OUP Oxford
Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France's Old Regime
Key Metrics
- John Hardman
- OUP Oxford
- Hardcover
- 9780199585779
- 9.3 X 6.4 X 1 inches
- 1.45 pounds
- History > Europe - France
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The reform programme which finance minister Calonne, with the full backing of Louis XVI, presented to a hand-picked Assembly of Notables would have transformed France. She would have ended up with a Napoleonic system: equality without liberty. Since that is what she got in the end, after wading through oceans of blood, it might have been better if she had taken the shorter route. Liberty, however, in 1787 was valued more highly than equality and the Notables mercilessly exploited this preference to defeat Calonne and the king. By 1789, equality was back on the agenda and remained there through the vicissitudes of the coming years - but too late for Calonne (who was in exile) or for the king, who never recovered from the blow the Notables had dealt him.
In the light of modern scholarship and the latest archival information, John Hardman integrates the various facets of this seminal assembly, which are often considered in isolation (the king, the royal council, the Notables, the role of Necker, and that of public opinion) into a lucid analytical narrative, interspersed with the Notables' critique of Calonne's measures as they were successively presented to them.
Author Bio
John Hardman was Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Edinburgh from 1969-1983 and Senior Research Fellow at Sussex university from 2000-2004. He is the author of many books on eighteenth-century France and has appeared in several television programs, most recently the BBC 2 series on Versailles.
His most recent book The life of Louise XVI is the joint winner of the Franco-British Society Literary Prize for 2016.
Source: Andrew Lownie Literary Agency
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