Of Poor Devils and "Low Intellectual History"

Abstract

Because of the great admiration I have for Robert Darnton's contributions to French cultural and social history, I find The Brissot Dossier a disappointing response to the that I raised in my article. Instead of attempting to refute the many serious criticisms that I offered of his evidence and his arguments about Brissot, Darnton prefers to discuss larger issues in the social history of ideas, archly wondering why one should become so exercised over the question of whether or not Brissot spied for the police. Although he may regard Brissot patronizingly as a poor devil of a hack during the ancien regime, there are others who see him as an important figure in the French Revolution, and for whom the charge of spying is a matter of some consequence. And after all, Darnton himself is the one who not only raised the question for the first time since Taine, but also answered it very definitely in the affirmative. Darnton seems not to have realized that my article offers not one but two theses in refutation of his own, first, that Brissot was most probably not a spy, and second, that he was considerably more than a mere Grub Street hack. In developing both I was neither adopting his undergraduate great-men-great-books approach nor reviving his own early credulous view of Brissot's memoirs, but appealing above all to the evidence, first to show that Darnton had presented no sound evidence that Brissot ever was a spy, and second, to show that there was a great deal of evidence in his published writings themselves and in his life to disprove Darnton's thesis that Brissot was just another ragged pamphleteer. On the spy charge, I find it puzzling that Darnton continues to believe that Brissot was a spy while admitting that he cannot convict him of having been one. Except for the throwaway line about the Revolutionary Tribunal, my arguments were not at all judicial; if I had