In a well-known paper delivered at a conference commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1848 revolutions, Ernest Labrousse argued that if the tempests of the period beginning in 1789 had ‘distant origins,’ each was immediately preceded by the sudden onset of ‘economic tensions.’ This was furthermore the ‘only force powerful enough’ for revolutions of the type 1789, 1830 and 1848, which he clarified as spontaneous, mass uprisings stemming from social grievances of an ‘endogenous’ nature. All were thus the product to a considerable degree of ‘hazard’ or chance, and ‘appeared to their contemporaries comme des révolutionssurprises.’ Labrousse's paper elicited a lively response from his listeners, some of whom pointed out that the hardships cited by the author were present elsewhere, and yet, did not have the same ‘explosive’ consequences. Labrousse's ruminations on the role and primacy of chance seemed in this case to be at odds with the conspicuous frequency of revolution in France, leading another to ask whether these results might be traced more precisely to ‘psychological’ factors (e.g., that the French people had come to regard revolution as a ‘phénomène normal’). Although Labrousse did not address this question directly in his essay, he believed that France's susceptibility to revolution in 1789, 1830 and 1848 accrued instead from the fact that certain economic and social imbalances persisted over the period and were even augmented by the emergence of new insecurities linked to the spread of industrialization.