Was the French Revolution inevitable?

In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve centre for transmitting information, gossip and rumours. If you wanted to know what was going on, all you had to do was ‘stand in the street [or garden] and cock your ear’. 

Throughout his brilliant career, which began in 1964 with a doctoral thesis ‘Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782-1788)’, Darnton has been cocking his ear to 18th-century debates, tracking ‘the flow of information at street level’. He has negotiated a totally independent path through all the historiographical trends that have come and gone over the past half century, keeping his ear to the ground and immersing himself in primary sources: diaries, correspondence, gazettes, street songs and informal newssheets known as nouvelles à la main. When he published George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century in 2003, he admitted to spending so much time in the 18th century that the 21st sometimes disorientated him, and claimed he would happily time travel on two conditions: high birth and no toothache.

The Revolutionary Temper is a riveting synthesis of Darnton’s life’s work that reckons with the weightiest of 18th-century questions: what caused the French Revolution? He argues that there was no clear line of causality, but the emergence of a revolutionary temper that was ‘ready to destroy one world and construct another’.