ABSTRACT
In most of this book I have taken the failure of the Second Republic as my effective end-date. Where I have journeyed beyond 1851 it has usually been to illustrate how the events of 1848 undermined the authority of history as a grand discourse of legitimation. The body of work which I have been examining took as its point of departure self-reflection upon the fact of the French Revolution. Guizot, Thierry, Quinet, Michelet all viewed 1789 as a boundary marking the emergence of new forms of consciousness and new political arrangements. They brought to their work a sense that they were writing from a privileged position situated near the end of a process of individual and collective emancipation. 1 The destabilising effects of political revolution were felt to have had fertile intellectual consequences for they had opened up a new perspective on the past. History as it had been conceived by the Enlightenment was considered inadequate. It could not provide support for a post-revolutionary identity which, on account of its anxious sense of separateness, desired to be embedded within a different kind of continuity, one which displayed new forms of pattern and purpose. The historical dimension was something that the new generation considered to be essential.
