ABSTRACT
The quarter-century of the French Revolution and Napoleonic rule, withits Europe-wide political and social upheaval, its insurrections, wars and civil wars, and its fundamental reforms developed, carried out in both drastic and gradual fashion, but also thwarted or revoked, marked a fundamental break with the social, political and cultural world of the old regime. Admittedly, we can trace continuities across the revolutionary divide, see new trends emerging even before 1789, and note areas, such as the economy, where the chaotic circumstances prevalent during much of the two and a half decades after the calling of the Estates General, had produced more disruption of these previous trends than far-reaching innovations. Still, it is hard to avoid the impression that the fundamental, irreversible changes taking place after 1789 outweighed the elements of continuity. Many contemporaries certainly were aware in 1815 of the gulf that separated them from the world of the 1780s; even those who denied these changes, or, more commonly, loudly proclaimed a desire to roll them back, found themselves acting in ways that demonstrated their acceptance of a new state of affairs.
