Цитаты из книг — Уильям Дойл

Very few bourgeois families remained in the business that had enriched them for more than a single generation—unless they were Protestants or Jews debarred by law from everything except making money.

And setting the pace of this activity almost everywhere were lawyers. ‘Everything would have been calm in Franche Comté’ , a bitter Besançon nobleman confided to his diary, ‘if ten advocates had been hanged.’

All this was spectacular evidence that, as the poor grew poorer and more numerous, the rich too were growing in numbers and getting richer. ‘The distance’, wrote Mercier in 1783, ‘which separates the rich from other citizens is growing daily and poverty becomes more insupportable at the sight of the astonishing progress…

Those who wrote and spoke with such confidence about the ‘rabble’ or ‘dregs of the people’ fomenting disorders like those of 1775 had mostly never known what it was to calculate domestic budgets so finely. The vast majority of French people who were not destitute lived under constant threat of becoming so, and were…

Worst of all, however, was the ‘Flour War’ of 1775, just before the coronation. Despite the poor harvest of 1774, the minister Turgot insisted on removing all controls in the belief that a free market would best avert shortages. By the spring, bread prices in Paris had risen by more than 50 per cent, and riots which began…