The Tree of Cracow was a huge chestnut tree that stood in the northern part of the gardens of the Palais-Royal at the heart of Paris in the years before the French Revolution. Beneath its branches newsmongers gathered daily to dispense the news, ancien régime style, by word of mouth. It was part of an information system – a sort of 18th-century equivalent to social media – and much like its modern counterpart it bristled with rumour, speculation, conspiracy theories and questionable assertions. Under a regime that censored politics, religion and morals, the Palais-Royal occupied a privileged space. It belonged to the Duke of Orléans, a cousin of Louis XVI, and one of the wealthiest men in France. The precincts of the Palais-Royal housed shops, theatres, cafes, gambling dens, printing presses and sellers of books and pamphlets, but Orléans had jurisdiction over the site, which meant that the police could not raid its bookstalls or scour its cafes for undesirables. As the trade in clandestine books and unfettered news thrived, it became a centre for the exchange of ideas. And, in the late 18th century, it became the birthplace of the French Revolution.

No one is better placed to uncover this world and bring it to life than Robert Darnton, a historian who emerged from a background in journalism at the New York Times to write a series of pathbreaking studies on 18th-century literature and the cultural impact of the Enlightenment that have inspired a generation of historians. The Revolutionary Temper is the culmination of Darnton’s output and, like all his works, it is very readable. It reveals the reactions of ordinary Parisians to political developments, from the mid-18th century to the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Politics was the business of the king and his ministers, conducted behind closed doors in the form of power struggles between factions of rival courtiers, ministers and royal mistresses. For ordinary Parisians, excluded from the privileged world of Versailles, concrete information was lacking, sowing doubt and, therefore, speculation and wild rumour. Occasionally politics circumvented censorship – often with the connivance of disaffected courtiers – and spilled onto the streets of Paris.

Darnton provides a sweeping account of succeeding events from the Parisian perspective, encompassing disastrous wars, struggles over Enlightenment ideas, fights for religious toleration and crazes for all manner of new phenomena, such as hot air balloons and mesmerism. He reveals this story through evocative sources, including pamphlets, libel cases, judicial memoirs and songs – the latter particularly dangerous, because they reached down through every stratum of society, including the poor and illiterate.

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Marisa Linton is Professor Emerita of History at Kingston University. Her latest book is Terror: The French Revolution and Its Demons (Polity, 2021).