George Rude "To Burke the revolutionary crowd was purely destructive and presumed to be composed of the most

undesirable social elements: the crowds that invaded the chateau of Versailles in October 1789 are 'a band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with blood.' On the other hand [the crowd] has [also] been presented as the embodiment of all the popular and Republican virtues." "The National Assembly's actions made it impossible to arrest the course of the Revolution." "In respect of social origins, a sharp division is revealed between the mass of demonstrators and insurgents and the political leaders directing, or making political capital out of these operations. [The latter] with few exceptions were drawn from the commercial bourgeoisie, the professions or the liberal aristocracy. This discrepancy in origins between leaders and participants is reflected in a discrepancy in their social and political aims." "Perhaps not surprisingly, the most constant motive of popular insurrection during the Revolution, as in the 18th century as a whole, was the compelling need for cheap and plentiful bread and other essentials." "Having won its victory over 'privilege' and 'despotism', the bourgeoisie now wanted peace and quiet in order to proceed with its task of giving France a constitution." The ideas of the philosophes were wildly disseminated and were absorbed by an eager reading public.

Simon Schama A noble was nothing more than a successful bourgeoisie" (p.116) "The one thing the Constituent Assembly was manifestly not was bourgeois." (p.478) "[Violence] was the Revolution's source of collective energy - it was what made the Revolution revolutionary. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy" (p.615). "[The revolution] depended on organized killing to accomplish political ends" (p.637) [Schama concluded that there was a direct link between the events of 1789 and the institution of the Terror] it was necessary to root out Uncitizens. Thus began the cycle of violence which ended in the smoking obelisk and the forest of guillotines.

Francois Furet "The historian of the French Revolution must produce more than proof of competence. He must show his colours. He must state at the outset where he comes from, what he thinks and what he is looking for. What he writes about the French Revolution is assigned a label even before he starts working."

"For the same reason that the Ancien Regime is thought to have an end but no beginning, the Revolution has a birth but no end."

"The August Decrees were an improvised parliamentary reaction to an emergency situation."

"I have long thought that it might be intellectually useful to date the beginning of the French Revolution to the Assembly of Notables in early 1787. The absolute monarchy died, in theory and in practice, in the year when its intendants were made to share their responsibilities with elected assemblies, in which the Third Estate was given twice as many representatives as the past. Tocqueville dates what he calls the 'true spirit of the Revolution' from September 1788." "The Ancien Regime had been in the hands of the king; the Revolution was the people's achievement. France had been a kingdom of subjects; it was now a nation of citizens. The old society had been based on privilege; the Revolution established equality. Thus was created the ideology of a radical break with the past, a tremendous cultural drive for equality." "There was an essential instability inherent in revolutionary politics, as a consequence of which the periodic professions of faith concerning the 'stabilisation' of the Revolution unfailingly led to renewed bursts of revolutionary activity." "Revolutionary France used the paradox of democracy as the sole source of power. Society and the state were fused in the discourse of the people's will; and the ultimate manifestations of that obsession were the Terror and the war, both of which were inherent in the ever-escalating rhetoric of the various groups competing for the exclusive right to embody the democratic principle. The Terror refashioned, in a revolutionary mode, a kind of divine right of public authority." "The two symmetrical and opposite images of undivided power furnished the ingredients for ministers for a plot to institute a ministerial despotism; the royal administration believed in a conspiracy among the grain merchants or the men of letters. It is precisely in that sense that the eighteenth-century French monarchy was absolute, and not as has been said again and again by republican historiography on the basis of what the Revolution asserted - because of the way it exercised its authority. Its power was weak, but it conceived of itself as undivided. The French Revolution is inconceivable without that idea, or that phantasm, which was a legacy of the monarchy; but the Revolution anchored power in society instead of seeing it as a manifestation of God's will. The new collectively shared image of politics was the exact reverse of that of the Ancien Regime."

Thomas Carlyle "France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams." "...the actual irrational Versailles Government? Alas, that is a Government existing there only for its own behoof: without right, except possession; and now also without might. It foresees nothing, sees nothing; has not so much as a purpose, but has only purposes, and the instinct whereby all that exists will struggle to keep existing. Wholly a vortex; in which vain counsels, hallucinations,

falsehoods, intrigues, and imbecilities whirl; like withered rubbish in the meeting of winds!" "Foolish enough! These Privileged Classes have been used to tax; levying toll, tribute and custom, at all hands, while a penny was left: but to be themselves taxed? Of such Privileged persons, meanwhile, do these Notables, all but the merest fraction, consist." "Poor ill-advised Marie-Antoinette; with a woman's vehemence, not with a sovereign's foresight!" "That greenish-coloured individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre. With a strict painful mind, an understanding small but clear and ready, he grew in favour with official persons, who could foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite free from genius." "And still the Prisons fill fuller, and still the Guillotine goes faster. On all high roads march flights of Prisoners, wending towards Paris. Not forever; no. All Anarchy, all Evil, Injustice, is, by the nature of it, dragon's-teeth; suicidal, and cannot endure.

William Doyle "(The storming of the Bastille] was the climax of the popular movement. The king of France needed no coronation. He reigned by the grace of God from the moment his predecessor breathed his last, and a coronation was purely customary. It certainly took Louis XVI several months to understand it (tax changes) and authorize its implementation. He (Calonne) totally miscalculated the forces he had let loose, and how to handle them. Those who thought themselves enlightened believed that they were a small band of crusades against widespread ways of thinking, habits and institutions that were not. Advocates [of the enlightenment] spent much of their time pouring scorn on pillars of the established order of things, such as the church and the legal system.

Peter McPhee "Resentment of seigneuralism above all bonded rural communities together against their lords ... People were being consulted about reform proposals, not about whether they wanted a revolution ... only later to become the focus of concerted action." "The Revolution of the bourgeois deputies had only been secured by the active intervention of the people of Paris."

Simon Schama "While the cahiers of the liberal nobility offered an alluring picture of a briskly modernizing France, that would shake off restrictions like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, those of the Third Estate wanted, very often, to return to the cocoon." "The bourgeoisie, the leading element of the Third Estate, now took over. Its aim was revolutionary ... Before long, however, it was carried forward by the pressure of the masses, the real motive force behind the Revolution." [pre bastille demolition, 12 July] During that single night of largely unobstructed riot and demolition, Paris was lost to the Monarchy. The real significance of the Great Fear was the vacuum of authority it exposed at the heart of the French government." "The effect of this prolonged state of anxiety was to create the politics of paranoia that would eventually engulf the entire Revolution." "More than any inequity in a society based on privilege, or the violent cycles of famine that visited France in the 1780's, the Revolution was occasioned by these decisions of state."

Christopher Hibbert The poverty of many and the grievances of nearly all French peasants were much aggravated by their liability for taxes from which noble landowners might well be immune.

Fenwick and Anderson The system of privilege alone infects everything, harms everything and prevents my improvements. Such a state is inevitably an imperfect kingdom. Agriculture is crushed by overwhelming burdens and the states finances impoverished. Without the consent of the people, the Parlement would not consent to registration of the edicts. The Kings words turned what seemed to be a government triumph into a disaster. Within a week, the country was in uproar. A law not made by the people is no law at all. The more brilliantly the first two orders swaggered, the more they alienated the Third Estate and provoked it into exploding the institution all together.

The Dauphins funeral was said to have cost 600k livres. (Anderson) The Assembly of Notables demonstrated the Monarchs momentary weakness. "The decision (the declaration of the National Assembly) marked the beginnings of the real revolution and it was largely as a result of the indecision of Louis XVI."

Michael Adcock Brienne was close to victory, when the King, misunderstanding the situation, ordered the Parlement to register the laws. The Parlement, stunned, registered the laws, but after the Kings departure, they cancelled them all.

Alfred Soboul The Enlightenment undermined the ideological foundations of the established order. "It is quite true that the abolition of 'the general effects of the feudal system'... along with the various judicial and administrative reforms, entailed the destruction of seigneurial power and laid the foundations of a unified national state. But the terms of redemption turned the abolition into a compromise heavily weighted in favor of the aristocracy. In the end, the real cost was to be borne by the tenant-farmers and share-croppers. For although the peasants had been freed from the feudal system, they did not all benefit equally from their new liberty." The economic base of society was changingthe middle class. Class-consciousness had been fortified by the exclusive attitude of the nobility and by the contrast between their advancement in economic and intellectual matters and their decline in the field of civic responsibility.

Gail Bossenga The economic crisis provoked an escalating and unresolvable constitutional conflict. Conflict over finances made the regressive nature of indirect taxation a political issue.

George Lefebvre [the Great Fear] provided an excellent excuse to arm the people against royal powerand this reaction in the countryside gathered the peasants together to turn against the aristocracyit allowed the peasantry to achieve a full realisation of its strength.