The Rising Temperatures Before the French Revolution
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton (2023)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
In 1744, Louis XV was called “le Bien-Aimé,” the “Beloved.” By 1750, he was avoiding Paris because he did not want to face the people. What happened? Among other things, he had been denied the Eucharist due to adultery—it had been years since he’d had it—and he could no longer administer “the royal touch,” which would heal people of scrofula. If he could not cure le mal du roi, perhaps he was a bad king. This is one of many interesting scenes in Robert Darnton’s narrative of Paris between the end of the War of Austrian Succession and the storming of the Bastille. This is a work which seeks to illuminate the “collective consciousness” of Parisians in the run-up to the Revolution. Darnton does that by paying special attention to news, rumors, and popular songs, arguing that people’s political perceptions developed primarily “in response to the news they received” (xviii).
Looking at many primary sources from the time, Darnton takes us through a series of “affaires,” as they were known, a “kind of event” that captured the public imagination, often involved news coverage and pamphlets, and “usually crystallized around trials, where abstract issues came to life in courtroom dramas played out before large audiences and reported in gazettes” (81). There is, of course, the famous “Diamond Necklace Affair,” but Darnton introduces us to many others, like the Kornmann Affair, which was about adultery and abuse of power. The book is organized chronologically into four time periods and as we near the Revolution we come to see how “abstract issues such as ministerial despotism were embodied by concrete figures…and were played out in sentimental dramas, which pitted heroes against villains” (294). Whether it was the Flour War or the way Bonnie Prince Charlie was treated by the monarchy, we see the gradual diminution of respect for traditional authority and the rising suspicion that the government was inept at best and corrupt at worst. By 1788, “Parisians acted out the conviction that the monarch had degenerated into a despotism” (363). Though at that time they believed it to be ministerial rather than monarchical despotism, the monarchy was unknowingly nearing its end.
Robert Darnton is a preeminent cultural historian, with expertise in French history, the eighteenth century and the history of the book. His works bring out the color and the life of French history and the eighteenth century in remarkable ways, as can be guessed by the titles of some of his works, like The Great Cat Massacre and George Washington’s False Teeth. The Revolutionary Temper is no different, it is both engaging and serious in ways that few books are. Nowhere else are you likely to encounter the thrills of the first hot air balloon flights and the dramas of the deaths of Jansenists denied last rites alongside a historiographical argument about the causes of the French Revolution. We get the complications surrounding Necker, but so much more.
The French Revolution is one of the most significant and most studied events in modern history. For many scholars it is the Ur-text of modernity, giving us everything from the “left” and “right” of the political system to the kilogram. It has been the Ur-text of many later revolutions, including those of 1848 and of the Bolsheviks. We are still reckoning the impact of the French Revolution. It was apparently a misunderstood response, but it is often repeated that when Zhou Enlai was asked about the importance of the French Revolution by Nixon, he said that it is “too early to say,” the implication being that it is still at work. The spirit of the French Revolution lives on. The French are not the only people who still aspire to “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” And even the failures of the French Revolution inspire many with their radical vision for a new world. We are currently in year 232 of the revolutionary calendar.
As much as the French Revolution has been admired, reviled, and studied, it remains something of a riddle. For many who watched it from a distance or who think of it today, all other aspects of the Revolution have been overshadowed by the Terror. The Revolution went through many phases, some liberal and some conservative, but many define it all by the guillotine. Even those who have studied the Revolution closely dispute the relationship between the Terror and the other aspects and stages of the Revolution. Thanks to Robespierre and Saint Just, people keep reading Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France though it was inaccurate about contemporary events. In some circles, the rest of the Revolution—including its chief goals and foundation in natural rights—is largely forgotten.
A more significant topic for those who know about the Revolution is its cause or causes. Historians have put forward many competing yet viable theses for its causes. Early on, the Revolution was considered by many to be the Enlightenment made flesh and Rousseau was a primary actor, despite being dead. Another generation of historians centered economic causes of the Revolution—the poor harvests, the debt and the taxes, the Ancien régime. Marxists have seen the Revolution as bourgeois, part of the process of the middle class taking control over government and society. François Furet turned the tide in the late 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that the Revolution was primarily political and cultural. He looked back to de Tocqueville who saw the Revolution as part of the centralization of the government and to Cochin, who drew attention to new sociability, tied to ideology. And, of course, in our time language is considered by some the ultimate cause of the French Revolution.
Robert Darnton wades into these choppy waters with his own argument about causation and the French Revolution. He argues that between 1748 and 1789, Parisians had developed a “revolutionary temper.” It had not happened overnight, “it was a long process, built up over the years by events and the perception of events. Although individuals experienced it in different ways, it took place collectively” (439). Material conditions mattered, but Parisians became revolutionaries largely because of the events they experienced and learned about, they were shaped by their information age and by perceptions of ministerial despotism. This approach leaves room for contingency while showing the build up of tensions in a specific time frame.
Darnton’s “revolutionary temper” is not an amorphous “vibe.” He notes eleven elements: 1. Hatred of despotism 2. Love of liberty 3. Commitment to the nation 4. Indignation at depravity among the aristocratic elite 5. Dedication to virtue 6. Moralizing 7. Disenchantment with the monarchy 8. Belief in the power of reason 9. Detachment from the church and attraction to the Enlightenment 10. Political engagement and resistance to taxation and 11. Familiarity with violence. The storming of the Bastille and other shocking moments may have seemed like an outflow of passions. As Darnton highlights, “the common term for riots, émotions populaires, suggests the collective passions they released” (446). But those passions were built on underlying sentiments regarding how France should operate and who could be trusted to lead.
Every argument about causation and the French Revolution faces the same questions. Why did the Revolution happen when it did and not some other year? Why did it happen in France and not somewhere else? The Enlightenment was not exclusively French, nor were bad ministers and bad harvests. Why did it happen with its particular order of events? Which of the events would we even consider the start of the Revolution? Arguments that center only material conditions, or the Enlightenment, or language, or sociability cannot fully answer those questions.
Darnton’s “revolutionary temper” wades into “collective consciousness” territory—which can be treacherous for historians—but it manages to present an argument that helps to answer those challenging questions. The Revolutionary Temper includes attention to the Enlightenment, but also to the specific concerns people had about kings and ministers and the Parisian parliament, as well as the songs people sang about the scandals of the day, and the ways in which prisons like the Bastille were understood by the public. Darnton makes his case with primary sources, like diaries, pamphlets, plays, and forbidden literature. Some historians will take issue with the approach or with some of the selection of events, but The Revolutionary Temper presents a comprehensive and compelling description of the Parisian relationship with the government and the ideas of the Enlightenment in the decades before the Revolution.
Our obsession with the French Revolution reflects our obsession with understanding events generally and our need to comprehend what happened before us. It is not only historians who wrestle with causality. There are so many possible explanations for anything that matters. Somehow, we believe that if we better understand why an event happened, we will be able to… uphold its legacy? Avoid its recurrence? Comprehend our own place in historical narratives? Perhaps all those things.
The French Revolution helped set modernity in motion, but it was also an event that led to a paroxysm of violence which we still do not fully comprehend. And we are always wondering when a revolution will next occur. A hobby of the United States is waiting for revolution in Cuba and in Iran and in North Korea. And it is also the hope of many Americans that we do or do not experience revolutionary riots in our own cities, as we sometimes do. Every book about the French Revolution in some ways parallels Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, it is trying to explain why storming the Bastille seemed like the right thing to do to so many people on July 14, 1789. And it is a complicated thing to explain, because it is a complicated event. Even though the guillotine came later, you can still find one of the keys to the Bastille on the wall at Mt. Vernon, where it hands as a symbol of the triumph of liberty.
As long as we have a tie to modernity, we will always have more books about the French Revolution. The Revolutionary Temper both explains the run-up to the Revolution well for those relatively unfamiliar with it and offers a good argument for why it occurred when and how it did. The notion of the development of a “revolutionary temper” is compelling and might be applied elsewhere. And where else will you read about how the citizens of Calais kept the hot air balloon that first crossed the Channel in their church to celebrate it and the kidnapping of poor children to send them off to silk farms in Mississippi alongside debates about the accounting of various finance ministers?
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War.
