There are few events that have set the terms of Western politics more than the French Revolution. Socialists and liberals claim it as their legacy and the far right sees it as the moment in which traditional authority was irrevocably shaken. It is an event that is impossible to discuss from a neutral viewpoint even 225 years on.

The French historian François Furet’s classic study of the fall of the ancien régime, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), defended the counterrevolutionary view that the Terror of 1793–94 was the natural conclusion of the process set in motion in 1789. Written during the Cold War, it was clearly motivated by a keen desire to discredit the idea of a revolution that communists in the twentieth century were attempting to emulate. Seventy-three days after the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin danced in the snow outside the Winter Palace to celebrate the fact that his own experiment had lasted longer than the Paris Commune. For socialists in the last century, a clear line could be drawn from 1789 to 1917 via 1848 and 1871.

Robert Darnton’s latest monograph, The Writer’s Lot, fits into a long tradition of thoughtful liberal writing on the Revolution that sees the event as giving rise to democratic and authoritarian ideas. Darnton’s book doesn’t seek to offer an overarching explanation of the events of 1789. Instead, he is concerned with his own previous understanding of the destruction of the ancien régime. In an influential 1971 paper entitled “High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” he offered a now classic account of the origins of the Revolution, which he saw as emerging, at least in part, from the literary subcultures of eighteenth-century France. Fifty years on, Darnton has set out to show that things were a bit more complicated.

In this early work, Darnton drew a parallel between prerevolutionary Paris and London. “Grub Street” was the name for the distinct milieu of hack writers who lived on the fringes of literary life in Britain’s capital, but the Harvard historian argued that it had its French counterpart. These were men shut out of the system of privileges, patronages, and sinecures, which the world of salons provided. They therefore had to subsist on hack work of various kinds. And it was this swelling population of writers — which starting from the 1750s flooded Paris and were subsequently satirized in Voltaire’s Le Pauvre Diable (The Poor Devil) and Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) — that provided the real breeding ground for Jacobinism and gave intellectual ammunition to its revolt against the ancien régime, Darnton claimed.

After all, much like their idol Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many prominent revolutionaries including Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre got their start as journalists and would-be playwrights. The term “sans culotte,” much like the genius quip “Rousseau du ruisseau,” literally, “Rousseau of the gutter,” was first coined as an insult for those indigent writers living in garrets and unable to afford decent clothing. Their writing was a combination of outright libels, pornography, and what Darnton wittily describes as political tracts “more seditious in tone than logic.”

Darnton’s 1971 article concluded with the statement that the true spirit of the Revolution resided among this crowd of scribblers and hustlers:

The crude pamphleteering of Grub Street was revolutionary in feeling as well as message. It expressed the passion of men who hated the Old Regime in their guts, who ached with the hatred of it. It was from such visceral hatred, not from the refined abstractions of the contented cultural elite, that the extreme Jacobin revolution found its authentic voice.

More than fifty years on, Darnton’s view on his earlier position has somewhat changed. In The Writer’s Lot, he chalks up his youthful exuberance to the influence of E. P. Thompson’s “history from below” and his own fascination with the world of muckrakers and reporters. “There is an aggressive, anti-elitist tone to my early writing as if at times I were a sixty-eighter, protesting in the streets.”

The Writer’s Lot, then, is Darnton’s attempt to reckon with the sixty-eighter within himself and ask whether what he wrote in the heat of youth and political conviction still holds up to historical scrutiny. Chastened, he avoids sweeping generalizations and sticks close to the primary sources and documents.

The book’s two central chapters, “The Facts of Literary Life” and “Contemporary Views,” tackle the rise of the writer in prerevolutionary France. During that period, the number of authors increased more or less threefold in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks in part to the influence of figures like Voltaire and Rousseau, who had made themselves into celebrities. This applied significant pressure on France’s clientelist system. Though Louis XVI’s kingdom enjoyed the reputation of being a republic of letters, it was a feudal state through and through, defined by the hierarchies that went along with that social order.

A lucky few, by means of significant string-pulling, eventually made it into the rarefied milieu of salons and got access to its byzantine web of pensions and favors. The vast majority, however, languished at the edges, hustling hard while harboring resentment, which seeped into the anti-system, insouciant tenor of their writings.

Darnton shows how this state of affairs gave rise to ideological polarization that pitted supporters of Voltaire against disciples of Rousseau. This split would later inform the anti-intellectual, populist positions of Robespierre and other left-wing Jacobins.

Although both camps abided by the myth of the philosophe, or independent freethinker, the elitist world of prerevolutionary France divided society into insiders and outsiders. The former celebrated being part of a fashionable clique, championed the virtue of politesse — basically, the ability to be a man about town — all the while mocking the losers of the social game. La canaille de la litterature, the scum of literature, was one of Voltaire’s favorite putdowns for those excluded from the rarefied world of salons.

Rousseau, on the other hand, provided consolation to the left behind, his philosophy told them that they were lucky to not be part of a venal corrupt, vapid system in which bootlicking trumped talent.

One such reject was Pierre Manuel (1751–93), a writer who, on the eve of the Revolution, was barely making ends meet as a small-scale entrepreneur at the fringes of the book trade. Soon after the Revolution he struck gold by chancing upon until-then-secret records of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille. He turned these findings into half-salacious, half-denunciatory accounts of the abuses of the ancien régime, which brought him money, fame, and expedited his rise through the ranks of the Jacobin Club, the most famous faction during the Revolution. During the Terror, Robespierre and his supporters would accuse him of harboring counterrevolutionary sentiments for which he would be taken to the guillotine.

André Morellet (1727–1819) was another such hack swept up by the Revolution. A member of the writers’ society that helped to produce Diderot’s famous Encyclopedia, he amassed wealth and privileges by turning into a “hired gun” for anyone willing to pay for his services. But toward the end of The Writer’s Lot, we find Morellet pining for the good old days of the ancien régime when pensions would fall down like “plums.”

Darnton’s account does a great deal to shed illusions that the budding fourth estate of the prerevolutionary era was made up entirely of radical revolutionaries. Grub Street was hardly a homogenous bloc of Jacobins in the making, as he seemed to suggest in “High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France.”

At the same time, The Writer’s Lot convincingly doubles down on the claim that the cutthroat, competitive milieu in which this reserve army of hacks and scribblers moved made them uniquely placed to take advantage of the disorder and uncertainty that the French Revolution produced. In order to survive in Grub Street, they had to become experts at scheming and rabble-rousing, they knew what games to play to get what they wanted. Many of them then became the Revolution’s foot soldiers and propagandists, even if sometimes all they really wanted was to get a commission out of it.