Title: Before the Deluge
Subtitle: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution
Description: 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.
Subjects: Causes, History, France, history, revolution, 1789-1799, France, history, revolution, 1789-1799, causes
Places: France
Time periods: Revolution, 1789-1799