The Revolutionary Temper
Paris, 1748-1789

I studied 18th-century France in college, and I read some of Darnton’s work before. But what a pleasure it was, with my undergrad years behind me, to really take the time to savor this book. Darnton uses on-the-ground sources to give a sense of how Parisians of different social classes reacted to the......more

How did news and information circulate in eighteenth-century Paris? And how did Parisians respond to that information? What kinds of narratives caught their attention? And how did those circulating narratives shape and reshape their understanding of the world and of politics? Starting with these que......more

A truly unique way of narrating history! This book is about experiencing Paris from 1748 till the revolution of 1789 through the eyes of the population, the typical Parisian. The first chapters explain this colorful mixture of ways by which the Parisians were keeping themselves informed They were gett......more

This is a very absorbing way of looking at history, it tries to use the information that was available to people in Paris in the decades before the French revolution and their reactions to that information to give us a glimpse at events from a somewhat different direction than the usual. I thought t......more

A gripping and well-told narrative, but does not quite live up to the promise of depicting the decentralized "information society" of mid to late eighteenth century Paris. Events are often summarized at a high level of generality, with crowds operating as impersonal masses and Paris treated as a sin......more