Robert Darnton: The Writer's Lot, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

In eighteenth-century France, writers stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scrawling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they were so influential that the state kept them under constant surveillance.

The Writer's Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography and take the measure of "literary France" as a whole. Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, diaries, and newspapers to show how ink-stained Parisians negotiated the social order and eked out a living by selling their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. While literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: The contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters-in theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected clique-dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.

Darnton brings rigor and an investigative eye to literary France, from the culture war that pitted the "decadent" Voltaire against the "radical" Rousseau to struggling scribblers and royal spies. Their lives afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.