BOOKS
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or atheist tracts? Why not consider popular discontent with a severe and
unforgiving Counter-Reformation priesthood that waged war against
local superstitions? Why not examine the effects of the deep doctrinal
splits within the eighteenth-century French Church? No matter how
"revolutionary" some pre-1789 works may appear, they did not necessar–
ily have much contemporary impact (Rousseau's
Social Contract,
a noto–
rious example, had few readers before the late 1780s.) Even if these works
did have an impact, what made readers receptive to their message in the
first place? "Do Books Make Revolutions?" Chartier asks in one of his
chapter titles, and he tentatively answers no, at least not by themselves.
Historians must rummage through the archives not only for the overt
warning signs of revolution but also for shifts in underlying, elusive
"cultural practices."
In his essay, Chartier scrupulously obeys this injunction. While not
entirely ignoring the writings of the
philosophes,
he also discusses law,
painting, religious rituals, royal iconography, and much else.
It
makes for
a rich, at times enthralling panoply. He speculates on the increasing
egalitarianism of literary salons where participants, so to speak, left their
social rank at the door, and also on the explosion of sensational printed
legal briefs in which lawyers attempted to try cases before "the tribunal
of public opinion," implicitly challenging the royal monopoly on justice.
A
particularly striking example comes in his interpretation of reading
habits. In the eighteenth century, he suggests, as the number of printed
works expanded and became available in smaller, cheaper editions, a fun–
damental shift in attitudes toward the printed word occurred. In place of
the reverence accorded to rare, elegant editions of the Bible and the
classics came a more casual, and ultimately, a more critical stance toward
reading material, including politically orthodox reading material. This
shift contributed to the "desacralization" of Church and monarchy alike.
Unfortunately, Chartier does not do a particularly good job of
weaving these different subjects together, thanks to his excessive - indeed
exasperating - modesty. As a work of synthesis,
The Cultural Origins oj
the French Revolution
necessarily mines most of its information and many
of its insights from other scholars (in large part Americans - a fact that
has doubtless sent some deceased French historians spinning in Pere
Lachaise .) Chartier not only gives these scholars full credit, but he also
summarizes their arguments at length, and he judiciously weighs their
criticisms of each other. All of this will delight graduate students, but it
makes slow going for everyone else. Chartier also understates his own
goals in the book. He presents it as little more than a postscript to
Mornet and devotes many overly opaque passages (inspired mostly by
Foucault) to the nature of causality and the question of whether revolu-
