The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution

This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. Roger Chartier's book The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution used "cultural history" to reconsider Daniel Mornet's work regarding the origins of the French Revolution. With the assistance of writings from Jurgen Habermas, Chartier argued that in the eighteenth century a new form of communication, the "bourgeois public sphere," emerged where private citizens could espouse their ideas of "reason" without interference from the Church or state. This finding by Habermas was critical to characterizing the eighteenth century as the Age of Enlightenment. It meant that rational private people took their judgments and publically developed them through the arts, in salons, and in the Republic of Letters. "The exercise of public reason by private individuals was subjected to no limit, and no domain was to be forbidden. The critical exercise of reason was no longer reined in by the respect due to religious or political authority" (Chartier, 21). However, his research did show that the book industry quadrupled between 1700 and the 1780's. In addition, the availability through borrowing institutions and increased ownership of books, especially cheaper forms of printed materials, such as pamphlets not only increased significantly, but also allowed reading to become a more individual pursuit by all classes of French society. "Printing thus made possible the constitution of a public realm that was unreliant on proximity--a community with no visible presence" (32). In addition, Chartier he dug into the historical revolutionary documentation to show that the Enlightenment did not make the revolution, but that revolutionaries adopted cultural changes taking place in French society to buttress their arguments advocating revolutionary change. Chartier found that "...thanks to the widespread diffusion of skills that made possible a larger circulation of the written word, people acquired habits of free judgment and contradictory criticism" (167). The previous quote illustrated that Chartier's findings were in agreement with both Van Kley's and Alexis De Tocqueville's theses showing that in the prelude to revolution, there was a general decline of faith in the Church and monarchy. Chartier even saw the influence that the Jansenists played leading up to the Revolution. However, Chartier did not totally agree with Van Kley's hypothesis. As an example, Chartier thought that the pernicious comments and posters against the monarchy largely due to Louis XV's sexual escapades, were primarily confined to the environs of Paris, and in the fifteen years preceding the Revolution, became less numerous and virulent against Louis XVI. Thus, Chartier highlighted different evidence from Van Kley's to further his thesis. Chartier noted a steady secularization of French society starting in the 1750's. The first piece of evidence he used was the increase in illegitimate birth

M. Chartier has written an intellectual, tightly argued work that has been greatly beneficial to my understanding of the revolution in France. His notion that the ideas of the Enlightenment influenced revolutionary thought indirectly through a "demystification" of the monarchy is very intriguing. This book did much to make me question some of my long-held presumptions about the French Revolution.