Was it merely a matter of court politics? If so, it need not be taken seriously as an expression of public opinion in Paris. Instead, it might be interpreted in the same way as the Mazarinades, the outburst of scabrous song and verse against cardinal Mazarin and his government during the Fronde one hundred years earlier. Although they contained some fierce protests and even some republican-sounding ideas, the Mazarinades now tend to be seen as moves in a power game restricted to the elite. True, they sometimes claimed to speak in the name of the people, using crude, popular language at the height of an uprising in the streets of Paris. But that language could be discounted as a rhetorical strategy, designed to demonstrate general support for the parlementary cause. None of the contestants in the struggle for power - neither the parlements, nor the princes, nor the cardinal de Retz, nor Mazarin - accorded any real authority to the common people. The populace might applaud or jeer, but it did not participate in the game, except as an audience. That role had been assigned to it during the Renaissance, when reputation - the protection of a good name and bella figura - became an ingredient in court politics, and the players had learned to appeal to the spectators. To demonstrate that the common people reviled one's enemy was a way to defeat him. It did not prove that politics was becoming democratized.⁴³

There is much to be said for this argument. By emphasizing the archaic element in the politics of the Old Regime, it avoids anachronism - the tendency to read every expression of discontent as a sign of the coming of the Revolution. It also has the advantage of relating texts to the larger political context, instead of treating them as self-evident containers of meaning. Perhaps the seemingly seditious poems of 1749 were nothing but "noise", the sort of static produced from time to time by discontented elements in any political system.

It should be remembered, however, that the Fronde shook the French monarchy to its roots at a time when the British monarchy was being brought down by a revolution. Moreover, conditions in 1749 differed greatly from those of 1648. A larger, more literate population clamored to be heard, and its rulers listened. The marquis d'Argenson, who was well informed about the behavior of the king, noted that Louis XV was very sensitive to what Parisians said about him, his mistresses, and his ministers. The king monitored the Parisian "on dits" and "mauvais propos" carefully by means of regular reports supplied by the lieutenant general of police and the minister for the department of Paris - Maurepas and then the marquis's brother, the comte d'Argenson. The reports included heavy doses of poetry and song, some provided for amusement, but much of it taken seriously. "Mon frère... se tue de travail pour l'espionnage de Paris, que le roi a fort à coeur," the marquis confided to his journal in December 1749. "Il s'agit de savoir tout ce qu'on dit, tout ce qu'on fait."⁴⁴

The king's sensitivity to Parisian opinion put great power in the hands of the minister who funneled information to him: hence Maurepas's attempt to undercut Pompadour and d'Argenson by exposing Louis to a steady barrage of satirical verse. But other ministers employed the same strategy, each for his own purposes. In February, 1749, the marquis d'Argenson noted how it was being used to manipulate the king by the leading figures in the government, a "triumvirate" composed of his brother, Maurepas, and Machault d'Arnouville, the contrôleur général: "Le triumvirat lui montre par toutes ces chansons et satires qu'il se déshonore, que ses peuples le méprisent, que les étrangers le vilipendent."⁴⁵ But this strategy meant that politics could not be restricted to a game played exclusively at court. It opened up another dimension to the power struggles in Versailles: the king's relations with his people, the sanction of a larger public, the perception of events outside the inner circles, and the influence of such views on the conduct of affairs.

Louis's sense of losing his place as "le bien aimé" in the sentiments of his subjects affected his behavior and his policies. By 1749, he had stopped exercising the royal touch to cure subjects suffering from scrofula. He had stopped coming to Paris, except for necessary events such as lits de justice to force unpopular edicts on the parlement. And he believed that the Parisians had stopped loving him. "Le roi est, dit-on, bourrelé de remords," observed the marquis d'Argenson. "Les chansons et les satires ont fait ce grand effet. Il s'y voit en haine à son peuple, il y considère la main de Dieu."⁴⁶ The religious element in this attitude went both ways. In May, 1749, word spread in Paris that the dauphine might have a miscarriage, because the dauphin, seized by some unconscious force, had hit her violently in the belly with his elbow while they were both asleep in bed. "Si cela est," d'Argenson worried, "combien le peuple va crier à la colère céleste, contre la race royale, pour les scandales que le roi donne au peuple."⁴⁷ When it did indeed take place, the miscarriage "... perce le coeur à tout le monde."⁴⁸ The common people saw the hand of God in royal sex, especially in the production of an heir to the throne and in the king's comportment with his mistresses. There was nothing wrong with the proper sort of maîtresse en titre; but Louis's string of mistresses included three sisters (four, according to some accounts), the daughters of the marquis de Nesle. That conduct exposed the king to accusations of incest as well as adultery. When Mme de Châteauroux, the last of the sister-mistresses, suddenly died in 1744, Parisians muttered darkly that Louis's crimes could bring down the punishment of God on the entire kingdom. And when he took up with Mme de Pompadour in 1745, they complained that he was stripping the kingdom bare in order to heap jewelry and châteaux on a vile commoner. Those themes stood out in the poems and songs that reached the king, some of them so violent as to advocate regicide: "Il a paru un poème de deux cent cinquante vers horribles contre le roi; il commence par: 'Réveillez-vous, mânes de Ravaillac!' Le roi, l'ayant entendu lire, dit: 'Je vois bien que je mourrai comme Henri IV.' "⁴⁹

This attitude may help explain the over-reaction to the half-hearted assassination attempt by Robert Damiens eight years later. It suggests that the monarch, theoretically absolute in his sovereignty, felt vulnerable to the disapproval of his subjects and that he might even bend policy to conform to what he perceived as public opinion. D'Argenson reported that the government had canceled some minor taxes in February 1749 in order to win back some popular affection: "Cela marque qu'on écoute le peuple, qu'on le craint, qu'on veut le gagner."⁵⁰

It would be a mistake to make too much of these remarks. Although he knew the king and the court very well, d'Argenson may have registered more of his own feelings than Louis XV's, and he did not go so far as to claim that sovereignty was slipping from the king to the people. In fact, his observations support two propositions that seem on the surface to be contradictory: politics turned on court intrigue, yet the court was not a self-contained power system. It was susceptible to pressure from outside. The French people could make themselves heard within the innermost recesses of Versailles. A poem could therefore function simultaneously as an element in a power-play by courtiers and as an expression of another kind of power, the undefined but undeniably influential authority known as "la voix publique."⁵¹ What did that voice say when it turned politics into poetry?

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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