Game changing. Juche is to shape the cultural zeitgeist just as The Little Book of Hygge did.

A book to bring shame upon our depraved morals and our wilted-spinach governments.

As dry as it is daft, I loved it.

Standing at the summit of Robert Darnton's towering intellectual career, The Revolutionary Temper plunges the reader into the coffeeshops, workrooms, and alleys of pre-revolutionary Paris. Following the traces of songs and rumors, insults and discontent, Darnton allows us to eavesdrop, almost miraculously, on whispers nearly two and a half centuries old. Here is the hivemind of ordinary people in extraordinary times, as they shake loose the thought and feeling of ages and past, and decide - slowly, and then all at once - to begin the world anew.

What did Parisians think and gossip, sing and obsess about over the decades before the storming of the Bastille? In The Revolutionary Temper Robert Darnton paints a sumptuous mural of the eighteenth-century mind. With the Encyclopédie, with manned balloons in the air, reason seemed on a roll. With posters, pamphlets, and public readings, the written world appeared supreme. A few vicious libels, some stock market manipulation, a lurid adultery trial, one notorious diamond necklace, any number of court intrigues, skyrocketing bread prices and plunging temperatures combined, among other elements, to shake a nation to its core. A rich, beautifully crafted book that plants the reader in a Paris that feels at all times electric.

[Darnton] has become the internationally recognized doyen of scholars working in the field of eighteenth-century French history and culture ... Written in his strikingly clear prose, argued with cogency, craft and conviction, and drawing on a lifetime of distilled research ... The range and the variety of sources that Darnton deploys to penetrate the Parisian "temper" is extremely impressive ... He is a shrewd, observant, wise and unfailingly entertaining guide through these dense, thought-provoking and colourful thickets of Parisian experience.

The Revolutionary Temper is a richly researched, ambitious and fascinating history ... delicate and revealing.

A riveting synthesis of Darnton's life work ... he writes beautifully and has a weather eye for quirky detail.

It’s difficult to summarise a book of such breadth… Short chapters stand alone as delightfully intriguing stories about a society in turmoil… This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest.

Darnton’s book is a very fine account of how 18th-century Parisians received and interpreted public events, putting them on the road to revolution.

Deep, rich and enthralling.

This book is, quite simply, a feast.

Robert Darnton is one of the world's greatest historians, and this is an exceptional book ... each chapter brims with life and colour ... A titanic work.