Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 28]

manuscript collections. They contain from six to twenty-three verses, the later ones alluding to the most recent events such as the notorious cuckolding of the tax farmer A.-J.-J. Le Riche de La Popelinière by the duc de Richelieu in the spring of 1750. Furthermore, if you compare different versions of the same verse, you can find small differences in phrasing, which probably bear the mark of the oral diffusion process, since variations crept in as the song passed from one singer to another. The Parisians may not have been signers of tales, like the Serbs studied by Albert Lord, but they were singers of news.⁴⁴ "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" contained so much news and commentary that it can be considered a sung newspaper.

But it should not be considered in isolation, because it belonged to a vast corpus of songs, which extended nearly everywhere in Paris and covered virtually everything of interest to Parisians. It is impossible to measure the size of this corpus, but we can get some idea of its dimensions by examining all the evidence that remains in the archives. When consigned to writing, the songs first appeared on slips of paper like that in Figure 10, which contains a selection of verses from "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" and came from a pocket of Christophe Guyard, one of the Fourteen, when he was frisked in the Bastille. As already explained, a similar scrap of paper, also with verses from "Qu'une bâtarde de catin," was confiscated from a pocket of Mairobert. He had no connection with the Fourteen, so he probably acquired the song by tapping into another network. And seven other copies, which have turned up in various libraries, probably came from still other sources. In short, the song had traveled through many channels of diffusion, and the network of the Fourteen was but a small segment of a very large whole.

How large? Consider the next category of evidence: collections. Many Parisians picked up scraps of paper scribbled with verse from cafés and public gardens, then stored them in their apartments. The police found sixty-eight of these snippets—songs, poems, scribbling of all sorts—when they searched Mairobert's room. Wealthier collectors had their secretaries transcribe this material into well-ordered registers, known as chansonniers. The most famous of these, the "Chansonnier Maurepas," contains Maurepas' own collection and runs to thirty-five volumes.⁴⁵ By studying it and seven other chansonniers from the mid-century years, I have formed a rough idea of how many songs existed at that time and which ones were the most popular. The richest source, a twelve-volume collection in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris entitled "Oeuvres diaboliques pour servir à l'histoire du temps," contains 641 songs and poems from the period 1745-1751 and 264 that date from the end of 1748 to the beginning of 1751.⁴⁶ It seems clear, therefore, that the six songs and poems exchanged among the Fourteen constituted only a tiny fraction of a gigantic repertory, but they show up everywhere in the chansonniers, along with a host of other songs and poems on the same subjects. "Qu'une bâtarde de catin" appears most often, eight times in all. It can be taken as a fairly representative example of what Parisians sung in the middle of the century.

A final run of documents makes it possible for us to have some notion of what the

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