"Franco Venturi, premier European interpreter of the Enlightenment, is still completing his acclaimed multivolume work Settecento Riformatore, a grand synthesis of Western history before the French Revolution as seen through the perceptive eyes of Italian observers. R. Burr Litchfield now makes available in English translation the third volume of Settecento Riformatore and first part of The End of the Old Regime in Europe. Here the reader will discover the lively world of Italian journalists, polemicists, chroniclers, and commentators, who followed with intelligence and growing awareness the great developments of their age, from the Greek uprising of 1770, the Pugachev revolt in Russia and unrest of peasants in Bohemia, through the first partition of Poland, the reactions of Struensee in Denmark and Gustavus III in Sweden, constitutional troubles in Geneva, the crisis of reform in France with the dismissal of Turgot, and events in England and America at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Thus began the outer circle of revolutions that after another two decades would find their epicenter in Paris in 1789"--Publishers description.