About the Author

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of many acclaimed, widely translated works in French history that have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A scholar of global stature, he is a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

"A gripping portrait of the social, literary, and political dynamics at work in prerevolutionary France."
*Michiko Kakutani - New York Times*

More specialized than The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton's latest still cogently demonstrates through tables, case studies, analysis and anecdotes just how different the pre-Revolutionary French were from postmodern Americans. In this second volume of a trilogy that began with The Business of Enlightenment, Darnton returns to the extensive publishing records of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) to trace the demand for books forbidden as a threat to morals and politics. These ``philosophical books,'' as they were called, included Rousseau's Social Contract. But with only one order in STN's records, it was hardly a bestseller. Accordingly, Darnton focuses on three widely disseminated books representing different popular genres: the pornographic Thérèse philosophe (probably by Marquis d'Argens); the philosophical utopian fantasy L'An 2440 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier; and the libelle (think libelous) Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry ascribed to Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert. His discussion of the distribution, reception and influence of these books is convincing and careful (general readers may find some sections on methodology a little too careful). Darnton sees these works as literature, not just sociological artifacts; and, if lengthy excerpts from L'An 2440 seem a little dated, those from Thérèse and Anecdotes are still ribaldly amusing. (Mar.)

"A gripping portrait of the social, literary, and political dynamics at work in prerevolutionary France." -- Michiko Kakutani - New York Times