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THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER

Robert Darnton

Paris, 1748-1789

A brilliant account of the coming of the French Revolution, and the culminating work of this most distinguished historian.
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. In retrospect we understand the French Revolution as the outcome of such factors as a faltering economy and Enlightenment thought. But what did the Parisians themselves think they were doing - how did they understand their world? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton draws on decades of study to conjure a past as vivid as today's news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal's Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, and public performances, the events of some forty years - from disastrous treaties and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents - entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. With public trust eroding as new aspirations soared, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution. Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus, Harvard University. The author of acclaimed, widely translated works in French history, he is a scholar of global stature, a Chevalier in the Légion d'Honneur, and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Published 2023-11-07 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

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UK: Penguin ; Chinese (simpl.): Citic ; Italian: Adelphi Edizioni ; Portuguese (Brazil): Companhia das Letras ; Russian: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie

Standing at the summit of Robert Darnton's towering intellectual career, The Revolutionary Temper plunges the reader into the coffee shops, workrooms, and alleys of pre-revolutionary Paris. Following the traces of songs and rumors, insults and discontent, Darnton allows us to eavesdrop, almost miraculously, on whispers nearly two and a half centuries old. Here is the hive mind of ordinary people in extraordinary times, as they shake loose the thought and feeling of ages past, and decide - slowly, and then all at once - to begin the world anew.

In 'The Revolutionary Temper,' [Darnton] 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 that was 'ready to destroy one world and construct another.' Read more...

A rich, beautifully crafted book that plants the reader in a Paris that feels at all times electric.

The author of many important scholarly works on 18th-century French print culture, Darnton examines this development with not only erudition but writerly flair. Read more...

This captivating history of the decades leading up to the French Revolution offers a populist account of a fervent political moment. Darnton goes beyond what everyday people thought and said to immerse readers in what agitated Parisians read, wore, ate and sang on the way to toppling the monarchy of Louis XVI. Read more...

...In his sweeping new book...he probes the information economy of the capitalthe café chat, pamphlets, gossip, and other circuits - to find how events (adverse treaties, royal depravity and corruption) were refracted and gave rise to a new, radical public consciousness punctuated by hatred of despotism, love of liberty, commitment to the nation, moralizing, and other tenets. His analyses of those channels of opinion formation, and of the radicalization of civic thought, both bear contemporary contemplation... Read more...

No one is better placed to uncover this world and bring it to life than Robert Darnton... Darnton is a brilliant guide; the result is enthralling.