Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 2]
history of communication. In principle, this kind of history could provoke a reassessment of any period in the past, for every society develops its own ways of hunting and gathering information; its means of communicating what it gathers, whether or not it uses concepts such as "news" and "the media," can reveal a great deal about its understanding of its own experience. Examples can be cited from studies of coffeehouses in Stuart England, tea houses in early republican China, marketplaces in contemporary Morocco, street poetry in seventeenth-century Rome, slave rebellions in nineteenth-century Brazil, runner networks in the Mogul Raj of India, even the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire.3
But instead of attempting to pile up examples by roaming everywhere through the historical record, I would like to examine a communication system at work in a particular time and place, the Old Regime in France. More precisely, I would ask: How did you find out what the news was in Paris around 1750? Not, I submit, by reading a newspaper, because papers with news in them—news as we understand it today, about public affairs and prominent persons—did not exist. The government did not permit them.
To find out what was really going on, you went to the tree of Cracow. It was a large, leafy chestnut tree, which stood at the heart of Paris in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. It probably had acquired its name from heated discussions that took place around it during the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), although the name also suggested rumor-mongering (craquer: to tell dubious stories). Like a mighty magnet, the tree attracted nouvellistes de bouche, or newsmongers, who spread information about current events by word of mouth. They claimed to know, from private sources (a letter, an indiscreet servant, a remark overheard in an antechamber of Versailles), what was really happening in the corridors of power—and the people in power took them seriously, because the government worried about what Parisians were saying. Foreign diplomats allegedly sent agents to pick up news or to plant it at the foot of the tree of Cracow. (See Figure 1.) There were several other nerve centers for transmitting "public noises" (bruits publics), as this variety of news was known: special benches in the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens, informal speakers' corners on the Quai des Augustins and the Pont Neuf, cafés known for their loose talk, and boulevards where news bulletins were bawled out by peddlers of canards (facetious broadsides) or sung by hurdy-gurdy players. To tune in on the news, you could simply stand in the street and cock your ear.4
Click here to go to the next page
| Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Pages: 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
Footnotes
|
|||
| Discussion | Maps & Cafes | Songs | Site Index |
| AHR Home | Presidential Address Home | AHA Home | |