description Robert Darnton Overview
Robert Darnton is an American cultural historian known for research on eighteenth-century France, the Enlightenment, and the history of books and reading. His work studies how books were produced, circulated, and interpreted, linking publishing and popular literature to the political and intellectual culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution.
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What is Robert Darnton's Great Cat Massacre about?
The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, published in 1984, uses unusual stories, including a Parisian printing-shop incident, to explore how people in 18th-century France made meaning. It is one of Darnton's best-known introductions to cultural history. [Princeton biography](https://history.princeton.edu/people/robert-darnton)
How did Robert Darnton change the history of the book?
Darnton studied not only what books said but also how they were printed, sold, circulated, censored, and read. His 1979 The Business of Enlightenment reconstructs the publishing history of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie.
What does Darnton's work have to do with the French Revolution?
He traced how Enlightenment ideas moved through publishers, readers, police networks, and underground literary markets before 1789. His work asks how abstract ideas became socially and politically powerful in late 18th-century France.
Which Robert Darnton book focuses on banned books before the French Revolution?
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France, published in 1995, examines books that circulated outside official royal publishing controls. It shows how readers encountered political and erotic literature through smuggling and informal distribution.
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