'In this illuminating study, he presents the outbreak of the revolution in Paris in 1789 as the culmination of 40 years’ worth of political scandals and cultural polemics, which — fueled by a barrage of real and fake news from a diverse range of sources — fostered in the public “a revolutionary temper that was ready to destroy one world and construct another.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/books/review/the-revolutionary-temper-robert-darnton.html