In terms of historians' opinions, all you have to do is write what you usually write, and chuck in something like, 'as Schama claimed, "Violence was the motor of the revolution."' As long as it's relevant and you're reinforcing what you're saying through use of quotes, that's fine. You really don't need to go into any detail. You're just wasting time if you spend a few sentences talking about Marxist historians and how they thought all history was a class struggle, or whatever.
As for structure, a chronological essay is one idea, but you would want to be very clear in how you separate the key events into each paragraph, and what the most logical way would be. I didn't do any chronological essays, ever, but the poster above seems to have it sorted for France.
The method that I used was to separate it by political/economic/social - so all my events were divided between the three and then organised chronologically within the paragraph. Again, you'd have to be careful with this one, and give it some thought, as a lot of events will overlap. For example, something might have both political and social ramifications, but if it gives more weight to a particular argument, then I'd put it in that paragraph.
By the time you've written a couple of practice essays, you'll hopefully have an idea as to how you'll categorise your events, and how best to argue for your contention. From the number of essay questions I've done, it seems that they stay the same each year - you'll be writing about the same sort of thing, so it's just a matter of adapting it slightly so that you answer the question you're being given. I found that after four practice essays or so, that every essay I wrote was very similar.
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