The Demand for Literature in France, 1769–1789, and the Launching of a Digital Archive

2016/06/21 by Robert Darnton · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Ancien regime #Art #Art history #Engineering #Historical and Literary Analyses #Historical and Literary Studies #History #Law #Literature #Political science #Politics #Relevance (law) #Work (physics)

paper · doi:10.7202/1036853ar

published in Mémoires du livre 7(2) (Groupe de recherches et d'études sur le livre au Québec)

openalex publication_date 2016/06/21 · openalex created_date 2016/09/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

What did the French read on the eve of the Revolution? Daniel Mornet asked this question in a famous article of 1910. Since then, historians have moved on to other ways of understanding the origins of 1789, but Mornet’s question has been left hanging, despite its relevance to recent work in fields such as the history of books and cultural history in general. This essay is intended to provide an answer to Mornet’s question while at the same time introducing an open-access website full of information about the demand for literature and the way the book trade actually operated under the Ancien Régime.

Discussions

• What did the French read on the eve of the Revolution? Robert Darnton provides an answer to this question while at the same time introducing an open-access website full of information about the way th [bsky, 34 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Smuggling in volumes: policing and the myth of the book-smuggler in late ancien régime France
• The Bibliothèque Nationale and Cultural Productions of Scholarship
• From Methods to Conclusions: The Limits of the Knowable in Digital Book History
• Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution
• Political control of the media in eighteenth-century France: printers, royal bureaucracy and aristocratic patrons