The Revolutionary Temper
Paris, 1748–1789
-
-
1.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £6.99
-
- £6.99
Publisher Description
A Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Book of the Year
‘Robert Darnton is one of the world’s greatest historians, and this is an exceptional book: a huge social and cultural portrait of Paris in the build-up to the French Revolution’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, class conflict or Enlightenment ideology. Without denying any of these, Robert Darnton offers a different explanation: what Parisians themselves, those at the centre of the Revolution, thought was happening at the time and how it guided their actions.
To understand the rise of what he calls ‘the revolutionary temper’, Darnton draws on a lifetime’s study of pamphlets, books, underground newsletters, songs and public performances, exploring Paris as an information society not unlike our own. Its news circuits were centred in cafes and market-places, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow, a favourite gathering-place for gossips. He shows how the events of forty years – from disastrous treaties, official corruption and royal scandal to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and a new conception of the nation – all entered the collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As news and opinion travelled across this profoundly unequal society, public trust in royal authority eroded, its legitimacy was undermined, and the social order unravelled.
Much of Robert Darnton’s work has explained the hidden dynamics of history, never more so than in this exceptional book. It is a riveting narrative, but it adds a new dimension, the perceptions of contemporary Parisians, which allows us to see these momentous decades afresh.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Darnton (Pirating and Publishing) offers a sweeping account of "how Parisians experienced" the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Following the shifting textures of public opinion through "conversations in cafes... underground gazettes... street songs... and processions and festivals," Darnton tracks the emergence of what he calls a "revolutionary temper" in the lived experience of 18th-century Parisians. He highlights the power of satirical street songs, which escaped censorship and served as "sung newspapers" for city dwellers (one particularly bawdy tune sparked a chain of events that led to the arrest of the philosopher Denis Diderot, who had to be bailed out by his publishers); the "craze for science," which manifested in the "frenzy for air balloons" and public fascination with Franz Anton Mesmer's "animal magnetism" (such fads reinforced a growing sense that "just as man had conquered the air, he was gaining mastery over disease and soon would control all of nature there were no limits to the power of his reason"); and the "climate of public opinion" formed by printed pamphlets, which were being produced so rapidly and at such volume that they were "like smoke from thousands of chimneys gathering over the city." Darnton's panoramic vision is rendered in lucid and vigorous prose, with a consistent focus on the day-to-day communications and emotions of regular people. It's an enthralling exploration of the psychology of political change.
