Essays on the French Revolution

The overwhelming focus on Paris is probably nowhere in French studies more obvious than in treatments of the French Revolution. Until recently, with few exceptions, historians of the revolution have begun and ended with the events and philosophies of the capital. In this volume, however, the authors describe how men and women across France sometimes welcomed, often modified, but most often rejected policies emanating from Paris, thereby inflecting the course of the fateful revolution. Steven G. Reinhardt examines peasant unrest in the region of the Perigord in 1789-90 and concludes that the blow thus dealt seigneurialism pushed the revolution in a more radical direction than the delegates in Paris had ever intended. In the Midi-Toulousain, a region of longstanding sectarian tension and hostility, violence erupted over the revolutionary decision to strip the Catholic church of much of its temporal power and property. Clarke Garrett examines the differing responses of Catholics and Protestants and the resulting disturbances. Roderick Phillips describes the wide variation in provincial response to the revolutionary assembly's family reform measures. He traces the different reactions o