The historian Robert Darnton specializes in 18th-century France. His latest book is The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789. This book attempts to trace the French mentality as it evolved during the 18th century; Darnton describes how the French people gradually turned against the monarchy, and finally overthrew it in 1789.
The Revolutionary Temper draws on primary sources — diaries, letters, pamphlets, newsletters, etc. One of the striking things about that period is the profusion of pamphlets dealing with contemporary affairs. Pamphlets were sometimes read aloud in cafés, parks, etc. Pamphlets performed the function that’s now performed by TV, radio, Internet, etc. Darnton writes,
| Instead of attempting to derive collective consciousness from the operation of the economy or the structure of the social system, [I] situate my argument at the level on which information flowed.... By studying Paris as an early information society, it is possible to construct a narrative of events as Parisians experienced them.1 |
Darnton’s book is lively and readable, scholarly and popular. It sums up his earlier books, which often discussed printing in 18th-century France. Darnton’s goal is “to show how the French Revolution happened — not by tracing a clear line of causality, but by narrating events in such a way as to describe the emergence of a revolutionary temper that was ready to destroy one world and construct another.”2 Darnton describes changes in France’s collective consciousness, its mentality, its temper — changes that led to the Revolution.
Though Darnton rarely connects the 18th century to our time, the reader will make his own connections. The government’s debt, for example, has a parallel in our time, as do the various plans to obtain more tax dollars, and levy taxes more fairly.
Complaints about the monarchy culminated in the convoking of the Estates General in May 1789. This was the beginning of the French Revolution. The Estates General hadn’t been convoked since 1614. The Estates General assumed governing power, and also assumed the power to design a future government.
One might compare the Estates General to our own Constitutional Convention. But it’s hard to imagine that a Constitutional Convention could take place now in the U.S., even if all sides felt that the Constitution needed amending. Such a Convention would be bitterly partisan, but in France in 1789, delegates to the convention generally agreed that the king should have less power, and the people should have more power. The monarchy had lost its legitimacy.
At one time, it was believed that the king had a magical power, his touch could cure certain diseases. During the 18th century, however, the king lost his aura, and stopped touching the sick; Darnton speaks of the “desacralization” of the monarchy. Instead of being in awe of the king, the people felt contempt for him.
Louis XV reigned from 1715 to 1774 (during the first few years of his reign, he was very young, so the country was ruled by a regent). The people were appalled when Louis XV had affairs with four sisters; such affairs were seen as incest. The king stopped going to confession, and stopped taking the sacrament. The people had little respect for Louis XV, and rarely shouted “Long live the King!” Louis XV avoided contact with the people, and when he visited his hunting lodge, he drove around Paris, rather than through Paris.
Louis XV’s son predeceased him, so Louis XV was succeeded by his grandson, who became Louis XVI. Louis XVI couldn’t restore respect for the monarchy, and couldn’t stabilize the nation’s finances; he was ousted by the Revolution, and executed in 1793.
The French Revolution was a bridge between the old monarchies and the new nationalism. Darnton writes,
| Before 1789, France was a crazy quilt of overlapping and incompatible units — fiscal, judicial, administrative, economic, and religious. After 1789 those segments were melted down into a single substance: the French nation. With its patriotic festivals, its tricolor flag, hymns, martyrs, army, and wars, the Revolution accomplished what had been impossible for Louis XIV and his successors: it united the disparate elements of the kingdom into a nation and conquered the rest of Europe. In doing so, the Revolution unleashed a new force, nationalism, which would mobilize millions and topple governments for the next two hundred years and has not yet spent its force.3 |
During the French Revolution, it was believed that everything was possible, that life could be completely transformed. “Possibilism against the givenness of things, those were the forces pitted against each other in France from 1789 to 1799.... The world appeared as a tabula rasa, wiped clean by a surge of popular emotion and ready to be redesigned.”4
Time and space were re-configured. The metric system introduced a new way of measuring space and weighing matter. The calendar was transformed: “There were ten days to a week, three weeks to a month, and twelve months to a year.... Ordinary days received new names, which suggested rational, mathematical regularity: primidi, duodi, tridi, and so on up to décadi.” January was renamed Nivôse (snow month), February Pluviôse (rain month), March Ventôse (wind month). “Fourteen hundred streets in Paris received new names because the old ones contained some reference to a king, a queen, or a saint.”5
When I read about the French Revolution, I’m continually reminded of Communist revolutions, especially the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Communists often gave new names to things, and often aspired to build a new world, a better world. Today we take a less sanguine view of politics; we’ve seen how utopian programs end.
Philosophically, the French Revolution may have been based, at least in part, on materialism — that is, the notion that nothing exists but matter, and there is no god. Likewise, Communism is based on materialism. When Marx was a student, he wrote his thesis on the Greek atomists, who were the first materialists in the Western tradition. Doubtless Marx approved of 18th-century French philosophers like Helvetius and d’Holbach, who subscribed to materialism and atheism.6
Such theories were liberating at first, but it soon became apparent that they diminished man, they turned man into an animal or a machine, and they gave rise to political extremism. Episodes of genocide in the French Revolution were a harbinger of Communist genocide.
Philosophers like Coleridge rebelled against materialism, and blamed it for the excesses of the French Revolution. Charles Renouvier, a 19th-century French philosopher, felt that man must overcome materialism. “The world is suffering,” Renouvier said, “from lack of faith in a transcendental truth.”7 Transcendental truth is not necessarily religious truth; a philosophy can emphasize spirit, the non-material, without subscribing to a traditional notion of God.
I recently started reading Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which I find most congenial and most interesting. Bergson “rejects conceptual thinking,” preferring “that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition.” This sympathetic intuition is “a direct way of knowing... placing oneself within the object itself.”8
Is this what Darnton is doing? Is he listening to what Frenchmen were saying on a daily basis? Is he trying to get inside their minds, rather than apply a theoretical framework to the period? Is he engaged in what Bergson called “a kind of intellectual auscultation,” what Germans called Einfühlung, empathy?
At the front of his book, Darnton has placed a quote from Henry James: “To live over other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensities of the same — since it was by these things they themselves lived.” James’ view is akin to Bergson’s, Bergson is all about growth and change. Darnton tries to enter the minds of Frenchmen, then observe how their minds changed over time.
Darnton gave a talk at the Boston Atheneum, summarizing The Revolutionary Temper; this talk will eventually be posted on the Atheneum’s video archive.
Robert Weide made a 3-hour documentary on Woody Allen, and a 2-hour documentary on Kurt Vonnegut. Both documentaries are good, the Vonnegut documentary is one of the best films I’ve seen on a contemporary writer.
Weide first contacted Vonnegut around 1980, and said he wanted to make a film about him. Weide and Vonnegut became close friends, while the film project dragged on, decade after decade. Vonnegut died in 2007, and the film was finally released in 2021. The film tells the story of Vonnegut’s life, and also tells the story of the making of the film, and Weide’s friendship with Vonnegut.
Vonnegut was of German extraction. He grew up in Indianapolis, his parents were both from prominent families. His father was an architect, but his business was slow during the Depression. His mother aspired to write, but didn’t succeed. His mother became bitter and depressed, partly at the decline of the family’s status. “Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was ‘as corrosive as hydrochloric acid.’”9 She finally died of an overdose; Vonnegut thought it was suicide.
Vonnegut was grateful to his family’s Black maid for looking after him in his early years. Vonnegut was also close to his older sister, Alice.
Vonnegut attended Cornell, and wrote for the newspaper. After a year or two at Cornell, Vonnegut joined the army, and fought in Europe. He once put his head against a tree, and had a vision of coming events. This incident may have inspired “time slips” in his fiction.9B
Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. He survived the Allied bombing of Dresden, then had the job of collecting bodies in the ruined city. He later wrote about these experiences in Slaughterhouse-Five, his most successful novel.
After World War II, Vonnegut got married, had children, and worked for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. His job was writing — technical writing and publicity writing. He also wrote short stories on weekends, and gradually began selling his stories to magazines.
His stories sometimes drew on his work in the corporate/scientific world; his fiction often had a science-fiction element. (His older brother was a noted scientist at General Electric; his older brother devised a way of “seeding clouds,” and changing weather.) Science-fiction may have helped Vonnegut to escape his traumatic war experiences.
After about four years at General Electric, Vonnegut thought he could make a living as a story writer, quit his job at GE, and moved with his family to Cape Cod. But as television became popular, the story market dried up. Vonnegut tried to publish novels, and struggled to support his family.
His family was large: three children of his own, and three born to his sister Alice, then adopted by Vonnegut, after Alice and her husband died. Vonnegut often became angry at his large, rambunctious family, when they disturbed his concentration.
Vonnegut’s wife was an educated woman who appreciated his literary ability. The marriage broke down, however, around 1970, and Vonnegut married photographer Jill Krementz. That marriage also had some problems, but survived until Vonnegut’s death in 2007.
Around 1966, when Vonnegut was struggling to support his family, he was saved by a 2-year teaching-job at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One of his students was John Irving.
Irving was later his summer neighbor in Sagaponack, New York. Irving said Vonnegut would come over very early in the morning, and sit on the porch until Irving got up and made coffee. Vonnegut suffered from loneliness, and often fantasized about (and wrote about) large, extended families.
Vonnegut’s style was casual and readable; his work was accessible even to 15-year-olds. His fiction was known for its light, satirical tone, and its wild fantasy. His fiction had an undercurrent of pessimism, a pessimism that probably stemmed from his upbringing and his war experiences.
The football stadium at the University of Florida is called The Swamp, so the Netflix series about UF football is called Untold: Swamp Kings. Four episodes, 45 minutes each. Very well done, every football fan will enjoy it. It focuses on the coach, Urban Meyer, and the quarterback Tim Tebow; several other players feature prominently, especially linebackers Brandon Siler and Brandon Spikes.
Meyer was an intense person who rarely smiled. When he became the UF coach, he told his players that this would be the hardest program in the country. Sometimes they worked out in the weight room from midnight to 2 a.m.
The pressure on Meyer was intense. Moments after winning the national championship in 2008, he shut himself in his office, and texted recruits, trying to build a team for 2009. He couldn’t enjoy the national championship even for an hour.
Every national championship made people expect another the next year. A single loss could make the whole season a failure. During the 2009 season, Meyer was so nervous he couldn’t sleep. After taking one Ambien, he still couldn’t sleep. He developed a habit of taking two Ambiens and drinking one beer, just to get four hours of sleep.
Meyer had to cope with various off-the-field problems — a player getting in a fight at a bar, a player arrested for buying drugs, etc. Many of these players were allowed to remain on the team. But a freshman named Avery Atkins was kicked off the team for hitting his girlfriend. A year later, Atkins died of an overdose.
Meyer blamed himself for Atkins’ death, but wasn’t sure what he could have done differently. Meyer had a rule for the team: if you hit a woman, you’re kicked off. How could Meyer have made an exception to that rule? How could he have known that enforcing that rule would have such deadly consequences?
The 2009 season ended with a disappointing loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. Soon after the game, “Meyer was quietly admitted into a Gainesville hospital suffering from chest pains and dehydration.”10 A few days later, Meyer quit as coach, surprising players and fans. After thinking it over, however, he changed his mind and returned. But the 2010 season didn’t go well, and after that season, Meyer left Florida.
It’s a gripping documentary because Meyer and his UF teams experienced such agonies and ecstasies. They worked so hard to be successful, and many players felt that their efforts paid off.
The first principle of politics is that nations are mortal. Every nation that has ever existed has eventually perished, and there’s every reason to believe that today’s nations will eventually perish. Therefore, the goal of the nation is to survive; the goal of the ship of state is to stay afloat. If the nation survives, all segments of the population are better off; if the nation perishes, all segments of the nation will suffer. The goal of the nation is not to compensate for past injustices, or distribute money and power equitably, the goal of the nation is survival. The past matters, the future matters more.
This is a rough world, and nations are continually bumping against each other, competing with each other, fighting each other. History is a series of wars, and there’s no reason to think that the future will be more peaceful than the past. A nation is not a charity, it’s a political unit battling for survival.
If we set a goal of national health, national survival, there’s a chance of social cohesion and patriotic feeling. But if we try to compensate for past injustices, and try to distribute money and power equitably, then there will be no end of disagreement and division.
Some Democrats fear that a Republican victory in November would mean the end of democracy. In my view, less than 1% of Americans want to end democracy. The chief threat to democracy is not top-down dictatorship, but rather bottom-up anarchy; the chief threat to democracy is not government power but the power of criminal gangs, the sort of gangs that hold sway in Haiti today, the sort of gangs that are entering the U.S. today through Biden’s open border.
Dictatorship is not a choice, it becomes a necessity when democracy ceases to function. Rome’s first emperor, Julius Caesar, may have believed that republican government was preferable to dictatorship, but he could see that republican government was no longer functioning, and a change was necessary.
Did Caesar foresee that the empire would be at the mercy of individual emperors, that it would have several good emperors and several bad emperors, and that it would never devise a method for ensuring that only qualified people became emperor? In short, did Caesar foresee Nero and Caligula? Or was he focused on immediate problems, was he focused on national survival in the near term?
One of the chief merits of democracy is that it’s better able to handle the thorny issue of succession. In non-democratic systems, ruthless people like Stalin and Putin rise to the top, and once at the top, they can remain there for decades.
Democracy begins with voting. For more than a century, American democracy has been based on the secret ballot. Democrats have replaced the secret ballot with the mail-in ballot; they’ve changed the rules in the middle of the game, changed the rules for partisan advantage. The riot on January 6 was a response to this partisan rule-change. Historians will say that ending the secret ballot was the first step toward ending American democracy. But it would be optimistic to assume that there will be historians in the future; if civilization continues declining, scholarship will cease to exist.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Conclusion, p. 450. See also Introduction, p. xviii. Darnton is particularly interested in Paris street songs, which both reflected and molded public opinion. (My page numbers refer to the first hardcover edition, which is dated 2024, though I bought it in December 2023.) back |
| 2. | Introduction, p. xxviii. “I have used this book,” Darnton writes, “to synthesize my own work, which goes back to my unpublished Oxford dissertation of 1964.”(Bibliographical Note, p. 463) back |
| 3. | Afterword, p. 453 back |
| 4. | Afterword, pp. 461, 462 back |
| 5. | Afterword, p. 452 back |
| 6. | Did Rousseau reject materialism? If so, did he reject it in the name of religion, or in the name of some sort of non-religious belief in spirit? A belief in the occult often leads to a belief in the non-material. What was Rousseau’s attitude toward the occult? back |
| 7. | This quote is the epigraph of Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals. back |
| 8. | See Richardson’s biography of William James (Ch. 70, “Bergson”). Here’s a screenshot from that biography:
 back |
| 9. | Wikipedia back |
| 9B. | Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five mentions several real incidents, including this “time slip.” Vonnegut writes, “Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with his eyes closed.... This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life.” back |
| 10. | Wikipedia back |