Review: Peter Brooks on Robert Darnton’s “Revolutionary Temper“
The word “temper” has to me a slightly old-fashion ring, but of a convincing sort. What rises to my mind is the moment in Henry James’s The Ambassadors when Lambert Strether in Paris goes to pay his final call on the love-crossed Madame de Vionnet, and his historical imagination is prompted to one of its gusts of fancy:
Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood.
Robert Darnton is a more sober reporter than Strether, but it is precisely those “omens” and “beginnings,” collectively constituting the “public temper,” that interest him in his splendid new book, The Revolutionary Temper.
Darnton picks up here from his rich earlier work, such as The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Those “communication networks” are in fact crucial in thinking about how an absolute monarchy of very long standing collapsed in revolution in 1789. France at the time had only one newspaper, which offered only “official” versions of the news, which is to say, virtually nothing at all. How did the people of Paris learn what was going on in the corridors and drawing rooms at Versailles?
Darnton has spent uncounted hours in archives, reading the ephemeral writings that created what we now think of as “public opinion.” He’s learned from diaries, correspondences, gazettes, and nouvelles à la main: fly sheets produced seemingly instantaneously and read widely in a city where basic literacy was nearly universal. Then there were nouvellistes de bouche, criers who passed information orally under the Tree of Cracow, a large chestnut in the Palais-Royal (a kind of free space that belonged to the Orléans family), as well as the cafés known for their discussions of public affairs. Much of all this was recorded by police spies, who kept tabs on Parisians—an important source of Darnton’s research has been Parisian police archives—and confiscated forbidden writings from those who had the bad luck to end up in the Bastille. And there were songs as well, spreading news in easily repeated form, and the scurrilous libelles, defamatory pamphlets that were especially numerous under Louis XV, a spendthrift monarch, never pardoned for taking the plebian Madame de Pompadour as mistress, banned by his confessor from taking communion, who progressively lost royal charisma. So the menu peuple of Paris had a picture, not necessarily quite accurate but often juicy, even salacious, of the doings of les grands. The people responded with murmures and the riots known as émotions populaires.
What is different in this book from much of Darnton’s earlier work is its narrative presentation: not quite year by year, but by significant moments from 1748, when the War of Austrian Succession came to an end, up to the storming of the Bastille (which by that point contained only seven prisoners) on July 14, 1789. He creates a compelling story of the inexorable march to Revolution. We learn about struggles with and within the Paris parlement, which had the traditional right of registration of new laws—and thus the power to remonstrate with the government—and the trials of the dissenting Jansenists as well as the destruction of the Jesuits, and the craze for hot-air balloons as well as the coming of mesmerism, also the Affair of the Queen’s Diamond Necklace and the ominous conflicts over the price of bread. And of course the perennial and increasing problems of taxation. Since by ancient tradition the first two “estates”—the clergy and the nobility—were largely exempt from taxation, the onus fell on the third estate: the bourgeoisie, artisans, peasants. Wars waged by the monarchy, as well as the cost of royal largesse—to ministers as well as mistresses—continually demanded new taxes. It was becoming increasingly clear that not all tax revenues could be drawn from in the Third Estate, that clergy and nobility would have to accept some of the burden.
Even an accurate picture of the country’s financial state seemed elusive. Charles Alexandre de Calonne, controller general, claimed in 1781 that there was a deficit of sixty million livres and tried to persuade an Assembly of Notables to endorse new taxes; he failed, and lost his job. Jacques Necker, reform finance minister, for his part argued that there might be a surplus of ten million. When in 1787 these two debated the finances of the kingdom in a public polemic, they were appealing to the novel idea of public opinion, making their pitch to the French nation, now newly educated in matters of finance and tax. It became progressively clearer that crown and parlement alone could not solve the nation’s problems: there had to be a gathering of the Estates-General, the consultative body representing the three estates—which had not met for 175 years. When this new Estates-General gathered in Versailles in May of 1789, the titanic events began to unfold, starting from the question whether the estates each met separately, or together as a true National Assembly. The nobles and the king refused to compromise; the clergy was split in its views; and finally the Third Estate, in accord with the famous pamphlet by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, declared that it was the nation. Locked out of their assembly hall, which they found surrounded by soldiers, the deputies of the Third Estate then moved to the Jeu de Paume, the royal tennis court, where they swore their famous oath not to disband until they had created a constitution for France.
As Louis vacillated and troops gathered on the outskirts of Paris, the people of Paris formed the revolutionary Commune de Paris, looked for arms, and stormed the Bastille on July 14, decapitating the governor of the prison and parading his head on the end of a pike through the city. The Revolution was underway.
All this and more is rendered clearly and compellingly. I think many readers will find The Revolutionary Temper just about the best exposition of how Old Régime France led to that unthinkable fact of revolution—a revolution that would transform not only France but eventually much of Europe, and beyond—caused in some large part by the creation of an informed public opinion. For all the rich explanation that he provides, Darnton notes toward the end of his book: “The Revolution defies belief. It seems incredible that an entire people could rise up and transform the conditions of everyday existence.” True. The French Revolution seems scarcely believable. Yet it happened.
Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. He has written for Book Post on Sally Rooney and the conte philosophique, Wagnerism, Marcel Proust, and libertines.
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