Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.
Henry Heller is Professor of Early Modern and Modern History at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. A specialist in early modern French history, he has a special interest in the origins of capitalism and in the problems of contemporary history and politics. His many publications include The Cold War and The New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005 (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2006), Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth Century France (Toronto University Press, 2003), Labor, science and technology in France, 1500-1620 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism; The Ongoing Debate (Pluto Press, forthcoming).