Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth Century Paris

Darnton (The Case for Books), a professor at Harvard and author of several books, writes wonderfully about the development of communication. Even as literacy was improving in the 18th century, communication was primarily oral, and could be a runner, a smoky fire, or a drum. Songs and poems were the newspapers for the illiterate and memorization was their flash drive. Yet censorship still existed, and in 1745, Paris police, in an operation called In L'Affaire des Quatorze, rounded up 14 men circulating some especially nasty songs about Louis XV, his policies, and his mistress. These songs, malicious intrigues likely originating in Versailles, spread from the court to servants to peddlers to Parisian markets. They were added to, re-written, and enhanced by each singer and then finally heard at court, marking the birth of the politically motivated public opinion. Darnton reproduces these songs and others, providing helpful notes; he even created a website of these songs, which can be downloaded to your MP3 player. (Nov.)