Seven authorities in their respective fields come together to offer a new interpretation of the French Revolution: they show how the French monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve a fiscal crisis politicized long-standing structural problems, metastasizing an apparently fairly "normal" fiscal crisis into a revolution.
From Deficit to Deluge takes stock of shifts in scholarly investigation of the origins of French Revolution. During the last decade, scholars have moved beyond "revisionist" historians of the 1970s, who highlighted the monarchy's degeneration into despotism, to explore related conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and colonial policy. In this book, seven established authorities explore some of these critical intersections, and together they make clear the role that unresolved tensions in these realms played in the essentially political narrative told by post-Marxian revisionist historiography.
While each chapter of From Deficit to Deluge focuses upon one site of contention-fiscal, social, religious, diplomatic, ideological, and colonial-they all help to explain how long-standing structural problems of the Old Regime caused a fairly "normal" fiscal crisis to metastasize into a revolution. As the editors show in their introduction and conclusion, the growing democratization of politics sparked by the monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve the fiscal crisis put these wide-ranging problems at the epicenter of political debate, thereby sapping the foundations of royal authority and the social hierarchy.
"The contributors to
From Deficit to Deluge represent a good slice of the leading American historians of eighteenth-century France . . . [Readers] will find a series of illuminating, clearly-written essays that largely summarize and bring together the results of work conducted since the bicentennial . . . [A]nyone who teaches the history of the French Revolution on a college or graduate level will find the essays particularly helpful for students."
