The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789. By Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton presents his new history of the origins of the French Revolution as ‘event history’ with the aim of reviving an approach that some, particularly those of the Annales school, had found inadequate. This renewed event history is familiar because it relies on the approach to the eighteenth century that has characterized much of Darnton’s influential career as one of the foremost practitioners of Enlightenment social history and the history of the book. Indeed, many of the chapters here rely on his previous research. The aim is, primarily, to show how ordinary Parisians experienced the events that led to the French Revolution. In parallel, he addresses how information circulated in an ‘early information society’ (p. xxvi) by tracking the origins of the French Revolution in the collective consciousness of the capital’s inhabitants, drawing extensively on research into eighteenth-century public opinion (by himself and others). Following an Introduction on news circulation in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century, Darnton begins with the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Louis XV’s reputation never recovered after the expulsion of Charles Edward Stuart under the terms of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Important episodes, such as the refusal of sacraments to Jansenists, are presented briskly. Darnton does not suggest that events from this period (1748–54) are linked inevitably to the fall of the Bastille. He includes them to provide a context for understanding later developments, particularly the conflicts between the Crown and the Parlement of Paris, such as the court’s refusal to approve tax laws, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the judicial reforms of Chancellor Maupeou. Public affairs and how they were digested by ordinary people are central to most chapters. Intellectual and cultural changes are also part of the narrative, including brief but nuanced chapters on, among other things, Rousseau’s new literary sensibility, Americans in the French imaginary, and the first balloon flights. More detail is devoted to the pre-revolutionary decade, where events are central: the revolving door of ministerial office; the scandals; the relentless pressure to reform the tax system. Unsurprisingly, Darnton’s account rejects by implication Marxist interpretations. He insists that the catalyst for the Revolution was ministerial despotism rather than any révolte nobiliaire. By 1789, political culture and the language of politics had changed. Ultimately, the momentum of the Revolution was carried by the people, because ‘vibrant strains of public opinion existed at street level, not merely in the world of salons’ (p. 464). Short chapters suit Darnton’s episodic narrative, which treats public reactions to different news cycles as points of crystallization whose accumulation forged the ‘revolutionary temper’ of his title. The Revolution was the naive realization of the attempts of this collective consciousness to make the world anew. The emphasis on the variety of sources for this ‘temper’ in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture addresses indirectly some of the common criticisms of Darnton’s approach to the causes of the French Revolution (see review of The Darnton Debate, ed. by Haydn T. Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), in FS, 55 (2001), 97–98).