EUR  â¬169.20EUR  â¬141.00 excl. VAT
State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France
A Study in Political Power and Popular Revolution in Languedoc. Revised and Updated Edition
Series: - Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 263
Author:
In contrast to the traditional Marxist interpretation of emerging capitalism and a revolutionary bourgeoisie, this book shows that commodified labor, fundamental to the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie, did not take shape in eighteenth-century France. The mass of the population consisted of peasants and artisans in possession of land and workshops, and embedded in autonomous communities. The old regime bourgeoisie and nobility thus developed within the absolutist state in order to have the political means to impose feudal forms of exploitation on the people. These class relations explain the crisis of 1789 and the revolutionary conflicts of the 1790s.
Stephen Miller, Ph.D. (1999), UCLA, is Professor of History at UAB (the University of Alabama at Birmingham). His many books and articles include The Social History of Agriculture: From the Origins to the Current Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction
1 The Peasant Economy, Seigneurial Regime, and State
2 The Rewards of Royal Service
3 Crown and Nobility in a Time of Financial Difficulties: Royal Policy 1758â89
4 Revolutionary Politics 1788â91: Despotism and Equality
5 Popular Revolts, Political Authority and the Revolutionary Dynamic, 1789â93
6 Politics and Class, 1792â99: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
1 The Peasant Economy, Seigneurial Regime, and State
2 The Rewards of Royal Service
3 Crown and Nobility in a Time of Financial Difficulties: Royal Policy 1758â89
4 Revolutionary Politics 1788â91: Despotism and Equality
5 Popular Revolts, Political Authority and the Revolutionary Dynamic, 1789â93
6 Politics and Class, 1792â99: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Historians of France. Research libraries, graduate and post-graduate students, as well as scholars, of economic history, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary era.