After watching the police chasing poetry in so many directions, one has the impression that their investigation dribbled off into a series of arrests that could have continued indefinitely without arriving at an ultimate author. No matter where they looked, they turned up someone singing or reciting naughty verse about the court. The naughtiness spread among young intellectuals in the clergy, and it seems to have been particularly dense in strongholds of orthodoxy, such as colleges and law offices, where bourgeois youths completed their education and professional apprenticeship. Had the police detected a strain of ideological rot at the very core of the Old Regime? Perhaps, but should it be taken seriously as sedition? The dossiers evoke a milieu of worldly abbés, law clerks, and students, who played at being beaux-esprits and enjoyed exchanging political gossip set to rhyme. It was a dangerous game, more so than they realized, but it hardly constituted a threat to the French state. Why did the police react so strongly?

The only prisoner among the fourteen who showed any sign of serious insubordination was the 31-year-old professor of philosophy at the Collège du Plessis, Pierre Sigorgne. He behaved differently from the others. Unlike them, he denied everything. He had not composed the poems, he told the police defiantly; he had never possessed any copies of them; he had not recited them aloud; and he would not sign the transcript of his interrogation, because he considered it illegal.¹⁸

At first, Sigorgne's bravura convinced the police that they had finally found their poet. None of the other suspects had hesitated to reveal his sources, thanks in part to a technique used in the interrogations: the police warned the prisoners that anyone who could not say where he had received a poem would be suspected of composing it himself - and punished accordingly. Guyard and Baussancourt had already testified that Sigorgne had dictated two of the poems to them from memory on different occasions. One, poem 2, "Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français" had 80 lines; the other, poem 5, "Sans crime on peut trahir sa foi," had 10 lines. Although memorization was a highly developed art in the eighteenth century and some of the other prisoners practiced it (Du Terraux, for example, had recited poem 6 by memory to Varmont, who had memorized it while listening), such a feat of memory might be taken as evidence of authorship.

Nothing, however, indicated that Sigorgne had the slightest knowledge of the main poem that the police were trailing, "Monstre dont la noire furie." He merely occupied a point where lines converged in a diffusion pattern, and the police had caught him inadvertently by following leads from one point to another. Although he was not what they were looking for, he was a big catch. They described him in their reports as a suspicious character, an "homme d'esprit", known for his advanced views on physics. In fact, Sigorgne was the first professor to teach Newtonianism in France, and his Institutions newtoniennes, published two years earlier, still occupy a place in the history of physics. A professor of his stripe had no business dictating seditious verse to his students. But why did Sigorgne, unlike all the others, refuse so defiantly to talk? He had not written the poems; and he knew that his imprisonment would be longer and more severe, if he refused to cooperate with the police.

In fact, he seemed to have suffered terribly. After four months in a cell, his health deteriorated so badly that he believed he had been poisoned. According to letters that his brother sent to the lieutenant general, Sigorgne's whole family - five children and two aged parents - would lose their main source of support unless he was allowed to resume his job. He was released on November 23 but exiled to Lorraine, where he spent the rest of his life. The lettre de cachet that sent him to the Bastille on July 16 turned out to be a fatal blow to his university career, yet he never cracked. Why?¹⁹

A half century later, André Morellet, one of the philosophic young abbés who had flocked around Sigorgne, still had a vivid memory of the episode and even of the poem, "Peuple jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile", that had provoked it. It had been written by one of Sigorgne's friends, a certain abbé Bon, Morellet revealed in his memoirs. Sigorgne had refused to talk in order to save Bon and perhaps also some of the students on the receiving end of his dictées. One of them was Morellet's close friend and fellow student, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who was then preparing for a career in the Church. Turgot had fallen under the spell of Sigorgne's eloquent Newtonianism in the Collège du Plessis and also had become a friend of Bon; so he, too, might have done time in the Bastille, if Sigorgne had talked. Soon after the Affaire des Quatorze, Turgot decided to pursue an administrative career; and twenty-five years later, when he became controller general of finances, he intervened to get Sigorgne appointed to an abbotcy.²⁰

During their student days, Turgot and Morellet had another mutual friend, six years older and a great deal more audacious in his philosophizing than Sigorgne: Denis Diderot. They contributed articles to Diderot's Encyclopédie, which was being launched at the same time as the Affaire des Quatorze. In fact, the launching was delayed, because Diderot, too, disappeared into prison, the Chateau de Vincennes, on July 24, 1749, eight days after Sigorgne entered the Bastille. Diderot had not written any irreverent verse about the king, but he had produced an irreligious treatise, Lettre sur les aveugles, and it crossed paths with the verse in the distribution system. Poem 5 had been dictated by Sigorgne to Guyard, and Guyard had sent it to Hallaire "... dans un livre intitulé Lettre sur les aveugles."²¹ Having been declaimed to philosophy students by the leading academic expert on Newton, the poetry had circulated inside an irreligious tract by the leader of the Encyclopedists. Morellet, Turgot, Sigorgne, Diderot, the Encyclopédie, the Lettre sur les aveugles, the inverse square law, and the sex life of Louis XV - they jostled together promiscuously in the communication channels of eighteenth-century Paris.

Does it follow that the place was wired, mined, and ready to explode? Certainly not. Nowhere in the dossiers can one catch the scent of incipient revolution. A whiff of Enlightenment, yes; a soupçon of ideological disaffection, definitely; but nothing like a threat to the state. The police often arrested Parisians who openly insulted the king. But in this case, they ran a dragnet through all the colleges and cafés of Paris; and when they pulled in an assortment of little abbés and law clerks, they crushed them with the full force of the king's absolute authority. Why? To put the question that Erving Goffman sets as the starting point of every investigation in the human sciences: What was going on?

The operation seems especially puzzling, if one considers its character. The initiative came from the most powerful man in the French government, the comte d'Argenson; and the police executed their assignment with great care and secrecy. After elaborate preparations, they picked off one suspect after another; and their victims disappeared into the Bastille without being allowed any access to the outside world. Days went by before friends and family learned what had become of them. The principal of two of the students in the Collège de Navarre wrote desperate letters to the lieutenant general, asking whether they had been drowned. They were exemplary students, incapable of committing a crime, he insisted:

Si vous êtes informé de leur sort, au nom de Dieu, ne refusez pas de me dire qu'ils existent; car dans l'incertitude où je suis, mon état devient pire que le leur. Des parents respectables, leurs amis me demandent à toutes les heures du jour ce qu'ils sont devenus... .²²

A certain amount of hugger mugger was necessary for the police to follow leads without alerting the author of the poem. As with Bonis, they used various ruses to lure the suspects into carriages and whisk them off to the Bastille. Usually they presented the suspect with a package and said that the donor, waiting in a carriage, wanted to discuss a proposition with him. None of their victims could resist the call of curiosity. All of them disappeared from the streets of Paris without leaving a trace. The police preened themselves on their professionalism in the reports that they submitted to d'Argenson, and he replied with congratulations. After the first arrest, he ordered Berryer to redouble his efforts, so that they could "... parvenir s'il est possible à la source d'une pareille infamie."²³ After the second, he again urged the lieutenant general on: "Il ne faut pas, Monsieur, laisser échapper le fil, puisque nous le tenons. Tâchons au contraire de remonter à la source, aussi haut qu'il est possible."²⁴ Five arrests later, d'Argenson sounded exultant:

Voici, Monsieur, une affaire suivie avec toute la vivacité et l'intelligence possible, et puisque nous avons été si loin, il faut tâcher d'arriver jusqu'au bout... . J'ai rendu compte au roi hier au soir à mon travail de toute la suite de cette affaire dont je ne lui avais pas parlé depuis l'emprisonnement du premier de la bande, qui est précepteur aux Jésuites. Il m'a paru que le roi était très content de la manière dont tout ceci se conduit et qu'il désire que nous le suivions jusqu'à la fin. Je vais lui faire voir ce matin votre lettre d'hier et je continuerai d'en user de même sur tout ce que vous me manderez à ce sujet.²⁵

Louis XV, pleased with the first arrests, signed a new batch of lettres de cachet for the police to use. D'Argenson reported regularly on the progress of the investigation to the king. He read Berryer's dispatches to him, ordered Berryer to Versailles for an urgent conference before the royal lever of July 20, and sent for a special copy of the poetry in order to be armed with evidence in his private sessions with the king.²⁶ So much concern at such a high level was more than enough to galvanize the entire repressive apparatus of the state. But, once again, why did this concern exist?

That question cannot be answered from the documentation available in the archives of the Bastille. To consider it is to confront the limits of the communication network sketched above. The diagram of the exchanges amongst the students and abbés may be accurate as far as it goes, but it lacks two crucial elements: contact with the elite located above the professional bourgeoisie and with the common people below. Those two show up clearly in a contemporary account of how political poems traveled through society:

Un lâche courtisan les ["ces infamies"] met en vers en couplets, et, par le ministère de la valetaille, les fait passer jusqu'aux halles et aux marchés aux herbes. Des halles elles sont portées à l'artisan qui, à son tour, les rapporte chez les seigneurs qui les ont forgées, et lesquels, sans perdre de temps, s'en vont a l'Oeil-de-Boeuf se demander à l'oreille les uns aux autres, et du ton de l'hypocrisie la plus consommée: Les avez-vous lues? Les voilà. Elles courent dans le peuple de Paris.²⁷

Tendentious as it is, this description shows how the court could inject messages into a communication circuit and extract them, too. That it worked both ways, encoding and decoding, is confirmed by a remark in the journal of the marquis d'Argenson, brother of the minister. On February 27, 1749, he noted that some courtiers had reproached Berryer, the lieutenant general of police, for failing to find the source of the poems that villified the king. What was the matter with him? they asked. Didn't he know Paris as well as his predecessors had known it? "Je connais Paris autant qu'on le puisse connaître," he reportedly answered. "Mais je ne connais point Versailles."²⁸ Another indication that the verse originated in the court came from the journal of Charles Collé, the poet and playwright of the Opéra comique. He commented on many of the poems that attacked the king and Mme de Pompadour in 1749. To his expert eye, only one of them passed as the work of "un auteur de profession."²⁹ The others came from the court: he could tell by their clumsy versification.

On m'a donné les couplets qui courent, sur Mme de Pompadour; de six, il n'y en a qu'un de passable. On voit bien, au reste, qu'ils sont faits par des gens de la Cour, à leur négligence et à leur malignité; la main de l'artiste n'y est pas, et d'ailleurs il faut que ce soient gens qui vivent à la Cour, pour savoir quelques particularités qui sont dans ces couplets.³⁰

In short, much of the poetry passed around in Paris had originated in Versailles. Its elevated origin may explain d'Argenson's exhortion to the police to follow each lead "as high as it may go" and their abandonment of the chase, once it became bogged down in students and lowly abbés. But courtiers often dallied in malicious verse. Why did this case provoke such an unusual reaction? Why did d'Argenson treat it as an affair of the highest importance, one that required urgent, secret conversations with the king himself? And why did it matter that courtiers, who may have invented the poetry in the first place, should be able to assert that it was being recited by the common people in Paris?

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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