"The predominant twentieth-century view of the French Revolution stresses the socioeconomic causes of this upheaval and argues that it began as an aristocratic class insurgency during 1787-88. Bailey Stone challenges this theory by showing that the parlements, the high judicial bodies that exercised the royal powers of justice, neither initiated nor sustained an aristocratic insurgency against the crown. In reality, they championed the traditional balance of social and political forces in France." -- Page 2 of cover.