Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 30]

translating this manuscript into sound, but Hélène Delavault, a gifted opera singer and cabaret performer from Paris, will sing a dozen of these songs in a cabaret-style concert following this lecture. All of them concern current events from 1749, and two—the two I have just discussed, "Par vos façons nobles et franches" and "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"—come directly out of the Affair of the Fourteen. Anyone who reads this lecture in the new, electronic edition of the American Historical Review will be able to hear Mme. Delavault's recording of the songs by clicking on a hyperlink. In short, technology from the age of information in 2000 can provide new access to the age of information in 1750. It can make history sing.


But I am beginning to sound like a commercial, and I have not yet reached the end of my talk. Perhaps it would be helpful if I paused at this point in order to try to clear a way through the difficulties inherent in the history of communication by asserting three preliminary conclusions, all of them unfortunately negative:

First, it makes no sense, I think, to separate printed from oral and written modes of communication, as we casually do when we speak of "print culture," because they were all bound together in a multi-media system. Nor, second, does it serve any purpose to derive one mode of communication from another, as if our task, like that of the police, was to trace a message to its source. It was the spread of the message that mattered—not its origin but its amplification, the way it reached the public and ultimately took hold. That process should be understood as a matter of feedback and convergence, rather than one of trickling down and linear causality. Third, it is equally misleading to distinguish separate realms of popular and elite culture. Despite the stratified character of Parisian society under the Old Regime, its publics crossed paths and rubbed elbows everywhere. They were mixed. In studying communication, I recommend that we look for mixtures, of milieus as well as media.

Having delivered myself of those imperatives, I realize that I am still far from my goal, and I have only a few pages left to get there. Until now, I have merely described what news was and the way it was transmitted, not how people made sense of it. That last step is the most difficult, because it has to do with reception as well as diffusion. We have plenty of reception theory but very little evidence about how reception actually took place. I cannot come up with a solution to that problem, but I may have found a detour that will help us get around it.

Let's consider once more the "news flash" about Louis XV's coffee spilling. How can we know what eighteenth-century readers made of it? We have no record of their reactions. But we can study the way the text works, the manner in which it fits into the book Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry, and the book's place in a corpus of related texts, which provided the basic fund of information about current events and contemporary history to the general reading public.

I would begin with the key phrase, "La France! Ton café fout le camp." It would have sounded particularly shocking to eighteenth-century ears, because "La

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