Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris

233 Pages·0.672 MB·English

by  Darnton, Robert

Poetry and the Police
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A Parisian street singer, 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Département des Estampes.
d
Poetry and
the Police
communication networks
in eigh teenth- century paris
robert darnton
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2010
Copyright © 2010 by Robert Darnton
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Darnton, Robert.
Poetry and the police : communication networks in eigh teenth- century
Paris / Robert Darnton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 05715- 9 (alk. paper)
1. Paris (France)—History—1715–1789. 2. Paris (France)—Politics
and government—18th century. 3. Paris (France)—Social conditions—
18th century. 4. Political culture—France—Paris—History—18th century.
5. Communication in politics—France—Paris—History—18th century.
6. Information networks—France—Paris—History—18th century.
7. Political poetry, French—History and criticism. 8. Street music—France—
Paris—History and criticism. 9. Police—France—Paris—History—18th
century. 10. Political activists—France—Paris—History—18th century.
I. Title.
DC729.D37 2010
944′.361034—dc22 2010026303
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Policing a Poem 7
2 A Conundrum 12
3 A Communication Network 15
4 Ideological Danger? 22
5 Court Politics 31
6 Crime and Punishment 37
7 A Missing Dimension 40
8 The Larger Context 45
9 Poetry and Politics 56
10 Song 66
11 Music 79
12 Chansonniers 103
13 Reception 118
14 A Diagnosis 124
15 Public Opinion 129
Conclusion 140
vi contents
The Songs and Poems
Distributed by the Fourteen 147
Texts of “Qu’une bâtarde de catin” 158
Poetry and the Fall of Maurepas 162
The Trail of the Fourteen 165
The Popularity of Tunes 169
An Electronic Cabaret:
Paris Street Songs, 1748–1750 174
notes 189
index 211
Poetry and the Police

Introduction
Now that most people spend most of their time exchanging
information—whether texting, twittering, uploading, down-
loading, encoding, decoding, or simply talking on the tele-
phone—communication has become the most imp or tant ac-
tivity of modern life. To a great extent, it determines the course
of politics, economics, and ordinary amusement. It seems so
all- pervasive as an aspect of eve ryday existence that we think
we live in a new world, an unprecedented order that we call
the “information society,” as if earlier so ci e ties had little con-
cern with information. What was there to communicate, we
imagine, when men passed the day behind the plough and
women gathered only occasionally at the town pump?
That, of course, is an illusion. Information has permeated
ev ery social order since humans learned to exchange signs.
The marvels of communication technology in the present have
produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense
that communication has no his tory, or had nothing of impor-
tance to consider before the days of television and the Inter net,
unless, at a stretch, the story is extended as far back as da-
guerreotype and the telegraph.