The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France

Past & Present, May, 1998 by Darrin M. McMahon

Over a quarter of a century ago Robert Darnton published in the pages of this journal an article that has since become a classic: `The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France'.(1) Noting there that the `summit view of Eighteenth-Century intellectual history ha[d] been described so often and so well', Darnton ventured demurely that it `might be useful to strike out in a new direction'. He proposed `digging downward', viewing the Enlightenment from the bottom where a motley crew of Grub Street hacks had once toiled in obscurity, only to be subsequently buried in the accumulated dust of the French national archives.(2) By blowing carefully, and so raising these men and women from the dead, Darnton not only reanimated a lost world, but also changed fundamentally certain conceptions of the Enlightenment and of its perennially vexing relationship to the French Revolution.

The story, by now, is familiar. The rise to prominence towards the middle of the eighteenth century of a handful of great philosophes -- the Voltaires, the Diderots, the d'Alemberts -- attracted to Paris a host of aspiring authors from the provinces eager to share in the burgeoning glory of the world of letters. Hoping to become Voltaires themselves, the majority of these aspirants encountered instead a closed world increasingly monopolized by a tight inner circle. Barred from the fame and fortune of the academies, the salons, the leading official periodicals and honorific posts, these literary hacks fell back into the rough-and-tumble world of Grub Street, venting their rage against the `pampered, pensioned' high philosophes -- and the monde for which they stood -- in libelles, scandal sheets and other ephemeral publications.(3) It was this literature, Darnton contended, that fed genuinely radical sentiment. Whereas the high philosophes of the final years of the ancien regime served as props for a dying society (`frosting for France's thin and crumbling upper crust'), the writers of Grub Street laid the kindling of Jacobin fire.(4) Any relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, thus, should be sought here, at the bottom, and not in the airy climes of the top.

In the twenty-five years since its initial statement, Darnton's thesis has not gone unchallenged. Jeremy Popkin, for example, in an important article published in Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1989, pointed out that much of the radical pamphlet literature of the waning years of the ancien-regime was in fact produced at the behest of `wealthy and powerful members of France's traditional elites'. Instigated and funded by courtiers and others engaged in the intrigues of ministerial politics, this literature, Popkin argued, should not be seen as the product of marginalized writers driven by social resentment. Roger Chattier, too, has cast doubt upon certain aspects of Darnton's thesis, questioning the `direct' and `ineluctable' association between radical literature and Revolutionary mindset, while calling for a more nuanced approach to reader reception. Rather than passively accept that the radical messages of pamphlets and libelles were simply `graven' into the `soft wax' of `readers' minds', Chattier argued with Foucauldian overtones that this literature should be viewed as part of a broader cultural transformation, specific facets of which resist direct causal connection with the Revolution. Finally, Sarah Maza and Dena Goodman have recently taken issue with Darnton on varying grounds. Maza highlights the importance of the memoires judiciares produced in startling volume by the avocats of the French bar, affirming that they had an impact on readers `at least as great as that of the Grub Street down-and-outers'. Goodman, by contrast, notes that Darnton's unflattering portrait of the effete world of the High Enlightenment drew on a discourse originally stemming from Rousseau: one that painted the world of salon society in gendered terms, associating it with frivolity and femininity, and so unduly downplaying its importance.(5)

Each of these authors has offered significant qualifications to Darnton's work. Yet, as Maza herself observes, this very criticism attests to the staying power of Darnton's thesis, which continues to serve as a `framework' against which to articulate other arguments.(6) Fleshed out in a host of other writings by Darnton himself, his students and his colleagues, the people and productions of the Low Enlightenment have entered the common vocabulary of scholars of the ancien-regime. Indeed, one might almost say that like the High Enlightenment of old, this story of the Low Enlightenment has too been told `so often and so well' that perhaps it is time, once again, to strike out in a new direction.

It might be useful, on this occasion, to branch out horizontally rather than vertically. For while the authors cited above -- to say nothing of countless other scholars working in different traditions -- have of course travelled down fruitful paths not followed by Darnton, they have tended none the less to remain within the general lines linking eighteenth-century print culture to the Revolution. There was, however, another side to the ancient-regime world of letters, one associated loosely with what Isaiah Berlin long ago termed the `Counter-Enlightenment'.(7) Oft-neglected and poorly understood, this world produced a host of fascinating characters, many of whom could trace their roots to an unlikely source: Grub Street itself. Sharing similarities with the hacks on the other side of the pavement, these writers none the less displayed profound differences. Whereas the literary rabble studied by Darnton shaped a world in which the Revolution was conceivable, their opponents helped to lay the foundations for an antithetical frame of mind, that of the Counter-Revolution.