The text of the first poem sought by the police, "Monstre dont la noire furie," has disappeared. As explained, it was an ode in fourteen lines that attacked the king for dismissing Maurepas and sending him into exile on April 24, 1749. By that time, the five other poems turned up by the police in the course of their investigation had been circulating in Paris for months. The second and third, "Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français" and "Peuple jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile", appeared during the outburst of indignation at the arrest of prince Edouard on December 10, 1748 (their full texts and those of the other poems are printed in the appendix). They made the most of the dramatic details from the reports of the arrest - the use of naked force, soldiers and chains - and worked over the basic contrast between the two protagonists: Edouard, more gallant in defeat and more of a king than Louis, who sat on a throne but actually was a prisoner of his vile mistress and his own base appetites. Both poems made the dishonorable treatment of Edouard into an extended metaphor of France's dishonor at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. "Peuple jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile" (poem 3) went over the main provisions of the treaty, then upbraided Louis in a fierce apostrophe, and ended with a sentimental address to Edouard:

Tu triomphes, cher Prince, au milieu de tes fers;
Sur toi, dans ce moment, tous les yeux sont ouverts.
Un peuple généreux et juge du mérite,
Va révoquer l'arrêt d'une race proscrite.

Ultimately, the poem was an exhortation to the French people: they should renounce their servility and reject the cowardly behavior of their sovereign.

"Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français" (poem 2) took this theme further. After condemning Louis for treachery and for lacking all the kingly qualities that Edouard embodied, it addressed him defiantly in the name of the French people:

Louis! vos sujets de douleur abattus,
Respectent Edouard captif et sans couronne:
Il est Roi dans les fers, qu'êtes-vous sur le trône?

The rhetoric cast the people as the ultimate arbiter in questions of legitimacy, but there was nothing democratic about it. On the contrary, it personified international relations as a struggle among monarchs, and it invoked the most popular figure in France's royalist past, Henry IV, an ancestor of Edouard as well as of Louis:

Mais trahir Edouard, lorsque l'on peut combattre!
Immoler à Brunswick [ie. George II] le sang de Henri IV!

In excoriating Pompadour along with Louis, the poet summoned up another favorite from historical folklore, Agnes Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, who had reputedly breathed some heroism into her royal lover at another time of national humiliation:

J'ai vu tomber le sceptre aux pieds de Pompadour!
Mais fut-il relevé par les mains de l'Amour?
Belle Agnès, tu n'es plus! Le fier Anglois nous dompte.
Tandis que Louis dort dans le sein de la honte,
Et d'une femme obscure indignement épris,
Il oublie en ses bras nos pleurs et nos mépris.
Belle Agnès, tu n'es plus! Ton altière tendresse
Dédaignerait un roi flétri par la faiblesse.

The message was clear: royal mistresses should be noble and inspire kings to noble deeds; Pompadour was as ignoble in her role as Louis was in his. But if the poet spoke for the French people, he did not adopt a popular tone. He appealed to sentiments in another register - royalist, not populist, plus royaliste que le roi.

The imagery and rhetoric have now lost their emotive charge, but they were designed to resonate among eighteenth-century readers and listeners, who would recognize the allusions and respond to melodramatic metaphors such as:

Brunswick, te faut-il donc de si grandes victimes?
O ciel, lance tes traits; terre ouvre tes abîmes!

Sceptres, thrones, laurel wreathes, and sacrificial altars filled out the symbolic setting, while the tone varied: at times indignant, at times pathetic, it stayed within the register of classical eloquence, just the thing to fire the passions of Frenchmen raised on Juvenal and Horace. The immediate model might have been Les Tragiques of Agrippa Daubigné, a poetic indictment of the monarchy during the religious wars, which was intended to arouse indignation, not simply to please. The principle of indignatio also animated other classic models of political poetry, Ronsard's Discours des misères de ce temps, for example, and Racine's Brittanicus. All such verse marshaled alexandrines and rhymed couplets in oratorical apostrophes to kings who had failed in their duty. The poet summoned the great to judgment and solemnly pronounced them unworthy of their roles. In the case of the Affaire du prince Edouard, he poured scorn on Versailles:

Tout est vil en ces lieux, Ministres et Maitresse

And he explicitly denounced the comte d'Argenson, Minister of War:

Mais toi, lâche Ministre, ignorant et pervers,
Tu trahis ta patrie et tu la déshonore.

It was serious, public poetry, built on classical models and driven by the passion of moral indignation.⁶⁴

The same form and the same rhetorical strategy characterized poem 6, another ode, which began with an apostrophe to the king:

Lâche dissipateur des biens de tes sujets,
Toi qui comptes les jours par les maux que tu fais,
Esclave d'un ministre et d'une femme avare,
Louis, apprends le sort que le ciel te prépare.

Here, too, the poet denounced Louis XV as if he were Racine declaiming against Nero, but the charges were slightly different. Although he protested against France's humiliation in foreign affairs, he concentrated on domestic disasters. Louis was taxing his subjects to death. By driving them into destitution, he had exposed them to epidemics, depopulated the countryside, desolated the cities, and for what? To satisfy the base appetites of his mistress and ministers:

Tes trésors sont ouverts à leurs folles dépenses;
Ils pillent tes sujets, épuisent tes finances,
Moins pour renouveler tes ennuyeux plaisirs
Que pour mieux assouvir leurs infâmes désirs.
Ton Etat aux abois, Louis, est ton ouvrage;
Mais crains de voir bientôt sur toi fondre l'orage.

What was the threat that hung over the king? The execration of his people and the punishment of God. The poem even suggested that the French would rise in revolt, driven desperate by the spoliation of what little they possessed. It did not prophesy a revolution, however. Instead it pictured a reign that would end in ignominy: the Parisians would smash the statue that was then being raised to the king on the new Place de Louis XV (today Place de la Concorde) and Louis would descend into hell.

Poem 5, "Sans crime on peut trahir sa foi," struck a different note altogether. It takes the form of a burlesque codicil to an edict by the parlement de Toulouse, which like the other parlements had capitulated to the crown in the struggle over the vingtième; and it is short and snappy:

Apostille du parlement de Toulouse à l'enregistrement de l'édit du vingtième

Sans crime on peut trahir sa foi,
Chasser son ami de chez soi,
Du prochain corrompre la femme,
Piller, voler n'est plus infâme.
Jouir à la fois des trois soeurs
N'est plus contre les bonnes moeurs.
De faire ces métamorphoses
Nos ayeux n'avaient pas l'esprit;
Et nous attendons un édit
Qui permette toutes ces choses

-signé: de Montalu premier président

Here the poet condemns the vingtième without mentioning it, except in the title. He adopts the dominant argument of its opponents: that the king, by converting an "extraordinary" wartime tax into a quasi-permanent levy on revenue, was simply pillaging the property of his subjects. But the argument remains implicit. After registering the edict for the tax, the parlement adds, as an afterthought, a blanket endorsement of all the other immoral actions of the king. The poem therefore puts the tax question on the same level as the other "affairs" that offended the public's sense of morality: the abduction of Edouard, the appropriation of the wife of a commoner, Le Normant d'Etioles, as a royal mistress (later made marquise de Pompadour), and the king's love affairs with the three daughters of the marquis de Nesle, which were considered as adultery compounded by incest. It was a simple message in simple rhymes - vers de circonstance that expressed the public's disgust at the feebleness of the parlements' resistance to tyrannical taxation.

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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