At the end of my previous lecture I warned of an easy assumption.
That just because the great writers of eighteenth century France,
the great philosophes of the
enlightenment, wrote books that challenged some
of the essential underpinnings of power in that society that,
that somehow meant that was the cause of the French Revolution,
that people read their work.
What I'd like to do in this lecture
is to explore more carefully the enlightenment from below.
What did people read?
I mentioned at the end of the last lecture
that the greatest work of
the enlightenment, the multivolume encyclopedia
was at a price that very few people, a very
thin segment of that society could hope to afford.
Moreover when we look at the works of one of
the greatest of the philosophes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we find that
what, from our perspective seemed to be his
most radical, revolutionary works, particularly Emile and the
Social Contract, that they were not the books
that were the most sought after that he'd written.
Easily his bigger seller before 1789 was the novel Julie or the New Eloise
which is essentially a romantic novel of sensibilities
a romantic love story, a novel of manners,
rather than his trenchant political and educational critiques.
A warning to us not to make easy assumptions that
radical ideas lead inexorably to revolution.
One of the difficulties we have in asking this question about
the enlightenment from below, is that there are no best seller lists.
But historians certainly have tried in various ways to answer
this crucial question about what people were reading in the 18th century.
More than a century ago, Daniel Mornet for example, investigated the catalogs
of 500 private libraries when people had died and their libraries were cataloged.
Of course a tiny fraction of society who
would have been wealthy enough to have large libraries.
Interesting though that Mornet in those 500
private libraries found one copy of the Social Contract.
Then in the 1960's Francois Furet made an important
distinction between those books which receive full public permission,
that were approved of by the regime and those
which were given tacit permission by the regime censors.
In other words, we don't like what you're
publishing but we'll let it pass this time.
And certainly Furet found that in the second category of
the tacit permissions, a bit of a nod and a wink,
that, certainly, that's where books that
were rather more radical, were being published.
In other words, there was evidence that people were wanting to
read more critical books as the 18th century wore on.
But the biggest breakthrough came from the work of Robert Darnton in the 1980's
work that, continues today.
Because what Darnton, wanted to do
was to investigate whether in fact there were, there was a whole
pirate industry, of producing cheap versions of
enlightenment classics outside France, and shifting them in across the borders.
And what he found is that in Britain, but particularly in Switzerland