In the spring of 1749, the lieutenant general of police in Paris received an order to capture the author of an ode, which began:

Monstre dont la noire furie ...

The police had no other clues, except that the ode went under the title, "L'Exil de M. de Maurepas." On April 24, the Louis XV had dismissed and exiled the comte de Maurepas, Minister of the Navy and of the King's Household. Evidently a partisan of Maurepas had vented his anger in some verse that attacked the king himself. Word went out to the legions of spies employed by the police, and in late June one of them picked up the scent. He reported his discovery on a scrap of paper - two sentences, unsigned and undated:

Monseigneur,

Je sais quelqu'un qui avait chez lui dans son cabinet il y a quelques jours les abominables vers faits sur le roi qu'il approuvait beaucoup. Je vous l'indiquerai si vous le souhaitez. ²

After collecting twelve louis d'or (nearly a year's wages for an unskilled laborer), the spy came up with a copy of the ode and the name of the person who had supplied it: François Bonis, a medical student, who lived in the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he supervised the education of two young gentlemen from the provinces. The news traveled rapidly up the line of command: from the spy, who remained anonymous; to Joseph d'Hémery, Inspector of the Book Trade; to Nicolas René Berryer, the Lieutenant General of Police; to Marc Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, comte d'Argenson, Minister of War and of the Department of Paris and the dominant figure in the new government. D'Argenson reacted immediately: there was not a moment to lose; Berryer must have Bonis arrested as soon as possible; a lettre de cachet could be supplied later; and the operation must be conducted in utmost secrecy so that the police would be able to round up accomplices.³

Inspector d'Hémery executed the orders with admirable professionalism, as he himself pointed out in a report to Berryer.⁴ Having posted agents at strategic locations and left a carriage waiting around a corner, he accosted his man in the rue du Foin. The maréchal de Noailles wanted to see him, he told Bonis - about an affair of honor, involving a cavalry captain. Since Bonis knew himself to be innocent of anything that could give rise to a duel (Noailles adjudicated such affairs), he willingly followed d'Hémery to the carriage and then disappeared into the Bastille.

The transcript of Bonis's interrogation followed the usual format: questions and answers, recorded in the form of a quasi-dialogue and certified as to its accuracy by Bonis and his questioner, commissioner Agnan Philippe Miché de Rochebrune, who both initialed each page.

Interrogé s'il n'est pas vrai qu'il a composé des vers contre le roi et qu'il en a fait lecture à différentes personnes.

A dit qu'il n'est point poète et qu'il n'a jamais composé de vers contre qui que ce soit, mais qu'étant il y a environ trois semaines a l'Hôtel Dieu, où il rendait visite vers les quatre heures du soir au sieur abbé Gisson, maître de l'Hôtel Dieu, il y vit arriver un prêtre au-dessus de la taille moyenne, paraissant âgé de trente-cinq ans, lequel venait voir aussi ledit sieur Gisson; que la conversation roula sur le contenu aux gazettes, et ce prêtre en disant qu'on avait eu la malignité de faire des vers satiriques contre le roi, il tira une pièce de vers contre Sa Majesté, desquels le répondant tira une copie dans la chambre dudit sieur Gisson, sans avoir écrit tous lesdits vers, dont il en passa beaucoup.⁵

In short, a suspicious gathering: students and priests discussing current events and passing around satirical attacks on the king. The interrogation proceeded as follows:

Interrogé quel usage il a fait desdits vers.

A dit qu'il les a lus dans une chambre dudit Collège de Louis-le-Grand en présence de quelques personnes et qu'il les a brûlés ensuite.

A lui représenté qu'il ne dit pas la vérité et qu'il n'a pas copié avec tant d'empressement lesdits vers pour les brûler après.

A dit qu'il a jugé que lesdits vers avaient été faits par des Jansénistes et qu'il a voulu, en les ayant sous les yeux, connaître de quoi les Jansénistes sont capables et de quelle façon ils pensent et même quel est leur style.

Commissioner Rochebrune brushed off this feeble defense with a lecture about the iniquity of spreading "poison." Having procured their copy of the poem from one of Bonis's acquaintances, the police knew he had not burned it. But they had promised to protect the identity of their informer, and they were not particularly interested in what had become of the poem after it had reached Bonis. Their mission was to trace the diffusion process upstream, in order to reach its source.⁶ Bonis could not identify the priest who had furnished him with his copy. Therefore, at the instigation of the police, he wrote a letter to his friend in the Hôtel Dieu asking for the name and address of the priest so that he could return a book that he had borrowed from him. Back came the information, and into the Bastille went the priest, Jean Edouard, from the parish of St. Nicolas des Champs.

In his interrogation, Edouard said he had received the poem 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 Jouret, who was arrested and said he had got it from a philosophy student, Lucien François Du Chaufour, who was arrested and said he had got it from a classmate named Varmont, who was tipped off in time to go into hiding but then gave himself up and said he had got the poem from another student, Maubert de Freneuse, who never was found.⁷

Each arrest generated its own dossier, full of information about how political comment - in this case a satirical poem accompanied by extensive discussions and collateral reading matter - flowed through communication circuits. At first glance, the path of transmission looks straightforward, and the milieu seems to be fairly homogeneous. The poem was passed along a line of students, clerks, and priests, most of them friends and all of them young - between 16 (Maubert) and 31 (Bonis). The verse itself gave off a corresponding odor, at least to d'Argenson, who returned it to Berryer with a note describing it as an "infâme pièce, qui me paraît, comme à vous, sentir le pédantisme et le pays latin."⁸

But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry - hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, "L'Affaire des Quatorze." But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called "mauvais propos" or "mauvais discours", a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.

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

Notes

Article Home

Discussion	Maps & Cafes	Songs	Site Index
AHR Home	Presidential Address Home		AHA Home