Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 31]
France" evoked a particular meaning in the social code of the time. Lackeys were often called by the province of their origin. So by shouting out "La France" in an unguarded moment, du Barry was calling the king her lackey.48 She did so in a spectacularly vulgar manner, one that could be taken to reveal the plebeian nature beneath her courtly veneer; for "fout le camp" was the language of the brothel, not the court. Similar outbursts of vulgarity occur throughout the book. In fact, they constitute its central theme. Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry was a classic libelle, organized according to the formula that I mentioned earlier: from the brothel to the throne. Du Barry sleeps her way to the top, using tricks she picked up in the whorehouse to revive the exhausted libido of the old king and thus to dominate the kingdom. She is a sluttish Cinderella and therefore different from all previous royal mistresses—or all since Mme. de Pompadour, née Poisson—who, whatever their morals, were at least ladies. This theme is summed up by a song—one of many songs printed in the book—which includes the lines:
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The rhetoric plays on the assumption that readers wanted their kings to be discriminating in their gallantry, just as they were expected to be heroic in war, regal in court, and pious in church. Louis XV failed on all counts, although he got high marks for his bravery at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745. He was the antithesis of France's favorite king, Henri IV. And he was reviled in the book, not because the author held him up to any radical or republican standard of statecraft but because he had not been kingly enough. Thus a second leitmotiv that runs throughout the text: the degradation of the monarchy. At every point, the narrative dwells on the profanation of royal symbols and the person of the king himself. The scepter, it says, has become as feeble as the royal penis.50
This was strong language for an age that treated kings as sacred beings directly ordained to rule by God and invested with the royal touch. But Louis had lost his touch, as I explained earlier. Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry compounded that loss by presenting him as an ordinary mortal—or worse, as a dirty old man. At the same time, it invited the reader to enjoy the frisson of seeing into the innermost chambers of Versailles, into the secret du roi itself, even to observe the king between the sheets. For that is where the great affairs of state were decided—the fall of Choiseul, the partition of Poland, the destruction of France's judicial system by the
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