The French Revolution, 1789-1799

The language of enlightened politics: The Société de 1789 in the French revolution

The Socidtd de 1789 was a political club founded in early 1790 to propagate the ideals of the Revolution and the Enlightenment. A systematic analysis of the language found in the public discourse of the Socidtd using simple quantitative techniques suggests important distinctions in comparison to the language found in a baseline sample, a selection of the General Cahiers de doldances of 1789. It...

Drought and the French Revolution: The effects of adverse weather conditions on peasant revolts in 1789

This paper examines the role of adverse climatic conditions on political protest and institutional development. In particular, it assesses the role of adverse climate on the eve of the French Revolution on peasant uprisings in 1789. Historians have argued that crop failure in 1788 and cold weather in the winter of 1788/89 led to peasant revolts in various parts of France. To test this hypothesi...

Knowledge Elites and Modernization: Evidence from Revolutionary France

This paper examines the role of knowledge elites in modernization. At the eve of the French Revolution, in the spring of 1789, King Louis XVI solicited lists of grievances (Cahiers de Doléances), in which the public could express complaints and suggestions for reforms of the Ancien Regime. We show that the demand for mass education and democratization was particularly high in regions that had a...

Penological pioneering in the Walnut Street Jail, 1789-1799.

The paradoxes of the revolutions of 1989 in central Europe

The self-limiting revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe offer an alternative paradigm of revolutionary change that is reminiscent more of the American struggle for independence in 1776 than the Jacobin tendencies that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789. In order to understand the contradictory impulses of the revolutions of 1989—the desire for a radical renewal and the concern for preser...