The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789
Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“This captivating history of the decades leading up to the French Revolution…immerse[s] readers in what agitated Parisians read, wore, ate and sang on the way to toppling the monarchy of Louis XVI.” —New York Times Book Review
A groundbreaking account of the coming of the French Revolution from a historian of worldwide acclaim.
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 in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation—all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution.
Darnton’s authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.
Praise for The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789
Illuminating…[Robert Darnton] presents the outbreak of the revolution in Paris in 1789 as the culmination of 40 years’ worth of political scandals and cultural polemics.… [He] examines this development with not only erudition but writerly flair.
— Caroline Weber - New York Times Book Review
Drawing on an ingenious array of archival materials to create a sequence of tableaux, [Darnton] traces the emergence of a popular mentality that was ‘ready to destroy one world and construct another.
— Dominic Green - Wall Street Journal
[A] riveting synthesis of Darnton’s life work that reckons with the weightiest of 18th-century questions: what caused the French Revolution?…Erudite and entertaining.
— Ruth Scurr - Spectator
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. Every chapter brims with life and colour, from newspapers and sex scandals to philosophers and hot air balloons. Step by step he shows how the revolutionary momentum mounted, reaching a crescendo with the storming of the Bastille. A titanic work.
— Dominic Sandbrook - Sunday Times
Lucidly argued and entertaining.… Darnton’s book is a very fine account of how 18th-century Parisians received and interpreted public events, putting them on the road to revolution.
— Tony Barber - Financial Times
The Revolutionary Temper is vintage Darnton. Written in his strikingly clear prose, argued with cogency, craft and conviction, and drawing on a lifetime of distilled research,…The Revolutionary Temper offers a superlative description of the febrile volatility of opinion through the last half century of the ancient regime, as many Parisians reacted—sometimes viscerally, sometimes wittily, and sometimes in despair—to the problems faced by the monarchy. It works best as a vivid account of what it must have felt like for many inhabitants of the city to find themselves caught up in collective political turbulence—then to discover that they were on the cusp of a new age.
— Colin Jones - Times Literary Supplement
Darnton provides a sweeping account of succeeding events from the Parisian perspective, encompassing disastrous wars, struggles over Enlightenment ideas, fights for religious toleration and crazes for all manner of new phenomena, such as hot air balloons and mesmerism.… No one is better placed to uncover this world and bring it to life than Robert Darnton, a historian who[se] pathbreaking studies on 18th-century literature and the cultural impact of the Enlightenment…have inspired a generation of historians. The Revolutionary Temper is the culmination of Darnton’s output and, like all his works, it is very readable.
— Marisa Linton - History Today
This book is the culmination of a lifetime of scholarly research, enhanced by an intuitive understanding of the French mood. Short chapters stand alone as delightfully intriguing stories about a society in turmoil. Brought together, they explain how the French eventually turned to revolution. This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest.
— Gerard DeGroot, Times (UK)
[Darnton] somehow combines acuity and erudition with an unbounded zest for literary performance. His energy seems palpable on every page.… It is hard to imagine a more engaging introduction to the intellectual currents of 18th-century France.
— John Adamson - Literary Review
The Revolutionary Temper is a richly researched, ambitious and fascinating history. It asks a big question in a novel way.
— Camilla Cassidy - Sunday Telegraph
The Revolutionary Temper is a book that convincingly reframes the French Revolution—and Darnton’s synthesis of scholarly rigor with style, brevity and wit is a singular achievement.
— Madoc Cairns - Observer
By the end of this exhilarating book, Darnton has done so much more than provide an account of France during the dying decades of the monarchy. Ever since his breakthrough book of essays, The Great Cat Massacre, in 1984 he has concentrated on combining the forward thrust of narrative, or ‘event,’ history with due concern for the deep structures of the past. Historically, these two distinct methodologies have positioned themselves sternly in opposition to one another, but here Darnton proves that it is possible to have the best of both worlds. The result is deep, rich and enthralling, and gets us as near as we probably ever can be to that elusive thing, the collective consciousness.
— Kathryn Hughes - Guardian
What did Parisians think and gossip, sing and obsess about over the decades before the storming of the Bastille? In The Revolutionary Temper, Robert Darnton paints a sumptuous mural of the eighteenth-century mind. With the Encyclopédie, with manned balloons in the air, reason seemed on a roll. With posters, pamphlets, and public readings, the written word appeared supreme. A few vicious libels, some stock market manipulation, a lurid adultery trial, one notorious diamond necklace, any number of court intrigues, skyrocketing bread prices and plunging temperatures combined, among other elements, to shake a nation to its core. A rich, beautifully crafted book that plants the reader in a Paris that feels at all times electric.
— Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Standing at the summit of Robert Darnton’s towering intellectual career, The Revolutionary Temper plunges the reader into the coffee shops, workrooms, and alleys of prerevolutionary Paris. Following the traces of songs and rumors, insults and discontent, Darnton allows us to eavesdrop, almost miraculously, on whispers nearly two and a half centuries old. Here is the hive mind of ordinary people in extraordinary times, as they shake loose the thought and feeling of ages past, and decide—slowly, and then all at once—to begin the world anew.
— Jane Kamensky, author of A Revolution in Color
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.
— Publishers Weekly
A page-turner on the 40 years before the fall of the Bastille.
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review
