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What Happens When Information Outruns A King

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 160

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What if a city without modern newspapers learned to think like a public anyway? We sit down with historian Robert Darnton to chart how Paris, from 1748 to 1789, became an information society powered by parades, fireworks, songs, rumor, and street theater. Instead of headlines, “publication” meant a royal herald reading peace aloud while bands played—and a celebration that ended in a deadly crush. Those moments didn’t just inform people; they taught them how power felt.

Darnton guides us through the mechanisms that carried ideas across a semi-literate city. Literacy gaps were bridged by chapbooks, pamphlets read aloud, graffiti, and unforgettable tunes that turned scandal into memory. We follow the “kingnapping” of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the 1750 child seizures that sparked riots and bloodbath rumors, and the widening gulf as Versailles wrapped itself in secrecy. When Necker printed the royal budget, finance left the king’s secret and entered the street, unleashing a public debate about debt, taxes, and responsibility.

The church’s authority faltered as Jansenist–Jesuit battles collided with deathbed fears, while a witty placard at a sealed graveyard mocked a monarchy that would “forbid miracles.” Royal intimacy became political fuel: Madame de Pompadour’s lavish gifts and influence, and Madame du Barry’s past, fed poissonnades and police dragnets that still couldn’t catch every tune. In the Palais-Royal, crowds staged mock trials for government texts and burned them like verdicts, rehearsing a civic role they were ready to claim.

By the late 1780s, few predicted the upheaval to come, but many believed change was possible. The nation, not ministers, should decide taxation; the king should ratify, not conceal. Transatlantic currents—from mythic American virtue to Quaker simplicity—added oxygen. Darnton ties these currents together to show how information flows can erode legitimacy and invite a different future.

Listen for a vivid, ground-level view of how culture becomes politics, how performance becomes persuasion, and why the French Revolution reshaped everyday life. If this story reorders how you think about media and power, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review to tell us which vignette struck you most.

Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele Mcaloon, your host. I love podcasting. I love books. But the reason why I like doing a nonfiction book podcast is because some of the incredible people that I get to converse with, that I get to share these conversations with you. And today is a prime example of that. This is Professor Robert Darnton. He is a scholars scholar. He has been for decades a professor of 18th century history, of the French Revolution, of the French literary movement. He is actually a national treasure. And we are so lucky to be able to have a man like this in our colleges and universities who's taught for so many decades and to be a guest on this show. So hopefully you will appreciate this interview and maybe understand a little bit more about revolution, because we need to understand that right now and not throw those words around so lightly. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend. The best way this show gets out is through word of mouth. And if you want to know more about me, you can find out on bookclues.com. Thanks, guys. God bless. Okay, folks, today we have a very eminent historian, Professor Robert Darton. Professor Darnton is the author of many award-winning works in French cultural history and has taught for years at Princeton and Harvard. He is a chevlier in the Légion d'honneur and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He you have, Professor Darton, you've written a lot. And you've, I mean, you really are an expert in French cultural history, especially revolutionary cultural history, is correct?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, yes, I've written quite a few books. It's true. I've spent my whole life studying not just French history, but the history of books, the history of communication, the study of how ideas spread in society, how public opinion is formed. And all of that has bearing, I think, on the coming of the French Revolution.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. And you know, that's a history that has not stopped. That is a history that we continue to live in. And one of the reasons why I was attracted to your book and why I wanted to speak to you is we kind of think we live in a media bubble now, right? That this is new, this is different, that it is noisier than it's ever been. But actually, I think you're writing, and especially the book that we're going to talk about today, The Revolutionary Temper, Paris 1748 through 1789, you really show how information actually helped formulate the revolution in the imagination of the Parisian people.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Yes, that's exactly what I attempt to do. You know, people often say today, as if it were something startling and new, we live in an information age. But of course, every age is an age of information, each in its own way, according to the media available at that time. If you follow that line of reasoning as far as it will go, you could come up with some surprising conclusions, including a new interpretation of how the French Revolution happened. Now, there's a vast literature, of course, on the coming of the French Revolution. Wonderful, it's a wonderful rich subject, but I think this aspect has not been adequately discussed at all. Namely, how did Paris in particular function as an information society? What were the media at that time? What were their effects? How did they communicate views of the world and news? So that my attempt is to reconstruct the way events were not just reported, but perceived during the 40 years before the revolution.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, why did you decide on 40 years? Why I know that was kind of the end of the War of the Austrian succession, but why did you choose to look at those four decades leading up to the revolution?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Aaron Ross Powell Well, I didn't want to write, you know, yet another general history of France or of Paris. So I needed a starting point, and I thought the mid-century years were crucial, would be a good time to start. I could have gone back farther, of course. I could have gone back 100 years or 200 years. But I wanted to I needed enough time span to show how there was a cumulative process of building up a public conscious consciousness about things, but I didn't want to bog the reader's attention down into a detailed account of everything that happened during the 18th century. So the end of the War of the Austrian Succession is really a good starting point, I think. And I, in fact, begin by asking, what did ordinary people know about a war? This war between 1740 and 1748. How do they get information about it and about its resolution in the treaty, the Treaty of Aix-la Chapelle? In other words, what did war and peace mean to ordinary people? Well, if you ask that question, it becomes instantly very interesting because I did a lot of research to find out how the information was transmitted. Now there were no newspapers in France at this time, not newspapers in the modern sense of the word, with news about public events. The first daily newspaper in France was the Journal de Paris, and it didn't begin until 1777, and it was very heavily censored. So how did people know about this war? Well, working people, they had to pay higher taxes, especially on consumer objects. Things were tough, and there were there was gossip about the occasional battle, but people's geography was pretty vague. They didn't know exactly where the armies were. They may have heard about the Marichal de Sachs, who was a famous general, but only vaguely. And meanwhile there were there were conflicts over the whole globe because there was a colonial dimension to it all, and people didn't really have a clear idea of where all of these naval battles took place. So when the the peace was declared, people knew about it because it was published. But what does it mean to publish something in a city that has got a lot of illiteracy? The publication was actually a parade, an enormous parade with about 800 people, some of them dressed all of them dressed in great costumes, on horses, on foot, had several traveling bands that played music. It went through Paris for a whole day, stopping at, I forget the exact number, about twenty neighborhood centers. The parade would stop, the band would play, trumpets blared, and a Royal Herald would read out a proclamation that the peace existed and there was to be no more conflict between the English and the French, and then it passed on. So what I'm saying is the concept of publication as a parade shows you how information reached ordinary people. And then afterwards, there was a celebration in the traditional way, namely dancing in fifteen different neighborhoods where bands were orchestras were set out, people danced, there was a a lot of whooping and hollering, free sausages, free wine, free bread, and then a fireworks display. Well, people adored fireworks. Fireworks were rather different in the eighteenth century, but you know, this is a high moment of celebration. And in fact, what happened during the fireworks where everyone gathered in the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, they were crammed together, and after the fireworks, some people tripped, and others fell over the tripped people. And there was a kind of stampede, and in fact, at least a dozen people were killed. So the peace is actually experienced as a catastrophe. And the next day there are reports that among the fishmongers in Paris, when they got into a quarrel and wanted to insult one another, they would say, tu es bet comme la paix, you are as stupid as the peace. So what I'm saying is, you know, I could go into it m in more detail, notably about the war itself. How did people know about it? But my point is information does reach ordinary people, not simply the elite. And when it does, it takes a particular twist, a turn, in this case, through the publication and the fireworks, which came off as a disaster. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Michele McAloon:

You show through a series of vignettes of how the people lost trust in the government, whether it was over taxation, whether it was over being able to protect them. And this is one of those incidents where they had heard about this piece, but there was conflicting evidence with this piece, right? Let me ask you a basic question here. What was the literacy rate? Do they have any idea of like uh how many people could read in Paris at this time?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, as you could imagine, there's an enormous debate among historians about rates of literacy. It matters. I mean, this is, after all, the age of Enlightenment when the ideas of the great philosophers were supposedly setting a new tone to public life. Unfortunately, the sources are very imperfect, and a lot of them were destroyed with the bombardment of Paris in 1871. But we do have some parish registers, and basically you're trying to figure out how many people could sign their names. Then we've done we have studies of teaching, and it turns out that you learn to read before you learn to write. So if you could sign your name, that's an indication that you probably could read. But how well could you read? You know, could ordinary people who would count as literate in that they could sign their names, could they read their way through a pamphlet or a book? Not many, I think. Still, most historians would agree that literacy rates are much higher for men than for women. They're higher in the north-northeast of France from the way they are in the south-southwest. Paris, although we don't have statistics for Paris, was probably quite illiterate. So it's fair to say that most, maybe 75% or more, of adult males could read or at least read, decipher writing and printing in an adequate way, but probably not adequate for reading philosophic treatises. So we face a problem. How did they know about philosop if if they knew at all about philosophic treatises? And that's that's fascinating. You know, how do you get at the actual diffusion of ideas in a semi-literate society?

Michele McAloon:

Aaron Ross Powell That's kind of a question I had, because again, talking about the supposed peace after the Treaty of Lexa-Chapelle, you had contradictory reports, and this was being talked about in the cafes. So you would assume that would be upper middle class, maybe to the even the elites at that point. And the workers, the porters, the fishmongers, everybody else. What is bridging that gap between the two? Because I would think that would be very heavily demarcated between those who are actually talking about ideas and those who are actually working and then hearing the rumors about the ideas.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, I think you're right in indicating that the elite, the people who met in cafes and especially in salons, discussed ideas. They did a lot besides actually, mainly they played cards. But there were indeed philosophic discussions, and they read books, and a huge cultural distance separates them from ordinary workers. Now we've there's been some wonderful study of what people owned, what bits of property appear in their wills after their death, because there's an inventory of all of their property. And by the late 18th century, books begin to appear, but different kinds of books, what we call chap books, little pamphlets about saints' lives, or the adventures of King Arthur at the round table. I mean, that's quite far from the philosophy of Didot and Montesquieu and Rousseau. So it's there is this cultural gap. And yet ideas don't simply filter down, sometimes they move from the bottom upward. Take the idea of despotism. Now, despotism is a key category in the way people think about governments, and it's really invented or reinvented, at least, by Montesquieu, so one of the great four of the philosophers, the philosophers, who said all governments are either monarchies or republics or despotisms. That's very different from Aristotle's division. Dotism appears as a new kind of government. Now, the French, and this is a central argument of my book, felt they were being ground down by a dys despotic system. Not the king, but the ministers. It's ministerial despotism. How do they get to that idea? Well, they did through reports of events and their own gossip about events. So for example, early in the book I talk about the kidnapping of a prince, the Bonnie Prince Charlie, we call him in English. In the French called him Prince Edouard. But the point is he was a kind of hero to pr ordinary Parisians. He would walk through the streets, he had a lot of swaggering, and he led the attempt to invade the enemy, England, and failed, came back. But by 1748, he's a real popular hero. However, the treaty required the French to expel him because he was a pretend to the English throne, and that's what the English demanded in the treaty. How do they get rid of him? Well, first, of course, Louis XV tried to persuade him to leave. And, you know, to make things easy for him, if only he would comply with the terms of the treaty, but no. Instead he paraded around Paris. Parisians are cheering him. He particularly showed up at the opera. So you get a kind of parading around of this popular hero who's a champion of the anti-English forces. And what does a king finally do? He, I call it kingnapping, because he's a pretend to the throne. He's kingnapped. That is, he's about to go in the opera. He's suddenly mugged by a group of soldiers. They lift him into the air, take away the pistols that were in his pocket, drag him or carry him off, and the streets are lined with soldiers all the way to the prison of Vincennes. So he is then rushed out of central Paris, taken to a dungeon in Vincennes, and finally driven, taken out of the kingdom. But the Parisians witness this. They see it happening. And so their hero is a victim of despotism. And people are talking about that, ordinary people in the streets. We know this because, fortunately for the historian, there are lots and lots of sources. There are private diaries, there's correspondence, there are police reports. The police had, according to some estimates, 3,000 spies that scatter around the city and send in reports about what people are talking about in marketplaces and in cafes and at crossroads, etc. So we I think I can prove that there was a powerful reaction to the kingnapping of Bonnie Prince Charlie that took the form of shock at despotism. And that's way back in 1748-49. By the time you get to 1788 and 89, the theme of despotism has grown and grown through a whole series of rather spectacular events. And that's my, in a way, central argument that a consciousness of despotism, the abuse of power, the arbitrary power of the government, this has provoked a profound reaction among Parisians who feel their government is no longer legitimate. It's the basic sense of legitimacy has eroded.

Michele McAloon:

You've got the figure of the king. You've got Louis XV, who, what he reigns for 59 years or something. I mean, he reigns for a long, long time, dies of smallpox, Louis the 16th comes in. But where the position of the king, and not even the king, but Versailles and the ministers, this royal aura, the Legrande. Le Grande. And you show kind of a 40-year trajectory downward of the trust in absolute monarchy. It comes associated with despotism, and despotism becomes a bad thing in the mind of the people.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Yes. Well, it's a long, complex story, but it's fascinating and I think fun for the reader because these episodes are not just abstract debates about the nature of government, that does take place, of course, but they are actual events that have that resonate and are quite spectacular. I mean, one example is 1750, is uh it concerns the common people of Paris, where there were urchins, street kids, disturbing pedestrians. These urchins often were abandoned children who walked into Paris from the countryside, were begging, robbing, uh, creating a fuss, and the police were ordered to clear the streets of vagrant kids. Well, they did that, but while doing it, they picked up some children of artisans and and bourgeois as well. These kids were taken to a prison, but the rumor spread that they were actually going to be sent to Mississippi.

Michele McAloon:

Right, right.

Professor Robert Darnton:

You know, the French the word had spread that Mississippi was this mountainous country that had silk a silk industry developed. I mean, it's completely crazy, but I'm from Alabama.

Michele McAloon:

We have a lot to say about Mississippi, so it's interesting.

Professor Robert Darnton:

You see, you've got this mythological country in the eyes of ordinary people, to which the kidnapped children are going to be sent as slaves to work in the silk industry. Sometimes when they were actually picked up by the police, thrown into wagons, carriages to be carried off to prison, the children would shout. People would come pouring out and would stop the wagon, beat up the police man who had kidnapped them, and sometimes violence would spread. You would have an actual riot. In fact, the word for riot in 18th century French, there are lots of words, but the one I find is especially interesting is emotion populaire, popular emotion. There's an emotional, effective side to all of this. In any case, later on in 1750, a mob takes one of these kidnappers, a police agent, beats him to death, drags his body to the front door of the head of the police force, the lieutenant general of police runs out the back door, and the mob just takes over Paris for a while. So you've got this popular emotion which is spreading on a very large scale and shows how vulnerable the city actually is to mass violence. And then the interesting thing is a rumor spreads that the reason for the kidnapping is not just Mississippi, but to bleed the children in order to make a blood bath in which a prince of the blood will uh bathe himself in order to cure himself from an exotic disease, leprosy. And that goes back to ancient views about Herod and the massacre of the innocents and that sort of thing. This is the kind of rumor that accompanies an outbreak of violence. It's reported to Louis XV, and he's horrified. He says if the Parisians treat me as a Herod, I'm not going to go to Paris anymore. And he actually has a road built around Paris so that when he wants to go hunting at Compiègne from Paris, from Versailles, he doesn't have to set foot in the city. And he rarely went to Paris after that, actually. So there's a kind of divorce between the king and the people that you can follow by studying rumors and events of this kind.

Michele McAloon:

Aaron Powell And Versailles really lit their imagination because of they had the secret devoir, right? Whatever the king did was secret. And it was, and anytime you've got secret in the human imagination, the human imagination will fill in the space. You know, from that time to this time today. Believe me, I work with Vatican. Trevor Burrus, Jr. That's that's quite true.

Professor Robert Darnton:

That's quite true. However, people assumed that the king's secret, which is politics, if you like, was correct. I mean, that was reality. That's the way public affairs were always done. So it's not as if anyone thought that the people themselves should participate in public affairs, at least not at first. I try to show how that changes by the time you reach 1789. But one of the interesting episodes in the changing of that attitude is the publication in 1781 of something called Le Comte Rendu, or it's really a kind of pamphlet version of the budget of the king. Now, this nothing was more secret than the expenditure of the king's treasures. No minister was responsible to any institution or to the general public about the way the money was spent. All of this was the king's affair. But this minister, Necker, is his name, actually was courting public opinion and trying to mobilize support in the general public so that he would not be thrown out of Versailles. He was a Protestant. He was Swiss. The courtiers all hated him as a kind of alien, but he was a very capable banker and needed to run the royal finances. So he published this budget with a preface which indicated that the people, the common people, should be informed about what had been the king's secret. And suddenly finance is opened up as an issue, and people begin debating about exactly how big the debt is and how it could be solved, through what responsibility the king had for taxing the people or lifting taxes. And you've got a whole series of pamphlets from 1781 to 1789 about the royal finances. So that's another example I cite as to the way this notion of the king's secret is undercut. And a new notion appears, which is the nation itself should be responsible for determining public business.

Michele McAloon:

They come on pun an idea of sovereignty, sovereignty of the nation versus sovereignty in a person. One thing I thought was really interesting because at the in your conclusion, you talk about, you know, one of the things that was part of this revolutionary temper was the age of reason. But you use you show some examples where actually the Catholic Church lost a lot of credibility. And it was between the Jansenists and then the Jesuits. Will you talk a little bit about that? Because that's interesting. That it in the end, the republic, the secular republic, actually grows out of some of these issues.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Yes, I mean, I assume that most modern readers won't know much about Jansenism. I'm probably not. Probably not much about Jesuitism either. So that's one of the challenges I face. I mean, how can I make understandable and interesting to modern readers seemingly esoteric things like Jansenism, which actually is a strain within the Catholic Church, as you know, because you're a canon lawyer, but most people don't know. It's the Augustinian strain, which stresses sinfulness and austerity. The Jesuits, on the other hand, had a completely different concept of sin and were very linked with the court and the king through the king's confessor. Well, a conflict developed between the Jansenists on the one hand and the Jesuits on the other. It wasn't really a turf battle, it was a battle for the loyalty and adherence of the elite and then of the common people. Now, what made this dramatic for the ordinary Parisians was an order made by the Archbishop of Paris, who favored the Jesuits against the Jansenists, that if someone is dying on that person's deathbed, that person must accept a particular papal bull condemning Jansenism. That means, now, deathbed scenes really mattered to people. There was a belief that if you could manage to make a good death to accept your sins and confess them, that you would be assured of going to heaven. There were even clubs that practiced the a good death. And you know there were there were brotherhoods of penitence to practice this so that you could at the crucial moment get into heaven. People believed deeply that this was in a way the most important moment of your life. And for the king, the archbishop first to intervene and s and deprive people of the sacraments at this last crucial moment seemed a tremendous abuse of power that everyone could understand. Well, ultimately the king backed the Jesuits, so to speak, against the Jansenists. There were a whole series of episodes. There were gigantic processions to memorial services for the people who had died and been deprived of the last sacraments, and this inflamed public opinion terribly. So and then there was a popular version of Jansenism, quite different from the theological version where Pascal and other great thinkers were involved. The popular version had to do with a a priest in a fairly poor neighborhood of Paris called the Diacre Paris. He was known for being very, very strict self-flagellation, wearing a hair shirt and being good to the poor. He died, and when people saw his tomb in the cemetery of the Church of Samidar in this poor section of Paris, they found that when they touched the tomb, they were cured of disease. And they believed that, as in the Middle Ages, as you know, he had a kind of sacred power. He was a saint. And so they gathered around his tomb, and people would touch the tomb and then fall into convulsions by the the power of God. And these convulsions spread, and soon you got among working people, poor people, a whole cult of convulsionaries, as they were called. And then sure enough, the government called in the troops, they shut off the cemetery, they wouldn't let people get near the tomb, and on it someone put a placard up on the fence around the tomb, which in French is very witty, it says Du Parle defense adieu de fer miracle en ce lieu. God is forbidden by order of the king to make any miracles in this place. Well, it's it's a wonderful witty thing, but it's what it expresses is again this hatred of despotism, this sense that the king himself is violating the order of God by preventing people from exercising their spirituality. So it's things like this that really ignite a passion, a passion of resentment, hatred, of arbitrary power. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Michele McAloon:

Well, let's go from the church, the sublime to the blatant. You talk about really the the corrupt morals of the aristocrats also brought it down. Let's talk about the mistresses of the king and how they were, they were actually celebrities in their own right, but kind of but kind of anti-heroes, right?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Yes, they were. That's right. You know, the French assumed that the kings had mistresses. I mean, that went way back. There's nothing in itself as shocking. Royal marriages were diplomatic affairs, and of course the king had mistresses. But he should have a certain kind of mistress in the eyes of the general public. They should be ladies. Well, Madame de Pompadour was the daughter of a bourgeois, and she had a very unfortunate maiden name, Poisson. Fish. So when she was made mistress, the entitled mistress, maîtresse en titre, and actually introduced to the court, all kinds of poems circulated about this fish woman. And they're very funny. Paris is flooded with these things. So there were so many that they acquired a special name as a genre. They were Poissonnade, fish rhymes, if you if you like. And so there is this sense that the monarchy is being dragged down and besmirched by a commonality. It's losing its luster as being high and mighty and distinguished. And then, of course, Madame de Popadour interferes in the affairs of state and is given fabulous presents, including what is today the Élysée Palace, where the President of France lives, and chateaus, Chateau de Bellevue, diamonds, and so on. So there's a lot of scandal about we're being taxed to death, and these extravagant presents are being uh thrown at this unworthy person. And then she begins to name ministers because she interferes in politics. Louis XV himself is rather bored by it, and she names two of the most disliked ministers of the whole century, and even that the uh commanding general during the next war, the war the Seven Years' War, the Pince de Soubise, who, when he leads out a gigantic French army, is roundly defeated by Frederick the Great, who has less than half the number of troops. And so she's blamed for the humiliation of the French losses as well. All of this builds up into a tremendous hatred, really, of Madame de Pompadour. It's put into songs. And a lot of in the book I stress the importance of street songs. Because, you know, songs are great mnemonic devices. Every all of us today carry around in our heads tunes that everyone else knows. Right. And I've done a long study, uh, wrote a whole book about street songs and their power, because they have been recorded in song books called Chansonniers. And these song books are astonishing documents. They're enormous, you know, 39 or 40 volumes in the Chansonier Maurepas, uh, more in the Chansonier Cré Rambeau. So I've read hundreds and hundreds of these words that are recorded at the time and then copied in into sort of scrapbooks, but they're set to tunes. So they always say to the tune of sur l'air d'eux. And then I, you know, I did statistics to figure out which were the tunes that everyone knew. What was the common repository of music? And fortunately, in the musicology department of the National Library in Paris, you can go to keys that give you the actual musical annotation of the songs. So you look up uh La Baïquille du Père Barnabas. No one's ever heard of that today, but I look it up by the title, I get the musical annotation. And a friend of mine, Hélène Delavaux, is a cabaret singer in Paris. And she recorded these songs. Okay. And they're available on my website so that the reader can actually hear songs pretty much as they were sung to the actual music in the streets of Paris. And these songs are they vary, you know, they're about everything, but many of them are highly critical of the government. So songs, I argue, are a kind of oral newspaper that fills the air of Paris. There's street singers at every corner, people sing at work, and they love inventing new words to old tunes which communicate understanding of current events. In fact, one of my chapters I talk about the collapse of the French government, that is the leading minister who's fired by the king in 1749. All of the contemporaries agree the government collapsed because of songs. And one particular song, I can't sing it to you, but I if you like, I can give you the words. But isn't that interesting? That it's sh it's common belief that the government fell because of a song. Now, the song, well, it's very short. By your charming and frank manner, Iris, you enchant our hearts, you sow on our path flowers, but they are white flowers. Now, to the modern reader, that doesn't mean anything at all. Sounds rather gallant, but in fact, it was a kind of it white flowers meant menstrual, venereal disease that spread through menstrual fluid. So the song says the king's mistress has given him VD. And that's pretty powerful stuff. So that's that's an example, and I I won't go into all the details, but the point is the minister was compromised as the author of this song, and therefore his government fell, and he was exiled to the provinces.

Michele McAloon:

That's right, because he gave the white flowers at the dinner party. She gave him the white flowers and he was making a joke about the white flowers, right? Exactly. That's right. Yeah, that's it. Well, how did the information about the intimate information about Madame Pompadour and then I mean he then he goes for a real floozy, Madame Duberry, right? And then he goes after sisters. I mean, this guy was he was a little randy, uh Louis XV. He was he was having his fun. But how does that filter down to the people? How does that go from noble, you know, to Prince of the Blood, to down to the bourgeoisie, down to the fishmonger? How did that flow in French in that time period?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, part of it by songs. And when I was working in the archives, the papers of the Bastille in the Bibliothèque de la Sidale in Paris, by chance I came upon a dossier called The Affair of the Fourteen. I'd never heard of it. I opened it, began reading it. It begins with an order that comes from Versailles. Find the author of the song that begins with, and then they gave the first line of the song, Monstre Don La Noire Fury, Monster Whose Black Fury. That's all the police had, the only clue, but they had to trace it down. Well, it's a long story, but it's fascinating because they finally did find someone who had recited this and he was arrested, interrogated. He says he got it, A got it from B, B's arrested, B got it from C, C is arrested, and he says, Well, and I also got these three other songs from X, Y, and Z. And soon the police have filled the busted with 14 people who are singing and reciting poems about the king and his mistress and the abuse of power. These are ordinary people. I mean, there a lot of them are students and clerks. I even have mapped it. I have diagrams showing, you know, who got the information from whom, and it shows you how information about royal mistresses is being spread very concretely among ordinary people. The police reports also include reports from spies about conversations in marketplaces and elsewhere. And you can see, you can eat almost hear people talking about the king and his mistresses. Of course, Madame Dubary did not interfere in politics the way Madame de Pompadour did, but she had been a prostitute. So now we're going the royal mistress formally presented at the court is not just a bourgeoise, but someone who had been a whore. And that is deeply, deeply shocking to people. And I've done uh in other studies, I've tried to prove, show statistically what were the forbidden best sellers in France at this time. And Madame Dubary was her there was a book about her, The Correspondence de Madame la Comtesse Dubaris, another private life of Louis XV. And I think I've proven that these were best sellers. Now, again, we're talking about books and readers, but the got the gossip reached everyone, and the police agents reported the gossip, so you can actually see the process. I don't think it's just a filtering down process. I think things filter up as well and turn in circles, and they move in and out of different medias from writing, from gossip to writing to printing, and then back to. Gossip into songs, graffiti and even kind of theatricality, which I find everywhere. For example, there there's a uh a couple of times I found this sort of scene. There were certain cafes in the garden of the Palais Royal where anyone could walk in the middle of Paris and in in one of in front of one of these, the Cafe Dufois, a man is reading aloud a pamphlet uh written by the government in favor of government policy. And the a huge public, hundreds of people are listening to him belt out this pamphlet. They all hate the government, they hate the policy, it's a it has to do with taxation. And so they interrupt with hisses and that kind of thing. When he's finished, they name an attorney, a judge, a confessor, and a public executioner. They put the pamphlet on a thousand and the the waiter at the cafe is the public executioner and he burns it in front of everyone. So you've got a theatrical performance accompanied by a public reading of a printed work. And this view of things, this information is spreading through m many media. The theatricalities, a kind of street theater, I find that everywhere in Paris. It's it's really fascinating. And I think it's very important because people are acting out their attitudes, their hatred of the government.

Michele McAloon:

You know, this is so fascinating because we really do. We I think in our arrogance and our myopia of who we are today in our pr in the myopia of the present, we really we don't see this as we only see this in our times. I mean, this is like the modern day X back then. I mean, this was you know, this was I mean, forget the internet. These people were getting their news and they were doing their thing. So by 1789, I mean, your in your conclusion you know, by the time the Estates General they really the the French have come to really an understanding of they don't know what they want, but they do they know what they want at this time? They know what they don't want, but do they really know what they want at this period?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, uh the the answer is complicated. Essentially, no one foresaw the French Revolution at all. There had been major crises, uh I discussed them in the case of the book that were uh involved violence and moments of that look like upheavals that could uh overthrow the government, but nothing like the French Revolution. In the course of all of these conflicts, there develops a widespread notion that the nation itself should determine uh things like taxation. This is not an attack on the king. The the idea is the ministers have been wicked and dissipating tax money and so on. So the king should sanction a new system in which the nation is empowered to tax itself with a royal agreement. So that I mean that's not a very sophisticated idea, but it is an idea, and it's an idea that comes out in the pamphlet liter literature and even in this kind of street theater that I'm talking about. But uh people did had no idea what they were getting into, but what they felt was the need to change the regime, to change the course of things, a profound conviction that the reality as they experience it is changeable and that you can change a world, the world as it is, for a world as it ought to be. There's a s a sentiment of, so to speak, possibilism that you really can intervene in the course of events and determine their outcome. So there's a a kind of sense of empowerment attached to the people themselves and a willingness to resort to violence in order to make this kind of change.

Michele McAloon:

Professor Darton, you do a really good job of at the end of the book explaining how this truly the French Revolution was truly a revolutionary everything changed. It was truly a throwing off of the old, whether it was intentional or accidental. We talk about the American Revolution. And I don't know if that's the right term for what we did as Americans because we really we revolted against a government, but it wasn't the French Revolution and the American Revolution really didn't have the same moral equivalency or outcomes or the consequence of the revolution. What came out of those two different revolutions was very different.

Professor Robert Darnton:

It was very different, and of course the societies were enormously different. We didn't have a medieval past, we had no feudalism, we had no aristocracy, we did have slave owning. The French who had uh uh transported a lot of slaves to the New World did not have slave owning in France itself. I mean, these are utterly different societies, I agree. I think that more recent historians have found there was a lot more violence in the American Revolution than had been thought of. And that the change really was was uh very deep and considerable. I mean, there of course was this period of confusion under the Articles of Confederacy before the Constitution, but these changes were were not just superficial. It wasn't window dressing about a written constitution and so on. It had to do with power and also of purging uh the purging of society of a lot of uh people who sided with uh George III. So it could be that the American Revolution was more revolutionary than the way it was taught when I was an undergraduate. Right. But that doesn't mean it i it approaches the French Revolution in the extent of its effects on the everyday life of ordinary people. But I think it was a a very important revolution, and in fact it had a great influence on the outbreak of the French Revolution. So I spent a lot of time in the book talking about French attitudes towards Americans. They they they conjured up a kind of mythological America that was full of virtuous farmers uh on the frontier, full of Quakers and whalers and and other, you know, that they were tough, virtuous, uh civic minded uh people with no established church and and no aristocracy, that they were in fact very democratic. And they there was even the creation of a French society of the friends of the blacks, as its title was, to fight the slave trade and slavery. They knew that slavery was, so to speak, the uh original sin in this new republic, and they hoped that the brave American frontier farmers and Quakers and so on would abolish slavery. You know, there's a lot going on in all of this. It's it's fascinating, and the currents that went across the Atlantic Ocean between America and France were laden with values and ideas and influence.

Michele McAloon:

And kind of vice versa, too, because we had our Benjamin Franklin, we had uh Thomas Jefferson. As we come upon the the 250th celebration of the signing of the declaration, one thing that I realized more and more, and I think my listeners probably understand this from, is that we have to understand our European history to understand our American history. You absolutely have to. The French Revolution didn't come out of a void, and the American Revolution didn't come out of a void. It was the the decades and the centuries preceding it that you really have to understand the context. And your book is actually it's really an enjoyable read because you have so many vignettes in there, and there's so many things that uh reading through the book, I went, oh, I didn't know that person did that, or that person did that, or I was and I was also looking because I lived in Paris for four years, looking on the map where different places were. It really is. It's a it's a great book and really kind of makes you really want to read more about the French Revolution. Do you have any other projects on the on the forefront?

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, actually, I just published another book on the heels of this this the one we're discussing. The n the new book is called The Writer's Lot.

Michele McAloon:

It's like another book.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Revolution and culture in 18th century France. And it's about what it was to be a writer. How did writers fit into French society? How do they make careers? How do they support themselves? And especially how did they experience the French Revolution? So it's kind of a a social history of literature that goes through the old regime and through the revolution, trying to show how this key figure, the intellectual, the writer, became so important in France and what the fate of writers was during the revolutionary upheaval.

Michele McAloon:

And this is a good book too, folks, because I also read this book. Anything that this man writes that Professor Darton writes, go read. It's good reading, and I have to say it, it's entertaining, and you learn a lot while you're reading it. So it really is very good. And we didn't even talk about Voltaire and we're so I might have to have you on again, Professor Darton. I really might have to maybe talk about your second book here, the writer's lot.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, thank you.

Michele McAloon:

Well, thank you very much, sir. Thank you for taking time and keep writing. You're good. Okay.

Professor Robert Darnton:

Well, thank you very much.

Speaker:

I enjoyed the mood.