French Revolution

Nothing was more frustrating to them on the eve of the French Revolution than the realization that the majority of Frenchmen didn’t speak French.

The term “Thermidorian,” central in the book, points to that period in the French Revolution following the toppling of the radical Jacobins.

Conservatism in the political sense arose in the modern world as a direct reaction to the French Revolution and, more indirectly, as a response to the Enlightenment.

Mr. Albertus is right that the French Revolution was a “turning point in human history,” not merely the event that gave us the assignat.

In the past, most academic scholarship on the French Revolution emphasized its social causes; a recent shift turned the focus to cultural factors involving past language and attitudes of mind.