Do Books Cause Revolutions? An Empirical Test of Darnton’s the Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France

Yu Sasaki, Kanazawa University

This paper is the first empirical investigation on a provocative hypothesis in the scholarship of the French Revolution: that eighteenth-century books critical of the ancien régime and banned for sale undermined its legitimacy and supported the revolutionary cause. In the 1995 monograph, Robert Darnton argues that antimonarchical books that were clandestinely sold played a crucial role in disseminating what the king perceived was the subversive idea. Darnton’s thesis has been controversial yet no empirical work has existed. In this paper, I fill this gap by creating a new dataset that digitizes Darnton’s corpus of the known 720 for­bidden books for the first time. The dataset features information about the date of publication, the number of copies and orders, and the name and location of dealers. Using the number of post-revolutionary émigrés and death sentences across different social groups as proxies for my outcome on the readers, I document evidence on the link between the diffusion of forbidden books and that of revolutionary supporters. My main finding is that illegal books are positively and significantly associated with emigration among nobles and clergymen but not the upper middle class or other groups. Death sentences are positively but not significantly correlated to illegal books. My analysis yields corroborating evidence on one of Darnton’s arguments that conservative elites were main consumers of the clandestine market. My finding is robust to inclusion of a host of covariates such as average literacy and the access to post offices that could constrain the spread of illegal literature. For an identification strategy, I show that major bookdealers are located far from the publishing house in Switzerland. This suggests that readership is not dependent on the distance to the publisher. My paper makes empirical contributions to the role of information in explaining major political changes like revolutions.

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