BOOKS: One hand clapping

THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE by Robert Darnton, HarperCollins pounds 25

25

ROBERT DARNTON has drilled a peep-hole into the extraordinary world of French illegal literature before the Revolution - a world where abstract philosophy and political theory rubbed shoulders with anti-clerical satire, utopian fantasy, political slander and pornography - and something of the clandestine and scandalous quality of the books he writes about has rubbed off on his. The experience this book offers is perhaps voyeuristic, but then, as Darnton shows, so were the secret tastes of 18th-century Frenchmen.

Although it is 30 years since he published a full-length study in English, Darnton, a professor of cultural history associated with Princeton, Paris and Oxford, is well known among scholars as a leader of his field. A witty and clever collection of essays published by Penguin, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, won him a wider audience. As might have been expected, then, this book was worth waiting for: it's imaginative, thorough and bold, and written with real flair. The only surprise, in fact, is that it is quite such fun.

You don't have to be Edward Gibbon to appreciate the importance of forbidden books in 18th-century France. At a time when there were no regular newspapers, no radio or television, books were immensely more influential than they are today; men did not just cry when they read Rousseau, they changed the way they dressed and thought, the way they led their lives. There is a case for saying that illegal books were especially important; schools, universities and churches helped in the propagation of orthodox views, but, as Voltaire understood so well, if your business was criticism or subversion there was nothing as effective as print.

Darnton has spent more than 30 years in the archives trying to piece together some picture of France's taste for the taboo. The task would be almost impossible if it were not for the survival of one great archive found in an attic 100 years ago: 5,000 letters and dozens of account books belonging to the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, a major publisher and wholesaler which supplied the French market from Switzerland (almost all the forbidden books were smuggled in from abroad). This is, admittedly, still a rather slim research base, but by supplementing the Neuchatel archive with registers of books confiscated in the Paris Customs, inventories of book shops made during police raids and catalogues from other Swiss publishers, Darnton has come up with a league-table of France's most popular "bad books" (or livres philosophiques as they were euphemistically known). It is, he maintains, probably as accurate as any of today's bestseller lists.

The list is full of surprises. At the top, it is true, stands Voltaire, the John Grisham of his day, and the leading names of the Enlightenment, Rous-seau, d'Holbach and Helvetius, make an appearance further down. But many of France's best- selling authors are now unknown, and most of its block-busters entirely forgotten. And just as unfamiliar as many of the book's titles are the genres into which they fall. There were, of course, works belonging to what Darnton describes as "the heavy artillery of the radical Enlightenment" - systematic defences of atheism and materialism like Delisle de Sale's Philosophy of Nature. But these were sold under the counter alongside libelles - scandalous accounts of the corrupt and wanton lives of the King, his mistresses and ministers; chroniques scandaleuses - rambling compilations of political gossip as told by a Turkish or English spy; and pornographic (often anti-clerical) stories, designed, as Rousseau put it, to be read "with one hand" - that is, for masturbation.

The categories, though, melted into one another, and the same stock figures appeared in nearly all the sectors of illegality: "lascivious monks, ruttish nuns, impotent bishops succumbing to venereal disease and lesbian abbesses surrendering to 'uterine fury' ". One of Darnton's aims, in fact, is to challenge the way historians think about the Enlightenment by drawing attention to the relation between its great works and other clandestine literature. Voltaire, as Darnton points out, contributed to almost every genre of illegality; Diderot and Rousseau both tried their hands at one- handed writing. And of course, the comparison Darnton wants to draw can work in two ways; if Diderot's The Nun can be set alongside the ever-popular La Fille de joie (Fanny Hill) as a sex book, Darnton also points to the radical philosophical and political component to many a bawdy tale.

Darnton gives the flavour of some of this literature by discussing three "bad books" in some detail. The Year 2440 is a Rousseau-esque utopian fantasy describing a Paris rid of poverty and luxury - perhaps the first utopia ever to be set in the future, it out-sold everything else; Anecdotes about Mme la comtesse du Barry tells the "true" story of the rise of the King's mistress from whoredom to riches (number two on the bestseller list and the Princess in Love of its day); Therese philosophe is a heady blend of pornography, Playboy feminism and deterministic materialism, much admired by the Marquis de Sade. All three must have been far more subversive than anything of which modern journalists are capable, and the last two at least still make good reading today.

We in Britain know first-hand how the steady drip of scandal can corrode the authority of a monarchy. It's hard to resist Darnton's argument that the whole corpus of forbidden literature, which he has so elegantly brought to light, played a major role in undermining the ancien regime.