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“... Few historians have had their judgments as little challenged as Alexis de Tocqueville. When he pronounced that the French Revolution had its origins in the very society which it was destined to destroy, he articulated a view which, for different reasons, would be acceptable to historians of every persuasion for the next century and a half. Writers of both Right and Left found common ground in asserting that the Revolution of 1789 had specific social origins which produced the political upheaval that left France socially, economically, institutionally and politically altered, never to be the same again ...”

“... the nascent political power of women, but she tends to make simple ideas sound very complicated; Olwen Hufton, in her study of women and citizenship, is a model of clarity. Hufton has produced a vigorous, well-argued, level-headed book, written with a nicely sardonic wit. She handles theoretical issues with ...”

“... is thought to begin – in 1700, or with the death of Louis XIV in 1714, or in 1730 as Professor Hufton has had to accept for her new book – we always seem to finish up at the Tennis Court or the Bastille. There is overwhelming pressure to see the century as an age before the deluge, everything in it being placed and scrutinised in the light of the great ...”

“... and ostensibly ephemeral sources, ingenious and gifted historians such as Richard Cobb, Olwen Hufton and E.P. Thompson have produced masterpieces of historical reconstruction in which the lives of the obscure and the downtrodden are given the front of the stage. There was, and is, a serious purpose in viewing élite culture and its politics ...”

“... What does it mean to be a ‘female citizen’? Is ‘female’ a word that qualifies and limits? Olwen Hufton has explored the issue very intelligently in Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, and from her work and Godineau’s we learn that we must be wary of grafting a feminist agenda onto demands for equality. The ...”