Robert Darnton’s new book revisits classic debates regarding the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by exploring the literary world of late 18th-century France. Pre-revolutionary France was home to thousands of published authors, amid the century’s generalised boom in print matter. Yet there were still relatively few out-and-out writerly ‘winners’ in this marketplace for products of the pen. As one contemporary observer, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, would aver, ‘not more than thirty writers’ in the country were able to ‘make a career’ from their work. Mercier knew what he was writing about, having become one of the period’s happy-few success stories. Besides underlining the perilous fragility of making a livelihood from writing, Mercier nevertheless also lionised the power of writers: in the century of Enlightenment, they could boast ‘the legitimate authority they have over minds’, channelling ‘the public interest’ in order to ‘direct the ideas of the nation’.
As Darnton shows, this emergent notion of the author as an independent intellectual – and the broader sense of the literary field as one of political engagement – was a potent cocktail. By 1789 writers ‘had begun to replace priests as a source of moral authority’. Yet even if an embryonic intelligentsia of sorts may be detected, this did not include the development of ‘a clear social identity and a firm economic base’. With the nascent literary marketplace incapable of sustaining more than a handful of Merciers, a surer path to authorial prosperity was through patronage and privilege. Many of the period’s leading philosophes parlayed their talents into obtaining plum sinecures; Voltaire for instance won courtly favour both in Louis XV’s France and in the Prussia of Frederick the Great. Such insider-intellectuals tended not to bite the hands that fed them. For Darnton, indeed, there was not necessarily anything revolutionary about ‘Enlightenment’ in and of itself: by the end of the ancien régime the political system ‘could assimilate Enlightenment principles’, to which most French government ministers subscribed in some measure. Outside the favoured circles of the literary elite, however, there remained a mass of marginal or outsider authors: these were the impecunious garret-dwellers of ‘Grub Street’, as Darnton puts it – or ‘poor devils’, in Voltaire’s words. They often wrote works in scandalous and muck-raking genres, and with a seditious edge.
A central aim of Darnton’s book is to fathom the scale and scope of authorship as a whole at this critical juncture. The book’s backbone is a prosopographical survey of individuals in France identifiable as writers – approximately 3,000 on the eve of the Revolution, more than double the number in 1750. Darnton reconstructs this data based on contemporary bibliographical compendia which aspired to list everyone in France who had at least one publication to their name. This material allows provisional reckonings to be made: writers stemmed mostly from ‘the traditional elite of the ancien régime’, with disproportionately small shares for women (three per cent) and the working classes (less than one per cent).
To flesh out these findings, Darnton offers three case studies illustrating career patterns at different levels within the world of letters. The first is a story of ancien régime success, André Morellet, a protégé of Voltaire’s and master of networking; the second exemplar, evoking a middling career, is the endlessly prolific sentimental novelist Baculard d’Arnaud; finally, for a case of the ‘down and out in literary Paris’, the focus turns to the hack writer Pierre-Louis Manuel. As the book then retraces, 1789 turned this hierarchy of penmanship on its head. While Morellet had contrived to turn his Enlightenment credentials into a worldly fortune, the Revolution blew most of this away. As for d’Arnaud, his voluminous pre-revolutionary publications were enough to scrape together enough for survival, but the Revolution tended to reinforce his financial woes rather than liberate him from them. And in the case of Manuel, 1789 was initially the making of him, providing openings in journalism and politics; yet its factional battles would ultimately bring him to the guillotine during the Terror.
Quite apart from any influence that their published works might have had, the cast of writers considered here prove to be especially revealing for the experiential and emblematic aspects of their careers. The writer’s lot, when located on the margins of the ‘cultural system’ of the ancien régime, vividly encapsulated the wider frustrations of a contemporary societal and political order which advantaged a few privileged insiders while excluding other talents. Ultimately it would be figures from the ‘poor devils’ milieu who took a lead in what Darnton terms ‘the cultural revolution at work within the French Revolution’. And here the guiding light was less Voltaire than Rousseau, the mid-century intellectual forebear who had most made a virtue of performing his outsiderdom while pathologising the iniquities and corruptions of the existing order.
Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Darnton has brought 18th-century France to life for generations of readers. Classic titles such as The Great Cat Massacre and The Literary Underground of the Old Regime not only earned him scholarly laurels but also put him at the forefront of engaging the wider public in the abiding fascinations of his period of study. His oeuvre, besides combining insight and writerly verve, has also been prodigious: he has produced more books during his retirement alone than most scholars manage over a lifetime. Were Darnton to have been dropped into the 18th century, one suspects that he would have given Mercier a run for his money. All this makes it a matter of great regret to learn that Darnton intends The Writer’s Lot to be his final book. If this is a parting gift, it provides more than just a sense of an ending, in that the debates pursued here remain enduringly lively ones, in which Darnton’s contributions will continue to echo, entertain and enlighten.
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The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France
Robert Darnton
Harvard University Press, 240pp, £22.95
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Simon Macdonald is Lecturer in Modern European History at University College London.
