Keywords
Intellectual History
French Revolution
History of the book
Abstract
From the History of the Book to the History of Communication, when, following Mornet, one tries to understand the origins of the French Revolution, and in particular the role of the “Enlightenment”, the two major approaches that emerged more than twenty-five years ago, one working through social history and the other through the philo-sophical analysis of ideologies, do not provide entirely satisfactory answers to the problem. Social transformations, which were taking place throughout Europe, are not in themselves sufficient to explain the peculiarity of the French case, while analyses of discourse perform a social decontextualization leading to excessive autonomy being ascribed to the specific symbolic efficacy of political and philosophical discourses. Between “ideas” and “states of society”, one has to take account of the modes of communication, in particular the specifie effects of communication through books, which developed strongly in the pre-revolutionary period and exerts a much stronger symbolic action than simple oral communication.
References
Bellanger, Claude; Godechot, Jacques; Guiral, Pierre y Terrou, Fernand, Histoire générale de la presse française, Vol. I., Paris, PUF, 1969.
Carrier, Hubert, La presse de la Fronde (1648-1653): Les Mazarinades. La conquête de l’opinion, Genève, Droz, 1989.
Darnton, Robert, Edition et sédition. L’univers de la littérature clandestine du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.
Dunn, John, The political thought of John Locke, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Foucault, Michel, L’ordre du discours, Paris, Collège de France, 1971.
Furet, François, “La ‘librairie’ du royaume de France au 18e siècle”, Geneviève Bollème (ed.), Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, París/La Haya, Mouton, 1965.
--------- Penser la Révolution française, Paris, Gallimard, 1978.
---------- y Ozouf, Mona, Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, Paris, Flammarion, 1988.
Lovejoy, Arthur, The Great Chain of Being. A study of a history of an idea, The William James Lectures, Boston, 1971.
Martin, Henry-Jean, Roger Chartier y Jean-Pierre Vivet (dir.), Histoire de l’édition française, Paris, Promodis/Cercle de la Librairie.
Mornet, Daniel, Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française. 1715-1787, Paris, A. Collin, 1933.
Pocock, J.G.A, Politics, Language and Time. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Sawyer, Jeffrey, Printed Posion. Pamphlet propaganda, faction politics and the public sphere in early seventeenth-century France, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.
Scarron, Paul, Oeuvres complètes, Genève, Slatkine reprints, 1970.
Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights Theories: Thier origins and development, Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1979.
Tully, James (ed.), Meaning and context. Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988.