The 18th century poetry police and an electronic cabaret

Jeremy Dibbell reviews John Darnton's new book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris on his PhiloBiblos blog. The book centers around the 1749 "Affair of the Fourteen," referring to the number of men arrested for distributing (in various not necessarily material forms) poems critical of Louis XV. These poems didn't travel the path of political pamphlets, rather they were disseminated orally. Spoken as well as transposed to street music, often to popular tunes which made them more memorable, their text could be found in the police records which provided only a small amount of context for how they actually functioned.

Darnton also admits the difficulties with the type of work he's trying to do with this book, noting that determining the actual public perceptions and impact of these verses in their own time is inherently tricky, since the much the evidence historians would want to be able to make a strong argument about the importance of this affair is simply lost to us.

The central focus of Darnton's book is on this particular scholarly difficulty; what he calls "reconstructing orality" in order to "uncover a complex communication network and study the way information circulated in a semiliterate society." The rest is filled in with notes on 18th century music and details about the political and cultural climate of the time, and what Darnton manages to reconstruct is fairly impressive. He's even put together an Electronic Cabaret where one can not only read the poems, but listen to how they might have been sung on the streets of 18th century France.