Stephen Miller has written a provocative book that asks big questions. His goal is to explain the cause and course of the French Revolution by reconstructing the structure of power and exploitation that prevailed in the Old Regime before 1789. His region is equally big: the nine departments that made up the old province of Languedoc. His ambition therefore is a huge archival challenge and he has clearly worked hard in local and national archives. Moreover, he attempts to put all this material in context through frequent references to experience elsewhere in France.

Miller intends to build on William Beik's thesis (Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) that in the seventeenth century the institutions of absolute government supported the class interests of the ruling elites, and that by the time of Louis XIV, the nobility and the church had accommodated themselves to royal despotism. This mutually beneficial relationship continued into the eighteenth century but by the eve of the Revolution, relations were increasingly frayed.

Miller is able to show in great detail how certain members of the elite were able to make unconscionable amounts of money through the financial system. Tax farming, audits, fees, bonds, accounting services, and much else made a lot of people rich. Nor was it a single group that benefitted so much. Nobles, judges, financial courts, churchmen, and businessmen all profited from their participation in the state's financial administration.

Eventually, the state's gargantuan need for more money to fight its wars shattered essential components of this alliance. Institutional arrangements had always made distinctions of status and access to power among the Languedocian elite. Only bishops, not parish priests, could sit in the provincial estates. Only nobles with appropriate ancestry and military background could sit in the second chamber of the estates, thus excluding many members of the judicial nobility. In addition, there were regional cleavages that affected how elites reacted to the monarchy's financial crisis in 1788, as jealousies erupted over Montpellier's position as the leading center of the financial network's oligarches.

All this is well done, but the argument becomes shakier when Miller attempts to relate these financial and social issues to the economy. Without ever defining his terms, he argues that the Old Regime fiscal system was exploitative and oppressive. Again without showing it, he argues that rising seigneurial fees and rents were impoverishing the peasantry. He also infers too much from his valuable investigation of court cases that almost invariably confirmed seigneurs' rights. Such decisions do not in themselves mean a change in villagers' economic security. The seigneurial system was more than an engine of class despotism and class justice. It offered real services, often at bargain rates, while for the government its policing and judicial functions were so many unfunded mandates. Similarly, the assertion that landlords took a greater share of the crop has its limits, unless productivity also rose. Yet Miller denies any productivity increases occurred. This assertion too requires stronger support. After all, it is hard to square with the well-known spread of viticulture in this period, a phenomenon that Miller attributes to peasant investment. Yet this is a puzzle too because if the Old Regime system of public and private taxation was so exploitative, where did the peasant investors get the capital or the credit to invest in new crops?

Miller's decision to extend his study into the Revolution makes a real contribution to the phenomenon of tax resistance. Most writings on the Revolution emphasize anti-seigneurialism instead, yet the fiscal issue ties in nicely to Miller's account. He also argues that fiscality was one of the reasons the former Third Estate split. While the revolutionary elites actively encouraged anti-seigneurial revolts, they drew the line at prompt payment of taxation. Moreover, as the revolutionary crisis deepened, they refused to sacrifice their property rights for requisitions, controlled prices, and popular mobilization. On the other hand, lower-class revolutionaries wanted positions and political power.

Miller could have pushed these arguments much further. It would have been interesting to know whether the Revolution really did ease ordinary people's fiscal burdens in the long run. If the national situation applied here, no one escaped tax evasion for very long because after 1798, the government began to collect arrears in hard currency, not inflated paper. There was an amnesty for everything in the Revolution, including murder and treason, but never for tax evasion. Franois Crouzet (La grande inflation: la monnaie en France de Louis XVI B Napolon. Paris: Fayard, 1993) also showed some time ago how easy it was for everyone to live outside the controlled economy, how a lucky few made fortunes in the black market, and how the economically vulnerable suffered enormously in the so-called heroic years of the Revolution. Since evasion was so easy, perhaps the elite's resistance to revolutionary extremists went beyond unpatriotic selfishness. Perhaps ordinary people also wanted more than recognition or power. In a region that the White Terror of 1794-1801 shredded, one suspects that social conflicts were deeper, more intimate, and a lot more violent, even in the early period of the Revolution.