Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 23]

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

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

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.

Click here to go to the next page

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Pages: 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Footnotes
Discussion	Maps & Cafes	Songs	Site Index
AHR Home	Presidential Address Home		AHA Home