Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French RevolutionEver since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, Aprs moi, le dluge (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher