Is it possible to say anything new about the French Revolution? Perhaps not, unless fresh sources come to light. Whether it might be possible to say something that has been so long forgotten that it appears to be new is a different question, one that John Hardman seeks to answer in this rigorously old-fashioned, explicitly political account of the events that lie ‘at the strategic centre of modern history’.

Hardman describes his book as the only ‘political history of the revolution by an empirical historian since … 1901’. It is a history of committees, constitutions, conventions and correspondence, of factions and high farce, of momentary decisions, personal slights and the role of rhetoric in shifting opinion on the spot. As such, it is a history of the Parisian crucible, the narrative rarely departing for the provinces.

In adopting this approach, Hardman illuminates incidents and accidents that other historians might neglect, not least the ‘fatal’ and orgiastic royal banquet that appalled revolutionary opinion at a delicate moment in 1789. Other symbolic episodes fade into insignificance. In this narrative, built from paper and not images, there is no