Chapter 1.

Six Ways That the Enlightenment Mattered [00:00:00]

Professor John Merriman: This is the beginning of the French part of the course.
Today I'm going to talk about the Enlightenment and the cultural concomitants o
f the French Revolution, and how people began to imagine an alternate sense of s
overeignty in the nation. You're in for a treat on Monday, because I have one of
the only bootlegged copies of the live speech and then the execution of Louis X
VI. I'm going to play that and also the death of Citizen Marat in the bathtub at
the hands of Charlotte Corday. That will be on Monday. Then I'll talk about ine
vitably, though I don't particularly like him Napoleon on Wednesday. The next th
ree times are about la belle France, but because the Revolution is terribly impo
rtant and, indeed, in lots of ways in many places it's well worth doing.
So, I'm going to do four things today. I'm going to first talk about your basic
outline of what difference the Enlightenment made, followed by with reference to
my good friend Bob Darnton's work, The Social History of Ideas and look at surp
rising ways that Enlightenment influence was felt. I'm not talking about the big
-time people like Rousseau and Voltaire, but the Grub Street hacks. Then I'm goi
ng to talk a little bit about the public sphere, taking two examples. One from t
he work of David Bell and one from the work of Sarah Maza, in which you can see
this emergence of this possibly different way of viewing sovereignty residing in
the nation and not in a king. Then look again at what difference, in a very str
ange way, the Enlightenment made in all of this.
First, the kind of classic stuff, just to review for you. If you had to summariz
e six ways that the Enlightenment mattered, you might list them like this. First
of all, without question, Enlightenment thought although the Enlightenment thin
kers disagreed on many things, and a few were atheists, but not many, most were
Deists and believed that God was everywhere the Enlightenment did weaken the hol
d of traditional religion, particularly the role of the Catholic Church as a pub
lic institution in France. Of course, if you read in high-school French or where
ver Candide, which is blatantly antireligious, of Voltaire, you'll see the most
extreme example of that.
Secondly, and related to this, Enlightenment thinkers taught a secular code of e
thics, one that was divorced from religious beliefs. That they were engaged with
humanity. They loved humanity. They thought people were basically good, and thi
s shouldn't be just a valley of tears awaiting eternal life, and went out to mak
e such claims.
Third is that they developed a critical spirit of analysis not to accept routine
tradition. Truths that were passed down from generation to generation, particul
arly those passed down by the religious establishment and not to accept routine
tradition, such, for example, routine hierarchies. This was part of their spirit
of analysis.
Fourth, they were curious about history and believed in progress. They were conv
inced that France had a special role to play in this. To be sure, the Enlightenm
ent was to be found in many places in Europe, and in what became the United Stat
es. Paris particularly played a central role in that.
Fifth, that they differentiated absolutism from despotism. In order to understan
d what happens in this remarkable series of events in 1789 and in subsequent yea
rs, as I said before, there weren't ten people in France who considered themselv
es republicans, that is who wanted a republic in 1789 and how it was that two or
three years later, in 1793 it became easy for the majority of the population to
imagine a life without any king at all.
Sixth and here's the role of the Grub Street hacks, of the third division of Enl
ightenment thinkers that I'll talk about in just a few minutes they heaped abuse
against what they considered to be unearned, unjustified privilege, and how can
one put this disrespected the monarchy and the nobles who hung around the king.
One can say in hindsight, because we know what happened next, that the Enlighte
nment helped prepare the way for the French Revolution and that the French Revol
ution transferred power, transferred authority to people who were very influence
d by the Enlightenment. The classic example which I will give, because I enjoy t
alking about him so much and he is important, is Maximilian Robespierre, who in
many ways was a child of the philosophes.
Chapter 2. The Spread of Enlightenment Thinking through the Public Sphere: Acade
mies, Masonic Lodges, and Salons [00:05:52]
As you know, the philosophes, which is such an important word in French, became
a word in English. The philosopheswere the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Robesp
ierre, born in Arras in the northern part of France and now what is the Pas de C
alais, was very much influenced by Enlightenment thought. As the twelve of the C
ommittee of Public Safety sat around that big green table making decisions that
affected the lives of lots of people in France, Enlightenment influence was cert
ainly there. The Enlightenment stretched across frontiers. I think there's a map
in the second edition of the book that you are kindly reading where you can fin
d copies of Diderot's famous encyclopedia. You could find it in South Africa. Yo
u could find it in Moscow. You could find it in Philadelphia. You could find it
in New York. You could find it in papal Rome. You could find it all over the pla
ce.
One thing that's interesting is that twenty or thirty years ago, when I was star
ting out, when people did what they used to call intellectual history, intellect
ual history was the big ideas. You call it the Via Regia of history, where you'v
e got one idea moving along and it hooks up with another idea, and then a third
idea comes as a result of that idea. It's rather like traditional art history wh
ere you try to discover where it is that Pizarro got his red ochre as a color, o
r where such and such a Baroque painter got the idea of painting cherubs in a ce
rtain way.
In the very early '70s, my colleague, retired a long time, a great historian Pet
er Gay, coined the phrase "the social history of ideas." Ideas, too, have a hist
ory. Who understood Rousseau? Who read Voltaire? Who read the Encyclopedia of Di
derot? How do we know how these ideas were used? He called for the social histor
y of ideas. A number of people, including Bob Darnton who is now at Harvard, but
taught at Princeton for decades and who turned out the finest historians of old
regime France, took this very seriously. So did another friend of mine, Daniell
e Roche, who did work on the acadmies, which I'll discuss in a while.
They began to look at how Enlightenment ideas got around. How did copies of Cand
ide, which was illegal in France, censored. How did these things turn up in Fran
ce? Let me just say a couple things about this. Enlightenment ideas really came
into elite popular opinion, in what we call the public sphere that is, people wh
o are interested in ideas, and people who became interested in politics in reall
y three major ways in France. There are equivalents of these in other place. The
Scottish example because the Scottish Enlightenment is very important. You can
read about it in the book. One of these will be quite clear there. First, throug
h, acadmies. An academy was not a university. It has nothing to do with a univers
ity. They still exist. I'm a member of one of these academies, an obscure one in
the Ardche.
An academy was a group of erudites, sometimes including clergy, many nobles, man
y bourgeois people of education. The population that was literate increases in W
estern Europe decidedly in the eighteenth century. They would get together and d
iscuss ideas. They had contests where people who wanted to make a little money w
ould answer a question put out by the acadmie. They would write responses to ques
tions about science, religion, and big ideas. Robespierre wins one of these cont
ests. These acadmies meet in smaller rooms than this, but they discuss ideas. The
se ideas are putting in sharp analysis, or re-evaluation, the role of the church
as an institution. They have to get around some way. People have to know about
them. The academy is one way this happened.
A second one, moving to number three, are Masonic lodges. Masonic lodges still e
xist. There's one, I don't know if it's still active, but there's a big Masonic
building out on Whitney on the right. I think it became an insurance building. O
ne of the horrors of my seventh grade life was having to be dragged off to the d
ancing school in Portland, Oregon, which met in a large building which was a Mas
onic lodge. Masonic lodges begin in Scotland. They are secularizing institutions
that the members mostly all agree, agreed in the eighteenth century, that the c
hurch's public institution role is too important. Masonic lodges talk about thes
e ideas as well. They talk about Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and all of thes
e people. This is a second way in which these ideas get out.
The third is the salon. There's another French word that's so important it becam
e an English word. A salon was a gathering of pretty elite people, but intereste
d in the life of the mind. They were hosted by hostesses, again, the role of wom
en in the Enlightenment. I give you in the book the example of Madame Geoffrin,
which was the classic one. People would come together to eat, to drink, and to d
iscuss ideas. When British guests came to Paris, the salons, they said, "All the
y do is eat and drink. They spend all their time eating and drinking, and they d
on't discuss ideas that much." In fact, they did.
There's still a wonderful place in Paris called the Palais Royal where you can g
o, and on very hot days in the eighteenth century, in the 1770s, you can imagine
people meeting there talking about the ideas of young Enlightenment hotshots, t
hose people who have become part of the canon of western civilization. This is a
nother way where these ideas get along. Young, would-be philosophes on the make
coming up from the provinces, what they want to do is be introduced to one of th
ese hostesses so that they will be invited to trot out their intellectual wares
at one of these gatherings. These are concrete examples of the way that these id
eas got around. People didn't pay any attention to this before about thirty, thi
rty-five years ago. Danielle Roche's book on the acadmies, two huge volumes not t
ranslated, are really marvelous in all of that. That's something to keep in mind
.
Chapter 3. The Enlightenment among the Grub Street Hacks [00:12:58]
The high Enlightenment really ends in 1778, traditionally. That's a textbook kin
d of date. But it does matter, because that's when Voltaire and his great enemy,
Rousseau, both die. After that, there are no more Montesquieus, or Voltaires, o
r the big-time all stars of the philosophes. There aren't any more. But there is
this next generation of would-bephilosophes, people who could think and write a
nd who want to hit the big time. They see that Voltaire made big bucks, big fran
cs, big livre writing. They want to be like him. They want to be like Voltaire.
They want to be like Rousseau, his archenemy who paced around his little farm ca
lled Les Charmettes in Savoy outside of Chambry, and who hated Voltaire. They rea
lly couldn't stand each other. But he also hit the big time.
What the Grub Street hacks, Grub Street refers to I don't know if it's a real st
reet or imaginary street in London where lots of would-be writers and writers wh
o are peddling their wares hung around. These Grub Street hacks, the third divis
ion of people who want to have the kind of entry into the salon life to put fort
h their ideas. They live on the top floor, where the poorest people live. They'r
e dodging their landlords all the time. They don't have enough money to pay. A l
ot of them live in Paris around now around Odon. It doesn't matter if you know Odo
n at all, but they live right around that part in the Latin Quarter, but more in
what now is the Sixth Arrondissement, and they write.
But what do they write about? They need to make money. The big news here, as Dar
nton discovered, is they write pornography. They write scatological pornography.
They write what they call in French libelles. They write broadsides, really, de
nouncing the royal family, denouncing the queen above all. Indelibly called "the
Austrian whore" by her many detractors, who are omnipresent. They write against
what they think is unearned privilege, the kind of censorship that they see is
keeping them from hitting the big time. The point of Darnton's many wonderful bo
oks is that in the long run, although these people were the Grub Street hacks, V
oltaire denigrated them as the canaille, the rabble, the scribblers, jealous, ea
ger, anxious, hungry is that their attacks on the regime and against the unearne
d privilege, as they saw it, helps erode belief in the monarchy, and helps sugge
st that the monarchy itself and the people hanging around the monarchy at Versai
lles is lapsing into despotism.
So, they do make a difference. Let me give you an example. This is sort of a cla
ssic one. Imagine you're a bookseller in Poitiers. Poitiers is a very nice town
full of lovely old romance churches in central western France. You are writing t
o Switzerland to order books that you want to sell to people who have ordered bo
oks, for example. He writes the following letter: "Here is a short list of philo
sophical books (books written by the philosophes) that I want to order. Please s
end the invoice in advance. They include: Venus and the Cloister, or, The Nun in
the Nightgown; Christianity Unveiled (that could be the subtitle, too); Memorie
s of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour; Inquiry on the Origins of Oriental Despoti
sm; The System of Nature; Teresa the Philosopher; Margot the Camp Follower.
This is not exactly the stuff of Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and these other pe
ople. But yet, those who penned such things imagined that they were philosophes
and wanted to have the same kind of impact that Voltaire and the others had. The
se were la canaille, the kind of rabble of Grub Street. Why was he writing Switz
erland to begin with? Again, this is the question of how do these ideas get arou
nd? One of the things that the Grub Street hacks didn't like is that you've got
censors. You've got paid censors who work for the government who say, "This can'
t be published" or "Un-uh. You shouldn't have published that baby. That wasn't a
good idea." The result is, in a system in which privilege, of which monopolies,
of which guilds controlled the production and distribution of almost everything
, that book-selling and book-printing are monopolies controlled by the state.
So, if you're a Parisian printer, unless you're risking being thrown in the slam
mer, the slammer (that's not a real word in French, obviously), you can't print
this stuff out in Paris. So much of the Enlightenment literature is published in
you'll not be shocked to know you already know this, Amsterdam, or in Brussels,
in the southern Netherlands, or Switzerland. Bob Darnton, when he was a young p
rofessor, before that a young graduate student, he hit the jackpot. A lot of the
stuff was printed in Switzerland in Neufchatel, and he got hold of the archives
of this printing company. He was able to do the social history of ideas. Who bo
ught what?
By the way, before the Ryan Air or any of these places, how do you get all of th
is stuff from Switzerland, where there are big mountains, into France? How do yo
u get it to Poitiers? How do you get it there? Again, you have to look at the wa
y that this stuff is distributed. The ideas, we've already seen how they were di
stributed, but how literally do you get these books, these bouquins, these pamph
lets, these brochures from Switzerland or the equivalent, from Amsterdam or Brus
sels that's easier, a flat country is a little different than mountains into Fra
nce?
Well, in France, as in the German states, as in Italy, there were peddlers. Ther
e were peddlers. They would go on the road and they had like a medicine ball in
a gym, they'd have these huge leather bags. They'd be stuffed with all sorts of
things pens and pins and I think I mentioned this is another context and religio
us literature, but also hidden at the bottom, beneath the religious literature,
they are smuggling into France Enlightenment literature. They have drop-off poin
ts. They go over the Jura Mountains, that's not so easy to do, and they take the
m to a city like Chaumont in the east, or Metz or Nancy. Then somebody else carr
ies the stuff all the way. Avoiding the police around Paris, the gendarmerie, th
e marchausses as they were called then, this stuff, Margot the Camp Follower ends
up pleasing this drooling guy in Poitiers, who can buy it from his bookstore.
You can really follow not only Diderot's encyclopedia and how do we know where D
iderot's encyclopedia ended up, by the way? Well, for example, people who leave
wills, that's how we know about literature in the nineteenth century, because th
e libraries in estates would be detailed, so we know what books people had. In t
he eighteenth century we have a tremendous proliferation of ideas, of reading, o
f literacy, and of ways of discussing these ideas. I've already mentioned three
of them there, but if you look at the case of Britain, you've got the coffeehous
es. Coffeehouses follow the mania of coffee. Coffee comes from where? The coloni
es. So, coffeehouses are part of this sort of globalization of the economy, but
also the globalization of ideas. This stuff all kind of fits together.
Again, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot and the others would be just
horrified to think that anybody intellectual would be mentioning some of these
Grub Street hacks along with them, because they didn't accept them and nor were
they of the same quality at all. Some of these guys, by the way, there's one who
I mention in the book, a guy called Brissot, B-R-I-S-S-O-T, who becomes an impo
rtant leader of a faction in the Revolution called the Girondins, from around Bo
rdeaux, who are against the Jacobins. More about that later. Brissot is broke. H
ow is he going to pay the landlord? He has no idea. Where is he going to get his
next drink? What does he do? He works for the police. He works as a police info
rmer on the other would-be philosophes, on the Grub Street hacks. How do we know
this? Darnton found the dossier in which Brissot is being paid off by these peo
ple.
What are other ways that we know how many of these characters there were? There
were about 200 to 300. I don't remember exactly. Why? Because they want money. O
n one hand they say, "I don't like this censorship, it's keeping people from rec
ognizing my true genius." On the other hand they write little sniveling letters
saying, "I am a writer and a very good one, indeed. Therefore, I merit a state p
ension." They write these letters to the various equivalents of ministries, sayi
ng, "Please give me some money, because I am a really wonderful writer and inste
ad of repressing my work, you should be saluting my genius." They write clammy l
etters like that, that you find in the archives. We piece this stuff together gr
adually.
Chapter 4. Desacralization of the French Monarchy [00:23:05]
Let me just race over here and give you just an example of where is this stuff?
here we go. What would Voltaire think of this? Here is one of these pamphlets th
at's denouncing the high-livers out at Versailles. "The public is warned that an
epidemic disease is raging among the girls of the opera, that has begun to reac
h the ladies of the court and that has been communicated to their lackeys. This
disease elongates the face, destroys the complexion, reduces the weight, and cau
ses horrible ravages where it becomes situated. There are ladies without teeth,
others without eyebrows, and some are now completely paralyzed." People want to
know what it is. It's obviously a venereal disease. He's obviously exaggerating
the who knows? I don't know but the results of such a malady.
What he's doing is he's suggesting that what's really going on at Versailles is
lots of people how do I put this politely? hooking up all over the place at the
petites runions, while they're dressing up as peasants, or whatever, and that the
result is very demeaning for the French state and for the French monarchy. So,
does this have an effect? It does. It really does. It contributes to what has be
en called the desacralization of the French monarchy. It is very hard to argue t
hat God has put absolute monarchs on earth to bring people better lives if you'v
e got these people and ordinary people did not get into Versailles, unless they
were among the 15,000 lackeys working there. Lackeys would be the term given by
the people who employed them. You didn't know. You had to surmise. You had to gu
ess what was going on.
I'll give you a couple of examples in a while, and I'd better hurry up and do th
is, in which you can kind of see how this works. I'll give you kind of a spectac
ularly interesting example, at least I think so, at the end. By the way, just as
an aside, during the French Revolution Louis XVI decides to get the hell out. H
e and Marie Antoinette, improbably, dress themselves up as ordinary people. They
're not people who have to set the alarm clock usually. They get up at 3:00 in t
he morning and they get into this large carriage that's been stuffed with silver
and foie gras and all sorts of other things. They hightail it toward what is no
w the Belgian frontier, but they get further and further behind. You can read ab
out this when you get to that chapter. It's an interesting story.
Finally, they get recognized. She is not a governess, she is the queen. One of t
he people that first realizes this is the king has actually caught a glimpse of
the king himself by looking through the fence at Versailles at the time of a wed
ding. He sees the king. There aren't photographs. He recognizes the king's nose.
He gets down on his knees and says, "Sire, you are the king." This guy can no l
onger pretend that he's a mere hanger-on assisting a Russian baroness. It's all
over but the shoutin' at that point. What these people do is they helped break d
own this sense of automatic respect for the monarchy as an institution. Of cours
e, the fact that they can't stand Marie Antoinette who, rightly or wrongly, is a
ccused of all sorts of things.
This is racing ahead of the story, but Louis XVI was a big-time cuckolded guy. H
is wife was seriously sleeping around while he was taking apart and putting back
together clocks, which he liked to do in the big house when his wife is out in
the bushes, to put it crudely. I forgot this is being televised. Anyway, take th
at back. Can you erase that, please? Anyway, what these people do is over the lo
ng run this helps erode respect for the monarchy, and helps us explain why it wa
s in 1789 you could imagine a world without a king and a world without a queen.
When they bring them back, they bring the old boy and his wife back from Varenne
s, which is in the northeast of France, the National Guard turns their backs in
serious disrespect to the carriage, and they hold their guns upside down. At tha
t point, that's la fin des haricots, the end of the green beans, as the French s
ay, for the king.
-->>
Chapter 5. Legal Briefs on the Despotism of the Monarchy: The Law as a New Sourc
e of Sovereignty [00:27:43]
But this process started earlier. The third-string hacks of the Enlightenment ha
d something to do with it. Let me give you a couple of examples also from other
friends, but really good serious work has been done in the last twenty or twenty
-five years. Rocketing right along here, let me give you another example of this
relationship of the public sphere to imagining a new source of sovereignty, tha
t is the nation, and give you an example of how that works. This comes from the
work of David Bell, who is my colleague and still very dear friend who teaches a
t Johns Hopkins. This is from his work on lawyers in the eighteenth century.
We'll give you an example of how this fits together. It fits into the Enlightenm
ent stuff, because if Enlightenment literature was censored and sometimes hard t
o get hold of, though an encyclopedia was tolerated and then not tolerated and t
hen tolerated again, what Bell's work on lawyers demonstrates is the way in whic
h lawyers and legal briefs help get these ideas around as well. Because you coul
d not censor legal briefs. To give you just an aside, don't worry about this now
. In the case of imperial Russia in the late nineteenth century you had big-time
censorship by the police. In fact, when there were these political trials, lots
of what was said in the courtroom got around as well and couldn't really be cen
sored in the way that ordinary publications could. You had this same sort of eff
ect there.
Let me give you a couple examples. They're complicated examples, but don't worry
about them. The first would be from this very strange not really heresy, but I
guess the Catholic Church considered it a heresy called Jansenism. I remember on
ce coming in to do the equivalent of this lecture and having to look at my own b
ook for a good definition of Jansenism that I must have found once, because it's
so obscure. There was a bishop who didn't think he was obscure, but a Belgian b
ishop called a Jansen who thought that the Catholic Church was becoming too over
-mighty, and full of Baroque masses and huge expenses for archbishops who weren'
t doing a damn thing. He imagined another kind of religion and became very ascet
ic. Somebody once called them Calvinists who went to mass. They were still Catho
lic, but they didn't believe in this high Baroque church.
Jansenism was in 1715 or so. Then it comes back in the 1760s or 1770s. It's extr
emely boring stuff. Louis XIV didn't think it was boring. He sent out the troops
to burn down Jansenist abbeys, the big one was called Port-Royal outside of Par
is. He thought that this was a threat to the Galician Church, which was sort of
the alliance of the Catholic Church with the monarchy in France. Rather like Car
thage, they were supposed to plow salt into the land and all this business. So,
they wage war on these Jansenist people, who were rather like Calvinists in many
ways. But the only point of that is that there are lawyers who begin to defend
the Jansenists and begin to see the actions of the king vis- vis this persecuted
religious minority as despotic.
When lawyers are publishing legal briefs and there's enough references in the bo
ok, so you can put this together, but I just want you to see the point. When the
y begin to publish legal briefs defending the Jansenists against these kinds of
attacks, these are published by thousands of them. They can't be censored. They
begin to suggest at a time in the eighteenth century, particularly after mid-cen
tury when we can already begin to speak of French nationalism, at least among th
e elite at the time of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, thus the Seven Years' Wa
r. It begins to suggest two things. That monarchies can behave despotically, goi
ng beyond the accepted limits of absolute rule, and that the nation, this idea o
f the nation is being betrayed by bad governments. If this doesn't sound like th
e French Revolution, then nothing else will. Those are very important defining m
oments.
The same things happen also in the 1760s and 1770s, with various attempts to lib
eralize the French economy that I describe in the book. The king's attempt to di
spense with the parlements, which were really noble law courts that were provinc
ial. You can read about this. But the same thing happens. This is the point. The
se lawyers begin turning out these legal briefs that imply the same two things:
that absolute monarchy is risking stepping over the lines of the acceptable and
behaving in a despotic way, and that there is something called the nation in whi
ch nobody would have imagined that classes were all equal the discourse of liber
ty, fraternity and equality is a hell of a long way away but that the traditiona
l rights of the nation are being betrayed by the monarchy and that things isn't
so good at Versailles.
Again, trying to look ahead and see what happens in 1788 and above all, 1789, wh
ich is one I'm not a big guy on dates in history and having to remember all thes
e dates. But 1789, like 1917, that's a big one. That's a big one. But in order t
o also understand the emergence of a radical republic and the execution of the k
ing, one has to see that the nation becomes invested with a sense of moral quali
ty that makes it not impossible to imagine a world without kings. And, so, lawye
rs, who are called barristers, play a major role in all of this.
Again, this has to be seen in the context of a century in which more and more pe
ople can read. The literacy rate in a country like France is still well below fi
fty percent, maybe forty or forty-five percent, something like that. More men co
uld read than women. Not only literacy increases among the elite, but the amount
of things that are published and the amount of newspapers that are published ex
pands dramatically. A point of reference would be in Britain, you can read about
this, the campaign of John Wilkes, who was sort of a rascally character. But Wi
lkes and the number forty-five becomes virtually illegal, because forty-five was
the number of a newspaper in which Wilkes and his supporters essentially call o
ut the British political system.
Again, we're talking mostly about Western Europe, and literacy is much higher in
the Netherlands and in Northern France and in Northern Italy and in England tha
n in other places. This is part of this cultural revolution. It's important to s
ee the role of this, because in orthodox Marxist interpretation you had to have
the ever-rising bourgeoisie, the rising in the fourteenth century. There they ar
e again in the sixteenth century. They're like some sort of runaway bread or som
ething like that. In the nineteenth century there they are, the bourgeois centur
y. I'll give a lecture on the bourgeoisie, because they do indeed rise. Nonethel
ess, a kind of class analysis can't be completely thrown out. Classes did exist
and people had a sense of themselves as being members of a social class. It was
not immutable these boundaries were more fluid in Britain than in other places,
but still are important.
Chapter 6. Sensational Royal Affairs: The Erosion of Monarchical Prestige [00:36
:41]
But now for the last thirty years, people have paid more attention to the cultur
al concomitance of revolution and what difference Enlightenment ideas made, and
what difference the emergence of a sense of the nation and the infusion of polit
ics with a sense of right and wrong and morality. It's an important part of all
this. In the last twelve minutes and thirty seconds that I have today, let me gi
ve you another example of this. I think this is a fascinating it's so fascinatin
g I can't find it. Let me give you an example. This is drawing upon an excellent
book by Sarah Maza. It's a very well-known episode, but it shows you and ties t
ogether the sense of the nation along with the impact of this sort of third gene
ration of Enlightenment hacks after 1778, to understand their role in the erosio
n of a sense that the monarchy was immutable in representing the rights of the n
ation, even if that construct was just coming into being.
In this book called what's it called? Private Lives and Public Affairs. Maza tak
es a couple of cause clbres. Cause clbre would be like one of the things that you fi
nd in the tabloids in Britain or the U.S. I don't read that stuff, so I really c
an't give any good examples. But one of these actors and actresses you always se
e running around, or whoever this person is, Brittany Spears, or something like
that. A singer or actress, I don't know what she does. But anyway, something lik
e that, that people focus their attention on these people. They sort of dominate
, if you will this is almost an insane comparison, but the public sphere in that
they're in the news all the time.
And, so, what Maza did about the same time that David Bell was working on the ro
le of lawyers in the eighteenth century is that she took a couple of these examp
les, and shows the way in which private affairs that were kind of sleazy and not
too cool but were sensational helped bring these threads together and contribut
ed to kind of erode the prestige of the monarchy. This fits into the sense that
I've already given you that was extremely pervasive, particularly around Paris i
s that a lot of things that went on at Versailles weren't so good. The 10,000 no
bles who were clustered around Louis XVI and particularly his wife were undermin
ing the authority and the prestige of the monarchy, and that wasn't a good thing
.
An incident called "The Diamond Necklace Affair" is illustrative and mildly amus
ing, not more than that. It also involves this Palais Royal place in Paris befor
e. A woman called Jeanne de Saint-Rmy the name doesn't matter at all was a poor n
oble. She claimed descent from the royal family. She had a pretty good education
. She had important protectors. She marries an officer of rather dubious noble t
itle, who was called, quite forgettably, the Marquis de la Motte. He met the fif
ty-year-old cardinal called Louis de Rohan, whose name I should have put on ther
e, R-O-H-A-N. He was from a very famous old family called Rohan Soubise. The nat
ional archives used to be and now they're adjacent to it in this fabulous old wh
y don't they ever have things that work in here? It's just unbelievable. I can't
find anything to write with.
The family called Rohan Soubise there's this wonderful, wonderful palace or chat
eau in the Marais, which is still there. This cardinal is on the make. He's very
, very wealthy. He's a cardinal. That's why he's wealthy. Or he's wealthy becaus
e he's a cardinal. He thinks he's snubbed the queen. He wants to be one of the p
eople who helped make important decisions, but he thinks he's alienated the quee
n, that this is standing between him and the power that he thinks he should have
. He writes missives to the queen begging her to forgive him. He's met this guy,
de la Motte. They begin sending forged replies from the queen that suggest that
the queen now is listening, and maybe all is forgiven and it's going to be okay
.
They have this idea. There's a famous jewel that had 647 flawless gems, worth 1.
5 million pounds, which is a whole lot of money in those days and still now. Lou
is XV had commissioned it for one of his mistresses and then backed down because
it was too expensive. In 1788 the necklace was offered to Louis XVI for Marie A
ntoinette, but he turned it down, saying the realm needs more ships than it does
more jewels, which was reasonable enough. They con this old, fairly horny cardi
nal into showing up at dusk at the Palais Royal and introducing him to the queen
herself, whom I guess he'd met once. But it's dusk and his eyesight isn't that
good. What they do is they find this prostitute, of which there were about 25,00
0 in Paris at any one time, who looks vaguely like Marie Antoinette.
This cardinal, de Rohan, thinks that his ship has come in, that everything is go
ing to be okay. This purchase order has been forged, supposedly signed by the qu
een, and the real jewels are delivered. Then, of course, it's broken up into pie
ces and sold on the street for zillions of francs, sold on the black market in L
ondon and in Paris. But there's a problem here, because the word gets out what h
as happened. And de Rohan, who has really been made a fool, there's no doubt abo
ut it. But it's more serious than that, because that he has done is he could be
accused of lse majest, which is the ultimate kind of insult, plotting against the
queen by identifying her prostitute as the queen herself.
To make a very long story short, the monarchy, humiliated by all of this the car
dinal is saying mass in his fancy robes in some cathedral, probably Saint-Eustac
he, but I'm not sure. It might have been Notre-Dame. I don't know. Well, Saint-E
ustache isn't a cathedral. But anyway, he's in his robes. The police come in and
arrest him. What happens then is they put him on trial. He is not a terribly lo
veable guy or not someone to be very much admired. By an incredible series or no
t an incredible series, but an almost logical playing out of what I've been sayi
ng, the lawyers who defend him and the crowds who salute him portray him as a vi
ctim of a regime that is crossing the line between absolutism and despotism.
He is a cardinal and he becomes the darling of the people. Poor old Jeanne, this
noble, she and her boyfriend get branded and sent off to the galleys, et cetera
, et cetera, predictably enough. But the parlement of Paris acquits the good car
dinal, and he emerges from the palace of justice or the parement still now on th
e Ile de-la-Cit, the largest of the then three but now two islands in the Seine i
n Paris to popular acclaim, saying that justice and the interests of the nation
have been served by his acquittal. What this sleazy, unsavory incident does is i
t helps continue the desacralization of the French monarchy.
Again, lawyers and the people who see themselves as representing the interests o
f the French nation are, in their own imaginary, and in their own mental constru
ction, and in the eyes of people who follow these events in legal briefs and in
newspapers the guy who's acquitted is seen as somebody who had been done wrong t
o by a monarchy that has gone too far. That exactly, not much more than a year l
ater, is what is going to play out in the French Revolution itself.
To conclude, Voltaire, de Rohan, Montesquieu, who you've been reading and these
folks have big-time impact on the way we look at the world around us. They had a
n impact on those people who would become the organizers of the revolution and i
ndeed, the leaders of France and their children, their successors in the ninetee
nth century. But lawyers, part of this culture of increased public sphere that w
as Western Europe in particular but also parts of the rest of Europe, too, in th
e eighteenth century, had a role in all of this, and that by 1789, not in any ki
nd of inevitable process, a revolution was not inevitable, but the sense that th
e monarchy had gone too far and that there was something called the nation out t
here, was in the public sphere and the results of all of this would be there to
see in 1789.
Now, have a good weekend and on Monday you're going to hear the execution of the
king, the death of Citizen Marat in his bathtub. I hope to make clear why some
people supported the revolution and others didn't, and what difference it all ma
de. Have a great weekend. See ya!
[end of transcript]
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