As we glide in towards the holidays, I treated myself to [amazon_link id=”0674066049″ target=”_blank” ]Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris[/amazon_link] by Robert Darnton. Professor Darnton is the University Librarian at Harvard and has written a number of brilliant articles (like these in the New York Review of Books) about the modern technology of information, and its implications for books, libraries, and access to knowledge. I’m a fan.

This is a short book about the circulation of poems and songs attacking King Louis XV and his mistress, the notorious Madame de Pompadour, in 1749. A police investigation led to the arrest of 14 minor clergy and lawyers’ clerks – “In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry. It was known as L’Affaire des Quatorze. It was impossible to prove authorship of the poems, as people added to them or adapted them, and they were often anyway descended from traditional songs or poems. Their creation was collective, a kind of UGC.

The book has a website that recreates how some of the songs might have sounded. Although this was four decades before the French Revolution, the affair reveals some of the social and political forces that led the country to that upheaval. The book concludes with some reflections on whether public opinion could be said to have existed in 18th century France, with this exuberance of singing rude songs and declaiming poems criticising the King. Professor Darnton concludes that in some form it did, so extensive was the transmission of these popular expressions: “The information society existed long before the Internet.”

He notes that by the early 1780s, Condorcet clearly saw public engagement as part of the playing out of political ideas: “Men of letters developed conflicting views of public questions and consigned them to print; then, after weighing both sides of the debates, the public opted for the better argument. It could make mistakes of course, but ultimately truth would prevail, because truth really existed, in social questions as in mathematics….Public opinion therefore acted as the motor force of history.”

We might accept the last leg of this Enlightenment optimism today, but probably not the first part. After all, in 1789 public opinion welled up from the streets of Paris in anything but a calm, reasoned manner.

[amazon_image id=”0674066049″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Poetry and the Police[/amazon_image]