55 pages • 1 hour read
Robert DarntonThe Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 6-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity”
Following the relative departure of the previous chapter, Darnton returns to his question of how ordinary individuals thought and behaved in 18th-century France. Here, he focuses on how they read. His guide in this process is Jean Ranson, a reasonably well-off merchant from La Rochelle, France, and a member of the bourgeoisie. Ranson is a strong case study because he left behind 47 letters written to his friend Frédéric-Samuel Ostervald, a Swiss book seller. While the utilitarian purpose of most of the letters was to order books from Ostervald, the correspondence also reflects Ranson’s reactions to various novels, sermons, essays, and other texts.
From both his letters and the specific book orders he submitted, Darnton determines that Ranson was a fairly pious individual. He was continually on the lookout for great new sermons, for example. At the same time, Ranson’s piety didn’t stop him from ordering The Encyclopédie. Also on the list of orders are two books that were forbidden by the church: Le Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France by Louis Petit de Bachaumont. This reflects that even very religious members of the bourgeoisie were at least curious about key texts of the Enlightenment, despite that movement’s broad antipathy toward religion. His letters also reflect how 18th-century readers, in the days before the mass production of books, cared nearly as much about the quality of the binding and the typography as they did about the quality of the writing.
Ranson held no author in higher esteem than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Though often associated with the Enlightenment and a contributor to The Encyclopédie, Rousseau had very different ideas about the role of the philosopher than Diderot and d’Alembert, leading to a break with the pair in 1758. Rousseau grew to regret the degree to which philosophy became fashionable in society circles, which he referred to as le monde. A religious man personally and a proponent of virtue in all forms, Rousseau came to view philosophy in 18th-century France as harmful to the everyday individual who lived outside la monde. It is for these readers—including Ranson—that Rousseau wrote, and his views on the relationship between writer and reader are considered by Darnton to be widely influential in the coming Romantic Era of the 19th century.
As a key example of this, Darnton highlights Rousseau’s 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse. An epistolary novel—meaning it takes the form of letters written between the characters—the book is presented as if the correspondence is real. While most readers are aware that the characters and story are strictly fictional, Rousseau’s presentation serves two purposes. First, it situates the book away from other novels of the day that Rousseau considered vulgar escapism targeted at the fashionable set. Second, it demands a leap of faith from readers, compelling them to consume the book almost as they would scripture. In Darnton’s words, “La Nouvelle Héloïse therefore required a new kind of reading, one that would succeed in proportion to the reader’s spiritual distance from Parisian high society” (231).
Rousseau’s approach also has the effect of breaking down the barrier between reader and writer in a way that runs counter to d’Alembert’s elevation of the philosopher-man to the height of the gods. This shows in Ranson’s appreciation of Rousseau, whom he calls “l’Ami Jean Jacques” (235)—“the friend Jean Jacques”—despite having never met him. From the frequency with which Ranson asks about Rousseau personally, Darnton safely assumes that Ostervald and Rousseau were at least acquaintances. In one 1777 letter in which he announces his impending marriage, Ranson describes the extent to which Rousseau’s writing has affected his views on marriage, going so far as to state that he will be a better husband thanks to Rousseau. In a letter from 1778, the year of Rousseau’s death, Ranson eulogizes the writer before he announces the impending birth of his first daughter, a sign of his priorities. He even named his third child Émile after the title character of one of Rousseau’s most celebrated works.
Ranson wasn’t alone in his adoration of Rousseau. When La Nouvelle Héloïse was published, it became an enormous hit. While statistics on book sales from that era are sketchy at best, Darnton states there’s a strong chance it was the best-selling book of the century in France. Beyond sales, what set the book apart from other novels of its era was the deep well of emotions it stirred in readers. Darnton characterizes the response as downright hysterical, and he quotes dozens of letters sent to Rousseau by fans, no less than four of which use the phrase “delicious tears” (243). Such adoring fan mail, directed at a writer no less, was a new phenomenon in Europe, and this cult of the author expanded in the 19th century, with literary celebrities like Lord Byron taking up the mantle.
Darnton closes the chapter by interrogating the theory that a reading revolution occurred in 18th-century Europe. In short, the theory states that readers evolved from intensive reading, in which they owned a small number of books like the Bible, which they read again and again, and adopted extensive reading, in which they consumed massive amounts of books on their own and in book clubs. While Darnton admits that there is some truth to these trends in a broad sense, he attributes them to a shift in how readers digested and interacted with books, a shift he credits Rousseau with initiating.
Conclusion Summary
In a brief conclusion, Darnton reiterates the value of taking an anthropological approach to history in which the behavior and attitudes of ordinary individuals are emphasized at least as much as the big societal upheavals and power exchanges. In doing so, one observes how attitudes often remain relatively stable during periods of great upheaval yet may shift dramatically during periods of stability. Darnton also addresses the shortcomings of his methodology, including a lack of hard evidence—particularly surrounding the formulation of folktales—and the risks of drawing broad conclusions from individuals whose attitudes may or may not be representative of the whole.
Chapter 6-Conclusion Analysis
While the featured player in the final essay is ostensibly Ranson, the true focus is on Rousseau. Rousseau occupies a unique and rather fraught place within the Enlightenment and the history of philosophy more broadly. His treatises on equality and the social contract were hugely influential among French revolutionaries—so much so that the Catherine the Great banned his work for fear that it would spark a similar revolution in Russia. At the same time, over the course of his life Rousseau became increasingly alienated from his Enlightenment colleagues and the concept of philosophy in general. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Rousseau’s own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion.” (Bertram, Christopher. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2018.)
Rousseau did not live to see the French Revolution. Yet with the above quote in mind, one can imagine him being appalled by the extent to which the Jacobin Club—the revolutionary political party responsible for killing 10,000 people during the Reign of Terror—adored his work.
For Darnton’s purposes, Rousseau serves to illustrate both his distance from Diderot and d’Alembert, and the ways his work transformed how readers consume literature. Regarding the first point, Rousseau personally rejected the atheism of many of his former Enlightenment colleagues. While he strongly argued in favor of religious tolerance—a concept considered profoundly impious in more conservative French circles at the time—he was a proponent of the Calvinism branch of Protestantism and credited it with reforming him morally and instilling in him a deep sense of virtue. Aside from the religious divide, the extent to which writers like Diderot elevated philosophy as an endeavor reserved for the intellectual elite was anathema to Rousseau. In characterizing this attitude, Darnton writes, “Philosophy itself had become a fashion, the ultimate in Parisian sophistication; and as it spread beyond Paris, it endangered the healthiest segments of the body politic” (230).
It is with this egalitarian attitude in mind that Rousseau wrote La Nouvelle Héloïse. In this, Rousseau uses his own literary strategy, which runs directly counter to the one employed by d’Alembert in The Encyclopédie. It is a careful balancing act, one that appeals directly to relatively unsophisticated readers without devolving into the notoriously lurid storytelling in demand among the literate and semiliterate underclass. The success of this strategy, Darnton writes, hinged on the public’s ability to adopt “a new kind of reading, one that would succeed in proportion to the reader’s spiritual distance from Parisian high society” (231).
While it is difficult to decisively substantiate Darnton’s broad claim that Rousseau transformed how people read, the fan mail excerpts offer strong evidence that there’s something singular about how readers responded to La Nouvelle Héloïse. The dramatic evocations of “delicious tears” (243) that emerge in the letters suggest that Rousseau’s willingness to descend from the lofty intellectual heights cordoned off by Diderot and others had a profound effect on readers. His technique caused readers to see their own identities reflected in both the characters and the author himself. In this collision of art and identity, one can sense the early rumblings of the fanboy/fangirl culture that exploded in the 21st century. This explosion was largely incited by social media’s enabling of individuals both to express their fandom as components of their identity and to connect directly to creators, illusory though these connections may often be. One can imagine these same letter-writers sending millions of tweets to Rousseau—though rather than sharing accounts of “delicious tears” (243), these messages would more likely express which characters they most “ship.”
The irony, of course, is that by forging a more lateral relationship with readers, Rousseau’s actions had the opposite effect: They elevated him to a status of cultish adoration. In an article in The New Republic, David A. Bell calls Rousseau “the world’s first celebrity intellectual”—although he certainly won’t be the last. (Bell, David A. “Happy Birthday to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” The New Republic. 22 Jun. 2012.) The 19th century saw the rise of other cultural celebrities, including poet Lord Byron and composer Franz Liszt, whose respective fandoms are described by contemporaries as “Byromania” and “Lisztomania.” For both Rousseau’s unfettered emotional candor—uncharacteristic among Enlightenment Era writers—and his ability to inspire rapturous responses from readers, Darnton makes a strong case that Rousseau is indeed the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era.
Finally, Darnton briefly interrogates the theory that a reading revolution took place in 18th-century Europe around the time of Rousseau. Coined by German scholar Rolf Engelsing, the reading revolution is said to have marked a shift from intensive reading to extensive reading. While pre-revolution individuals read a small number of books repeatedly, post-revolution individuals consumed a far larger number of books throughout their lives. While 19th-century economics and technology certainly allowed for the increased consumption of books, Darnton is not convinced that the style of reading changed on a wide scale in this manner. His contention is supported by a 2010 Atlantic article that identifies Cicero’s letters as an example of pre-modern extensive reading and Goethe’s hit book The Sorrows of Young Werther as an example of intensive reading in the post-Enlightenment era—to say nothing of the Harry Potter books today. (Carmody, Tim. “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books.” The Atlantic. 25 Aug. 2010.) While Darnton steadfastly argues that Rousseau demands a new kind of reading, he cannot say how widespread this shift is, confessing once again that his methodology is limited by issues of representation. That issue emerges for a final time in the conclusion as something of an asterisk that even Darnton believes should be applied to much of the book’s content.
