Before the Deluge

Madame de Pompadour's comment, 'Apres moi, le deluge' (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness. This book examines these fears and the responses to them.