Robert Darnton

Darnton explores some fascinating territory in the genre of histoire du livre and tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. Meer

Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and began to promulgate an exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Meer

In 1749, Francois Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an abominable poem about the king. So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. 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