A collection of essays examining how print culture shaped the legacy of the Enlightenment. Explores the challenges, contradictions, and dilemmas modern European societies have encountered since the eighteenth century in trying to define, spread, and realize Enlightenment ideas and values.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Charles Walton
“Un garçon plein d’esprit mais extrêmement dangereux: The Darnton Subversion”
Roger Chartier
Part 1: Making News
1 A Trojan Horse in Parliament: International Publicity in the Age of the American Revolution
Will Slauter
2 “The Bastard Child of a Noble House”: Détective and Middle-Class Culture in Interwar France
Sarah Maza
Part 2: Print, Paper, Markets, and States
3 Who Were the Booksellers and Printers of Eighteenth-Century France?
Thierry Rigogne
4 Making the Fair Trader: Papermaking, the Excise, and the English State, 1700–1815
Leonard N. Rosenband
5 Commerce with Books: Reading Practices and Book Diffusion at the Habsburg Court in Florence (1765–1790)
Renato Pasta
Part 3: Police and Opinion
6 Invasion of Lorient: Rumor, Public Opinion, and Foreign Politics in 1740s Paris
Tabetha Ewing
7 Book Seizures and the Politics of Repression in Paris, 1787–1789
Thomas M. Luckett
Part 4: Enlightenment in Revolution
8 A Grub Street Hack Goes to War
David A. Bell
9 Reading in extremis: Revolutionaries Respond to Rousseau
Carla Hesse
10 Les graines de la discorde: Print, Public Spirit, and Free Market Politics in the French Revolution
Charles Walton
Part 5: Enlightenment Universalism and Cultural Difference
11 The Limits of Tolerance: Jews, the Enlightenment, and the Fear of Premature Burial
Jeffrey Freedman
12 From Cosmopolitan Anticolonialism to Liberal Imperialism: French Intellectuals and Muslim North Africa in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Shanti Singham
Appendix: Publications by Robert Darnton
List of Contributors
Index
“Along with Daniel Roche, Robert Darnton has been the most influential historian of eighteenth-century France during the last four decades. From his early work on Mesmerism to his most recent study of communication networks in Enlightenment Paris, Darnton has written about an impressively broad array of topics, from peasant folk tales to the publishing business. . . . Charles Walton’s volume will be of great interest to a wide audience because the chapters are skillfully compressed, providing the advanced undergraduate and graduate student accessible entry points into the historical debates and trends that Darnton has shaped. Because this volume contains contributions from leading historians who, like their mentor, are opening new vistas of French and European history, this collection is both a celebration of a pathbreaking past and an adumbration of a promising future.”
