Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
Online Discussion Archive: Topic and Reply 3
Topic: Revolutionary Discontinuity? Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article From: David Andress david.andress@port.ac.uk Date: Friday, March 17, 2000 09:35 AM Robert Darnton's excellent piece makes clear a whole host of elements within the history of eighteenth-century court-capital relations, and shows us the interrelation of what might have been thought to be distinct "elite" and "popular" cultures. What is most thought-provoking for me, as a historian of the French Revolution, is that, while many of the features of Darnton's information world quite clearly carry over into the revolutionary context, there is a significant extent to which some do not. One key feature present in the events he depicts is the acceptance, by everyone except the police, of a realm of popular comment on political affairs. I have written elsewhere of the extent to which Parisians continued to practice such comment, at least into 1791, but as I have noted, the revolutionary authorities and revolutionary commentators were extremely ambivalent about the legitimacy of such popular political voices. (See most recently "The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution: Discourses around the Champ de Mars Massacre, 17 July 1791," _French Historical Studies_ 22, no. 2 [1999]: 183-209; and "Press and Public in the French Revolution: A Parisian Case-Study from 1791," _European History Quarterly_ 28, no. 1 [1998]: 51-80.) One of the key points that Darnton articulates about the critical messages of the Old Regime is that they had the figure of the king at their heart. Thus we might suggest that, in a sense, the common position of all others as subjects of his majesty rendered them equal participants in a critical discourse about the reality, or otherwise, of that "majesty." Once the revolution had made the Nation into its sovereign, might we not further suggest that such a critical discourse became deeply problematic? One could criticize the public person of the king from "outside," but it was very difficult for revolutionaries to locate a similar "outside" from which criticism of the Nation (and its representatives very clearly assumed themselves to be the Nation, from the very origins of the "National Assembly") could be legitimate. The logic of the existence of the politically active Nation, and its representation in the Assembly, was that the only "outside" position available to a French citizen was the one that implied a counterrevolutionary intent. The revolutionary sovereign was no more able to accept criticism than had been the monarchy, but it was far more effective at excluding it from public expression. David Andress Topic: Re: Revolutionary Discontinuity? Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article From: Robert Darnton darnton@princeton.edu Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 02:17 PM David Andress makes an important point: the ground rules governing the circulation of information and the actual practices of talking about public affairs changed fundamentally in 1789. Of course, continuities also existed. As Laura Mason has shown in _Singing the French Revolution_, revolutionary songs echoed those of the Old Regime. Caf³s, public gardens, the Palais-Royal continued to be hotbeds of political gossip, and police spies continued to report on it throughout the entire course of the revolution. In fact, the outspokenness of the French, even under the Terror, is likely to amaze anyone who reads documents about daily life in the Parisian Sections in 1793-1794 while looking backward across the history of oppression in the twentieth century. But David Andress correctly emphasizes a contradiction at the heart of popular sovereignty as it was understood at the height of the revolution: to criticize those who spoke in the name of the Nation could be construed as placing oneself outside the Nation, in the position of a counter-revolutionary. That contradiction may be implicit in articles 3 and 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which locate sovereignty in the nation and define law as the expression of the general will, in contrast to articles 10 and 11, which guarantee freedom of opinion and expression. Article 11 ends with a dangerous proviso: "subject to accountability for abuse of this freedom in the cases determined by law." By 1791, as David Andress shows in his own research, the law was beginning to bend before such cases. After August 1792, conditions became so catastrophic that freedom of expression was stifled in the name of a higher law: the _salut public_. Should we attribute this tragedy to the contradiction itself? For my part, I would insist on the extreme conditions that made the Terror thinkable in 1793-1794 rather than on the thinking of the delegates to the Estates General in 1789 or the thoughts of Rousseau. Political gossip under the Old Regime did indeed turn on the personal qualities of the king, but it does not follow that democracy is incompatible with freedom of expression and the liberty of the press. Robert Darnton Princeton University
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