Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 34]
L'espion anglais runs to ten; Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la république des lettres en France to thirty-six.
These books charted the whole course of contemporary history. In fact, they were the only map available, because political biography and contemporary history—two genres that provide the backbone of our own bestseller lists—did not exist in the legal literature of the Old Regime. They were forbidden.52 Contemporaries who wanted to orient themselves by relating the present to the recent past had to turn to libel literature. They had nowhere else to go.
How did that process of orientation take place? If you read your way through the entire corpus of libelles and chroniques scandaleuses, you find the same traits, the same episodes, and often the same phrases scattered everywhere. The authors drew on common sources and lifted passages from each other's texts as freely as they traded scraps of news in the cafés. It was not a matter of plagiarism, because that notion hardly applied to underground literature, and the books, like the songs, hardly had individual authors. It was a case of rampant intertextuality.
Despite their baroque profusion, the texts can be reduced to a few leitmotifs, which recur throughout the corpus. The court is always sinking deeper into depravity; the ministers are always deceiving the king; the king is always failing to fulfill his role as head of state; the state's power is always being abused; and the common people are always paying the price for the injustices inflicted on them: higher taxes, increased suffering, more discontent, and greater impotence in the face of an arbitrary and all-powerful government. Individual news items like the coffee spilling were stories in themselves. But they also fit into narrative frames of whole books, and the books fit into a meta-narrative that ran through the entire corpus: politics was an endless series of variations on a single theme, decadence and despotism.
True, I don't know how the readers read those books, but I don't think it extravagant to insist on a quality of reading in general: it is an activity that involves making sense of signs by fitting them in frames. Stories provide the most compelling frames. Ordinary people often find meaning in the booming, buzzing confusion of the world around them by telling, hearing, and reading stories. The general readers in eighteenth-century France made sense of politics by incorporating news into the narrative frames provided by the literature of libel. And they were reinforced in their interpretations by the messages they received from all the other media—gossip, poems, songs, prints, jokes, and all the rest.
have reached the end of my argument, and I realize that I have not
proven it. To drive it home, I must push it in two directions. First,
further back into the past. The corpus of libelle literature
from the 1770s and 1780s grew out of an old tradition, which goes
back beyond the Huguenot propaganda against Louis XIV, beyond the
seditious libeling of Jules Mazarin (mazarinades), and beyond
the pamphleteering of the religious wars to the art of insult and
rumor-mongering
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