There are few events that have set the terms of Western politics more than the French Revolution. Socialists and liberals claim it as their legacy and the far right sees it as the moment in which traditional authority was irrevocably shaken. It is an event that is impossible to discuss from a neutral viewpoint even 225 years on.
The French historian François Furet’s classic study of the fall of the ancien régime, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), defended the counterrevolutionary view that the Terror of 1793–94 was the natural conclusion of the process set in motion in 1789. Written during the Cold War, it was clearly motivated by a keen desire to discredit the idea of a revolution that communists in the twentieth century were attempting to emulate. Seventy-three days after the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin danced in the snow outside the Winter Palace to celebrate the fact that his own experiment had lasted longer than the Paris Commune. For socialists in the last century, a clear line could be drawn from 1789 to 1917 via 1848 and 1871.
Robert Darnton’s latest monograph, The Writer’s Lot, fits into a long tradition of thoughtful liberal writing on the Revolution that sees the event as giving rise to democratic and authoritarian ideas. Darnton’s book doesn’t seek to offer an overarching explanation of the events of 1789. Instead, he is concerned with his own previous understanding of the destruction of the ancien régime. In an influential 1971 paper entitled “High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” he offered a now classic account of the origins of the Revolution, which he saw as emerging, at least in part, from the literary subcultures of eighteenth-century France. Fifty years on, Darnton has set out to show that things were a bit more complicated.
In this early work, Darnton drew a parallel between prerevolutionary Paris and London. “Grub Street” was the name for…
Auteur: Bartolomeo Sala
