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Charles Walton

Assistant Professor

Office:    HGS 300-F

Phone:  (203) 432-1396

Email:    charles.walton@yale.edu

Links:    Recent Publications

 

Charles Walton received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.  His research focuses on Old Regime, Enlightenment, and Revolutionary France.  His prize-winning book, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: the Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech, explores the themes of honor, public opinion, and political violence.  It shows how freedom of expression became a contentious, radicalizing issue before and during the French Revolution.  He has recently edited a collection of essays in honor of Robert Darnton on print culture and the Enlightenment, Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (forthcoming). 

His current book project, From Eden to the Terror: Reciprocity, Rights, and Free-market Politics in the Age of the French Revolution, examines how cultural patterns of reciprocity changed in the transition from Old Regime absolutism to Revolutionary republicanism.  It focuses especially on the politics of gift-giving and patronage, free trade, and economic and social rights (as human rights). 

He is an associate researcher at the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française (Sorbonne) and a fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University.

Publications

Books

  • Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment. Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton (University Park: Penn State University Press, forthcoming), (edited)

  • Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: the Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)                  Winner of the 2010 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize of Yale University

     

Articles & Essays

  • “Les graines de la discorde: Print, Public Spirit, and Free-market Politics in the French Revolution,” in Walton (ed.), Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment
  • “De la liberté de la presse et de la responsabilité des écrivains: perspectives des philosophes pendant les Lumières,” Les intellectuels dans la cité: identités, sociabilités et fonctions intellectuelles, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Rouen: Presses universitaires de Rouen, forthcoming)
  • “La liberté de la presse dans les cahiers de doléances de 1789,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (jan-mars, 2006)
  • “Charles IX and the French Revolution: Law, Vengeance, and the Revolutionary Uses of History,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire, 4: 2 (1997)

Courses Taught

  • Old Regime France
  • The French Revolution
  • Europe 1500-1815
  • Terror in France (1560-1968)
  • The Enlightenment
  • The History of Free Speech (Britain, France, U.S.)
  • Human Rights in France
  • Gifts, Reciprocity, and Exchange in Early Modern France, 16th-18th centuries
  • The Evolution of Evil and Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

 

 

 
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