This book is not a history of the French Revolution, which has been recounted too brilliantly for me to contemplate doing it again. It is rather a study of that Revolution.

In 1789 the French tried harder than any other people has ever done to sever their past from their future, as it were, and hollow out an abyss between what they had been and what they wished to become. To that end, they took any number of precautions to ensure that they would carry over nothing from the past into their new condition. They imposed all sorts of constraints on themselves so that, in fashioning the people they were to be in the future, they would not resemble their fathers. They spared no effort to make themselves unrecognizable.

In this singular enterprise I have always thought that they were far less successful than people outside France generally believe and than the French themselves believed initially. I was convinced that, unbeknownst to themselves, they had taken from the Ancien Régime most of the feelings, habits, and ideas that guided the Revolution which destroyed it, and that, without intending to, they had built the new society out of the debris of the old. Hence, in order to understand the Revolution and its achievements properly, we must temporarily avert our eyes from the France that exists today and begin our investigation at the tomb of the France that is no more.