Stephen Miller
Author: Stephen Miller
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.
Biographical Note
Readership
Historians of France. Research libraries, graduate and post-graduate students, as well as scholars, of economic history, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary era.
Table of Contents
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 1758–89
4 Revolutionary Politics 1788–91: Despotism and Equality
5 Popular Revolts, Political Authority and the Revolutionary Dynamic, 1789–93
6 Politics and Class, 1792–99: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
