk bei seinem Durchbruch zu selbständigen politischen Leben, zu Freiheit und Macht, notwendig die Krise der Revolution durchzumachen habe, ist durch das doppelte Beispiel von England und Frankreich . . . ungemein nahegelegt." Cited by R. KoseUeck, "Revolution," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1984), 5: 747.

25. John Clapham, Economic History of Modern Britain , vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1926).

26. F. A. Mignet, Histoire de la Révolution Française , vol. 1, 18th ed. (Paris, 1898), p. 2.

27. Colin Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois and the French Revolution," in French Society and the Revolution , ed. D. Johnson (Cambridge, 1976), p. 1. Lucas is among the rare specialists who sees clearly that the problem of "bourgeois revolution" does not go away when we have shown that there were no distinct and antagonistic classes of bourgeois and nobles in 1789. For "in that case we have to decide why, in 1788-9, groups which can be identified as non-noble combatted and defeated groups which can be identified as noble, thereby laying the foundations of the political system of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie; and why they attacked and destroyed privilege in 1789, thereby destroying the formal organization of eighteenth-century French society and thereby preparing a structure within which the socioeconomic developments of the nineteenth century might blossom'' (p. 90).

28. Simon, ed., French Liberalism , p. 142.

29. Where such a stratum consisted of foreigners or strangers, its relation to the indigenous social structure was much more complicated, as nineteenth-century Jews discovered in Central and Eastern Europe.

30. The implicit link between such a civil society and bourgeois society is clear, for linguistic reasons, in German, where both are "buergerliche Gesellschaft." Even here we must not read the meanings of the nineteenth century into the words of the eighteenth.

31. Rudolf Vierhaus, "Gegenstand nachtrauernder Erinnerung: Ueber das bürgerliche Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich," Süddeutsche Zeitung , 5 October 1988. This is a review of Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich , 3 vols. (Munich, 1988), which contains the best discussion of these topics.

32. Solé, La Révolution , pp. 273, 275.

33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections , p. 2.

34. This seems to be the line taken by the antirevolutionary historian Cochin, whose views have been rediscovered and taken up by the head of the "revisionist" school, François Furet. The argument fitted in well with the fashion for analyzing changes in discourse as autonomous events in history, not requiring any further explanation. Cf. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981).

35. "Nobles, Bourgeois and the French Revolution," p. 123.

36. Lorenz Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreich: Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte , 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1848) pp. 126-131.

37. Victor Cousin, Cours de Philosophie: Introduction à l'Histoire de la Philosophie (Paris, 1828), Première Leçou, p. 12.

38. W. G. Runciman, "Unnecessary Revolution: The Case of France," European Journal of Sociology 23 (1982): 318.

39. Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime , p. 23.