Description
Book SynopsisRobert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre.
Trade Review"Darnton's bravura demonstration of how Old Regime slander was grafted onto the main stem of Revolutionary political culture is one of the highlights of his engaging book. . . . The
libellistes seem to have been most effective when their work fitted in with wider political and ideological trends. But their writings certainly complicated and dramatized questions about the limits of free speech as it was used for personal vilification and innuendo. Those were questions with which the Revolutionaries wrestled and never resolved. And they are with us still, and not only in the blogosphere." * Colin Jones,
New York Review of Books *
"In political slander everything is of the moment, and only someone as immersed as Darnton is in the particularities of eighteenth-century publishing, politics and cultural life could possibly do justice to its noisome unruliness. . . . The reader gets a taste of the thrill of the chase not just from the text but also from a number of telling illustrations taken from the illicit publications themselves. The return on Darnton's investment of time, energy and determination is extraordinary." * Lynn Hunt,
London Review of Books *
"This is a book for experts on eighteenth-century France; but it is also lucid and scurrilous enough to have much wider appeal. The spectacle of a public figure cut down to size by revelations-true or false-about her or his private life is a literary genre that continues in rude health when more refined forms of writing-literary fiction, criticism and poetry, for example-threaten to become obsolete. Readers will find much to titillate and shock in the slanders that brought
les grands of eighteenth-century France to their knees. But there is also a contemporary resonance to consider: as our own voracious yellow press goes from strength to strength and life-writing converges on celebrity biography, the more defamatory the better selling, what can the history of slander and libel teach us?" * Ruth Scurr,
The Nation *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
PART I. INTERLOCKING LIBELS
1. The Armor-Plated Gazetteer
2. The Devil in the Holy Water
3. The Parisian Police Unveiled
4. The Secret Life of Pierre Manuel
5. The End of the Line
6. Bibliography and Iconography
7. Reading
PART II. POLITICS AND POLICE WORK
8. Slander and Politics
9. The Book Police at Work
10. A Double Agent and His Authors
11. Secret Missions
12. Hugger-Mugger
13. Entrapment
14. The View from Versailles
15. The Devil in the Bastille
16. Bohemians Before Bohemianism
17. The Grub Street Route to Revolution
18. Slander into Terror
19. Words and Deeds
20. Postscript, 1802
PART III. THE LITERATURE OF LIBEL: BASIC INGREDIENTS
21. The Nature of Libels
22. Anecdotes
23. Portraits
24. News
PART IV. THE LITERATURE OF LIBEL: PRIVATE LIVES
25. Revolutionary Metamorphoses
26. Sex and Politics
27. Decadence and Despotism
28. Royal Depravity
29. Private Lives and Public Affairs
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
