Robert Darnton

Darnton's book addresses one of the big questions of history - what caused the French Revolution? - through its study of the salacious, seditious and scandalous bestselling books read by the French during the Enlightenment. Meer

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre. Meer

The Writer’s Lot explores the working lives of eighteenth-century French authors—celebrities and unknowns—at a time when their example, if not often their ideas, changed the course of history. Meer

A classic work of European history Meer