The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
. . . & Angry Young Men Today

2,079 words

Robert Darnton
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985

Historical dissident literary and artistic movements that have had an impact on the political realm are worth studying. One such example is the literary underground in pre-Revolutionary France. In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, historian Robert Darnton advances the thesis that dissident writers and publishers played an important role in undermining the ancien régime. There are some striking parallels between the political climate in eighteenth-century France and that of the present.

Darnton’s book is unique in that it studies France’s literary underground from the perspective of the flesh-and-blood men who occupied it, as opposed to the state. Since most dissident writers wrote anonymously, the evidence attesting to their existence is minimal, and most of it is state documentation. However, Darnton was able to access the untouched archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), an underground publishing house in Switzerland, which contain thousands of letters written by eighteenth-century dissident writers and clandestine booksellers and smugglers. His investigation of the STN’s papers has yielded a fuller, more human picture of these men and the challenges they faced.

The impetus for the creation of a literary underground was the combination of two factors: a surplus of young men with intellectual ambitions, and state censorship and bureaucracy. Rising literacy rates and the cult of the philosophe that emerged in eighteenth-century France prompted many young men from the provinces to flock to Paris in search of literary fame. They found themselves unable to penetrate France’s increasingly ossified cultural institutions and become members of the intellectual elite (le monde). Instead, they were consigned to the margins of society. Meanwhile, members of le monde were subsidized by the government. Every major cultural institution — the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, etc. — was backed by royal privileges. Even books bore privileges, and the booksellers’ guild suppressed unprivileged books. Non-guild members “could not even sell old paper without facing a 500 livres fine and ‘exemplary punishment’” (p. 186). It was difficult for up-and-coming writers to overcome these bureaucratic hurdles if they lacked the right connections. One could liken the ancien régime’s complex web of privileges to today’s elite universities, which similarly stifle innovation and use their institutional power to prop up the status quo.

The monopoly of privileged books gave way to a vast, decentralized underground that contained several levels and encompassed everything from philosophical treatises to pornography. The situation was such that many young writers struggled to succeed in the mainstream literary world even if their works were not all that radical. The suppression of even relatively inoffensive literature had the ironic effect of radicalizing writers who perhaps might otherwise have become respectable philosophes. Forced to find employment in Paris’ underworld, they nurtured “a deep, visceral hatred of a regime whose corruption had spread into their own inner beings” (p. 118). The grim reality of the life they led was a far cry from the lofty status they had been promised as aspiring men of letters. (It was also a downgrade for them, as most of them came from bourgeois backgrounds.)

In retaliation, these young men — whom Darnton collectively terms “Grub Street” (after a street of the same name in London where struggling writers lived) — penned polemical tracts, pamphlets, novels, etc. skewering the regime. Their attacks on the aristocracy were vicious and unsparing. Accusations of sexual impotence and/or deviance appear to have been a recurring theme. The elites’ supposed sexual vices were portrayed as a symptom of their corruption. It is noteworthy that the men of Grub Street upheld traditional morality. They resented having been cast into an underworld of pornographers and prostitutes and having been denied the chance to “serve humanity honorably in Voltaire’s church” (p. 36).

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One aspiring writer whose ambitions were crushed by the state was Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who “had done everything a young writer should do” yet had to contend with failed investments, poverty, the suspension of his journal’s privilege, and ultimately imprisonment in the Bastille on suspicion of having written provocative pamphlets (p. 42). There is an ongoing debate as to whether these circumstances compelled him to agree to become a spy for the police out of desperation; Darton argues that he probably was a spy. Whatever the case, men like him were not strangers to odd jobs.

Darnton also mentions the case of a certain abbé Le Senne, a writer whose works no longer survive and whose name would have been lost to history had it not been for his extensive correspondence with the STN. Le Senne “pounced on any sustenance he could find”; in addition to being a writer, he was an energetic participant in the illegal book trade (p. 114). He led an itinerant lifestyle and at one point was pursued by the police, who seized his manuscripts in a raid.

Darnton discusses the STN’s smuggling operations in detail, which gives one an appreciation for how difficult it must have been to be a distributor of dissident books prior to the Internet. It required a great deal of coordination, shrewdness, and tolerance for risk. In the words of one smuggler:

We have risked liberty, life, health, money and reputation.

Liberty, in that without the intervention of friends, we would have been locked up by lettre de cachet.

Life, in that we have had several encounters with customs agents and have forced them, weapons in hand, to return confiscated crates (at one point they had twelve from your firm, which                 otherwise would have been lost without hope of recovery).

Health: how many nights have we spent, exposed to the most intemperate weather, on snow, fording flooded rivers, sometimes even on ice!

Money: what sums have we not spent, on various occasions, both for smoothing the way for shipments and for avoiding prosecution and calming spirits?

Reputation, in that we have come to be known as smugglers. (p. 183)

According to the records of one bookseller associated with the STN, the works that were in the greatest demand in the underground book market were libelles, or pamphlets that attacked public figures. Dense academic treatises, such as those by Enlightenment philosophers, were not so popular. The clients of this bookseller were more interested in books such as Les Fastes de Louis XV, which accuses the King of wasting state finances on prostitutes, or Des Lettres de cachet et des prisons d’État, a sensationalistic account of the author’s experiences as a prisoner in the Bastille. Prison memoirs stoked the public’s animosity toward the state and “helped create a political mythology that made many Frenchmen feel they were slaves” (p. 145).

Libelles and chroniques scandaleuses, the forerunners of today’s gossip magazines, provided the public with unfiltered accounts of the events of the day. Mainstream, privileged journals avoided political subjects, creating a vacuum that was filled by the underground press. These personal attacks on public figures were particularly effective because of the personality-centric nature of court politics. The libellistes did not merely criticize the monarchy; they desacralized it and “severed the sense of decency that bound the public to its rulers” (p. 206). They did not explicitly set out to foment a revolution, but their writing described a society that was so depraved and corrupt that it could only be destroyed. The state grasped the threat posed by the libellistes and kept secret files on them.

Darnton’s thesis cannot be conclusively proven because it is difficult to pin down the reading habits of eighteenth-century Frenchmen or trace the impact of underground literature. Nonetheless, it is compelling based on the limited evidence we have. Enlightenment philosophers contributed to the Revolution by undermining the authority of the Church and state, but they were not its sole progenitors. Voltaire, for instance, was more interested in winning over elites — and establishing himself in high society — than launching a full-blown revolution. His successors were comfortably ensconced within le monde and were hardly revolutionaries. By the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had “lost its fire and [become] a mere tranquil diffusion of light, a comfortable ascent toward progress” (p. 15). While philosophes “grew fat in Voltaire’s church, the revolutionary spirit passed to the lean and hungry men of Grub Street” (p. 40).

The men of Grub Street were essentially the shitposters of their day, in more ways than one. Darnton devotes a chapter to the STN’s printers, who, like today’s anons, developed their own jokes, slang, and rituals reminiscent of vaudeville and street theater. On one occasion, two apprentices staged a mock execution of cats to spite their feline-loving masters, which resembled the “burlesque public executions” that would occur during festivals such as Mardi Gras (p. 165).

If Grub Street can be compared to shitposters, one could also liken the eighteenth century’s court politics to the reality TV spectacle that is modern American politics. This explains why Trump and the Alt Right’s vaudevillian humor was so effective. In an era in which politics is characterized by raucous, populist blood sports, adopting some of the trappings of vaudeville and street theater is a worthwhile strategy.

Libellistes and shitposters resemble the court jesters of yore, who would ruthlessly parody their superiors and plead innocent by virtue of being insane. This maneuver comes at a cost, as it effectively exiles one from humanity and removes the constraints on one’s darker impulses. This is illustrated in Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau, a philosophical portrait of a brilliant jester-like outsider:

By perceiving his degeneration with such merciless clarity, and by accepting it, Rameau’s nephew renounced his humanity. He sacrificed his soul for his stomach. And the sacrifice hurt, because he knew that he had destroyed the most essential part of his self. (p. 120)

Because of this, the court jester has an affinity with the criminal. Grub Street attracted its fair share of unsavory characters. A weakness of the clandestine book trade was that it “operated on the ineffective principle of honor among thieves” (p. 132). Darnton goes as far as to argue that the industry “suffered more from the debtors and swindlers within its own ranks than from the police” (p. 124). (Sound familiar?)

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Thus, building a movement of marginal young men is a dangerous game. But it is also a necessary one. The resentment of angry young men is a powerful weapon, and has been the driving force of every mass movement in history. In order to win, we will eventually need a mass movement, and this will require mobilizing angry young white men and stoking their resentment and fears (such as the aforementioned prison memoirs).

Perhaps due to my conservative past, combined with my innate aversion to humanity’s baser instincts, I have always been instinctively wary of the politics of victimhood and resentment and have been of the mindset that attracting angry ne’er-do-wells would drag down the movement and create an anti-social climate repulsive to ordinary white people. I have begun to reconsider this. Ultimately we cannot build a mass movement without appealing to resentment. People who are motivated by abstract ideals and principles are in the minority. The prospect of avenging personal grievances is more capable of galvanizing the average person into action. The fact that such a person might not be a principled White Nationalist is irrelevant. Grub Street’s hatred of le monde was more personal than ideological, but their actions led to political results. Indeed, the fact that their motivations were largely personal was precisely why they were so impassioned.

It is true that the politics of victimhood and resentment is attractive to people high in dark triad traits, since they are more likely to see themselves as victims (hence the high incidence of psychopathology one observes on the radical Left). If these types are channeled in the right direction and do not occupy central roles, however, they can be useful, and the more problematic ones can be weeded out.

None of the above negates the importance of circulating ideas and pursuing a metapolitical strategy, which is necessary in order to lay the foundations for a mass movement and give direction to populist impulses. It could be said that Enlightenment philosophers laid the Revolution’s metapolitical foundations, even though they were not the ones who enacted it.

In discriminating against young middle- and working-class white men in college admissions, pursuing anti-white/anti-male hiring policies, making it harder for the average young man to find a good wife, and dismissing and silencing white men’s concerns, the Left has unwittingly created the perfect conditions for a populist rebellion led by angry young white men. This is a gift that we should exploit.