The Poor Devils
The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton (Belknap Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
In 1784, there were approximately 2,819 French authors scribbling away, most of them unable to feed themselves by the pen. They wrote all kinds of things, from theology to philosophical tracts to scandal sheets to plays to pornography. They got no royalties for their work and were sometimes imprisoned by the authorities. Voltaire, the most successful French author, described the garret dwellers as les pauvres diables, poor devils. Robert Darnton has been researching and writing about these “Rousseaus of the gutter” since the 1970s. The Writer’s Lot is the fruit of his exhaustive research and a reflection on what Darnton has previously written about them.
The Writer’s Lot begins with a long, reflective introduction. In 2024, the Institute for Advanced Studies asked Darnton to evaluate his early work and its influence on the field. He turned to a 1971 article, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” which put forward ideas now conventional about the role of pre-Revolutionary writers, especially the “Rousseaus of the gutter,” in stirring up the sentiments that started the French Revolution. Now, in 2025, Darnton does not reject the central ideas or all the arguments, but he does consider some of his statements more asserted than founded and some of his conclusions too strong. Of course, now, in 2025, he also has decades’ more research to support many of those claims and a much more thorough understanding of the lives of the pre-Revolutionary poor devils.
We know that the “war of words” and pamphlet culture were very important in preceding the French Revolution, but how many writers did France have and how did they live? Over the years, Darnton has discovered and read thousands of pages about and by all kinds of French writers 1750-1800. France had a growing population of writers at that time, perhaps doubling between 1757 and 1784, according to contemporary accounts. A “writer” was classified as anyone who had published a book, at any point, so there were not necessarily 2,819 actively writing, but there were many writers writing, quite often. Most were indeed poor devils, as almost no one could make their living by their pen. Darnton estimates that the marketplace could perhaps support only “three dozen” writers.
One strength of The Writer’s Lot is the encyclopedic knowledge it reflects. As much as Darnton has been a pioneer in work on “mentalities,” he has also clearly mined the sources for figures and data. The Writer’s Lot is a valuable source for age and career demographics of France’s writers within the time-period, as well as geographic concentrations. This book is rich in qualitative and quantitative data. No living person knows more about the lives of French eighteenth-century writers and Darnton puts the information to good use in supporting his conclusions. At the same time, Darnton suggests that the more he studies the time-period and the more he knows, the more he attributes to “contingency, unforeseen consequences, miscalculation, and sheer accident, such as the hailstorm in the Paris region of July 13, 1788.” The Writer’s Lot, then, is an extremely well-researched short book with very well-supported conclusions, which reflect Darnton’s belief in contingency and the humility of an esteemed historian in his emeritus era.
What was it like to be a Rousseau of the gutter? Darnton employs a biographical approach to reveal the experience. We are familiar with the rich and famous Voltaire, but most of us probably know very little about the tier below him—which was essentially everyone. Darnton focuses on the careers of André Morellet, Baculard D’Arnaud, and Pierre-Louis Manuel. As we learn from these lives, success depended on patronage, from certain figures and in the form of government positions and allowances. It was not enough to be a good writer, one needed to circulate in the right salons, and, ultimately, have a source of guaranteed income. Those who relied on their writing to feed themselves were often pursuing downward mobility. Almost any writer could produce either serious prose or satire or even pornography, and many produced all three depending on their interests and financial needs. Any of the three could also land one in prison, which could add to prestige and reputation if it was the Bastille, but did not good at all if it was anywhere else, which could happen. Many people may have been going to plays and reading pamphlets, but the minds behind those works could still easily die penniless.
Were these Rousseaus of the gutter all opponents of the monarchy and destined to be sans-culottes? Darnton informs us that the term “sans-culotte” was considered in that era to have originated as an insult about a poor writer who died in 1780, Nicholas Gilbert, teased as “Gilbert le sans-culotte” because “he was so poor that he could not afford decent clothing.” Some poor devils did become Jacobins when the time came, perhaps in part because of their resentment and frustrated ambitions. But not all.
One of the most interesting parts of The Writer’s Lot is Darnton’s illumination of the ideological camps among writers. In certain respects, all the pre-Revolutionary writers may be assumed to have something in common with their shared grievances about authoritarian governmental control and the lack of freedom of the press. All were subject to imprisonment and seemingly arbitrary governance. However, most writers fell into camps best defined by Voltaire and Rousseau. Those who favored wit and satire were more closely aligned with Voltaire and the philosophes. Those who favored sentiment and moralizing aligned more with Rousseau. These two camps could be very different.
While we may think of the French Revolution as caused by the Enlightenment and, therefore, philosophe-friendly, Darnton outlines the ways in which successful pre-Revolutionary writers and philosophes were not always welcome in the Revolution. As the political tide turned, the world of writers turned over and many fortunes were reversed. Philosophes and many satirical writers were considered conservatives and threats to the Revolution, especially by the Jacobins, who included many of the more sentimental and previously less successful writers. The “Republic of Virtue” that the radicals wanted had little room for satire, or nuance, and Darnton has examples of writers whose works were misunderstood when judged by revolutionary tribunals. Rousseau was against civilization and many of the Jacobins shared his desire to take down all that represented it, which included refined writers and the world of academies and patronage.
The Writer’s Lot explores the political minefield for authors during the Terror through the biographical lens. The sections on each of the writers he follows are gripping and you can easily imagine each of the figures meriting an entire biography of their own. For example, Pierre Manuel was a writer and pamphlet distributor who profited from the publication of the Bastille archives, became a prominent Jacobin, held political office, voted for the execution of the king, and ended up guillotined himself in 1793 as a suspected traitor. Morellet underwent some harrowing interviews and hearings and seems to have survived partly by luck. His life was endangered by the inability of others to understand his work. His previous financial success was also considered grounds for suspicion.
The Writer’s Lot pairs nicely with Darnton’s 2024 book, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789. That book examined the scandals and the sentiments that brought Paris to the edge of revolution through developing a temperament for revolution. In The Writer’s Lot, we see the experience of writers in that milieu, where they played an important role, and we see how their world shook during the Revolution. Darnton does not assign writers the role of triggering the Revolution, but he thinks their experience illustrates “the cultural revolution at work in the French Revolution, a force propelled by the fusion of print and politics. The poor devils from the old world of letters provided much of the energy that made this combination so explosive.” His analysis is not only sound, but fascinating and relevant to the study of other revolutions.
The only seeming limitation of The Writer’s Lot is the fact that Darnton has written it with limited ambitions. It is clear he has many more case studies which could have been included and has much more to say about the Revolution, but this book “is meant as an essay, not a treatise—that is, as an attempt to try out an argument, to interpret a familiar subject in an unfamiliar light.” Despite not being as exhaustive as possible, The Writer’s Lot succeeds in Darnton’s goal of describing the experience of the writing life of the time and its relationship to the Revolution.
The Writer’s Lot will also be a useful read for those interested in the Terror, professionally or casually. Those with an interest in the world of books and print culture will especially enjoy this book.
Robert Darnton is one of the reasons that we have book studies. His work is a textbook example of what history can be. He uses language that anyone can understand, backed by rigorous historical methods and time spent in the archives, and founded on answering serious historical questions. This book is no departure from his strengths. It is tight, engaging, and worth the read for a number of audiences.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
