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noemie_0612's review
adventurous
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Gun violence, and Violence
theciz's review
informative
medium-paced
3.5
A book that claims to look into the causes of the French Revolution "from the perspective of the ordinary Parisian" - how events were seen socially at the time, what they actually thought of things, etc. It’s partially successful at this, but not entirely - it’s a sort of mixture of the regular history of the revolution and other social history things that happened in the 1700s. Some are more convincingly relevant than others, and Darnton is constantly forced to admit that the availability of insight into what the "ordinary Parisian" thought of things is patchy at best.
So, if you’ve read about the revolution before, there’s not actually much new here, but if you haven’t this is a broadly accessible telling.
As an aside, I read this both on kindle and as an audiobook, and the latter is a little painful. It gives the impression that it was recorded out of order and the reader was only given a French pronunciation guide half way through. Sometimes he pronounces things perfectly normally (eg. "Vive le roi"), and sometimes he talks about "roy-yee" Louis XV. He constantly pronounced Boulogne as baloney, which drove me nearly insane. I don’t even speak French and it was painful, just stick to the written version.
So, if you’ve read about the revolution before, there’s not actually much new here, but if you haven’t this is a broadly accessible telling.
As an aside, I read this both on kindle and as an audiobook, and the latter is a little painful. It gives the impression that it was recorded out of order and the reader was only given a French pronunciation guide half way through. Sometimes he pronounces things perfectly normally (eg. "Vive le roi"), and sometimes he talks about "roy-yee" Louis XV. He constantly pronounced Boulogne as baloney, which drove me nearly insane. I don’t even speak French and it was painful, just stick to the written version.
caidyn's review
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Most books focus on the revolution itself, but this book is about all the things that led up to it. And it wasn't just Louis XVI's reign. It started far before him.
lifesarosch's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
So obviously this is not Darnton's most academic book and it retreads a lot of ground of some of his earlier work, but I really enjoyed it. Each chapter captures a moment of scandal/public discourse leading up to the French Revolution but taken together it is so clear why the public sentiment, such as you can have public sentiment in the 18th century, underwent the shift it went. As always, the way he handles questions of print is soooo good. Was I able to keep track of all the French names? No and it didn't really matter.
wayneg's review
informative
medium-paced
4.25
This attempts to demonstrate how the events of 1789 grew gradually from the experiences of the Parisians over a series of events over the previous 40 years. It is very successful at this, using a varied collection of written sources. In fact, it demonstrates how literate the Paris of the late 18th century was and that Paris was “an early information society”
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