Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 10]
Figure 4: Conversation in a café. Courtesy of the BNF, 67B 41693. Here is an excerpt from "Mapping Café Talk" (available at www.indiana.edu/~ahr): Café de Foy, Palais-Royal. "Some said that they had heard the Controller General [Le Peletier de Forts, appointed on June 15, 1726, at the time of the revaluation of the currency] was teetering and might fall. Others said, `Come on, that's nothing more than what you hear in the current songs. It looks very unlikely; and if he left the government, the cardinal [André Hercule Fleury, the dominant figure in the government by June 1726] would leave also. It's nothing more than a false alarm.'"
hypocrisy, 'Have you read them? Here they are. This is what is circulating among the common people in Paris.'"15
Fortunately for the historian, if not for the French, the Old Regime was a police state—"police" being understood in the eighteenth-century manner as municipal administration—and the police appreciated the importance of public opinion. They kept track of it by posting spies wherever people gathered to discuss public affairs—in marketplaces, shops, public gardens, taverns, and cafés. Of course, spy reports and police files should not be taken literally. They have built-in biases, which sometimes reveal more about the police themselves than the persons they were observing. But if handled with care, the archives of the police provide enough information for one to see how oral networks functioned. (See Figure 4.) I would like to draw on them in order to discuss two modes of communication that functioned most effectively in eighteenth-century Paris: gossip and songs.
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