Robert Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian, recognized as a leading expert on 18th-century France.

One of his books, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1995.

In 1999 he was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, an award given by the French government, in recognition of his work. In 2004 he was awarded the Gutenberg prize by the International Gutenberg Society.

In 2005 he received an award for distinguished achievement from the American Printing History Association.

Works

Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France.

The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime.

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History.

Revolution in Print: the Press in France 1775-1800.

The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History.

(in French) Edition et sédition. L'univers de la littérature clandestine au XVIIIe siècle.

Berlin Journal, 1989-1990.

(in French) Gens de lettres, gens du livre.

The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France.

The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789.

George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century.

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future.

The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon.

Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

A rich and splendid book! ---Marghanita Laski.

A riveting portrait of French mentalités under the ancien régime.

The Great Cat Massacre (1984) is the subject of a scholarly work by American historian Robert Darnton, describing and interpreting an unusual source detailing the murder or "massacre" of cats during the late 1730s by apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris.

Darnton describes how, as the apprentices suffered hard conditions, they came to resent the favours which their masters gave to their cats, and contrived to deal with the nuisance cats by slaughtering them so as to distress their masters. Darnton interprets this as an early form of workers' protest.

Believing that historians should adopt anthropological methods in order to understand 'the otherness' of previous eras,Robert Darnton analyses a rich variety of sources,from grim peasant folklore to Enlightenment philosophy,in order to show not merely what men and women thought,but why they thought it.