Originally assembled from the French Communist journal Cahiers du Communisme for the Revolution’s 150th anniversary in 1939, this collection offers an explicitly Marxist account of 1789 and its aftermath.

Translated by William Zak and introduced by British communist historian T. A. Jackson, it treats the Revolution not chiefly as a drama of famous statesmen, but as a struggle shaped by class, material conditions and collective political action. The original English edition appeared with Lawrence & Wishart in 1945; this is the 1970 Kennikat Press reissue. 

The essays divide the Revolution into its political and social machinery: Jacobin foreign policy, revolutionary finance, the popular masses, workers and peasants, Enlightenment philosophy, science and the fine arts. Contributors include Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, Gabriel Péri, Jean Bruhat and Georges Politzer—several central figures in twentieth-century French communism and antifascism. It argues from within a political tradition, reading the bourgeois revolution both as a genuine blow out with feudal power and as an unfinished historical process whose freedoms remained limited by class society.

It preserves a coherent communist interpretation produced on the eve of the Second World War, when the inheritance of 1789 was being openly contested by fascism. Best read alongside later Marxist historians such as Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul or George Rudé, and by anyone interested in how revolutions are continually rewritten by those seeking either to inherit or contain them.

Kennikat Press, 1970. Hardcover reissue of the 1945 English edition. Cream cloth boards with blue spine lettering; issued without the dust jacket here. Moderate soiling and scattered marks to the cloth, particularly the front board and lower spine; binding sound and pages clean.