VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement/Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys

[Richard Romeo]

for a little perspective

from current ny review of books, review of Robert
Darnton's George Washington's False Teeth by Gordon
Wood:

"In a path breaking and much-cited article, 'The High
Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in
Pre-Revolutionary France', Darnton drew a distinction
between the heroic Enlightenment of the mid-century,
when risk-taking Voltaire and his allies shook the
power structure to its roots and the High
Enlightenment of the generation that followed the
famous philosophes during the last 25 yrs of the Old
Regime. By the time of this later phase, in the 1770s,
Darnton argued, Voltaire and the other philosophes had
lost much of their earlier critical edge.  They had in
some ways become tamed and domesticated by the
establishment..."

"Although they continued to criticize the Old Regime
and to fit bigotry and injustice to the end, they had
become identified with the fasjionable radicalism that
many of the nobility themselves were drawn to."

More interesting points:

"They (historians) needed to look at 18th century
literary life from the bottom up, not from the lofty
point of the philosophes in the salons and academies,
but from that of literary low-lifes and obscure
scribblers...


--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 24/2/04 8:45 AM, jbor wrote:
snip
> But after
> > she, and other betrayers like her, had brought it
> crashing down, these
> > causes were also lost. The '60s Youth Movement
> achieved nothing, or very
> > little, of its original agenda.
snip> 
> Part of the fault
> rests with Brock, and less directly, the regime; the
> bigger component of it,
> and what Brock recognises, is just how easily and
> readily the hippies and
> revolutionaries allow themselves to be exploited,
> and how quickly they turn.
> 
> best
> 


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