Was the French Revolution inevitable?

In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve centre for transmitting information, gossip and rumours. If you wanted to know what was going on, all you had to do was ‘stand in the street [or garden] and cock your ear’. 

Throughout his brilliant career, which began in 1964 with a doctoral thesis ‘Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782-1788)’, Darnton has been cocking his ear to 18th-century debates, tracking ‘the flow of information at street level’.