The Revolutionary Temper by Robert Darnton

The Ancien Regime, as the French ruling class was known in 18th-century France, always sounds like such an immovable force. It speaks of arbitrary power, stiffened with protocol, girded by gold, topped by a dusting of icing sugar (something we all enjoy about France today) and utterly stuck in its ways. Until, that is, revolution arrived in 1789 with a clap of thunder to reset the clock so that everything could start over. Yet, as is shown in this book, the last 50 years of old France were in fact febrile and shifting, rocked by a series of social and political affairs that reached far beyond elite circles, engaging men and women who were more used to worrying whether the cost of bread would rise by another two sous--which of course it did, and that was also in the mix. The author labels this new flexible mood the “revolutionary temper”, by which he doesn’t simply mean that the French people eventually became so cross that they embarked on a program of violent protest that led to the guillotining of the king and queen in 1793. Rather, he is referring to a frame of mind that was shifting. The role of food prices is not fully fleshed out in here, which is a pity because it sounds like there were some climactic factors that led to severe weather and crop failure that might have been a harbinger of the future (or maybe not). Instead he suggests that between the end of the war of the Austrian succession in 1748 and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French population underwent a series of convulsions, some as molten as others were icy, which resulted in a subtle but powerful molecular shift. After 500 years of rigidity, it made anything seem possible. Edmund Burke's 'Reflections on the French Revolution', published in 1790, posits that unlike America, the French were not ready for democracy, whereas this author focuses on the things that boiled over rather than why ultimately the whole thing collapsed on itself.