Artigo História das idéias_robert darnton

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In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of IdeasAuthor(s): Robert DarntonReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 113-132Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877929 .

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In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts toCreate a Social History of IdeasRobertDarntonPri,icetoIl Ulniversitv

The history of the Enlightenmenthas always been a lofty affair-a tendencythat will not be regrettedby anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer,sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topographyofeighteenth-centuryhought laid out neatly at his feet. But the time has comefor a more down-to-earth ook at the Enlightenment,because while intellec-tual historianshave mappedout the view from the top, social historianshavebeen burrowingdeep into the substrataof eighteenth-centuryocieties. And,as the distancebetween the two disciplinesincreases, the climatesof opinionmultiplyandthickenand the Enlightenmentoccasionallydisappears n cloudsof vaporousgeneralizations.The need to locate it more precisely in a socialcontexthas producedsome importantnew work in a genre that is coming tobe called the "social historyof ideas."PeterGay, who has sponsoredthe term,' has attemptedto satisfy the needwith the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (NewYork, 1969). A half yearafter the appearanceof Gay's book, anothersecond-volumework came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequelto a pioneeringcollection of essays on sociointellectualhistory producedbya group at the VIPSection of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.These two volume 2's make fascinatingreadingtogether, because they showtwo differenthistoriographical raditions converging on the same problem.Gay descendsfromCassirer, he VIPSectiongroup from the "Annales" chooland from Daniel Mornet'sexperimentswith quantitativehistory. Curiously,the two traditionsseem to ignoreeach other. In a bibliography hat totals 261pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of Europeanhistory,Gay never mentions Livre et societ. He makes only a few, irrever-ent referencesto Mornet and does not seem to have assimilatedmuch "An-nales"history. The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appearedayearbefore Gay's firstvolume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer.Infact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated intoFrenchuntil 1966 and has not made much impressionon Frenchstudy of theEnlightenmentince its originalpublication n German in 1932, a yearbeforethe appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran-(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18'siecle. So here is an opportunityto compare the methods and results of twoattempts,expressingtwo separatehistoriographical urrents, to solve one ofthe knottiestproblems in early modernhistory: the problemof situatingtheEnlightenmentwithin the actualities of eighteenth-century ociety.

l PeterGay, The Parlty of Humanity: Essays in the Frenclh Enliglhtetinment(NewYork, 1964), p. x.


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1 14 Robert DarntonIGay came to the social history of ideas through an attemptto redefinetheEnlightenment.He wanted his "definition" as he modestlydescribeshis twolargevolumes) to incorporate he social dimension of the philosophes'experi-ence into a Cassirer-likenterpretation f their ideas.This concerntestifiestothe ever-expandingnfluenceof social historytoday, but it does not ultimatelydetermine he characterof Gay's book, which can be read as intellectualhis-tory of the sort that has flourished in the United States for the last few de-cades. If read in this way, it offers a delightful tour of the Enlightenment,theme by theme,philosopheby philosophe.Gay cuts his way throughclichesand breathesnew life into figuresthat had been embalmed and placed onpermanentexhibit in the nineteenthcentury. His philosophesare not desic-catedrationalists,naive prophets of progress,or narrow-mindedvillage athe-ists. They are complicatedindividualswith complicatedproblems,irrationalin theircalculationsof pleasureand pain, and pessimistic in their dedicationto the advancementof civilization. Gay does justice to these complexities,especially in the first two chaptersof volume 2, by relating the philosophes'ideasto theirexperienceand by eschewingworn-outlabels like "The Age ofReason."His own labelingsometimescreatesconfusion, as when he describeseighteenth-century mpiricism as a "revolt against rationalism."(Cassirer,and even d'Alembert, made the point clearer by contrasting the "espritdesysteme" of the seventeenthcentury with the "esprit systematique"of theeighteenth.) But the book makes the philosophes live. Its strength consistsin its stresson the complex, humandimensionof their philosophy.AlthoughGay'sEnlightenmentwill delightand instructanyonewho wantsto freshen his sense of the past, it deservesto be read as its authorintended:not as just anotherwork on the eighteenth century, but as an attempt toestablisha new historical genre. Gay needed to develop a social history ofideas in order to bring together the highly distilled philosophicalhistory ofCassirerand the highlyspecificfindingsof social history.2Crossbreedinguchdifferenthistoricalspecies raisesenormous problems,because Cassirerdealtwith modes of thought, like the rise of "critical"as opposed to "mythopoeic"thinking,while social historiansare concernedwith a differentorder of phe-nomena,like the rise of the bourgeoisie. In order to reconcile such opposedviewpoints,Gay adopts a Hegelian device: he definesthe Enlightenmentasa "dialecticalstruggle for autonomy" (The Enlightenment,1:xi; all refer-ences are to this work unless otherwisestated).The history of historyis so strewnwith dead dialectics that it might seemrashto create a new one as the conceptualframeworkfor a new kind of his-tory. But Gay's social history of ideas will not hold together without hisdialectic,so the dialectic deserves to be examinedwith care. It goes like this:thesis-"The Appealto Antiquity" (book 1); antithesis-"The Tension withChristianity" book 2); synthesis-"The Pursuit of Modernity" (book 3).Gay explains that he is dealingwith the Enlightenment n its narrowsense,the philosophy of the philosophes, not with the broad climate of opinion

2 Ibid.See also PeterGay, TlheEnlighlteniment:n InterpretationNew York,1966), 1: 427; and esp. PeterGay, "TheSocial Historyof Ideas: ErnstCassirer andAfter," n TheCriticalSpirit:Essays n Honorof HerbertMarcuse, d. KurtH.Wolff and BarringtonMoore, Jr. (Boston, 1967).


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In Search of the Enlightenment 115comprising the "Age of the Enlightenment." He argues persuasively that thephilosophes' philosophy can be treated as a coherent historical phenomenon,despite their quarrels and contradictions, because they comprised a coherentunit, a "family"; and their dialectic should be understood as a result of thefamily's actual experience in the actual environment of eighteenth-centuryEurope and America. Accordingly, the philosophes responded to the demys-tifying message of the classics, turned that message against Christian my-thology, and then liberated themselves from their liberators by rejecting neo-classicism and embracing modernity. Modernity, autonomy, or "The Scienceof Freedom" (Gay sticks so many ingenious titles and subtitles to his textthat it is difficult to remove his ideas from their packaging) means humane,critical, tolerant, realistic liberalism-a faith worthy of modern modernity,Gay suggests, for he has no pretense of writing value-free history.This dialectical definition raises the problem of determining what set theEnlightenment apart in time as a distinct phenomenon. If Gay's dialecticcannot be pinned down with precision and supported by rigorous reference toevidence, it may float away like the most ethereal Hegelianism: for no dialec-tic can be static, even if it is intended only as a "definition." It therefore seemsbest to follow the unfolding of Gay's Enlightenment stage by stage, pausingto take up themes as they appear-notably in the case of the antireligious,"revolutionary," and psychological aspects of the Enlightenment-and re-serving two special themes for the end: the Enlightenment's relation to socio-political issues and to the spread of literacy.Assuming that the Enlightenment originated with an appeal to antiquity,the problem is to show what in antiquity appealed to the incipient Enlighten-ment rather than to other eras. Gay reveals an affinity between the philo-sophes and the ancients, but he does not prove that the philosophes read theirclassics differently than did the "classical" writers of the seventeenth century.Even if Gay's argument could be proven-and to do so would require a mul-titude of studies in comparative literature as thorough as Jean Seznec's Essaiisslur Diderot et l'antiquite and Reuben Brower's Alexander Pope: The Poetryof Alllision-the differences in the response to the ancients would have to beexplained, and the explanation might involve elements that are unrelated toGay's "thesis." Gay's discussion of the Renaissance illustrates this difficulty,because he argues that the classical revival during the Renaissance producedthe same dialectic as that of the Enlightenment. Then, in order to avoid en-tangling dialectics or interpreting the Enlightenment as a rerun of the Renais-sance, he is forced to emphasize the elements that separated the two periods-the reawakening of religious controversy and the subsequent spirit of tol-eration and skepticism, the scientific revolution, and the systematic philoso-phies of the seventeenth century. But are not these new developments pre-cisely the ones that brought about the Enlightenment? And are they not ex-traneous to Gay's dialectic? Sensing this danger, Gay tries to fit Montaigne,Grotius, Bayle, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke into a chapter entitled"Pagan Christianity," one of the hybrid terms like "Epicurean Stoicism" thathe seems to coin when his argument is overstrained. An admixture of pagan-ism and Christianity may have colored the ideas of those thinkers as it didin the thought of such pagan-Christians as Aquinas and Augustine, but thereal question at issue is: What was fundamental and what accidental in pro-ducing the Enlightenment? It will not do to display the pagan-Christian dia-


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116 Robert Darntonlectic at the front door and to smuggle Montaigne, Grotius, Bayle, Bacon,Descartes,Newton, and Locke in the back. Once those men have got a footinside they will take over, making it impossible to preserve the dialecticevenas window dressing.The Enlightenment'senemies present as many problems as its precursorsfor Gay'sthesis,because,according o Fran9oisBluche, the magistratesof theParlementof Paris had the same favorite authors as Gay's philosophes-Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil.3 And according to the Livre et societegroup, the educated but unphilosophic general public shared the same tastefor the classics. In order to explainwhy the philosophesreactedpeculiarly tothe common stock of their culture, Gay would have been forced back tostandardaccountsof the Enlightenment'sorigins, which he seems to avoid.His own accountdoes not deal with the classic studies of Paul Hazard andPhilippe Sagnac,which argue that the French Enlightenmentgrew out of aprofound crisis during the last years of Louis XIV's reign; nor does it in-corporate the recent work on the "crise de conscience" period by PierreGoubert and Lionel Rothkrug. Gay barely mentions Fenelon, Saint-Simon,and Boulainvilliers;and he entirely ignores Vauban, La Bruyere,and Bois-guillebert.WhileGay has difficulty n getting his thesis off and running,his antithesisalmostruns away with him. Here the main theme is the radicalizationof theEnlightenment'santireligious character. Gay sees it advancing inexorablyfrom tolerationto skepticism, deism, and the full-blooded atheism of Humeand Holbach. The philosophes certainly undermined established churches,but few of them, even in the coterie Holbachique, went over to atheism.4And some intellectualcurrents lowed in the oppositedirection-from the aridatheism of Toland and Woolston in Britain and the godless Temple poetsin France to the GreatAwakeningthat spreadacrossEurope fromStockholm,SaintPetersburg,and Bavariaduringthe prerevolutionary ecade. As AugusteViattehas shown,the Enlightenmentwent out in a greatblaze of illuminism.How incompatiblewere Christianityand the Enlightenment, n any case?They were enemies in France,but therephilosophyfed on persecutionand atradition of anticlericalismabsent in Protestant countries. Perhaps, also, itowed more to Jansenismthan Voltaire, in his horror at the convulsionaires,wanted to admit. Such, at least, is a hypothesisdangled temptinglyin "TheEnlightenment:Free Inquiry and the World of Ideas," an essay by RobertShackleton in the new volume edited by the late Alfred Cobban.Shackletondetects "a de facto alliance, in many respectssurprising,between Jansenism

3 Fran,ois Bluche,Les magistratsdu Parlemetitde Paris au XVIII sicle(17I5-1771) (Paris, 1960), p. 294.4 In hisMemoiresde I'abbeMorellet ur le dix-hruiliemeiecleet surla Rcvolu-tioI ([Paris, 1821], 1: 130), Morellet emphasized, "II ne faut pas croire que danscette societe [Holbach's group], toute philosophique qu'elle 6tait, . . . ces opinionslibres outre mesure fussent celles de tous. Nous etions la bon nombre de th6istes,et point honteux, qui nous defendions vigoureusement, mais en aimant toujoursdes athees de si bonne compagnie."The predominance of deism over atheism inthe Enlightenment is stressed in Paul Hazard, La pensee europeeneneau XVIIIsi&le: de Montesquieu a Lessinig (Paris, 1946). The forthcoming work of AlanKors should give the final blow to the myth about the rampant atheism of thec6terie Holbachique.


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In Search of the Enlightenment 119a pretty mild affair after all. By 1778, when all of Paris was salaaming beforeVoltaire, the last generation of philosophes had become pensioned, petted,and completely integrated in high society. Ten years later men like Morelletand Dupont labored valiantly to prevent the collapse of the Old Regime,as was perfectly natural, for the High Enlightenment was one of its most im-portant potential props. Quesnay, Turgot, and even Voltaire offered a programof liberal reform, a possibility of perpetuating the social order by blunting itsconflicts. The idea of subverting society, if it ever occurred to them, wouldhave struck them as monstrous. Not only did they believe in the basic struc-ture of the Old Regime, they thought that it ought to remain hierarchical.As d'Alembert explained: "Is a great effort of philosophy necessary to under-stand that in society, and especially in a large state, it is indispensable to haverank defined by clear distinctions, that if virtue and talent alone have a claimto our true homage, the superiority of birth and eminence commands ourdeference and our respect?""1' With exceptions like Rousseau, the philosopheswere elitists. They enlightened through noblesse oblige in company withnoblemen, and often with a patronizing attitude toward the bourgeois as wellas the common people. In the article "Go'ut"of his Dictionnaire philosophli-qie, Voltaire observed, "Taste is thus like philosophy; it belongs to a verysmall number of privileged souls, . . . It is unknown in bourgeois families,where one is continually occupied with the care of one's fortune." It has beenargued recently that, far from rising with the middle class, liberalism de-scended from a long line of aristocrats, and so did the Enlightenment.'1Except for men like Condorcet, the last of the philosophes fit in perfectlywith the Sevres porcelain and chlinoiserie of the salons; the High Enlighten-ment served as frosting for France's thin and crumbling upper crust.If there was any "radicalism" among the abbes and petits marquis of thesynthetic Enlightenment, it was their faith in natural law, the very weaponthat Gay excludes from his overstocked arsenal of revolutionary philosophy.The abbe Raynal, who lived to bewail the advent of the Revolution, polemi-cized against slavery because he considered it contrary to the law of nature-and this was not innocuous humanitarianism, because powerful interests fedon slavery, as the Amis des noirs were to learn when they tangled withthe Club Massaic during the Revolution. The philosophes justified many otheritems in their "program," as Gay calls it in his account of their reform cam-paigns, by reference to what they considered as eternal, immutable values.Gay interprets these references as rhetoric. Like Alfred Cobban,12 he em-phasizes the strain of utilitarianism in the writings of Holbach, Beccaria, andBentham and treats Hume's attack on normative reasoning as the turningpoint in eighteenth-century thought. But what Hume killed with logic lived on

10 D'Alembert, Histoire des membles de l'Academie fran!caise morts depuis 1700ju(sqII'eii 1771 (Paris, 1787), 1: xxxii.11For the Marxist view of a bourgeois Enlightenment,see Lucien Goldmann,"La pensee des 'Lumieres,'" A irnales: economies, societes, civilisationis 22 (1967):752-70. On aristocratic liberalism, see Denis Richet, "Autour des origines id6o-logiques lointaines de la R6volution francaise: 6lites et despotisme," AnIniales:(econlomhies, societes, cilvilisationis 24 (1969): 1-23. Jacques Proust, Diderot et1'EiicyclopMdie (Paris, 1962), contains a sophisticated version of the old issue ofthe Enlightenment's character as "revolutionary" ideology.12 Alfred Cobban, In Searchl of Humaniitv: The Role of thle Enilighltetnmeiit inModernl History (New York, 1960), p. 3.


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120 Robert Darntonin the hearts and minds of most philosophes; and Hume, despite Gay's in-genious revisionist interpretation of him, remained a very Tory revolutionary.Why not admit that natural law, codified in influential textbooks like Burla-maqui's Principes du droit naturel, survived throughout the Enlightenn3entin contradiction to strict empiricism, utilitarianism, and Hume's lethal surgery?Philosophy thrives on contradictions. In fact there was a built-in contradic-tion between the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of natural law itself.The philosophes were forever attempting to bring the physical and moralworlds together and to seek spiritual uplift in the Spacious Firmament onHigh. This tension between the normative and the material is what gave theEnlightenment life. It is fully appreciated in classical studies like Cassirer'sThe Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Hazard's European 7'hought in theEighteenthl Century, and-for all Gay's efforts to expunge it-Becker's TheHeavenly City of the Eighteentlr-Century Philosophers.

The final dimension of Gay's dialectic is psychological. It, too, includes arevolution: the emergence of a new personality type-autonomous, demysti-fied, modern man. Psychological modernity, Gay argues, came about througha collective identity crisis among the philosophes. To be sure, an identitycrisis on top of a dialectic makes for problems, but Gay does not shrink froman explicitly Eriksonian attack on them. His bibliography contains threegenerous pages of acknowledgment of works on psychoanalysis and sex thathe found helpful, beginning with Erikson-or rather beginning with the be-ginning: "In my view of sexuality, both its meaning and its history, I havebeen guided by Freud" (2: 628). It may be that Erikson is feeling over-acknowledged these days (he has been heard to mutter unhappily about learn-ing of an identity crisis in men's wear), but Gay does not use the magicformula frivolously. He argues that the struggle against Christianity producedan identity crisis in the entire family of philosophes and that they were ableto resolve it because "it was precisely the growth of the superego in Westernculture that made greater sexual freedom possible" (2: 204-5). Thus thedialectic of ancients, Christians, and philosophes apparently correspondedin some way to a three-cornered fight between the id, ego, and superego; and"the Enlightenment is the great rebellion of the ego against irrational author-ity" (1: 462). This interpretation, however, raises problems for the faithfulEriksonian reader who had been assured by the master that "the Renaissanceis the ego revolution par excellence."13 The problems are compounded byGay's assertion that "the sexual ideal of the Enlightenment may be said tohave been the genital personality" (2: 628). Did some subdialectic synthesizeorality and anality into genitality? If the philosophes reached such advancedmodernity in the eighteenth century, where is "Western culture" today? Poly-morphous perversion presumably.Would it not be easier to give up the subdialectics, reversed antitheses, andentangled syntheses and to admit that the only dialectic in history is historio-graphical: the dialectic between those who get it right and those who get itwritten? In this case, alas, the written version is wrong: the Enlightenmentwas not a dialectical struggle for autonomy.If one abandons Gay's dialectic, what is left of his social history of ideas?Its feasibility can best be measured by considering Gay's treatment of twofinal problems: the relation of the Enlightenment to sociopolitical issues and

1- Erik H. Erikson, Young Mati Luther:A Study in Psyclioanalvsis anld Hfistory,5th ed. (New York, 1962), p. 193.


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In Search of the Enlightenment 121to the spread of literacy.Both will be discussed in the context of French his-tory, so that Gay's interpretation an be comparedwith the findingsin Livreet societe',a book that belongsto the mainstreamof advancedFrenchhistori-ography.The advance has occurredmost spectacularlyin the study of theOld Regime'ssocial structureand has already reached the textbook stage.The uninitiate hereforeneed not readeveryword in the overwhelming omesof PierreGoubert,EmmanuelLe Roy Ladurie,Pierre de Saint-Jacob,RogerDion, Rene Baehrel, Abel Poitrineau,Paul Bois, FrangoisBluche, and JeanMeyer. They can consult the brief and brilliant popularizationswritten byPierreGoubert and Robert Mandrou,14and there they will see that Gay iswrong to reduce the main sociopolitical issues of the eighteenthcenturyto adualism, pitting the these nobilijaire the reactionary cause championedbythe parlementsand Montesquieu) against the these royale (the progressivecauseof royal reformersand Voltaire). The Old Regimewas too complicatedto be classifiedso simply, and Voltaire'spropagandawas too simplisticto be"good history always and good politics for decades" (2: 483). Contrarytowhat Gay maintains, the privileged orders paid importantsums in taxation,and privilege was not consonant with "order" n any case: it ate through alllevels of society, down to the very peasantry.15 n defending privilege, theparlementsdid not so much defend the nobility as protect a complex combi-nation of vested interests typical of traditional societies. Their defense hada wide enough appealto make their "liberal"rhetoricsomethingmore thanhypocritical.By the end of the century, they were not the closed, caste-riddenbodiesGay describes.1"n fact, contrary o what Gay suggests,Turgotfavoredtheir recall in 1774, and Montesquieu'ssympathy for them did not amountto a reactionary deology.Voltaire was a sincere reformerbut no greatenemyof privilege: he was an annobli,courtier,grand seigneur, and proud possessorof a coat of arms with a fake marquis'scrown.The attack on privilege came less from Ferney than from such unphilo-sophic quarters as the chancellery and the Controle general. Consider theopinion of CharlesFrangoisLebrun, who epitomizes a tradition of bureau-craticreform that shaped policy duringMaupeou'sattack on the parlements:"I did not want to enlist with the philosophes ... I would have preferredtosee them devote their energies to a field other than the one they had chosen[i.e., the campaignagainst the church?].It seemed to me that the governmentcould make them into useful auxiliaries in the fields of administrationandinternalpolitics, could directtheir attacksagainstthe barrierswhich separatedprovince from province, againstprivileges which placed uneven burdensonthe people, againstnumberlesscontradictorycustomarylaws, against the di-versity of legal systems, against courts which were distant and inaccessibletopeople bringing suit, against usurped jurisdictions,against that swarm of

14 Pierre Goubert, L'Aniciei Regime (Paris, 1969); Robert Mandrou. LaFranice iuxXVIJJ t XVIIIJ siecles(Paris,1967).15See Goubert, chap. 7; and C. B. A. Behrens, "Nobles, Privileg,esand Taxesin France at the End of the Ancien Regime," Ecoiomic- HistorY Reviei, 2d ser..no. 3 (1963).16The complex question of the sociopolitical character-of the parlemiienitsasnot yet been settled, despite the important theses of Frani,ois Bluche and JeaniMeyer. But the work of Jean Egret has at least dented the standard interpreta-tion of a late eighteenth-century "revolte nobiliaire" (see Egret, "L'aristocratieparlementaire frangaise a la fin de l'Ancien R6gime," Revulle Iiistori-iqiu 208[1952]: 1-14, and La pre-Revolutioii Irangaise [1787-17881 [Par-is,1962]).


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122 Robert Darntonguilds which hindered industry and stopped its progress. In every part ofFrance there were reforms to carry out, p2ople to be enlightened."'7,Howmuch did the reform movement owe to the Enlightenment?Far more, nodoubt, than Lebrunacknowledged, but far less than is maintained by mostintellectualhistorians.Administrativehistory, rather than philosophictheory,mightbe the place to look for the real thrustbehind reformism.Many of thereforms decreed by the Revolutionwere drafted in the baroque bureaucracyof Louis XIV, as is illustrated n The Single Duty Project by J. F. Bosher,an excellent, unintended example of the social history of ideas. The OldRegime left enough of its red tape behind. Why not go to the archivesandget wrappedup in it, instead of readingVoltaire, if one wants to learn howideas and politics tangled in the eighteenthcentury?What is true of Franceapplies even more to the rest of Europe. where "enlightenedabsolutism,"asGay astutelycharacterizes t, had little relationto the Enlightenment.Mostsovereignsreformedin order to maximize power. They reformedwith cam-eralists,not philosophes,drawing on a traditionof bureaucraticrationalizingthat wentback to the seventeenth,and sometimesthe sixteenth,century.The problemsof measuring literacy and reading habits, which have at-tractedthe heaviestresearchby the Livre et societe group,receive somewhatsummarytreatmentby Gay: "In France (to judge from signatures on mar-riagecertificates)the percentageof literateadults rose from aboutfour in tenin 1680 to more than seven in ten a centurylater" (2: 58). Where Gay gotthis information s difficultto say, becausehis book is as short on footnotesas it is long on bibliography.The only historicalstudy of literacythat coversthe entire country (the survey directed by Louis Maggiolo in the 1870s)estimatesthat 21 percentof all French adultscould sign marriagecertificatesin 1686-90, 37 percent in 1786-90, and 72 percent in 1871-75.1Importantconsequencesresult from this apparentconfusion of the eigh-teenth and the nineteenthccnturies,because,as Gay says, "The firstprecon-ditionfor a flourishingrepublicof letterswas a wide readingpublic" (2: 58).Believing hat literacy soaredto 70 percent,he concludesthat the philosophesacquired a "new audience"(2: 61), increased prosperity,improvedstatus,and relative freedom from patronage.These conditions not only made theEnlightenment ossiblebut transformed t into a revolutionary orce, for Gaynever drops the theme of radicalization: "[T]he growing radicalism andincreasing reedomof the Enlightenmentreflectedand produced irreversible,if often subterranean, hanges in Westernpolitics, economy, and society. Asdemocratsand atheists took the lead in the family of philosophes, radicalsrebelled against constitutedauthorityall over the Westernworld" (2: 83).This statementcomes closer to describingFranceat the time of the Communethanthe France of Voltaire.Voltaire'sFrancecreatesenormousproblemsfor the social historyof ideas,because the mental world of its inhabitantsdid not extend very far beyond

17 Lebrun'sautobiography,as translatedin the anthology of readings edited byJohn Rothney. The Brittaln Affair atndl thle Crisis of the Ancien RWgime (NewYork, 1969), p. 243."IMichel Fleury and Pierre Valmary, "Les progres de l'instructione6lmentairede Louis XIV a Napol6on III," Populationi, no. 1 (1957), pp. 71-92. Gay alsoassociates the philosophes with a "linguistic revolution" (2: 60): the shift fromLatin to French as the dominant language in which books were published inFrance. Here his source seems to be David Pottinger, Tile French Book Tradein the Anicietn Regime, 1500-1791 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). Pottinger,however,


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In Search of the Enlightenment 123the boundariesof their social world-beyond the guild, the parishassembly,the regional units of administrative,egal, commercial,and religious institu-tions;beyond localways of weighing,measuring,andpayingfor commodities;and beyond provincialtechniquesof raising children,dressing,and talking.Most Frenchmenprobablydid not speak FrenchduringVoltaire'schildhood.By the time of his death ( 1778), improvedroadwaysand demographicandeconomic expansion had broughtthe country together. But France did notcohereas a nation until after the Revolutionaryand Napoleonic periods.Tounderstandhow the Enlightenment"took" in such a fragmentedsociety isno easier than to measure ts influenceon a Europeanscale. Perhapsit neverpenetrated ar below the elite in any area of eighteenth-centuryEurope.It is the elite that interestsGay, so he should not be expected to producea parish-by-parishociological analysis.The elite shared a common, cosmo-politan culture. Nevertheless, to be a philosophe in Poland was a differentexperience than to be a philosophein England.Gay tries to explain the dif-ferencesby relatingthem to forces outside the philosophic "family,"and thisattempt makes him stumble on the complexitiesof social history. To takethe example of literacyagain,Gay's interpretationmight be rescuedby argu-ing that literacy is only important as a precondition for the growth of areadingpubliclarge enough to support a populationof writersliving entirelyfrom their pens. Thus the crucial factor is that the total numberof Frenchreaders increased,owing to population growth, although the incidence ofliteracyremainedbelow the level of "modern" ocieties. Furthermore,adultmiaileiteracywent up significantly from 29 percent in 1686-90 to 47 percentin 1786-90, usingsignaturesof marriagecertificatesas an index), and certainareas, particularly n the nortlheast, eached levels of 80 percent. In fact,a sort of literacy barrier or Maggiolo line ran from Mont Saint-Michel toBesanqonor Geneva, separatingthe north, where literacywas always above25 percent,from the south, where the rate was usually under 25 percent.19Butgiventhis limited,regionalgrowth of the readingpublic, anotherquestionarises: Did the new readerscreate a new literarymarket, freeing the philo-sophes from patronageand therebyradicalizing he Enlightenment? f Dide-rot's Lettresur le conmmtiercee librairie,Malesherbes'sMemoires sur la li-brairie,and the royal edicts on the book tradeare to be believed,the answerto that question is no. And if the pension lists in the Archives Nationalesindicatetrends in patronage, the state subsidized writers in the traditionalmannerunderLouisXVI, and may have subsidizedmore of them than in thedays of Louis XIV. The publishingindustry did not reach a "takeoff"pointuntil the developmentof the steampress, cheap techniquesof manufacturingpaper, and mass education in the nineteenthcentury. Increasedliteracy didnot liberate the philosophes any more than the philosophes revolutionizedsociety.Actually,Gay backs away from some of his statements about literacyandrevolutionizingby the end of the book. Thus the new phenomenonof massliteracy, which he announcesat the beginning,declines as the dialectic un-folds, until in the end, "the overpoweringpresence of the illiteratemasses"(2: 492) saps the philosophes'revolutionaryardor. Driven by "a sense of de-places this "revolution"well before the Enlightenment. Of the books he examined,62 percentwere published in Latin in 1500-1509, 29 percentin 1590-1599, 7 percentin 1690-1699, and 5 percent in 1790-91 (p. 18).19 See Fleury and Valmary.


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124 Robert Darntonspair at the general wretchedness, lliteracy,and brutishnessof the poor" (2:517), the philosophesbegin to mutter about canaille,to flirtwith enlightenedabsolutism, and to entertain ideas of a repressive,obscurantist "social re-ligion" (2: 522). All's well that ends well. Saved from errorby inconsistency,we are left in an eighteenthcenturywe can recognize.Gay'sEnlightenment emainsrecognizable,despitethe confusion of its dia-lectic, because it covers familiar territory with a refreshingsense of redis-covery. Insteadof striking or the frontier,Gay set out to cleara paththroughthe monographs cluttering eighteenth-centuryhistoriography,and he suc-ceeded wherehis dialecticfailed. Following him is like touringwith a GuideMichelin:one stops for the occasional degustationbut neverwandersfar fromthe three-starroutes. In the end, the verdict is clear: Gay's Enlightenment"vaut le voyage." But it is most valuable as one man's summingup, a syn-thesis of years of thoughtfulreading, which one instinctively places on theshelf next to R. R. Palmer's The Age of the DemocraticRevolution. Takenas a synthesis of social historyand the history of ideas, however, it does nothold up becauseit will not stand without its dialecticalscaffolding.1IIt may be misleading to compare Gay's polished synthesis with the mono-graphic articles published in Livre et societe. But the two works share aconcernfor what the Livreet societe groupsometimes refersto as "l'histoiresociale des idees,"and the comparison is revealing becausethe French beginby resisting he urge to synthesize.In a way, they locate the Enlightenmentbynot looking for it: instead, they put aside preconceptions about the "philo-sophie des lumieres"and seek out the unenlightened,the everyday, and theaverage. Their purpose is to reconstruct iterary culture as it actually was.They thereforeemphasizeintellectual "inertia"and try to measure the depthof tradition,adopting an approachthat had lain fallow since Daniel Mornetfirstexperimentedwith it a half-centuryearlier.While Cassirer was exploring the phenomenologyof the Enlightenmentmind, Mornetstudied the Enlightenmentas a social process. And while otherliteraryscholarspondered he eighteenthcentury'sgreat books, Mornet exam-ined the meansby which ideasdiffuseddownward n society. His examinationrevealed that some books, which later ages took to be great, may not havebeen widely read under the Old Regime,2')and this revelation raised a newset of questions: What did eighteenth-centuryFrenchmen read? And whatwas the balance of traditionand innovation in early modern book culture?Mornetleft thesequestionsto his descendants n the Vle Section of the EcolePratiquedes Hautes Etudes,and especiallyto the research eam that producedLivreet socite. The researchersalso inheritedthe techniques and traditionsof the "Annales" school, which inclined them toward the study of "men-talites" rather han formalphilosophic ideas and which made them receptiveto the quantitativemethods that Mornet had developed.Owingto the complexityof the Old Regimeand the diversityof its culture,the Livre et societe group tried to relate the literary and social life of eigh-teenth-centuryFrance by studying specificmilieux: the obscure masses who"read"or listened to popular literature,the educated provincialswho pur-

20 Daniel Mornet, "Les enseignementsdes bibliotheques priv6es (1750-1780),"Revued'hlistoireitiraire tie la Franice17 (1910): 449-92.


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In Search of the Enlightenment 125chased traditionalworks, the elite of the provincial academies, and the Pa-risianswho producedand consumedcertain "advanced"periodicals.The work done on the first of these four groups makes the most excitingreading,because it gives one a sense of contactwith the remote mental uni-verse of the eighteenth-centuryvillage. Robert Mandrou showed that suchcontact was possible in De la culture populaire aux 17c et 18e siecles (Paris,1964), a brief but brilliant study of the crude paperbacksknown as theBibliothequebleue, which colportershawked throughthe countryside, alongwith thread and cutlery, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.Printedon cheap paper with wornout type, sold for a sou, and read until theyfell apart, these little books contain clues to a popular culture that is other-wise more inaccessiblethan the civilizationinscribed on Cleopatra'sNeedle.They were read aloud by the few villagers who could read during the veillee,an informalevening get-togetherwherewomen sewed and men repaired ools.The Bibliothequebleue certainly belongedto a humble level of culture. Itsstories often begin, "As you are about to hear.... But what message wascommunicatedby this oral-writtengenre, and how did these books relate tothe culture of the upper strata?Mandrouplaced them far behind and belowthe Enlightenment.He showed that while the philosophes were stressingtherationalityand sensibiliteof humannature,the Bibliothequebleue presentedman as a slave of passion, driven by astrologicalforces and weird mixturesof the four humorsand the four elements. While the freethinkerswere natu-ralizing religion, the Bibliothequebleue purveyed spiritualism,miracles,andhagiography.And while the scientistswere emptyingthe universeof mystery,the Bibliotheque bleue filled the heads of its reader-listenerswith visionsof threatening,occult forces, which could be appeasedby mumbo-jumboanddecipheredwith recipe-knowledge-magic numbers,physiognomy,andprimi-tive rituals. As literature, the Bibliothequebleue adapted and simplifiedthemedieval tales and Gaulois humor that polite society rejected in the seven-teenth century. So Mandrou concluded that in comparisonwith the cultureof the elite, the popular culture representedby the Bibliothequebleue wasboth distinct and derivative. He went on to hypothesize that the popularliteratureof the Old Regime servedas an ideological substitutefor class con-sciousnessamong the masses. The peasants et their thoughts wander througha wonderland nhabited by Robert le diable, Oger le danois, Pierre de Pro-vence, the giant Fierabras,and all mannerof magical forces, instead of takingthemeasureof the real world of toil and exploitation.Mandrou'sstudy, a productof the "Annales"school but not of the Livreet societe group, prepared he way for the work of Genevieve Bolleme, whoproduceda general survey of the Bibliothequebleue for volume 1 of Livreet societe and a detailed study of popularalmanacs, which grew too big forvolume 2 and was published as a separate monograph. Bolleme's analysisconfirmedthe main lines of Mandrou's but emphasized change rather thancontinuity n the evolutionof popular literature.She found that the escapismand supernaturalismof the seventeenth century receded in the eighteenthwith the influx of new attitudes: a more worldly and realistic orientationtoward death, human nature, social relations, and natural forces. The oldastrologyand mythical tales gave way to a new sense of science and history.A new "moralesociale," an "esprit critique,"'1and an awarenessof current

21 GenevieveBolleme,Les almnaniaclhsopulaires aux XV!! et XV!!!" siwcles:Essai d'liistoire sociale (Paris, 1969), p. 84.


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126 Robert Darntonevents indicated the penetration not merely of the Enlightenment but also ofincipient revolutionary ideas.'' Despite their similarities, therefore, the studiesof Mandrou and Bolleme point in opposite directions, the first toward theseparation of cultural worlds and the intellectual enserfment of the masses,the second toward an increase in cultural integration, with popular literatureacting as a liberating force.It is too early to tell which view will prevail because there has not yet beenenough detailed study of the many genres of popular literature. Bolleme'swork is more detailed, as it concentrates on one genre-the popular almanac-whose development can be traced with some precision through the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries. But the attempt to be precise about the cos-mology of the common man raises methodological problems that did not ham-per Mandrou's more general and impressionistic work. For not only didBolleme move beyond general impressions, she attempted to enter right intothe minds of the almanacs' reader-listeners, and there she found not merelymumbo-jumbo but "Kantian"23 categories. The categories-"observationsastrales perpetuelles,"24for example-do not summon up the Critique of PureReason. Instead, they arouse skepticism: Do the almanacs reveal the workingsof the popular mind, or is this upside-down Cassirer? Bolleme did not provethe "popular" character of her almanacs. On the contrary, she drew materialfrom some almanacs in bindings with aristocratic coats of arms; from othersthat expressed scorn for "les prejuges populaires";25 and from several thatdid not aim their aphorisms at the illiterate or the indigent: "Lis souvent";"Achete des livres en tout temps"; "Ne tyrannisez point le pauvre debiteur";"Peragit tranquilla potestas quod violenta requit."126 oor Richard (a favoritein France) belonged in part to the lost, aristocratic world of Thomas Jeffer-son. There were almanacs for everyone, even in the upper reaches of the OldRegime. Bolleme acknowledged the differences among the almanacs but shegrouped them all together for the purpose of analysis. And when she analyzedchanges in the world view of the eighteenth-century populace she based herconclusions almost entirely on a sampling of only twenty-seven undifferen-tiated almanacs. The almanac upon which she relied most heavily and whichshe cited most often as evidence of advanced opinion at the popular level wasLe messager boiteux, a work printed in Bern, Bale, Yverdon, Vevey, andNeuchatel-that is, by Swiss and in some instances by Protestants: not a re-liable index to the attitudes of Catholic French peasants.27But how reliable are the most folksy and most French of the almanacs?Frequently presented as the aphorisms of one shepherd ("le Grand Bergerde la Montagne") addressing others, they have more of the flavor of Renais-sance pastoralism than of a genuine shepherd-to-shepherd dialogue. The pas-toralism may have been adapted for mass consumption from the "model"

22 See esp. ibid., pp. 123-24, 16, and 55.2" Ibid., p. 95. 24 Ibid.,p. 98. 25 Ibid.,p. 131.2 ; Ibid. (in order of citation) pp. 74, 79, 75, and 81.27 The versions published in Yverdon and Vevey by Jeanne-Esther Bondeliand Paul-AbrahamChenebie derived from the Hiuickenide Bote of Berii, a Ger-man almanac produced by Emmanuel Hortiti, the son of a Protestant minister(see Jules Capr6, Histoire du lveritable messages- boiteux de Bet-te et Vev'ey[Vevey, 1884] and Jeanne-Pierre Perret. Les imprimeries d'Yverdotn au XVIICet au XVHll' siecle [Lausanne, 1945], pp. 74-78).


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In Search of the Enlightenment 127almanacof the fifteenthcentury,Le grantd ompost des bergers,but the rhe-torical pose might have had more in common with the masquerading ofMarie-Antoinette than the mountainsidle egalitarianism detected by Boll'eme.The almanacs represent a popularization of upper-class culture, not popularculture in itself, because they were written for the people, not by the people,and they were not so much "written" as adapted in the most casual fashion,sometimes even by typesetters, from the literature of the elite. The greatproblem is not to extract their message, but to know whether that messagewas integrated in the indigenous culture of the masses.Mandrou believed it was. The real dialogue, in his view, did not involveshepherds but publishers and colporters. The wandering salesmen knew whatthe peasants would buy and stocked up accordingly, thereby determining, inthe long run, what the publishers produced. This argument seems convincing,but it applies more aptly to upper-class literature, which was far more sensi-tive to changes in styles and ideas than was the extremely standardized reper-tory of the Bibliotheque bleue. Unlike the educated elite, villagers may havebeen passive consumers of literature; they may have bought whatever wasavailable, just because they wanted something-it hardly mattered what-tosubmit to the veillee reader or to stare at themselves. As Bolleme put it, therecould have been an element of "magic,"' a mystical respect for the word, inprimitive reading-an obscure psychological process that probably had littlerelation to the sophisticated reading and consumer control that went on inhigh society. So changes in popular literature could have been imposed fromabove without being assimilated at the village level. The actual culture(s) ofFrance's heterogeneous masses remains lost in an unfathomable ocean of oraltradition; the books that dropped into it probably disappeared without mucheffect, like missionaries in India.Although the work of Mandrou and Bolleme may have failed to define thepopular culture of eighteenth-century France, it enormously enriches the con-ventional view of the "Age of Reason." By revealing the existence and char-acter of a vast literature that circulated on levels far below the philosophes,it helps place the Enlightenment in perspective. This attempt to define levelsof cultural experience and to relate reading to specific social sectors is also thestrong point of the other essays in Livre et soc0te, especially the study ofprovincial reading by Julien Brancolini and Marie-Therese Bouyssy. Afterexamining book consumption in the provinces by gc-nre and by region, Bran-colini and Bouyssy concluded that educated provincials were about as farremoved from the Enlightenment as illiterate peasants. The weight of tra-ditional culture crushed innovation in town and village alike.The Brancolini-Bouyssy study was based on a quantitative analysis of therecords of requests by provincial publishers for permissions simples, a kind ofauthorization to produce works that had fallen into the public domain byvirtue of legislation reforming the book trade in 1777. These requests in-cluded the projected number of copies for each edition, so they provide moreprecise information than any of the sources consulted in previous attemptsto chart the boundaries of literary culture in the Old Regime. The most im-portant of these attempts was published by Franqois Furet in volume 1 ofLivre et socie'te. It indicated that an enormous quantity of religious worksand pre-eighteenth-century "classics" all but smothered the Enlightenment,

28 Bolleme, pp. 15-16.


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128 Robert Darntonalthough the production of scientific books and secular fiction increased atthe expense of religious literatureas the century progressed. Furet's findingsderivedfrom quantitativeanalysis of requestsfor privileges (strictly legal au-thorizations to publish) and permnissions ta(ites (more flexible and less for-mally legal authorizations). But they lacked data on the size of editions andthe places where the books were marketed.Brancoliniand Bouyssy providedprecisely that information, thereby supplementing and confirming Furet'sanalysis. Taken together, the two studies suggest that cultural "inertia"weighed heavily on all of France and that the inroads of "innovation"did notpenetratefar beyond Paris. Not a surprisingpattern-unless it is measuredagainst the conclusions of Genevieve Bolleme. For she saw modernizationgalloping full tilt throughthe crude almanacsof the late eighteenth century,while Brancolini and Bouyssy found nothing but cultural stagnation at amore sophisticated evel of literature.Did the literary experienceof the eliteandof the masses somehow converge without meetingon the middle groundof the middleclasses?This paradox,like so many of the problemsin quantitative history, mayarise from insufficiencies in the data. Requests for permissions simples do notrepresentthe "vie provincialedu livre," as Brancolini and Bouyssy claim,because the permnissions simples excluded probably the most important com-ponent in the stock of provincialbookdealers:books acquired by purchasesor, more often, by exchanges measuredin page gatheringswith publisherslocated in other regionsor other countries.The pcrmissions suinples also ex-cludedall bookspublished n Franceunderpernmissions ayites, the legal loop-hole throughwhich much of the Enlightenmentreached French readers.2!3In fact, the permissionssimnplesovered primarilya specializedand unrep-resentative egment of the provincialbook trade: the relativelystable marketfor schoolbooksandreligiousworks.With the expirationof old privileges,theprovincial publishers supplied new editions of old books to local teachers,priests, and teacher-priests.But they might have suppliedother readerswithan equal number of "advanced"works, which could not have appearedinthe Brancolini-Bouyssy ata.Although the data fail to prove the backwardnessof provincial culture,they do provide a very revealing picture of regional variations in Frenchreading. They show that book production correspondedwith the incidenceof literacyas measured by the Maggiolo study mentioned above. The greatmajorityof permissioni-simple books circulatednorth of the Maggiolo line.Moreover,the north's areas of highest literacy and highest book production,like Lorraineand Normandy,were areas wherethe Counter Reformationhadbeen most effective and where nineteenth- and twentieth-century votersshowed most attachment to the church. Northern readers tended to favorthe religious "classics"of the seventeenth century and even Jansenist works,while southerners,especially around Toulouse, read a relatively high propor-tion of secular literature.A series of maps illustrates he point in rich detail.So despitethe limitationsimposed by its data, the Brancolini-Bouyssy tudysuggests some of the complexities and the long-term trends in the culturalhistoryof France.

211 For details on the permi.issions simples, see the text of the edict of August30. 1777 in Jourdan, Decrusy, and Isambert, eds., Reciueil geti5ral des anciennieslois fran(,aises(Paris, 1826), 25: 108-12.


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In Search of the Enlightenment 129Daniel Roche's monographson provincialacademies,publishedin volumes1 and 2 of Livre et societe, analyze the character of the intellectualelite inthe areaswhereBrancoliniand Bouyssytried to provide an overall measure-ment of literary culture.Like all elite studies, Roche's investigationcompen-sates in specificityfor what it lacks in generality;but here the specifics ofquantitative analysis have important general implications, for they definesome of the milieux throughwhich the diffusion of 'lumieres"was refracted.Taking a cue from Mornet,who had stressed the importanceof studying theprovincialacademies n Les originesintellectluelles e la Re'voliutionran(!aise,Roche began with an analysis of th- academies'social composition.By adopt-ing a carefully nuancedclassificationscheme, he reducedsuch abstractprob-lems as the supposedly"bourgeois" haracter of the Enlightenment o man-ageable proportions. He found that the membership of the academies ofBordeaux,Dijon, and Chalons-sur-Marne orresponded o the hierarchiesofprovincialsociety. The landedaristocracy,service nobility, and (especiallyinthe parlementary owns) th- nobles of the robe dominated the academies,which themselves were privileged corporations n a society characterizedbyprivilegeand corporateness.The academies' ower ranks (correspondatitsandassocies) become increasinglybourgeois as the centuryprogressed-but notbourgeois in the Marxist sense. The lesser academicians were civil servantsand professional men, including a very high proportion of doctors and vir-tually no financiers, ndustrialists,or merchants, even in the booming com-mercialcenter of Bordeaux.Thus the academiesrepresenteda traditionaleliteof notables, opening up increasingly to men of talent but not to capitalistentrepreneurs.They were also open to new ideas. The topics set for theirprize essay contests show concerns related to the Enlightenment: humani-tarianism, a tendency to move from abstract to utilitarianthought, and anincreasing interest in political economy. The men who gave first prize toRousseau's Discouirssur les sciences et les arts had a very unrousseauisticfaith in the paralleladvancementof science and social welfare.In his second article,Roche produceda comparativesocial analysisof theacademiciansand the collaboratorsof the Encyclopedieidentifiedby JacquesProust in Diderot et l'Encyclopedie.Like the academicians, he encyclopedistscontaineda large number of professionalmen (especially the omnipresentenlighteneddoctors), savants, and technicians supplementedby a heavy doseof nobles and civil servants (20 percent in each case) but not a single mer-chant. So the Encyclopedie tself seems to have representeda tendencyof oldelites to assume a new role of intellectual eadership in conjunction with thenascent"bourgeoisiede talents" rather than the industrial-commercial our-geoisie. That conclusion should be handledwith care, however,because it restson a fragile statistical base of 125 encyclopedistswhose social and profes-sional status could be identified. Since Diderot had more than 200 collabo-rators, Proust and Roche may not have worked with representative tatistics.

The statistics were too small, in any case, to represent large social groups.Because the encyclopedists included only nine abb6s, eight parlementaires,and seven lawyers,it does not follow that those three groupswere more im-mune to encyclopedismnehan doctors, who contributed twenty-two collabo-rators.A dozen men in any category could change the statisticalpicture com-pletely. As Proust pointed out, it was a community of intellectualinterest,not a common social milieuL,hat bound together the collaboratorsof the


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130 Robert DarntonEncyclope'die. They did not cast off the old deference patterns: in fact Proustfound a kind of deferential differential in Diderot's correspondence, whichshows Diderot talking down to social inferiors, like Rousseau, while chattingup more established writers, like Voltaire, Buffon, and Marmontel.30 None-theless, a common intellectual cause united the men at the center of the En-lightenment. When their message spread outward, it had to pass downward,through the traditional hierarchies of provincial society. This was the enlight-ening process as d'Alembert and Voltaire conceived it-a slow seeping oflumie're from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, without any level-ing or lowering effects. Thus the studies of Proust and Roche complementeach other nicely, showing the traditional society's ability to absorb new ideasand the traditional elite's capacity for acquiring new functions-but not anew ideology rising with a new economic class. The social history of ideasseems to have broken out of the old categories of Marxist sociology.31Most of the articles in Livre et societe emphasize continuity rather thanchange. By macroanalysis of book production and by concentrating on peas-ants and provincials, they reveal the weight of tradition in the cultural livesof the great majority of Frenchmen. One study, however, by Jean-Louis andMarie Flandrin, concerns the milieu at the center of cultural innovation, thesalon society of Paris. Here, as in Proust's work on the encyclopedists, quan-titative history came into direct contact with the Enlightenment. The Fland-rins tried to measure the literary experience of the Parisian elite by tabulatingreferences to books in three journals: the Jouirnailof Joseph d'Hemery, thepolice inspector for the book trade; the Metnoires secrets of Bachaumont;and the Correspondance litteraire of Grimm. Each of the three was writtenfor private consumption and therefore contained material on avant-gardeworks that could not be reviewed in standard periodicals like the scrupulouslycensored Journal des savants. A statistical analysis of reviews in the Journaldes saivtantsand in the Jesuit Memoires de Tre'votuxwhich was published involume 1 of Livre et socie't, had revealed a "traditional" bias almost as pro-nounced as in the Furet and Brancolini-Bouyssy studies.32 But the Parisianswho read and sometimes even edited these censored periodicals came fromthe same literary circles that the Flandrins studied; and in analyzing theclandestine press the Flandrins found unalloyed Enlightenment. Seen throughthe Journal des savants, the Parisians look like Brancolini's provincials; theykept to a sparse diet of old-fashioned devotional, historical, and legal works,seasoned with some science. Seen through the Mernoires secrets, the Parisiansglutted themselves on philosophy, read very little history, and no religious,legal, or purely scientific books. Wherever the distortion may be, it resultsfrom the selection of data, not from statistical imprecision. The Flandrins'statistics seem impeccable, but the journals that provided them did not men-tion all the books read in salon society. They referred only to the extra-ordinary, controversial books, the books that were talked about and that made

30 Proust, chap. 1.31 Robert Mandrou'sinterpretationof Proust's researchseems distorted, at leastto this reader (see Mandroti,La Frantceaux XVIP et XVIII s.iecles,pp. 168-69:"le XVIIIe siecle pense vraiment bourgeois").32 Jean Ehrard and Jacques Roger, "Deux periodiques frangais du 18' siecle:'le Journaldes savants' et 'les M6moires de Tr6voux.' Essai d'une etude quantita-tive," in Livre et sociehi, vol. 1.


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In Search of the Enlightenment 131news. These journals were really primitive newspapers-nolivelles d la main-not systematic literary reviews. They provide information about literaryvogues but no quantifiable index to book consumption that can be comparedwith the statistics of Furet and Brancolini. So the "circulation du livre" inParis and the cultural distance between Parisian innovators and provinciallollowers has yet to be measured.The remainder of Livre et societe constitutes an attempt at measuring aneven more elusive phenomenon: language. Historical semantics is now abooming discipline in France and one that promises to enrich the standardviews of the Enlightenment by uncovering implicit concepts, the kind thatescape exegeses of formal thought):13 Unlike conventional lexicology, histori-cal semantics does not treat words as isolated units but rather as parts of asemantic field, a linguistic structure in which each part conveys meaningthrough its function within the whole. To grasp the meaning of individualeighteenth-century words, it therefore is necessary to reconstruct the lin-guistic structure of eighteenth-century French, treating the language as afluid, socially determined system of communication, not as a fixed crystalliza-tion of thought from which parts can be arbitrarily detached. Put abstractly,these propositions seem reasonable enough; the difficulty is to put them intopractice by discovering the mental processes behind eighteenth-century Frenchas it has come down to us in the form of words congealed on paper. The re-search for volume 1 of Livre et societe produced a special collection of speci-mens of this dead communications system-a list of 40,000 book titles reg-istered for privileges and permlissions tafites. By analyzing each title as asemantic field, computing the results statistically, and organizing the statisticsinto a series of semantic models, Frangois Furet and Alessandro Fontanatried to get at the meaning of two eighteenth-century words, histoire andmethode.Fontana's study, the more elaborate and ambitious of the two, best repre-sents this new historical discipline. After 100 pages of laborious analysis,Fontana produced a "structural profile" of eighteenth-century meithode. Insome cases, he concluded, nmthode was fixed, final, and transcendental ormathematical; in others it was fragmented, variable, and relative to particulardisciplines. Its varied usage revealed a thought pattern moving from seven-teenth-century apriorism to nineteenth-century relativism, and so suggests acosmological shift that might be compared with the transition from the closedto the infinite universe that Alexandre Koyre discerned in studying the historyof science.Whether or not Fontana proved his case is difficult to say, owing to thelinguistic barriers to understanding linguistics. No uninitiated reader shouldconfront Fontana's monograph unless armed with something much more for-midable than a Petit Larousse, for he will get trapped in an impenetrablesemantic underbrush. He may pride himself on having mastered the mots-clesof the "Annales" school: conjoncture, contingence, synchronie-diachronie,and mot-cle. But what is he to make of mathesis, apax, inessif, hendiadys,ethnoseme, and semiosis? At the risk of seeming ubusif, anti-sememic, or an

:.4"or reports on the state of historical semantics, see Actes du 89c congresdes societes savantes (Paris, 1964), vol. 1; and M. Tournier et at., "Le vocabulairede la Revolution: pouI un inventaire syst6matique des textes," Annales historiquesde la Revolutioti fJran!aise, no. 195 (January-March 1969), pp. 109-24.


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132 Robert Darntonoutrightidiolect, this reviewer must confess that he cannot follow Fontana'sargumentand that he finds historical semantics more impressivein principlethan in practice.But the two volumesof Livre et societe do representan impressiveattemptto rescue the intellectualhistory of eighteenth-centuryFrance from vaguegeneralizations nd to root it in the realitiesof social history. They revealthegeneralcontoursof literary culture as it was experienced by the great massof eighteenth-centuryFrenchmen rather than as it appearsin a few, posthu-mously selected classics. And they relate that literaryexperienceto specificsocial groups-the obscuremillions who participated n popularculture, themore elevated reading public of the provinces,the provincialelite, and theParisianavant-garde.Whatevertheirshortcomings, hese experimentalessaysshow that the social history of ideas can be written.They do not redefinetheEnlightenmentany more successfullythan Gay does, but they help to situateit in the complexcontext of eighteenth-centuryociety.IIIThe comparison of Gay's Enlightenm-ent and Livre et socite suggests that thesocial history of ideas must move out of its armchairphase and into thearchives,tapping new sources and developingnew methods. For how can itbe writtenfrom within the confinesof even a first-rate ibrary?To pull someVoltairefrom the shelf is not to come into contactwith a representative liceof intellectual ife from the eighteenthcentury,because, as the Livre et societeessays show, the literaryculture of the Old Regime cannot be conceived ex-clusively in terms of its greatbooks. Yet librariescrammedwith classics can-not findroomfor the Bibliothequebleue, a genre too undignified o be classi-fiedwith "books"or to fit into ourpreconceptionsabout"culture."And everyyear our universities urn out thousandsof certifiedexpertsin Western civili-zation who have read the Social Contract many times and have never heardof Les quiatreils Aymnon.As far as the social history of ideas is concerned,the difficulty is not simply in recognizing "low" as well as "high" culture,becauseGay's techniques-a matter of index cards and intelligence, but nooriginalresearch-will not even uncover the social historyof the intellectualelite. The finances,milieux, and readershipof the philosophes can only beknown by grubbing n archives.If readas conventional intellectualhistory,however, Gay's Enlightenmenthas the greatadvantageof imposingnew form on a great deal of unmanage-able old matter.Livre et societe holds out little hope for arrivingas such aheroic synthesis. Instead, it suggests that we must face another outbreak ofmonographs, which will take us in a dozen differentdirections, whereverthe data lead. As the data tend to be statistical,they continually raise prob-lems about quantifyingculturalphenomena. Literaryjournalscannot be re-duced meaningfullyto bar graphs, and literary "influence"still seems toointangible o be computerized.Statistics about book consumption give one ageneral sense of the culturalterrain,but do not explainthe meaning of whatit is to "consume"a book. So the social history of ideas is searching for amethodology. It will probablyfall back on ad hoc combinationsof CassirerandMornet until it develops a discipline of its own. If those two masters can-not yet be broughttogether in a new definitionof the Enlightenment,theycannot be left alone. And seen through the work of their successors, theirachievement ooms largerthan ever.

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