Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
Online Discussion Archive: Topic and Reply 2
Topic: Media Systems and Desacralization Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article From: Brad Brown bb@hilltop.bradley.edu Date: Thursday, March 16, 2000 08:16 PM As interested as I am to hear others comment on the place of Africa in the French political imagination during the eighteenth century, I would like to prompt further discussion about this article's contributions to the historiography on communication networks and the desacralization of the monarchy. A long-time admirer of Professor Darnton's work, I took pains to attend his talk at the AHA conference and was pleased to hear him press the analysis set out in his recent books further back in time and to hear about other sources beyond _libelles_. That said, I find the article's reticence about some of the historiography it quite evidently confronts somewhat curious. Speaking personally, the alternative presented here to public-sphere analysis by an emphasis on "media systems" (is this the right term?) seems a welcome change. Still I would have liked to hear more about the implications of this substitution, and perhaps others can step forward to suggest how they see this as opening up more room for analysis of change in the eighteenth century. And yet, there is a whole body of literature that has adopted the language of "public spheres" and simultaneously tackles similar evidence. While there are no doubt other works to mention here, the studies of Arlette Farge seem especially apposite. In particular, given the attention to discourse about the king, the article left me wondering about how the author might reinterpret the material in _Subversive Words_ (1994)in a direction that would be less concerned with revealing and periodizing the establishment of a public sphere than it would be with rethinking the relations between different media and social institutions. Or, do feedback loops preclude this sort of question in favor of other sorts of questions? What does Gabriel Tarde provide that Jurgen Habermas does not? Silence about Farge's study of the expression of attitudes toward the king also seems important here, since her work directly addresses the issue of the desacralization of the monarchy over the same period as the article, including attention to some of the same events. The difference between Farge and Darnton seems to be that even while gesturing to the fitfulness of desacralization, this article reads the process as a more straightforward development of disillusionment with Louis XV's failings than the ironic consequence of obsessive interest with the spectacle of the king. At issue in this difference is perhaps a debate about how far we should see eighteenth-century political rhetoric in the light of modern attitudes toward politics. Again, I would like to see a more open statement about these implicit disagreements. And there is room, too, for statements of agreement, as, for example, in the similarities of analysis of the case of Mlle. Bonafon between this article and the careful research of Lisa Jane Graham (see "Crimes of Opinion" in Jack R. Censer, et al., eds.,_Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France_, 1997). For what it is worth, my own take on the desacralization historiography--spelled out in my recent dissertation (Bradford C. Brown, "Kingship and the French Revolution of 1830: The Meaning of Royal Authority in Popular Political Culture and Orl³anism," University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999)--is that too much has been made of (1) the evidence of attacks on the king at the expense of evidence of belief in the values of popular monarchism, and of (2) the particular crises of the reign of Louis XV at the cost of a longer view of the ups and downs of support for the monarchy. Clearly, no article can be expected to discuss all the relevant literature, and least of all one that originated as a lecture. So I hope these comments seem, as they are intended, less like complaints than provocations for further discussion. I want to take this opportunity, too, to thank Professor Darnton and commend the AHR and all of those who worked on this project for posting this article and creating the useful web sites that surround it. Brad Brown Bradley University Topic: Re: Media Systems and Desacralization Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article From: Robert Darnton darnton@princeton.edu Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 02:18 PM Brad Brown invites me to situate my interpretation in relation to those of Arlette Farge and Lisa Graham and to be more explicit in my objection to aspects of Habermas's thesis. Arlette Farge, Lisa Graham, and I have often crossed paths, both personally and in following one another through boxes of manuscript in the Biblioth²que de l'Arsenal. I don't believe we have any fundamental disagreements. Once, I set out to write a book very similar to _Dire et mal dire_; then, after Arlette Farge's book appeared, I found that she had covered the subject so well that I abandoned the project. I especially sympathize with her contention that ordinary people had opinions about public events and that they participated in the formulation of public opinion, even though Habermas excluded them from the public sphere of the eighteenth century. He identified the public sphere with rationality and the bourgeoisie, but he did so in the course of an abstract dissertation written thirty-eight years ago without recourse to primary sources in French. To historians who have worked in Parisian archives, ordinary people--workers and artisans as well as lawyers and merchants--appear everywhere, talking about everything, including affairs of state. The autobiography of Jacques-Louis M³n³tra edited by Daniel Roche provides the supreme example of a streetwise and politically informed working artisan. My own forays into the archives differ from those of Farge and Roche only in that I have set myself a different goal. I am trying to understand the process of communication and to reconstruct circuits of information rather than to understand daily life and street culture. By their very nature, however, our subjects overlap. I don't believe that Arlette Farge would dissent from my argument about the way songs moved across the social hierarchy, from the bottom up as well as the top down. I doubt that Lisa Graham would disagree, either, although I have not yet read her book about Mlle. Bonafon and similar cases, which will be published this spring. From conversations with her and a reading of her "Crimes of Opinion," I gather that she finds less sedition than does Arlette Farge in the loose talk about Louis XV and his ministers and mistresses. I think she is right to emphasize the popular mythology that supported the monarchy and to warn us against a tendency to see the French Revolution around the corner every time the police locked up an irreverent gossip in the Bastille. In a lecture on the Bonafon case, which I gave at the New York Public Library two years ago, and in my study of songs, which can be read as a hyperlink to "An Early Information Age," I stressed that much of the gossip and singing offended the authorities not because it was revolutionary but because it had repercussions in an old-fashioned variety of court politics. Yet I agree with the testimony of the marquis d'Argenson, who stressed that a profound discontent with the monarchy was spreading through the Parisian public--the common people as well as the sophisticated elite--during the mid-century years. I must admit, therefore, that I want to have it both ways. I think the fall of the Maurepas ministry in 1749 expressed two kinds of phenomena: court politics as a power game that had been played since the early Renaissance and public opinion as a force that was beginning to turn decisively against the Bourbon monarchy. Although I have more sympathy with Habermas's political views than with Tarde's, I think Tarde offers a useful corrective to Habermas's notion of the bourgeois public sphere. As I understand it, Habermas's thesis provides a heuristic point of entry to the study of caf³s, salons, provincial academies, masonic lodges, and journalism. But historians who have actually completed research on these subjects--first-rate scholars like Daniel Roche, Pierre R³tat, and Benedetta Craveri in addition to Arlette Farge and Lisa Graham--have not found the egalitarian world of rational discourse imagined by Habermas. Instead, they have discovered complex cultural codes laced with social distinctions, privileges, patronage, clientelism, and influence peddling linked to the power system. It may be that Habermas developed his concept of communication in the eighteenth century as an ideal type, which he could put to use in criticizing the mass media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If so, how does it help us understand the flow of information and the nature of public opinion under the Old Regime, and how does it compare with the ideas of Gabriel Tarde? Habermas seems to have derived his views of eighteenth-century France from thinkers such as Condorcet, who believed that communication through the printed word would make rationality triumph, all readers being equal when confronted with texts in the silence of their studies. Tarde, by contrast, allows for social complexities inherent in the practices of reading, especially the reading of newspapers, which he relates to public discussions in caf³s. He argues that in nineteenth-century Paris, newspapers provided a menu for the day's caf³ talk. The talk, as a digest of commentary and news, then fed back into subsequent newspapers, so that reading and discussing belonged to a dialectical process, which ultimately shaped public opinion. Since the same texts arrived at the same time everywhere in the caf³s, readers were conscious of participating in a collective act of assimilating and interpreting news, even when they disagreed about its implications. By stressing the collective and dialectical aspects of this process, Tarde does justice both to the interactive quality of communication and to the interplay between oral and print culture. Tarde's insights apply best to the nineteenth century, but I have found them helpful in studying archives from the 1740s, where references to talk and print often appear side by side in the same document. Here, for example, is how the law student, Franois Bonis, acquired the text of one of the songs in the Affair of the Fourteen, according to his interrogation in the Bastille: "While visiting the abb³ Gisson in the Hªtel Dieu about three weeks ago at four in the afternoon, he saw a priest--a man of about thirty-five, above average in height--also arrive on a visit to the said Gisson. The conversation turned to the subject matter of the gazettes; and this priest, saying that someone had been so malicious as to make some satirical verse about the king, took out a sheet of verse against His Majesty from which the respondent made a copy." The spoken, the written, and the printed word all reinforced each other in this little scene, which illustrates a communication process quite different in character from the rational discourse imagined by Habermas. If taken as heuristic tools, Tarde's concepts may sharpen the researcher's perceptions, while the voguish theories of Habermas may get in their way. A researcher who sets out to discover the public sphere is likely to find it wherever he or she looks and then perhaps to reify it--that is, to construe it as a force at work in history, an active agent which produces palpable effects, possibly even the French Revolution. Of course, Habermas himself cannot be blamed for this misuse of his ideas. Much of it derives from mistranslation; for his concept of "Éffentlichkeit" has been rendered in French as "sph²re publique." French historians have attributed agency to this "space" and made it the crucial factor, more important than ideas or public opinion, in the collapse of the Old Regime. In fact, spatial metaphors have proliferated so much in historical writing that they are choking out other modes of analysis. I think the mode of Habermas has outlived its usefulness. And if Tarde's approach seems unpersuasive, I would argue for a return to Tocqueville, where questions of ideology, intellectuals, and public opinion were given their earliest and most incisive treatment. Robert Darnton Princeton University
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