Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 3]
Figure 1: "L'arbre de Cracovie," c. 1742. The Tree of Cracow as depicted in a satirical print. The figure of Truth, on the far left, pulls on a rope to make the tree go "crack" every time something false takes place beneath it. According to the caption, the falsehoods include an innkeeper who claims he does not water down his wine, a merchant who sells goods for no more than what they are worth, a truthful horse dealer, an unbiased poet, etc. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), 96A 74336.
But ordinary hearsay did not satisfy Parisians with a powerful appetite for information. They needed to sift through the public noise in order to discover what was really happening. Sometimes, they pooled their information and criticized it collectively by meeting in groups such as the famous salon of Mme. M.-A. L. Doublet, known as "the parish." Twenty-nine "parishioners," many of them well connected with the Parlement of Paris or the court and all of them famished for news, gathered once a week in Mme. Doublet's apartment in the Enclos des Filles Saint-Thomas. When they entered the salon, they reportedly found two large registers on a desk near the door. One contained news reputed to be reliable, the other, gossip. Together, they constituted the menu for the day's discussion, which was prepared by one of Mme. Doublet's servants, who may qualify as the first "reporter" in the history of France. We don't know his name, but a description of him survives in the files of the police (and I should say at the outset that police archives provide most of the evidence for this lecture—important evidence, I believe, but the kind that calls for especially critical interpretation): He was "tall and fat, a full face, round wig, and a brown outfit. Every morning he goes from
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