The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille

This is the first study to examine in detail the political and fiscal origins of the French Revolution by means of sustained archival research at the local level. The book helps to illuminate an important question in the current debate in French historiography (as posed, among others, by Francois Furet, Lynn Hunt, and Simon Schama): if the Revolution was essentially a political event, what shaped the political attitudes of the revolutionaries? The answer, it is argued here, can be traced to...