Anempiricaltestofrobertdarnton

Do Books Cause Revolutions? An Empirical Test of Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France* Yu Sasaki† This version: March 22, 2020 Preliminary; comments welcome Abstract This article is the first empirical test of Robert Darnton (1995)’s thesis that illegal books clandestinely circulated contributed to the French Revolution. The provocative argument has spawned a vibrant industry in historical research but quantitative studies have not been offered. I do so by constructing a new data set that digitizes all 720 illegal works in Darnton’s published corpus. Using the number of émigrés and deaths sentences as my proxies for the Revolution, I show that the diffusion of illegal books has a positive and significant impact on nobles and clergymen who fled from France but not those who received death sentences. My findings are robust to a host of covariates that could determine diffusion and the two revolutionary outcomes. My analysis implies that an information revolution in which technological progress allows for a fast and inexpensive transmission of information could facilitate a political revolution. *I thank Takayuki Kubouchi for his able research assistance. Financial support from the Joint Usage and Research Center Programs, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University (IERPK1917) is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are mine. †Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University. E-mail: [email protected]. See yusasaki.squarespace.com for the most updated version. Introduction In the spring of 2011, a wave of mass mobilization and regime change in the Middle East and North Africa has made scholars reconsider the causes of political revolution. In this cascade of events, digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which are facilitated by mobile technologies, particu- larly the smart phone, appeared to play a critical role in not only sharing information about protests but also communicating among like-minded individuals. An “information revolution,” in which technological progress allows for a faster and cheaper transmission of information, seems to have made possible hitherto hard-to-imagine transformations such as political revolution (Howard and Hussain 2013). In response, incumbent autocrats take advantage of the digital media to fine-tune their public image and take greater control over the flow of political information (Guriev and Treis- man 2019). Authoritarian states have since made a substantial investment in systematic methods to monitor online communications to both undercut dissent and minimize occurrences of mobilization (King and Roberts 2013, 2017; Mattingly 2019; Qin and Wu 2017; Roberts 2018). I argue in this paper that the first incident that information revolution led to political revolution is not 2011 but 1789 in France. As in the twenty-first century, fin-de-siècle France saw the flourish- ing of the book market deemed to be illegal by the king. Many readers were political and social elites who were supposedly the ones to benefit the most from the preservation of the existing regime. The historian Robert Darnton is the first to advance this idea. Darnton argues that the diffusion ofthe literature on political libel, which is forbidden by the state yet is clandestinely published and circulated, spread the idea of the desacralization of the monarchy and progressively won support among the elites. When the state faced political instability, those who subscribe to it left the state vulnerable to a revolution. Darnton’s thesis is distinct from the existing hypothesis on the causes of the French Revolution in the historical literature in that the previous scholarship tends to regard most if not all intellectuals as espousing antimonarchical and anticlerical views and as willing agents to channel them through the general population in support of a regime change (Darnton 1995b, 171). Darn- ton’s diffusion hypothesis offers two advantages: one is to provide a mechanism that focuses on the market of underground literature; another is to allow for variation in the geographical distribution 1 of progressive individuals by taking forbidden books as a proxy. Darnton’s provocative argument leaves no doubt about its impact. His 1995 monograph, along with the published corpus of 720 illegal books that underlay it, was so pathbreaking that it has spawned a niche industry in intellectual history and the history of the book and print to evaluate the extent to which forbidden bestsellers shapes the political culture of prerevolutionary France and caused the Revolution (Barker and Burrows 2002; Mason 1998; Rigogne 2007; Walton 2011). Crit- ics contend that Darnton’s preoccupation with scurrilous literature does not substantiate his claim that it left as strong a mark on Enlightenment (Mason 1998). Contemporary historians of the book seek to widen the scope of the role of the clandestine market in the social and intellectual history of early-modern Europe. Seaward (2014), for instance, illustrates how the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a prominent Swiss printer-wholesaler located in Neuchâtel, won support and protection from government agents. Curran (2013) puts the STN publications, from which Darn- ton draws heavily for his database and argument, in a broader, pan-European context by taking advantage of the recent digitization project on the STN’s book trade.1 The Darnton thesis that the diffusion of illegal books—hence ideas—triggered political change has not been investigated quantitatively. Though it has piqued strong interest among historians in the relationship between books, print, and their impacts on various social and political outcomes including the French Revolution, no studies exist to test Darnton’s thesis empirically. Books are tangible objects and relatively easy to quantify in terms, inter alia, of author, price, place of publication, and the number of copies and orders. Diffusion—and its impact on a political outcome—are harder to capture, because of the illicit nature of the market. I fill these gaps by constructing a new data set to test specifically the Darnton thesis. Anem- pirical investigation entails the quantification of outcome and explanatory variables that hitherto remain undigitized. I start by digitizing the database of all 720 illegal books in Darnton (1995a) with respect to the date of publication and the number of copies and orders. Then, as I explain in more detail in the Empirical Strategy section, I use the known location of twenty cities housing 1The project is The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) that digitally maps the circulation of books printed and sold at the STN (Burrows et al. 2014). 2 major booksellers and the variation in the geographical distance between these cities and recipient cities to construct a measure on the diffusion of these books. For the outcome variable, I employ two measures that provide insights on elites whose life course dramatically altered in the wake of the French Revolution. The first is the number of people who emigrated from France. Those who expected their postrevolutionary life to be worse off and believed that they would be victimized, including ancien-régime elites such as nobles and clergymen, left the country en masse. The second is the number of people who received death sentences in the postrevolutionary tribunals. These tar- geted primarily pro-monarchy individuals to persecute their past actions in the “Reign of Terror” (la Terreur). Donald Greer documents these incidents in great details in separate volumes (Greer 1951, 1935). Scholars have already taken advantage of the émigré data to address whether the flight of these elites affected economic performance (Franck and Michalopoulos 2017). The “terror” data has yet to be quantified and used in an empirical analysis for the first time. In this paper, I first discuss the social environment in which the publication business was orga- nized in France and the clandestine market developed. This section draws primarily on Darnton’s earlier works to illustrate how customers place an order of illegal books and how these commodities were distributed under the risk of police confiscation. Second, I describe in detail a new data set with a focus on the construction of the outcome and main explanatory variables. Since much of the data on the core idea of illegal book diffusion and its impact has not been quantified, I document the breadth of the data from chronological and geographical perspectives. Descriptive data corrobo- rates Darnton’s contention that the underground market flourished especially in the late eighteenth century in terms of the number of titles, their orders, and their volume. Third, statistical analyses find that the diffusion of illegal books is positively and significantly associated with the emigration of the nobility and clergy. Other categories, such as the upper middle class and all-inclusive groups, give no systematic results. By contrast, illegal works have a positive but not significant impact on death sentences across different categories when covariates are included. My analysis provides statistical evidence for Darnton’s argument that main customers of the clandestine market are those elites who supposedly work to preserve the ancien régime. This evidence is robust to inclusion of 3 a host of covariates, such as the geographical distance to Paris, literacy rates, and economic growth measures. My selection of covariates mitigates major threats to identification.

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