Description
A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.
In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs.
The Writers Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of literary France as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social orderor didnt. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien r?gime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Lettersin theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected cliquedramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.
Darnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the decadent Voltaire against the radical Rousseau to struggling scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.
Author: Robert Darnton
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 05/13/2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.67w x 1.02d
ISBN: 9780674299887
Language: English
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