Subversive Words

Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France

Arlette Farge

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509534036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This important and original book addresses the nature of public opinion, the relation between rulers and ruled, and the role of popular rumours in eighteenth century France. Arlette Farge draws on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police records and newsheets to show that ordinary Parisians had definite opinions on what was happening in their city.

PART I
Journals, Newspapers and Policemen: Scenes from Street Life

No one could be indifferent to what ordinary people were saying: the street was an active member of society. It could be denied or rejected, but its noisy exuberance was ever present; rumours escaped it or entered it with equal speed. It was under constant observation from its social superiors, from the press and the police, and its echoes – reported inaccurately or with dread, with indignation or without it – fill their writings. Earlier on it was viewed with scorn and suspicion; later, as we shall see, it was seen as a mine of information. News stories and tavern gossip were enlightening to the chief of police, but they also delighted hack writers avid for news and anecdotes and spicy, saleable stories – not to mention the underground press whose impact depended in part on the weight of people’s reactions to particular events.

Popular gossip, interpreted on these varying levels, could have a formidable influence. Scarcely had it been uttered than it was spreading, via carriers who all put it to their own use. As the century grew older its sphere was transformed: it invaded the street, the press, the royal court. Its real presence, even manipulated, distorted or hyped, could cause consternation in its hearers, who might fear it, but could not avoid it. So it took its place amidst a plethora of commentaries and attitudes, feelings and policies, all equally incapable of keeping it under control.

1
Words scorned and persecuted

I shall make use of two kinds of sources. The first is the printed documentation coming from the higher echelons of early eighteenth-century society. Between 1715 and 1726, three great observers wrote their Journals or Memoirs: Jean Buvat, Mathieu Marais and Edmond-Jean Bourbier, three men of widely differing social backgrounds and outlook.¹

My second source is unpublished, and is neither literary nor journalistic. It consists of reports by police inspectors and observers who were paid by the lieutenant general of police to keep him informed about Paris gossip. These reports, now in the Bastille Archives in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,² cover the years 1725 to 1740, and are of incomparable value, since it was at exactly that time that popular talk acquired a sudden importance.

Diaries and memoirs from the early eighteenth century

This was a political interlude, the regency during the minority of Louis XV. There was an outburst of exuberance after the sorry end of the Sun King’s reign, but people were also waiting, with affectionate impatience, for the child-king to reach adulthood. History gives us a favourable image of those years, which seem to have been unaffected by the decay of royal prestige which (so historians tell us) did not begin until the mid-century.³ Moreover, the philosophes and the Enlightenment outlook were not yet supreme, and it is a relief to be able to study the diarists’ attitudes towards the common people, untroubled as yet by the horribly difficult question of how popular thinking influenced the Enlightenment and vice versa. This is not to say that the regency was uneventful. Some events were in fact to leave a lasting impression on men’s minds and attract a good many reactions.

When Louis XIV died he left France in a sadly chaotic economic and financial situation, bled almost white. The attempted solution was the Law system, named after the Scottish expert called in by the regent to restore financial order. In 1718 a Royal Bank was set up to receive all state revenues, and the king became sole proprietor of all financial securities. To stimulate the economy, he began to issue banknotes guaranteed by the State. At the same time, Law set up a great trading company which was originally called the Compagnie d’Occident, the Company of the West. This referred to Louisiana. Louis XIV had granted the exploitation of that territory to a financier, Crozat, who later resigned. The Conseil des Finances then entrusted the task to Law, on condition that he borrowed two million louis to help colonize the territory. Law extended his economic power to many other countries, such as China, Mongolia and Japan, and renamed his company the Compagnie des Indes. It soon became popularly known as the Compagnie du Mississippi, for Law was particularly interested in implementing plans to move settlers to the Mississippi and Louisiana.

These new plans were to go through many vicissitudes. In January and March 1719, and again in 1720, the police took severe measures against begging and idleness: to clear up a floating population which they now saw as a nuisance, they began a rigorous policy of detention. Dubious characters and vagabonds were arrested on the streets, and in early 1720 transports of the poorest men and women were sent off to colonize and fill up the all-too-empty spaces of Louisiana. The lieutenant of police, d’Argenson, was particularly harsh: his habit of having people snatched in broad daylight, or forcing them to marry, caused a scandal. In 1720 there was a serious uprising.

As for Law’s system, it turned out to be inflationary: the printing of notes outstripped the cash available, vast fortunes were made and lost and the whole system spun out of control. When it finally collapsed, there was panic. Fights broke out in the streets, Law had to flee for his life and wall-posters attacked the regent, while the ground was strewn with vicious pamphlets. The parlement did not stand aside. Using the right of protest granted it by the regent, it admonished him and quarrelled with him over the bull Unigenitus, of 1713, which had condemned certain forms of Jansenism. This was the first of a series of harsh criticisms by the parlement of the royal authority; it also led to the former’s noisy exile to Pontoise in July 1720.

That was indeed an eventful year. Plague broke out in Marseilles,⁴ and the Parisians, fearing an epidemic at home, grew more nervous of immorality. Their attention and imagination were soon to be focused on the famous arrest, in 1721, of the thief Cartouche and his execution a few months later. His trial, intended to serve as a warning to others, turned him into a hero, but he was to drag hundreds of accomplices after him in his fall.

The first quarter of the century ended in a riot. In 1725 bread was expensive and food short, and Paris erupted. D’Ombreval, the lieutenant general of police, was dismissed, and in 1726 the hated Duc de Bourbon was disgraced. It was then that Fleury began his long ministerial career.

During those eleven years, the mob had had more than one occasion to make its feelings known. We must now see how memorialists and diarists brought that mob into their writings, how they saw it and how they spoke of it. The intrusion of the mob into these journals and memoirs did not happen by chance.

With a few exceptions, diaries and memoirs have received little literary attention. For this very reason they are of interest, though we need not think that they always tell the truth. At the very least they belong to ‘that intimate and confidential side of historical writing which, under the title “Memoirs”, conveys day by day, with casual honesty, the thoughts of the moment, and records freely, inconsistently, diffusely, but with tolerable fidelity, the very making of history.’⁵

With fidelity? Let us examine the writing of three famous chroniclers of the early eighteenth century: Jean Buvat (1660–1729), Mathieu Marais (1665–1737) and Edmond-Jean Barbier (1689–1771).

Buvat began his journal in 1715 and finished it in 1723. He was a simple man, a copyist in the king’s library. He was curious about events and jotted them down pell-mell, with no attempt at a coherent narrative. Aubertin was to call his work ‘history in disorder’;⁶ no matter, for his viewpoint is valuable for its very naivety. His information, picked up in the streets or from various churchmen of his acquaintance, gave him a clear idea of the disturbances caused in 1713 by the bull Unigenitus.

Marais was of another sort: he was a lawyer, a born parliamentarian, and he wrote his memoirs between 1715 and 1737. He was very cultured and witty and combined a sense of style with an acute critical outlook, which he directed principally against the Jesuits. He lived among parliamentarians, most of whom were of the Jansenist persuasion, and was no friend to absolutism. He was not much interested in street life; his attention focused more on royalty, and especially the regent. He watched displays, took part in ceremonial, immersed himself in the celebratory atmosphere the better to describe it later on. He was looking into the same mirror as the common folk, but from a different angle.

Barbier must be the best known of the three. His chronicle is very long, for he went on writing from 1718 to 1763, and historians have always regarded him as a major source, especially for the parliamentary disputes of Louis XV’s reign. His detailed descriptions of the quarrels between parlement and king show a certain foreboding of the future. Reading him, we immediately sense his moderate outlook and his nervousness. A lawyer who became head of the council of d’Argenson (keeper of the seals), then of the councils of the Princesse de Conti and the Duc d’Orléans, he was never at ease with the common people, whom he feared even when they were in celebratory mood. He was mildly anticlerical, no Jansenist, a lover of order who avoided enthusiasm, hating impetuosity and passion, but observing each successive crisis with scrupulous care.

These three sharply contrasting witnesses all lived in a somewhat turbulent intellectual and moral climate. In spite of their differing styles and personal outlooks, they all three speak in almost identical fashion concerning the ‘people’. First, they all give the people a prominent role. They do not, of course, get as much space as news of the court, the prince, the dukes and duchesses, or as treaties, church affairs and the parlement; but in comparison with memoirs from the reign of Louis XIV, their presence is felt much more clearly. There was a reason for this: the court had left Versailles, for the regent was living in the Palais-Royal, in the heart of Paris. Observers of Paris, the regent’s city, who were anxious to keep track of the court and its master, could not but be aware of the crowd. In the capital, feasts and entertainments were provided for public consumption and drew their importance from this immersion in the urban sphere. The court was no longer, as in the seventeenth century, a décor meaningless without the king’s presence, but a collection of varied, unlocalized scenes exhibited to an audience whose multiplicity determined the nature of the play itself. Thus, any chronicler observing the court was forced to see those before whom it preened and pranked. In a word, the news was made by the court in its favourite resorts – the Comédie Française, the Opéra, Saint-Sulpice or the church of Saint-Roch – which were thronged with an audience invited not to participate in, but to assent to, the brilliant demonstrations organized before their eyes. The observer could not get away from the audience.

The common people may have been unavoidable, but they were not allowed into every cranny of a chronicler’s meticulous account of the times. Buvat, Marais and Barbier all bring them on in two ways, and two only: in anecdotes concerning a single individual who has had some extraordinary experience (unpleasant scandal, weird accident, wonderful dream, astonishing cure); or collectively – not to say generically – when a visible and solidly constituted crowd assembles to complain, jeer or applaud.

The anecdotes are entertaining, and sometimes amazing. On 15 January 1716, Buvat noted that ‘on the night of the 21st, a girl was found on the rampart, tied to a tree stark naked and dead of cold.’ June 1719: ‘A marriage took place in the church of Saint-Eustace: the husband was aged 108, the bride, ninety-five.’ Apart from such unusual occurrences, the people appear as an undifferentiated mass, responding en bloc to all kinds of events which concern them, such as a rise in the price of bread, an abortive revolt or some incidental rejoicing...