Yale University Library ‘The French Lawyer in London’; caricature of Charles Théveneau de Morande, 1774. Morande was a publisher of scurrilous pamphlets attacking King Louis XV, his mistress Madame du Barry, and high-ranking French nobles and officials. On his head are pamphlets with writhing serpents; in one hand he holds du Barry’s head and in the other a scale loaded with coins, representing money the French government paid him to destroy all copies of his Mémoires secrets d’une femme publique, another attack on du Barry. Some events refuse to wither and die in our collective memories. The French Revolution is one of them. It prompted admiration and loathing—many observers felt both at once—because it linked the dazzling new dreams of democracy, human rights, and universal education with the equally novel nightmares of the Terror and the inexorable guillotine. No wonder, then, that novelists and filmmakers still find the revolution rich in material and that scholars continue to wrestle over understanding it. These epochal events have always hovered on the edge of the historian Robert Darnton’s …