A History of Modern France

Professor Cobban writes, in his concluding chapter, The French eighteenth century is not a period of great, dominating political figures. Yet if no one man counted overmuch, more men – and women – counted for something than possibly at any other time..:If it was not a century of greatness, for the student of /’homme moyen sensuel there is no more fruitful field. The eighteenth century was also something more: it was, and above all in France, the nursery of the modern world. Ideas and social forces, the seeds of which were sown much earlier, can be seen now pushing above the surface, not in the neatly arranged rows of the careful gardener but in the haphazard tangle of nature. Yet they can be seen and distinguished: the field is no longer a seed-bed but it is not yet a jungle, and a pattern is discernible. The simple interpretations imposed on eighteenth-century France by historians writing under the influence of later social and political ideologies may have to be abandoned, but the history that is beginning to emerge from more detailed studies, if it is more complex, is still coherent.’