Publishers Weekly
11/20/2023
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. (Nov.)
Observer - Madoc Cairns
"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."
Caroline Weber
"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."
Wall Street Journal - Dominic Green
"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."
Literary Review - John Adamson
"[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."
Sunday Times - Dominic Sandbrook
"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."
Times Literary Supplement - Colin Jones
"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."
Jane Kamensky
"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 pre-revolutionary 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."
Stacy Schiff
"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."
Spectator - Ruth Scurr
"[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."
Financial Times - Tony Barber
"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."
New York Times Book Review
"This captivating history of the decades leading up to the French Revolution offers a populist account of a fervent political moment. Darnton…immerse[s] readers in what agitated Parisians read, wore, ate and sang on the way to toppling the monarchy of Louis XVI."
History Today - Marisa Linton
"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."
Guardian - Kathryn Hughes
"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."
Gerard DeGroot
"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."
Sunday Telegraph - Camilla Cassidy
"The Revolutionary Temper is a richly researched, ambitious and fascinating history. It asks a big question in a novel way."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-07-18
A page-turner on the 40 years before the fall of the Bastille.
The kings during this period were Louis XV and his grandson, Louis XVI, absolute monarchs whose rule was far from absolute, writes veteran historian Darnton, recipient of the National Humanities Medal and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Despite an oppressive police force, Paris citizenry remained touchy, often disrespectful, and sometimes violent. Royal power also faced resistance from the Parlement, which was not a legislative body but an assembly that oversaw the courts and legal system. A law wasn’t official until Parlement published it, and it regularly used this power to express disagreement. Inevitably, wars dominated these decades. Following the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War was a disaster; victory supporting the American colonies seemed satisfying revenge over Britain but swelled an already massive debt. Wars are expensive, and since the church and aristocracy paid no taxes, they weighed heavily on the poor. Throughout this prodigiously researched narrative, Darnton concentrates on scandal and royal infighting, a reasonable tactic because kings preferred to leave the boring details of governing to underlings. The author accomplishes the impressive feat of bringing to vivid life these men, largely unknown to American readers, who were preoccupied with raising money. Reforms to require the church and aristocracy to contribute always failed, but borrowing was easy, so that’s what they did until 1787, when investors refused to subscribe to the latest loan. Declaring “partial bankruptcy,” officials cut interest payments, mostly to annuities that provided income to average citizens. This “produced outrage and panic” that was not relieved with news that the king would summon the Estates General, an ancient advisory body last called in 1614, which would, in theory, establish a constitution, reform the tax system, and regenerate France. It met two years later, and Darnton capably chronicles what followed, but riots and mass murder were already well under way.
The run-up to the French Revolution in expert hands.
