Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 25]

At first glance, the pattern looks straightforward, and the milieu seems to be homogeneous. The verse (poem 1 on the diagram) was passed along a line of students, priests, lawyers, notaries, and clerks, most of them friends and all of them young—between sixteen and thirty-one, generally in their early twenties. The verse itself gave off a corresponding odor, at least to the comte d'Argenson, who returned a copy to the lieutenant general of police with a note describing it as an "infamous piece, which seems to me, as to you, to smell of pedantry and the Latin Quarter."³⁹ But the picture became more complicated as the investigation broadened. When it reached Hallaire, the fifth person from the top of the diagram, the path of the poetry bifurcated. Hallaire had received three other poems from the abbé Guyard, who in turn had three further suppliers, who had suppliers of their own, and so on, until the police found themselves tracking a total of six poems and songs, one more seditious than the next (at least in the eyes of the authorities) and each with its own diffusion pattern.

In the end, they filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry—hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, "The Affair of the Fourteen." They never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author at all, not because Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have told us that the author is dead, but because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with mauvais propos, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.

The interrogations of the suspects in the Bastille provide a picture of the settings in which the verse circulated as well as the modes of their transmission. At each point, the poetry readings were accompanied by discussion. Bonis said that he had copied the first poem in the Hôtel-Dieu, where he had found a friend deep in conversation with a priest. "The conversation turned on the subject matter of the gazettes; and this priest, saying that someone had been so wicked as to write some satirical verses about the king, pulled out a poem attacking His Majesty."⁴⁰ Hallaire testified that he had made his copy during a dinner with some friends in the house of his father, a silk merchant in the rue Saint-Denis. Montange copied the poem after hearing it read aloud during a bull session in the dining hall of his college. Pierre Sigorgne, a professor at the Collège Du Plessis, dictated two of the poems to his students: it was a political dictée in the heart of the University of Paris! Sigorgne knew the poems by heart, and one of them had eighty-four lines. The art of memory was still flourishing in eighteenth-century Paris, and in several cases it was reinforced by the greatest mnemonic device of all, music; for some of the poems were composed to fit the rhythms of popular tunes, and they circulated by means of singing, along with the songs that came from the court and that had provoked the investigation in the first place.

Whether sung or declaimed from memory, the verse was copied on scraps of paper, which were carried about in pockets and swapped for other verse. The texts

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