Reading Assignment

Robert Darnton, "What Was Revolutionary About The French Revolution?," New York Review Of Books (January 19, 1989).

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Some Questions

What was so revolutionary about the French Revolution?

Darnton:  "How can we grasp those moments of madness, of suspended belief, when anything looked possible and the world appeared as a tabula rasa, wiped clean by a surge of popular emotion and ready to be redesigned?"  Comment.

Darnton: "Popular sovereignty, civil liberty, equality before the law -- the words fall so easily off the tongue today that we cannot begin to imagine their explosiveness in 1789."  Comment.

How would you begin to analyze the intersection of the French Revolution and politics?  The French Revolution and culture?

How does Darnton add to our understanding of the role of violence in the French Revolution?

What was the force that burst loose on the world two hundred years ago?  What was the French Revolution?