ABSTRACT
“Do books make revolutions?” This is the enigmatic question with which historian Roger Chartier concluded one of the chapters of his book, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Chartier 1990: 98). And, in so doing, he opened a rich vein of research about the role of ideas in history and their impact on reality. He did not believe that books and their reading have consequences: “certainly not, if we want to admit that books do not have the effectiveness attributed to them and that the deepest disorders of ways of being are not the immediate result of clear and manifest thoughts” (Chartier 1990: 159). The outbreak and course of a revolution involve too many things for a book, however important (from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto to Lenin’s What is to be Done), to be the trigger – “the precipitating factor” MacIver termed it – or the decisive element that made the difference.
