请将“The entire course of the ancien régime in France was dominated by crises of the type ancienne (Ernest Labrousse), i.e. crises that were heralded by a rise in bread prices, and every crisis of provisioning, the result of bad harvests and intensified by speculation, was followed by crises in trade and manufactures due to lack of demand. This crisis-bound structure of material reproduction was not overcome either by the immense growth in colonial trade, the rise in mining production or the thriving of some branches of manufacture; indeed it took an even sharper form in the second half of the eighteenth century. As a result of inflation and unemployment, refusal to pay taxes became common, along with the fixing of prices by a resisting population, aggressive begging and robbery. Phenomena of this kind were structural features of a society in which the lower orders, if they sought to make their voices heard, had no modes of behaviour open to them that would not be criminalised. If the authorities reacted draconically, this was a structurally typical ruling practice for the ancien régime, and not even the signal of an 'intensifying' crisis of rule.
The second of the great crisis complexes of the French ancien régime resulted from the privatisation of generalised rule. The fact that offices could be bought and inherited limited the crown's scope of action, so that it could generally afford strategies of expropriation neither financially nor politically; it provoked conflicts between the 'sword' and the 'robe', or at least between particular groups on both sides, and reinforced the crisis-like structure of material reproduction. Offices were a relatively secure investment, and often a reward-ing one. Above all, however, income from office brought social respect. Own-ership of office could provide access to circles that remained closed to mere merchants or artisans, no matter how wealthy they were, and in certain cir-cumstances it opened the way to ennoblement - or, for those already ennobled, integration into the families of the long-established noblesse de robe. In the social conditions of the time, investment in office was a good prospect for all who sought social advance for themselves or their children. For, despite all the criticism made of it - which grew steadily in the eighteenth century - under the ancien régime the nobility remained culturally dominant. There certainly were families of the wealthy bourgeoisie whose strategies of marriage and appropriation were not designed to raise themselves above their station, but on many others the attributes of nobility exercised a considerable force of attraction. For all those set on noble status in ancien-régime France, the route via ownership of office was unavoidable. This meant, however, that a considerable part of accumulated wealth was diverted to unproductive waste. The same was true of investment in state loans. The crown's regular financial crises, the high interest payments and the conditions of advance into the nobility, 
all contributed to reinforcing this pattern of behaviour. This meant the repro-duction of practices of appropriation the very existence of which restricted the possibilities of expanding the basis of material production. This development coincided in time with a dramatic rise in the costs of war and with the power-political strategies of the French crown. The French kings' advisers were aware that the crisis of generalised power was becoming acute, yet the remedies that most immediately suggested themselves were unavailable. For no matter how powerful the French crown was, it did not have the strength to abolish private ownership of offices and established privileges. All gov-ernment strategies that aimed at making the ‘administration' an instrument of the crown were undone by demands for fees, competences and pensions. The possibilities of reforming the generalised rule were severely restricted in ancien-régime France.
Acute crises of government generally arose when the crown was no longer in a position to more or less satisfy the different interests established in the ‘state apparatus', or else to play off their representative groups against one another: in times of a king's minority, in the case of a fall in the profit from offices and ‘state' creditors, and also if a king did not ‘enjoy respect' in his government. That latter observation was made about Louis XVI by Count Mercy-Argentau in a letter of 6 November 1784 to the Austrian state chancellor Kaunitz.
The crisis-prone structure of the material reproduction of generalised rule, and the structural obstacles to their adequate reform, were the preconditions for the French Revolution. The question why this Revolution actually occurred demands separate explanation. 
Chapter Four
The French Revolution as Event and Structural Change
Digression: The French Revolution as object of dispute between historical schools
Nothing need be added here to the many depictions of the French Revolution that historians have offered. We shall confine ourselves to certain aspects of the latest phase in the long struggle over the interpretation of this historical event and along with it the interpretation of the history of the French nation, a struggle also over issues of contemporary political discourse and for academic esteem.
It seemed at the end of the 1950s as if, whilst anal-ysis of the Revolution could always be pursued fur-ther, its interpretational framework was now secure. From the time of Aulard, Jaurès and Mathiez, the Jacobin tradition of interpreting the Revolution had been increasingly linked with materialist analytical concepts. Georges Lefebvre had extended this model of interpretation, which was already internally coherent, with a history from below when he drew attention to the revolutionary struggles of the peasantry.1 When Albert Soboul's great study of the Paris sans-culottes appeared in 1958, the urban activists from the lower orders had also found their historian. One might have supposed this to be the cornerstone of an analytical framework that could subsequently be applied to ever further areas.
Already in the arguments of Jaurès and Mathiez we can rediscover the crude model of historical theory that Marx and Engels had taken over from contemporary political debates about the ‘class struggle' between bourgeoisie and nobility and used for the propagandist text of the Communist Manifesto. When a particularly confined version of Second-International Marxism spread in France, claiming to be a science of society and its historical development, the materialist interpretation of the Revolution (usually known in France as the ‘social' interpretation) passed from the heady emotion of the Manifesto to the sorry structural analysis of orthodox Marxism. In this respect as well, Soboul's works marked an end-point. Despite being undoubtedly a great historian, even Soboul pressed historical events into a categorical pattern immune to further research. In this interpretation - as can be read for example in his classic work La Révolution française,2 the Revolution was a watershed between feudalism and capitalism. Feudal forms of appropriation, and feudal-aristocratic forms of rule, had been dominant in France up to August 1789, but they were experiencing a profound structural crisis. For this reason, the feudal-aristocratic class in France was no longer able to defend the old system once the crown's financial crisis provoked a crisis of rule. Revolutionary consciousness arose spontaneously in this situation, which actualised as it were the inclination to a revolutionary attitude. In the Revolution the feudal- aristocratic class was confronted by a class alliance under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The threat to the Revolution and the internal contradictions of the class alliance brought a radicalisation. Given the material power position of the bourgeoisie, and the fact that the more radical revolutionaries were trapped in the confined positions of artisans and peasants, the bourgeoisie was able to monopolise the fruits of the Revolution for itself. A whole generation of students interested in politics and history - myself among them - was still marked by this interpretation of the French Revolution, even after its foundations had already been shaken by scholarship. So little now remains of this once dominant position that François Furet no longer even felt the need to mention his long-time scholarly opponent, Albert Soboul, in a recent presentation of the historiography of the French Revolution.3 In point of fact, however, the questions posed by scholars studying the Revolution - including Furet himself - were still governed until very recently by the ‘social interpretation'. It is only in the last few years that historians have managed to avoid the deep gulfs drawn between the hostile camps. For the sake of simplicity, I shall avoid fine distinctions here and confine myself to sketching out the key points of departure of this criticism.
It bears first of all on the preconditions for the Revolution. Since the Marxist explanatory model explained both the content and the effects of the Revolution in terms of these preconditions, a criticism of the thesis that feudal relations still obtained necessarily shakes the basis of the social interpretation. From the time that Alfred Cobban4 asserted that only insignificant residues of feudal lordship remained in the eighteenth century, that capitalisation was already under way before the Revolution and that this was in no way exclusively the work of members of the Third Estate but also of nobles, one side searched everywhere for feudal lords living off their seigneurial revenues, while the other side searched for nobles engaged in manufacture. After examples had been piled up for a good while, Régine Robin, in no way with the agreement of the entire ‘Marxist camp', drew a courageous line under the question, by accepting the empirical objections to the thesis of feudalism and maintaining that, under the ancien régime, two modes of production had stood in a relationship of interaction.5 The crisis-prone character of this social formation came to the fore when the state apparatus was no longer able to guarantee this contradictory connection. If this did not amount to a theoretical advance (as we have already explained), it did open up the Marxist interpretation to the results of concrete historical research. In the meantime, the dispute over the preconditions has reached the point that in the last few decades we no longer have the situation that Henri Doniol lamented back in 1876, since no one can say any longer that we know nothing about conditions in the year 1788.6”翻译为中文