Review of The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, by Robert Darnton, pub. Penguin 2023
The sources about the flow of information in eighteenth-century Paris are extraordinarily rich. We can reconstruct conversations in cafés, pick up news in underground gazettes, listen to the running commentary of street songs, and visualize power as it was displayed in processions and festivals. We often say that we live in an age of information, as if this were something new. Yet every period of history is an age of information.
This is an attempt to figure out, not so much the causes of the French Revolution as the mood that gave birth to it. After all, hunger, unemployment, disaffection with the government, were nothing new; they had existed for a long time without actually erupting in violence and the overthrow of a regime. This time they did, and Darnton persuasively argues that various factors had combined to build up a “revolutionary temper” in the people. Beside street songs, he uses diaries, pamphlets, gazettes, fashions in hairstyles, demonstrations, court records, even café conversations, which were reported, often in dialogue form, by police spies who had no idea what a help they were being to later historians. Without these obliging fellows, we should not know what café wits were saying after the battle of Lawfield: “Police spies noted that the foreign gazettes were widely read in Paris and that some Parisians-those with enough money and leisure to frequent cafés-had doubts about the government’s claim of victory. “That is to say that according to them [café commentators], we won the battlefield and they won the battle.”
Darnton takes various incidents and cases in the lead-up to the revolution and shows how they were reported, how they appeared to Parisians, and how each contributed to, and sometimes changed, the prevailing mood on the street. (The book does not totally ignore the rest of France, but Paris is its main focus, reasonably enough, since it was there that things really kicked off.) Satirical songs set to well-known tunes, for instance, were widely thought to have brought about the downfall of the Maurepas ministry, while Voltaire’s passionate pamphlet campaign undoubtedly brought about the posthumous rehabilitation of poor Jean Calas. Such events demonstrated to ordinary people that even under an autocratic regime they had more potential power than they might have supposed. Meanwhile unprecedented advances in science - like the craze for ballooning - seemed to show that they were living in an age where there were possibilities for change and progress. After one incident where Parisians had for a short time taken over the streets, the Marquis d’Argenson wrote: “The common people now are under no constraint and can dare to do anything with impunity …. When the common people fear nothing, they are everything.”
There was also a wave of idealistic sentimentality, for which one may blame La Nouvelle Héloïse, which generated a demand booksellers could not satisfy, they had to fall back on renting out copies by the hour. The fan letters Rousseau received show readers wallowing in “tears,” “sweet tears,” “tears that are sweet,” “delicious tears,” “tears of tenderness.” Not only that; many had persuaded themselves that the characters and events depicted were real, because they wanted them to be (“I sense that I am better ever since I read your novel, which, I hope, is not a novel”), much as fans of TV series sometimes do now. This confusion of fact and fiction fed into the permanent rumour mill that could do such damage. Calas was killed on the basis of completely false rumours, and though her extravagance is a matter of record, the evidence for Marie-Antoinette’s alleged debaucheries is equally flimsy. And the sentimental belief in the perfectability of man showed up even in politics; “On July 7, 1792, Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, a deputy from Rhône-et-Loire, told the Assembly’s members that their troubles all arose from a single source: factionalism. They needed to respond to the principle of fraternity. Whereupon the deputies, who had been at each other’s throats a moment earlier, rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing one another as if their political divisions could be swept away in a wave of brotherly love”. They couldn’t, of course, as would soon become clear. Lamourette was guillotined in 1794.
As the proliferation of pamphlets, songs, posters and other forms of information shows, the public were desperate for news, and government attempts to censor it were not only ineffective but generally counter-productive. Means of evading censorship were incredibly inventive - Darnton remarks of wall posters that “if attached to walls with enough pressure and powerful glue, they could leave a readable impression after being removed by the police”. Even more brilliant was the method used by the Abbé de Prades to get the defence of his controversial thesis past the Sorbonne; “The examiners did not read it carefully or perhaps not at all, because it was printed in the standard format of one page, but […] it went on for 8,000 words and therefore had to be printed in very small type. They passed it without hesitation, but then word spread that it contained heretical propositions”. When the establishment tried to use similar methods, it tended to shoot itself in the foot: “The scandal might have dissipated if Archbishop Beaumont had not thrown oil on the flames by issuing an episcopal decree (mandement) on January 31, which was distributed in all parishes and hawked through the streets. In it, he fulminated against de Prades’s arguments in so much detail as to make them known and comprehensible to Parisians who had no familiarity with such abstract propositions”.
Meanwhile the unsavoury private life of Louis XV, commemorated in verses like “Quitte ta putain/Et donne-nous du pain”, and the chilly hauteur of his successor Louis XVI, plus the financial extravagance of the latter’s Austrian wife, were diminishing any respect for the monarchy, while a succession of ministers tried by various methods, all unsuccessful, to stabilise the price of bread. The usual reaction in the Paris streets was to hang the offending minister of the day in effigy, and while the authorities did not positively condone this, they do seem to have seen it as a relatively harmless, carnivalesque means of letting off steam. In fairness, few would have prophesied that in a few years the victims would not be effigies.
Though perhaps they should, for the volatility of the crowd - Chaucer’s “stormy people” - does come across very strongly, as does the change in the public mood between 1773, when Beaumarchais got the better of his enemy Goezman by, in Voltaire’s phrase, getting the laughter on his side, and 1787, when he came off worst against Kornmann because the public was no longer in a mood for wit.
There are many entertaining observations - during a period when Jesuits were unpopular, “shopkeepers sold toy Jesuits made out of wax, which could be made to retreat into a shell like a snail by pulling on a string” - and Diderot’s suspiciously anti-religious Tree of Knowledge in his Encyclopaedia - “he gave “Revealed Theology” a place on his tree, but he consigned it to a small branch close to ‘Black Magic’.” But the one that stays in the mind, because after reading this, one can see how events confirm it, is the verdict of one of the foreign newspapers Parisians favoured, in the absence of an uncensored press of their own: “’It was an insurrection,’ remarked the Gazette de Leyde, ‘because one had become necessary.’”