Of Brotherly Love and Other Odd Notions : THE KISS OF LAMOURETTE<i> by Robert Darnton (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 344 pp.) </i>

Robert Darnton daydreams about history the way other people daydream about taking a vacation or finding true love. He lets the heavy volume in his hands fall on his lap. He sleeps a little, until awakened by a kiss. Un baiser. He is in Paris in the late 18th Century. Revolution ravages the city. It could be a kiss of death, or a kiss of love, still lingering among the restless shades of past events. It is “The Kiss of Lamourette.”

On a summer day in 1792, Antoine Adrien Lamourette stood up to address his colleagues in France’s disharmonious Legislative Assembly. At a time of feverish criticism of the Revolution and renewed attacks on France’s fronts, Lamourette proposed that the assembly’s problems could be solved by more fraternit-- fraternite, or brotherly love. In surely one of the most improbable scenes from European political history, the deputies of the assembly rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing each other, as if their political differences could be so easily erased.

Lamourette, his contemporaries, and the French Revolution are the subject of the lead essay in this new collection of writings by the esteemed historian Darnton, whose last book, “The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History,” won the 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was chosen as one of the Best Books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. In the episode of “Lamourette’s Kiss,” Darnton sees the momentary triumph of the ideal over the real, at a time when life was being reconfigured so suddenly and violently that anything seemed possible.

As a scholar and writer, Darnton has a special gift for making these momentsflower like rare plants in the landscape. In “The Kiss of Lamourette,” we find him considering the periods he knows best--the 18th Century and the present--with particular interest in the French Revolution, the cultural history of books and communication, and in the writing of history itself. Most of the essays in this volume have been published previously in scholarly journals. The rest were written with the general reader in mind.

Darnton is a leading authority on the French Revolution, whose 200th anniversary is being celebrated this year with an outpouring of public parades, stately ceremonies, scholarly symposia and countless books and films about the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of feudalism, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. These things have little to do with what actually happened two centuries ago, though, as Darnton points out. The Bastille was almost empty and practically undefended on July 14, 1789. The feudal system had begun to break down before the revolutionaries announced its abolition. And the Rights of Man were swept away in the bloody Terror just a few years after they were proudly declared.

Perhaps “The Revolution” is just another hardy national myth. Even so, no one could deny that events around 1789 transformed the reality of everyday life. To begin with, time and space were redefined. The revolutionaries introduced the metric system and instituted the use of a new calendar. Revolutionary time began when the old monarchy ended, on Sept. 22, 1792, or the first of Vendemaire, Year I of the Republic. The week was recast to include 10 days. The days and months were renamed. Some revolutionaries even renamed themselves. After all, in those days was it not better to be Brutus Republique or Liberte Lebrun than a Louis or a Marie?

In the course of the Revolution, the familiar address tu replaced the formal vous. Divorce was made possible. The new Republic gave civil rights to Protestants and Jews. On the dark side, there were the atrocities directed by the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal, the September Massacres of 1792, the delirious violence of the Parisians themselves. If “The Revolution” is a myth, then these events still resound with reality.

To pay attention to events and dates and individuals is to take a controversial course among professional historians today. As strange as that may sound to some, a new wave of outspoken “avant-garde historians” has advocated the study of the “structure” of history. Some want to see the record of our past exclusively as “discourse.” Others have called for a death to “facticity” (a pretentious substitute for the perfectly good word factuality, but characteristic of the followers of French fashion in scholarship).

Darnton allows that the “new” history has something to teach the “old,” but that events, dates and individuals still are important. Once you begin to treat all of history as a text to be deconstructed, he warns, “soon you will be trapped in a maze of mirrors, lost in a semiotic wonderland, overwhelmed with epistemological jitters.” In an essay entitled “Let Poland Be Poland,” Darnton proposes a simple test. “Try telling a Pole that events don’t matter.” Try suggesting that it doesn’t matter whether the Germans massacred the cream of the Polish officer corps at Katyn in 1941 or the Russians in 1940, as official Polish history had it until recently.

Several of the essays in “The Kiss of Lamourette” are devoted to the variety of practices and interests of historians today and gathered in two impressive sections of the book called “The Lay of the Land” and “Good Neighbors.” In “The Lay of the Land,” Darnton writes about the fields of intellectual and cultural history, the social history of ideas, and the history of mentalities. In “Good Neighbors,” he considers history’s relation to anthropology, literature and sociology. For Darnton, “(the) most exciting and innovative varieties of history are those that try to dig beneath events in order to uncover the human condition as it was experienced by our predecessors.”

In his earlier work, “The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes of French Cultural History,” he tried to show why a group of printers in Paris early in the 18th Century thought a ritual slaughtering of cats was so funny. By working beneath the surface, “by getting the joke,” Darnton writes, he had “hoped to ‘get’ a key element in artisanal culture and to understand the play of symbols in cultural history in general.”

In a few of the pieces in “The Kiss of Lamourette,” Darnton considers the cultural history of the printed word and the printed word in our own times. Before becoming the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Princeton University, Darnton worked as a reporter for the New York Times. In the essay, “Journalism: All the News That Fits We Print,” he sketches a humorous sociology of the newsroom, where the managing editor reigns over a kingdom of desks. In “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature,” he looks at some of the rascally characters who, in making the works of Diderot or Voltaire or Rousseau available to the reading public, “made the business of the Enlightenment.” They usually did so according to a simple and effective, if unpoetic, maxim: “The best book for a bookseller is a book that sells.” “Publishing: A Survival Strategy for Authors” was written after Darnton served on the editorial board of Princeton University Press and offers a set of strategies and cautionary tales for authors seeking an academic publisher, while making good fun of the industry of scholars and scholarly publishing.

As Darnton tells us in his introduction, at least half a dozen of the essays in “The Kiss of Lamourette” were written for the “General Educated Reader”--”someone who exists somewhere out there, on the far side of the editors, producers and other cultural mediators who separate the author from the audience.” Indeed, anyone interested in books, and the way the printed word can shape and define a culture, will find an excellent introduction to their history in the essay, “What Is the History of Books?”

Darnton’s account of his experience at the New York Times will entertain anyone curious to know how the news is made at one of the most influential papers in the world. And anyone who has made or watched a television docudrama won’t be able to resist “Television: An Open Letter to a TV Producer.” Darnton wrote the letter after being asked to review a script for a show about Napoleon and Josephine. The script was full of many awful and gratuitous distortions of history, and Darnton’s letter leaves you feeling that the “docu” in docudrama is just a feeble appendage to the word.

In the essays, articles and reviews collected in “The Kiss of Lamourette,” Darnton ranges from the Terror to TV, but a rich intelligence lights up the varied terrain. As another critic has observed, he has “the inquisitiveness of a first-rate investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar and the sensitivity of a novelist.” On his beat among the vanished of centuries past, and even in his daydreams, Darnton discovers those moments that, however fleeting, help us make contact with the greater portion of the human race--those who came before us. Whether exploring the high plains of scholarly debate or the fertile lowlands of popular culture, he makes an excellent guide for all. You can refresh your pleasure in these essays if you’ve read them before. If not, making Darnton’s acquaintance will be a new joy.