Revolutionary Temper

A Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Book of the Year ‘Robert Darnton is one of the world’s greatest historians, and this is an exceptional book: a huge social and cultural portrait of Paris in the build-up to the French Revolution’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, class conflict or Enlightenment ideology. Without denying any of these, Robert Darnton offers a different explanation: what Parisians themselves, those at the centre of the Revolution, thought was happening at the time and how it guided their actions. To understand the rise of what he calls ‘the revolutionary temper’, Darnton draws on a