This French Revolution Case Study Crosses All T’s, Dots All I’s

Robert Darnton’s ‘The Writer’s Lot’ views pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France from an insightful perspective—a brilliant, short scholarly work.

“The Writer’s Lot,” by the director of the University Library, Emeritus, at Harvard University, Robert Darnton, examines three 18th-century French writers and how the French Revolution changed their fates. Courtesy of Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton has presented an intriguing and enlightening (no pun intended) work on the literati of 18th-century France. The author is also up-front about what the book is and is not, based on the parameters of its size and scope. He wrote that his book “is meant as an essay, not a treatise—that is, as an attempt to try out an argument, to interpret a familiar subject in an unfamiliar light.”

This “unfamiliar light” shines brightly in his new book, “The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France.” The “familiar subject” is the writers of the French Revolution, but the interpretation follows the lives of three writers from pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France, how their works were viewed, accepted, and, most importantly for those individual writers, where their financial backing came from.