Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 26]
soon found their way into manuscript gazettes and,finally, into print. The two longest poems, "Quel est le tristesort des malheureux Français" (What is the sad lot of theunhappy French) and "Peuple, jadis si fier, aujourd'hui siservile" (People, once so proud, today so servile), appearedprominently in Vie privée de Louis XV, the hostilehistory of the reign that became a bestseller in the 1780s. Indiscussing the outburst of songs and poems in 1749, it observed:
Itwas at this shameful time that the general scorn for the sovereignand his mistress began to become manifest, then continued to growuntil the end of the reign . . . This scorn broke out for the first time in some satirical verse about the outrage committed to PrinceEdward [Charles Edward Stuart, or Bonnie Prince Charlie, the YoungPretender, who was arrested in Paris on December 10, 1748 andexpelled from the kingdom in accordance with the British demandsaccepted by France in the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle], where Louis XVis addressed in a passage that compares him with that illustriousexile:
Il est roi dans les fers; qu'êtes-vous sur le trône?
[He is a king in irons; what are you on the throne?]
And then, in an apostrophe to the nation:
Peuple, jadis si fier, aujourd'hui si servile,
Des princes malheureux vous n'êtes plus l'asile![People, once so proud, today so servile,
You no longer provide a sanctuary for unhappy princes!]
Theeagerness of the public to seek out these pieces, to learn them byheart, to communicate them to one another, proved that the readersadopted the sentiments of the poet. Madame de Pompadour wasn'tspared, either . . . She ordered a drastic search for the authors,peddlers, and distributors of these pamphlets, and the Bastille wassoon full of prisoners.41
Inshort, the communication process took place by several modes in manysettings. It always involved discussion and sociability, so it wasnot simply a matter of messages transmitted down a line of diffusionto passive recipients but rather a process of assimilating andreworking information in groups—that is, the creation ofcollective consciousness or public opinion. If you will tolerate somejargon, you could think of it as a multi-media feedback system. Butthat sounds rather fancy. I merely want to signal you that there aretheoretical issues at stake in this kind of study and that inpursuing it I have drawn on the sociology of communication developedby Elihu Katz and Gabriel Tarde rather than the more voguish theoriesof Jürgen Habermas.42
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