This text describes how the French Revolution, which seemed to promise an era of Franco-British partnership, led to an even more bitter estrangement between the two nations. Both the British and French peoples saw the revolution of 1789 as offering the prospect of a new Franco-British partnership. These hopes sound foundered on old suspicions and new ideological divergences. The result was to confirm the traditional perception of each nation's own identity, centred on the state in France and the people in Britain. This study illuminates late 18th-century nationalism and xenophobia.

The revolutionary movement which began in 1787 disrupted every aspect of French society, rising to a pitch of such extreme violence that the effects are still felt in France today. The Revolution was the product of social tensions that developed throughout France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Norman Hampson analyses the nature of these social conflicts within their political framework. With enough background information to satisfy the general reader with no previous knowledge of the subject, Norman Ha mpson's book devotes particular attention to provincial France. The result is both a picture of the supreme crisis in French society, and an examination of social attitudes and aspirations whose influence has been universal and enduring.

The revolutionary movement which began in 1787 disrupted every aspect of French society, rising to a pitch of such extreme violence that the effects are still felt in France today. The Revolution was the product of social tensions that developed throughout France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Norman Hampson analyses the nature of these social conflicts within their political framework.
With enough background information to satisfy the general reader with no previous knowledge of the subject, Norman Ha mpson's book devotes particular attention to provincial France. The result is both a picture of the supreme crisis in French society, and an examination of social attitudes and aspirations whose influence has been universal and enduring.

Hampson describes how the French Revolution, which seemed to promise an era of Franco-British partnership, led to an even more bitter estrangement between the two nations. Both the British and French peoples saw the revolution of 1789 as offering the prospect of a new Franco-British partnership. These hopes soon foundered on old suspicions and new ideological divergences. The result was to confirm the traditional perception of each nation's own identity, centred on the state in France and the people in Great Britain.

Dedicated to the ship's company of "La Moqueuse", this book is not so much an account of naval operations as a kind of social history. With the help of recollections, diaries and letters home, the author recreates the reactions of an undergraduate to his various incarnations as an ordinary seaman in a corvette, the most junior officer on board a destroyer and the British naval liaison officer in a Free French sloop. Roughly half of the book deals with the very special atmosphere in the Free French forces and the complex situation in southern France immediately after its liberation in August 1944. The volume as a whole provides a vivid impression of what it actually felt like to be involved in the day-to-day experience of helping to make a warship work.

'I love that philosophy which raises up humanity' wrote Diderot, and his words echo in all the intellectual achievements of the eighteenth century. Armed with the insights of the scientific revolution, the men of the Enlightenment set out to free mankind from its age-old cocoon of pessimism and superstition and establish a more reasonable world of experiment and progress. Yet by the 1760s this optimism about man and society had almost evaporated. In the works of Rousseau, Kant and Goethe there was discernible a new inner voice, and an awareness of individual uniqueness which had eluded their more self-confident predecessors. The stage was set for the revolutionary crisis and the rise of Romanticism. In this book Norman Hampson follows through certain dominant themes in the Enlightenment, and describes the contemporary social and political climate, in which ideas could travel from the salons of Paris to the court of Catherine the Great - but less easily from a master to his servant. On such vexed issues as the role of ideas in the 'rise of the middle class' he provides a new and realistic approach linking intellectual and social history.

Contents Include:

Preface I. The Intellectual Climate II. The Political and Social Environment III. The French Revolution and the European Reaction IV. The Indian Summer of Enlightened Despotism V. The Victory of Reaction