Part front matter for Part V The French Revolution, 1789

Extract

In the early years at least, once we have accounted for the efficacy of pamphlets and journals, and the spoken propaganda … there still remains an element of spontaneity that defies a more exact analysis.
george rudé¹

It was with these words that George Rudé ended the last substantive chapter in his history of The Crowd in the French Revolution, which remains to this day one of the most famous scholarly works on the revolutionary mobilizations that beset Paris between 1788 and 1795. This part of the book begins where Rudé left off: trying to understand the element of spontaneity that he identified as a matter historians might be inclined to leave “more particularly to the province of the sociologist.”²

Thankfully, historians have disobeyed Rudé’s suggestion and have instead helpfully returned to the topic a great many times since The Crowd. I thus arrive at the case not only equipped with a sociological theory to explore, but with the benefit of sixty more years of in-depth research into the social and contentious history of the Revolution. It is guided by the wisdom and insight of the many historical studies before and since The Crowd that I approach the French case. Even so, to obtain a thorough sense of the case, it was necessary to delve somewhat into the primary material. Visits to the Parisian police archives, the Archives Nationales, and various outposts of the French National Library, as well as surveys of the wide variety of archival material now remotely available to scholars sufficed to familiarize me with the Revolution in a way that made the question of popular mobilization far more accessible than it would have been otherwise. Properly dissecting such voluminous archival material, however, is a task that often requires decades, rather than months, of delving, so I refer to such material sparingly. Rather, it is overwhelmingly the thoroughly concerted, critically interrogated, and empirically detailed work of historians that guides my analysis of the French case.

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Part front matter for Part V The French Revolution, 1789

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