Economic dislocation and social discontent in the French Revolution: survival in Paris in the era of the flight to Varennes

Thirty years ago, the place of lepeuple in the French Revolution was clear they were the agents of radicalizing change, whether as 'crowd' or 'popular movement*, and in this context, their revolutionary virtue amounted to a historical given. The trend of historiography in the last twenty years, however, has been in general terms to devalue the relevance of popular action, by disputing the 'social interpretation' of the Revolution overall, and more recently, and more particularly, to rewrite the popular role negatively with what has politely been described as "Voltairean contempt'.