Public Opinion and Communication Networks
© Robert Darnton / Princeton University
Oral Communication The last poem of the group, "Qu'une bâtarde
de catin" (poem 4) was simpler still. Like many topical poems of
that time, it was written to be sung to a popular tune, identified in
some versions from its refrain as "Ah! le voilà, ah! le
voici."65
The refrain, a catchy couplet, completed stanzas made up of
eight-syllable lines and interlocking rhymes. The versification
conformed to the most common pattern of the French ballad:
a-b-a-b-c-c; and it lent itself to endless extension, because new
verses could easily be improvized and added to the old. Each verse
attacked a public figure, while the refrain shifted the abuse to the
king, who stood out like the butt of a joke or the simpleton of a
children's game, in which Louis played an ignominious role while his
subjects danced around him singing mockingly, "Ah! le voilà,
ah! le voici/ Celui qui n'en a nul souci" - as if he were the
cheese in "The cheese stands alone" from "The Farmer
in the dell". Whether or not the song evoked such a game to its
audience in eighteenth-century France, its refrain made Louis look
like an ineffectual idiot, who gave himself over to pleasure while
his ministers fleeced his subjects and the kingdom went to hell.
Groups of Parisians often sang along to the refrains of "Pont
Neufs" or topical songs bawled out by street singers and
peddlers at gathering points like the Pont Neuf itself.66
It therefore seems possible that "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"
set choruses of derision echoing around Paris in 1749.
The mockery began with
Louis himself and Pompadour: Qu'une
bâtarde de catin
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
A
la cour se voie avancée,
Que
dans l'amour et dans le vin
Louis
cherche une gloire aisée,
Ah!
le voilà, ah! le voici
Celui
qui n'en a nul souci.
Then the satire continued downward, to the queen (a religious bigot abandoned by the king); the dauphin (remarkable for stupidity and obesity); Pompadour's brother (ridiculous in his attempt to cut a figure as a grand seigneur); the maréchal de Saxe (a self-proclaimed Alexander the Great who conquered fortresses that surrendered without a fight); the chancellor (too senile to administer justice); the other ministers (impotent or incompetent); and assorted courtiers (one more stupid or dissolute than the other).
As the song made the rounds, Parisians modified old verses and added new ones. Improvization of this sort provided popular entertainment in taverns and along boulevards and quais, where crowds gathered around songsters playing hurdy-gurdies. The versification was so simple that anyone could fit a new pair of rhymes to the old melody and pass it on, by singing or in writing. Although the original song may have come from the court, it became increasingly popular and covered an ever-broader spectrum of contemporary issues as it gathered verses. The copies from 1747 contain little more than mockery of prominent figures in Versailles, as indicated by the title cited in some of the police reports, "Echos de la Cour."67 But by 1749, the stanzas grafted on to the original verses covered all sorts of current events - the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle, the ineffective resistance to the vingtième tax by the Parlement de Paris, the unpopular administration of the police by Berryer, the latest quarrels of Voltaire, the triumph of his rival, Crebillon, at the Comédie française, and the cuckolding of the tax farmer La Popelinière, whose wife had installed a turn-table under the fireplace of her bedroom so that her lover could enter by means of a secret revolving door.
The diffusion process left its mark on the texts themselves. Two have survived in their original state - that is, on scraps of paper, which were carried in pockets so that they could be pulled out and declaimed in cafés or swapped for other verse or left at strategic locations such as benches in the Tuileries Gardens. The police confiscated one such copy when they frisked Pidansat de Mairobert in the Bastille. Mairobert had no connection with the Quatorze, but he was arrested at the same time and carried the same song around with him, a version of "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" in 23 stanzas scribbled on a small sheet of paper. Mairobert had written out only the most recent stanzas, indicating the others by a few words from their first lines, for example "Qu'une bâtarde etc." He also kept a copy of an early version, with eleven stanzas written out in full, in his room on the third floor of a house over a laundry. When the police searched the room, they came up with 68 poems and songs, some innocent lyrics, some satires about public figures and current events.68
The police had had their eye on Mairobert for some time, because he was notorious for disseminating hostile information about the government. Their spies put him down as an obscure writer and café frondeur:
Le sieur Mairobert a sur lui des vers contre le roi et contre Mme de Pompadour. En raisonnant avec lui sur le risque que court l'auteur de pareils écrits, il répondit qu'il n'en courait aucun, qu'il ne s'agissait que d'en glisser dans la poche de quelqu'un dans un café ou au spectacle pour les répandre sans risque ou d'en laisser tomber des copies aux promenades. Il m'aurait laissé prendre une copie des dits vers sur le vingtième, si je lui avais prié. Il me paraît assez peu [sic] facile sur cela, et j'ai lieu de penser qu'il en a distribué bon nombre... . Mairobert ne me paraît pas un homme d'importance... mais il est si fort répandu dans tous les lieux publics, que l'exemple sera connu. J'ai pensé que je devais donner sur-le-champ cet avis, parce que lui ayant vu remettre dans la poche de sa veste, à main gauche, les vers du vingtième, la détention sera fondée et justifiée. 69
Il a dit au café de Procope en parlant de la réforme qui a été faite [the demobilization of army divisions after the peace], que le militaire qui se trouvait dans le cas devait envoyer faire f..... pour jamais la cour, qui n'a d'autre plaisir qu'à dévorer les peuples et à commettre des injustices. C'est le ministre de la guerre qui a enfanté ce beau projet digne de lui. Aussi le bénit-on à l'envers.
Ce Mairobert est un des garçons qui aient la plus mauvaise langue de Paris, frayant avec tous les poètes, se le disant lui-même, comme aussi d'avoir fait une comédie qui n'a pas encore vu le jour.70
Mairobert was a minor employee in the naval ministry and a habitué of the nouvellistes who gathered around Mme M.-A. Legendre Doublet, a group connected with the Jansenist faction of the Parlement. His milieu differed completely from that of the Quatorze. But he kept a huge stock of songs and poetry and distributed the same verse that they did, scribbled on similar scraps of paper. While they recited "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" in classrooms and refrectories, he spread it about cafés and public gardens. One should imagine him accosting someone in the Procope, his favorite café, pulling a copy of the song from his vest pocket, and declaiming it - or culling new verses, along with fresh songs, from his contacts in the garden of the Palais-Royal.
The other original copy of "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" belonged to a different information circuit, the one uncovered by the police during their investigation of the Quatorze. It was scribbled on two ragged bits of paper which the police extracted from Guyard's pockets during his interrogation in the Bastille. He said that he had got them from the abbé Le Mercier and that he had another copy, which had been given to him by the abbé de Baussancourt, in his room. A police report indicated that Baussancourt had got his text from a certain "sieur Menjot, fils du maitre des comptes,"71 but they could not trace it further. The copy carried around by Guyard had been given to him by the abbé Le Mercier, who said in his own interrogation that he had written it out, adding some notes and critical observations, during one of the poetic exchanges that seem to have been common among students in Paris:
Nous a déclaré... que l'hiver dernier le déclarant, qui était au séminaire de St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, entendit un jour le sieur Théret, qui était alors dans le même séminaire, réciter des couplets d'une chanson contre la cour commençant par ces mots, "Qu'une bâtarde de catin;" que le déclarant demanda ladite chanson audit sieur Théret, qui la lui donna et à laquelle le déclarant a fait quelques notes et a même marqué sur la copie par lui écrite et donnée audit sieur Guyard que le couplet fait contre Monsieur le Chancelier ne lui convenait point et que le mot décrépit ne rimait point à fils. Ajoute le déclarant que sur la même feuille contenant ladite chanson a lui donnée par ledit sieur Théret il y avait deux pièces de vers au sujet du Prétendant, l'une commençant par ces mots, "Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français," et l'autre par ceux-ci, "Peuple jadis si fier," lesquelles deux pièces le déclarant a copiées et a déchirées dans le temps sans les avoir communiquées à personne.72
The two pieces of paper in the archives conform to this description. One, 8 X 11 centimeters, contains 8 verses of the song. The other, 8 X 22 centimeters, is torn vertically in half. It contains only three verses and some notes, part of which have been torn away. Presumably the other two poems, "Quel est le triste sort des malheureux Français" and "Peuple jadis si fier aujourd'hui si servile," had been written on the part of the page that Guyard had torn off. The notes identify the personages satirized in the song, including chancellor d'Aguesseau, whose verse in other versions goes as follows:
Que le chancelier décrépit
Lâche la main à la justice
Que dans sa race il ait un fils
Qui vende même la justice
Ah! le voilà, ah! le voici
Celui qui n'en a nul souci73
The relevant section of the torn piece of paper shows that Le Mercier did indeed object to the rhyme and also sympathized with the chancellor, Henri-François d'Aguesseau, who was then 81 and enjoyed a reputation for integrity:
J'ai omis un couplet dans la [the missing part of the sheet comes here]
d'Aguesseau, tant parce que la
monde est content de lui, que par
que féminine ne valent rien
This evidence, in all its physicality, points to three conclusions: 1. Recipients of the song did not react passively, even when they copied it. They added notes and modified phrasing according to their own preferences. 2. The handwritten versions of the texts sometimes contained several poems belonging to different genres - in this case, two classical - type odes and one topical ballad. By scattering the same messages over different genres, the attacks on the king and the court aimed to elicit a wide range of responses among the listeners and readers - everything from moral indignation to derisive laughter. 3. There were several modes of diffusion. Le Mercier identified the text of "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" simply as a "chanson" and said he had heard it "recited" by Théret, meaning presumably that it could have been declaimed from memory, read aloud from a handwritten copy, or sung. Memorization certainly played an important part in this process. In the case of the two odes, the police noted that Sigorgne had dictated them to his students "de mémoire"74 and that after writing out this "dictée," one of the students, Guyard, also had memorized them: "Il a assuré n'avoir point gardé copie de ces vers, qu'il a seulement appris par coeur."75 The police also remarked that a third ode had been memorized at a different point in the transmission circuit by two other students, Du Terraux and Varmont: "[Du Terraux] déclare avoir récité par coeur à Varmont fils les vers "Lâche dissipateur du bien de tes sujets", que Varmont a pu retenir de mémoire."76 In short, the mental activity involved in the communication process was complex - a matter of internal appropriation, whether the messages were taken in by the ears or by the eyes.
Oral communication has almost always escaped historical analysis, but in this case the documentation is rich enough for one to pick up echoes of it. In the eighteenth century, Parisians sometimes collected the scraps of paper on which songs were written while being dictated or sung. The scraps were then transcribed, along with other ephemera - epigrammes, word games ("énigmes"), pièces de circonstance - in journals or commonplace books. Journals that consisted almost entirely of songs were known as "chansonniers", although the collectors sometimes gave them more exotic titles, such as "Oeuvres diaboliques pour servir à l'histoire du temps."77 After going through several chansonniers in various archives, I have located six versions of "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" in addition to the copies confiscated from Mairobert and Guyard. They vary considerably, because the song kept changing as it was transmitted from one person to another and as current events turned up new material for additional verses.
The changes can be followed in appendix II, which contains seven versions of the verse that mocks the maréchal de Belle-Isle for dallying with his army in the south of France while the Austrian and Sardinian troops (referred to as "Hongrois") pillaged a large part of Provence between November 1746 and February 1747. The invading army withdrew across the Var before Belle-Isle could engage it in battle, so later versions deride his failure to win a victory. Here are three examples:
|
Guyard's copy
Que notre moulin à projets |
Mairobert's copy
Que notre héros à projets |
|
Bibliothèque
historique de Paris, ms. 648
Que
notre moulin à projets |
|
Slight as they are - perhaps even because of their slightness - the changes suggest the way the text varied, while retaining its essential character, through the process of oral transmission. Of course, it was also written down, so the changes could have occurred in the act of transcription. It would be absurd to claim that the different versions of the same song provide a way for the historian to tap a pure oral tradition. Purity cannot be found even among the oral tales tape-recorded by anthropologists and folklorists,78 and there was none at all in the streets of Paris, where dirt from many sources washed into popular songs. By the time "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" reached the Quatorze, it included a little of everything that was in the news. It had become a sung newspaper, full of commentary on current events and catchy enough to catch on with everyone. Moreover, the listeners and singers could trim it to their own taste. The topical song was a flexible medium, which could be bent to suit the preferences of different groups and stretched to include everything that interested the public as a whole.
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
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