Abstract
Skillfully researched, cunningly organized, and brilliantly written, this may well be Robert Darnton's best book to date. Readers of his earlier work will recognize familiar elements: thematically, it offers us Grub Street, starving literary hacks, police spies, the market in prohibited books, and pornography twinned with politics; methodologically, it scours the archives, draws on book history, nods to anthropology, and tells a great story. But Darnton hones in here on a particularly vivid genre of underground writing that proliferated dramatically in the last decades of the Old Regime and was vigorously reworked during the French Revolution: the slanderous anonymous publications, or libels, that emanated from the colony of French writers in London (“a hundred leagues from the Bastille and under the sign of liberty,” as more than one title page proclaimed). Mixing denunciations of despotism with revelations of personal immorality and corruption, he argues, this literature fabricated the mythology of “a satanic fairyland” in which the high and mighty of the French monarchy indulged their “pursuit of lust and power” (p. 6).
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