« Combining the results of a similar survey of a number of historians - de Tocqueville, Soboul, Schama, Darnton, Cobb, Sewell, Tilly, and others - we can arrive at something like an inventory of ontological concepts of the French Revolution – events, individuals, structures, mentalities, processes, conditions, patterns, and technologies. These categories of historical ‘“things”’ encompass what begins to look like a comprehensive list of the types of entities to which historians refer when conceptualizing France’s revolution. Or in other words: it is possible for us as readers of these historians to sketch out a large historical ontology, from which different historians borrow in varying proportions in their analysis of the events of the late eighteenth century in France. »

Daniel Little, Ontology of the French Revolution