France first became a republic on 21 September 1792, by declaration of the newly elected Convention. How and when did that event become possible, in the nation whose political culture had sponsored a cult of royal authority like no other in early-modern Europe? It is sometimes suggested that republicanism had no foothold in France prior to the royal family's attempted flight from the Revolution, halted at Varennes in June of 1791 – as if this abortive contingency were alone capable of effecting so massive a shift of loyalties. In reality, of course, the advent of the First Republic was prepared by a long process of ideological contention in the eighteenth century, involving both the gradual delegitimisation of the monarchy and the slow domestication of once-alien republican ideas. What were the stages in this process? We are in a better position than ever before to grasp them, thanks in part to the transformation in our understanding of early-modern political thought wrought by J. G. A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment. If his own conception of a post-Renaissance ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ was confined to the Anglophone world – to the surprise even of sympathetic critics (see Gilbert 1976: 308; and Shklar 1978) – scholars have in the meantime devoted a good deal of energy to bringing Pocock's perspectives to bear on the career of civic humanism in eighteenth-century and revolutionary France.