“Revolutionary mood. Paris, 1748-1789” (The Revolutionary Temperament), by Robert Darnton, translated from English (United States) by Hélène Borraz, Gallimard, “NRF essays”, 582 p., €32, digital €23.
One question has haunted all historians of the French Revolution: how could an ancient, centuries-old order collapse in a few weeks in the summer of 1789? For his part, Robert Darnton, in revolutionary moodFace this provocative question. “It seems inconceivable that an entire people could rise up and transform the conditions of daily existence”writes. And yet this is what the French did.
To try to understand the inconceivable, the American historian uses the dozen books he has dedicated to 18th century France.my century and in the careful reading of innumerable testimonies of the time, manuscripts or prints, preserved, all at the same time, as “evidence of what happened and what people thought was happening”because “the perception of events was inherent to the accounts of the events themselves”.
Like his predecessors, he runs into a fundamental contradiction, expressed by the revolutionaries themselves. Exalted as the absolute beginning of a new society, the Revolution never stopped celebrating the precursors who had prophesied it. If it is thought of as a radical rupture, the historian must accept the devastating criticism of the notion of “origin”, condemned by Michel Foucault because it dissolves the emergence of the event in the conditions of its advent. But if the Revolution is considered the result of speeches and gestures that prefigured it, then space opens up for the imposing undertaking of Robert Darnton.
It is not without difficulties. What events should the historian consider relevant to understanding the revolutionary rupture? The author rejects, at the same time, economic determinism (although he gives all its importance to the crises that raise the price of bread) and the immediate effect of philosophical ideas (although all the great works of the Enlightenment are present in his book). .
Cabinets and engravings
The essential is elsewhere: in the formulation and circulation of events ensured by the “multimedia system” of Paris in the second half of the 18th centurymy century, which gives greater pride to pamphlets and libels, to handwritten stories and periodicals, to poems and songs, to posters and engravings that transport courtly intrigues and conflicts to the sociability of the big city between institutions or cases tried by the courts.
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