Robert Darnton on the ingenious methods used to spread ideas and information in pre-revolutionary Paris

We often say that we live in an age of information, as if this were something new. Yet every period of history is an age of information, each in its own way, and in the 18th century, Paris was saturated with information transmitted by a multimedia system peculiar to its time and place.

Consider the Tree of Cracow, a large chestnut tree in the northern part of the garden in the Palais-Royal at the heart of Paris. Every day, “nouvellistes de bouche” (oral newsmongers) gathered under it to exchange the latest news by word of mouth. Ambassadors reportedly sent agents to pick up information or implant it, while ordinary people stopped by to satisfy their curiosity.

“Craque” in slang meant false news, and the tree’s branches supposedly made a cracking sound whenever a nouvelliste got things blatantly wrong.

Some of the listeners scribbled notes about the latest reports and declaimed from them to groups that gathered in other meeting places – the nearby Café du Caveau and Café de Foy, certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens and the gardens of the Tuileries, wineshops, dinner tables, and salons.

Tucked inside sleeves and waistcoat pockets, the notes were confiscated by the police when they frisked prisoners in the Bastille. They can still be seen in the Bastille archives, fragments of the information that stirred up talk two and a half centuries ago. The conversations themselves can be followed, café by café, in reports by police spies, which were often written in dialogue form.

Other kinds of newsmongers transformed the notes into “nouvelles à la main” or manuscript newsletters, which circulated “sous le manteau” (under the cloak).

At least 31 nouvellistes produced gazettes of this kind during the last decades of the Ancien Régime. Although they were illegal, the police knew all about them, frequently vetted them, and even produced bulletins of their own, so insatiable was the demand for information in a society that lacked modern newspapers – that is, printed periodicals with reports about politics and public affairs.

France’s first daily, the Journal de Paris, did not appear until 1777. It was heavily censored and contained nothing that would upset anyone in the government or church, while the official Gazette de France, produced for many years by the ministry for foreign affairs, carried little more than notices issued by the powers in Versailles.

For local information, Parisians consulted a newssheet, Annonces, affiches et avis divers, which carried advertisements and short articles on all sorts of nonpolitical subjects.

For international news, they read French-language newspapers printed in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and Avignon, which then was a papal enclave in the Comtat Venaissin.

The foreign journals circulated widely, especially during the 40 years after 1745, when their number increased from 15 to 82. Although effectively censored (the police could cut off their distribution through the mail), they contained a great deal of news from around the world, including the revolutionary colonies of America; and their Parisian correspondents often wrote extensive dispatches.

The information system of the Ancien Régime blended news from oral, manuscript, and printed sources. How this happened is illustrated best by the salon of Marie-Anne Doublet, a group known as “la paroisse” (the parish) that met every Saturday in Mme Doublet’s apartment in the Marais district.

To prepare for the meeting, one of her valets went around the servants’ quarters of the neighborhood gathering gossip. He entered the information in two registers kept for the salon, one for news that seemed reliable, the other for dubious rumors.

As the “parishioners” arrived, they consulted the registers, added reports of their own, and then gathered around a table for discussion and supper.

Servants later made digests of the news that the group deemed credible. Copies circulated for sale, and copies of the copies spread in widening circles throughout France and much of Europe. A version first appeared in print in 1777 and was extended in edition after edition to 36 volumes by 1789 under the title Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France.

The authorities knew all about the activities of the parish and at one point threatened to shut Mme Doublet up in a convent. Yet her primitive newsroom survived, and it left its mark on the news it produced – worldly, gossipy, spiced with witticisms about actresses and men about town, full of reviews of plays, books, and art exhibits, sympathetic to the Voltairean strain of the Enlightenment, and in political matters slanted in favour of the Parlement of Paris.

While news and information of all kinds derived from word of mouth, Parisians inhabited a world where media overlapped and intersected. No boundaries separated communication by sounds and sights, whether in talk, writing, printing, or images. Rumour, for example, shaded off from casual gossip to seditious bruits publics (public noises). The extent of the variations can be gauged from the terminology of the time: commérage, potin, ragot, on dit, rumeur, murmure, tapage, bruit public.

Witticisms took many forms such as the bon mot, épigramme, and pont neuf; and after being improvised in a verbal exchange, they often appeared in print. The manner and the tone of the exchanges inflected their meaning and effectiveness. Ridicule was a powerful weapon, as indicated by common remarks about the importance of getting laughter on one’s side (“mettre les rieurs de son côté”).

So was sentiment. In fact, the growth of sensiblerie during the second half of the century was accompanied by a shift in rhetoric. Just as Rousseau challenged the dominance of Voltaire, laughter gave way to tears.

The change in tone showed up especially in court cases that attracted so much attention that they became “affairs”, as in the Calas Affair, the Diamond Necklace Affair, and the Kornmann Affair, which stirred passions and spread them through a broad public.

An element of theatricality pervaded the arguments of lawyers and of talk in general, whenever it attracted a crowd. Individuals declaimed pamphlets at street corners and read them aloud in cafés. On occasion, the readings turned into performances with elaborate scenarios: After being read to an audience, a pro-government tract was sometimes put on trial, accused of a crime, condemned, and burned.

Messages were conveyed by all sorts of gestures and even by clothing. Well-dressed men sometimes sported buttons on their waistcoats with images about current events, and women wore bonnets that evoked the themes of pamphlets. During the American Revolution, society ladies had elaborate coiffures “à la Philadelphie” and “à l’Indépendance”.

Words also traveled by means of music. Nearly all Parisians carried in their heads a common repertory of tunes, at least a dozen, I have calculated. Nearly everyone could hum favorites such as “Les Pendus” (“The Hanged”) and “Réveillez-vous belle endormie” (“Wake Up Beautiful Sleeper”).

Every week and nearly every day, a wit, sometimes someone from the lower classes, composed a new verse to an old tune, making fun of a public figure or commenting on a current event. Collectors copied the latest songs into scrapbooks known as chansonniers. The 18th-century Chansonnier Clairambault in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France runs to 58 volumes. A chansonnier in the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris contains 641 songs and poems in 13 thick volumes merely for the period 1745–1752.

Singers with fiddles or hurdy-gurdies begged for pennies in the streets, and artisans often sung at work – as Charles-Simon Favart did while kneading dough in his father’s pastry shop before he was discovered and became the best-known author of comic operas.

This is an extract from The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 by Robert Darnton (Penguin, £35). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Robert Darnton will be our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 8 February at 6pm. Free to subscribers.

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