I recently read the wonderful Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee, which filled a major gap in my knowledge. I didn’t know that Manet, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, Pissarro and the other impressionists created their groundbreaking work during a period of great political turmoil. I had seen references to the “Paris Commune”, but I had glossed over the term without looking into its meaning. On the occasion of the excellent Jacques-Louis David retrospective at the Louvre I thought I’d fill another gap in my knowledge by reading The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton, which examines the cultural and informational landscape that preceded the French Revolution.

Darnton, a Harvard historian specializing in eighteenth-century French print culture, argues that the French revolution resulted from four decades of political scandals and media-driven polemics that cultivated what he terms a "revolutionary temper" among Parisians: a collective consciousness shaped by repeated exposure to contentious events and alternative visions of political order.

Darnton's methodology focuses on tracing public opinion through diverse media sources including pamphlets, songs, engravings, gazettes, police reports, and coffeehouse discourse. He organizes his analysis around specific scandals and affaires that captured public attention, such as the Calas Affair, the Diamond Necklace Affair, the suppression of the Jesuits, and Jacques Necker's unprecedented public accounting of state finances. Rather than emphasizing elite philosophical texts, Darnton highlights accessible popular media that ordinary Parisians could comprehend, arguing that these materials proved more influential in shaping public sentiment than highbrow Enlightenment treatises, though he acknowledges the latter's contributions. Through publication scandals surrounding works like Diderot's Encyclopédie the public learned that new intellectual forces challenged traditional authority, while Enlightenment ideas about social contracts, national sovereignty, and press freedom made alternatives to absolute monarchy conceivable, first among educated classes and reform-minded officials, later among the general public.

The book demonstrates how information circulated through both print and oral channels in pre-revolutionary Paris, where official censorship paradoxically intensified demand for illicit writings. Darnton shows how publishers circumvented restrictions through foreign printing, smuggling operations, and tacit permissions from sympathetic officials like Malesherbes. Police surveillance of cafés and public spaces revealed governmental anxiety about rumor and criticism, yet repressive measures proved ineffective at containing seditious discourse. Songs, poems, and pamphlets attacking royal ministers, the court, and eventually Marie-Antoinette herself proliferated despite official efforts at suppression. Darnton also highlights the role of the “nouvellistes de bouche” or oral newsmongers who would gather in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the gardens of the Tuilleries and other public spaces to exchange the latest news and gossip by word of mouth.

Darnton lists a number of elements that contributed to the “revolutionary temper”: a hatred of despotism, a love of liberty, a commitment to the nation, indignation at aristocratic depravity, a belief in the power of reason, and a loss of faith in monarchy and church. He argues that the accessibility and emotional resonance of popular media, combined with Parisians' familiarity with violence, created the conditions for revolutionary action in 1789. 

I enjoyed reading The Revolutionary Temper. The short chapters and the great variety of juicy scandals make for a lively book. I’m not a historian, so I’ll leave it to others to judge the accuracy of Darnton’s claims. In the decades leading up to the revolution public opinion gained importance as competing power-holders learned to mobilize it for their purposes. Darnton contends that the revolution erupted, because of the uncontrollable dynamics this created. He also highlights popular anger over the price of grain and bread, at the time one of the main food staples. Darnton refrains from drawing parallels with the present, but it’s worth noting that a rise in wheat prices was also a catalyst for the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia and Egypt. And whereas in 18th century Paris news travelled via pamphlets, gazettes and “nouvellistes“, during the Arab Spring social media platforms served as tools for spreading information and organizing protests against the region’s authoritarian regimes. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.