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.

Darnton examines poems, gossip, food, amusements, scandals, the bonnets that women wore and the songs that were sung. He juxtaposes erudite philosophy with base rumour, showing how one blended into the other.

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..

In many ways, The Revolutionary Temper is a richly researched, ambitious and fascinating history.

Darnton has drawn on diaries, letters, gazettes, pamphlets and informal news sheets, as well as court cases and Enlightenment treatises, to produce another lucidly argued and entertaining book.

Sweeping.

A page-turner.