Books by Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre.

Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and began to promulgate an exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton's lively study provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.

In 1749, Francois Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an abominable poem about the king. So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? This book deals with this topic.

Darnton explores some fascinating territory in the genre of histoire du livre and tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing.