The Making of a Fiscal-Military State in Post-Revolutionary France

Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of archival and published documents, this book explains how the French Revolution of 1789 transformed the French state and its fiscal system, and how further reforms in the nineteenth century created a durable, post-revolutionary state. Instead of presenting the nineteenth-century French state as primarily the creation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, as most scholars have done, Jerome Greenfield emphasises the importance of counter-revolution after 1815 in establishing a stable, durable state, capable of surviving revolutions in 1830 and 1848 intact. The years 1815–1870 thus marked a crucial period in the development of the French state, not least in stimulating the economic interventionism for which it become notorious and facilitating the resurgence of France as a great power after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.