Public Opinion and Communication Networks
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
© Robert Darnton / Princeton University
A Conceptual Problem
At the risk of oversimplification, I think it fair to distinguish two positions, which dominate current work on public opinion and which can be identified with Michel Foucault on the one hand and Jürgen Habermas on the other. As the Foucauldians would have it, public opinion should be understood as a matter of epistemology and power. Like all objects, it is construed by discourse, a complex process which involves the ordering of perceptions according to categories grounded in an epistemological grid. An object cannot be thought, cannot exist, until it is discursively construed. So public opinion did not exist until the second half of the eighteenth century, when the term first came into use and when philosophers invoked it to convey the idea of an ultimate authority or tribunal to which governments were accountable. To the Habermasians, public opinion should be understood sociologically, as reason operating through the process of communication. A rational resolution of public issues can develop by means of publicity itself, or Öffentlichkeit - that is, if public questions are freely debated by private individuals. Such debates take place in the print media, cafés, salons, and other institutions that comprise the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas's term for the social territory located between the private world of domestic life and the official world of the state. This sphere first emerged during the eighteenth century; so public opinion was originally an eighteenth-century phenomenon.1
For my part, I think there is something to be said for both of these views, but neither of them works when I try to make sense of the material I have turned up in the archives. So I have a problem. We all do, when we attempt to align theoretical issues with empirical research. Let me therefore leave the conceptual questions hanging and turn to something concrete: a dossier from the archives of the Bastille.
A Conceptual Problem
Policing a Poem
A Communication Network
Ideological Danger?
Court Politics
Crime and Punishment
A Missing Dimension
The Larger Context
Poetry and Politics
Oral Communication
Chansonniers
Reception
A Diagnosis
Public Opinion
Appendix I: The Songs and Poems Distributed by the Quatorze
Appendix II: Texts of "Qu'une bätarde de catin"
Appendix III: Poetry and the Fall of Maurepas
Appendix IV: The Trail of the Quatorze
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