A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of
Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics
Circle Award winner.
In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power.
They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the
Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or
philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state
kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but
most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs.
The Writer’s Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography
to take the measure of “literary France” as a whole. Historian Robert
Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private
diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they
fit into the social order—or didn’t. Reassessing long-standing
narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject
was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub
Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government
ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall
of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its
ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters—in
theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected
clique—dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.
Darnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the
character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the
“decadent” Voltaire against the “radical” Rousseau to struggling
scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their
lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the
ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.
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