The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution

Download or read book The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution written by Roger Chartier and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991-04-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reknowned historian Roger Chartier attempts in this book to analyze the causes of the French revolution not simply by investigating its "cultural origins" but by pinpointing the conditions that "made is possible because conceivable." Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier's second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. "The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution" is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject. -- From product description.