Abstract
In September 1788, the English agronomist Arthur Young found himself in the Atlantic port of Nantes just six weeks after Louis XVI had announced the convocation of the Estates-General for 1 May 1789. A keen observer and recorder, Young noted in his journal:
Nantes is as enflammée in the cause of liberty, as any town in France can be; the conversations I witnessed here prove how great a change is effected in the minds of the French, nor do I believe it will be possible for the present government to last half a century longer, unless the clearest and most decided talents be at the helm.1
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Notes
Arthur Young, Travels in France during the years 1787–1788–1789 (New York, 1969), 96–7.
Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France (London, 1990), 25–6.
Paul Beik (ed.), The French Revolution (London, 1971), 12;
Emmanuel Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, trans. M. Blondel (London, 1963);
William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution. The Abbé Sieyès and ‘What is the Third Estate?’ ( Durham, NC, 1994 ).
George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), ch. 3.
On the elections of 1789, see Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge and New York, 1996), ch. 1.
Michel Vovelle, Les Métamorphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris, 1976), 71, 103.
Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 ( Ithaca, NY, 1996 ), 50.
Michel Vovelle, ‘La Représentation populaire de la monarchie’, in Keith Baker (ed.), The Political Culture of the Old Régime (Oxford, 1987 ), 77–96.
Timothy Tackett, ‘Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror’, AHR 105 (2000), 691–713.
David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 ( Columbia, MO, 1986 ).
Elizabeth Rapley, ‘“Pieuses Contre-Révolutionnaires”: The Experience of the Ursulines of Northern France, 1789–1792’, FH 2 (1988), 453–73.
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© 2004 Peter McPhee
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McPhee, P. (2004). The Revolutionary Reconstruction of French Society, 1789–1792. In: A Social History of France 1789–1914. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3777-3_3
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