Complete catalogue and index of one of the largest collections of its kind of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic newspapers pamphlets and official publications covering the years 1789-1815. Over 20,000 listings are preceded by an introduction giving a history of the collection, a survey of other notable French Revolution collections, and a biographical essay on William S. Maclure. William S. Maclure (1763-1840) was a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, a radical social reformer, and our first scientific geologist. His huge collection of French Revolutionary publications is one of the greatest libraries of its kind to be formed during the period of the Revolution. Maclure bestowed the collection on the Philadelphia Academy of the Natural Sciences in 1821, and the Academy in turn gave the collection to the Historical Society of Philadelphia, In 1949 it was acquired by the University of Pennsylvania.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1837.

Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France, first published in 2000, offers a lucid interpretation of the Ancien Régime and the origins of the French Revolution. It examines what was arguably the most ambitious project of the eighteenth-century French monarchy: the attempt to impose direct taxes on formerly tax-exempt privileged elites. Connecting the social history of the state to the study of political culture, Michael Kwass describes how the crown refashioned its institutions and ideology to impose new forms of taxation on the privileged. Drawing on impressive primary research from national and provincial archives, Kwass demonstrates that the levy of these taxes, which struck elites with some force, not only altered the relationship between monarchy and social hierarchy, but also transformed political language and attitudes in the decades before the French Revolution. Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France sheds light on French history during this crucial period.