The French Revolution is an historical event unlike any other. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the same terms as it was by its contemporaries. There have been many accounts of the French Revolution, and though their opinions differ, they have often been commemorative or anniversary interpretations of the original event. The dividing line of revolutionary historiography, in intellectual terms, is therefore not between the right and the left, but between commemorative and conceptual history, as exemplified respectively in the works of Michelet and Tocquevifle. In this book, Francois Furet analyses how an event like the French Revolution can be conceptualised, and identifies the radically new changes the Revolution produced as well as the continuity it provided, albeit under the appearance of change. This question has become a riddle for the European left, answered neither by Marx nor by the theorists of our own century. In his analysis of the tragic relevance of the Revolution, Furet both refers to contemporary experience and discusses various elements in the work of Alexis de Tocclueville and that of Augustin Cochin, which has never been systematically applied by historians of the Revolution. Furet's book is based on the complementary ideas of these two writers in an attempt to cut through the apparent and misleading clarity of various contradictory views of the Revolution, and to help decipher some of the enigmatic problems of revolutionary ideology. It will be of value to historians of modern Europe and their students; to political, social and economic historians; to sociologists; and to students of political thought.

弗朗索瓦・傅勒：

生於1927，卒於1997，卓越的學者和思想傢，他的一生享譽無數。前不久，他被評為法蘭西學院“不朽的四十位學者”之一。他擔任過高等社會科學學院的院長，被國際學術界稱為“法國大革命史研究的領軍人物”，托剋維爾研究專傢等等，他的學術影響遠遠超越瞭法國，遍及世界，芝加哥大學聘他為“社會思想”教授，他是美國藝術和科學研究院的院士，是哈佛大學和特拉維夫大學的名譽博士，等等。這些榮譽歸功於他對法國大革命的研究成就，在這個領域，他幾乎是無可替代的巨人，芝加哥社會思想委員會主席耐丹・塔可夫認為“沒有任何人能比他更負責任地復活瞭法國的自由思想”。《思考法國大革命》這本書可以說是他最重要的學術著作。