Over a quarter of a century ago Robert Darnton published in the pages of this journal an article that has since become a classic: 'The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in PreRevolutionary France'.' Noting there that the 'summit view of Eighteenth-Century intellectual history ha[d] been described so often and so well', Darnton ventured demurely that it 'might be useful to strike out in a new direction'. He proposed 'digging downward', viewing the Enlightenment from the bottom where a motley crew of Grub Street hacks had once toiled in obscurity, only to be subsequently buried in the accumulated dust of the French national archives.2 By blowing carefully, and so raising these men and women from the dead, Darnton not only reanimated a lost world, but also changed fundamentally certain conceptions of the Enlightenment and of its perennially vexing relationship to the French Revolution. The story, by now, is familiar. The rise to prominence towards the middle of the eighteenth century of a handful of great philosophes the Voltaires, the Diderots, the d'Alemberts attracted to Paris a host of aspiring authors from the provinces eager to share in the burgeoning glory of the world of letters. Hoping to become Voltaires themselves, the majority of these aspirants encountered instead a closed world increasingly monopolized by a tight inner circle. Barred from the fame and fortune of the