The Revolution, though, is a ripping good story. It also affected the largest population in Europe and so shook Europeans to the core of their being. Over 20 of Europes population lived in France, and every European agreed that France was the central power of Europe. For such a large and powerful country to fall precipitously into such dark and violent change terrified everyone in Europe; the universal condemnation of the Revolution led to a flurry of introspection. The pain of the process, however, this long, difficult process of remaking society into a nonmonarchical, industrybased society, would continue well into the 1940s and beyond. The story begins in the one world, dead, the world of the ancien regime , in its last, blissfully unaware days. It unfolds into magnificent and visionary action: the brave defiance of the monarch, the visionary power of the middle class representatives in the Estates General, and the great documents on rights and autonomy. It quickly, however, descends into both tragedy and farce: the radical revolution that sought to remake society from the ground up, no matter what the cost in human life. It ends with Napolean, brilliant, visionary, cruel, and ultimately a figure of farce, if only he hadnt flooded Europe with the blood of so many people. It was the birth of the nineteenth century, the unambiguous start of a modern era, in which the French, alternatively majestic and vile at the same time, stepped away from the past without looking back.

Website: http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~dee/REV/INTRO.HTM