Top Highlights

• In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.
• In the course of its crisis the young French Republic discovered or invented total war: the total mobilization of a nation’s resources through conscription, rationing and a rigidly controlled war economy, and virtual abolition, at home or abroad, of the distinction between soldiers and civilians.
• The characteristic modern state, which had been evolving for several centuries, is a territorially coherent and unbroken area with sharply defined frontiers, governed by a single sovereign authority and according to a single fundamental system of administration and law. (Since the French Revolution it has also been assumed that it should represent ...
• In the history of our period this massive apathy plays a much larger part than is often supposed. It is no accident that the least skilled, least educated, least organized and therefore least hopeful of the poor, then as later, were the most apathetic: at the 1848 elections in the Prussian town of Halle 81 per cent of the independent crafts masters...
• There was little leadership or co-ordination. The most ambitious attempt to turn a movement into an organization, the ‘general union’ of 1834–5, broke down miserably and rapidly. At most—in Britain as on the continent—there was the spontaneous solidarity of the local labouring community, the men who, like the Lyons silkworkers, died as hard as they...