Given my previous work on Adam Smith and his extended visit to the City of Light in 1766 (see especially here and here), I decided to give Robert Darnton’s new book The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 a go. Darnton, a history professor at Harvard University, purports to narrate the history of the “collective consciousness” or “frame of mind” of the people of Paris during the four decades preceding the great Revolution of 1789. Alas, although this beautiful book is well-researched and written, Professor Darnton’s project is doomed from the start for three reasons:

1. The definitional or “level of generality” problem: how does one even begin to define such vague and fuzzy constructs like “collective consciousness” or “frame of mind”?
2. The measurement problem: even if we could all agree on an acceptable definition of these social constructs, there is no reliable way of measuring them!
3. Both of these problems are further compounded by the fact that Paris was the second-largest city in Europe at the time (after London), with an estimated population of at least 600,000 souls at the start of the 1789 Revolution. (See here, for example.) How could such a large and diverse group of people — from artisans to aristocrats, merchants to clergymen, and everyone in between — share a “collective consciousness” in the first place?

Nevertheless, although the plural of anecdote is not data (or is it?), Darnton’s collection of amusing 18th-century anecdotes is still worth reading, for he covers all the major events in French history that in one way or another may have contributed to the eventual downfall of the old regime. (Indeed, a better title for this book would be Vignettes of the Ancien Régime.) By way of illustration, I will limit this micro review to my favorite of these old regime vignettes: the commotion caused by the publication of Richesse de l’Etat in 1763, a political pamphlet that “took Paris by storm and stirred up an enormous debate about royal finances” (p. 72). In Darton’s telling, the anonymous author of this pamphlet proposed nothing less than an end to France’s “unjust system of taxation”, to be replaced with a new and simple single tax system, “which would be apportioned among the top two million property owners according to a graduated scale” (ibid.).

For my part, I wonder whether Adam Smith was aware of Richesse de l’Etat and other similar political pamphlets during his travels in France (early February 1764 to late October 1766), and if so, to what extent did these works and the larger political debate over taxation in France influence his subsequent magnum opus on The Wealth of Nations, especially Book V? These are questions that I shall explore in a future post, but in the meantime, speaking of the great Scottish philosopher-economist, I will conclude my series of “micro reviews” in the next day or two with Paul Sagar’s excellent 2022 tome Reconsidering Adam Smith.