One of the central questions of the French Revolution is what happened to the country from the time the monarchy collapsed in the summer of 1792, when the prospects for popular democracy seemed brightest, to the Terror of 1793–94, when the Committee of Public Safety ruled by fiat and repression. A key moment during this interim period was the so-called Federalist Revolt, when four provincial cities—Caen, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille—rebelled against the more radical revolutionaries in Paris, threatening to plunge France into civil war. Over the years some very good work has been published on the Federalist Revolt, but no one has attempted an overarching study of the event in over a century. It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what offers.