Welsh Journals

concerns which moulded the patriotism of London Welshmen. However, Price was not the only Welshman to pride himself on being a 'citizen of the world'. Price's influence on Wales may be found in what one American historian has recently termed 'village enlightenment'. It is timely, now that the bicentennial celebrations have passed, to look at 'village enlightenment' in Wales, giving proper attention to popular conservatism and loyalism. Hannah More's 'Village Politics', which has appropriately been called 'Burke for Beginners', was published in Welsh in the 1790s. We have had to wait 200 years for a translation of Price's Discourse. HYWEL M. DAVIES Aberystwyth INVENTING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Keith Baker. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 372. £ 10.95. Keith Baker is the leading exponent in America of the revisionist approach to the study of the French Revolution. This compilation of his essays, published over the past decade, clearly exposes the ground upon which that approach rests, involving 'a shift from Marx to Tocqueville, from a basically social approach to the subject to a basically political one'. Baker's work is a product of the 1970s which became eminently marketable in the 1980s, a decade which saw a conservative rejection of the very concept of 'society', a word too frequently associated with those dreadful people 'socialists' or, even more horrifying to the academic conservative, 'sociologists'. The academic and cultural space (l'espace is the buzz-word for French revisionists) had been created for a return to the Cobbanite tradition which promoted the primacy of political and intellectual history. Keith Baker studied under Alfred Cobban. There is, and always has been, much to be said in favour of the English historiographical tradition of political history: William Doyle's recent Oxford History of the French Revolution (O.U.P., 1989) is an impressive testament to its continuing strength. Keith Baker, an early emigre to the States, has also produced work which is invariably scholarly and original in conception. In this collection we find thought- provoking ideas on the application of science to politics by reforming ministers like Turgot who, it is convincingly argued, sought to use 'universal' scientific truth to legitimize political change and to defeat particularist resistance. We need more work along these lines in Britain: C. Gillispie's Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), which confirms the importance of the link between science-theoretical and applied-and the development of the modem state, provides a very good point de depart. However, the real strength of Baker's work lies in his analysis of the new 'political culture' (the buzz-term of the Anglo-American revisionist), originating with the theological/political conflicts of the 1750s, through the traumatic years of the 1770s when Maupeou and Turgot, it is argued, dealt irreversible damage upon the parlements, while simultaneously laying the monarchy