A Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Book of the Year

‘Robert Darnton is one of the world’s greatest historians, and this is an exceptional book: a huge social and cultural portrait of Paris in the build-up to the French Revolution’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, class conflict or Enlightenment ideology. Without denying any of these, Robert Darnton offers a different explanation: what Parisians themselves, those at the centre of the Revolution, thought was happening at the time and how it guided their actions.

To understand the rise of what he calls ‘the revolutionary temper’, Darnton draws on a lifetime’s study of pamphlets, books, underground newsletters, songs and public performances, exploring Paris as an information society not unlike our own. Its news circuits were centred in cafes and market-places, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow, a favourite gathering-place for gossips. He shows how the events of forty years – from disastrous treaties, official corruption and royal scandal to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and a new conception of the nation – all entered the collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As news and opinion travelled across this profoundly unequal society, public trust in royal authority eroded, its legitimacy was undermined, and the social order unravelled.

Much of Robert Darnton’s work has explained the hidden dynamics of history, never more so than in this exceptional book. It is a riveting narrative, but it adds a new dimension, the perceptions of contemporary Parisians, which allows us to see these momentous decades afresh.

"[Darnton] has become the internationally recognized doyen of scholars working in the field of eighteenth-century French history and culture ... Written in his strikingly clear prose, argued with cogency, craft and conviction, and drawing on a lifetime of distilled research ... The range and the variety of sources that Darnton deploys to penetrate the Parisian "temper" is extremely impressive ... He is a shrewd, observant, wise and unfailingly entertaining guide through these dense, thought-provoking and colourful thickets of Parisian experience." - Times Literary Supplement

"The Revolutionary Temper is a richly researched, ambitious and fascinating history ... delicate and revealing." - Sunday Telegraph

"A riveting synthesis of Darnton's life work ... he writes beautifully and has a weather eye for quirky detail." - Spectator

"It’s difficult to summarise a book of such breadth… Short chapters stand alone as delightfully intriguing stories about a society in turmoil… This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest." - The Times

"Darnton’s book is a very fine account of how 18th-century Parisians received and interpreted public events, putting them on the road to revolution." - Financial Times