The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France

What were the ideological origins of the French Revolution? What were the connections between this epochal event and the eighteenth-century revolution in thought, the Enlightenment? How did ideas penetrate politics and society two centuries ago? How does public opinion influence events?

To address these big questions in the history of the modern world, the distinguished historian Robert Darnton poses a comparatively small one: What did the French read in the eighteenth century? The answer lies only partially in the canon of the great Enlightenment philosophes: Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau.

More popular than these works - indeed, the best-sellers of their time - were other books, also banned by the regime, written and sold "under the cloak." These formed a libertine literature that undercut all the orthodox values of the Old Regime.

Salacious, blasphemous, treasonous, these illegal best-sellers formed a crucial part of the culture of dissent in the Old Regime. They intersected with gossip, rumors, jokes, songs, graffiti, posters, pasquinades, broadsides, letters, and journals, all of which coalesced in a political folklore that powerfully portrayed an illegitimate regime. Events and public opinion compounded each other in an increasingly revolutionary brew.

Drawing on twenty-five years of research, Darnton reveals the illegal book trade in rich detail.

He explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers: Therese Philosophe, an anti-clerical blend of sex and metaphysics; L'An 2440, an attack on the Old Regime in the form of a utopian fantasy set in a future Paris; and Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, a deliciously scathing work of political slander with the king as its target.

Substantial excerpts from these works, gathered at the end of the book, make excellent reading today and shed light on elements of our own political culture.