Before the deluge : public debt, inequality, and the intellectual origins of the French Revolution / Michael Sonenscher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [373]-402) and index.

1. Facing the future -- Three descriptions of the French Revolution -- The terror and its causes -- Balanced government and the English constitution -- England's future in a French context -- Sieyes and his contemporaries -- True monarchy, or the idea of a modern republic -- 2. Montesquieu and the ddea of monarchy -- The troglodytes and the morality of monarchy -- Law's system, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and the grand design -- From The Persian letters to The spirit of laws -- The inheritance of property and the inheritance of thrones -- The problem of sovereignty and the nature of monarchy -- Trade, the system of ranks, and the alternative to public credit -- 3. Morality and politics in a divided world -- Montesquieu's legacy -- Francois Veron de Forbonnais and the limits of trade -- Physiocracy, or The natural and essential order of political societies -- From friendship to mankind to political economy -- Rousseau and physiocracy -- Rousseau and Mably -- 4. Industry and representative government -- Agriculture, industry, and inequality -- Helvetius -- Turgot -- Chastellux -- Jacques Necker and Burke's paradox -- Joseph Fauchet and Pierre-Paul Gudin de la Brenellerie -- Pierre-Louis Roederer -- Jean-Baptiste Say.

"Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Apres moi, le deluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness - not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.