Historians of the French Revolution analysing the political struggles of the two years immediately prior to 1789 have to draw heavily on scholarship that has grown hoary with age. Jean Égret’s classic The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788 (trans. by Wesley D. Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)), for example, first appeared in French in 1962 and was based on research going back to the 1940s. Although the Assemblée des notables of 1787 has recently been receiving deserved reassessment, notably by John Hardman and Vivian Gruder, insufficient attention has been paid to the hierarchy of assemblies instituted by Louis XVI in the provinces in 1787–78 (following a pilot project in 1778–79 in Berry and Haute-Guyenne) as a means of reorganizing how state taxes obtained consent and were distributed. Indeed, for a full account we still rely on Pierre Renouvin’s Les Assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, résultats, which recently celebrated its centenary (Paris: Picard, 1921). Some readers may be disappointed that Stephen Miller’s important new study on the assemblies largely endorses Renouvin and Égret’s view of the fundamental importance of the bodies; but it does so in ways that complicate and enrich existing accounts, cleverly open up new perspectives, and thereby challenge current orthodoxies. It is not, Miller points out, that these assemblies actually did much — and in fact their slim achievements were few and far between. Rather, the assemblies’ introduction at a moment when the central government was desperate to extract itself from impending bankruptcy shuffled the cards in significant ways that allowed new understandings and presented new horizons of collective action. At province level, the number of commoner deputies was doubled and voting by head (rather than order, or estate) envisaged. But by looking closely at the pyramid of assemblies (from municipality upwards) in three contrasting areas — Berry, the Lyonnais, and Poitou — Miller shows that, when push came to shove, the bulk of the nobility across the country demonstrated solid intransigence in the face of financial and social reforms that damaged their established privileges. This served as both a rude awakening and a political education to commoners seeking reform at all levels, from the peasantry upwards. It set out some of the battlelines for 1789, provided ammunition for those struggles, and removed many inhibitions on further action. Influenced by the neo-Tocquevillian account of the Ancien Régime made popular by François Furet, most current historians rather downplay the power of the Ancien Régime nobility which they see as ruthlessly reduced by the Bourbon state’s long-term centralizing thrust. Miller’s nobility proves to have been far from etiolated and indeed seemed well entrenched within a feudal system that was alive and well, and alert to threats. This a small book — it comes in at not much over two hundred pages — but it packs a big punch. Penetratingly and incisively, Miller obliges historians to think afresh about the causes and circumstances of 1789 and the practices and political stakes involved.