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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution

Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution

Sonenscher, Michael

Paperback

French HistoryGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 0691143269
ISBN13: 9780691143262
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Aug 30 2009
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.35
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, Après moi, le déluge (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.

In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself.


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