Robert Darnton  

"The American cultural historian Robert Darnton, who specializes in the literary history of the French Enlightenment, made a study of banned books on the eve of the French Revolution. He opposes the prevailing view that there is a causal link between the spread of what we know as Enlightenment literature - namely by encyclopedists such as Rousseau - and the outbreak of the French Revolution. Darnton proves, on the basis of previously undiscovered bookkeeping accounts of a Swiss commercial printer that not the encyclopedists were the bestsellers of their time. That privilege was reserved for scabrous novels à la The Story of Dom Bougre, Porter of the Carthusians (1741), The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) by Diderot and Thérèse Philosophe (1748), novels which both embody enlightened philosophy, and also deal with the enlightenment in an 'embodied' fashion. These forbidden libertine books are sold 'under the counter' and pave the way for the French Revolution, to a greater degree than the Enlightenment canon. It is obvious that the ingredients of these forbidden books are 'light' versions of the Enlightenment ideals of the encyclopedists. It is unfortunate however that this amusing anarcho-erotic oeuvre was subsequently ignored and carefully excluded from our literary and political histories."--A History of Erotica (2011) by Jan-Willem Geerinck