Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 32]
chancellor Maupeou, everything that would have warranted a banner headline, if there had been headlines, or newspapers with news. In each case, as the story went, du Barry filled the king with drink, dragged him to bed, and got him to sign any edict that had been prepared for her by her evil counselors. This kind of reportage anticipated techniques that would be developed a century later in yellow journalism: it presented the inside story of politics in Versailles; it pictured power struggles as what-the-butler-saw; it reduced complex affairs of state to backstairs intrigue and the royal sex life.
That, of course, was hardly serious history. I would call it folklore. But it had enormous appeal—so much, in fact, that it is still alive today. I found the coffee-spilling episode—with the wrong mistress but the right emphasis on her vulgarity—in a French-Canadian comic book. (See Figure 11.) Instead of dismissing political folklore as trivial, I would take it seriously. In fact, I believe it was a crucial ingredient in the collapse of the Old Regime. But before leaping to that conclusion, I had better retreat to familiar territory: the trade in forbidden books, which I studied in my last round of research. The main results of this study can be summarized in the following bestseller list, which shows which books circulated most widely in the vast underground of illegal literature during the twenty years before the revolution:51
Five of the top fifteen books on the list, those marked by an asterisk, were libelles or chroniques scandaleuses, and there were dozens more. A huge corpus of scandalous literature reached readers everywhere in France, although it has been almost completely forgotten today—no doubt because it did not qualify as literature in the eyes of literary critics and librarians. The libelles often have impressive literary qualities, nonetheless. Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry made it to the top of the bestseller list because, among other things, it was very well written. Mairobert knew how to tell a story. His text is funny, wicked, shocking, outrageous, and a very good read. I recommend it strongly.
It also looks impressive physically. It comes packaged in an imposing, 346-page
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