This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event, particularly with regards to the body and public life, as the revolutionary middle class set new ideals and behaviours.

1. The Problem of the Body in Political Culture 2. Modern Histories of the Body 3. Deconstructing the French Revolution 4. The Eighteenth-Century Medical Revolution: Bodies, Souls and the Social Classes 5. A New Public Body: Stoicism, Suffering and the Middle Class in the French Revolution 6. Heroic Suicide: The End of the Body and the Beginning of History 7. The Guillotine, the Soul and the Audience for Death 8. Words and Flesh: Mme Roland, the Female Body and the Search for Power 9. The French Revolution, Modernity and the Body Politic