The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France

Historian Darnton (The Revolutionary Temper) delivers a fascinating examination of the rise of the writer-as-public-figure in revolutionary France. He vividly depicts a revolutionary milieu in which, for every towering figure like Voltaire or Diderot who owed their career to a “system of patronage,” there were innumerable “scribblers... churning out hack work and living miserably in garrets.” While the writers who “made it to the top” advocated “moderate change,” those at the bottom “vented their frustrated ambitions” in the mostly “illegal works” they wrote to eke out a living. These consisted mainly of “libels, pornography, and seditious political tracts,” in which their authors honed a language that “resonated” among the “Jacobins and sans-culottes.” Most of the writers were anti-satire—they “hated satire the way they hated high society”—and instead embraced a radically earnest journalistic style. Darnton posits that, with their “mastery over... media” at a time when “public opinion began to determine affairs of state,” these “Rousseau du ruisseau,” or the “Rousseaus of the gutter,” were a crucial but unacknowledged force. The French Revolution, he convincingly argues, was not simply the result of the powerful ideas of a handful of well-connected public intellectuals but the cultural work of a new class of precariously employed writers-for-hire. It’s a fresh and vital history, as well as an appealing romanticization of the freelancer’s lot. (May)