Issuing one more call to enter my giveaway for three paperback copies of Alexis Hall’s delightful The Affair of the Mysterious Letter!

I have drawn the pentagram (gone to the library), lit the candles (located the designated notebook and put it on top of the pile), burned the incense (arranged all the relevant books I bought last year at the top of my desk), and the demon is upon me. I read thirty pages of a library book. I order four more books by the same author off a used books website. I read sixteen pages of the library book. I one-click two ebooks which I hope might elucidate an unrelated question which occurred to me during the introduction. I read five pages of the library book. I vanish down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, cursing my inadequate French all the while. I read an unrelated news article in French to reassure myself that I haven't totally lost all my language skills.

My research process is frankly garbage and involves having hundreds of open tabs in my browser, notebooks all over the house, hundreds of ambiguous sticky notes, and a truly irresponsible book-buying budget. I do not think methodically! I am not a methodical person! I rarely start reading a research book knowing what I want to get out of it, and take notes haphazardly, on things which seem like they could be fun worldbuilding details (European fireworks in the 1700s only came in orange and included flaming ground displays, which were, as you can imagine, extremely hazardous), relevant historic benchmarks (throughout the 18^th century, Parisians felt that 8 sous was the “just” price for a standard four-pound loaf of bread, and when the price went over 13 sous per loaf they often started riots), stuff which isn't relevant at all but which delights me (a controller general with the given first name Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste), and a bunch of other, vaguer things, like songs, phrases from journals and newspapers, and transcripts of speeches, which give me some sense of what a person living through these events might have felt, and what part of that feeling might have survived generations to reshape the culture of their children.

When, for example, did the average French person start feeling as though a king wasn't something an all-powerful god had imposed upon them, but a regular human who was subject to the justice of the masses?

(Finding out specific, plot-relevant facts, like “what ships and merchants were moving between England and France in 1820” tends to get delayed to some unknown later date.

The library book I'm currently working through this messy process with is The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, by Robert Darnton, a scholar of 18th-century book culture. The book tries to trace the shifts in French public opinion over the course of the century which led to the Revolution. (He notes that prior to 1789, the word “revolution” had no connotations of violence.) Darnton, being a books guy, looks at the works published in these years, tracing which ones were banned (done at that time by giving them to an executioner to ceremonially burn, quel horreur), their prices and what that implied about which audience was able to read each work, and their reviews by various literary magazines and in personal journals and letters. He's a good storyteller and carefully chains historical anecdotes together in a compelling tapestry of eighteenth-century life centered on, but not exclusive to, Paris.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the book so far is that I may be forced to retire my longstanding (and admittedly unfair; I just don't like Candide) dislike of Voltaire. It seems that he not only wrote about principles of religious tolerance, but actually acted on those principles in the service of other people. In 1762, he started a campaign of letter-writing to exonerate Pierre Calas, an elderly man who had been wrongly accused of murdering his son and then tortured to death by authorities in Toulouse. The story put about the courts was that Pierre, a Protestant, had killed his son for wanting to convert to Catholicism.

The real story was that his son, Marc-Antoine, known to be a depressive, had died by suicide. However, in the religious climate of France at the time, when Protestants had limited civil rights and were regarded with suspicion and contempt, the family made a promising target for persecution. The rest of the family was also implicated as conspirators in the death of Marc-Antoine, which forced Pierre's widow into impoverished seclusion in Paris and his other sons into hiding in Switzerland. Voltaire's letters were aimed at allowing Calas' family to return to their lives in Toulouse. He was eventually successful in 1765, when the king evoked the case, forcing the Tribunal of Toulouse to declare the family innocent. The king awarded the family a significant pension in recognition of their suffering.

Voltaire, a noted atheist, wrote a defense of religious tolerance after the Affaire Calas, entitled the Traité sur la tolérance, which ends with a banger of a prayer, addressed to an Almighty who he admittedly did not believe in:

Thou did not give us hearts to hate each other and hands for us to slit our throats. Let us help one another to mutually bear the burden of a painful, fleeting life.

I am not one for hero worship, and Voltaire was a complex dude, but I am thinking a lot about what the public reception (extremely supportive, at least in Paris) of his fierce defense of mutual understanding and respect meant about how things were changing on the ground for ordinary people. I saw a post today from a fellow writer in Minneapolis who is still raising money to pay rent for people affected by the violent ICE raids over the winter. I do not think the vast, interlocking network of community members we saw mobilized over the winter has gone anywhere. After all: it was not so many months ago when we saw tens of thousands of everyday Minnesotans turn out in frigid winter weather to demand mutual understanding and respect for their neighbors (which is not to downplay the Angelenos, New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and members of hundreds of other communities doing the same work in less cinematic numbers.)

The 18^th century left us with scant records of those regular folks; we are left to infer what they thought from records of popular songs, book sales, and the journals of the more literate and well-off. And yet: those records are a powerful testament.

(If you are thinking: “Huh, I'm sure Sharon isn't drawing any irresponsible parallels between the increasing despotism of the French government and the increasing rage of the French people in the mid-1700s and the current political situation of the United States,” hey! Welcome new reader!)

This research is for the project you probably think it's for, if you've been subscribed to my newsletter or reading my fiction for any length of time. But in case my motivation to work gets scared and runs away, I am not invoking its true name. I will say that I started my research the January before last, and have already sent quite a few newsletters on relevant topics: the Haitian Revolution; the linguistic complexities of Haiti; the development of modern French cooking; restaurant kitchens in the early 1800s; tropical starches; the chemistry of blue cheese; and queer love between men in the 19^th century. Enjoy!

If you’d like to read my writing elsewhere, consider hitting up one of my recent reading journal blog entries, or my most recently released book, The King in the Forest.

Best,

Sharon

P.S. What thing have you most recently fallen down a rabbit hole while researching?