The People's Revolution of 1789

This book analyzes the historic events that unleashed a vast panoply of anarchic, destructive, and creative disorders that demolished France's Old Regime and founded a new revolutionary order. The book captures the complex and dynamic interplay of uprisings, elections, meetings, and revolutionary moments that helped create modern freedom. This is the first book to chronicle the Parisian, provincial, and colonial movements of 1789 together. In doing so, the book builds from hundreds of local and regional studies and sources on the French Revolution to provide a new interpretation of the powerful contestations that created the modern revolutionary tradition. The book explores the multiplicity of movements that gave the revolutionary dynamic its power, without which the legislators' revolution at Versailles would have failed or been severely curtailed. The rapid onslaught of protests across the First Year of Liberty compounded their effects, overpowering authorities' efforts to maintain a degenerating order and forcing the establishment of a more open system. The book reveals in new ways how the French revolutionaries ended feudalism, established human rights, abolished the police, and instituted new elected governments. By returning emphasis to the people's revolution, we can better understand how world history's most consequential revolution developed, as millions of French people embraced direct action in hopes of fundamental change. Through the movements of millions, the French created the most powerful revolution the world had yet experienced.