The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Paperback)

by Robert Darnton (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment (1979) afforded a remarkable glimpse into an episode of publishing history that brought Diderot's Encyclopedie to a very large reading public in a comparatively cheap edition put out by an improvised French-Swiss publishing consortium. The primary fund of material mined in that work - the luckily preserved records of the Swiss partner, the Societe typographique de Neuchatel (STN) - is also widely drawn on in most of the six articles collected here. Though a lay reader may need the help of a good general history of prerevolutionary France to piece together some parts of the picture, the general outlines are more than accessible. Darnton repeatedly argues that the structure of restrictions on publishing under the old regime inevitably created a thriving demi-monde profiting from the idiocy of the law - as well as an inkslingers' underworld schooled in the lessons of not only political but literary injustice. Among the human marginalia he turns up are a bogus bookdealer who (on the strength of a few knowledgeable-sounding letters) persuaded the STN to advance him some 2,400 livres' worth of books; a scrivener who bombarded the STN with proposal after proposal for grandiose histories, critical analyses, and anti-clerical compendiums of Cistercian breviaries (depending on the market); and - more unexpectedly - Brissot de Warville, the ill-fated Girondist leader, who in 1784 was nothing but a failed philosophe and pamphleteer, obliged to buy his way out of the Bastille by agreeing to turn police informer. Other articles comment on: the contrast between the sanctioned canonization of the more august prophets of reason (Voltaire, d'Alembert) and the walls of repression and exclusion penning most would-be-philosophes into the confines of Grub Street; the day-to-day records suggesting "that preindustrial work tended to be irregular and unstable, craft-specific and task-oriented, collective in its organization and individual in its pace"; and the certainty that - no matter what the 18th-century French public read - the regime's very perception of books was deformed by a screening system that merrily classified pornography, political commentary, and works of atheism as livres philosophiques: i.e., forbidden books. Though the present, composite work is inherently specialized, Darnton's lucid efforts to present books as evidence of labor history, economic structures, and political institutions may justly be called pioneering. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 )

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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.com Sales Rank: #752,878 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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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 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.