Revolutions, like bankruptcy, happen in two ways: gradually, then all at once. The French Revolution, according to Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, was no different. Histories of the period conventionally begin with the storming of the Bastille prison, hated symbol of royal tyranny, by Parisian commoners on 14 July 1789. Darnton, who built his reputation as an inventive, often iconoclastic historian in works such as The Great Cat Massacre, turns the conventional narrative upside down. Where other historians ask what made the revolution, looking to economics, ideology and outstanding personalities, The Revolutionary Temper asks what made the revolutionaries – and looks to the streets. Going back 50 years before 1789, Darnton tracks the transformation in values that led ordinary Parisians to believe, in spite of everything they knew, that the will of the people could break the power of kings.
The ideas that triumphed in 1789 were, in 1748, difficult even to imagine. The France of the ancien regime was a disorienting cross-hatch of the medieval and the modern; politically “a crazy quilt of overlapping and incompatible units”. Sovereignty rested absolutely with the king (the details of government, his private business, were kept strictly secret). The distribution of power was diffuse. The jumble of groups that made up Parisian society – aristocrats and clerics, lawyers and wage earners – competed for economic advantage, legal rights and royal favour. It was an order bound together by a web of mutual obligations, structured by tradition, cemented by symbolic parades, festivals and elaborate public rituals. Behind the spectacle, conflict raged.
