The literature on the Revolution is massive. Putting 'French Revolution' into Google nets 11.5 million results, and the French national library (a creation of the Revolution) has 38,579 catalogue entries for 'Révolution Française'. A quarterly journal of French revolutionary history has been published for over a century. It is indeed extraordinary how much has been discovered and calculated. We know that there were 515 new newspapers in Paris during the Revolution, and 701 new songs in 1794 alone. More shockingly, we know that 1,376 people were guillotined in Paris during one six-week period. A scholar writing a general book thus faces a formidable task. Any card-carrying historian must record with admiration Peter McPhee's remarkable mastery of the literature, the debates, and the generations of interpretation about the French Revolution. The names of fellow scholars are relegated to McPhee's notes and bibliography, keeping his narrative moving along at a most engaging pace, but his knowledge is deep and broad. The personal familiarity with and affection for France of McPhee, a long-time professor at the University of Melbourne, is evident at every turn.

McPhee takes readers through the complex series of events that over a decade saw the fall of a regime that had been in place, in an increasingly creaking and ramshackle way, for hundreds of years. Timorous and ill-managed attempts at reforms gave way to more dramatic changes, such as the abolition of aristocratic and clerical privileges, a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, parliamentary government, and constitutional monarchy. Then the Revolution took an even more radical direction with the proclamation of a republic and some of the boldest acts of social and economic legislation ever adopted anywhere. Challenges arose from counter-revolutionary activity, and there was a bitter civil war, with perhaps 200,000 people killed in the Vendée region. France was also at war against an anti-revolutionary coalition of international powers. One response was the Terror, but Robespierre and the cohort that had overseen the Terror ultimately became its victims. Only from the mid-1790s was a kind of stability established, but an ambitious Corsican general was waiting on the sidelines.

Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, Jean Duplessis-Bertaux (1747–1819) (Wikimedia Commons)

One of the original aspects of McPhee's magisterial study is that he looks at the provinces and not just at Paris. Only one in forty French people lived in the capital, and the Revolution played out in regional centres and tiny villages (and distant colonies). Local lords lost their privileges, estates, and income, new élites emerged, and political sentiments divided families and communities. The effects of the Revolution on the Catholic Church were particularly felt in the parishes around France. Priests had to swear loyalty to the new constitution (and 6,000 married), but many fled abroad. Church property was nationalised, and a Cult of the Supreme Being was introduced to replace traditional Christianity. Religious practice had already been declining during the Enlightenment, but these developments created a major sense of disorientation, especially in regions of great piety. The confiscation and melting down of 100,000 church bells transformed the aural landscape: 'the countryside was a quiet place, devoid of the sound of bells and the call to worship.'

Whether to support or oppose the tectonic changes taking place was a question each French person faced. McPhee's discussion of the choices, and how people made them, provides one of his most insightful chapters. There were strong ideological positions, but also unpredictability and contingency. No one, the author remarks, in early 1789 knew that he or she was about to live through a revolution. McPhee repeats a query that many then undoubtedly asked themselves: 'And who was to decide when the Revolution had achieved its goals?' He conveys well the hopes, fears, and uncertainties that the revolutionary years engendered. Life-and-death choices made by individuals, political groups, and communities were neither scripted nor fated.

Maximilien Robespierre was among those who faced alarming choices. The author of a fine and sympathetic biography of Robespierre (2012), McPhee here shows how Robespierre's profound hopes for the regeneration of France, and his utopian plans for radical democracy, forced him into terrible decisions about the execution of the king, comrades, and friends. He and others had to determine whether sanguinary violence was necessary and justified to preserve their pure ideals.

Portrait of Maximilien Robespierre, Pierre Roch Vigneron (1789-1872) copy after the pastel drawing by Adélaide Labille-Guiard (Wikimedia Commons)'Whose revolution was this?' McPhee pertinently asks. The events of the revolutionary decade posed that question to contemporaries, and for more than two centuries historians have addressed it as well. Some in France, of course, disowned the Revolution. Others were in part excluded, such as women who were denied the vote despite the pleas of Olympe de Gouges in a 'Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen', and the efforts of many other women whose active participation McPhee highlights. The clergy and aristocracy, and peasants in devout western France, suffered from the Revolution, and thousands died in the wars. French people of later years and different political allegiances proclaimed themselves heirs of moderate or radical revolutionaries, partisans of the old regime or Bonapartists. Liberals, Marxists, constitutional monarchists, and republicans, later anti-colonialists, and even protesters in Tiananmen Square have all claimed pieces of the Revolution.

McPhee states: 'History is replete with examples of regimes that have collapsed because of their own failure or inability to respond to crisis; it is much rarer that such collapses result in a revolutionary shift in who holds power and for what purposes. France in 1789 was one of those rare occasions.' The Revolution left behind a vision of a new society, a toolbox of strategies for trying to build it, institutions meant to serve as its foundations, and warnings about the obstacles to be encountered and the price to be paid. McPhee's splendid book – historiographically astute, sensitive to moral as well as political and social positions, beautifully written – provides a guide through the complexities of the Revolution and reflects on its legacy. The book inspires thought about present-day issues of entitlement and inequality, rights and duties, inclusion and exclusion, power and violence. As historical template, set of reformist ideals, and cautionary tale, McPhee concludes, the Revolution is not yet over.