"Just seventeen years ago the late Alfred Cobban opened the case against the "orthodox interpretation" of the French Revolution. Ten years later, in 1964, he summed up that case in his brilliant essay on The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban's argument and works inspired by or complementary to his revisionism have profoundly affected the historiography not only of the Revolution but of the Old Regime as well. We are today still working out the implications of Cobban's position. Briefly, what Cobban did was to demonstrate that the empirical data gathered by historians, including "Marxist" and "Neo-Marxist" historians, had exploded the "Marxist" theory which purported to explain the Revolution."