This book began at Stanford University and I wish to express my gratitude to Sepp Gumbrecht, who first encouraged me to embark on this project, for his continuing advice, support and enthusiasm. I also wish to thank Jean-Marie Apostolidès and acknowledge the late Richard Rorty, both of whom provided useful guidance at an early stage of this project. At a crucial point in my thinking on this topic, Thomas Pavel gave me excellent suggestions that I have tried to follow. I would also like to thank Criscillia Benford, Marilynn Desmond, Emma Gilligan, Jan Goldstein, Tamara Griggs, Rebecca Lemon, Ellen McClure, Robert Morrissey, Larry Norman, Catriona Seth, Chenxi Tang, Caroline Warman and the participants of the Early Modern France workshop at the University of Chicago, all of whom have read or commented on parts of the manuscript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wonderful colleagues at King’s College London who have made teaching and working such a pleasure, in particular to Simon Gaunt, Nicholas Harrison and Jo Malt for their invaluable advice and generosity. Two anonymous readers for the Press made excellent suggestions for improving the manuscript. Any remaining errors in these pages are, of course, entirely my own. Anne-Célia Feutrie provided much appreciated help in the final stages of editing. Matthew Shaw generously shared his own research on the Republican calendar with me. A Geballe Dissertation Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Centre provided financial support in the earlier stages of this project, and I would like to thank King’s College London for help with the cost of illustrations. I would also like to acknowledge the Musée de la Révolution française de Vizille, and especially Annick Le Gall, for a very hospitable stay during my preliminary research on this project. This book has benefitted from being presented at numerous conferences, in particular the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies where the opportunity to present the Haydn Mason lecture helped revise my thinking on the topic. Some of the material in Chapter 1 was published in my The French Republican Calendar: Time, History and the Revolutionary Event’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (2012):1–16. Chapter 4 is a modified version of ‘Death by Volcano: Revolutionary Theatre and Marie- Antoinette’, French Studies (forthcoming). Chapter 5 is adapted from ‘The Goddesses of Reason: Incorporating Real and Metaphorical Bodies in Year II ’, in The Body and Its Images: Health, Humours, Illnesses, eds. Sabine Arnaud and Helge Jordheim (Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming). I thank Wiley Publications, Oxford Journals and Slatkine Press for permission to reuse this material. Last but hardly least, my deepest thanks go to my parents for everything and more. This book is dedicated with much love to Dimitris, who has lived with it far longer than anyone should, but always with good humour and patience.