Much of my earlier research and writing was concerned with religious culture in France under the Old Regime and the French Revolution. In a first book, I focused on the rural parish clergy and its relations with the peasantry, in part as a means of entering into the cultural perspectives of a largely illiterate population which left no direct records. In a second book, I made use of a civic oath required of all clergymen in early 1791 to explore regional religious culture in France at the end of the eighteenth century and to sort through the social, economic, and political determinants of that culture.

Beginning in the late 1980s my research turned toward a series of questions related to revolutions: how they arise, how they function, how men and women become revolutionaries, how and why revolutions become violent. In an effort to test conflicting theories about the origins and process of the Revolution of 1789, I wrote a book about the 1200 members of the first French National Assembly: their cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and their political options in the course of the Revolution. This study involved both an extensive quantitative analysis of the men of 1789 and an examination of the diaries and letters of about 100 individuals. Currently, I am involved in research on the origins of the Terror of 1792-94. As a first stage in this inquiry, I completed a book on the attempted flight of king Louis XVI and his family on the first day of summer 1791 and the impact of this event on the Revolution, in general, and the origins of the Terror, in particular. Presently, I am pursuing research on the emergence of the “First Terror” in the summer of 1792.