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 concedes that these ripples are hard to trace and harder to quantify. (At its most compelling, his book provides concrete information about the print runs and sales rate of influential documents) ... He restricts himself instead to the apt — if more general — conclusion that in the run-up to the revolution, public opinion was 'a dangerous force, which could, under some circumstances, be turned against' the established order.
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 ... Darnton maps the irreversible alterations of the public mood.
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 ... The range and the variety of sources that Darnton deploys to penetrate the Parisian 'temper' is extremely impressive ... Darnton advances his argument by steady, drip-drip accumulation – thick description rather than sweeping overview or structural analysis ... He is a shrewd, observant, wise and unfailingly entertaining guide through these dense, thought-provoking and colourful thickets of Parisian experience.
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 ... It’s difficult to summarise a book of such breadth. Darnton has written more than a dozen works on 18th-century France; few scholars understand the revolutionary temper as well as he does. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of scholarly research.
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 ... This is an enticing premise, and in places, its aims are achieved. The Revolutionary Temper immerses us in gossip and popular songs about the extravagance and immorality of the ancien régime ... draws on a rich array of sources – official edicts, police reports, pamphlets, journals, letters, books – but often favours paraphrase with extensive footnotes over direct quotation. In places, there are surprisingly few other voices to be heard. The sources quoted most extensively are accounts by a small number of relatively prosperous people about what they believe 'all Paris' thinks ... I sometimes had the feeling of being asked to take his word for it. Even so, Darnton’s book ends on a striking note, drawing parallels with how more recent 'historical' events...have brought people together, however temporarily.
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 ... Darnton’s book is a very fine account of how 18th-century Parisians received and interpreted public events, putting them on the road to revolution.
Sweeping ... Darnton’s panoramic vision is rendered in lucid and vigorous prose, with a consistent focus on the day-to-day communications and emotions of regular people. It’s an enthralling exploration of the psychology of political change.
