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Interview with Robert Darnton Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert Darnton ASECS at 50: Interview with Robert Darnton Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert Darnton Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 53, Number 1, Fall 2019, pp. 21-29 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2019.0039 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/737989 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Bond / Interview with Robert Darnton 21 ASECS AT 50: INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT DARNTON Elizabeth Andrews Bond Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus at Harvard University. He earned his A.B. from Harvard University and his B.Phil. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After graduate school, he worked as a reporter for The New York Times. Darnton joined the faculty of the Department of History at Princeton University in 1968, where he worked for forty years. He became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University in 2007. He has served as president of the American Historical Association (1999) and the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1987). Darnton is a member of the French Legion of Honor, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and an awardee of the Institut de France’s Del Duca World Prize in the Humanities. Darnton is well known as a leader in the field of cultural history. Cultural history as an approach emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, as historians engaged with new theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches that equipped them to move beyond the study of elites. Darnton was among a group of historians who embraced critical theory and cultural anthropology to study the Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France. His books on cultural history include The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), which has been translated into eighteen languages, and The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1991). Robert Darnton has worked as a groundbreaking scholar in the history of the book. Over the course of his career, he has studied authors and readers, but also the numerous and fascinating middlemen who mediated the world of print: Elizabeth Andrews Bond is Assistant Professor of History at the Ohio State University. © 2019 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 53, no. 1 (2019) Pp. 21–29. 22 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 1 the publishing houses, the printers and their apprentices, the agents, smugglers, peddlers and retailers, and the censors and police. His scholarship has enabled historians to understand the connections of such figures to one another, and to limn their engagement with broader intellectual currents, as well as state and market forces. He visualized this complex system of interaction within a “communications circuit,” a model he first proposed in 1982 in his article, “What is the History of Books?” In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, he has written more than a dozen books, which include: The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995), The Case for Books (2009), The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010), Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010), and A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (2018). Darnton’s work has profoundly shaped the way historians today understand the world of print and communication in the eighteenth century. Our conversation began with a discussion of Darnton’s recollections of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the 1970s and 1980s and his perspective on the field of eighteenth-century studies today. The discussion then turned to his experiences and influence on the field of eighteenth-century studies through his research and his leadership in the digital projects, Gutenberg-e and the Digital Public Library of America. Elizabeth Andrews Bond: You have worked in a range of leadership positions over your career, including on the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Executive Board (1976–1980), and as President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), which held its Enlightenment Congress in Budapest in 1987. What are your recollections of ASECS from that period, and of the 1987 Congress in particular? Robert Darnton: As I recollect (but my memory is blurred and tinted around the edges with shop talk), ASECS was founded in the wake of a private steam ship, which took the participants of the first Enlightenment conference late at night in July 1963 from the château de Chillon on Lac Léman to Geneva. Theodore Bes- terman masterminded the affair. He had published the first of the 107 volumes of Voltaire’s correspondence seven years earlier from his Genevan headquarters, and he inspired the succession of international conferences that took place at different sites every four years after the founding event in Geneva. They led to the creation of national societies of eighteenth-century studies, beginning with France in 1964 and the U.S. in 1969. I missed the Genevan extravaganza, but I heard all about it from Robert Shackleton, who then was one of my tutors at Oxford. Drawing on his inexhaustible energy and entrepreneurial spirit, Besterman set eighteenth- century studies on a course that was both international and interdisciplinary. It has remained so ever since. I began serving on the Board of ASECS in 1976, the year of Besterman’s death. By then, few of the American members had ever encountered him, and other senior scholars set the pace in the field, but there was a French focus in many of our activities. Perhaps it resulted from the concentration on Voltaire and the Bond / Interview with Robert Darnton 23 other famous philosophes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot. At that time, eighteenth-century studies crystallized around great men and great ideas. Women, except for a few salonnières, hardly existed, and the ideas came well packaged in great books, as we had studied them in the Arthur Lovejoy tradition of intellectual history. Notions of discourse, idiom, intertextuality, and episteme were nowhere to be found, except in remote corners of the Left Bank unknown to most of us. Another characteristic of eighteenth-century studies as practiced in ASECS was the dominance of literature as opposed to history, the fine arts, philosophy, and the social sciences. Most of our members came from departments of English and Romance Languages, yet they usually approached their subjects from a historical or philosophical perspective. I think a survey of all the papers given at ASECS meet- ings would show a continued commitment to interdisciplinarity—an appropriate approach to a century when most academic disciplines had not yet taken shape and when cultural life spilled over national as well as intellectual boundaries. Nationalism certainly had no place in our deliberations. Yet much friction developed between the American and the French societies, particularly at meetings of ISECS and in discussions of subjects like the payment of dues. At the ISECS meeting in New Haven in 1975, one prominent American dix-huitiémiste reportedly took off his coat and invited his French counterpart to a fight in the street. Perhaps this kind of conflict led to my election as vice-president (and president-elect) of ISECS in 1983. As a Francophile and a member of both the French and American societies, I was in a position to restore an entente cordiale. By 1987, when I began to serve as president, the climate had changed, in part because of the thaw in the Cold War. The international conference took place that year in Budapest—for the first time in a country located within the Soviet em- pire. During the previous summer, Roland Mortier, the great Belgian scholar who then was president, his wife, and I drove from Brussels to Budapest to help prepare for the conference. I remember how Roland was seized with fear when we crossed the border: the hostility of the customs agents, the mirrors placed under the car, the surrender of our passports. But when we arrived in Budapest, passports duly stamped, the sun came out. Our host, Béla Köpeczi, a dix-huitiémiste who spoke fluent French, was minister of education. He served us the most stately dinner I have ever eaten: waiters standing at attention, Ancien Régime style, behind each chair, keeping our glasses full with astonishing Tokays. A year later, everything was sunshine. I left the conference in the hope that we dix-huitiémistes might contribute something, however modest, to ending the Cold War—not that I ever dreamt it would end within my lifetime. Bond: One particularly rich aspect of Eighteenth-Century Studies as a journal is its publication of research informed by various interdisciplinary perspectives, from a wide range of geographic vantage points. How has this expansive approach at the journal, at ASECS, and ISECS opened up unique possibilities for scholarly conver- sations? In light of your work with this organization, what emerging approaches and questions have you found to be especially influential for eighteenth-century studies? In light of your experiences, what is most exciting to you about where eighteenth-century studies as a field is going? 24 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 1 Darnton: In 1988 I received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create an East-West Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Under the auspices of ISECS, we would bring together ten young dix-huitiémistes from Eastern Europe and ten from the West. The best applicants would be selected by a jury of experts and would write papers, which would circulate in advance.
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