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THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE by Robert Darnton

THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

by Robert Darnton

Pub Date: March 1st, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03720-7
Publisher: Norton

Continuing his expert exploration of 18th-century French publishing and reading, Darnton (Berlin Journal, 1991, etc.) takes on the salacious, seditious, and sociological natures of the potboilers banned and in high demand during the reign of Louis XV. Whatever the debate over the responsibility borne by Rousseau and Voltaire for the French Revolution, they shared the bestseller lists with less notable yet audacious authors, whose works were censored and sold under the euphemistic category of ``philosophic'' literature. These included ThÇräse philosophe, which combined the erotic spirit with that of the Enlightenment; the futuristic utopia of L'An 2440 with Juvenalian attacks in its footnotes; and the pornographic and libelous (even revolutionary, in Darnton's thesis) biography of Louis XV's last mistress, Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry. Culled from his companion volume, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 17691789 (to be published by Norton in March; $32.50; ISBN: 0-393-03745-2), these bestsellers, and their sellers, provide Darnton with an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic guide to the Old Regime and its citizens, from which he then speculates on pre-Revolution culture and discourse. Darnton has a gift for collating immense amounts of data (here mainly the extensive records of a Franco-Swiss publisher/book wholesaler), bringing to life the circumstances of bookselling ``under the cloak,'' and reading between the lines of books ``to be read with one hand,'' in Rousseau's words. Less successfully, Darnton tries to address their importance to the French Revolution, admitting his lack of documented reader response. As an added bonus, though, the final section provides condensed versions of the three cited forbidden books, which have both the quaint flavor of the antiquarian and the cheap, universal attraction of trash. A fascinating, if peculiar, study of the flip side of Enlightenment France's Great Books, though the broader implications are just out of this volume's reach. (Photos, maps, not seen)