Poetry and the Police [is] the latest in [Darnton's] impressive probes into the popular culture of ancien régime France, its relation to the business of Enlightening, and, possibly, to the Revolution looming at the end of the century.Historians will continue to debate the relative force of the movements that undermined the ancien régime. Darnton's idiosyncratic and conspicuous achievement has been to supplement attention to the leaders of the Enlightenment with an attempt to uncover the less visible writings, the less audible voices.The historian as detective has for some time now been attached to uncovering what we today derive from surveys, questionnaires, and polls. At its best, as in Poetry and the Police , this microhistorical sleuthing is intellectually gripping and evocative of experiences that we thought were lost to historians. It is sometimes difficult to know how to fit all the small pieces together into the panorama of a society like that of eighteenth-century France, where we appear to encounter contradictions at every turn. Darnton, who masters both the intellectual and the material history of the Enlightenment--as he demonstrated years ago in The Business of Enlightenment (1979), on the publishing history of the Encyclopédie --doesn't in his new book aim for a grand narrative of how public opinion was constituted in 1749. He is content rather to be suggestive, to retrieve forgotten voices and tunes, and to tease out their pertinence to an understanding of a lost world.