Few historical subjects have received as much attention as the French Revolution, and yet the how and why of this seminal moment continue to fascinate. The events themselves are unfailingly dramatic, the ideas behind them preposterously utopian, their implementation grotesquely violent. In Robert Darnton’s new history of the origins of the French Revolution, he sets out to explain how Parisians experienced the events that set the stage for the storming of the Bastille and the overthrow of France’s monarchy.
This account of the Revolution differs from many others because Darnton’s real focus is not the events themselves, but how they were understood by ordinary people. How did Parisians receive information about French politics and society, and what did they make of it? These are essential questions because Parisians’ collective consciousness, their “revolutionary temper”, was forged by exposure to news about local, national and international affairs.
Darnton’s Paris is an “early information society”. While the ruling Crown produced an innocuous official news sheet, Parisians often relied for real insights on foreign gazettes that circulated illegally in the capital. News was exchanged in cafes, where police spies noted what they overheard in a regime obsessed with controlling “public rumours”.
At the Tree of Cracow in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, unofficial newsmongers exchanged the latest rumours from battlefields or the royal court. News writers (nouvellistes) distributed this information in manuscript form to an avid public. Pamphlets, often read aloud to the semi-literate, were occasionally rented by the hour and became the major topic of conversation for days among the people, sometimes hungry for bread and always hungry for the latest gossip.
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Another difference with Darnton’s history of the origins of the Revolution is that he begins in 1748 at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, “possibly the first world war”. According to the terms of the peace, Charles Edward Stuart had to leave the French capital where he had been in exile. Public sympathy was with the Young Pretender who refused to go despite pressure from Louis XV. In the end, a significant military operation was launched to arrest him, an event which “marked a turning point in relations between Parisians and the king”.
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Darnton’s history is full of such events that demonstrate how, over a 40-year period, the public not only started to question the system of absolute monarchy but was exposed to ideas, debates and scandals that sapped the authority of the Church and aristocracy.
In the early 1760s, Europe’s most famous author, Voltaire, denounced religious intolerance in his defence of the family of a Protestant merchant, Jean Calas, wrongfully accused of murder. The public response to the Calas affair showed that an increasingly enlightened France now “had enough moral force […] to displace the authority of the church on ethical issues”.
The Crown’s attempts to reform the judicial system in 1770 were hugely unpopular and viewed as an authoritarian coup. The judges, whose positions were their private property, were in open revolt as they considered themselves guardians of France’s “fundamental laws”.
Both scholarly and highly readable, this book brings together the insights of one of the most influential historians of 18th-century France
The Parlement of Paris (the kingdom’s Supreme Court) had made it increasingly difficult for Louis XV to register new tax laws and claimed that it alone had the authority to approve such taxes. Debates around taxation led to the adoption of new vocabulary, such as the term “patriot”. Demands for more “equality” in taxation were common. As the Parisian bookseller Nicolas Ruault commented, “In changing words, one changes ideas; and in changing ideas, one changes things”.
Problems with the Crown’s finances and attempts at tax reform dominated the pre-revolutionary decade. At the same time, abstract notions such as “ministerial despotism” were made into something more tangible by several high-profile court cases such as the Diamond Necklace Affair, which involved Marie-Antoinette and an amorous cardinal in a glittering scandal that left the queen’s reputation in tatters. In such cases the public – enthralled – were presented with honest heroes pitted against privileged villains in sentimental dramas that favoured sensitive bourgeois decency over aristocratic wiles.
But bankruptcy loomed and tax reform was essential. By 1788, both the Parlement of Paris and the Assembly of the Clergy were refusing to accept tax changes that would have seen the Church and aristocracy pay more. They claimed that only the Estates-General could consent to such changes on behalf of the “nation”. This was echoed in the provinces, where the Provincial Estates of Dauphiné asserted, adopting the language of Rousseau, that “Law must be the expression of the General Will”. A revolutionary vocabulary had become embedded in political debate. These events “destroyed the sense of legitimacy that bound the people to their rulers”.
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Both scholarly and highly readable, this book brings together the insights of one of the most influential historians of 18th-century France. This is history from below in a series of sumptuous episodes. Darnton’s long view shows that, like bankruptcy, revolutions happen gradually, and then suddenly. Once the Estates-General finally met, a new dynamic unfolded, spurred on by a “revolutionary temper” characterised by hatred of despotism, love of liberty, dedication to virtue, detachment from the Church and attraction to the ideals of Enlightenment.
James Hanrahan is Associate Professor of French Studies at Trinity College Dublin
