The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France

Abstract

The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France* Robert Darnton Where does so much mad agitation come from? From a crowd of minor clerks and lawyers, from unknown writers, starving scribblers, who go about rabble-rousing in clubs and cafes. These are the hotbeds that have forged the weapons with which the masses are armed today. P. J. B. Gerbier, June 1789 The nation’s rewards must be meted out to those who are worthy of them; and after having repulsed despotism’s vile courtiers, we must look for merit dwelling in basements and in seventh-storey garrets. . . . True genius is almost always sans-culotte. Henri Gregoire, August 1793 This ESSAY IS INTENDED to examine the late Enlightenment as historians have recently studied the Revolution—from be­ low. The summit view of eighteenth-century intellectual history has been described so often and so well that it might be useful to strike out in a new direction, to try to get to the bottom of the En­ lightenment, and perhaps even to penetrate into its underworld. Digging downward in intellectual history calls for new methods and new materials, for grubbing in archives instead of contem­ plating philosophical treatises. As an example of the dirt that such digging can turn up, consider the following titles taken from a * This essay, which first appeared in Past and Present, 51 (May, 1971), 81-115, was the first chosen by ASECS for its annual award to the best scholarly article of the year in eighteenth-century studies. Prize-winning essays will be reprinted regularly in the Society’s Proceedings. Ed. 83 Racism in the Eighteenth Century manuscript catalogue that circulated secretly in France around 1780 and that were offered for sale under the heading "philosophical books’’:1 Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in a Nightgown*, The Woman of Pleasure; The Pastime of Antoinette (a reference to the Queen); Authentic Memoirs of Mme. la Comtesse Du Barry; Monastic News, or The Diverting Adventures of Brother Maurice; Medley by a Citizen of Geneva and Republican Advice dedicated to the Americans; Works of La Mettrie; System of Nature. Here is a definition of the "philosophical” by a publisher who made it his business to know what eighteenth-century Frenchmen wanted to read. If one measures it against the view of the philosophic move­ ment that has been passed on piously from textbook to textbook, one cannot avoid feeling uncomfortable: most of those titles are completely unfamiliar, and they suggest that a lot of trash somehow got mixed up in the eighteenth-century idea of "philosophy.” Per­ haps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century. One way to bring the Enlightenment down to earth is to see it from the viewpoint of eighteenth-century authors. After all, they were men of flesh and blood, who wanted to fill their bellies, house their families, and make their way in the world. Of course the study of authors does not solve all the problems connected with the study of ideas, but it does suggest the nature of their social context, and it can draw enough from conventional literary history for one to hazard a few hypotheses.2 A favourite hypothesis in histories of literature is the rise in the writer’s status throughout the eighteenth century. By the time of the High Enlightenment, during the last twenty-five years of the Old Regime, the prestige of French authors had risen to such an ex­ tent that a visiting Englishman described them exactly as Voltaire had described English men of letters during the early Enlighten­ ment: "Authors have a kind of nobility.”3 Voltaire’s own career testifies to the transformation of values among the upper orders of French society. The same milieux who had applauded the drubbing administered to him by Rohan’s toughs in 1726 cheered him like 84 The Low-Life of Literature in France a god during his triumphal tour of Paris in 1778. Voltaire himself used his apotheosis to advance the...