Review: Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995)

[truepenny]

The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As you can kind of tell by the title, this is an academic book, recommended to me to a friend because one of the things going on in my current ms is, yes, the manufacture and sale of pornography. (I don't know how I got there, either.) This is a very good academic book, less about pornography per se than about how books on the forbidden list (which includes pornography, philosophy, and libelous (and frequently pornographic) biographies of Louis XV and his mistresses and ministers) circulated in France in the 1780s. One of the things that I found most fascinating was the way that pornography, philosophy, and libel/biography all swirled together into almost the same genre (the code for them was livres philosophiques), and I loved reading about the book publishers and booksellers colluding to get around the state censorship, not in any We are striking a blow for freedom! way, but just in that simple There is a market for these books! way.

Darnton shies away from coming to any conclusions about the relationship of these forbidden books to the Revolution, and while partly I agree with him that we cannot reconstruct the experience of reading in the 1780s well enough to know, I also feel that it left the book flapping feebly a bit at the end, which is a pity, because the earlier parts were so good.



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Comments

[anne]

I loved the book about the cats.

I took an 18th-century class from Robert S. Dawson, a man who would have fit into every sf con I've ever been to. I don't remember much about it, except the riproaring tales about how they smuggled books from what is now Belgium to Paris. Barrels with false bottoms! Barrels with false tops! But barrels with false middles were apparently the most successful. Line your double-walled beer barrel with leaves of Voltaire and never get caught. (He also made us read prerevolutionary French porn. It was...actually no weirder than some of the stuff on AO3, although at the time I found it quite surprising.)