Subversive Words: Public Opinion in 18th Century France [Anglais] [Broché]

Farge clearly recognizes the danger of writing about public opinion in 18th-century France: ``that of setting out to find, in an eighteenth century which we know ended in revolution, a current of hostile opinion becoming continually stronger until it naturally reaches the upsurge of 1789.'' Probably more important than the piggy-backed episodes of hostility Farge records is the changing attitude to the whole idea of a popular opinion in the first place. Over the course of the century, popular opinion went from something that was officially considered nonexistent to an increasingly powerful political force. Farge draws not only on well-known memoirs but on the ephemeral news-sheets and the gazetins, the reports of police observers and spies popularly called mouches (flies) culled from the old Bastille archives. Starting in 1713 with the anti-Jansenist papal bull Unigenitus and continuing on through Damiens's attack on Louis XV in 1758, public reaction returned time and again to the abuse of power in the first case and to the vulnerability of the king in the second. If Farge is leery of interpreting the events of the first half of the century as leading inexorably up to the second, her account still gives an intriguing look into a volatile but important factor in the formation of modern French history.

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A distinguished French historian examines popular public opinion in France during the years leading up to the Revolution.

“[Farge’s] task, perfectly achieved, is to show that in the course of the eighteenth century. . . the Parisian poor, heretofore almost voiceless, gradually but inexorably entered into the public debates of their times. . . . Her book is truly original. Restif de la Bretonne, the ‘Rousseau du ruisseau’, would have cherished these pages which introduce us to a side of popular Parisian life that we hardly knew.”—Times Literary Supplement

From the book:
“Paris was fond of stormy weather and emerging toads; the thirst for knowledge was supreme, and the first to read and reread the news were the first to render it with criticism. Authors and readers, great and small, all shared the impression that they were caught between truth and falsehood, and moreover that the ‘probable-improbable’ they relished so much was being manipulated by the complex strategies of the court, the police and the petty hordes of the evil-minded. We cannot understand the curiosity of the Parisian public without realizing that they did at least know one thing: the extent they were being made fools of.”

The eighteenth century was awash with rumor and talk. The words and opinions of ordinary people filled the streets of Paris. But were these simply the isolated grumblings and gossip of the crowd, or is it possible to speak of genuine "public opinion" among the common people? This is the subject of Subversive Words, the newest book by French historian Arlette Farge.

Farge begins with Jürgen Habermas's notion of a bourgeois public sphere. However, whereas Habermas was concerned mostly with the "cultured classes," Farge focuses on the uneducated common people. Drawing on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police reports, and news sheets from the time, she finds that by the second half of the eighteenth century ordinary Parisians had come to assert their right to hold and declare clear opinions on what was happening in their city--visible, real, everyday events such as executions, price rises, and revolts. Yet the government preferred to regard ordinary Parisians as unsophisticated, impulsive, or inept.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, however, the administration increasingly feared the mobilization of these people. Officially, it denied the existence of any distinct popular public opinion, but in practice it kept the streets of Paris under regular surveillance through a system of spies, inspectors, and observers. Amid this curious tension between denial and action, Farge argues, popular rumors arose and gained a life of their own. Wise and filled with vivid descriptions of everyday life, Subversive Words is cultural and intellectual history at its best.

Arlette Farge is Director of Research in Modern History at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her previous books include Fragile Lives (Harvard, 1993) and, with Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris (Harvard, 1991). She is co-editor, with Natalie Zemon Davis, of volume 3 of A History of Women in the West, (Harvard, 1993).