Word: darnton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Robert Darnton; Basic Books...
That is a sample of the rich meanings Princeton History Professor Robert Darnton finds in the commonplaces of prerevolutionary France. He is exploring a relatively new branch of history, cross-fertilized by anthropology and known in France as l'histoire des mentalités. Says Darnton: "It attempts to show not merely what people thought but how they thought - how they construed the world...
...this somewhat speculative re-creation of the ancien régime is solidly based on Darnton's mastery of its most obscure documents. He has discovered, for example, that there was a police official who spent the years 1748 to 1753 writing more than 500 still unpublished dossiers covering virtually every writer in Paris. They included all those troublesome philosophes whose skeptical criticisms of the Bourbon monarchy contributed to its downfall, yet this diligent police analyst never used the term philosophes, never considered them as a group, never imagined that any writers could have political importance...
...whole relationship between writing and reading in these prerevolutionary years was undergoing significant changes that reached beyond politics. Darnton endeavors to demonstrate the change from the letters that a young merchant in La Rochelle wrote to the bookseller who regularly sent him the new works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Darnton's view, Rousseau's preachings first established "the author as Prometheus" and his readers as emotional disciples. Darnton also finds rich social implications in folk tales like "Little Red Riding Hood...
Interpreted historically, they record the harshness and cruelty of rural life. In the peasant version, Little Red Riding Hood does not escape the wolf. Darnton's portrait of France is impressionistic, a series of sketches, but it is striking, original and often very clever. Félicitations...