The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.

Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities. Forrest challenges the notion of a nation heroically rushing to arms by examining the massive rates of desertion and avoidance of service as well as their consequences on French society--on military campaigns and the morale of armies, on political opinion at home, on the social fabric of local villages, and on the Napoleonic dream of bringing about a coherent and centralized state.

A major assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution - the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.

The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.

The economic history of revolutionary France is still a neglected area in studies of the Revolution of 1789. Whilst some attention has been given to the condition of the peasants, the urban working classes and the financial crisis of the Ancient Régime, there has been a general tendency to regard economic factors as external and somewhat peripheral to the truly political nature of the Revolution. This book is designed to redress the balance, providing a clear, accessible, and thought-provoking guide to the economic background to the French Revolution. Professor Aftalion analyses the policies followed by successive revolutionary assemblies, examining in detail taxation, the confiscation of church property, the assignats, and the siege economy of the Terror. He shows how decisions taken in 1789 by the Constituent Assembly inevitably led to a deepening financial and economic crisis, and to increasingly radical and disastrous policies. The study is important also for its exposure of many of the economic fallacies propounded both at the time by many Frenchmen and later by many modern historians.

How the Revolution should be remembered has been the focus of debates concerned as much with France's future as with its past. Kaplan both reviews these debates and reconstructs - in sometimes hilarious detail - events leading up to the official commemoration. Bringing to bear the skills of the archival historian and the ethnographer, he masterfully explains how a particular political culture attempts to come to terms with its past.

Confident that they had broken with a discredited past, French revolutionaries after 1789 referred to pre-revolutionary times as the ancien regime (old regime). The National Assembly proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, grasping the reins of power and asserting the supremacy of law over all other interests. Even as the liberalism of 1789 collapsed into the Terror and then into the Napoleonic dictatorship, a new regime emerged at the juncture of state and civil society. The cycles of recrimination, hatred, and endemic local conflict unleashed by the Terror did not obliterate this new civic order. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study of three turbulent decades in French history, the eminent historian Isser Woloch examines some large questions: How did the French civic order change after 1789? What civic values animated the new regime; what policies did it adopt? What institutions did it establish, and how did they fare when carried into practice? Drawing on a variety of archival sources, Professor Woloch explains shifts in lawmaking and local authority, state intervention in village life, the creation of public primary schools, experiments in public assistance, a cycle of changes in the mechanisms of civil justice, the introduction of felony trials, and above all the imposition of military conscription. Unlike most accounts of the period, The New Regime moves outside Paris in search of the new civic order. Professor Woloch writes: "Imagine approaching a typical French town in 1798 or 1808 - the capital of one of the eighty-odd departments that the National Assembly created by redividing the nation's territory. The spires of a cathedral or the largest parish churches would stillcommand the horizon. But as one moved about the town, one could readily identify its civic institutions: the departmental administration (later the prefecture); the town hall or mairie; the local schools; several new courts or tribunals; the institutions of poor relief such as a