Before considering the texts of the poems, it might be helpful to review the circumstances that provoked them and to set them in the context of current events.

The winter of 1748-1749 was a winter of discontent - hard times, high taxes, and a sense of national humiliation at the unsuccessful conclusion of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). Foreign affairs were remote from the concerns of ordinary people, and most Frenchmen probably went about their business without caring or knowing who succeeded to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. But Parisians followed the course of the war with fascination. Police reports indicate that conversations in cafés and public gardens frequently turned to great events: the capture and abandonment of Prague, the dramatic victory at Fontenoy, the string of battles and sieges by the maréchal de Saxe, which left France in command of the Austrian Netherlands.⁵² By a process of simplification and personification, the war appeared as an epic struggle among crowned heads: France's Louis; his sometime ally, the dashing young king of Prussia, Frederick II; and their common enemies, Maria-Theresa of Austria (usually called the Queen of Bohemia) and George II of England (often referred to slightingly as "Brunswick", because of his Hanoverian possessions). The military story had a happy ending: Louis came out on top. But having won the war (except in the colonies), he lost the peace. He surrendered everything his generals had won by acceding to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which restored the situation that had existed before the outbreak of hostilities. The treaty also bound the French to expel the Young Pretender to the British throne, known in the English-speaking world as Bonnie Prince Charlie and in France as "le prince Edouard" (the Frenchified version of Charles Edward Stuart.)

"L'Affaire du prince Edouard", as it was called in Paris, dramatized the humiliation of the peace in a way that could be grasped by people who were incapable of following the complexities of eighteenth-century diplomacy. Le prince Edouard had captured the hearts of the Parisians after the failure of his attempt to stage an uprising in Scotland and regain the British throne in 1745-1746. Accompanied by a retinue of Jacobite exiles - all of them, like himself, Catholic, French-speaking, and passionately hostile to the Hanoverian rulers of Britain - he cut quite a figure in Paris: a king without a crown, the hero of a spectacular military adventure, the romantic embodiment of a lost cause. Louis XIV had treated the Stuarts as the legitimate rulers of Britain when they had established their court in France after the revolution of 1688. Forced by the Peace of Utrecht to recognize the Protestant succession in 1713, the French had nonetheless provided prince Edouard with a place of exile and then had backed his claim to the British throne during the War of the Austrian Succession. Although the '45 was a disaster for the Stuart cause, it provided a useful diversion for the French armies during their campaign in the Low Countries. To withdraw recognition of the prince and to expel him from French territory as required by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle struck Parisians as the ultimate failure in Louis's attempt to defend the national honor.

The way the expulsion was carried out compounded the damage to the respect for the king. Edouard had publicly denounced the treaty and reputedly went around Paris with loaded pistols, determined to resist any attempt to arrest him or, if confronted with overwhelming force, to commit suicide. The police feared that he might provoke a popular uprising. A huge dossier in the archives of the Bastille, shows that they made elaborate preparations to strike before a crowd could rally to his defense. A detachment of soldiers, bayonets drawn, seized the prince as he was about to enter the Opera at five o'clock on December 10. They bound his arms, seized his weapons, forced him into a carriage, and whisked him away to the dungeon of Vincennes along a route lined with guards. After a brief confinement, he disappeared across the eastern border. Newspapers were forbidden to discuss the affair, but Paris buzzed for months about every aspect of it, including Edouard look-alikes spotted everywhere in Europe and rumors of Jacobite conspiracies to seek revenge. It was the greatest news story of the era: a king-napping, executed in the heart of Paris, with bayonets and (in some versions) handcuffs. Every detail proclaimed the despotic character of the coup, and every version of the story spread sympathy for its victim along with scorn for its villain: Louis XV, the agent of perfidious Albion in the dishonoring of France.⁵³

Having foisted this humiliation on his people, Louis made them pay for it. They bore a heavy load of taxation, but most of their direct revenue remained, at least in principle, tax exempt. During national emergencies, notably wars, the king raised money by special levies known as affaires extraordinaires; but in peacetime, he was supposed to live off the income from his own domains and from taxes like the taille and the capitation, which were sanctioned by tradition and riddled with exemptions, especially for the clergy and nobility. Louis XV had levied an "extraordinary" tax, the dixième, to finance the War of the Austrian Succession; and he had promised to revoke it within four months of making peace. Instead, he transformed it into a vingtième, which would last for twenty years and would be far more rigorous than any previous tax, because it was to be based on a new assessment of all landed property, including that of the Church and nobility.⁵⁴

Historians have generally given the vingtième and the controller general who proposed it, Machault d'Arnouville, a good press.⁵⁵ It would have destroyed the most important exemptions of the privileged orders and modernized the state's finances in one blow. But contemporaries saw it in a different light. To them, or at least some of them who confided their reactions to journals, it opened the way to more abuse of royal power. A special tax in peacetime! And one that would go on indefinitely without any institutional checks to constrain it! Their only hope was in the parlements, which could resist royal decrees by refusing to register them and issuing remonstrances. Even if the king forced registration in a lit de justice, the parlements could protest, suspend justice, and mobilize the country behind them by denouncing the new tax as a threat to everyone and not merely to the privileged, such as themselves.

The cause of the parlements became entwined with another popular cause that had waxed and waned since the late seventeenth century: Jansenism. Originally a theological controversy about the nature of grace, it had become an austere ethos, which appealed to the professional classes and the nobility of the robe, where the parlements recruited their members. Louis XIV had got the pope to condemn Jansenism as a heresy in the bull Unigenitus, and the parlements' resistance to the bull had provided the main issue in their quarrels with the Crown during the 1730s and 1740s. In 1749, the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, ordered his clergy to refuse the sacrements to anyone who could not produce a billet de confession certifying that he confessed to a priest who accepted Unigenitus. The controversy took many twists and turns during the next few years, but it had already produced a series of martyrs, pious Jansenists who died without benefit of the last rites, by the end of 1749. The best known was Charles Coffin, the saintly former rector of the university, who died in June. A crowd of perhaps 10,000 sympathizers followed his funeral procession through the streets of the Left Bank. It was a political as well as a religious demonstration, because the crown had backed the persecution of the Jansenists. And it probably reverberated among the common people, who had developed their own variety of Jansenism, a mixture of ecstatic religiosity and miracle healing. To deny the final absolution of sins to Christians on their death bed was, in the eyes of many, to send them straight to Purgatory, an unforgivable abuse of royal and ecclesiastical authority.⁵⁶

Whether or not Louis could dispatch his subjects to the nether world, he sent a great many of them to the Bastille - supporters of prince Edouard, protesters against the vingtième, philosophes, Jansenists, and people who simply spoke ill of the regime. So many had been imprisoned by the time of the Affaire des Quatorze that all the cells were said to be full and the overflow had to be sent to the dungeon of Vincennes. Parisians spoke darkly about confessions extracted behind stone walls by the public hangman. To some of them, the monarchy had degenerated into a despotism, and it had installed a new Inquisition to stifle all protest:

Le mécontentement augmente, dans Paris, des captures continuelles qui se font chaque nuit de beaux esprits et d'abbés savants, soupçonnés de faire des livres, des chansons, et de répandre de mauvaises nouvelles aux cafés et aux promenades. On n'appelle plus cela que "l'inquisition française".⁵⁷

It is impossible to know how far this perception was shared, but the archives of the Bastille certainly indicate a surge of arrests in 1749. Along with a large number of Jansenists, they included many people who had no contact with the Quatorze but who ran down the government in the same manner by "mauvais propos." Here are a few examples taken from a registry in which the administrators of the Bastille summarized each case:⁵⁸

Bellerive, J.-A.-B.: "Pour discours contre le roi, Mme de Pompadour, et les ministres".

Leclerc, J.-L.: "Pour avoir tenu de mauvais propos contre le gouvernement et les ministres".

Le Bret, A.: "Pour mauvais propos contre le gouvernement et les ministres".

Mellin de Saint-Hilaire, F.-P.: "Pour mauvais propos contre le gouvernement et les ministres".

Le Boulleur de Chassan: "Pour mauvais propos contre le gouvernement".

Dupré de Richemont: "... Traçait des portraits injurieux des ministres et autres personnes constituées en dignité".

Pidansat de Mairobert, M.-F.: "Récitait dans les cafés des vers contre le roi et la marquise de Pompadour".

In a few cases, the dossiers contain reports from police spies about what the arrested men allegedly had said:⁵⁹

Leclerc: "... A tenu les discours ci-après dans le café de Procope: Qu'il n'y avait jamais eu des rois pires; que la cour, que les ministres et la marquise de Pompadour faisaient faire au roi des choses indignes, qui révoltaient absolument le peuple."

Le Bret: "Ayant tenu dans différents lieux des propos contre Mme de Pompadour, disant qu'elle faisait tourner la cervelle au roi par mille choses qu'elle lui mettait en tête, comment, dit-il, elle veut être garce, elle fait le diable à quatre pour des vers qu'on fait sur son compte. Veut-elle qu'on la loue tandis qu'elle est dans les horreurs du crime?"

Fleur de Montagne: "... Tient des discours téméraires; entre autres, il disait que le roi se f...... de son peuple par les grandes dépenses qu'il fait, qu'il le sache dans la misère, et que pour la lui faire sentir davantage, il le chargeait d'un nouvel impôt, comme pour le remercier des grands services qu'il en avait reçus. Qu'on est fou, ajouta-t-il, en France de souffrir... Il dit le reste à l'oreille."

François Philippe Merlet: "Accusé d'avoir dit au Jeu de Paume de la Veuve Gosseaume que Richelieu et la Pompadour perdaient le roi de réputation qui ne [sic] l'avait pas trop bonne dans l'esprit de son peuple, puisqu'il ne cherchait qu'à le ruiner, et que l'imposition du vingtième pourrait bien lui attirer quelque chagrin."

Pidansat de Mairobert, author of many libelles against Louis XV, is better known than the other frondeurs who bad-mouthed the king in cafés and public gardens. He went about Paris with poetry stuffed in his pockets, and he declaimed the verse whenever he could get an audience. His repertory included at least one of the poems distributed by the Quatorze, although he apparently had no connection with them.⁶⁰ The same is true of a bailiff from the Châtelet, André d'Argent, his wife, and a friend of theirs, a lawyer named Alexandre Joseph Rousselot. They, too, had no links with the Quatorze but diffused one of the same poems:

Ces particuliers gardaient chez eux des vers contre le roi et les répandaient dans le public par des copies qu'ils donnaient à un chacun. On trouva chez eux une pièce commençant par ces mots, 'Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français' écrite de la main de Rousselot.⁶¹

In one case, the police may have actually captured the author of one of the poems, Esprit-Jean-Baptiste Desforges. He, too, seemed to operate outside the circuit that connected the Quatorze. According to his dossier in the Bastille, he had composed one of the fiercest odes on the Affaire du Prince Edouard, "Peuple jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile." He read it to some friends two days after the prince's arrest. One of them later warned him that he could get into serious trouble; so he decided to burn it. But when he searched for it in his pockets, it had disappeared. And when he discovered that copies of it were circulating through other pockets and were being read in cafés, he decided to disappear himself. Another friend, Claude-Michel Le Roy de Fontigny, let slip that he knew the author; and as soon as this information reached the comte d'Argenson, the police mounted an investigation. At this point, the story became entwined with a plot that is difficult to unravel, but it seems that Fontigny concocted a conspiracy: he sought out Desforges's mother and proposed that he and Desforges should appear before the minister with a false story, which would clear Desforges, place the blame for the poem on a third person, and win them a reward. After consulting her son, who remained in hiding, Mme Desforges indignantly rejected this proposition. But after the dismissal of Maurepas, Fontigny tried to revive it, only to fall victim to his own machinations. Somehow word of the plot reached d'Argenson. He had Fontigny sent to the Bastille and then exiled to Martinique. Desforges was captured on August 17, 1749, confessed that he had written the poem, and spent the next seven years in prison, three of them locked up in an iron cage in Mont-Saint-Michel.⁶²

Similar characters show up in the files kept by the inspector of the book trade, Joseph d'Hémery.⁶³ They, too, handled some of the poetry that filtered into the circuit of the Quatorze, although they belonged to other networks. By the end of 1751, d'Hémery's spies had identified two more poets who were said to have composed "Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français": a certain Boursier, son of a hatmaker, who served as secretary to the marquis de Paulmy, and a Frenchified Scottish Jacobite named Dromgold, "fort satirique", who taught rhetoric at the Collège des Quatre Nations. But d'Hémery did not accumulate enough evidence to arrest them, and he had his eye on other authors who bore more careful watching. One, a clerk named Mainneville, was denounced by a servant for writing a poem against the king; but after running into financial difficulties, he escaped to Prussia. Another, an ex-Jesuit named Pelletier, looked suspicious because he had been seen passing out copies of seditious songs as early as August 1749. A third, a certain Vauger, was suspected of composing verse against the king and of accumulating a large arsenal of topical poetry in the furnished room that he rented from a wig-maker in the rue Mazarine.

Then there was a dubious pair of littérateurs: François-Henri Turpin, a protégé of Helvétius and a specialist in satirical verse, who reportedly had said that he knew the author of a poem sought by the police, and his close friend, abbé Rossignol, who taught with Sigorgne at the Collège du Plessis. Turpin's landlady told the police that she had overheard them reading some suspicious Latin verse in Turpin's room. True, she could not understand Latin; but she could make out "Pompadour" and "Louis" in the flood of unintelligible sounds and mad laughter that struck her ear when she posted herself at the key hole.

By splicing together enough cases of this sort, one could give the impression that the entire population was composing, memorizing, reciting, and singing seditious verse about the king. But police archives are notoriously untrustworthy as a source of information about attitudes and behavior patterns. They provide a record of reported crime, not of actual criminality, and they often reveal more about the views of the police than those of the public. By their very nature, the papers of the Bastille concern characters whom the police considered to be a threat to the state. They do not mention the vast majority of Parisians who went about their business without running afoul of the law and perhaps without muttering anything hostile to the king. But the police archives help to put the Affaire des Quatorze in perspective, because they show that it belonged to a wave of repression that followed a wave of "mauvais propos," which left its mark in other sources like the diaries of d'Argenson and Barbier.

Seen in the light of the other cases, the songs and poems exchanged among the Quatorze do not look exceptional. Many other Parisians were arrested for making the same kinds of protests, sometimes with the same poems. All of them participated in a general welling-up of discontent, which surged through all the channels of communication in 1749. The links among the Quatorze formed only a small segment of that larger entity - a huge communication system that extended everywhere from the palace of Versailles to the furnished rooms of the Parisian poor. What did it communicate? At this point, we must consider the poems themselves.

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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