Robert Darnton on The Writer's Lot

Robert Darnton's latest book The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Harvard U.P.) is to be published on 30th May.

"The Writer’s Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of “literary France” as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social order—or didn’t. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And 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.
The Writer's Lot - Harvard University Press

Contents list on JSTOR 

Review in The Jacobin magazine