At the end of the 18th century, many French people agreed on an amazing idea: they could create a new world. To such an extent that they wanted to change religion with Reason, the name of the months (brumaire, germinal, thermidor), the way of measuring things (the metric system, which we continue to use) or, fundamentally, the political and social system. And, to a large extent, they did.
The French Revolution was a historical milestone that marked the step towards modern societies: it sowed the ideas of freedom, equality, citizenship and sovereignty that would end up shaping liberal democracies and the contemporary world. A world which, among other things, some today are questioning starting from the far right, claiming traditional values more typical of the Ancient Regime than of the enlightened era that inaugurated modernity.
But what happened in the decades preceding the storming of the Bastille in 1789, which gave rise to that revolution, perhaps the most important in history? How was that “revolutionary temperament” that made the French – especially the Parisians – think they could reinvent the world? There are immediate historical causes: the succession of bad harvests and increases in the price of bread, the economic crisis due to war exploits and fiscal mismanagement, or the inequality between the splendor of the court of Versailles and the hungry masses: “If they are hungry, let them eat sweets,” is one famously attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette (she probably didn’t say it, but it illustrates the feeling towards the monarchy).
The historian Robert Darnton (New York, 86 years old), who made a career as an expert in the history of books and reading, and was a professor at Princeton University and director of the library at Harvard University, wanted to study that time, focusing not so much on the great causes of History in capital letters, but on how Parisians saw the situation in those same moments, on how ideas circulated on the streets of Paris: a society not so different from ours, with its satires, pamphlets and novels, with their circuits of news centered in cafes, parks and under the Krakow Tree of the Palais-Royal, where the latest rumors and news were shared (today we have social networks): from the juiciest court gossip to the charm of hot air balloon trips.
So, the most surprising thing about the essay The revolutionary temperament. How the French Revolution was born. Paris 1748-1789 (Taurus, translated by Jordi Ainaud i Escudero), by Darnton, is that both the topic (the French Revolution) and the method used to gather information are equally important. This interest in the ways of communicating in 18th century Paris shows that it was also an “information society”, that thing that seems so contemporary to us.
“The popular phrase ‘we live in the information society’ is true, but also misleading, because every society was an information society, each in its own way, according to the means available,” the historian, who tries to show how information reached ordinary Parisians, whether they were ordinary workers or elites frequenting sophisticated salons, tells this newspaper. Paris had no newspapers in the modern sense of the word, unlike Amsterdam or London, so the newspapers gathered under the Krakow tree. nouvellestes to exchange information. There were other nerve centers of gossip: certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens, cafés, street corners or markets.
“THE news within everyone’s reach They wrote down the rumors and collected them in clandestine news sheets, which were then printed and became underground best-sellers,” explains Darnton. The songs, whose lyrics changed from the standard melodies, were another way to find out about things, through street singers. Even the recordings, the voices, the graffiti, the public readings of pamphlets… all contribute to what the author calls “revolutionary mood”.
A “revolutionary spirit” that included love of freedom and commitment to the nation, familiarity with violence and the denunciation of vice, tiredness in the face of the degeneration of the aristocracy and the distancing from the Church, and which was based on the widespread belief that the political system had degenerated into a despotism. “The French understood it as ministerial despotism. They directed their anger against the government, particularly against ministers such as Maupeou, Terray, Calonne, Lamoignon and Brienne, not against the king. In my book I try to show how that collective consciousness developed over forty years, how it took shape in response to events and how it gained enough strength to mobilize a revolt in 1789,” says the author.
Although we associate the French Revolution with much of what is virtuous in modern societies, the truth is that, as shown in the essay, it was a time of unusual violence, not only because of the famous guillotine (which was considered a pious and civilized way of killing), but also because of other types of riots, lynchings, or dismemberments. How do we deal with it? “Much of the violence remains incomprehensible, at least to me,” says the historian, “although one must take into account the fact that violence existed in everyday life before 1789, in public hangings or in riots known as ‘popular emotions’.” Darnton seeks to show that those “emotions” had roots in the Ancien Regime, as well as to record the violence of the counterrevolution that also generated its “counterviolence.” “Without downplaying the bloodshed, I think it is essential to highlight how the Revolution freed the French from the arbitrary power and oppression inherent in the political and social order of the Ancien Regime,” adds the author.
The French Revolution is depicted here as a prodigious moment in which everything seemed possible, in which everything seemed to be able to transform, in which the world itself could begin again. Today the idea is quite the opposite; Margaret Thatcher had already stated it in the 1980s: “There is no alternative”. How did that feeling arise? “We could call it ‘possibilism,’ that is, the belief that the sociopolitical order is not unalterably fixed in its current form, but that it can change, that ordinary people can intervene to modify it, that things as they are can transform into things as they should be,” says the historian.
The path through which this belief develops is long and complex and has to do, according to the author, precisely with the way in which the information was transmitted and with the way in which it was interpreted; and how, thanks to this, the system was losing legitimacy. “Without downplaying factors like the price of bread, I believe that the belief in legitimacy functions as the cement that holds political systems together. When it is eroded, revolution becomes possible.”
The idea of revolution has long enjoyed prestige. Some, like the French or the Americans, created the modern world. Others, such as the much criticized Russian one, changed the course of history and generated an entire geopolitical bloc that competed for world hegemony for decades. Today the word seems to be used only in advertising or to talk about technological advances. What remains of the idea of revolution? “I agree that the concept of revolution has been trivialized, as in advertisements for a ‘revolution’ in clothing or hairstyles. Few people know much about the French or American revolutions, or find inspiration in the revolutionary tradition,” Darnton says. “But when people face injustice, they need to rely on some historical tradition to resist,” he concludes.
