The Revolutionary Temper, page 56
BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France
Correspondance secrète: Correspondance secrète inédite sur Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, la cour et la ville de 1777 à 1792, ed. Mathurin de Lescure (Paris, 1866), 2 vols.
D’Argenson, Journal: René Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, ed. E. J. B. Rathéry (Paris, 1857–1858), 2 vols.
Grimm, Correspondance littéraire: Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris, 1877–1882), 16 vols.
Hardy, Journal: Siméon-Prosper Hardy, “Mes loisirs, ou journal des événements tel qu’ils parviennent à ma connaissance (1764–1789),” 8 vols., Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits Français, 6680–87, currently being edited by Pascal Bastien and others and published by Hermann Éditeurs (Paris, 2012–2019). Vols. 1–7 have appeared as of this writing.
Journal historique: Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert, Journal historique de la révolution opérée dans la constitution de la monarchie française par M. de Maupeou, chancelier de France (London, 1776–1777), 7 vols.
Luynes, Mémoires: Mémoires du duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV (1735–1758), ed. L. Dussieux and Eud. Soulié (Paris, 1860), 17 vols.
Mémoires secrets: Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert and others, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres (London, 1777–1789), 36 vols.
Métra, Correspondance: Correspondance secrète, politique et littéraire, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des cours, des sociétés et de la littérature en France depuis la mort de Louis XV (London, 1787–1790), 18 vols.
Ruault, Gazette: Nicolas Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Révolution. Lettres à son frère 1783–1796, ed. Anne Vassal (Paris, 1976).
Véri, Journal: Journal de l’abbé Véri, ed. Jehan de Witte (Paris, 1928–1930), 2 vols.
Introduction
1. The readiness of historians in the Annales school to reconsider events goes back to an article by Pierre Nora published in 1972. See the reworked version of it, “Le retour de l’événement,” in Faire de l’histoire. Nouveaux problèmes, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris, 1974), 210–28. See also François Dosse, “L’Événement historique: une énigme irrésolue,” Nouvelle revue de psychosociologie, no. 19 (2015), 13–27; Paul Ricoeur, “Événement et sens,” L’Événement en perspective, ed. J. L. Petit (Paris, 1991), 41–56; Pierre Laborie, Penser l’événement, 1940–1945 (Paris, 2019); and Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York, 1996), 17–38. For a view of events that connects history and anthropology, see Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, 1981) and the interpretation of Sahlins’s theory by William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), chap. 7. Sewell applies a related concept of structure to the fall of the Bastille in chap. 8.
2. This definition derives from the Oxford English Dictionary and is discussed more fully in the Conclusion at the end of this book.
3. Among the many monographs on Paris, I have drawn on the work of Daniel Roche, especially Le Peuple de Paris: essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1981) and Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles (XVIIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris, 1997); David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002); and several books by Arlette Farge, especially Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992).
4. I have sketched these themes, drawing on police archives, in “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” The American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 1–35.
5. Planted at the beginning of the century and cut down during the remodeling of the Palais-Royal 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. Its name probably derived from the groups of nouvellistes who gathered around it during the War of the Polish Succession, 1733–1735. See François Rosset, L’Arbre de Cracovie: le mythe polonais dans la littérature française (Paris, 1996).
6. See Gilles Feyel, L’Annonce et la nouvelle. La presse d’information en France sous l’Ancien Régime (1630–1788) (Oxford, 2000) and the excellent monograph by Elizabeth Andrews Bond, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2021), which concentrates on letters to the editor.
7. Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1994), 7 and 215–17.
8. Among the many monographs on the press, I am indebted especially to Pierre Rétat, Gazettes et information politique sous l’Ancien Régime (Saint-Étienne, 1999); Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1994); Jeremy D. Popkin, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 1997); and the superb volumes edited by Jean Sgard, Dictionnaire des journaux (Oxford, 1991), 2 vols., and Dictionnaire des journalistes (Oxford, 1999), 2 vols.
9. Although written for a popular audience, the work of Frantz Funck-Brentano contains much original research on the Doublet salon and the nouvellistes: Les Nouvellistes (Paris, 1905). But it is superseded by the studies of François Moureau, De Bonne main: la communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford, 1993) and Répertoire des nouvelles à la main: dictionnaire de la presse manuscrite clandestine XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Oxford, 1999).
10. Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA, 2010).
11. I have summarized my research on these subjects in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979); A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (New York, 2018); and Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (New York, 2021).
12. Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia, 2009); see especially pp. 269–99.
13. Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague, 1976), II, 701.
14. See, for example, Bronislaw Baczko, Les Imaginaires sociaux. Mémoires et espoirs collectifs (Paris, 1984), especially pp. 30–35. Many historians use similar phrasing. Thus “âme collective” and “conscience sociale” in Jean Nicolas, La Rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale (1661–1789) (Paris, 2002), 541; “imaginaire collectif” in François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), 108; “modes collectifs de pensée et de sensibilité,” in Laborie, Penser l’événement, 89; “collective psychology” and “revolutionary consciousness” in Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, 1996), 302 and 309; “social imagination” and “collective memory” in David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002), 71, 131; and “collective consciousness” in Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2000), 26.
15. De la Division du travail social (Paris, 1960; 1st edition, 1893), 46. All translations in this book are mine.
16. Gabriel Tarde, L’Opinion et la foule (Paris, 1901) and Les Lois de l’imitation (Paris, 1890).
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition, London, 1991). See especially pp. 35–36, where the argument closely resembles Tarde’s thesis.
18. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston, 1986; original edition, 1974), 10. See also Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1990; original edition, 1959).
19. Darnton, “Theatricality and Violence in Paris, 1788,” in Voltaire: An Oxford Celebration, ed. Nicholas Cronk, Alison Oliver, and Gillian Pink (Oxford, 2022), 9–29. A shortened version of this essay was published in The Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 2022, pp. 7–9.
20. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen, 1980; first edition, 1922), 2.
21. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 5 and 131.
Chapter 1
1. To appreciate the disparity between the reports of events that circulated in Paris in 1747 and the version of events reconstructed by historians, compare the account that follows with standard histories such as Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire 1740–1763 (New York, 1940), 161–62, vol. 9 of The Rise of Modern Europe, edited by William L. Langer; and Henri Carré, Louis XV (1715–1774) (Paris, 1911), 153–54, vol. 8 of Histoire de France, edited by Ernest Lavisse. A more recent history of the war treats Lawfeld as a French victory: Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (Phoenix Mill, UK, 1994).
2. Bibliothèque nationale de France (henceforth BnF), ms. fr. 13705, fo. 149. This is the text of the note according to a bulletin from the salon of Mme Doublet. A different version appeared in the Courrier d’Amsterdam of July 14, 1747.
3. Ibid., fo. 156. The Courrier d’Avignon of July 14, 1747, also contains a different version of this note. On July 2, 1747, Louis XV also ordered the bishop of Bayonne to conduct a Te Deum in his cathedral: Michèle Fogel, Les Cérémonies de l’information dans la France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1989), 342–46. On rumors in relation to the war, including reports about Lawfeld, see Tabetha Leigh Ewing, Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford, 2014).
4. The reports are scattered through the nouvelles à la main in BnF, ms. fr. 13705. The quotation comes from a letter from Tongres dated July 3, 1747, fo. 154.
5. Gazette d’Amsterdam, July 7, 11, 14, 18, and 21, 1747, in Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris (cited henceforth as Arsenal), Quarto H.8, 929. The reports on casualties varied enormously from issue to issue. On July 18, 1747, the Gazette d’Amsterdam printed a letter from London dated July 11, which stated, “Notre perte est peu considérable en comparaison de celle des ennemis.” The Courrier d’Avignon, which strongly favored the French, published articles that made the battle look more decisively like a French victory. See its issues of July 14, 18, 21, 25, and 28, 1747.
6. Thus the report of a police spy dated December 2, 1747, Arsenal, ms. 10169, fo. 222: “Tout Paris commente beaucoup sur la réponse des Hollandais contenue tout au long dans leur gazette d’hier.” See also the spy report of November 24, 1747, Arsenal, ms. 10169, fo. 114.
7. On public opinion and police nouvellistes, see Arsenal, ms. 10022, fos. 45–47 and ms. 10169, fo. 112.
8. Arsenal, ms. 10022, fo. 46.
9. Barbier, Chronique de la Régence et du règne de Louis XV (1718–1763), ou Journal de Barbier, avocat au Parlement de Paris (Paris, 1857; cited henceforth as Barbier, Chronique), IV, 250.
10. Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris, 1994), I, 377.
11. This personalization also characterized the language of peace treaties, such as the one that ended the War of the Austrian Succession: Traité de paix entre le Roi, le Roi de la Grande Bretagne, et les Etats Généraux des Provinces-Unies des Pays-Bas (Paris, 1750).
12. See the police reports on conversations in cafés and public places in Arsenal, ms. 10169. Similar references occur in Lettres de M. de Marville, lieutenant général de police, au ministre Maurepas (1742–1747), ed. A. de Boislisle (Paris, 1905), III and Barbier, Chronique, IV.
13. In Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), Michael Kwass has corrected the standard view that the nobility generally managed to avoid direct taxes. That view derives mainly from the work of Marcel Marion, particularly Les Impôts directs sous l’Ancien Régime, principalement au VIIIe siècle (Paris, 1910).
14. Barbier, Chronique, IV, 289.
15. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Nîmes, 1778; edition of 1762) defined “publier” as “rendre public.” The dictionary also defined “Publication” as “action par laquelle on rend une chose publique et notoire.” Among the examples it cited was “la publication de la paix.”
16. The following account is based on BnF, ms. fr. 12719, p. 185; Courrier d’Avignon, Feb. 25, 1749; and Barbier Chronique, IV, 350–52.
17. Barbier, Chronique, IV, 350.
18. Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, ed. E.-J.-B. Rathery (Paris, 1862), IV, 391. For reports of police spies, see François Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1881), XVI, 19.
Chapter 2
1. The following account is based primarily on “Dossier du Prétendant Charles Édouard” in the archives of the Bastille, Arsenal, ms. 11658; the nouvelles connected with the salon of Mme Doublet, BnF ms. fr. 13707–13710; and Barbier, Chronique, IV, 329–41. See also the excellent article by Thomas E. Kaiser, “The Drama of Charles Edward Stuart, Jacobite Propaganda, and French Political Protest, 1745–1750,” Eighteenth-Century Studies XXX, no. 4 (1997): 365–81; and L. L. Bongie, The Love of a Prince: Bonnie Prince Charlie in France (Vancouver, 1986). On the general issue of the desacralization of the monarchy, see Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1990).
2. Barbier, Chronique, IV, 161.
3. Courrier d’Avignon, Dec. 10, 17, 20, and 27, 1748.
4. In addition to the sources cited above, note 1, this account draws on reports in Courrier d’Avignon, Dec. 20, 1748; Gazette d’Utrecht, Dec. 27, 1748; Gazette d’Amsterdam, Dec. 27, 1748; and Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ, 1718–1784, ed. Vicomte de Grouchy and Paul Cottin (Paris, 1906), 114.
5. The following quotations come from Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (henceforth Bibliothèque historique), ms. 649, pp. 13, 16, 31, and 60.
6. Ibid., p. 60. “Français, rougissez tous, que l’Ecosse frémisse; / George d’Hanovre a pris le roi à son service, / Et Louis devenu de l’Electeur exempt, / Surprend, arrête, outrage indignement / Un Hannibal nouveau, d’Albion le vrai maître, / Et qui de l’univers, mériterait de l’être.”
7. See BnF, ms. fr. 13710, fos. 65–66; Courrier d’Avignon, Aug. 22, 1749; Barbier, Chronique, IV, 440 and V, 121; and Mémoires du duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV (1735–1758), ed. L. Dussieu and E. Soulié (Paris, 1862), IX, 147–55.
8. Louis XV’s supposedly incestuous affairs with the de Nesle sisters provoked gossip and reports by police spies and underground gazettes throughout the early 1740s. See, for example, Arsenal, ms. 10029, fo. 129: “Les gens d’affaires, les officiers retirés, et le peuple gémissent, murmurent contre le ministère et prévoient que cette guerre aura des suites fâcheuses. Les gens d’Eglise, Jansénistes surtout, sont de ce dernier sentiment et osent penser et dire que les malheurs qui sont à la veille d’accabler le royaume viennent d’en haut en punition des incestes du roi, et de son irreligion.” On the king’s early mistresses and his loss of the royal touch, see the excellent biography by Antoine Michel, Louis XV (Paris, 1989), 484–92. The definitive work on the royal touch is Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, études sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg, 1924).
9. Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, XII, 212.
10. BnF, ms. fr. 12720, p. 367.
11. BnF, nouvelles acquisitions françaises (henceforth n.a.fr.), 10781.
12. D’Argenson, Journal, V, 464 and 468.
Chapter 3
1. Chamfort himself attributed the remark to “un homme d’esprit”: Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Chamfort. Oeuvres principales (Paris, 1960), 213. Patrice Coirault has explored the history of folk songs in several works, notably Notre chanson folklorique (Paris, 1941). For a detailed study of the material discussed in this chapter, see my Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA, 2010).
2. D’Argenson, Journal, V, 343.
3. Hélène Delavault, accompanied by Claude Pavy on the guitar, has recorded twelve of the songs, which are freely available online at www.hup.harvard.edu/features/darpoe. See “An Electronic Cabaret” in Poetry and the Police, 174–88.
4. Poetry and the Police, 158–61.
5. Portefeuille d’un talon rouge. Contenant les anecdotes galantes & secrètes de la cour de France (Paris, n.d.), 22.
6. The original version is in Clef des chansonniers, ou recueil de vaudevilles depuis cent ans et plus (Paris, 1717), I, 130: “Réveillez-vous, belle dormeuse, / Si mes discours vous font plaisir. / Mais si vous êtes scrupuleuse, / Dormez, ou feignez de dormir.” The attack on the duchess is in BnF ms. fr 13705, fo. 2: “Sur vos pas, charmante duchesse, / Au lieu des grâces et des ris, / L’amour fait voltiger sans cesse / Un essaim de chauve-souris.” Although it had no political message, it prepared the way, by means of association, for the attack on Mme de Pompadour, which appeared in several sources and is quoted here from d’Argenson, Journal, V, 456. See also BnF, ms. fr 13709, fo. 42.
