Robert Darnton > Quotes

“News in not what happened but a story about what happened.”
― Robert Darnton

“The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.”
― Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre

“To eat one's fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite, was the principal pleasure that the peasants dangled before their imagination, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.
They [the peasants] also imagined other dreams coming true, including the standard run of castles and princesses. But their wishes usually remained fixed on common objects in the everyday world. One hero gets "a cow and some chickens"; another, an armoire full of linens. A third settles for light work, regular meals, and a pipe full of tobacco. And when gold rains into the fireplace of a fourth, he uses it to buy "food, clothes, a horse, land." In most of the tales, wish fulfillment turns into a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape. ”
― Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre

“By seeing the way a joke worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that missing element—laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh-slapping, rib-cracking Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar. ”
― Robert Darnton

“Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.”
― Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future

“... a reconstrução dos mundos é uma das tarefas mais importantes do historiador. Ele deve empreendê-la não por algum impulso estranho que o leve a escavar arquivos e folhear papéis velhos, mas sim porque quer conversar com os mortos. Interrogando os documentos, e lhes escutando as respostas, pode sondar as almas daqueles já se foram e dar forma às sociedades nas quais eles viveram. Se interrompêssemos todo contato com os mundos que perdemos, seríamos condenados a viver em um presente bidimensional, transformado em uma jaula temporal, e o nosso mundo mesmo se tornaria mais raso”
― Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

“Dress often serves as a thermometer for measuring the political temperature.”
― Robert Darnton