The Literary Underground of the Old Regime [Paperback]

Robert Darnton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674536576 | ISBN-13: 978-0674536579 | Publication Date: October 15, 1985

Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.

Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street-victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these "Rousseaus of the gutter" desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them.

While censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the visible publishing industry within the limits of official orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive, the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and publishers' records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the fascinating story of that forgotten underworld.

The activities of the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing history that will inform and delight the general reader.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is splendid historical writing...Darnton [has] a well-justified reputation as one of the most original contributors to our understanding of life in pre-revolutionary Paris...What Darnton says about the writers is necessary to understanding the revolutionaries. The French Revolution was a continuous conflict between people, as well as a battle of ideas, and anyone who wants to understand the people had better start with the work of Robert Darnton.
--Norman Hampson (New York Review of Books )

[Darnton's] book gives us not only a history of 18th-century publishing but a notion of how the lower orders of literature contributed to the fall of the Old Regime...The reader who wants a glimpse of the world behind a very unusual literature and an enlightening look at a famous time in history will get an eyeful in this surprising and entertaining volume.
--Margaret Peters (New York Times Book Review )

Rarely has assiduous, original research (aided and abetted by Darnton's energetic prose) made for such fascinating reading.
--Mark Feeney (Boston Globe )

Detail is indeed Robert Darnton's strong suit. He likes to conjure up voices which had been silent for two centuries, to resurrect what he calls (modifying Peter Laslett's famous phrase) 'a world that we had lost.' And how? Not by 'contemplating philosophical treatises,' but by 'grubbing in archives,' in particular, the rich store of papers from a Swiss publishing house, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel...Darnton resuscitates a vanished world, and in doing so, like the best historians...produces a literary text of our own time.
--Peter France (London Review of Books )

About the Author

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University, and Director of the University Library, Harvard University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 15, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674536576
• ISBN-13: 978-0674536579
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #430,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, August 17, 2008

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Paperback)

This well written book is a set of linked essays on the literary underground of pre-Revolutionary France. Darnton was fortunate to discover a treasure trove of archival materials in the form of business records and correspondence of a major 18th century Swiss publisher producing for the French Market. The French book market was controlled by a combination of government censorship and the activities of Parisian publishers/booksellers who enjoyed semi-monopoly privileges. Darnton describes the activities of the clandestine book trade including the difficult life of the Grub Street hack who wrote much of the published material through the actual and often difficult mechanics of smuggling proscribed books into France and selling them.
Cumulatively, these essays paint a vivid picture of pre-Revolutionary France; a nation where the government tried, with variable success, to control the press, where there was a consistent market for tracts attacking the monarchy and aristocracy, and where a marginal living could be made by individuals committed to some forms of the Enlightenment critiques of the Ancien Regime. Beyond exposing an interesting aspect of 18th century French social history, Darnton's work leads to some generally interesting points. Much of what was retailed, and presumably read, was not the major works of the Enlightenment philosophes, but rather a mixture of scurrilous political attacks, semi-pornographic tracts, and popular fiction. Much of this work, however negligible its literary or intellectual merit, had the effect of discrediting the monarchy and aristocracy, and particularly the whole notion of privileged orders of society. While often presented in vulgar and actually libelous forms, this literature probably contributed greatly to the erosion of the legitimacy of the Ancien Regime. Darnton shows also that a number of the leaders of the early Revolution emerged, including individuals like Brissot and Marat, emerged from the literary underground. Their relatively primitive ideology was formed in this milieu and their experience as marginal figures in French life contributed greatly to their hatred of the Ancien Regime and their zeal to destroy the established orders of society.