Reviews for Le dix-huitième siècle et l'antiquité en France (1680-1789)

The average rating for Le dix-huitième siècle et l'antiquité en France (1680-1789) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-10 00:00:00 Gina Holub I'm almost done with this book. It's a series of essays about French-American intellectual exchanges in the 18th century. Darnton writes in such a lovely style, it's almost as fast a read as a novel. I'm interested in the whole aspect of Enlightenment ideas that these guys -- Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and Rousseau, Voltaire, Bayle, and many others whom I had barely heard of, used as the basis of the democratic movement they were working on. Of course, the democracy they were building didn't always include a very wide range of people. Slaves, workers, and women, for example, were not considered worthy. Darnton examines the biographies of these organizers, and how their life stories influenced their views of the world. I'm writing this without the book in front of me, but I am enjoying it. They called it the Republic of Letters, which actually involved writing lots of letters...

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-24 00:00:00 Patrick Mccolley This book is a collection of essays on the Enlightenment era of the 18th Century. Of particular interest is Chapter 2, which deals with "news networks" in 18th Century Paris. Newspapers as we know them didn't exist and anything of that character would in fact have been illegal. So how did people learn about what was going on? Darnton's history, pieced together relying on administrative and police records of the era, is fascinating. Every person working in the news business would benefit from this essay.