The ancien regime”, as applied to 18th-century France, always sounds like such a solid proposition. It speaks of arbitrary power, stiffened with protocol, girded by gold, topped by a dusting of icing sugar (you could always spot a noble by their terrible teeth) and utterly stuck in its ways. Until, that is, revolution arrived in 1789 with a clap of thunder to reset the clock so that everything could start over. Yet, as Robert Darnton shows in this enthralling book, the last 50 years of old France were in fact febrile and shifting, rocked by a series of social and political affaires that reached far beyond elite circles, engaging men and women who were more used to worrying whether the cost of bread would rise by another two sous.
Darnton calls this new flexible mood the “revolutionary temper”, by which he doesn’t simply mean that French people eventually became so cross that they embarked on a programme of violent protest that led to the guillotining of the king and queen in 1793. Rather, by “temper” he is referring to “a frame of mind fixed by experience in a manner that is analogous to the ‘tempering’ of steel by a process of heating and cooling”. In other words, he suggests that between the end of the war of the Austrian succession in 1748 and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French population underwent a series of convulsions, some as molten as others were icy, which resulted in a subtle but powerful molecular shift. After 500 years of rigidity, “it made anything seem possible”.
Take the Jesuits. For well over a century they had haunted the popular imagination as a collective bogeyman, loyal only to their “general” in Rome, yet with fingers in every French pie. In 1760 the tide began to turn when commercial courts in Marseille and Paris ruled against them in a bankruptcy case. From here a special investigation found the Society of Jesus (the order’s proper name) to be gratifyingly wicked: they specialised in poisoning their enemies, were relaxed about theft, especially if the victim was rich, and, most egregious of all, their larders were found to be stuffed with “an astonishing amount of coffee”.
Ordinary Parisians picked up these notions from loose talk, pamphlets, and above all from ribald street songs. According to the progressive commentator Baron von Grimm: “A holy horror has taken hold of the common people, and one is persuaded that the Jesuits spend their lives talking to their pupils about murders, assassinations, and abominations.” It is this process by which thoughts, feelings and attitudes were gusted across the city and between individuals that is the focus of The Revolutionary Temper. Darnton refers to these bruits publiques as “an early information system” and, while he doesn’t labour the point, it’s clear that he is thinking in terms of today’s social media. Within an astonishingly swift five years, the Society of Jesus had been run out of town….
After the truth-shower 