[to be published in
a volume on public opinion
edited by Peter-Eckhard Knabe
University of Greifswald, 2001]
Public Opinion and
Communication Networks
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
© Robert Darnton / Princeton University
Click here for details of the image
After gathering force for decades, public opinion provided the decisive blow when the Old Regime collapsed in 1788. But what exactly was it, and how did it affect events? Although we have several studies of the concept of public opinion as a motif in philosophic thought, we have little information about the way it actually operated.
How should we conceive of it? As a series of protests, which beat like waves against the power structure, in crisis after crisis, from the religious wars to the parliamentary conflicts of the 1780s? As a climate of opinion, which came and went according to the vagaries of social and political determinants? As a discourse, or congeries of competing discourses, developed by different social groups from different institutional bases? As a set of attitudes, buried beneath the surface of events but potentially accessible to historians by means of survey research? One could define public opinion in many ways and hold it up to examination from many points of view; but as soon as one gets a fix on it, it blurs and dissolves, like the smile on the Cheshire Cat.
Instead of attempting to capture it in a definition, I would like to follow it through the streets of Paris - or, rather, since the thing itself eludes our grasp, to track a message through the media of the time. But first, a word about the theoretical issues involved.
- 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 bātarde de catin"
- Appendix III: Poetry and the Fall of Maurepas
- Appendix IV: The Trail of the Quatorze
- Notes
- Policing a Poem
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