General editor's preface -- Acknowledgements -- Maps -- Introduction PART ONE: 'LA FRANCE PROFONDE' -- 1. Louis XIV and the Regent: war and peace -- Bourbon absolutism -- Checks and balances -- Louis XIV - 'absolutism reinterpreted' -- The Regency: a failed revolution? -- The liberal phase, 1715-18 -- The authoritarian phase, 1718-23 -- 2. The Catholic Church and French society -- Church and state: 'the jealous sisters' -- The organisation of the Catholic Church -- The Catholic Church: 'in sickness and in health' -- Religion, women and 'the public sphere' -- 3. The nobility and the seigneurial system -- French agriculture: custom and modernisation -- A 'feudal' or a 'seigneurial' ruling class? -- The eighteenth-century noble -- Categories of nobles -- Landownership: 'This bizarre system' -- The exploitation of a seigneury -- The coercive power of the seigneury -- 'Apprentice seigneurs': fermiers and laboureurs -- 4. The ancien regime bourgeoisie -- The rise of the bourgeoisie' -- Typology of the bourgeoisie -- The lawyer, the ironmaster, their wives and children': case studies -- 5. A 'fourth estate' of poverty -- Dependency and poverty in the countryside -- Protoindustrial 'peasant-artisans', factory workers and miners -- Urban workers: journeymen, street vendors and migrants -- Servants, beggars and slaves -- Poverty, the pulpit and popular protest -- PART TWO: 'WINDS OF CHANGE' -- 6. 'Enlightenments' and the people -- Love, sex and marriage -- Medicine and health -- Literacy and education -- Philosophes and the people -- 7. 'Enlightenments' and the state -- Choiseul and the lessons of defeat -- Economic growth: from state regulation towards free trade -- Maupeou's 'enlightened absolutism' -- Repression and social rebellion -- PART THREE: REFORM AND REACTION -- 8. 'New ideological wine into old constitutional bottles': reform and reaction, 1774-91 -- Social reform: from Turgot to Necker, 1774-81 'Liaisons dangereuses': political and cultural crossroads during the 1780s -- The fiscal and financial crisis of the ancien regime -- The bourgeois-popular revolution of 1789-91: 'mixed messages' -- 9. War and dictatorship -- The rise and fall of the Jacobin-sansculotte alliance, 1792-4 Le peuple, counter-revolution and the bourgeois state The exclusion of the people from power -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Notes -- Index.
Biography
Gwynne Lewis is Emeritus Professor at The University of Warwick. She has also taught in Canada and in Tanzania.
Her works include The Second Vendee (1978); The Advent of Modern Capitalism in France 1770-1840 (1993) and The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (Routledge, 1993).
