22,40 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This important and original book addresses the nature of public opinion, the relation between rulers and ruled, and the role of popular rumours in eighteenth century France. Arlette Farge draws on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police records and newsheets to show that ordinary Parisians had definite opinions on what was happening in their city.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 462
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
PART I: Journals, Newspapers and Policemen: Scenes from Street Life
1 Words scorned and persecuted
Diaries and memoirs from the early eighteenth century
Police records, 1725–1740: secret policing and the persecution of words
2 Words caught in flight: government, information and resistance
Popular gossip invades the police reports
News-sheets
The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques
PART II: Speeches of Discontent: Forms and Motifs
3 Mobility and fragmentation
Placards and satire: the dangers of laughter
Between archaism and modernity
The function of anecdotes
Differentiated opinions
4 Motifs
The traditional objects of popular concern
Exceptional inflections
PART III: Speaking against the King, or Words from the Bastille (1661–1775)
Between 1661 and 1775: approaches to a distance
What was ‘seditious talk’? Who talked sedition?
The king – threatening and threatened
A reader’s impressions
5 ‘Who is to stop me killing the king?’
An obstinate theme, 1661–1775
From secrecy to secrets
Vision and genius, alchemy and poisons
‘You will murder the king…’
The impossibility of innocence
6 ‘Your worthy subjects deserve a king who shall surpass them.’
From 1744 to 1749
1757–1760: concerning the Damiens affair
1760–1775: the flight of a king
In prison
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
C1
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
1
2
3
4
5
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
55
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
123
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
e1
SUBVERSIVE WORDS
Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France
Arlette Farge
Translated by Rosemary Morris
This translation copyright © Polity Press 1994.
First published in France as Dire et mal dire: L’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle © Éditions du Seuil, 1992.
This translation first published 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.
Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.
Reprinted 2005
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 0 7456 1142 7
ISBN 0 7456 1378 0 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk
J’ai embelli ma vie de jours que je n’ai pas vécus.
I have embellished my life with days I never knew.
Pascal Quignard
Foreword
Time: the eighteenth century. Words – light, rebellious, angry or insulting – are taking flight. Sternly, the king persecutes the word and shuts it within prison walls. It falls exhausted into a police report or is set down and read in an order of imprisonment. The historian seizes it and says, ‘This word has meaning.’ Now it is he who persecutes the persecuted word, and makes of it what some call an intellectual object. Is this the last snare of all? Perhaps it is one of the multiple avatars of the historian, that hunter of the past and bearer of (ultimately poetic) illusions: the word once evaded him, but this time he has painstakingly extracted it from the archives, and will now restore to it that freedom which the king took away so long ago.
That is, of course, a dream, but it is also a conviction. As one approaches the places where words were said concerning the events of those days, or hearkens to street-corner opinions, one is creating a sphere which may also form the plot of a story. The winged words will remain dumb unless they are carefully gathered up, not to fill a museum but to discover, in and through their very lightness, the weightiness of revolt or consent coming from mouths which had never been asked, or allowed, to speak any words at all.
Seldom can we rediscover the criticisms uttered by an anonymous populace, and the historian knows how likely he is to stumble over that ever-present absence of the word. Such words did not make history, and they remain enigmatic despite the researcher’s eager desire to find them in his sources, as lively and tumultuous as they must have been when the old days were new. Of that past eagerness, those appeals and interjections, those secretive or overt dialogues, nothing remains save the opaque certainty that they once existed, and contributed just as much as actions – which are easier to trace – to innumerable important moments in past history. Sometimes a breach opens in the silence of the sources, and words come down to us – usually because they caused a scandal or boldly ventured into forbidden space. It may be gossip overheard in public places by zealous police inspectors, or conversations reported by chroniclers interested in the impetuous and subversive shifts of town life. Or it may be words reported by some informer who considered them suspect, in which case their author could find himself in trouble with the law; or again, graffiti on walls, or words written on scraps of paper dropped on the ground.
All through the eighteenth century, the authorities were goaded with words; they understood when those words seemed to express opposition, but were astonished when they appeared insignificant, or even an expression of loyalty. ‘Speaking about’ was as disconcerting as ‘speaking against’: it was a serious derogation of one of the profoundest ideas of the monarchy, that the populace, vulgar followers of instinct, had no business thinking about current events. All they had to do was to give their consent to the acts of authority, often canalized through ceremonial – ritual, festival, religious service or punishment.
The words which give opinions – this will do, that will not do – are a reality and show very clearly that the people of Paris did not blindly accept the conditions under which they lived. There is nothing extraordinary about that. What is extraordinary is that their view of events, and the words they spoke concerning what they had seen and heard, had no meaning for the monarchy, which actually feared the people more than anything else. This is the space which we must investigate; this is the speech whose meaning we must strive to discover. It will be no easy task, for the words are scattered through a vast number of sources. Once we have found them, we must then ask about their history, their reasons for existing, the motives which caused them to be uttered, the change in their inflexions as times and events went by. The eighteenth century, like so many others, was awash with rumour; was it unique, and can one talk of it in terms of public opinion or of an assumption of political attitudes? This is an audacious question which risks being anachronistic, since we know that at that time the men and women of town and countryside were subjects of the king, not political subjects. But it is nevertheless a real question, not because we are setting out yet again to seek the origins of the French Revolution which brought the century to an end in fundamental change, but because we wish to set those words in particular contexts and precise movements in the course of history. Words spoken and opinions pronounced could open up distances, cause displacements and organize something which was new to the spheres of saying and doing; and that is how we must take them, in the place where they were born, at the heart of the situations from which they sprang. That is how we can read ‘the formation of newness, the emergence of what Foucault calls “topicality”’.1
The ‘topicality’ of the eighteenth century, as we see it, is made up of words (often punishable) spoken by people of no, or little, importance in the heated environment of the public sphere – or the public square. Novelists, of course, delight in the liveliness of such words and the buried dramas and tiny renunciations which they help to reveal; novelists, of course, aspire to communicate that ‘living substance’ through an art of dialogue which will in no way falsify it.2 Theirs is a noble task; we shall leave them to it. Historians, meanwhile, have to cleave words so as to extract their meaning; their desire is above all to give a name to the thing of no importance, the ordinary everyday word which falls apart as soon as spoken, but pushes in between two morsels of time which were formerly indivisible. It is the space thus created which is ‘topical’. It is those words which we are trying to speak. ‘He claimed that he was pursued by vulgar words [sordida verba] and that he had to speak them …’3
Introduction
This book was inspired by the now-classic study by Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,1 and by the interest recently shown in the subject by a number of historians.2 Habermas has shown how, in the eighteenth century, a bourgeois ‘public sphere’ (or ‘public space’) was created; it was governed by reason, a reason which was capable of challenging those in power, meaning the king and the court. In this ‘sphere’ there arose an enlightened opinion, intensely rational and universal. This, of course, had nothing more to do with private opinion, and it could lay claim to a sort of ‘truth’ that challenged and opposed the public domain of the court, which was monopolized by the representation of royal power. It was in writing – journals and newspapers – that this new opinion was most at home: it was here that members of elite groups expressed themselves and constituted an educated critical ‘sphere’ with a precise historical outline. Here, says Habermas, public opinion related to ‘a public sphere constituted by private people putting reason to use’. This is the model which his book is devoted to studying, and he makes it clear at the outset that his examination of this determined historical form (the bourgeois public sphere) ‘leaves aside the plebeian public sphere as a variant that in a sense was suppressed in the historical process’.
‘Suppressed’? The idea merits closer consideration. If that sphere was suppressed, then it must at least have existed, so there seems no reason why its outlines should not be sought. It was then that this book began – precisely as I read those words of Habermas’s. He goes on to say that in the French Revolution ‘there became active, for a moment, a public sphere which had shaken off its literary aspect. It was the uneducated common people which was its subject, not the cultured classes.’ Three concepts here provoke a reaction: ‘common people’, ‘uneducated’, ‘subject’. What was happening to these so-called uneducated common people in the eighteenth century before the Revolution? Were they really quite uneducated? Did they ‘become active’ before 14 July 1789? In what way did they think of themselves as a ‘subject’, and whose ‘subject’? And how were they thought of, and by whom?
If we must express ourselves in more learned terms, then this book is seeking to detect the political forms of popular acquiescence in, or dissatisfaction with, events and the monarchy-as-spectacle; it is an inquiry into the existence of a ‘popular’ public opinion whose motives it seeks to discover and articulate. Such questions cannot be asked without some preliminary reflection. ‘Public opinion’ is not an object which is easy to handle; when we are dealing with constituent societies of the Ancien Régime we must be still more alert, and our methodology still more cautious, lest we fall into facile anachronism, or even serious errors of interpretation. For ‘public opinion’, as the expression is usually used, ‘is closely bound to parliamentary democracy’3 – which was obviously not the case in the eighteenth century. Moreover, at that time politics was not the business of the people; there was far more concern to keep the people out of it. Any ‘opinion’ issuing from among the common herd was described as crazy, impulsive, inept – as when Condorcet, in 1776, defined popular opinion as ‘that of the stupidest and most miserable section of the population’. Did this mean that I was seeking an object which simply could not be found? I should certainly have had to abandon it, had I not been convinced, for other reasons, that a society always functions, in part, outside its own formal organization,4 and that in this gap there is room to study the processes, emergence and configurations of certain aspects of reality. The object of history must be constructed with reference to the actors in society, their strategies, words, deeds and under-the-counter dealings.
If this is the case, it becomes less hazardous to look for motifs emerging from the contents of certain words spoken by an eighteenth century which, by its very essence, forbade the common people to have any well-developed opinions. We are dealing with a long tradition: in his De la sagesse (‘On Wisdom’, 1601), Pierre Charron wrote:
The people … constantly grumbles and murmurs against the State, all swollen with slanders and insolent comments about those who govern and command … In brief, the commoner is a wild beast, all that he thinks is but vanity, all that he says is false and erroneous, what he blames is good, what he approves of is bad, what he praises is infamous, what he does and undertakes is but pure folly.5
These ideas reappear, almost unaltered, in writings by scholarly free-thinkers such as Gabriel Naudé (Considérations politiques sur les coups d’Etat, Rome, 1639) and by many eighteenth-century philosophers and memorialists. However, in the age of the Enlightenment something different was happening. The lieutenant general of Paris police and his squad, created in 1667, devoted a large part of their efforts to placing informers in certain public places (promenades, cabarets, gardens, squares and crossroads) with orders to listen to what people were saying about the king and about current events. Police observers and spies (they were popularly known as mouches, flies on the wall) flitted about, listening to exclamations and comments and transcribing them in reports which they sent regularly to the lieutenant general of police, who then, in his weekly visit to the king, kept the monarch informed about the current climate.
This systematic reporting of opinions expressed among the common people was not a mere amusement: it was one of the grounding activities of a police system which was obsessed with the detail of what was said and articulated, and required to report the essence of it to the highest authorities of State.
It now becomes obvious that we are dealing with a flagrant contradiction: the people of Paris had opinions on what was happening – visible, real, everyday events – opinions whose pertinence, and existence as a political element, were denied by a government which, at the same time, was observing them continually, and moreover, through its policing system of spies, inspectors and observers, was using them to help shape its policies of repression, or demonstration. The contradiction was particularly violent when some great social or political event took place: wars, peace treaties, revolts, or even parliamentary crises or stirrings of Jansenist resistance. But it was also very obvious from day to day, when prices rose or when executions became particularly frequent.
Such ‘opinions’, though officially kept out of the political field, became one of the main terrors of the monarchic government, one of the things to which it sometimes took up a distinct attitude. This inevitably created widespread after-effects and triggered an unavoidable process of action and reaction between the government, events and people’s response to those events. It began a curious spiral effect, which in itself shaped fresh configurations of popular opinion, even if it meant (as of course it did) that that opinion was expressed in an unregulated way. What ordinary people said had no existence and no status: it was politically non-existent even while it was a commonplace of social action. Hounded by governmental power, it took on form and existence and developed in the heart of the very system which was both denying it and reckoning with it – and so, to a certain extent, creating it. Both existent and non-existent, popular speaking about current events dwelt in a kind of limbo: in politics it had no place, but its suspect nature was nothing if not a commonplace.
This non-existence of popular opinion, confirmed in high places, contradicted its persecuted real existence; the contradiction sparked off new and accentuated meanings. It was, surprisingly, this very contradiction that determined the way in which monarchy and people went through the century constantly changing the way they related to each other. Grumbles and criticisms existed in this state of exclusion from the political sphere, which simultaneously contained and repelled them. Unless we realize that, we cannot study them: anything else will lead to anachronism. While there was no public opinion, in the modern sense, in the eighteenth century, there were popular opinions, whose form, content and function developed within a monarchic system whose attitude gave them life’ even as it rejected them. It was amidst this curious tension that rumours arose, and perhaps at times gained a life of their own.
In the light of the foregoing reflections we might suggest that, if we assume that any individual is competent to criticize,6 then by tracing the history of that competence we may be able to determine the sphere within which that criticism can be active. Indeed, grumbles and expressions of public discontent are of real interest only if we take care to connect them with the sphere which is allotted to them. That sphere itself is shifting and multiple, so that we will do well to ‘hook’ the complainings on to a multiplicity of different phenomena. What were the events and the sites which at certain moments allowed the unification of the words which were spoken? Were there certain facts around which themes of popular criticism were particularly inclined to crystallize and be verified? How did the reception – and repression was only one possible process of reception – of the word cut it short, or reactivate it?
If we are careful to relate all our considerations to a particular context we shall avoid two traps. The first, that of believing in a fixed and invariable expression of discontent (‘men and women have always criticized their government and living conditions’). The second, that of setting out to find, in an eighteenth century which we know ended in revolution, a current of hostile opinion becoming continually stronger until it naturally reaches the upsurge of 1789. Let us turn our backs on these approaches, and work along the uneven line of public opinion with all its diverse orderings and mechanisms, its specific engagements with institutions, political facts, discourse and social practice.
Popular opinions are contained in several kinds of sources: chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police reports and news-sheets supply a goodly number, as do the archives of the Bastille.
Every depository of this kind of opinions structures them in its own way and appropriates them to different ends: chroniclers and memorialists deride or worry about them; the police watch them and are ready to pounce; the news-sheets use them to inform; the underground press uses them as ammunition against the opposition; the king ponders them so as better to govern the realm (as he thinks); and so on. Scorn, interdiction, solicitation and appropriation are the poles among which these opinions move. The social and political functioning of the witnesses to this speaking is the subject of part I.
In part II we examine the forms and motifs of complaint: how does it arise? And what are the traditional, or exceptional, reasons which lie behind the attitudes assumed?
In the final part, which centres on a single source (the Bastille archives), I work on the dossiers of prisoners sent to the Bastille for their evil intentions towards the king (grumbles, insults, anonymous letters, plots or denouncing of plots). These words from the Bastille tell us the way to discover the complex and ambiguous relationships between the king and his subjects, and the moments when opinions are formed.
From first to last we shall have voluntarily hitched our wagon to the words of others. At the end of our journey it may be possible to read, or discern, a sustained discourse, a knowledge of everyday things which hitherto we had scarcely noticed because we believed them to be formless, or, worse, deformed from birth.
PART IJournals, Newspapers and Policemen: Scenes from Street Life
No one could be indifferent to what ordinary people were saying: the street was an active member of society. It could be denied or rejected, but its noisy exuberance was ever present; rumours escaped it or entered it with equal speed. It was under constant observation from its social superiors, from the press and the police, and its echoes – reported inaccurately or with dread, with indignation or without it – fill their writings. Earlier on it was viewed with scorn and suspicion; later, as we shall see, it was seen as a mine of information. News stories and tavern gossip were enlightening to the chief of police, but they also delighted hack writers avid for news and anecdotes and spicy, saleable stories – not to mention the underground press whose impact depended in part on the weight of people’s reactions to particular events.
Popular gossip, interpreted on these varying levels, could have a formidable influence. Scarcely had it been uttered than it was spreading, via carriers who all put it to their own use. As the century grew older its sphere was transformed: it invaded the street, the press, the royal court. Its real presence, even manipulated, distorted or hyped, could cause consternation in its hearers, who might fear it, but could not avoid it. So it took its place amidst a plethora of commentaries and attitudes, feelings and policies, all equally incapable of keeping it under control.
1Words scorned and persecuted
I shall make use of two kinds of sources. The first is the printed documentation coming from the higher echelons of early eighteenth-century society. Between 1715 and 1726, three great observers wrote their Journals or Memoirs: Jean Buvat, Mathieu Marais and Edmond-Jean Bourbier, three men of widely differing social backgrounds and outlook.1
My second source is unpublished, and is neither literary nor journalistic. It consists of reports by police inspectors and observers who were paid by the lieutenant general of police to keep him informed about Paris gossip. These reports, now in the Bastille Archives in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,2 cover the years 1725 to 1740, and are of incomparable value, since it was at exactly that time that popular talk acquired a sudden importance.
Diaries and memoirs from the early eighteenth century
This was a political interlude, the regency during the minority of Louis XV. There was an outburst of exuberance after the sorry end of the Sun King’s reign, but people were also waiting, with affectionate impatience, for the child-king to reach adulthood. History gives us a favourable image of those years, which seem to have been unaffected by the decay of royal prestige which (so historians tell us) did not begin until the mid-century.3 Moreover, the philosophes and the Enlightenment outlook were not yet supreme, and it is a relief to be able to study the diarists’ attitudes towards the common people, untroubled as yet by the horribly difficult question of how popular thinking influenced the Enlightenment and vice versa. This is not to say that the regency was uneventful. Some events were in fact to leave a lasting impression on men’s minds and attract a good many reactions.
When Louis XIV died he left France in a sadly chaotic economic and financial situation, bled almost white. The attempted solution was the Law system, named after the Scottish expert called in by the regent to restore financial order. In 1718 a Royal Bank was set up to receive all state revenues, and the king became sole proprietor of all financial securities. To stimulate the economy, he began to issue banknotes guaranteed by the State. At the same time, Law set up a great trading company which was originally called the Compagnie d’Occident, the Company of the West. This referred to Louisiana. Louis XIV had granted the exploitation of that territory to a financier, Crozat, who later resigned. The Conseil des Finances then entrusted the task to Law, on condition that he borrowed two million louis to help colonize the territory. Law extended his economic power to many other countries, such as China, Mongolia and Japan, and renamed his company the Compagnie des Indes. It soon became popularly known as the Compagnie du Mississippi, for Law was particularly interested in implementing plans to move settlers to the Mississippi and Louisiana.
These new plans were to go through many vicissitudes. In January and March 1719, and again in 1720, the police took severe measures against begging and idleness: to clear up a floating population which they now saw as a nuisance, they began a rigorous policy of detention. Dubious characters and vagabonds were arrested on the streets, and in early 1720 transports of the poorest men and women were sent off to colonize and fill up the all-too-empty spaces of Louisiana. The lieutenant of police, d’Argenson, was particularly harsh: his habit of having people snatched in broad daylight, or forcing them to marry, caused a scandal. In 1720 there was a serious uprising.
As for Law’s system, it turned out to be inflationary: the printing of notes outstripped the cash available, vast fortunes were made and lost and the whole system spun out of control. When it finally collapsed, there was panic. Fights broke out in the streets, Law had to flee for his life and wall-posters attacked the regent, while the ground was strewn with vicious pamphlets. The parlement did not stand aside. Using the right of protest granted it by the regent, it admonished him and quarrelled with him over the bull Unigenitus, of 1713, which had condemned certain forms of Jansenism. This was the first of a series of harsh criticisms by the parlement of the royal authority; it also led to the former’s noisy exile to Pontoise in July 1720.
That was indeed an eventful year. Plague broke out in Marseilles,4 and the Parisians, fearing an epidemic at home, grew more nervous of immorality. Their attention and imagination were soon to be focused on the famous arrest, in 1721, of the thief Cartouche and his execution a few months later. His trial, intended to serve as a warning to others, turned him into a hero, but he was to drag hundreds of accomplices after him in his fall.
The first quarter of the century ended in a riot. In 1725 bread was expensive and food short, and Paris erupted. D’Ombreval, the lieutenant general of police, was dismissed, and in 1726 the hated Duc de Bourbon was disgraced. It was then that Fleury began his long ministerial career.
During those eleven years, the mob had had more than one occasion to make its feelings known. We must now see how memorialists and diarists brought that mob into their writings, how they saw it and how they spoke of it. The intrusion of the mob into these journals and memoirs did not happen by chance.
With a few exceptions, diaries and memoirs have received little literary attention. For this very reason they are of interest, though we need not think that they always tell the truth. At the very least they belong to ‘that intimate and confidential side of historical writing which, under the title “Memoirs”, conveys day by day, with casual honesty, the thoughts of the moment, and records freely, inconsistently, diffusely, but with tolerable fidelity, the very making of history.’5
With fidelity? Let us examine the writing of three famous chroniclers of the early eighteenth century: Jean Buvat (1660–1729), Mathieu Marais (1665–1737) and Edmond-Jean Barbier (1689–1771).
Buvat began his journal in 1715 and finished it in 1723. He was a simple man, a copyist in the king’s library. He was curious about events and jotted them down pell-mell, with no attempt at a coherent narrative. Aubertin was to call his work ‘history in disorder’;6 no matter, for his viewpoint is valuable for its very naivety. His information, picked up in the streets or from various churchmen of his acquaintance, gave him a clear idea of the disturbances caused in 1713 by the bull Unigenitus.
Marais was of another sort: he was a lawyer, a born parliamentarian, and he wrote his memoirs between 1715 and 1737. He was very cultured and witty and combined a sense of style with an acute critical outlook, which he directed principally against the Jesuits. He lived among parliamentarians, most of whom were of the Jansenist persuasion, and was no friend to absolutism. He was not much interested in street life; his attention focused more on royalty, and especially the regent. He watched displays, took part in ceremonial, immersed himself in the celebratory atmosphere the better to describe it later on. He was looking into the same mirror as the common folk, but from a different angle.
Barbier must be the best known of the three. His chronicle is very long, for he went on writing from 1718 to 1763, and historians have always regarded him as a major source, especially for the parliamentary disputes of Louis XV’s reign. His detailed descriptions of the quarrels between parlement and king show a certain foreboding of the future. Reading him, we immediately sense his moderate outlook and his nervousness. A lawyer who became head of the council of d’Argenson (keeper of the seals), then of the councils of the Princesse de Conti and the Duc d’Orléans, he was never at ease with the common people, whom he feared even when they were in celebratory mood. He was mildly anticlerical, no Jansenist, a lover of order who avoided enthusiasm, hating impetuosity and passion, but observing each successive crisis with scrupulous care.
These three sharply contrasting witnesses all lived in a somewhat turbulent intellectual and moral climate. In spite of their differing styles and personal outlooks, they all three speak in almost identical fashion concerning the ‘people’. First, they all give the people a prominent role. They do not, of course, get as much space as news of the court, the prince, the dukes and duchesses, or as treaties, church affairs and the parlement; but in comparison with memoirs from the reign of Louis XIV, their presence is felt much more clearly. There was a reason for this: the court had left Versailles, for the regent was living in the Palais-Royal, in the heart of Paris. Observers of Paris, the regent’s city, who were anxious to keep track of the court and its master, could not but be aware of the crowd. In the capital, feasts and entertainments were provided for public consumption and drew their importance from this immersion in the urban sphere. The court was no longer, as in the seventeenth century, a décor meaningless without the king’s presence, but a collection of varied, unlocalized scenes exhibited to an audience whose multiplicity determined the nature of the play itself. Thus, any chronicler observing the court was forced to see those before whom it preened and pranked. In a word, the news was made by the court in its favourite resorts – the Comédie Française, the Opéra, Saint-Sulpice or the church of Saint-Roch – which were thronged with an audience invited not to participate in, but to assent to, the brilliant demonstrations organized before their eyes. The observer could not get away from the audience.
The common people may have been unavoidable, but they were not allowed into every cranny of a chronicler’s meticulous account of the times. Buvat, Marais and Barbier all bring them on in two ways, and two only: in anecdotes concerning a single individual who has had some extraordinary experience (unpleasant scandal, weird accident, wonderful dream, astonishing cure); or collectively – not to say generically – when a visible and solidly constituted crowd assembles to complain, jeer or applaud.
The anecdotes are entertaining, and sometimes amazing. On 15 January 1716, Buvat noted that ‘on the night of the 21st, a girl was found on the rampart, tied to a tree stark naked and dead of cold.’ June 1719: ‘A marriage took place in the church of Saint-Eustace: the husband was aged 108, the bride, ninety-five.’ Apart from such unusual occurrences, the people appear as an undifferentiated mass, responding en bloc to all kinds of events which concern them, such as a rise in the price of bread, an abortive revolt or some incidental rejoicing. Nothing can be made out save an aggregate of anonymous figures which, when gathered together, are always more or less frightening. To this hovering fear we must add scorn, condescension and a certain irony. There is no need for numerous examples: it is always the same story.
Buvat, May 1719: ‘In Paris bread was being sold for 2 sous 6 deniers or 3 sous the livre, at which the populace protested.’
Buvat, 4 May 1720, after the king’s order not to annoy the archers who had been sent to arrest vagabonds and poor beggars whether crippled or sound in body: ‘The populace and shopkeepers had revolted several times against the untrustworthiness of these archers.’
Barbier again, in 1723: ‘Despite the poverty of the times, there was good cheer this carnival.’
March 1722: ‘As the people of Paris must always be kept amused to console them for their lack of money, ceremonies of astonishing magnificence are being prepared for the arrival of the Infanta of Spain, who will be here by Sunday or Monday, and we expect the very streets to be hung with tapestries, which is quite out of the ordinary.’
Thus the people appear episodically, via a collection of more or less exotic but minor events; or in a general way, when the size of the crowd itself constitutes an event. There is no half-way house, where there might be some consideration of their varying ways of life and behaviour, some analysis of their social stratification and their aspirations. Not until the Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1782) do we find some close observation of strategies within a diverse population. Individual members of the populace can be chronicled only when they have strange and unusual adventures (not unlike some curious animal which we observe without understanding), or merged into an aggregate of impulsive and simple-minded men and women whose behaviour is hard to channel or to control – again, much like animals.
Having presented the ‘people’ in this way, between curiosity about the oddities of some of its members and an obsession with its collective stirrings, which of its actions were most often recorded by memorialists? That is easy to answer. The people appear in three different kinds of situation: to express their joy or sorrow at royal ceremonies (marriages or funerals, Te Deums for a victory or the birth of a prince); when the criminal element among the people of Paris plunges the whole place into cut-throat insecurity; and when there are ugly rumours of popular discontent in the city.
It is fairly obvious that the chroniclers are interested only in collective retorts and reactions: fidelity to the monarchy, revolt and criminality are responses to an order imposed from above. There is no trace of other aspects: leisure, social custom, everyday and home life, buying and selling, or the struggle to keep alive at all; what, for example, might we have learned from a description of popular migrations?
The people are generally described from the outside. We hear their acclamations, ‘Long live the king!’, and see them fighting on street corners, an unending round of violence, quarrels, crimes and emotions, unvarying noisy gestures and gross physical appearances. It is bodies which we are shown: there are very few notes on the mental or intellectual capabilities of the crowd. The people are there. We hear both their noisy agreements and their equally noisy, and threatening, denials.
As for scandalous stories, the chroniclers’ somewhat dubious tastes introduce the reader to some macabre scenes: dismembered bodies, severed limbs scattered broadcast, women cut in two – as if the authors’ imagination were fixated on butchery. On 6 February 1716 Buvat recounted this horrid anecdote:
Some ice came away [he is referring to the frozen Seine] and smashed up several boats, so that several washerwomen perished and were cut in two; the heads of some of them showed above the ice, but their bodies were trapped underneath, so that they could not be saved; which was a sad sight.
In 1717 he gives a variation on the theme: ‘There were found in the church of Notre Dame, the church of the Carmelites in the Place Maubert, and in that of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, bundles of linen containing pieces of human bodies.’ And again: ‘In a street in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, they found the body of a girl roasted on a spit, the spit being stuck through her head.’
This state of the imagination could be connected with the contemporary medical obsession with dissection; or it could be viewed symbolically: the body of the people exists either en masse or in pieces, it cannot be perceived otherwise – especially as the most familiar sight for everyone was the executions in the Place de Grève. Several times a week the crowd gathered to see executions, as bodies were torn to tatters, cut in pieces, quartered. In 1721 Cartouche was caught, and he denounced a great number of accomplices who were then torn to pieces week by week. The chroniclers never tire of describing these executions with their almost immutable rituals. Cartouche’s henchmen would come up to the Hôtel de Ville, confess all, and then, after their last, sleepless night on earth, would climb the fatal ladder.7 The crowd was always there, the court was sometimes represented (let us not forget the regent’s taste for rotting bodies, witnessed by his morbid celebrations). Even before this execution-rich period, Buvat had shown no reluctance to describe spectacular punishments. In June 1716 he recorded the execution of two forgers, a pair of lovers who afforded their judges some amusement before going to the gallows, and who obviously fascinated Buvat: ‘His concubine had dressed her hair very elegantly and with very handsome ornaments, as if she intended to charm Death. She was still only twenty-two, very handsome and well made.’ This made the ensuing execution all the more deplorable.
Marais, usually more intrigued by court life than by that of the people, sometimes yielded to the attraction of scandal and executions. In March 1724, he recorded his astonishment at two odd stories.
A few days ago a donkeyman of Montmartre was burned alive. He used his she-asses for a quite different purpose than providing milk, and was guilty of all kinds of blasphemies. His tongue was cut out and his hand cut off. His uncle went with him to the end, on the hangman’s cart, and exhorted him to offer his tongue, to hold out his hand, to submit to the burning.
Later it emerged that there had never been any affair with a she-ass – but this discovery came too late to save the victim.
On the same day Marais told the story of La Perelle, a valet de chambre of M. Puysegur.
He used to neatly cut off his friends’ heads and arms, then robbed them and got rid of the bodies as best he could, throwing them either into the latrines or into a river. A head found on a boat led to the investigation of this crime … So he was broken on the wheel after making a detailed confession of his technique of dismemberment.
The people always appear in an explosion of joy or anger; excess is as native to them as a bee to the hive. Or, if the chroniclers give this impression, it is because they are quite unable to imagine the lower orders having any sort of intelligent understanding of, or interaction with, events.
As the controversy over the Jansenists developed, things changed: the people discussed it at such length that the chroniclers had to modify their attitudes. Those committed to either the parliamentary or the Jansenist cause found out how to make the most of this ready-made audience and this new atmosphere, seeking to win over or appropriate both. No longer could they lament the public indifference which was sadly noted by President Hénault in his Memoirs of the exile of the parlement to Pontoise in 1720:
The people, who by our absence were deprived of their only remaining protection, nonetheless regarded our departure with indifference. The yoke which had been imposed on them eighty years since had accustomed them to suffer many things in silence, and the excess of their misery had dulled their reactions.8
Was that really true? In any case, by about 1723 things had changed a good deal.
The real subject of these journals and memoirs was not the people but the life of the court, the petty doings and scandals of the regency. Chroniclers opened their pages to scenes of court life, while the princes solicited the public eye by public celebration. Their status, too, was confirmed by the spectacles they offered to a public greedy for festivals and novelties. Marais had a great appetite for such anecdotes and told them with verve. Insatiable, voluble, he peppered his pages with princely personages in whose activities he delighted. Between 1717 and 1720 he told, without passing value judgements, a great number of spicy anecdotes, obscene puns and saucy little stories which circulated among the princes: all without apology, without any comment and with jesting amusement. The princes’ unembarrassed conduct, and Marais’ unembarrassed reporting of it, make striking reading: one is surprised by the nonchalance of the court whose cynical amusements could sometimes be dangerous, if they came under the public gaze.
From 1720 onwards his tone changes from the descriptive to the accusatory. A strain of indignation mixed with anxiety runs through his prose. In 1722 he is even talking about ‘abominations’ in the court, feeling himself submerged under the regent’s too-frequent changes of mistress, the number of ‘ruined’ ladies at court, the contamination of debauchery. ‘Dreadful games are afoot here,’ he writes. ‘This is how the court indulges in debauchery … there is love-making everywhere’ – and homosexuality is becoming a commonplace of these spurious joys …
Court aesthetics are crumbling: day by day this blatant self-indulgence causes fresh cracks in the edifice. No secret is safe amidst these dissolute lives, and the court, living in ‘open debauchery’, is becoming unworthy of itself. It is falling apart, with no vigilant kingly eye to restore it, and in the very midst of this public disintegration, the regent is even exposed to public insult. In July 1721 ‘there was talk of a night-time misadventure in the Tuileries, where the regent was strolling with those ladies. He was insulted by three men, who handled him roughly, and his mistress also.’ Marais misses the gaze of the Great King, Louis XIV, who by his mere presence could sustain all needful propriety and civility. Even if Marais never concerns himself with the real effect of this ‘debauchery’ on public opinion, what he recounts shows obvious alterations in the relationship between people, court and king. The social (public) gaze is incessantly attracted to the court; in this new and public sphere, between the court and Paris, there is evidently room and to spare for criticism and judgement.
Police records, 1725–1740: secret policing and the persecution of words
The gazetins, police records from between 1724 and 1781, are a source of exceptional value.9 They are complete only for the years 1725 to 1740, doubtless because of the vagaries of preservation. They originated in an urgent request from the lieutenant general of police. He had a number of informers stationed in particularly public places: the Palais Royal, the Tuileries gardens, the forecourt of the Palais de Justice, and also a variety of more or less notorious taverns and, more rarely, a few tollbooths and barriers at the edge of the suburban ‘liberties’. These observers, who were paid to listen to city gossip and were little inclined to penetrate really deep into the heart of a ‘populace’ which invariably found them out quite quickly, were supposed to write a report once a week. The lieutenant general awaited these reports anxiously and informed the king about them at regular intervals; Louis XV heard them with particular eagerness and used to have them read out at length by his personal lieutenant. Eager he may have been, but he was also quick to punish any among all the thousands of remarks which had overstepped the bounds of propriety or expressed forbidden opinions.
The observers reported their labours in letters or loose sheets which they sent to the lieutenant general. Later they were bound in leather and included in the Bastille archives, which are now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. They were handwritten by observers who were all very different from one another, which explains the variety of handwriting and of style, and the abundance of different viewpoints on Paris. Some seem passionately interested in their task and describe vividly what they have seen. Others, more hasty or less interested, are satisfied with a rapid list of the remarks they have overhead. In either case, it is clear how strictly they were subjected to the authority of the lieutenant general of police: it was no good irritating him if you wanted to be properly paid. Any lapse or carelessness was notified to the organizer, and reprimands were communicated directly or indirectly to a lazy or inattentive observer. The lieutenant expected a certain originality in every report; he was not at all pleased if he found only commonplace gossip, and expressed himself forcibly on the subject, as is shown by this reply of 18 February 1726 from an observer:
My lord: I have sent no report to Your Eminence this week because I could only have sent one full of the news which is circulating in public places, as I customarily do. And as Your Eminence has told Monsieur Bazin [first secretary of police] that you wished it to be full of more important things and that I ought to insinuate myself more cunningly for this purpose, I hereby take the liberty of repeating my request [for an advance], and then within a month my reports will have so changed that you will be pleased with me.10
The informers defended themselves: if they were to ‘insinuate themselves more cunningly’, they also had to be better paid, and there follows a tough game of protest, demands for subsidies and hard bargaining. One informer offered a lengthy self-justification, not without criticism and irony, on 11 December 1726:
I have worked for Your Eminence under your orders; I have not done anything outstanding for lack of opportunity; however, truth has always governed me, but that too depended on chance and on better emoluments: the task is a very delicate one, it incessantly threatens my life and honour; the better paid an honest man is, the better he can enlighten you, but I was not in that case, I cannot do my duties promptly on less than 300 livres a month. Journeys and meals at 30, 40 or 50 sous apiece from the best-known suppliers, where important people go, together with expenditure on clothes, are making my life a perfect misery.11
The observer had a strange job; it was risky, and he felt entitled at least to make a profit. He had to eavesdrop on the discontented lower orders, but he also had to be seen amongst their betters in places where one was expected to keep up appearances, which meant good clothes and expensive meals … The observer was not always very good at disguises, and might easily be recognized on any street corner. To be good at the job one had to cover one’s tracks skilfully, be immune to embarrassment and be extremely loyal to the lieutenant general of police. The last skill was not easy to come by, for informers were often recruited from among petty criminals or old lags. The lieutenant general was demanding: he needed firsthand information, which some lazy observers did not bother to seek out, preferring to feed on news-sheets.
The style of the reports is in fact similar to that of news-sheets or handbills: raw information presented without comment. Besides the desire to please the lieutenant general and satisfy the known bent of his curiosity, we find a confusion of information delivered in gobbets, with no attempt to rank events in order of importance. We pass abruptly from the discovery of an outrageous hermaphrodite to a grumble against the war, or some acerbic street-corner remark concerning the king’s hunting. What mattered, it seems, was to catch the news, not to waste time on discovering links between events or even making sense of them – far less to distil any moral from all those randomly overheard remarks. A good many things are simply taken for granted, so that a twentieth-century reader can have difficulty in understanding what event is being talked about.12
However, if we persist in reading through these hundreds of reports, we gain a somewhat unexpected impression: though the writers themselves were unaware of it, a certain critical outlook does float gently to the collective surface. The unfavourable reflections, acerbic remarks and sometimes radical questionings, heard at random, create an overall effect of dry vigour. Not that the authors ever set out to be critical: they were not there to criticize, but to overhear and record, and they make no attempt to justify themselves. But their notes, raw and unpolished by any attempt at contextualization, actually throw the intrusive criticism into relief. The informers make no excuses; perhaps they took a covert pleasure in transmitting so many black remarks, laced with some humour. ‘It is said that His Eminence gives the king the title Louis the Pacific, which makes people say that he might better be entitled Louis the Hunter’ (September 1728).13
The list of criticisms is long and lively; it swamps the news itself and eventually conveys a real harshness which is never mitigated by the style. This harshness comes from the conditions of writing: be quick, lose no detail, note what seems most dangerous, transmit exactly what you have heard – which means concentrating on the oral expression of the eighteenth century, swift, succinct, with a feeling for the telling word or turn of phrase. The informers absorbed everything, indiscriminately, and delivered it unaltered to the lieutenant. But there was more. Words were being denounced and persecuted (those who spoke ill of affairs were arrested), and this made the work ever harder: the streets were so full of criticism and discontent that the reports became a faithful mirror of those streets in their entirety. The harshness was not necessarily a result of the format. It was part of the social fabric.
In fact, the status of popular speech was to change, little by little, overflowing from the sphere of amusing gossip into the atmosphere as a whole, to become not simply a possible source of information, a way of getting news and guiding government – at a time when popular opinion was notoriously considered to be formless and vulgar – but also a mainstay of an underground press with a thoroughly worked-out strategy of opposition: such newspapers, for instance, as the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which undoubtedly had considerable influence.
