Table Of ContentTracing the Shadow of
Secrecy and Government
Transparency in
Eighteenth-Century
France
Nicole Bauer
Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government
Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France
Nicole Bauer
Tracing the Shadow
of Secrecy
and Government
Transparency
in Eighteenth-Century
France
Nicole Bauer
University of Tulsa
Tulsa, OK, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-12235-4 ISBN 978-3-031-12236-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1
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For my parents
Acknowledgments
It is no secret that the historian, no matter how solitary her labors and
habits, could not complete such a project without the aid and support
of a network of mentors and friends. I have been incredibly lucky on
many fronts. I am grateful to the University of Tulsa for financial support,
the extremely helpful time provided during my junior sabbatical, and
for a collegial atmosphere that helped foster my scholarship and craft
as a writer; thank you especially to Kristen Oertel and Joli Jensen at
the University of Tulsa. I would also like to thank the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yale University, and the Institut français
d’Amérique for generous research support. I am very grateful to Jay Smith
for being a great mentor, sounding board, role model, and friend. I would
like to thank Lloyd Kramer for “bouncing back” whenever I came into
his office to bounce ideas off of him, and Donald Reid for his innumer-
able pep talks, confidence-boosting encouragement, and active listening.
I owe much to William Reddy for getting my mind tangled in knots
over modernity or culture, and to Ellen Welch for her always supportive
and helpful feedback and comments. I would also like to thank Lisa Jane
Graham, who provided invaluable help in understanding lettres de cachet.
Thank you also to John Merriman for being a supportive mentor from
the beginning. He will be missed.
I also received the kind assistance from archivists at the Arsenal library,
a branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Archives de Paris, the Biblio-
thèque historique de la Ville de Paris, the Archives des Jésuites. The
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
librarians at Catholic University, George Washington University, and
Georgetown University were all immensely helpful and generous.
I would also like to thank my friends who have been so selfless, enthu-
siastic, and helpful. I am especially grateful to the members of my French
history writing group: Sarah Griswold, Peter Soppelsa, Jennifer Davis
Cline, Melissa Byrnes, and Jess Pearson. Completing this project would
not have been the same without Michelle Coates who took me out for
drinks when I was first published, or Lindsay Ayling who often listened
to me work through my argument and who provided colorful anecdotes
about Robespierre. Molly Barnes was an invaluable friend through all my
stages of graduate school. Scott Krause read many drafts, and both he and
Gregory Mole showed me what beautifully-written scholarly prose could
look like. Zardas Lee, Bethany Keenan, Julia Osman, and Sara Shurts have
been so warm and helpful in my research.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, especially my
parents, who provided all the different forms of support a family could
give, always encouraging me during this long journey through all its
surprises, joys, and rough patches.
Contents
Introduction 1
Creatures of Infamy: Lettres de Cachet, Family Honor,
and the Uses of Secrecy 15
The Fate of Secrets in a Public Sphere: The Comte de
Broglie and the Demise of the Secret du roi 51
Those Who Know Your Secrets: Jesuit Secrecy
and the Proto-nationalism of the Jansenists 81
“I Promise Never to Speak to Anyone”: Police Practices
and the Bastille 115
Desire, Dread, and the Grateful Dead: The Bastille, Its
Cadavers, and the Revolutionary Gothic Imaginary 149
The Marat of Versailles: Advocates of Transparency During
and After the Terror 175
Conclusion 201
Bibliography 209
Index 225
ix
Introduction
In his Testament politique, intended to guide Louis XIII in statecraft and
to ensure a strong monarchy, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Riche-
lieu, emphasized the importance of doing “whatever is necessary to bring
about the execution of that which we have rightly resolved to accom-
plish.” The cardinal added, “It is this which obliges me to speak here of
secrecy and diligence, both of which are so necessary to the success of
affairs as to dwarf all other attributes. Both experience and reason make
it evident that what is suddenly presented ordinarily astonishes in such a
fashion as to deprive one of the means of opposing it, while if the execu-
tion of a plan is undertaken slowly, the gradual revelation of it can create
the impression that it is only being projected and will not necessarily be
executed.”1 Making a surprisingly similar argument over a century later,
though in a radically different tone, Jean-Paul Marat wrote in 1774: “It is
not therefore by open attacks princes first attempt to enslave the people,
they take their measures in secrecy, they have recourse to craft, it is by slow
but constant efforts, by changes almost imperceptible, by innovations of
which it is difficult to observe the consequences, and such as are scarcely
1 Armand Jean du Plessis and Cardinal Richelieu, The Political Testament , trans. Henry
Bertram Hill (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 75.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
N. Bauer, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government
Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1_1
2 N. BAUER
taken notice of.”2 Richelieu and Marat both understood the profound
connection between secrecy and power, yet only Marat could say what
had changed between 1638 and 1774 to create fertile ground for his
hostility towards both princes and secrecy. Marat chose not to expound
on that point, however, and instead devoted his book to decrying the
despotism of kings, including an entire chapter on secrecy and its evils.
Writers and thinkers, however, had not always held such an intense suspi-
cion for government secrecy, as figures like Richelieu demonstrate. In the
early modern period, most political actors saw secrecy as the sine qua
non of statecraft, but in the eighteenth century, attitudes had shifted, and
understanding this shift is central to understanding the shift from early
modern to modern.
One occurrence early in the French Revolution shows in macabre and
spectacular fashion the public attitude towards government secrecy at the
end of the eighteenth century. In the summer of 1790, a year after the
storming of the Bastille, the French press reported that so many cadavers
were being found in the ruins of the fortress that the accumulation of
remains was beginning to get in the way of demolition work. Workers
were being bribed by curious onlookers, eager for a glimpse of the long-
hidden victims of the despotism of the royal regime. Speeches were given
to commemorate the dead who had been killed in secret but were now
finally honored in public, and hundreds attended the parade carrying the
human remains to a cemetery. This event and the curiosity it garnered
reflected both the suspicion of secrecy and the association of secrecy with
power by the time of the Revolution. Ordinary people and the jour-
nalists who wrote for them feared the putative horrors of a despotic
regime and interpreted those cadavers as a sign of unchecked, despotic
power, but one which also revealed an undeniable fascination and hunger
for spine-chilling tales.
This book explores the strange and unexpected path secrecy took in
eighteenth-century French culture and the surprising forces that led to
the emergence of the notion of government transparency. By looking
at a broad range of sources including police files, private letters, reli-
gious pamphlets, and Gothic literature, I attempt to trace the evolution of
the early modern French attitude towards secrecy (a nebulous term that
could cover many domains of public and private life) and to identify the
2 Jean-Paul Marat, The Chains of Slavery (London: J. Almon, Richardson, and
Urquhart, 1774), 4.
