Robert Darnton. The Revolutionary Temper. Paris 1748-1789.

      

      Harvard doyen Robert Darnton's book about seething unrest leading to the French Revolution is quite a good reading. Political, economic and administrative realities of the French society serve only as a frame to describe the changes in public opinion, his specialty. 

    The picture of the French society he describes in his book -- without expounding on that -- hints at the causes of the French Revolution as incompatible divergences of the political elites. And these were four: the court, the (upper) clergy, the executive -- the ministers and the Parliaments. Each had its sets of publicists to support their positions. Incongruously, but consistent with American academic tradition, Darnton describes these medieval institutions, the Parliaments, as democracy in action. But he honestly shows that they were largely defenders of entrenched interests of the urban upper classes. Even in one case -- the absolution of the Jansenists -- in which Parliaments were seemingly on the side of the freedom of the press and consciousness, they were defending Jansenism. But it became a superstition long ago, contrasting with a "more enlightened" views of the upper clergy. 

     At the same time, Gallican Church, or at least her upper echelons were more and more entrenched in their Ultramontanism and complete inflexibility, first and foremost, with respect to their own taxation. 

      The most progressive part of the elite were the ministries but they were hamstrung by the court intrigues and the laziness and the indecision of both kings, Louis XV and Louis XVI. Because of the parochial interests of the Parliaments they had to introduce reforms by "tyrannical" (compared with the French Revolution -- ha-ha) methods. 

     The weakness of Darnton's book -- henceforth it cannot replace the classics of De Tocqueville "The Old Regime and the Revolution" and Edgar Faure's "La disgrace de Turgot" -- that all the problems are sorted out from the point of view of Parisian educated middle class. The ones that could afford to pay 9 livres for a literary pamphlet and subscribe to the "Gazette de Leyde" -- his favorite broadsheet source and the barometer of the public opinion.