The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France By Robert Darnton

Accepting a French academic invitation to autocritique his seminal 1971 article ‘The high Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-revolutionary France’, Robert Darnton uses the occasion to embark on an essay to re-explore ‘how literature was revolutionized’ from the mid-eighteenth century to the French Revolution. Darnton concedes he would not, in some respects, write the ‘Low-life’ article today as he did then. Despite its role in the ascendence of his celebrated academic career, he now finds the piece ‘overblown’ and ‘underdocumented’, insufficiently substantiating the links between the resentments of struggling writers and the radicalism many soon displayed during the Revolution. Darnton describes the project as emanating from his sixties forays into the ‘radical Left’ and personal and familial ties to New Jersey journalism. Understandably, he notes ‘the excitement of coming up with a new idea and the temptation to push it as far as it would go’. Nevertheless, as he has in a long string of subsequent books over the last half-century, Darnton in this book returns to the tantalizing relationship between struggling writers—barely 3,000 living French people had written and published a book of any sort by the end of the Old Regime—and their disproportionate impact during the French Revolution. Indeed, struggling writers became some of the Revolution’s most important political figures, from Girondin leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot to Jacobins Louis Antoine Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins to radical newspapermen Jacques-René Hébert and Jean-Paul Marat. No other small group—particularly from such impoverished and marginal backgrounds—adapted to the Revolution so well or contributed so much to its flourishing political culture.