Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
An Enlightened Revolution?
By Robert Darnton
The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution
by Roger Chartier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
Duke University Press, 257 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century
by Keith Michael Baker
Cambridge University Press, 382 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The question won't go away. After two centuries of debate, you would think it had been worried to death, but it keeps reviving and now looks livelier than ever: What was the connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—or, to put it more broadly, how did the cultural system of the Old Regime contribute to the political explosion of 1789?
Review, 4603 words
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