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79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
67/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
Robert Darnton
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
November 7, 2023
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doingâhow did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today's news.
What The Reviewers Say
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..
The author of many important scholarly works on 18th-century French print culture, Darnton examines this development with not only erudition but writerly flair. He organizes his material into brief, chronologically ordered chapters with snappy titles.
Darnton is one of the foremost Anglophone interpreters of French culture in the decades before 1789. In The Revolutionary Temper, he searches for that most elusive of historical subjects, a state of mind. Drawing on an ingenious array of archival materials to create a sequence of tableaux, he traces the emergence of a popular mentality.
Vintage Darnton. Written in his strikingly clear prose, argued with cogency, craft and conviction, and drawing on a lifetime of distilled research, the book seeks to make a contribution towards understanding the origins of the French Revolution. Darnton’s way into the question focuses heavily on the city of Paris.
