Spring Reception/Talk

You are cordially invited to the Society's Spring reception and talk:

Historian Robert Darnton Discusses His Book:

THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER: Paris, 1748-1789

How Everyday Parisians Helped to Topple the Monarchy of Louis XVI

Thursday, April 4, 2024 | Union Club of Boston, 8 Park Street, 02108

6:00pm Reception

6:45pm Lecture and Q&A

7:30pm Book signing

Tickets cost $65 and include a glass of wine, beer, or soft drink.

Dress: Business Casual

There will also be a full cash (only) bar. The book will be on sale at the event at $45 (cash or credit).

The club is a one-block walk from the Green and Red Line stop “Park Street”. Parking is available at evening rates at the nearby Boston Common Garage, entrance at 0 Charles Street.

Please book online here by April 1st, or contact secretary@oxcamne.org with questions.

A 1794 gouache by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur depicting a republican feast during the French Revolution. Credit Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris

An excerpt from the November 4, 2023 New York Times Book Review:

The protest culture that arose in France in the turbulent final decades of the ancien régime has never left the minds of the Parisian citizenry, nor, one imagines, the mind of the Harvard historian and librarian emeritus Robert Darnton, who has newly chronicled it in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789.” In this illuminating study, he presents the outbreak of the revolution in Paris in 1789 as the culmination of 40 years’ worth of political scandals and cultural polemics, which — fueled by a barrage of real and fake news from a diverse range of sources — fostered in the public “a revolutionary temper that was ready to destroy one world and construct another.”

Dr. Robert Darnton is a cultural historic and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France. He was director of the Harvard University Library from 2007 – 2016.

Dr. Darnton graduated from Harvard University in 1960 and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. He earned a DPhil in history from Oxford University in 1964. He then joined the Princeton University faculty in 1968 where he was appointed Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982.

President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from 1987 -1991, he also served as president of the American Historical Association in 1999.