It is a book of previously published essays, so it does not offer a new synthesis comparable to the more ambitious work by Chartier. Of course social conflicts had to be expressed in language, and revolutionary oratory acquired a force of its own. In the case of de-Christianization, for example, Chartier shows that historians have failed to demonstrate any direct linkage between the decline in traditional religiosity throughout the eighteenth century and the explosion of anti-Catholicism in 1789. Chartier goes so far as to dismiss the Enlightenment as an invention of the Revolution, which needed an intellectual pedigree in order to legitimize itself. That will not do for Chartier and Baker. Robert Darnton THE BUSINESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT : Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800 1st Edition 2nd Printing Softcover Cambridge, Massachusetts Belknap Press 1979 Very Good in wrappers. On September 11, 1789, the deputies voted for a “suspensive” rather than an “absolute” royal veto—that is, they limited the king’s ability to block legislation to the duration of two legislatures or four years. By Robert Darnton Professor Darnton specializes in the French Enlightenment. But do they alter our understanding of French political culture in a fundamental way? He is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard. Citation Darnton, Robert. But Baker makes discourse the driving force of the revolutionary process, and in doing so he goes much further than Mornet. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. Finally, a democratic strain, exemplified by Rousseau and Mably, derived all legitimate authority from the will of the people, whose sovereignty was deemed to be as absolute as that of the absolute sovereigns in the treatises of Bossuet and Hobbes. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. It is a fascinating hypothesis, and it helps to explain the crusading zeal that the revolutionaries directed against the Church. It cannot be taken as a guide to eighteenth-century France. The tables of the Café Procope? Or the columns of the Gazette de France? Virtual Conferences, Working from Home, and Flying Kids, Like many conferences this year, the annual American Academy of Religion­/­Society of Biblical Literature conference will be virtual. Those arguments may be exaggerated—the Enlightenment certainly existed as a cause that marked the consciousness of the French before 1789, and the French could not conceive of anything comparable to the Revolution until after 1788—but that is what makes both books such good reading. For Mornet merely claimed that the spread of enlightened ideas predisposed people to accept political change. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. But the very success of his exegesis raises a problem: Can one write a history of the constitutional debates without taking social conflict into account? Your story matters. He argued that Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to conquer public opinion in the middle of the eighteenth century and that their ideas, increasingly radical and widespread, determined the climate of opinion during the 1770s and 1780s. Can the traditional conception of the monarchy be reduced to Baker’s trio of attributes? In practice, however, Baker ignores this precept, because he treats the Revolution as the working out of the logic propounded in the constitutional debates. What Tocqueville failed to grasp, according to Chartier, was a “process of privatization” in social life that created an autonomous sphere where public affairs could be debated and the state could be resisted. 1971. In any case, the Constitution of 1791 contained enough checks and balances to prevent parliamentary tyranny. After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Robert Darnton's remarkable history of what followed him, from 1775 to 1800. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. Robert Darnton's latest book is A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. Their successors argue about “discourse” and “conceptual space.”. Buy Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France by Darnton, Robert online on Amazon.ae at best prices. If this space was actually constructed, both conceptually and as the site of action, where can we locate it? He conjures up a world of free and easy ratiocination among philosophic equals. And for Baker, the “inventing” took place in “language games” under the Old Regime, when the Revolution was devised as a “script.”. Robert Darnton's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime offers the most complete analysis of French hack writers. Like Alexis de Tocqueville and Crane Brinton, he interprets Jacobinism as a secular religion; but unlike them, he traces the sacralization of the state back to the Old Regime. But their meaning was shaped by events outside the assembly hall. In fact, he claims that the “script” for it was written from the three ideological languages as early as 1774. Where Chartier attempts to relate the Revolution’s origins to the whole cultural system of the Old Regime, Baker keeps to fine-grained textual analysis; but fine as his analysis is, it has broad implications. His strategy for dealing with it begins with a rejection of the assumption, which was typical of intellectual history in Mornet’s day, that ideas are autonomous units of thought that can be traced through society and across spans of time. Thus the attacks on the Church between 1789 and 1794 did not come from a sudden outburst of anticlericalism but rather were the culmination of a de-Christianization process that can be seen in a century-long decline in Masses said for the dead, in a drop in the incidence of religious vocations, in an increase in secular as opposed to religious publications, and even in the beginning of widespread contraception. In practice, it flourished in the eighteenth-century world of letters, where writers competed for the favor of readers on an open market, and everyone acknowledged the supreme authority of public opinion. He posits an intermediary phrase, a “transfer of sacrality,” which he attributes paradoxically to the increased rigor of the Catholic Church. ‘Histoire mondiale de la France,’ edited by Patrick Boucheron, Robert Darnton's latest book is A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. Robert Darnton ’s history of the Encyclopédie is such an occasion. According to Habermas, Öffentlichkeit developed wherever ordinary citizens discussed public affairs outside the reach of the state. Using folktales, oral histories, letters, and police reports, Darnton explores the attitudes and behaviors of 18th-century French men and women, from indigent peasants to the … Porter, “The Enlightenment”. Thus Chartier’s version of Habermas: “It was precisely the construction of a space for liberty of action, removed from state authority and reliant on the individual, that permitted the rise of the new public space that was at once inherited from and transformed by the creative energy of revolutionary politics.”. He wants to show how the French Revolution was “invented” from concepts developed under the Old Regime. In the cahiers of 1789, he detects a “politicization of the village” and a certain “symbolic disenchantment” about the monarchy, even though they continue to celebrate the king as the father of the people. A reformist strain reinforced royal authority, but did so in the manner of enlightened despotism—that is, as the rational expression of the nation’s interest as a whole in opposition to the particularist interests of orders and estates. That may not matter, however, because Baker does not pretend to take account of everything. The key conceptual shift occurred long before the taking of the Bastille, and the crucial revolutionary step took place much afterward—on September 11, 1789, to be exact. He begins by outlining the enthusiasm for science - more often exuberant pseudo-science - which existed in France in the eighteenth century (an … Whatever the implications of Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Terror was unthinkable without a foreign invasion, economic chaos, a religious schism, a constant threat of counterrevolution, and a civil war. But Chartier and Baker are correct to point out his conceptual shortcomings. The Revolution appears as nothing more than a problem of political theory—essentially, an attempt to resolve the contradiction between a Rousseauian notion of the general will and a constitutional monarchy with a balance of powers. (December 2019) Mornet needs to be assimilated, not merely modernized. Presumably Baker would say no, because at the beginning of his book he makes a convincing argument for erasing the conventional distinction between intellectual and social history: “All social activity has a symbolic dimension that gives it meaning, just as all symbolic activity has a social dimension that gives it point.”. Habermas’s Öffentlichkeit is one of those German words that can be both sociological (meaning the public as a group of persons) or philosophical (meaning making something public—the airing of an idea). In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas (Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Far from being democratic and egalitarian, they were complex structures with hierarchies of their own, entry and exit points, and modes of differentiating those who were “in” from those who were “out.” Yet Habermas has nothing to say about the realities of cultural life under the Old Regime. In fact, Habermas based his argument almost entirely on the work of German, British, and American social scientists—and appropriately so, because he did not pretend to write history; he addressed theoretical issues raised by writers such as Theodor Adorno and Carl Schmitt. By Mark Curran. Please share how this access benefits you. In the hands of someone like Condorcet, this “social reason,” as Baker calls it, could dispense with the king altogether after 1789. It provided him with a standard that could be used to measure the degradation of the public sphere by consumerism and the mass media in the twentieth century, where his interest really lay. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. He provides a wonderfully astute analysis of the constitutional issues debated during the first year of the French Revolution. A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, i: Selling Enlightenment. When politicians like Mounier and Mirabeau took the king’s side in arguments over the royal veto, their moves belonged to party struggles, in which contemporaries saw the opposition of revolution and counterrevolution and not merely propositions derived from political theory. But the language came from the works of Mably and Rousseau. According to Darnton, hacks constitute a group of struggling writers (a "literary proletariat") who cobbled together a living by engaging in a range of practices: underground journalism, pamphlet-writing, education, spying on other intellectuals for the police, etc. Chartier would improve them by directing the discussion toward the sociology of culture, Baker by turning it toward political theory. This is the boldest and most controversial point in Baker’s book. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. Within this space, the French Revolution became thinkable.”. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France: Darnton, Robert: Amazon.sg: Books. Before the eighteenth century, as absolutism reached its apogee, family life spilled into the street and no clear boundaries separated the private from the public. Robert Darnton The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. When Keith Baker takes up Habermas’s thesis in Inventing the French Revolution, he has a much easier time of it than Chartier did, because he eliminates the sociological half of the argument. 1995 [1968]. Chartier would want to add elements generated by conflicts between peasants and lords in the country and workers and masters in cities, because he includes both in his argument about the politicization of attitudes at the bottom of society. Chartier has no clear answer to this question. The most important constitutional decision probably occurred on November 7, 1789, when the assembly rejected the British model of parliamentary government by voting to exclude deputies from all ministries. …, About & Contact | Awards | Catalogs | Conference Exhibits | eBooks | Exam Copies | News | Order | Rights | Permissions | Search | Shopping Cart | Subjects & Series, Resources for: Authors | Booksellers & Librarians | Educators | Journalists | Readers, Harvard University Press offices are located at 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA & 71 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BE UK, © 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College | HUP Privacy Policy • HU Additional EEA Privacy Disclosures, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES: Publishers & Publishing Industry, 1979 Leo Gershoy Award in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Western European History, American Historical Association, deliberate destruction of documents by Trump administration officials on their way out the door, 2020 election results affirmed decades-old political divisions among the American voters frequently lumped together as “Latinos.”, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan, Robert Darnton Is a 2011 National Humanities Medal Winner. The result is a refreshing sense of rediscovery and a great deal of confusion. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. Dec. 27, 2018 A bust of the French philosopher Voltaire. Robert Darnton. Journal of Modern Chartier’s book does not present new research but combines familiar material in fresh ways, exposing fault lines and proposing new interpretations. by Roger Chartier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Duke University Press, 257 pp., $8.95 (paper), Cambridge University Press, 382 pp., $16.95 (paper). Most people are probably passingly familiar with Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century German-born physician and originator of what we now know as “mesmerism,” but the background that Robert Darnton (formerly of Princeton University, but now heads the Harvard University Library) brings to the this book puts mesmerism into not just medical and physical, but also political perspective. For him, Öffentlichkeit is public opinion, or rather the peculiar concept of public opinion that emerged in France between 1750 and 1789. It has nothing to do with cultural institutions or social life because it is purely conceptual: the conviction that public opinion, as the dispassionate, rational consensus of the informed citizenry, should be the ultimate authority in political life. In theory the deputies of the Third Estate took the most important revolutionary step on June 17, 1789, when they laid claim to sovereignty by declaring themselves to be the National Assembly. Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton. Without the religious schism, the war, and the treachery of Louis XVI, it might actually have worked. They are meant to be provocative rather than conclusive. Hello Select your address All Hello, Sign in. Soiling to front and back panels. His work has long been an indispensable study for all those who ponder on Chartier’s version of the Habermas thesis includes two characteristics that he takes to be distinctive of French culture in the eighteenth century: first, a democratic style of sociability derived from literary institutions such as salons, cafés, and periodicals; second, the articulation by several writers of a concept of public opinion that turned into a demand for popular sovereignty in politics. Turning point in Baker ’ s trio of attributes, on September 11, 1789, authority. 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