The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating historical study
Review: The French Revolution was a revolution of ideas. But where did those ideas come from? The traditional answer has focused on high-minded Enlightenment sources, like the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. But, as Robert Darnton proves in this book, for every Rousseau, there were a score of "Rousseaus de la ruisseau" --"gutter Rousseaus" who attacked the Ancien Regieme with scandalous polemics, scurrillous pamphlets and political and pornographic fantasies. That most of this literature was forbidden by law only made it more attractive to the public.

Darnton provides us with a scholarly study of the underground book trade in the years leading up to the Revolution. He explores every aspect of the business, and manages to make what could have been an abstruse topic fascinating to the reader. Most of the authors he mentions have been completely forgotten except by scholars, but they were highly influential and controversial in their time.

The last part of the book is a fascinating series of excerpts from the books discussed in the text. The pornographic excerpts are the most interesting: to me, they demonstrate that the writing style of the Marquis de Sade, with its philosophical rantings and outrageous obscenity, was far from unique and must be placed in the context of other, less famous writers of the same ilk.

I highly recommend this book to people interested in the ideas that sparked the French Revolution, and to those interested in issues surrounding freedom of the press.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating historical study
Review: The French Revolution was a revolution of ideas. But where did those ideas come from? The traditional answer has focused on high-minded Enlightenment sources, like the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. But, as Robert Darnton proves in this book, for every Rousseau, there were a score of "Rousseaus de la ruisseau" --"gutter Rousseaus" who attacked the Ancien Regieme with scandalous polemics, scurrillous pamphlets and political and pornographic fantasies. That most of this literature was forbidden by law only made it more attractive to the public.

Darnton provides us with a scholarly study of the underground book trade in the years leading up to the Revolution. He explores every aspect of the business, and manages to make what could have been an abstruse topic fascinating to the reader. Most of the authors he mentions have been completely forgotten except by scholars, but they were highly influential and controversial in their time.

The last part of the book is a fascinating series of excerpts from the books discussed in the text. The pornographic excerpts are the most interesting: to me, they demonstrate that the writing style of the Marquis de Sade, with its philosophical rantings and outrageous obscenity, was far from unique and must be placed in the context of other, less famous writers of the same ilk.

I highly recommend this book to people interested in the ideas that sparked the French Revolution, and to those interested in issues surrounding freedom of the press.

Rating:
Summary: Carefully Researched and Fascinating History
Review: The study of literary and intellectual history often has tended to identify a canon, or core of classics, for each historical period and then study the broader corpus of works in relation to those classics. In accordance with this model, there also has been a tendency to identify such canonical works as the "cause" of historical events. Eighteenth century French history has not been an exception, many historians arguing, rightly or wrongly, that the Enlightenment writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau provided the ideological basis for the French Revolution.

There are, of course, many problems with this approach. Among those problems, Robert Darnton suggests in his fascinating and carefully researched "The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France," is that, "if we put the issue that way, we are likely to distort it, first by reifying the Enlightenment as if it could be separated from everything else in eighteenth-century culture; then by injecting into it an analysis of the Revolution, as if it could be traced through the events of 1789-1800 like a substance being monitored in the bloodstream."

Moreover, as Darnton's book argues, any approach that focusses exclusively on the canonical literature of the Enlightenment necessarily misses the mark since there was a flourishing popular and illegal underground literature, the so-called "livres philosophiques" or "philosophical books," that exerted a powerful impact on eighteenth century French culture and politics. These were the books sold "under the cloak," illegal books forbidden by the French Monarchy because they undermined the authority of the king, the Church, or conventional morality. "By sampling them, the reader will be able to form his or her own impressions of the world of illegal literature. It may seem surprising, shocking, naughty, or comic; but it certainly will look different from the world made familiar by the great-man, great-book variety of literary history."

From these premises, Darnton carefully explores the trade in forbidden books in seventeenth and eighteenth century France and the potential impact of that trade on popular consciousness and the ever-changing way in which the French Monarchy was perceived from the reign of Louis XIV until the Revolution. Darnton elucidates the mechanics of the book trade of the time, how it worked to disseminate forbidden literature, and which forbidden books attained "best seller" status. Darnton also elaborates on the various categories of forbidden literature, including the works of philosophical pornography, utopian fantasy and political slander which fed the public's desire for transgressive works and, ultimately, undermined the foundations of monarchical legitimacy. Finally, in painting this brilliant history of the forbidden book in pre-Revolutionary France, Darnton carefully and persuasively outlines the details of the vast communcations network which existed in French society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a network which ran from Court to café to popular pamphlet to book and back, each element operating in a way which served to reinforce popular (and usually unfavorable) notions of the Court and Church and create a fertile breeding ground for social unrest.

In all of this, Darnton displays great care in sifting the historical evidence and avoiding hasty conclusions. If anything, his research asks as many questions as it answers, leaving the reader with a much deeper understanding of the complexity of the historian's task in reaching any firm conclusions about the interplay between popular literature, Enlightenment ideas and the Revolution in France. "The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France" is a carefully researched and fascinating piece of historical writing, a book which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of the book.

Rating:
Summary: enlightened pornography
Review: This novel proves that all the enlightened hub bub surrounding the great dead white thinkers, such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu is hogwash. The masses in the late 18th century were not reading these great minds. (...) The masses could not and did not want to get their hands on the now famous intellectual writers of their time. They wanted this explicit pornography to read. These books passed censors because they supposedly contained works of philosophy. This is what the commoners were reading and thus the enlightened heroes of this time priod probably did not have a direct effect on the French Revolution.

Rating:
Summary: enlightened pornography
Review: This novel proves that all the enlightened hub bub surrounding the great dead white thinkers, such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu is hogwash. The masses in the late 18th century were not reading these great minds. (...) The masses could not and did not want to get their hands on the now famous intellectual writers of their time. They wanted this explicit pornography to read. These books passed censors because they supposedly contained works of philosophy. This is what the commoners were reading and thus the enlightened heroes of this time priod probably did not have a direct effect on the French Revolution.