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.
What turned the crises of the 18th century into a revolution wasn’t conflict but communication: Paris’s primitive, semi-literate public sphere, forming around street-corner gossips and coffee shop debates. Darnton locates The Revolutionary Temper’s protagonist here, in an “information society” of pamphlets and gossip and song: a popular consciousness running horizontally across the common people of Paris, and vertically through the politicians, intellectuals and endemic mischief-makers of the French capital. The nouvelles – something like primitive newspapers; prolific, unreliable and wildly popular – acted as the central pivot of this “imagined community”. Around them, the city turned. Nouvelles were hungry for controversy. As France slouched from war to depression to war again, their writers rarely had to look far.
Darnton structures his history by looking at how individual news cycles – wars, operas, trials, riots – were received by the nascent literary culture forming around the nouvelles. Story by story, he unpicks the crises that eroded the foundations of the ancien regime. Within the church, Jansenists – theological dissidents censured by Rome but supported by the Parisian crowd – faced off against the all-powerful, much-loathed Jesuit order. Enlightenment thinkers – the gens de lettres of Diderot and Voltaire – dodged censors as they reconstructed the nation’s worldview along scientific lines. Physiocrats proposed the rational resolution of the nation’s economic woes as those problems drove a vast, unruly underclass to riot for bread. The American revolution sparked crazes for frontier fashion and radical political change.
Though Parisians understood themselves as living through a new age, Darnton writes that the corrosion of royal authority among the populace owed less to the spread of Enlightenment ideals than to Louis XV’s impassioned pursuit of new mistresses. Royal affairs were hardly unknown to the Bourbon court, but the intensity of Louis’s amatory pursuits led to his exclusion from Catholic communion. For the readers of the nouvelles, Louis’s adultery brought judgment on the whole country and, across four scandalous decades, dragged him down to the level of his subjects.
As deference decayed, the secrecy surrounding the ancien regime crumbled too. Ministers worried about popular unrest released pamphlets of their own to justify their decisions and dilute rumours generated by the nouvelles. An interested public – one title by the lawyer Nicolas Bergasse was so popular it was rented out a few pages at a time – took note. As counterattacks and critiques began to circulate, sovereignty subtly and fundamentally shifted. The competition for readers was a battle for political legitimacy. King and nation, so long inseparable, entered into opposition. And as the crises worsened, power now rested with the printed word. By 1789, Darnton’s “imagined community” manifested a collective revolutionary will. The rumour mills and cafes, the nouvelles and the pamphleteers, had become, without participants entirely realising, the seedbed of a different kind of world. The Revolutionary Temper is a book that convincingly reframes the French Revolution – and Darnton’s synthesis of scholarly rigour with style, brevity and wit is a singular achievement.
• The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
