Robert Darnton

"Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it an unworthy topic of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment." "Darnton here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, TheDevil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places."--BOOK JACKET.

"The world of illegal publishing in eighteenth-century France was large and varied, taking in the greatest works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot, as well as the scandalous books of grub street writers. Here we have a map of that world, constructed by Robert Darnton based on his many years of research in the field.". "Darnton shows us the scope of this literary underground with a complete bibliography of the hundreds of books that circulated "under the cloak." He documents their geographical distribution throughout France, and measures the levels of demand for these books. By ranking these levels of demand he compiles a bestseller list of illegal books, with surprising results.". "Having thoroughly mined the sources, Darnton provides a trove of information on the illegal literature of Old Regime France. The result is an invaluable resource to specialists in French cultural history, the history of the book, the social history of ideas, and problems of censorship and state control of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.

What were the ideological origins of the French Revolution? What were the connections between this epochal event and the eighteenth-century revolution in thought, the Enlightenment? How did ideas penetrate politics and society two centuries ago? How does public opinion influence events? To address these big questions in the history of the modern world, the distinguished historian Robert Darnton poses a comparatively small one: What did the French read in the eighteenth century? The answer lies only partially in the canon of the great Enlightenment philosophes: Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau. More popular than these works - indeed, the best-sellers of their time - were other books, also banned by the regime, written and sold "under the cloak." These formed a libertine literature that undercut all the orthodox values of the Old Regime. Salacious, blasphemous, treasonous, these illegal best-sellers formed a crucial part of the culture of dissent in the Old Regime. They intersected with gossip, rumors, jokes, songs, graffiti, posters, pasquinades, broadsides, letters, and journals, all of which coalesced in a political folklore that powerfully portrayed an illegitimate regime. Events and public opinion compounded each other in an increasingly revolutionary brew. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, Darnton reveals the illegal book trade in rich detail. He explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers: Therese Philosophe, an anti-clerical blend of sex and metaphysics; L'An 2440, an attack on the Old Regime in the form of a utopian fantasy set in a future Paris; and Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, a deliciously scathing work of political slander with the king as its target. Substantial excerpts from these works, gathered at the end of the book, make excellent reading today and shed light on elements of our own political culture.

Examines how the past operates in the present, the operation of the media, the history of the book, and discusses history and the human sciences.