The Crowd in History A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848

What really motivated the food rioters who sparked off the French Revolution? Who took part in the widespread disturbances that periodically shook eighteenth-century London? How did the Captain Swing movement of agricultural labourers destroying new machinery spread from one village to another in the English countryside? How did the sans-culottes organise in revolutionary Paris?