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Presidential Address
An Early Information
Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris
ROBERT DARNTON
Standing here on
the threshold of the year 2000, it appears that
the road to the new millennium leads through Silicon Valley. We have
entered the information age, and the future, it seems, will be
determined by the media. In fact, some would claim that the modes of
communication have replaced the modes of production as the driving
force of the modern world. I would like to dispute that view.
Whatever its value as prophecy, it will not work as history, because
it conveys a specious sense of a break with the past. I would argue
that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and
that communication systems have always shaped events.1 |
1 |
That
argument may sound suspiciously like common sense; but, if pushed
hard enough, it could open up a fresh perspective on the past. As a
starting point, I would ask a question about the media today: What
is news? Most of us would reply that news is what we read in
newspapers or see and hear on news broadcasts. If we considered the
matter further, however, we probably would agree that news is not
what happened—yesterday, or last week—but rather stories about what
happened. It is a kind of narrative, transmitted by special kinds of
media. That line of reasoning soon leads to entanglement in literary
theory and the World Wide Web. But if projected backward, it may
help to disentangle some knotty problems in the past.2 |
2 |
I would
propose a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense
of events and transmitted information about them, something that
might be called the history of communication. In
principle, this kind of history could provoke a reassessment of any
period in the past, for every society develops its own ways of
hunting and gathering information; its means of communicating what
it gathers, whether or not it uses concepts such as "news" and "the
media," can reveal a great deal about its understanding of its own
experience. Examples can be cited from studies of coffeehouses in
Stuart England, tea houses in early republican China, marketplaces
in contemporary Morocco, street poetry in seventeenth-century Rome,
slave rebellions in nineteenth-century Brazil, runner networks in
the Mogul Raj of India, even the bread and circuses of the Roman
Empire.3 |
3 |
But
instead of attempting to pile up examples by roaming everywhere
through the historical record, I would like to examine a
communication system at work in a particular time and place, the Old
Regime in France. More precisely, I would ask: How did you find out
what the news was in Paris around 1750? Not, I submit, by reading a
newspaper, because papers with news in them—news as we understand it
today, about public affairs and prominent persons—did not exist. The
government did not permit them. |
4 |
To find
out what was really going on, you went to the tree of Cracow. It was a large, leafy chestnut tree, which
stood at the heart of Paris in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. It
probably had acquired its name from heated discussions that took
place around it during the War of the Polish Succession (1733–1735),
although the name also suggested rumor-mongering
(craquer: to tell dubious stories). Like a mighty
magnet, the tree attracted nouvellistes de bouche, or
newsmongers, who spread information about current events by word of
mouth. They claimed to know, from private sources (a letter, an
indiscreet servant, a remark overheard in an antechamber of
Versailles), what was really happening in the corridors of power—and
the people in power took them seriously, because the government
worried about what Parisians were saying. Foreign diplomats
allegedly sent agents to pick up news or to plant it at the foot of
the tree of Cracow. (See Figure 1.) There were several other nerve
centers for transmitting "public noises" (bruits publics), as
this variety of news was known: special benches in the Tuileries and
Luxembourg Gardens, informal speakers' corners on the Quai des
Augustins and the Pont Neuf, cafés known for their loose talk, and
boulevards where news bulletins were bawled out by peddlers of
canards (facetious broadsides) or sung by hurdy-gurdy
players. To tune in on the news, you could simply stand in the
street and cock your ear.4
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Figure
1: "L'arbre de
Cracovie," c. 1742. The Tree of Cracow as depicted in
a satirical print. The figure of Truth, on the far
left, pulls on a rope to make the tree go "crack"
every time something false takes place beneath it.
According to the caption, the falsehoods include an
innkeeper who claims he does not water down his wine,
a merchant who sells goods for no more than what they
are worth, a truthful horse dealer, an unbiased poet,
etc. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
(BNF), 96A 74336.
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But
ordinary hearsay did not satisfy Parisians with a powerful appetite
for information. They needed to sift through the public noise in
order to discover what was really happening. Sometimes, they
pooled their information and criticized it collectively by meeting
in groups such as the famous salon of Mme. M.-A. L. Doublet,
known as "the parish." Twenty-nine "parishioners," many of them well
connected with the Parlement of Paris or the court and all of them
famished for news, gathered once a week in Mme. Doublet's apartment
in the Enclos des Filles Saint-Thomas. When they entered the salon,
they reportedly found two large registers on a desk near the door.
One contained news reputed to be reliable, the other, gossip.
Together, they constituted the menu for the day's discussion, which
was prepared by one of Mme. Doublet's servants, who may qualify as
the first "reporter" in the history of France. We don't know his
name, but a description of him survives in the files of the police
(and I should say at the outset that police archives provide most of
the evidence for this lecture—important evidence, I believe, but the
kind that calls for especially critical interpretation): He was
"tall and fat, a full face, round wig, and a brown outfit. Every
morning he goes from house to house asking, in
the name of his mistress, 'What's new?'"5 The servant wrote the first
entries for each day's news on the registers; the "parishioners"
read through them, adding whatever other information they had
gathered; and, after a general vetting, the reports were copied and
sent to select friends of Mme. Doublet. One of them, J.-G. Bosc du
Bouchet, comtesse d'Argental, had a lackey named Gillet, who
organized another copying service. When he began to make money by
selling the copies—provincial subscribers gladly paid six livres a
month to keep up with the latest news from Paris—some of his
copyists set up shops of their own; and those shops spawned other
shops, so that by 1750 multiple editions of Mme. Doublet's
newsletter were flying around Paris and the provinces. The copying
operations—an efficient means of diffusion long after Gutenberg and
long before Xerox—had turned into a minor industry, a news service
providing subscribers with manuscript gazettes, or nouvelles à la
main. (See Figure 2.) In 1777, publishers began
putting these nouvelles into print, and they circulated as
the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la république
des lettres en France, a bestseller in the underground book
trade.6 |
6 |
Anecdotal
as they are, these examples show that news (nouvelles)
circulated through several media and by different modes—oral,
manuscript, and print. In each case, moreover, it remained outside
the law. So we also should consider the political constraints on the
news. |
7 |
This is
a rich and complicated subject, because research during the last
twenty years has transformed the history of early modern journalism.7 Simplifying radically, I
would insist on a basic point: information about the inner workings
of the power system was not supposed to circulate under the Old
Regime in France. Politics was the king's business, "le secret du
roi"—a notion derived from a late medieval and Renaissance view,
which treated statecraft as "arcana imperii," a secret art
restricted to sovereigns and their advisers.8 |
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Figure
2: A group of
nouvellistes discussing the news in the
Luxembourg Gardens. Courtesy of the BNF, 88C 134231.
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Of
course, some information reached the reading public through journals
and gazettes, but it was not supposed to deal with the inside story
of politics or with politics at all, except in the form of official
pronouncements on court life. All printed matter had to be cleared
through a baroque bureaucracy that included nearly 200 censors, and
the censors' decisions were enforced by a special branch of the
police, the inspectors of the book trade. The inspectors did not
merely repress heresy and sedition; they also protected privileges.
Official journals—notably the Gazette de France,
Mercure, and Journal des savants—possessed royal
privileges for the coverage of certain subjects, and no new
periodical could be established without paying them for a share in
their turf. When the revolutionaries looked back at the history of
the press, they saw nothing but newslessness before 1789. Thus
Pierre Manuel on the Gazette de France: |
9 |
A people
that wants to be informed cannot be satisfied with the Gazette
de France. Why should it care if the king has performed the
ritual of foot-washing for some poor folk whose feet weren't even
dirty? Or if the queen celebrated Easter in company with the comte
d'Artois? Or if Monsieur deigned to accept the dedication of a
book that he may never read? Or if the Parlement, dressed in
ceremonial attire, harangued the baby dauphin, who was dressed in
swaddling clothes? The people want to know everything that is
actually done and said in the court—why and for whom the cardinal
de Rohan should have taken it into his head to play games with a
pearl necklace; if it is true that the comtesse Diane appoints the
generals of the army and the comtesse Jule the bishops; how many
Saint Louis medals the minister of war allotted to his mistress
for distribution as New Year's presents. It was the sharp-witted
authors of clandestine gazettes [nouvelles à la main] who
spread the word about this kind of scandal.9
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These
remarks, written at the height of the excitement over a newly freed
press, exaggerate the servility of journalism under the Old Regime.
Many periodicals existed, many of them printed in French outside
France, and they sometimes provided information about political
events, especially during the relatively liberal reign of Louis XVI
(1774–1792). But if any ventured criticism of the government, they
could easily be snuffed out by the police—not simply by raids on
bookshops and arrests of peddlers, which frequently occurred, but by
being excluded from the mail. Distribution through the mail left
their supply lines very vulnerable, as the Gazette de Leyde
learned when it tried and failed to cover the most important
political story of Louis XV's reign, the destruction of the
parlements from 1771 to 1774. |
10 |
So
newspapers of a sort existed, but they had little news—and the
reading public had little faith in them, not even in the French
journals that arrived from Holland. The general skepticism was
expressed clearly in a report from a police spy in 1746: |
11 |
It is openly said that
France pays 2,000 livres [a year] to Sieur du Breuil, author of
the Gazette d'Amsterdam, which is vetted by the French
representative at The Hague. Besides that, France gives 12,000 to
15,000 livres to Mme. Limiers, who does the Gazette
d'Utrecht. This money comes from the revenue of the gazettes,
which the postal service sells for 17 sous 6 deniers [per copy] to
David, its distributor in Paris, and which he sells to the public
for 20 sous. When the gazettes did not appear
as usual yesterday, it was said that the minister had had them
stopped.10
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In
short, the press was far from free; and it was also underdeveloped,
if you compare it with the press in Holland, England, and Germany.
The first French daily newspaper, Le journal de Paris, did
not appear until 1777. The first German daily appeared more than a
century earlier, in Leipzig in 1660. Yet a substantial reading
public had existed in France since the seventeenth century; and it
expanded enormously in the eighteenth century, especially in cities
and in northern France, where nearly half of all adult males could
read by 1789. This public was curious about public affairs and
conscious of itself as a new force in politics—that is, as public
opinion—even though it had no voice in the conduct of the
government.11 |
12 |
So a
basic contradiction existed—between the public with its hunger for
news on the one side and the state with its absolutist forms of
power on the other. To understand how this contradiction played
itself out, we need to take a closer look at the media that
transmitted news and the messages they conveyed. What were the media
in eighteenth-century Paris? |
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We
tend to think of them by way of contrast to the
all-pervasive media of today. So we imagine the Old Regime as a
simple, tranquil, media-free world-we-have-lost, a society with no
telephones, no television, no e-mail, Internet, and all the rest. In
fact, however, it was not a simple world at all. It was merely
different. It had a dense communication network made up of media and
genres that have been forgotten—so thoroughly forgotten that even
their names are unknown today and cannot be translated into English
equivalents: mauvais propos, bruit public,
on-dit, pasquinade, pont-neuf, canard,
feuille volante, factum, libelle, chronique
scandaleuse. There were so many modes of communication, and they
intersected and overlapped so intensively that we can hardly picture
their operation. I have tried to make a picture, nonetheless—a
schematic diagram, which illustrates how messages traveled through
different media and milieus. (See Figure 3.) |
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Now,
this model may look so complicated as to be absurd—more like a
diagram for wiring a radio than the flow of information through a
social system. Instead of elaborating on it, let me give you an
example of the transmission process, something you might liken to a
modern news flash. I quote from Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du
Barry, a top bestseller on the eve of the French Revolution
(about which, more later): |
15 |
We
find in the manuscript gazette that has often guided us in
assembling the materials for our history, an anecdote [about Mme.
du Barry] that illustrates the general opinion of thepublic about her
dominance of the king. It is dated March 20, 1773: "There is a
report, carefully spread about by some courtiers, which proves
that Mme. du Barry has not lost any favor or familiarity with the
king, as some had suspected. His Majesty likes to brew his own
coffee and, by means of this innocent amusement, to get some
relief from the heavy burdens of government. A few days ago, the
coffeepot began to boil over while His Majesty was distracted by
something else. 'Hey France!' called out the beautiful favorite.
'Look out! Your coffee's buggering off.' [La France, ton café
fout le camp.] We are told that 'France' is the familiar
expression utilized by this lady in the intimacy of the king's
private chambers [petits apartements]. Such details should
never circulate outside of them, but they escape, nonetheless,
thanks to the malignity of the courtiers."12
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Figure
3: A schematic
model of a communication circuit. From Robert
Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of
Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995), 189.
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The
anecdote is trivial in itself, but it illustrates the way a news
item moved through various media, reaching an ever-wider public. In
this case, it went through four phases: First, it began as
mauvais propos, or insider gossip at court. Second, it turned
into a bruit public, or general rumor in Paris—and the text
uses a strong expression: "the general opinion of the public."
Third, it became incorporated in nouvelles à la main, or
manuscript news sheets, which circulated in the provinces, like Mme.
Doublet's. Fourth, it was printed in a libelle, or scandalous
book—in this case, a bestseller, which went through many editions
and reached readers everywhere. |
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The
book Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry is a scurrilous
biography of the royal mistress pieced together from bits of gossip
picked up by the greatest nouvelliste of the century,
Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert. He went around Paris
collecting tidbits of news and scribbling them on scraps of paper,
which he stuffed into his pockets and sleeves. When he arrived in a
café, he would pull one out and regale the company—or trade it for
another item collected by another nouvelliste. Mairobert's
biography of du Barry is really a scrapbook of these news items
strung together along a narrative line, which takes the heroine from
her obscure birth as the daughter of a cook and a wandering friar to
a star role in a Parisian whorehouse and finally the royal bed.13 |
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Mairobert
did not hesitate to vent his political opinions in telling his
story, and his opinions were extremely hostile to Versailles. In
1749, a police spy reported that he had denounced the government in
the following terms: "Speaking about the recent reorganization of
the army, Mairobert said in the Café Procope that any soldier who
had an opportunity should blast the court to hell, since its sole
pleasure is in devouring the people and committing injustices."14 A few days later, the
police hauled him off to the Bastille, his pockets bulging with
poems about taxes and the sex life of the king. |
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Mairobert's
case, and dozens like it, illustrates a point so self-evident that
it has never been noticed: the media of the Old Regime were mixed.
They transmitted an amalgam of overlapping, interpenetrating
messages, spoken, written, printed, pictured, and sung. The most
difficult ingredient in this mixture for the historian to isolate
and analyze is oral communication, because it usually disappeared
into the air. But, evanescent as it was, contemporaries took it
seriously. They often remarked on it in letters and diaries, and
some of their comments conform quite closely to the model that I
just presented in the form of a flow chart. Here, for example, is a
contemporary description of how news traveled by word of mouth: "A
vile courtier puts these infamies [reports of royal orgies] into
rhyming couplets and, through the intermediary of flunkies,
distributes them all the way to the marketplace. From the markets
they reach artisans, who in turn transmit them back to the noblemen
who first wrought them and who, without wasting a minute, go to the
royal chambers in Versailles and whisper from ear to ear in a tone
of consummate hypocrisy, 'Have you read them?
Here they are. This is what is circulating among the common people
in Paris.'"15 |
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Figure
4: Conversation in a
café. Courtesy of the BNF, 67B 41693. Here is an
excerpt from "Mapping Café Talk" (available at
www.indiana.edu/~ahr): Café de Foy,
Palais-Royal. "Some said that they had heard the
Controller General [Le Peletier de Forts, appointed on
June 15, 1726, at the time of the revaluation of the
currency] was teetering and might fall. Others said,
'Come on, that's nothing more than what you hear in
the current songs. It looks very unlikely; and if he
left the government, the cardinal [André Hercule
Fleury, the dominant figure in the government by June
1726] would leave also. It's nothing more than a false
alarm.'"
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Fortunately
for the historian, if not for the French, the Old Regime was a
police state—"police" being understood in the eighteenth-century
manner as municipal administration—and the police appreciated the
importance of public opinion. They kept track of it by posting spies
wherever people gathered to discuss public affairs—in marketplaces,
shops, public gardens, taverns, and cafés. Of course, spy reports
and police files should not be taken literally. They have built-in
biases, which sometimes reveal more about the police themselves than
the persons they were observing. But if handled with care, the
archives of the police provide enough information for one to see how
oral networks functioned. I would like to draw on
them in order to discuss two modes of communication that functioned
most effectively in eighteenth-century Paris: gossip and songs. |
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First, gossip. The papers of the Bastille are full of
cases like Mairobert's: people arrested for mauvais propos,
or insolent talk about public figures, especially the king. The
sample is biased, of course, because the police did not arrest
people who spoke favorably of Versailles; and a similar slant may
distort the other principal source, spy reports, which sometimes
concentrated on irreligion and sedition. Usually, however, the spies
recounted casual discussions about all sorts of subjects among
ordinary Parisians; and, during the early years of Louis XV's reign,
the talk sounded favorable to the monarchy. I have studied reports
on 179 conversations in 29 cafés between 1726 and 1729. (For a list,
see Figure 5.) The sample is far from complete,
because Paris had about 380 cafés at that time; but it indicates the
topics and the tone of the talk in cafés located along the most
important channels of communication, as one can see from the map in Figure 6. (For extensive excerpts from the spy
reports and a detailed mapping of the cafés on segments of the Plan
Turgot, see the web version of this lecture.)16 |
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Most of
the reports were written in dialogue. Here is an example: |
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At the Café
de Foy someone said that the king had taken a mistress, that she
was named Gontaut, and that she was a beautiful woman, the niece
of the duc de Noailles and the comtesse de Toulouse. Others said,
"If so, then there could be some big changes." And another
replied, "True, a rumor is spreading, but I find it hard to
believe, since the cardinal de Fleury is in charge. I don't think
the king has any inclination in that direction, because he has
always been kept away from women." "Nevertheless," someone else
said, "it wouldn't be the greatest evil if he had a mistress."
"Well, Messieurs," another added, "it may not be a passing fancy,
either, and a first love could raise some danger on the sexual
side and could cause more harm than good. It would be far more
desirable if he liked hunting better than that kind of thing."17
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As
always, the royal sex life provided prime material for gossip, but
the reports all indicate that the talk was friendly. In 1729, when
the queen was about to give birth, the cafés rang with jubilation:
"Truly, everyone is delighted, because they all hope greatly to have
a dauphin . . . In the Café Dupuy, someone said, 'Parbleu,
Messieurs, if God graces us with a dauphin, you will see Paris and
the whole river aflame [with fireworks in celebration].' Everyone is
praying for that."18 On September 4, the queen
did indeed produce a dauphin, and the Parisians went wild with joy,
not merely to have an heir to the throne but also to have the king
in their midst; for Louis celebrated the birth with a grand feast in
the Hôtel de Ville following the fireworks. Royal magnificence
choreographed to perfection in the heart of the city—that was what
Parisians wanted from their king, according to the
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Figure
5: List of the 29
cafés.
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spy reports: "One of them said [in the Café de Foy], 'Parbleu,
Messieurs, you could never see anything more beautiful than Paris
yesterday evening, when the king made his joyful entry into the
Hôtel de Ville, speaking to everyone with the greatest affability,
dining to a concert by two dozen musicians; and they say the meal
was of the utmost magnificence.'"19 |
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Figure
6: Map of Paris with
cafés indicated by number. Map designed by Jian Liu
and researched by Sean Quinlan.
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Twenty
years later, the tone had changed completely: |
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In the shop
of the wigmaker Gaujoux, this individual [Jules Alexis Bernard]
read aloud in the presence of Sieur Dazemar, an invalid officer,
an attack on the king in which it was said that His Majesty let
himself be governed by ignorant and incompetent ministers and had
made a shameful, dishonorable peace [the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle], which gave up all the fortresses that had been
captured . . . ; that the king, by his affair with
the three sisters, scandalized his people and would bring down all
sorts of misfortune on himself if he did not change his conduct;
that His Majesty scorned the queen and was an adulterer; that he
had not confessed for Easter communion and would bring down the
curse of God upon the kingdom and that France would be overwhelmed
with disasters; that the duc de Richelieu was a pimp, who would
crush Mme. de Pompadour or be crushed by her. He promised to show
Sieur Dazemar this book, entitled The Three Sisters.20
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What
had happened between those two dates, 1729 and 1749? A great deal,
of course: a flare-up of the Jansenist religious controversy, a
running battle between the parlements and the crown, a major war,
some disastrous harvests, and the imposition of unpopular taxes. But
I would like to stress another factor: the end of the royal
touch. |
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Let me tell you a
story. Call it "The Three Sisters." Once upon a
time, there was a nobleman, the marquis de Nesle, who had three
daughters, one more beautiful than the other—or, if not exactly
beautiful, at least ready and eager for sexual adventure. But that
is a delicate subject, so I had better disguise their names and set
the story in Africa. |
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So:
Once upon a time, in the African kingdom of the Kofirans, a young
monarch, Zeokinizul, began to eye the ladies in his court. (If you
choose to unscramble the names—Kofirans/Français, Zeokinizul/Louis
Quinze—that is up to you.) The king was a timid soul, interested in
nothing except sex, and he was pretty timid at that, too. But the
first sister, Mme. de Liamil (Mailly) overcame his awkwardness and
dragged him to bed. She had been coached by the chief minister, a
mullah (prelate) named Jeflur (Fleury), who used her influence to
fortify his own. But then the second sister, Mme. de Leutinemil
(Vintimille), decided to play the same game; and she succeeded even
better, thanks to tutoring from a still more wicked courtier, the
kam de Kelirieu (duc de Richelieu). She died, however, after giving
birth to a child. |
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So the
king took up the third sister, Mme. de Lenertoula (La Tournelle,
later the duchesse de Châteauroux), the most beautiful and ambitious
of them all. She, too, accepted counsel from the wicked Kelirieu,
and she conquered the king so completely that soon she was ruling
the kingdom. Blinded by passion, Zeokinizul took her with him to the
front, when he set off to repulse an invasion of the Maregins
(Germans). His subjects grumbled that kings should leave their
mistresses at home when they did battle. In fact, the attempt to
make love as well as war proved to be more than Zeokinizul's
constitution could bear. He fell ill, so deathly ill, that the
doctors gave him up for lost, and the mullahs prepared to give him
the last rites. But it looked as though the king might die
unshriven, because Mme. de Lenertoula and Kelirieu refused to allow
anyone near the royal bedside. Finally, one mullah broke into the
bedroom. He warned Zeokinizul of the danger of damnation. As the
price for administering confession and extreme unction, he demanded
that the king renounce his mistress. Lenertoula departed under a
volley of insults, the king received the sacraments, and
then—miracle!--he recovered. |
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His
people rejoiced. His enemies retreated. He returned to his palace
. . . and began to think it over. The mullah had been
awfully insistent about hellfire. Mme. de Lenertoula was awfully
beautiful . . . So the king called her back. And then she
promptly died. End of story. |
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What is
the moral of this tale? For Parisians, it meant that the king's sins
would bring down the punishment of God; and everyone would suffer,
as Bernard proclaimed during the discussion of The Three
Sisters, the version of the story that he declaimed in the shop
of the wigmaker Gaujoux. |
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For
historians, the story can be taken as a symptom of a rupture in the
moral ties that bound the king to his people. After the death of
Mme. de Châteauroux on December 8, 1744, Louis never again set foot
in Paris, except for a few unavoidable ceremonies. In 1750, he built
a road around the city so that he could travel from Versailles to
Compiègne without exposing himself to the Parisians. He had also
ceased to touch the sick who lined up in the Great Gallery of the
Louvre in order to be cured of the King's Evil, or scrofula. This
breakdown in ritual signaled the end—or at least the beginning of
the end—of the roi-mage, the sacred, thaumaturgic king known
to us through the work of Marc Bloch. By mid-century, Louis XV had
lost touch with his people, and he had lost the royal touch.21 |
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That
conclusion, I admit, is much too dramatic. Desacralization or
delegitimation was a complex process, which did not occur all at
once but rather by fits and starts over a long time span. In
recounting this tale about Louis's love life, I did not mean to
argue that he suddenly lost his legitimacy in 1744, although I
believe he badly damaged it. My purpose was to suggest the way
stories struck the consciousness of Parisians by the middle of the
century. |
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To
modern Americans, the story of the three sisters may read like an
unconvincing blend of folklore and soap opera. But to
eighteenth-century Parisians, it served as a gloss on current
events—Louis XV's brush with death at Metz in August 1744, the
disgrace of Mme. de Châteauroux, the general rejoicing at the king's
recovery, and the general consternation at his decision to recall
his mistress. The story also conveyed a prophecy of doom. Louis XV
had compounded adultery with incest, because fornicating with
sisters had an incestuous character in eighteenth-century eyes. Thus
the report of a spy who warned the police about the public's
consternation at the king's affair with Mme. de Châteauroux in 1744:
"Businessmen, retired officers, the common people are all
complaining, speaking ill of the government and predicting that this
war will have disastrous consequences. Clergymen, especially the
Jansenists, take that view and dare to think and to say aloud that
the evils that will soon overwhelm the kingdom come from above, as
punishment for the incest and irreligion of the king. They cite
passages from Scripture, which they apply [to the present
circumstances]. The government should pay attention to this class of
subjects. They are dangerous."22 |
33 |
Sin on
such a scale would call down punishment from heaven, not merely on
the king but on the entire kingdom. Having been anointed with the
holy oil preserved since the conversion of Clovis in the cathedral
of Reims, Louis XV had sacred power. He could cure subjects
afflicted with scrofula, simply by touching them. After his
coronation in 1722, he had touched more than 2,000, and he continued
to touch the diseased for the next seventeen years, particularly
after taking Communion on Easter. In order to exercise that power,
however, he had to cleanse himself from sin by
confession and Communion. But his confessors would not admit him to
the Eucharist unless he renounced his mistresses, and he refused to
renounce them after 1738, when he began openly to exhibit his
adultery with Mme. de Mailly. From that time on, Louis never again
took Easter Communion and never again touched the sick. The Metz
crisis revived hope that he would recover his spiritual potency, but
its denouement, the death of Mme. de Châteauroux, and the succession
of mistresses that began with the installation of Mme. de Pompadour
in 1745 signaled the end of Louis's effectiveness as a mediator
between his people and their angry God. That was the conclusion
reached by Bernard after declaiming The Three Sisters to his
audience in the wigmaker's shop. |
34 |
At this
point, I should pause to deal with an objection. You may concede
that the police reports provide evidence about the public's fear of
divine retribution for the king's sins, but you also might protest
that my version of "The Three Sisters" does not necessarily coincide
with the story recounted in the 1740s by Parisians. Perhaps in a fit
of postmodern permissiveness, I simply made it up. |
35 |
I did
not. Like many of you, I deplore the current tendency to mix fiction
with fact, and I disagree with those who take liberties with
evidence on the grounds that history requires unavoidable doses of
tropes.23 I therefore looked far and
wide for a book entitled Les trois soeurs. I failed to find
it, but I did come up with four other books published between 1745
and 1750 that tell the story of Louis' love affairs. They are all
romans à clef, or novels in which real persons appear as
fictitious characters. The story may be set in Africa (Les amours
de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans, 1747), Asia (Mémoires
secrets pour servir à l'histoire de Perse, 1745), fairyland
(Tanastès, conte allégorique, 1745), or an exotic island
(Voyage à Amatonthe, 1750). But they all read like a
commentary on current events, and they all condemn the king. The
story of "The Three Sisters" as I recounted it is a faithful
synopsis of Les amours de Zeokinizul, and it fits the
narrative line of all the others.24 |
36 |
The
meaning of those novels for their readers can be ascertained with
some accuracy, because they all have keys. A collection of keys is
available in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 7067, and many of
the copies of the novels have keys printed at the end, entered in
handwriting, or inserted in the binding. (See Figure 7.) Decoding with a key, however, turns out to be a less
mechanistic process than you might expect. If you work through a
novel with a key in hand, you find yourself reading simultaneously
at different levels and reading between the lines. A stilted story
can come alive, once it is found to conceal another, naughtier
story; and the inside stories proliferate as you penetrate deeper
and deeper into the text. Some references are
obvious, but others are ambiguous, and some are unexplained. In
fact, the keys occasionally contradict each other or contain
manuscript corrections. So reading with a key becomes a kind of
puzzle-solving; and the heart of the mystery turns out in the end to
be "le secret du roi"—the private life of the king, which is the
ultimate mainspring of power. The Vie privée de Louis XV, a
best-selling libelle of the 1780s, incorporated all this
literature from the 1740s, often word for word, in a four-volume
history of the entire reign. |
37 |
|
|
![]() |
Figure
7: Part of a key to
the anagrams in Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des
Kofirans: Ouvrage traduit de l'Arabe du voyageur
Krinelbol (Amsterdam, 1746), attributed to Laurent
Angliviel de La Beaumelle and to Claude-Prosper Jolyot
de Crebillon, fils. Photo courtesy of the Department
of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton
University Library.
| |
|
|
|
Sophisticated
literature of this sort might seem to be far removed from the raw
gossip that coursed through the cafés, but by 1750 these "public
noises" conveyed the same themes: the ignominy of the king, the
degradation of him by his mistresses, and the manipulation of the
mistresses by vile courtiers. Consider a few examples taken from
police reports on what Parisians were saying about Mme. de Pompadour
in 1749:25 |
38 |
Le Bret:
After running down Mme. de Pompadour by loose talk in various
locales, he said that she had driven the king crazy by putting all
sorts of notions in his head. The bitch is
raising hell, he said, because of some poems that attack her. Does
she expect to be praised while she is wallowing in crime?
|
Jean-Louis
Le Clerc: Made the following remarks in the Café de Procope: That
there never has been a worse king; that the court, the ministers and
the Pompadour make the king do shameful things, which utterly
disgust his people. |
39 |
François
Philippe Merlet: Accused of having said in the tennis court of Veuve
Gosseaume that Richelieu and the Pompadour were destroying the
reputation of the king; that he was not well regarded by his people,
since he was driving them to ruin; and that he had better beware,
because the twentieth tax could cause some mischief to befall
him. |
40 |
Fleur
de Montagne: Among other things, he said that the king's extravagant
expenditures showed that he didn't give a f— for his people; that he
knows they are destitute and yet he is piling on another tax, as if
to thank them for all the services they have rendered him. They must
be crazy in France, he added, to put up with . . . He
whispered the rest into someone's ear. |
41 |
The
congruence of themes from the mauvais propos and the
libelles should not be surprising, because talking and
reading about private lives and public affairs were inseparable
activities. It was a public reading of a libelle that touched
off the seditious talk in the wigmaker's shop. Moreover, "public
noises" fed into the confection of the texts. According to the
police, the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de
Perse was generated from the information gathered in the circle
of Mme. de Vieuxmaison, much as the Mémoires secrets pour servir
à l'histoire de la république des lettres en France came out of
the salon of Mme. Doublet. Mme. de Vieuxmaison appears in the police
files as "small, very white, blond, with a perfidious physiognomy
. . . She is very clever and being [also] very wicked, she
writes poems and couplets against everyone . . . Her
circle . . . is the most dangerous in Paris and is
strongly suspected of having produced the Anecdotes de
Perse."26 |
42 |
The
most remarkable example of talk translated into text was
Tanastès, a roman à clef about the king and the three
sisters by Marie Madeleine Joseph Bonafon, a twenty-eight-year-old
chambermaid in Versailles. The police could not believe that a
female domestic servant could compose such a work. Having traced it
back to her, locked her into the Bastille, and summoned her for
cross-examination, they found themselves faced with an enigma: a
working-woman author—could it be true? They kept returning to this
question in the interrogations. Had Mlle. Bonafon really written
books? they asked. Yes, she replied, and she named them:
Tanastès, the beginning of another novel entitled Le baron
de XXX, several poems, and three unpublished plays. Baffled, the
police continued questioning: |
43 |
Asked what
it was that gave her a taste for writing? Hadn't she consulted
someone who was familiar with the composition of books in order to
learn how to go about organizing the ones she intended to write? Answered
that she did not consult anyone; that since she reads a great
deal, this had given her a desire to write; that she had imagined,
moreover, that she could make a little money by writing
. . . Had she
written the book out of her own imagination? Hadn't someone
supplied her with written material to work over? Who was it that
had given [that material] to her?
Replied
that no memoirs had been given to her, that she had composed her
book by herself, that in fact she had fashioned it in her
imagination. Agreed, however, that having her head full of what
people were saying in public about what had happened during and
after the king's illness, she had tried to make some use of it in
her book.27
|
Once it
began to circulate, the book—and especially the key, which was
printed and sold separately—reinforced the "public noises." From
talk to print to talk, the process built on itself dialectically,
accumulating force and spreading ever wider. It is difficult to
follow, owing to the sparseness of evidence about oral exchanges
that occurred 250 years ago. But enough documentation has survived
to suggest that by 1750 the talk of the town had turned decisively
against the king. |
44 |
|
Now let's
consider songs. They, too, were an important
medium for communicating news. Parisians commonly composed verse
about current events and set it to popular tunes such as "Malbrouck
s'en va-t-en guerre" ("The Bear Went Over the Mountain" in America,
"For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in England). Songs served as mnemonic
devices. In a society that remained largely illiterate, they
provided a powerful means of transmitting messages, one that
probably functioned more effectively in eighteenth-century Paris
than commercial jingles do in America today. Parisians of all
stripes, from sophisticated salon lions to simple apprentices,
shared a common repertory of tunes, and anyone with a bit of wit
could improvise couplets, or the standard French ballad made up of
eight-syllable lines with interlocking rhymes, to melodies carried
in the head. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier remarked, "No event takes
place that is not duly registered in the form of a vaudeville
[popular song] by the irreverent populace."28 |
45 |
Some
songs originated in the court, but they reached the common people,
and the common people sang back. Artisans composed songs and sang
them at work, adding new verses to old tunes as the occasion arose.
Charles Simon Favart, the greatest librettist of the century, got
his start as a boy by putting words to popular melodies while
rhythmically kneading the dough in his father's bakery. He and his
friends—Charles Collé, Pierre Gallet, Alexis Piron, Charles-François
Panard, Jean-Joseph Vadé, Toussaint-Gaspard Taconnet, Nicolas
Fromaget, Christophe-Barthélemy Fagan, Gabriel Charles Lattaignant,
François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif—outdid each
other at improvising bawdy ballads and drinking songs at first in
Gallet's grocery store, later in the Café du Caveau. Their songs
made the rounds of taverns, echoed in the streets, and found their
way into popular theaters—at the Foire Saint-Germain, along the
vaudeville shows of the boulevards, and ultimately in the Opéra
Comique. At a more plebeian level, ragged street-singers, playing
fiddles and hurdy-gurdies, entertained crowds at the Pont Neuf, the
Quai des Augustins, and other strategic locations. Paris was
suffused with songs. In fact, as the saying went, the entire kingdom
could be described as "an absolute monarchy tempered by songs."29 |
46 |
In such
an environment, a catchy song could spread like wildfire; and, as it
spread, it grew—inevitably, because it acquired new phrasing in the
course of oral transmission and because everyone could join in the
game of grafting new stanzas onto the old. The new verses were
scribbled on scraps of paper and traded in cafés just like the poems
and anecdotes diffused by the nouvellistes. When the police
frisked prisoners in the Bastille, they confiscated large quantities
of this material, which can still be inspected in boxes at the
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal—tiny bits of paper covered with scribbling
and carried about triumphantly, until the fatal moment when a police
inspector, armed with a lettre de cachet, commanded, "Empty
your pockets."30 A typical
scrap of verse, the latest stanzas to "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"—one
of the most popular songs attacking Mme. de Pompadour, the king, and
court—was seized from the upper left vest pocket of Pidansat de
Mairobert during his interrogation in the
Bastille.31 |
47 |
Mairobert
lived like a literary hack—"rue des Cordeliers, at a laundrywoman's
place on the third floor," according to his police dossier—and
described himself as "without fortune, reduced to what he could
provide by his talent."32 But he frequented the
elegant company in Mme. Doublet's salon, and other song collectors
belonged to the highest ranks of the court. The greatest of them all
was the comte de Maurepas, minister of the navy and the king's
household, one of the most powerful men in Versailles. Maurepas
epitomized the court style of politics under Louis XV. Witty, canny,
and unscrupulous, he covered his maneuvering with an air of gaiety
that endeared him to the king. He also held on to Louis'
|
|
![]() |
Figure
8: The police lifted this scrap of paper from a pocket
of the abbé Guyard when they frisked him in the
Bastille on July 10, 1749. The verse was dictated to
Guyard by Pierre Sigorgne, a professor in the
University of Paris, who had memorized a whole
repertory of anti-government songs and poems and
declaimed them to his students. This poem, a burlesque
edict by the parlement of Toulouse, attacks the recent
twentieth tax and various abuses of power, which it
attributes to the immorality of the king as
exemplified by his affair with the three daughters of
the marquis de Nesle. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms.
11690, 1749.
| |
|
|
favor by regaling him with the latest songs, even songs
that made fun of Maurepas himself and especially those that
ridiculed his rivals.33 |
48 |
|
This
was a dangerous game, however, and it backfired. On April 24, 1749,
the king dismissed Maurepas from the government and sent him into
exile by lettre de cachet. Contemporaries interpreted
Maurepas' fall as a spectacular upheaval in the power system of
Versailles. What had caused it? they asked. The answer, as it
appears in letters and diaries, was unanimous: not political
conflict, not ideological opposition, not questions of principle or
policy or even patronage . . . but songs. One song, in
particular, written to the tune, "Quand le péril est agréable":34
Par vos façons nobles et
franches, Iris, vous enchantez nos coeurs; Sur nos pas vous semez des fleurs. Mais ce sont des fleurs blanches.
|
|
To the modern
reader, the text, and the entire episode, is utterly opaque.
Translated literally, the song sounds like an innocent exercise in
gallantry:
By your noble and free
manner, Iris, you
enchant our hearts. On our path you strew flowers. But they
are white flowers.
|
|
To insiders in
Versailles, however, the meaning was obvious, and it showed that the
current wave of songs had gone beyond the boundaries of the
permissible, even among the nastiest wits at court. The song cast
Pompadour as Iris (some versions referred to her by her ignoble
maiden name, Poisson, "Fish") and alluded to an intimate dinner in
the private chambers of the king, where Louis was supposed to be
protected from gossip by a barrier of secrecy. The little party
consisted of the king, Pompadour, Maurepas, and Pompadour's cousin,
Mme. d'Estrades. After arriving with a bouquet of white hyacinths,
Pompadour distributed the flowers to her three companions: thus the
"white flowers" in the song. But "fleurs blanches" also meant signs
of venereal disease in menstrual discharge ("flueurs").35 Of the three witnesses,
only Maurepas was capable of turning this episode into verse and
leaking it to the court. So whether or not he had actually composed
the song, it produced such outrage in the private chambers that he
was stripped of power and banished from Versailles. |
|
Of
course, there was much more to this than met the ear. Maurepas had
enemies, notably his rival in the government, the comte d'Argenson,
minister of war and an ally of Mme. de Pompadour. Her position as
maîtresse en titre, a quasi-official role
designated by formal presentation at court, had not yet solidified
to the point where she could consider herself invulnerable to
gossip. A campaign of derision, orchestrated by Maurepas and
conducted by means of songs, might persuade the king to renounce her
in order to win back the respect of his subjects. Such at least was
the opinion of some Parisians, who noted that the white flower song
belonged to a flood of hostile verse that coursed through the city
during the first six months of 1749.36 |
49 |
The
tide did not turn after the fall of Maurepas—perhaps, according to
some observers, because his partisans kept up the crescendo of songs
after he had disappeared in order to prove that he had not been
responsible for them in the first place. But whatever the tactics
pursued at court, the singing in Paris caused the government serious
concern. With the backing of the king, d'Argenson organized a
campaign to wipe it out. He went into action as soon as he learned
that Parisians had taken up a new song with the first line, "Monstre
dont la noire furie" (Monster whose black fury), the monster being
Louis XV. From the ministry in Versailles to police headquarters in
Paris, an order went out: find the author of the verse that began
with those words. The order passed down the chain of command from
the lieutenant general of police to a squad of inspectors and spies.
And before long, Inspector Joseph d'Hémery received a note from an
undercover agent: "I know someone who had a copy of the abominable
verse against the king in his study a few days ago and who spoke
approvingly of them. I can tell you who he is, if you want."37 Just two sentences, without
a signature, on a crumpled piece of paper, but they earned the spy
twelve louis d'or, the equivalent of nearly a year's wages for an
unskilled laborer, and they triggered an extraordinary poetry-hunt
and manhunt, which produced the richest dossiers of literary
detective work that I have ever encountered. By following the police
as they followed the poem, I will try to reconstruct a network that
shows how messages traveled through an oral communication system in
eighteenth-century Paris.38 |
50 |
After a
good deal of hugger-mugger, the police arrested the person who had
possessed a handwritten text of the verse, a medical student named
François Bonis. In his interrogation in the Bastille, he said he had
got it from a priest, Jean Edouard, who was arrested and said he had
got it from another priest, Inguimbert de Montange, who was arrested
and said he had got it from a third priest, Alexis Dujast, who was
arrested and said he had got it from a law student, Jacques Marie
Hallaire, who was arrested and said he had got it from a clerk in a
notary's office, Denis Louis Jouet, who was arrested . . .
and so on down the line, until the trail gave out and the police
gave up, fourteen arrests from the beginning. Each arrest generated
its own dossier, and each dossier contains new evidence about the
modes of communication. The overall pattern can be seen in the flow
chart in Figure 9. |
51 |
|
|
![]() |
Figure
9: The diffusion
pattern of six songs and poems.
| |
|
|
|
At
first glance, the pattern looks straightforward, and the milieu
seems to be homogeneous. The verse (poem 1 on the diagram) was
passed along a line of students, priests, lawyers, notaries, and
clerks, most of them friends and all of them young—between sixteen
and thirty-one, generally in their early twenties. The verse itself
gave off a corresponding odor, at least to the comte d'Argenson, who
returned a copy to the lieutenant general of police with a note
describing it as an "infamous piece, which seems to me, as to you,
to smell of pedantry and the Latin Quarter."39 But the picture became more
complicated as the investigation broadened. When it reached
Hallaire, the fifth person from the top of the diagram, the path of
the poetry bifurcated. Hallaire had received three other poems from
the abbé Guyard, who in turn had three further suppliers, who had
suppliers of their own, and so on, until the police found themselves
tracking a total of six poems and songs, one more seditious than the
next (at least in the eyes of the authorities) and each with its own
diffusion pattern. |
52 |
In the
end, they filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of
poetry—hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, "The Affair
of the Fourteen." They never found the author of the original verse.
In fact, it may not have had an author at all, not because Roland
Barthes and Michel Foucault have told us that the author is dead,
but because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified
phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and
the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that,
taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing
from one transmission point to another and filling the air with
mauvais propos, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme. |
53 |
The
interrogations of the suspects in the Bastille provide a picture of
the settings in which the verse circulated as well as the modes of
their transmission. At each point, the poetry readings were
accompanied by discussion. Bonis said that he had copied the first
poem in the Hôtel-Dieu, where he had found a friend deep in
conversation with a priest. "The conversation turned on the subject
matter of the gazettes; and this priest, saying that someone had
been so wicked as to write some satirical verses about the king,
pulled out a poem attacking His Majesty."40 Hallaire testified that he
had made his copy during a dinner with some friends in the house of
his father, a silk merchant in the rue Saint-Denis. Montange copied
the poem after hearing it read aloud during a bull session in the
dining hall of his college. Pierre Sigorgne, a professor at the
Collège Du Plessis, dictated two of the poems to his students: it
was a political dictée in the heart of the University of
Paris! Sigorgne knew the poems by heart, and one of them had
eighty-four lines. The art of memory was still flourishing in
eighteenth-century Paris, and in several cases it was reinforced by
the greatest mnemonic device of all, music; for some of the poems
were composed to fit the rhythms of popular tunes, and they
circulated by means of singing, along with the songs that came from
the court and that had provoked the investigation in the first
place. |
54 |
Whether
sung or declaimed from memory, the verse was copied on scraps of
paper, which were carried about in pockets and swapped for other
verse. The texts soon found their way into
manuscript gazettes and, finally, into print. The two longest poems,
"Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français" (What is the sad
lot of the unhappy French) and "Peuple, jadis si fier, aujourd'hui
si servile" (People, once so proud, today so servile), appeared
prominently in Vie privée de Louis XV, the hostile history of
the reign that became a bestseller in the 1780s. In discussing the
outburst of songs and poems in 1749, it observed: |
55 |
It was at
this shameful time that the general scorn for the sovereign and
his mistress began to become manifest, then continued to grow
until the end of the reign . . . This scorn broke out
for the first time in some satirical verse about the outrage
committed to Prince Edward [Charles Edward Stuart, or Bonnie
Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, who was arrested in Paris on
December 10, 1748 and expelled from the kingdom in accordance with
the British demands accepted by France in the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle], where Louis XV is addressed in a passage that
compares him with that illustrious exile:
Il est roi dans les fers;
qu'êtes-vous sur le trône? [He is a king in irons; what are you on the
throne?]
And then, in an apostrophe to
the nation:
Peuple, jadis si fier,
aujourd'hui si servile, Des princes
malheureux vous n'êtes plus l'asile!
[People, once so proud,
today so servile, You no longer provide a
sanctuary for unhappy princes!]
The
eagerness of the public to seek out these pieces, to learn them by
heart, to communicate them to one another, proved that the readers
adopted the sentiments of the poet. Madame de Pompadour wasn't
spared, either . . . She ordered a drastic search for
the authors, peddlers, and distributors of these pamphlets, and
the Bastille was soon full of prisoners.41
|
In
short, the communication process took place by several modes in many
settings. It always involved discussion and sociability, so it was
not simply a matter of messages transmitted down a line of diffusion
to passive recipients but rather a process of assimilating and
reworking information in groups—that is, the creation of collective
consciousness or public opinion. If you will tolerate some jargon,
you could think of it as a multi-media feedback system. But that
sounds rather fancy. I merely want to signal you that there are
theoretical issues at stake in this kind of study and that in
pursuing it I have drawn on the sociology of communication developed
by Elihu Katz and Gabriel Tarde rather than the more voguish
theories of Jürgen Habermas.42 |
56 |
|
But to
return to the medium of singing, the song that circulated most
actively among the Fourteen, "Qu'une bâtarde de catin," typified the
ballads that had the most popular appeal in Paris. Its simple,
eight-syllable lines fit a common tune, "Quand mon amant me fait la
cour," which was also identified in some sources as "Dirai-je mon
Confiteor?" The "catin" (strumpet) in the first line was Mme. de
Pompadour. And the catchy refrain, "Ah! le voilà, ah! le voici /
Celui qui n'en a nul souci," pointed a finger at the king, clueless,
carefree Louis. The first verse went as
follows:43 |
57 |
Qu'une bâtarde de catin A la cour se voie
avancée, Que dans
l'amour et dans le vin, Louis cherche une gloire aisée, Ah! le
voilà, ah! le voici Celui qui n'en a nul souci.
[That a bastard strumpet Should get
ahead in the court, That in love and wine Louis should
seek some easy glory, Ah! there he is, ah! there he is He who doesn't
have a care.]
|
Each
verse satirized a public figure. After Pompadour and the king, the
song worked its way down through ministers, generals, prelates, and
courtiers. Everyone appeared incompetent or corrupt; and in each
case, the refrain reiterated the song's main theme: that the king,
who should have taken responsibility for the welfare of his people,
paid no heed to anything but drink and sex. While the kingdom went
to hell, Louis remained "he who doesn't have a care." Although I
cannot prove it, I think the song suggests a children's game—the
kind where one person stands in the middle of a circle and the rest
join hands and skip around him singing "the farmer in the dell" or
"the cheese stands alone"—except here the singing is pure mockery:
the king is the ultimate idiot. |
58 |
The
verses cover all the major events and political issues between 1748
and 1750, and the versification is so simple that new subjects of
mockery could easily be added as events evolved. That is exactly
what happened, as you can see by comparing all the surviving
versions of the song. I have found nine, scattered through various manuscript collections. They contain
from six to twenty-three verses, the later ones alluding to the most
recent events such as the notorious cuckolding of the tax farmer
A.-J.-J. Le Riche de La Popelinière by the duc de Richelieu in the
spring of 1750. Furthermore, if you compare different versions of
the same verse, you can find small differences in phrasing, which
probably bear the mark of the oral diffusion process, since
variations crept in as the song passed from one singer to another.
The Parisians may not have been signers of tales, like the Serbs
studied by Albert Lord, but they were singers of news.44 "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"
contained so much news and commentary that it can be considered a
sung newspaper. |
59 |
But it
should not be considered in isolation, because it belonged to a vast
corpus of songs, which extended nearly everywhere in Paris and
covered virtually everything of interest to Parisians. It is
impossible to measure the size of this corpus, but we can get some
idea of its dimensions by examining all the evidence that remains in
the archives. When consigned to writing, the songs first appeared on
slips of paper like that in Figure 10, which
contains a selection of verses from "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" and
came from a pocket of Christophe Guyard, one of the Fourteen, when
he was frisked in the Bastille. As already explained, a similar
scrap of paper, also with verses from "Qu'une bâtarde de catin," was
confiscated from a pocket of Mairobert. He had no connection with
the Fourteen, so he probably acquired the song by tapping into
another network. And seven other copies, which have turned up in
various libraries, probably came from still other sources. In short,
the song had traveled through many channels of diffusion, and the
network of the Fourteen was but a small segment of a very large
whole. |
60 |
How
large? Consider the next category of evidence: collections. Many
Parisians picked up scraps of paper scribbled with verse from cafés
and public gardens, then stored them in their apartments. The police
found sixty-eight of these snippets—songs, poems, scribbling of all
sorts—when they searched Mairobert's room. Wealthier collectors had
their secretaries transcribe this material into well-ordered
registers, known as chansonniers. The most famous of these,
the "Chansonnier Maurepas," contains Maurepas' own collection and
runs to thirty-five volumes.45 By studying it and seven
other chansonniers from the mid-century years, I have formed
a rough idea of how many songs existed at that time and which ones
were the most popular. The richest source, a twelve-volume
collection in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris
entitled "Oeuvres diaboliques pour servir à l'histoire du temps,"
contains 641 songs and poems from the period 1745–1751 and 264 that
date from the end of 1748 to the beginning of
1751.46 It seems clear, therefore,
that the six songs and poems exchanged among the Fourteen
constituted only a tiny fraction of a gigantic repertory, but they
show up everywhere in the chansonniers, along with a host of
other songs and poems on the same subjects. "Qu'une bâtarde de
catin" appears most often, eight times in all. It can be taken as a
fairly representative example of what Parisians sung in the middle
of the century. |
61 |
A final
run of documents makes it possible for us to have some notion of
what the
|
|
![]() |
Figure
10: Some verses from
the song "Qu'une bâtarde de catin," taken from the
abbé Guyard by the police when they frisked him in the
Bastille. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 11690, fols.
67–68, 1749.
| |
|
|
Parisians heard. Of course, the sounds themselves disappeared
into the air 250 years ago, and they cannot be duplicated exactly
today. But a series of musical "keys," such as "La clef du Caveau"
in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, contain the actual music to
the tunes cited in the chansonniers.47 I am incapable of translating this manuscript into sound, but
Hélène Delavault, a gifted opera singer and cabaret performer from
Paris, will sing a dozen of these songs in a cabaret-style concert
following this lecture. All of them concern current events from
1749, and two—the two I have just discussed, "Par vos façons nobles
et franches" and "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"—come directly out of the
Affair of the Fourteen. Anyone who reads this lecture in the new,
electronic edition of the American Historical Review will be
able to hear Mme. Delavault's recording of the songs by clicking on
a hyperlink. In short, technology from the age of information in
2000 can provide new access to the age of information in 1750. It
can make history sing. |
62 |
|
But I am
beginning to sound like a commercial, and I have
not yet reached the end of my talk. Perhaps it would be helpful if I
paused at this point in order to try to clear a way through the
difficulties inherent in the history of communication by asserting
three preliminary conclusions, all of them unfortunately
negative: |
63 |
First,
it makes no sense, I think, to separate printed from oral and
written modes of communication, as we casually do when we speak of
"print culture," because they were all bound together in a
multi-media system. Nor, second, does it serve any purpose to derive
one mode of communication from another, as if our task, like that of
the police, was to trace a message to its source. It was the spread
of the message that mattered—not its origin but its amplification,
the way it reached the public and ultimately took hold. That process
should be understood as a matter of feedback and convergence, rather
than one of trickling down and linear causality. Third, it is
equally misleading to distinguish separate realms of popular and
elite culture. Despite the stratified character of Parisian society
under the Old Regime, its publics crossed paths and rubbed elbows
everywhere. They were mixed. In studying communication, I recommend
that we look for mixtures, of milieus as well as media. |
64 |
Having
delivered myself of those imperatives, I realize that I am still far
from my goal, and I have only a few pages left to get there. Until
now, I have merely described what news was and the way it was
transmitted, not how people made sense of it. That last step is the
most difficult, because it has to do with reception as well as
diffusion. We have plenty of reception theory but very little
evidence about how reception actually took place. I cannot come up
with a solution to that problem, but I may have found a detour that
will help us get around it. |
65 |
Let's
consider once more the "news flash" about Louis XV's coffee
spilling. How can we know what eighteenth-century readers made of
it? We have no record of their reactions. But we can study the way
the text works, the manner in which it fits into the book
Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry, and the book's place
in a corpus of related texts, which provided the basic fund of
information about current events and contemporary history to the
general reading public. |
66 |
I would
begin with the key phrase, "La France! Ton café fout le camp." It
would have sounded particularly shocking to eighteenth-century ears,
because "La France" evoked a particular meaning
in the social code of the time. Lackeys were often called by the
province of their origin. So by shouting out "La France" in an
unguarded moment, du Barry was calling the king her lackey.48 She did so in a
spectacularly vulgar manner, one that could be taken to reveal the
plebeian nature beneath her courtly veneer; for "fout le camp" was
the language of the brothel, not the court. Similar outbursts of
vulgarity occur throughout the book. In fact, they constitute its
central theme. Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry was a
classic libelle, organized according to the formula that I
mentioned earlier: from the brothel to the throne. Du Barry sleeps
her way to the top, using tricks she picked up in the whorehouse to
revive the exhausted libido of the old king and thus to dominate the
kingdom. She is a sluttish Cinderella and therefore different from
all previous royal mistresses—or all since Mme. de Pompadour, née
Poisson—who, whatever their morals, were at least ladies. This theme
is summed up by a song—one of many songs printed in the book—which
includes the lines: |
67 |
Tous nos laquais l'avaient eue, Lorsque traînant
dans la rue, Vingt
sols offerts à sa vue La déterminaient d'abord.
[All our lackeys had her In the days
when she walked the streets, And twenty sols offered up front Made her
accept at once.]49
|
The
rhetoric plays on the assumption that readers wanted their kings to
be discriminating in their gallantry, just as they were expected to
be heroic in war, regal in court, and pious in church. Louis XV
failed on all counts, although he got high marks for his bravery at
the battle of Fontenoy in 1745. He was the antithesis of France's
favorite king, Henri IV. And he was reviled in the book, not because
the author held him up to any radical or republican standard of
statecraft but because he had not been kingly enough. Thus a second
leitmotiv that runs throughout the text: the degradation of the
monarchy. At every point, the narrative dwells on the profanation of
royal symbols and the person of the king himself. The scepter, it
says, has become as feeble as the royal
penis.50 |
68 |
This
was strong language for an age that treated kings as sacred beings
directly ordained to rule by God and invested with the royal touch.
But Louis had lost his touch, as I explained earlier. Anecdotes
sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry compounded that loss by presenting
him as an ordinary mortal—or worse, as a dirty old man. At the same
time, it invited the reader to enjoy the frisson of seeing
into the innermost chambers of Versailles, into the secret du
roi itself, even to observe the king between the sheets. For
that is where the great affairs of state were decided—the fall of
Choiseul, the partition of Poland, the destruction of France's
judicial system by the chancellor Maupeou,
everything that would have warranted a banner headline, if there had
been headlines, or newspapers with news. In each case, as the story
went, du Barry filled the king with drink, dragged him to bed, and
got him to sign any edict that had been prepared for her by her evil
counselors. This kind of reportage anticipated techniques that would
be developed a century later in yellow journalism: it presented the
inside story of politics in Versailles; it pictured power struggles
as what-the-butler-saw; it reduced complex affairs of state to
backstairs intrigue and the royal sex life. |
69 |
That,
of course, was hardly serious history. I would call it folklore. But
it had enormous appeal—so much, in fact, that it is still alive
today. I found the coffee-spilling episode—with the wrong mistress
but the right emphasis on her vulgarity—in a French-Canadian comic
book. (See Figure 11.) Instead of dismissing
political folklore as trivial, I would take it seriously. In fact, I
believe it was a crucial ingredient in the collapse of the Old
Regime. But before leaping to that conclusion, I had better retreat
to familiar territory: the trade in forbidden books, which I studied
in my last round of research. The main results of this study can be
summarized in the following bestseller list, which shows which books
circulated most widely in the vast underground of illegal literature
during the twenty years before the
revolution:51 |
70 |
L'an deux mille quatre
cent quarante by L. S. Mercier Anecdotes sur Mme.
la comtesse du Barry* by M. F. Pidansat de Mairobert Système de la nature by
P. H. Baron d'Holbach Tableau de Paris by L. S.
Mercier Histoire philosophique by
G. T. F. Raynal Journal historique de la révolution
opérée . . . par M. de Maupeou* by M. F.
Pidansat de Mairobert and B. J. F. Moufle d'Angerville L'Arrétin by H. J. Du
Laurens Lettre philosophique par M. de
V–––, anonymous Mémoires de l'abbé Terray* by
J.-B. L. Coquereau La pucelle d'Orléans by
Voltaire Questions sur l'Encyclopédie by
Voltaire Mémoires de Louis XV,*
anonymous L'espion anglais* by M. F.
Pidansat de Mairobert La fille de joie, a translation
of Fanny Hill by Fougeret de Montbrun (?) Thérèse philosophe by J.-B. de
Boyer, Marquis d'Argens
|
Five of the top
fifteen books on the list, those marked by an asterisk, were
libelles or chroniques scandaleuses, and there were
dozens more. A huge corpus of scandalous literature reached readers
everywhere in France, although it has been almost completely
forgotten today—no doubt because it did not qualify as literature in
the eyes of literary critics and librarians. The libelles
often have impressive literary qualities, nonetheless. Anecdotes
sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry made it to the top of the
bestseller list because, among other things, it was very well
written. Mairobert knew how to tell a story. His text is funny,
wicked, shocking, outrageous, and a very good read. I recommend it
strongly.
|
L'an deux mille quatre
cent quarante by L. S. Mercier Anecdotes sur Mme.
la comtesse du Barry* by M. F. Pidansat de Mairobert Système de la nature by
P. H. Baron d'Holbach Tableau de Paris by L. S.
Mercier Histoire philosophique by
G. T. F. Raynal Journal historique de la révolution
opérée . . . par M. de Maupeou* by M. F.
Pidansat de Mairobert and B. J. F. Moufle d'Angerville L'Arrétin by H. J. Du
Laurens Lettre philosophique par M. de
V–––, anonymous Mémoires de l'abbé Terray* by
J.-B. L. Coquereau La pucelle d'Orléans by
Voltaire Questions sur l'Encyclopédie by
Voltaire Mémoires de Louis XV,*
anonymous L'espion anglais* by M. F.
Pidansat de Mairobert La fille de joie, a translation
of Fanny Hill by Fougeret de Montbrun (?) Thérèse philosophe by J.-B. de
Boyer, Marquis d'Argens
|
It also
looks impressive physically. It comes packaged in an imposing,
346-page
|
|
![]() |
Figure
11: The
coffee-spilling episode as pictured in a modern-day
French-Canadian comic book. Mme. de Pompadour is
mistakenly substituted for Mme. du Barry. From Léandre
Bergeron and Robert Lavaill, Petit manuel
d'histoire de Québec (n.p., n.d. [1970s]), 48. | |
|
|
tome, complete with a handsome frontispiece and all the
appearances of a serious biography. The other libelles are
often more elaborate. They contain footnotes, appendices,
genealogies, and all sorts of documentation. The Vie privée de
Louis XV provides a four-volume history of the entire reign,
more detailed and better documented—for all its scurrility—than many
modern histories. The Journal historique de la révolution opérée
. . . par M. de Maupeou runs to seven volumes; L'espion anglais runs to ten;
Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la république des
lettres en France to thirty-six. |
71 |
These
books charted the whole course of contemporary history. In fact,
they were the only map available, because political biography and
contemporary history—two genres that provide the backbone of our own
bestseller lists—did not exist in the legal literature of the Old
Regime. They were forbidden.52 Contemporaries who wanted
to orient themselves by relating the present to the recent past had
to turn to libel literature. They had nowhere else to go. |
72 |
How did
that process of orientation take place? If you read your way through
the entire corpus of libelles and chroniques
scandaleuses, you find the same traits, the same episodes, and
often the same phrases scattered everywhere. The authors drew on
common sources and lifted passages from each other's texts as freely
as they traded scraps of news in the cafés. It was not a matter of
plagiarism, because that notion hardly applied to underground
literature, and the books, like the songs, hardly had individual
authors. It was a case of rampant intertextuality. |
73 |
Despite
their baroque profusion, the texts can be reduced to a few
leitmotifs, which recur throughout the corpus. The court is always
sinking deeper into depravity; the ministers are always deceiving
the king; the king is always failing to fulfill his role as head of
state; the state's power is always being abused; and the common
people are always paying the price for the injustices inflicted on
them: higher taxes, increased suffering, more discontent, and
greater impotence in the face of an arbitrary and all-powerful
government. Individual news items like the coffee spilling were
stories in themselves. But they also fit into narrative frames of
whole books, and the books fit into a meta-narrative that ran
through the entire corpus: politics was an endless series of
variations on a single theme, decadence and despotism. |
74 |
True, I
don't know how the readers read those books, but I don't think it
extravagant to insist on a quality of reading in general: it is an
activity that involves making sense of signs by fitting them in
frames. Stories provide the most compelling frames. Ordinary people
often find meaning in the booming, buzzing confusion of the world
around them by telling, hearing, and reading stories. The general
readers in eighteenth-century France made sense of politics by
incorporating news into the narrative frames provided by the
literature of libel. And they were reinforced in their
interpretations by the messages they received from all the other
media—gossip, poems, songs, prints, jokes, and all the rest. |
75 |
|
I
have reached the end of my argument, and I
realize that I have not proven it. To drive it home, I must push it
in two directions. First, further back into the past. The corpus of
libelle literature from the 1770s and 1780s grew out of an
old tradition, which goes back beyond the Huguenot propaganda
against Louis XIV, beyond the seditious libeling of Jules Mazarin
(mazarinades), and beyond the pamphleteering of the religious
wars to the art of insult and rumor-mongering
developed in the Renaissance courts. From the political slander of
Pietro Aretino onward, this tradition changed and grew, until it
culminated in the vast outpouring of libelles under Louis XV
and Louis XVI.53 |
76 |
Those
libelles in turn provided a frame for the public's perception
of events during the crisis of 1787–1788, which brought down the Old
Regime. That is the second direction in which I would take the
argument. But to explain how that happened, I will have to write a
book, showing how the crisis was construed, day by day, in all the
media of the time. |
77 |
So I am
issuing promissory notes instead of arriving at a firm conclusion.
But I hope I have said enough to provoke some rethinking of the
connections between the media and politics—even politics today.
Although I am skeptical about attempts to make history teach
lessons, I think the Paris of Louis XV may help us gain some
perspective on the Washington of Bill Clinton. How do most Americans
orient themselves amidst the political confusion and media blitzes
of the year 2000? Not, I fear, by analyzing issues, but from our own
variety of political folklore—that is, by telling stories about the
private lives of our politicians, just as the French regaled
themselves with the Vie privée de Louis XV. How can we make
sense of it all? Not merely by reading our daily newspaper but by
rereading the history of an earlier information age, when the king's
secret was exposed beneath the tree of Cracow and the media knit
themselves together in a communication system so powerful that it
proved to be decisive in the collapse of the regime. |
78 |
Robert Darnton is the Davis
Professor of European History at Princeton University. His latest
books include Gens de lettres, gens du livre (1992), The
Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995),
Démocratie, co-edited with Olivier Duhamel (1998), and a
chapter in The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the
Eighteenth Century (1998). He is currently preparing an
electronic book on the history of books in eighteenth-century
France.
Notes
1 People have complained about a surfeit of
information during many periods of history. An almanac of 1772
referred casually to "notre siècle de publicité à outrance," as if
the observation were self-evident: Roze de Chantoiseau, Tablettes
royales de renommée ou Almanach général d'indication, rpt. in
"Les cafés de Paris en 1772" (anonymous), Extrait de la Revue de
poche du 15 juillet 1867 (Paris, n.d.), 2. For a typical remark
that illustrates the current sense of entering an unprecedented era
dominated by information technology, see the pronouncement of David
Puttnam quoted in The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1998,
W3: "We are on the threshold of what has come to be called the
Information Society." I should explain that this essay was written
for delivery as a lecture and that I have tried to maintain the tone
of the original by adopting a relatively informal style in the
printed version. More related material is available in an electronic
edition, the first article published in the new online edition of
the American Historical Review, on the World Wide Web, at
www.indiana.edu/~ahr, and later at www.historycooperative.org.
2 I have attempted to develop this argument in
an essay on my own experience as a reporter: "Journalism: All the
News That Fits We Print," in Robert Darnton, The Kiss of
Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990),
chap. 5. See also Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A
Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978); and
Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story
(Chicago, 1940).
3 Brian Cowan, "The Social Life of Coffee:
Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England,
1600–1720" (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2000); Qin Shao,
"Tempest over Teapots: The Vilification of Teahouse Culture in Early
Republican China," Journal of Asian Studies 57 (November
1998): 1009–41; Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: The
Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community (Chicago,
1984); Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban
VIII (Princeton, N.J., 1992); João José Reis, Slave Rebellion
in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Arthur Brakel,
trans. (Baltimore, Md., 1993); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and
Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780–1870 (New York, 1996); and Keith Hopkins, Death
and Renewal (Cambridge, 1983).
4 Planted at the beginning of the century and
cut down during the remodeling of the garden in 1781, the tree of
Cracow was such a well-known institution that it was celebrated in a
comic opera by Charles-François Panard, L'arbre de Cracovie,
performed at the Foire Saint-Germain in 1742. The print reproduced
above probably alludes to a theme in that vaudeville production: the
tree went "crack" every time someone beneath its branches told a
lie. On this and other contemporary sources, see François Rosset,
L'arbre de Cracovie: Le mythe polonais dans la littérature
française (Paris, 1996), 7–11. The best general account of
nouvellistes is still in Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les
nouvellistes (Paris, 1905), and Figaro et ses devanciers
(Paris, 1909). As an example of how remarks made beneath the tree of
Cracow spread throughout Paris and Versailles, see
E. J. B. Rathery, ed., Journal et mémoires du marquis
d'Argenson (Paris, 1862), 5: 450.
5 Pierre Manuel, La police de Paris
dévoilée (Paris, "l'An second de la liberté" [1790]), 1: 206. I
have not been able to find the original of this spy report by the
notorious Charles de Fieux, chevalier de Mouhy, in Mouhy's dossier
in the archives of the Bastille: Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal
(hereafter, BA), Paris, ms. 10029.
6 This description relies on the work of
Funck-Brentano, Les nouvellistes, and Figaro et ses
devanciers, but more recent work has modified the picture of the
"parish" and its connection to the Mémoires secrets. See
Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort, eds., The "Mémoires
secrets" and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century
France (Oxford, 1998); François Moureau, Répertoire des
nouvelles à la main: Dictionnaire de la presse manuscrite
clandestine XVIe–XVIIIe
siècle (Oxford, 1999); and Moureau, De bonne main: La
communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris, 1993). After studying the voluminous text of the
nouvelles à la main produced by the "parish" between 1745 and
1752, I have concluded that the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France (hereafter, BNF) contains little information that could
not have passed through the censorship administered by the police:
BNF, ms. fr. 13701–12. The published version of the Mémoires
secrets, which covered the period 1762–1787 and first appeared
in 1777, is completely different in tone. It was highly illegal and
sold widely: see Robert Darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine
Literature in France 1769–1789 (New York, 1995), 119–20.
7 In the case of France, a vast number of
excellent books and articles have been published by Jean Sgard,
Pierre Rétat, Gilles Feyel, François Moureau, Jack Censer, and
Jeremy Popkin. For an overview of the entire subject, see Claude
Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou,
Histoire générale de la presse française (Paris, 1969); and
the collective works edited by Jean Sgard, Dictionnaire des
journaux, 1600–1789, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991); and Dictionnaire
des journalistes, 1600–1789, 2 vols. (1976; rpt. edn., Oxford,
1999).
8 Michael Stolleis, Staat und Staatsräson in
der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 1990); and Jochen Schlobach,
"Secrètes correspondances: La fonction du secret dans les
correspondances littéraires," in Moureau, De bonne main.
9 Manuel, La police de Paris dévoilée,
1: 201–02.
10 A. de Boislisle, ed., Lettres de M. de
Marville, Lieutenant-Général de Police, au ministre Maurepas
(1742–1747) (Paris, 1896), 2: 262.
11 On literacy, see François Furet and Jacques
Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L'alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à
Jules Ferry, 2 vols. (Paris, 1977); on public opinion, Keith M.
Baker, "Public Opinion as Political Invention," in Baker,
Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political
Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990); and Mona
Ozouf, "L'Opinion publique," in Keith Baker, ed., The Political
Culture of the Old Regime, Vol. 1 of The French Revolution
and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 1987).
12 [Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert],
Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry (London, 1775), 215.
13 This and the following remarks about
Mairobert are based on his dossier in the archives of the Bastille:
BA, ms. 11683, and on his dossier in the papers of Joseph d'Hémery,
inspector of the book trade: BNF, ms. acq. fr. 10783. See also the
article on him in the Dictionnaire des journalistes, 2:
787–89.
14 "Observations de d'Hémery du 16 juin 1749,"
BA, ms. 11683, fol. 52.
15 Le portefeuille d'un talon rouge
contenant des anecdotes galantes et secrètes de la cour de
France, rpt. as Le coffret du bibliophile (Paris, n.d.),
22.
16 BA, ms. 10170. This source, the densest I
have been able to find, covers the years 1726–1729. For help in
locating the cafés and in mapping them, I would like to thank Sean
Quinlan, Editorial Assistant at the American Historical
Review, and Jian Liu, Reference Librarian and Collection Manager
for Linguistics, Indiana University Libraries, who worked with the
staff of the AHR in preparing the electronic version of this
address. The detailed mapping, with excerpts from reports on
conversations in eighteen of the cafés, can be consulted in the link
entitled "Mapping Café Talk," at
www.indiana.edu/~ahr.
17 BA, ms. 10170, fol. 175. For reasons of
clarity, I have added quotation marks. The original had none,
although it was clearly written in dialogue, as can be seen from the
texts reproduced in the electronic version of this essay, at the
link entitled "Spy Reports on Conversations in Cafés,"
www.indiana.edu/~ahr.
18 BA, ms. 10170, fol.
176.
19 BA, ms. 10170, fol.
93.
20 BNF, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 1891, fol. 419.
21 Marc Bloch, Rois thaumaturges: Etude sur
le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale (Paris,
1924). On contemporary indignation about the route around Paris, see
BNF, ms. fr. 13710, fol. 66. For a sober account of Louis XV's
relations with the Nesle sisters (there were actually five of them,
but contemporary libelles usually mentioned only three or
sometimes four), see Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris, 1989),
484–92. My interpretation of political and diplomatic history in
these years owes a good deal to Antoine's definitive study.
22 BA, ms. 10029, fol. 129. The incest theme
appears in some of the most violent poems and songs attacking Louis
XV in 1748–1751. One in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de
Paris, ms. 649, p. 50, begins, "Incestueux tyran, traître inhumain,
faussaire . . ."
23 These issues have been dramatized most
recently in the controversy aroused by the duplicitous mixture of
fact and fiction in Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald
Reagan (New York, 1999): see Kate Masur, "Edmund Morris's
Dutch: Reconstructing Reagan or Deconstructing History?"
Perspectives 37 (December 1999): 3–5. For my part, I would
not deny the literary quality of history writing, but I think the
invention of anything that is passed off as factual violates an
implicit contract between the historian and the reader: whether or
not we are certified as professionals by the award of a PhD, we
historians should never fabricate evidence.
24 Four editions of Les amours de
Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans: Ouvrage traduit de l'Arabe du voyageur
Krinelbol (Amsterdam, 1747, 1747, 1748, and 1770) can be
consulted in the BNF, Lb38.554.A-D. All but the first have elaborate
keys, usually inserted into the binding from a separate copy,
sometimes with manuscript notes. Some notes also appear in the
margins of this and the other three works, which also have keys.
25 The following quotations come from BNF, ms.
nouv. acq. fr. 1891, fols. 421, 431, 433, 437.
26 BNF, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 10783.
27 BA, ms. 11582, fols. 55–57. See also Mlle.
Bonafons' remarks in her second interrogation, fols. 79–80: "A elle
représenté qu'il y a dans cet ouvrage des faits particuliers dont
son état ne lui permettait pas naturellement d'avoir connaissance.
Interpellée de nous déclarer par qui elle en a été instruite. A dit
qu'il ne lui a été fourni aucuns mémoires ni donné aucuns conseils,
et que c'est les bruits publics et le hazard qui l'ont déterminée à
insérer dans l'ouvrage ce qui s'y trouve."
28 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de
Paris, new edn. (Neuchâtel, 1788), 1: 282. Mercier also remarked
(6: 40): "Ainsi à Paris tout est matière à chanson; et quiconque,
maréchal de France ou pendu, n'a pas été chansonné a beau faire, il
demeurera inconnu au peuple." Among the many historical studies of
French songs, see especially Emile Raunié, Chansonnier historique
du XVIIIe siècle, 10 vols. (Paris, 1879–84);
Patrice Coirault, Formation de nos chansons folkloriques, 4
vols. (Paris, 1953); Rolf Reichardt and Herbert Schneider, "Chanson
et musique populaire devant l'histoire à la fin de l'Ancien Régime,"
Dix-huitième siècle 18 (1986): 117–44; and Giles Barber,
"'Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre' or, How History Reaches the
Nursery," in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, eds., Children and
Their Books: A Collection of Essays to Celebrate the Work of Iona
and Peter Opie (Oxford, 1989), 135–63.
29 This bon mot may have been coined by
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort: see Raunié, Chansonnier
historique, 1: i.
30 One box in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal,
ms. 10319, contains dozens of these snippets, thrown together
helter-skelter, which comment in rhyme on all sorts of current
events: the amorous adventures of the regent, Law's fiscal system,
the battles of the Jansenists and Jesuits, the tax reforms of the
abbé Terray, the judicial reforms of the chancellor Maupeou—set to
all kinds of popular tunes: "La béquille du Père Barnabas,"
"Réveillez-vous belle endormie," "Allons cher coeur, point de
rigueur," "J'avais pris femme laide." The repertory of melodies was
inexhaustible, the occasions for drawing on it endless, thanks to
the inventiveness of the Parisians and the rumor mill at work in the
court.
31 BA, ms. 11683, fol. 59, report on the
arrest of Mairobert by Joseph d'Hémery, July 2, 1749. The verse on
the scrap of paper comes from a separate dossier labeled "68 pièces
paraphées." In a report to the police on July 1, 1749, a spy noted
(fol. 55): "Le sieur Mairobert a sur lui des vers contre le roi et
contre Mme. de Pompadour. En raisonnant avec lui sur le risque que
court l'auteur de pareils écrits, il répondit qu'il n'en courait
aucun, qu'il ne s'agissait que d'en glisser dans la poche de
quelqu'un dans un café ou au spectacle pour les répandre sans risque
ou d'en laisser tomber des copies aux promenades . . .
J'ai lieu de penser qu'il en a distribué bon
nombre."
32 BA, ms. 11683, fol.
45.
33 Maurepas' love of songs and poems
about current events is mentioned in many contemporary sources. See,
for example, Rathery, Journal et mémoires du marquis
d'Argenson, 5: 446; and Edmond-Jean-François Barbier,
Chronique de la régence et du règne de Louis XV (1718–1763), ou
Journal de Barbier, avocat au Parlement de Paris (Paris, 1858),
4: 362–66.
34 Rathery, Journal et mémoires de marquis
d'Argenson, 5: 448, 452, 456. The following version is taken
from d'Argenson's account of this episode, 456. See also Barbier,
Chronique, 4: 361–67; Charles Collé, Journal et mémoires
de Charles Collé (Paris, 1868), 1: 71; and François Joachim de
Pierre, Cardinal de Bernis, Mémoires et lettres de
François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis (1715–1758)
(Paris, 1878), 120. A full and well-informed account of Maurepas'
fall, which includes a version of the song that has "Pompadour" in
place of "Iris," appears in a manuscript collection of songs in the
Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, ms. 649, 121–27.
35 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française
(Nîmes, 1778), 1: 526: "FLEURS, au pluriel, se dit pour
flueurs et signifie les règles, les purgations des femmes
. . . On appelle fleurs blanches une certaine
maladie des femmes." Rather than a sexually transmitted disease like
gonorrhea, this maladie might have been clorosis, or
green-sickness.
36 In addition to the references given above,
note 30, see Bernard Cottret and Monique Cottret, "Les chansons du
mal-aimé: Raison d'Etat et rumeur publique (1748–1750)," in
Histoire sociale, sensibilités collectives et mentalités:
Mélanges Robert Mandrou (Paris, 1985),
303–15.
37 BA, ms. 11690, fol.
66.
38 I have discussed this affair at length in
an essay, "Public Opinion and Communication Networks in
Eighteenth-Century Paris," to be published sometime in 2001 by the
European Science Foundation. Its text, which contains references to
a great deal of source material, can be consulted in the electronic
version of this essay, on the AHR web site,
www.indiana.edu/~ahr. Most of the documentation comes from the
dossiers grouped together in BA, ms. 11690.
39 Marc Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, Comte
d'Argenson, to Nicolas René Berryer, June 26, 1749, BA, ms. 11690,
fol. 42.
40 "Interrogatoire du sieur Bonis," July 4,
1749, BA, ms. 11690, fols. 46–47.
41 Vie privée de Louis XV, ou principaux
événements, particularités et anecdotes de son règne (London,
1781), 2: 301–02. See also Les fastes de Louis XV, de ses
ministres, maîtresses, généraux et autres notables personnages de
son règne (Villefranche, 1782), 1: 333–40.
42 My own understanding of this field owes a
great deal to conversations with Robert Merton and Elihu Katz. On
Gabriel Tarde, see his dated but still stimulating work,
L'opinion et la foule (Paris, 1901); and Terry N. Clark, ed.,
On Communication and Social Influence (Chicago, 1969). For my
part, I find Habermas's notion of the public sphere valid enough as
a conceptual tool; but I think that some of his followers make the
mistake of reifying it, so that it becomes an active agent in
history, an actual force that produces actual effects—including, in
some cases, the French Revolution. For some stimulating and
sympathetic discussion of the Habermas thesis, see Craig Calhoun,
ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
43 I have located and compared the texts of
nine manuscript versions of this song. The first verse, quoted below
and reproduced in Figure 10, comes from the scrap of paper taken
from the pockets of Christophe Guyard during his interrogation in
the Bastille: BA, ms. 11690, fols. 67–68. The other texts come from:
BA, ms. 11683, fol. 134; ms. 11683, fol. 132; BNF, ms. fr. 12717,
pp. 1–3; ms. 12718, p. 53; ms. 12719, p. 83; Bibliothèque Historique
de la Ville de Paris, ms. 648, pp. 393–96; ms. 649, pp. 70–74; and
ms. 580, pp. 248–49.
44 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), shows how the rhythms of poetry and music
contribute to the extraordinary feats of memorizing epic poems.
45 Unfortunately, the chansonnier
Maurepas stops in 1747, but the even richer chansonnier
Clairambault extends through the mid-century years: BNF, mss. fr.
12717–20.
46 Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de
Paris, mss. 648–50.
47 P. Capelle, La clef du Caveau, à l'usage
de tous les chansonniers français (Paris, 1816); and J.-B.
Christophe Ballard, La clef des chansonniers (Paris, 1717).
Most of the other "keys" are anonymous manuscripts available in the
Fonds Weckerlin of the BNF. The most important for this research
project are Recueil d'anciens vaudevilles, romances, chansons
galantes et grivoises, brunettes, airs tendres (1729) and
Recueil de timbres de vaudevilles nottés de La Coquette sans le
savoir et autres pièces à vaudeville (n.d.). For help in
locating this music, I would like to thank Hélène Delavault, Gérard
Carreau, and Andrew Clark. Hélène Delavault has recorded fourteen of
the songs that circulated in Paris during the political crisis of
1749–1750, and the songs and lyrics are available on the AHR
web site.
48 Louis Petit de Bachaumont, the doyen of
Mme. Doublet's salon, had a lackey known as "France": see
Funck-Brentano, Figaro et ses devanciers,
264.
49 Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du
Barry, 167.
50 Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du
Barry, 76.
51 Robert Darnton, The Forbidden
Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995).
52 Despite their official function, few
historiographes du roi wrote contemporary history. The
exception was Voltaire, whose Siècle de Louis XV reads like a
political pamphlet in comparison with his magisterial Siècle de
Louis XIV.
53 I have attempted to sketch the long-term
history of libelles in Forbidden Best-Sellers of
Pre-Revolutionary France, chap. 8.
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