ABSTRACT
France in the eighteenth century was a powerful country – a fact thatthe descent into turmoil and revolution after 1787 should not beallowed to obscure. By comparison with her continental neighbours, she achieved territorial unity early on and in an irrevocable fashion. Even at the start of the century, the ‘hexagon’ figured unmistakably on the map of Europe: once the absorption of Lorraine had been completed in 1766, the frontiers of the Bourbon kingdom would come to resemble closely those of the present-day Fifth Republic. France was a large, compact and wellpopulated state, then. With perhaps 21.5 million inhabitants in 1700 and over 29 million by the century’s end, she bestrode the Continent. England and Prussia (12 million and 6 million respectively in 1800) were minnows by comparison. Only the Habsburg Empire (about 20 million) and the untapped and largely unmeasured resources of the Russian Empire appeared to offer some counterweight. A fifth of all Europeans were born French (compared with a little over one-tenth today). Historians in search of explanations for the train of events beginning in 1787 tend to dwell upon the ramshackle features of the Bourbon state, but not so contemporaries. By the standards of the second half of the eighteenth century, France was a prosperous, welladministered country whose rulers possessed an enviable (if still inadequate) capacity to extract tax revenue from their subjects.
