François Furet addresses the French Revolution from a critical perspective, particularly through Marxist historiography on the subject from authors and historians such as Albert Soboul and Claude Mazauric. The author works to analyse the nature of the pre-revolutionary period (French: l’ancien régime) with focus on social structures and to discuss the revolutionary ideology that took shape between 1789 and 1794, then transformed into a universal standard underpinning subsequent European revolutions (especially the 1917 Russian Revolution). Furet uses this analysis to deconstruct the dominant teleological approach to scholarship on revolutions and to consider matters free from the allure of remembrance and reverence for the critical moment.