The Books That Brought Down an Empire : Fascinating history of an all but forgotten literature : THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE, <i> By Robert Darnton (W.W. Norton: $27.50; 464 pp.)</i>

From the storming of the Bastille to the bloody end of Robespierre and his sanguinary reign of virtue and political correctness, the story of the French Revolution has been told time and again. But in this fascinating history of an all but forgotten literature, Robert Darnton casts light on a shadowy subculture that helped inspire these familiar events.

The illegal books published in the last years of the Old Regime ranged from futuristic novels and pornographic stories to “secret biographies” of the rich and famous told in a kind of lascivious Technicolor. It is Darnton’s thesis that these “forbidden bestsellers” informed the readership of the 18th-Century French public at least as much as the great books by great writers that have traditionally been credited with enlightening and subverting France’s ancien regime.

Thus, works by Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot are shown in the popular readership of the time with such now forgotten books as “Therese Philosophe,” “Memoirs About the Affair Between Father Dirraq and Mademoiselle Eradice,” and “The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One.” All these books--the lofty-literary, the philosophical and the lowly pornographic--were lumped together and sold by the pre-Revolutionary dealers of forbidden books.

Livres philosophiques was the term used in the underground trade to designate books that would have been condemned to burning had they not been printed, peddled and sold away from the censors’ eyes. Except for those books given the official stamp of approval, the line between what was deemed legal and illegal was blurry. Books which the censors saw as “undermining the authority of the king, the Church or conventional morality” were the target of confiscation and public burning, but obviously tons of atheistic, deistic, salacious and pornographic titles passed from the booksellers to the public right down to the eve of the 1789 Revolution.

In addition to vividly conjuring up these lost, forgotten works from the limbo where so many popular books reside, and splendidly depicting how they were published and distributed, Darnton raises the question of their influence. What, if anything, did they mean to the reader of that time, other than a pleasant way to spend some time? And how do we avoid the error of assuming that we, readers without the powered wigs, react to books just as they did?

Darnton’s interest in what the pre-revolutionary French made of what they read traces back to his essay on Rousseau’s writings in his classic study of French cultural history, “The Great Cat Massacre.” Rousseau’s impact was not difficult to assess, for his writings provoked outpourings of ecstatic letters and reviews.

But it is one thing to analyze public reaction to a prominent literary figure and quite another to discover what the French really thought about a secondary and supposedly tawdry literature, some of which was read, as Rousseau reportedly said, with one hand. Much, then, of what Darnton suggests about the reader’s response to the non-canonical literature is supposed through a study of the shifts in the general social and political climate, in popular opinions of the moment, and in the forbidden books themselves.

While not going so far as to propose that the forbidden books brought down the monarchy, Darnton takes the evidence to read that they were part of the living network of the culture’s sentiment, both shaping and expressing public opinion. What he finds in the literature is a growing disaffection from the monarchy from the time of Louis XV, a disaffection which by 1789 led some to lose faith in the legitimacy of the monarchy itself.

Books mocking the monarchy or illuminating its real or imagined sexual exploits had been published, of course, well before the 18th Century. But the uniquely subversive nature of the pre-revolutionary crop could be seen clearly in such vastly popular books as “Anecdotes sur Mme. la Comtesse du Barry.” Purporting to be a true history, “Anecdotes” belonged to that sub-category of forbidden books called libelles , or those works dealing with the affairs of the “kingdom, beginning with the king himself, and working their way down through ministers and royal mistresses to the common run of courtiers.”

Libelles were, in effect, slander and lie in the guise of inside story or secret history. “Anecdotes” traced the rise of a ravishing prostitute from the brother to the bed of Louis XV, who, until du Barry entered it, was impotent and sexually disaffected. The story of a courtesan’s career itself was not shocking; the sexual adventures of the court even less so. But damaging to the prestige of the monarchy itself was the book’s insistence that Louis XV and his policies were controlled and corrupted because of the sexual wiles of a vulgar, ignorant “nobody,” herself manipulated by degenerate courtiers into seducing the besotted king to sign away the throne’s wealth, ruin the state and leave them to squander it as they pleased.

As Darnton says, “Telling stories about the sex lives of kings was not seditious in itself . . . they demonstrated royal virility,” and since the women they conquered were themselves noble, they provided noble sport. “Du Barry was a whore. As the libelles insisted, anyone could have had her for a few pennies before she was let loose in Versailles. Many did, including the lowest of lackeys. Instead of demonstrating the prowess of the king, she stood out in the libelles as a symbol of his feebleness and, worse, of the degradation of the throne.”

It’s worth mentioning that by 1781, just a few short years after the Du Barry book saw print, libelles more virulent and vicious circulated, attacking not a low born but a woman of high birth and a Queen. In these accounts, Marie Antoinette was depicted as sexually depraved, a lesbian, an orgy lover and a seducer of her own 11-year-old son. The increasing irreverence of the libelles seems to mirror the change in French public sentiment from discontent with the monarchy to disgust with it, a disgust that made it all the more easy to execute that “inhuman pervert,” the Queen. Darnton himself does not make this linkage; while the “Anecdotes” were revolutionary, he writes, they neither foretold nor “promoted anything like the French Revolution. They attacked the legitimacy of the Bourbon monarchy at its very foundation.”

Whatever the relationship between the forbidden books of pre-revolutionary France to the atmosphere that finally exploded into revolution, we are left with the books themselves, as they now are returned to us under Darnton’s immense and lucid scholarship. In his preface, he expresses the rather modest hope that some of these bestsellers be read for their intrinsic merit and not just as documents of cultural history.

Judging from the extracts of three of these forbidden bestsellers--”Anecdotes,” “Therese Philosophe” and “The Year 2440”--I would say Darnton’s taste is as elegant as his scholarship. “Therese,” and “The Year 2440” each offend in different ways and easily fit into the categories of the subversive and the corrupting, perhaps even today: “Therese,” not only for its place in a recognizable pornography terrain, but also for the novel’s profund anti-clericism; “The Year 2440” because of its comparison of a 21st Century enlightened, humane France with the oppressive and unjust one in which the author actually lived. These books beckon us beyond their period call; they are beautifully written, as they come to us in Darnton’s own engaging, dream-like translations.

Darnton’s book is a revelation and a delight. Read him and you will understand the true meaning and value of humanistic scholarship, of the way it opens windows to worlds closed down by time.