ABSTRACT
George Taylor argued that the French Revolution was an accident, the result of an avoidable political crisis, rather than a ‘bourgeois revolution’ as the Marxist interpretation argued, the inevitable transition from a feudal economy dominated by the aristocracy to a capitalist economy in which a new class would control political power. Popular violence and the violence of the Terror were the focus of political debate during the revolutionary decade and have been ever since. Women never secured the right to vote during the French Revolution, nor did they enjoy the same rights of citizenship as men in other respects. Historians of the French Revolution have drawn on the concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, first introduced in the 1960s by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and on the concept of ‘public opinion’ that Keith Baker and Mona Ozouf have discussed in some of their writings.
