The following diagram, based on a close reading of all the dossiers, provides a picture of how the communication networks operated. Each poem - or popular song, for some were referred to as "chansons" written to be sung to particular tunes⁹ - can be traced through combinations of persons. But the actual flow must have been far more complex and extensive, because the lines of transmission often disappear at one point and reappear at others, accompanied by other poems from other sources.

For example, if one follows the lines downward, according to the order of arrests, one reaches a bifurcation at Hallaire. He received the poem that the police were trailing - labeled as number 1 and beginning "Monstre dont la noire furie" - from the main line, which runs vertically down the left side of the diagram; and he received three other poems from abbé Christophe Guyard, who occupied a key nodal point in an adjoining network. Guyard in turn received five poems (two of them duplicates) from three other suppliers, and they had suppliers of their own. Thus poem 4, which begins "Qu'une bâtarde de catin", passed from a seminary student named Théret (on the bottom right) to abbé Jean Le Mercier to Guyard to Hallaire. And poem 3, "Peuple jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile", went from Langlois de Guerard, a councillor in the Grand Conseil, to abbé Louis-Felix de Baussancourt to Guyard. But poems 3 and 4 also appeared at other points and did not always continue further through the circuit, according to the information supplied in the interrogations (3 seems to stop at Le Mercier; 2, 4, and 5 all seem to have stopped at Hallaire.) In fact, all the poems probably traveled far and wide in patterns much more complex than the one in the diagram, and most of the fourteen arrested for spreading them probably suppressed a great deal of information about their role as a middlemen, in order to minimize their guilt and to protect their contacts.

The diagram therefore provides only a minimal indication of the transmission pattern, one limited by the nature of the documentation. But it gives an accurate picture of a significant segment of the communication circuit, and the records of the interrogations in the Bastille supply a good deal of information about the milieux through which the poetry passed. All fourteen of those arrested belonged to the middling ranks of Parisian and provincial society. They came from respectable, well-educated families, mostly in the professional classes, although a few might be classed as petty bourgeois. The attorney's clerk, Denis Louis Jouret, was the son of a minor official (mesureur de grains); the notary's clerk, Jean Gabriel Tranchet, also was the son of a Parisian administrator (contrôleur du bureau de la Halle); and the philosophy student Lucien François Du Chaufour was the son of a grocer (marchand épicier). Others belonged to more distinguished families, who rallied to their defense by pulling strings and writing letters. Hallaire's father, a silk merchant, wrote one appeal after another to the lieutenant general of police, emphasizing his son's good character and offering to provide attestations from his curate and teachers. The relatives of Inguimbert de Montange protested that he was a model Christian whose ancestors had served with distinction in the Church and the army. The bishop of Angers sent a testimonial in favor of Le Mercier, who had been an exemplary student in the local seminary and whose father, an army officer, was beside himself with worry. The brother of Pierre Sigorgne, a young philosophy instructor in the Collège du Plessis, insisted on the respectability of their relatives, "bien nés mais sans fortune";¹⁰ and the principal of the college testified to Sigorgne's value as a teacher:

La réputation qu'il s'est acquise dans l'université et dans tout le royaume par son mérite littéraire, sa méthode, et l'importance des matières qu'il traite dans sa philosophie attire beaucoup d'écoliers et de pensionnaires dans mon collège. L'incertitude où nous sommes sur son retour les empêche d'y venir cette année, et même engage plusieurs à nous quitter, ce qui fait un tort infini au collège... . Je parle pour le bien public et pour le progrès des belles-lettres et des sciences.¹¹

Of course, such letters should not be taken literally. Like the answers in the interrogations, they were intended to make the suspects look like ideal subjects, incapable of crime. But the dossiers do not suggest much in the way of ideological engagement, especially if compared with those of Jansenists who were also being rounded up by the police in 1749 and who did not conceal their commitment to a cause. The interrogation of Alexis Dujast, for example, indicates that he and his fellow students took an interest in the poetical as well as the political qualities of the poems. He told the police that he had acquired the ode on the exile of Maurepas (poem 1) while dining with Hallaire, the eighteen-year-old law student, at the Hallaire residence in the rue St. Denis. It seems to have been a fairly prosperous household, where there was room at the dinner table for young Hallaire's friends and where conversation turned to belles-lettres. At one point, Dujast reported, "Il fut tiré à l'écart par le sieur Hallaire fils, étudiant en droit et se piquant de littérature, lequel lui fit lecture d'une pièce de vers contre le roi." Dujast borrowed the handwritten copy of the poem and took it to his college, where he made a copy of his own, which he read aloud to students on various occasions. After a reading in the dining hall of the college, he loaned the poem to abbé Montange, who also copied it and passed it on to Edouard, whose copy reached Bonis.¹²

The cross references in the dossiers suggest something like a clerical underground, but nothing resembling a political cabale. Evidently young priests studying for advanced degrees liked to shock each other with under-the-cloak literature carried under their soutanes. Because the Jansenist controversies were exploding all around them in 1749, they might be suspected of Jansenism. But none of the poems expressed sympathy for the Jansenist cause, and Bonis in particular tried to talk his way out of the Bastille by denouncing Jansenists.¹³ Moreover, the priests sometimes sounded more gallant than pious and more concerned with literature than with theology; for young Hallaire was not the only one with literary pretentions. When the police searched him in the Bastille, they found two poems in his pockets: one attacking the king (poem 4) and another accompanying a gift of a pair of gloves. He had received both poems from abbé Guyard, who had sent the gloves and the accompanying verse - some frothy vers de circonstance that he had composed for the occasion - in place of payment of a debt.¹⁴ Guyard had received an even more worldly poem (no. 3, "Qu'une bâtarde de catin") from Le Mercier, who in turn had heard it recited in a seminar by Théret. Le Mercier had copied down the words and then added some critical remarks on the bottom of the page. He did not object to its politics but to its versification, especially in a stanza attacking Chancellor d'Aguesseau, where "décrépit" was made to rhyme with "fils".¹⁵

The young abbés traded verse with friends in other faculties, especially law, and with students finishing their philosophie, or final year in secondary school. Their network extended through the most important colleges of Paris - Louis-le-Grand, Du Plessis, Navarre, Harcourt, Bayeux (but not the heavily Jansenist Collège de Beauvais) - and beyond "le pays latin." Guyard's interrogation shows that he drew his large stock of poems from clerical sources and then spread them through secular society, not only to Hallaire, but also to a lawyer, a councillor in the presidial court of La Flèche, and the wife of a Parisian victualler. The transmission took place by means of memorization, handwritten notes, and recitations at nodal points in the network of friends.¹⁶

As the investigation led upstream in the diffusion pattern, the police moved further away from the Church. They turned up a counsellor in the Grand Conseil (Langlois de Guerard), the clerk of an attorney in the Grand Conseil (Jouret), the clerk of an attorney (Ladoury), and the clerk of a notary (Tranchet). They also encountered another cluster of students whose central figure seemed to be a young man named Varmont, who was completing his year of philosophy at the Collège d'Harcourt. He had accumulated quite a collection of seditious verse, including poem 1, which he memorized and dictated in class to Du Chaufour, a fellow student of philosophy, who passed it down the line that eventually led to Bonis. Varmont was tipped off about Du Chaufour's arrest by Jean-Gabriel Tranchet, a notary's clerk who also served as a police spy and therefore had inside information. But Tranchet failed to cover his own tracks, so he, too, went into the Bastille, while Varmont went into hiding. After a week of living underground, Varmont apparently turned himself in and was released after making a declaration about his own sources of supply. They included a scattering of clerks and students, two of whom were arrested but failed to provide further leads. At this point, the documentation gives out and the police probably gave up, because the trail of poem 1 had become so thin that it could no longer be distinguished from all the other poems, songs, epigrams, rumors, jokes, and bons mots shuttling through the communication networks of the city.¹⁷

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

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