📔 The Great Nation

Partly too it reflected the nature of Revolutionary politics throughout the 1790s, which was invariably a kind of inspired bricolage, which involved yoking together a wide range of pre-existent elements into an unanticipated and constantly changing salmagundi of political forms.

Notions of civic virtue were at that moment changing, in ways which would make of Louis's alleged vices an incubus on the back of the monarchy.

Fleury had correctly grasped the wisdom of forestalling possible Austrian revanchisme over Lorraine, while France's biggest international problems emanated from England […]

As we have seen, government regulated the number of printshops throughout the realm [...] and enforced censorship throughout the land.

If there would be former freemasons on the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, they would be numbered too in the ranks of the émigré armies and counter-revolutionary Chouan rebels, and in tumbrils bound for the guillotine.

Topsy-like, the Encyclopédie just grew and grew. Some seventeen volumes of text appeared spasmodically between 1751 and 1772, with eleven volumes of plates intercalating from 1762 to 1777.

The extent to which these Parisian radicals ‘represented’ the French people as a whole was very moot.

With anglophobia driving out anglophilia, the king – as during the Seven Years War – came to represent the very cynosure of patriotic zeal.