Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 19]
Had she written the book out of her own imagination? Hadn't someone supplied her with written material to work over? Who was it that had given [that material] to her?
Replied that no memoirs had been given to her, that she had composed her book by herself, that in fact she had fashioned it in her imagination. Agreed, however, that having her head full of what people were saying in public about what had happened during and after the king's illness, she had tried to make some use of it in her book.27
Once it began to circulate, the book—and especially the key, which was printed and sold separately—reinforced the "public noises." From talk to print to talk, the process built on itself dialectically, accumulating force and spreading ever wider. It is difficult to follow, owing to the sparseness of evidence about oral exchanges that occurred 250 years ago. But enough documentation has survived to suggest that by 1750 the talk of the town had turned decisively against the king.
ow
let's consider songs. They, too, were an important medium for
communicating news. Parisians commonly composed verse about current
events and set it to popular tunes such as "Malbrouck s'en
va-t-en guerre" ("The Bear Went Over the Mountain" in
America, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in England). Songs
served as mnemonic devices. In a society that remained largely
illiterate, they provided a powerful means of transmitting messages,
one that probably functioned more effectively in eighteenth-century
Paris than commercial jingles do in America today. Parisians of all
stripes, from sophisticated salon lions to simple apprentices, shared
a common repertory of tunes, and anyone with a bit of wit could
improvise couplets, or the standard French ballad made up of
eight-syllable lines with interlocking rhymes, to melodies carried in
the head. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier remarked, "No event
takes place that is not duly registered in the form of a vaudeville
[popular song] by the irreverent populace."28
Some songs originated in the court, but they reached the common people, and the common people sang back. Artisans composed songs and sang them at work, adding new verses to old tunes as the occasion arose. Charles Simon Favart, the greatest librettist of the century, got his start as a boy by putting words to popular melodies while rhythmically kneading the dough in his father's bakery. He and his friends—Charles Collé, Pierre Gallet, Alexis Piron, Charles-François Panard, Jean-Joseph Vadé, Toussaint-Gaspard Taconnet, Nicolas Fromaget, Christophe-Barthélemy Fagan, Gabriel Charles Lattaignant, François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif—
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