Interview with Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton is one of the premier cultural historians, past or present. His specialty is eighteenth-century France and he is the author of over a dozen books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a Chevalier of the French Légion d’Honneur and is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

So my first question is about your your book that's coming out a little bit later this year, The Writer’s Lot. How would you describe that to people who haven't read it yet, which I guess is almost everyone?

 No one's read it, except my editor. It's an attempt to understand what it was to be a writer in 18th century France. That's a time of tremendous explosion of literature. And we have lots of studies of famous writers and not so famous writers. But believe it or not, we don't have a single study that looks at writers as a whole. So, this book is an attempt to explain the nature of a literary career. How did you actually make a living as a writer at a time when the marketplace really wasn't open, and yet that the patronage system was beginning to disappear? It's a sort of in between time. And it's got a kind of sociological aspect to it, but it's very amusing in lots of places. There are debates about the profusion of writers, and in fact, there was a kind of over population of authors in the late 18th century, and this led to a lot of satirical works and polemics, and so on. So, I've attempted to read the writing about writers while at the same time coming up with hard evidence as to how many there were. And how do they fit into the society of the Old Regime.

That sounds really interesting that that leads really well into my next question, which is do you think there's any equivalent today to 18th century print culture? So, I guess one aspect, just the proliferation of pamphlets in writing and then as you're saying, an overpopulation of authors, is there a similar ecosystem later in history at the present or between us and them?

 Well, I think that there is a similar problem in a totally different system. So for example I you know my figures are very approximate, but I think about 350,000 or so new titles are published every year in the US. These are trade books and academic books and so on, but at the same time there are something like more than 500,000 books that are self-published, in other words, twice as many books are being published by the writers themselves, and we have this extraordinary explosion of writing done by writers who don't make careers from it.

 Now, that's rather similar to the situation in the 18th century, when, according to one estimate, this is by a man called Louis-Sébastien Mercier, very well informed. And he said there are 30 writers, only 30 who live from their pens in France. And I've got hard evidence that there were at least 3000 writers, probably more at that time. Now everything depends on how you define a writer, of course. But the 18th century definition was a writer is someone who has written at least one book. So, in other words, what I'm trying to do is to get a sense of the scale of things of the general proportion of the literary world and then to investigate the way they perceive things themselves. And there it turns into a kind of history of mentalities, if you like, a history of the perception and attitudes, beliefs, values, that sort of thing.

I had another question, just related to writing, in general. I think people don't think of academic authors as writers so much. We just think, I guess, that there are historians and there are writers, but obviously a historian like yourself, you are also a writer. And what do you think of that idea of a writer today and how do you see yourself? Do you tell your people that you're a writer, or do you say I'm a historian and I also write books like, how do you, how do you work that out?

Well, I must say I aim my books at two audiences. The general educated reader and other professionals. Now, that's tough to do and some of my books are more esoteric than others, but, in general, I try to write books that would be interesting for everyone and even fun for everyone. And maybe some books that would shake the reader up a little bit, as in The Great Cat Massacre, which caused a lot of people to be, at first, puzzled, and then a little bit shocked at the nature of what a professional historian does.

So I believe that we've got a problem in the US that too many historians write for other historians using a lot of jargon and making esoteric references where they don't need to do that. I mean, sometimes you do. You can write articles for other professionals in professional journals. But if you write a book, it seems to me it should be possible for anyone to write in such a way that it's accessible to the general public.

 At the same time, it's got to be rigorous, so I'm not just relating an extraordinary event. I'm trying to show how something that to us seems repulsive, killing cats to them was funny, and the idea is if you can get the joke, if you can understand a humorous incident. Then maybe you can get the culture in some sense. So often I look for aspects of the past where I'm puzzled myself, where I run into a kind of opacity and that's where I think I should concentrate my energy in order to understand what is actually going on.

What is your process? You've written so many books. How? How do you get the words on the page? What is your discipline for doing that?

 Well, I don't put on a hair shirt and you know flagellate the flesh or anything like that. But it's hard work and I, you know, I just write all the time. No particular tricks or anything like that. I must say I rewrite a great deal and I've tried to develop a skill as an editor in editing my own work. But, it's become a way of life. And my wife says I'm obsessional about writing, that I work too long of hours and so on. But I can't stop myself. I mean, it's hard work, but it's very satisfying if somehow you can find the words to get across what you found in the archives. So, you're communicating the nature of experience among people who live to two hundred and fifty years ago. I mean, that, in itself, is thrilling, I find.

I wanted to ask you some questions about the French Revolution, because it's something that you've studied for so long. What keeps it interesting to you? I mean the Revolution itself, but also that general time period.

Well, I think most historians would agree that the French Revolution is the founding event or series of events of the modern world. It's not that violence and revolts and so on did not occur earlier. Of course they did. But the French Revolution occurred on a scale that was unprecedented. And furthermore, it set an agenda. I mean, there's a lot of radical ideology, that is realized, acted out, made to live in the streets of Paris and all of France between 1789 and 1799. It doesn't disappear despite the Bonaparte and the Restoration, it remains as a kind of defiant challenge to the rest of the world—a challenge to try to establish the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. I mean, that sounds like a slogan. It was a slogan, but behind it was a conviction that you don't you don't need to take things as they are. You can try to create things as they ought to be. So there is a utopian element that accompanies the violence.

And I believe it's quite wrong to think of the Revolution as many people do, simply as a series of mindless eruptions of violence. In fact, it was an attempt to redesign the world. They reinvented time and space. You know, there's a new calendar. There are new ways of measuring things, such as the kilometer and the meter. It's a fascinating attempt to redesign reality.

I think you kind of answered my next question, which was, what do you think is maybe the most misunderstood part of the Revolution? Would you say that's it: People think of it as a mindless eruption of violence. Do you think that's the most common mistake or misunderstanding?

I do. Yeah, people just think it's the guillotine. It's bloodshed. And so on. And, in fact, it did involve violence and a lot of the violence, especially the September Massacres of 1792. It’s revolting to read about. So, I'm not by any means celebrating the violence of the Revolution, but you know that violence in a way was necessary because of the Counter Revolution, the attempt of the aristocracy, members of the church, and powerful people from the Old Regime to regain power. And they were serious about it. And of course, France was invaded by armies from the rest of the old regimes in Europe. So, they were fighting a desperate struggle against the rest of Europe. I mean, it was it was extraordinary and they won and survived only because they created the National Army fighting these professional old regime armies that were not driven by the same commitment to the ideals that the French revolutionaries were. I mean you have something like that under Cromwell. And, of course, there's a lot of violence during the Reformation. So, I'm not saying this is utterly new, but it is new in that it's secular. It's an attempt to create a political order that would conform to these ideals of equality and liberty.

Is there anything that you see differently today about the French Revolution or any of the other subjects that you studied from when you first got into it, or anything in one of your earlier books that you think “I would do that a little bit differently now?”

Well, the one of actually the first books I wrote was published long ago in 1968, it was about Mesmerism or animal magnetism. And this was a kind of pseudoscience that just swept through France in the 1780s. I mean, people were more interested in it than anything else, including the first balloon flights. And what fascinated me about it was not simply that it captured people's imaginations, but that is expressed a worldview: The sense that you could understand the forces of nature in such a way as to cure all disease. And even cure the diseases of the body politic because there were radical Mesmerists. Well, I followed that argument and tried to flesh it out with lots of information in 1968, but at that point I never read any anthropology and since then. I've, you know, immersed myself in anthropology, and I can see that a subject like worldview is a favorite topic among anthropologists who have a more systematic way of studying it. So that's one thing I would have done differently.

 And in the in the book I most recently published, The Revolutionary Temper, the emphasis falls on information. And that is, I think, something new. I mean, you know we say we live in an Information Society, which is true enough, but it's misleading because it implies that other societies were not information societies, but they all were, each in its own way, and according to the media, available at the time.

So what I did in this last book was in a systematic way to try to show what the media were, how they operated. And especially how people reacted to them. So, it's a study of information, but the perception of information at the same time. And that involves lots of things like, well, misinformation, which is a big subject today. It was very important in the 18th century and so that would be an example of how I've kind of changed my position and have attempted to look at the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France from an unfamiliar point of view.

One of the things I like about the Mesmer story is also that Ben Franklin pops up because he's, I mean, he's just everywhere in American history. And then he just happens to be in France and be really skeptical of Mesmer. I just think, of course, he's on the scene. This guy. Just what doesn't he do, right?

Franklin, he's amazing. He actually chaired the Committee of the Academy of Sciences that investigated Mesmerism and he couldn't speak French all that well. He was an old man, but he was so clever, so intelligent, that he devised a series of experiments to demonstrate that the so-called Mesmerised invisible fluid, that supposedly penetrated everything, did not exist. And so he chaired the committee that wrote a report saying Mesmerism/animal magnetism was a pseudoscience, didn't hold up. But then he added something, and that was people were flipping out in Mesmerous seances. You know, people fainted, they went into convulsions. They did have diseases cured--they thought—and so, Franklin said, “We need to understand the operations of the imagination.” And that, you know, is going to lead to, well, a doctor called Charcot in France and to Sigmund Freud. So. I utterly admire Franklin for his cleverness and his openness to new ideas.

He's definitely one of my favorite figures in American history. He's tied in with print too, because he's a printer, right? It's just hard to imagine anybody being, I guess, clever in so many fields at this one time and still so self-taught. Every time I think I have a list of everything he's done, I find out something else that he did, but I didn't even realize.

Yes. And you know, he also had a sense of humor. Most of our most of our founding fathers didn't. I mean, they were pretty stern types. But Franklin really could see the humorous side of the human condition, too. He is just endlessly fascinating.

Who have been some of the biggest influences on you in terms of historical thinking and your approach to the past?

That's a good question. When I was a graduate student, I did my graduate work at Oxford. This was in the early 1960s. I was there 60 to 64 and the most exciting tendency going on in history was the attempt to see history from below. to understand the past from the viewpoint of ordinary people, often the poor. Edward Thompson was the most famous English historian who did this, but also the advisor of my thesis, Richard Cobb, took that point of view. Usually this involved the study of working class people and riots and strikes and that sort of thing. I thought, could we do intellectual history from below? And that's what I attempted to do with my PhD thesis at Oxford. It wasn't a very good thesis, actually. I wrote it fast. I was reporting for the New York Times while doing it, so it was, in a way, dashed off. But it had some, I think, rather good ideas and original research, which I've used in this last book, The Revolutionary Temper. So, decades and decades later, I did make use of the PhD thesis and I was trying to treat the history of Paris--not all of France—but to treat life in Paris at street level. So, one of the influences was definitely a kind of social history that had the ambition to understand life as lived by ordinary people.

There were other influences. The one from anthropology was crucial to me, and came much later. And that actually that happened almost by chance. I ran into an anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, when I first arrived to teach at Princeton in 1968. He said to me, “what are you working on?” And I said, “well, it's this new thing, the French call, the history of mentalities.” “What's that?” he said. “Well, it's an attempt to understand how people view the world, worldviews, how they felt about things, what their general attitudes were.” He paused. And then he said, “that sounds like anthropology. That's what we do.”

Well, one thing led to another and we wound up teaching a course together at Princeton. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is separate from Princeton University, but he did it for the fun of it. It was a course on history and anthropology for undergraduates. And we did it for the fun of it. He sat at one end of the table. I sat at the other. And we discussed books that dealt with a similar subject, like witchcraft, but from the point of view of anthropology on the one hand, history on the other, and we did this, off and on, for 20 years. So for me it was a fabulous education in anthropology, done by one of the really great anthropologists of our time.

What do you think is the future of history? I guess either trends in the discipline or even the discipline as it's valued by the public. Any thoughts on that?

Well, I'm bad enough at predicting the past, and I certainly can't prophesize anything about the future. You know, in history for over the last 20 years at least, there is a term used, and I'm sure you've run into it yourself, “the turn.” You know, you get the linguistic turn. Or the emotional turn. Or the semiotic turn. And I think that this tendency to announce turns is a sign of modishness. There is, I think, a kind of scramble to be taking the lead in various fads or fashions, or ways of looking at things. Now, I think the ways of looking at things announced by turns are good ways.

I mean, they're interesting and valid and so on. But all the fuss about belonging to a new turn, a new movement…The tendency I find regrettable because it does seem to celebrate trendiness as opposed to, you know, good solid work or novelty from the point of view. So, the future of history, I hope it won't be endless turns and modes.

And I have worries because so many undergraduates now do not take history courses. You know, we've lost an audience there and I don't know how to explain it. There is an understandable desire among students to prepare for jobs later on, to take computer science and economics. Fine, but why not take some history along the way and broaden your understanding of the human condition? Because history is about the human condition. And isn't that what we want to understand when we go to college? Not perfectly, we never do, but what is more important? So, I worry about the decline in interest in history and I think we historians are responsible for part of it because we do on our professional writing, write in this esoteric manner... I think we could correct that frankly and that more time should be spent on writing itself as a skill in the preparation of professionals. …And there are some excellent historians who never got PhDs and are not professionals in sense of teaching in universities. They write good history and we, the professionals, can learn from them their ability to communicate the fascination with the past.

Isaiah Berlin, he has his famous characterization of thinkers as either hedgehog or fox. The hedgehog, he knows the one thing, and the fox knows many things. Do you see yourself as more of a hedgehog or a fox?

Well, I think I have to admit to being hedgehogy in general, but my last book is a fox book. And the French have a different way of expressing that contrast. It was invented by Le Roy Ladurie, he says some people, some historians, are parachutists and other historians are truffle hunters.

And I tried to be a parachuter in the last book, that is to look at the whole sweep of history in Paris between 1740 and 1789, and to show how it developed a kind of cumulative force in the minds of people. So it's not just recounting events, it's recounting the perception of events along with the events themselves in an attempt to understand a general mentality of people who were ready to make a Revolution in 1789, so it's not exactly a causal explanation, but it's an attempt to get inside the heads of people and to understand how it was that they were ready to destroy one world and to attempt to create another. One from the ruins of the old.

What is a book you wish you had written? Something someone else wrote that you thought, “I wish I had written that.”

Well, you know, one of the books I most admire is Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Now that's a masterpiece. I'm not capable of writing such a great book. But, you know, if you ask me to name one book that I most admire, I think it would be that. After I finished my PhD, I went back to New York to work as a newspaper reporter. So I was continuing and what I thought would be my career. I just got the PhD sort of quickly on the side and I used to work in police headquarters covering crime. And there was always a poker game and so on and the some of the people there were pretty tough. And I would--I couldn't play poker because you had to ante a dollar which was a lot of money in those days--so people would sit around reading and I brought in Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. But, of course, I couldn't let the other reporters see me reading such a book, you know? So, I hid it in a copy of Playboy. And I was reading Burkhart, you know disguised as Playboy and that way, I mean, I got on fine with the other reporters, but I said to myself, “you really want to be an historian. What are you doing here?”

What are some books you regularly recommend to other people? History or just anything.

 Currently I'm going through a phase of reading Latin American writers. I've been invited to Latin America many, many times. In fact, I just came back from giving lectures in Mexico City. But I had never learned Spanish. Well, I felt guilty being in Mexico, and I've been into almost every country in Latin America giving lectures because my books have been translated extensively into Spanish and Portuguese. (In the case of Brazil, I have a wonderful Brazilian publisher.) But there I was, and I couldn't speak their language, so I just bought a book, Teach Yourself Spanish, and I learned it. It's no great feat. It's not difficult. But speaking it is something else, and I also speak Italian, so I would get the two mixed up all the time and make a mess of things. However, the reading experience was terrific. So, the book I would recommend is by Borges. I'm a great Borges fan and, of course, he's written many, many wonderful books. One is called Fictions. That's the first one I would read if someone hasn't read any book of his and a second one is The Book of Sand, that's its title. And so on and so on. They're wonderful books and they make you reflect in a in an unfamiliar way. So, he's not just telling his story, he's telling a story that is provocative in the way Kafka is provocative. So my recommendation is he's terrific, and of course he's a famous writer, but a lot of people I know have not read his works and I think they are really inspired.

 Thank you for your time, this was a great conversation.

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice.