The year 1939, which saw the outbreak of the Second World War, is also
remembered among students of the French Revolution as the 150th
anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. In France the occasion was
marked by extensive celebrations and a spate of new writings on the Revo-
lution and its significance. Undoubtedly the most distinguished product
of this activity was Georges Lefebvre's concise account of the origins of
the Revolution andits outbreak, Quatre-Vingt-Neuf. Unashamedly exult-
ing in the achievements of 1789, Lefebvre's book itself had an eventful his-
tory in the years following its publication. Much of the edition was
destroyed, as subversive literature, on the orders of the Vichy govern-
ment. In 1947, however, it was translated into English by the American
scholar Robert R. Palmer; and under the title of The Coming of the French
Revolution it rapidly became essential reading wherever the French Revo-
lution was studied throughout the English-speaking world. By the time
of Lefebvre's death in 1959 it had sold over 40,000 copies in English. It
remains, and will remain, a model of historical writing by a master of his
subject. For many years its analysis of the death throes of the old order in
France, and the diseases which killed it, remained the definitive statement
of what by the 1980s was beginning to be called the 'classic' version of the
Revolutior's origins.

The ultimate cause of the French Revolution, Lefebvre believed, was
the rise of the bourgeoisie. ¹ A lifelong socialist, by 1939 he was falling
increasingly under the influence of Marxism -- a theory of history
which assigns a central role to the bourgeoisie as the representatives and
beneficiaries of capitalism. ² According to Lefebvre, 1789 was the moment
when this class took power in France, after several centuries of growing
numbers and wealth. Medieval society had been dominated and ruled
by a landed aristocracy, for land was the only form of wealth. By the
eighteenth century, however, 'economic power, personal abilities and
confidence in the future had passed largely to the bourgeoisie', who
were buttressed by 'a new form of wealth, mobile or commercial' and a

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