Introduction
Political pamphlets were produced on a remarkable scale in seventeenth-century France. One inventory of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris lists 3,417 titles from the reign of Louis XIII (1610-1643) and 4,503 titles from the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).[1] These pamphlets constituted the political press of the age, and historians of the Old Regime have long recognized their importance.[2] Yet a convincing explanation of the concrete purposes and functions of these pamphlets has not emerged.
By later standards the production of pamphlets in the seventeenth century was slow and distribution poorly organized. Rates of functional literacy were low, especially outside large urban centers. There were few opportunities for the general population, or even the elite reading public, to respond directly to pamphlets by engaging in the national political process. And in the world of the Old Regime, there were many means of coercion and manipulation besides the printed word whereby powerful men and women could achieve their political goals.
What, then, did the authors and sponsors of these pamphlets hope to accomplish? How effective were their efforts? What audience, or public, did they reach? How do the pamphlets fit in the broader context of political discourse and culture? This book offers answers to these questions based on a close analysis of pamphlet production, pamphlet rheto-
[1] . Catalogue de l'Histoire de France (1968 ed.); see Duccini, "Regard sur la littérature pamphlétaire," 313-337.
[2] . Leber, L'Etat réel de la presse , 96-97; Martin, Livres , 1:197-274; and Chartier, "Pamphlets et gazettes," 1:407. The holdings of several major research libraries in the United States are catalogued in Lindsay and Neu, French Political Pamphlets , and published in the extensive microfilm collection, French Political Pamphlets .
ric, and political dynamics during the course of a particular national conflict—the struggle for domination of Louis XIII's government from 1614 to 1617.
Propaganda has a long history in early modern Europe.[3] In Old Regime France, government ministers routinely sponsored and disseminated printed material for political purposes, as the work of Joseph Klaits, Myriam Yardeni, and others has shown.[4] The mid-eighteenth century marked a new stage of development, especially when the views of the philosophes began to echo a Lockean preoccupation with the connections between public opinion and political consent.[5] Such enlightened thinking helped to precipitate the crisis of political authority that led to the Revolution of 1789 and the end of the Old Regime. Before the eighteenth century, however, a simpler and more traditional view prevailed. Propaganda aimed to help the government control the impressions (perceptions) of its subjects in order to secure better compliance with its policies.
The 1614-1617 conflict in France is a particularly revealing context for investigating the use of printed propaganda in early modern politics. In this introduction, I seek to explain why this is so. Preliminary remarks about method are also in order, as are comments about the relationship of this book to recent work on the history of printing, popular culture, and the world of books. I also indicate why this study has larger implications for our understanding of the politics of absolutism.
The 1614-1617 crisis, which brought down the government of Louis XIII's mother, Marie di Médicis, has a special significance in the history of French politics and pamphleteering. Not only was it one of the more important political upheavals of the century, but it also set a pattern of political disobedience for later rebellions. The presence of a minor king and a regency government was always destabilizing for the Old Regime because it exposed the conventions of monarchical government to public discussion and embarrassing legal scrutiny. The normal ties of personal allegiance to the king were attenuated, and the precise boundaries of sovereign royal authority became more difficult to enforce. Only during the Fronde (in Louis XIV's minority), and possibly during the brief religious wars of the 1620s, did such a flood of printed propaganda challenge the royal government as that of 1614-1617.
[3] . Roelker, "Impact of the Reformation Era," 2:41-84; Lewis, "War-propaganda and Historiography," 1-21; and Hale, "War and Public Opinion," 18-36.
[4] . Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV , 3-34; Yardeni, Conscience nationale en France ; and in addition to the sources cited below for the seventeenth century, Kaiser, "Abbé de Saint-Pierre," 618-643.
[5] . Much was borrowed from the views of John Locke. Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections," 204-246; and Ozouf, "L'Opinion publique," 419-434.
Some features of these pamphlet wars have already been studied. J. M. Hayden has analyzed the content and production patterns of the pamphlets surrounding the Estates General of 1614.[6] Denis Richet analyzed a sample of pamphlets published from 1612 through 1615 in an investigation of the presence of historical consciousness in the political argument of the times.[7] The most comprehensive study to date was undertaken by Hélène Duccini, who provided the first effective overview of pamphlet production in the seventeenth century and a more detailed view of the 1614-1617 campaigns.[8] The present investigation is based in part on this earlier work, but it also analyzes pamphlets from a new perspective, emphasizing the place of the printed word in the political process as a whole.
The early seventeenth century was a period of fundamental and complex transition in France. The steady growth of the state transformed the monarchy, but centralized royal power was frequently undermined by financial weakness, popular revolts, and self-interested obstructionism on the part of the king's own officials. Religious war no longer dominated political culture, but fearsome memories remained. The highly emotional factionalism of the later years of the Holy League (1585-1594) still played an important part in local and national politics. Secularization was strong in many quarters but was less influential on the whole than the efforts of the dévôts to revitalize Catholicism.[9] Intellectual life in general was also moving from the metaphorical world of the late Renaissance and baroque periods to the syllogistic world of seventeenth-century classicism; political discourse reflected this change.[10] Dense analogical reasoning à la Jean Bodin increasingly gave way to more straightforward legal argumentation in the style of Charles Loyseau and Cardin Le Bret.
Absolutism is a central theme for historians of this period; but as a term, it is the subject of some debate.[11] The term absolutism has come to mean so many things that one specialist has suggested it be abandoned altogether.[12] A solution less neat but perhaps more realistic is to accept it as common currency but to remain alert to its changing value in different contexts. In a widespread, generic sense, absolutist describes any highly centralized European state like the one over which Louis XIV
[6] . Hayden, "Uses of Political Pamphlets," 143-165; and Hayden, France and the Estates General , 90-92, 99, 107-113, 142-144, and 164-171.
[7] . Richet, "Autour des Etats-Généraux," 151-194.
[8] . Duccini, "La Littérature pamphlétaire."
[9] . Cf. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State .
[10] . Thuau, Raison d'état et pensée politique .
[11] . Bonney, "Absolutism," 93-117.
[12] . Hanley, "Lit de Justice" of the Kings of France , 226-227.
presided.[13] More specific meanings are used to designate particular developments in early modern Europe that contributed to making absolutist states possible.
Studies of French absolutism usually emphasize one of four areas—(1) political institutions, (2) ideological change, (3) social structures, or (4) cultural life. First, even within the extended apparatus of the royal government, military, administrative, and fiscal functions were increasingly centralized in the hands of the king or a few ministers and their agents.[14] Second, an expanding ideology of unchallengeable royal power was built out of a mixture of juridical ideas in opposition both to representative government and to moral restraints on political authority coming from the church.[15] Third, state centralization and its ideological justifications grew out of a social reality in which the greater share of economic resources was concentrated in the hands of royal officials or classes of merchants and financiers who were able to maintain effective relationships with those officials.[16] Fourth, the government succeeded in part because it presented itself as a necessary result of France's immutable legal, moral, and social order wherein all authority emanated from an eternal hierarchy originating in the will of God and extended downward through the monarchy.[17] An important expression of these developments was the staging of state ceremonials and public rituals affirming the monarchs' position within the state.[18]
All of these elements of absolutism were at work in early seventeenth-century France, but periodization is a problem.[19] If we take the political institutions of the later Middle Ages as our reference point, the government of France under Francis I (1515-1547) or Henry II (1547-1559) appears to be moving toward absolutism in many ways.[20] Yet perhaps an even clearer example is the remarkably centralized and effective government built up by Henry IV (1589-1610) after the breakdown of royal authority under Henry III (1574-1589).[21] However, if we take the probable epitome of absolutism as our starting point—the power of Louis
[13] . For example, Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State , 15-42; and Behrens, Society, Government, and the Enlightenment , 10-40.
[14] . Parker, French Absolutism , 46-117; Bonney, Political Change in France ; and Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France .
[15] . See Bonney, "Absolutism," 95-99, for an overview; and Mousnier, "Exponents and Critics of Absolutism," 4:104-131.
[16] . Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France , 3-33; and Giesey, "State-Building in Early Modern France," 191-207.
[17] . Basdevant-Gaudemet, Charles Loyseau, 1564-1627 .
[18] . Giesey, "Models of Rulership in French Ceremonial," 41-64.
[19] . This is Hanley's main objection to the term in "Lit de Justice ," 226-227. See also Rowen, "Louis XIV and Absolutism," 302-305.
[20] . Knecht, Francis I and Absolute Monarchy , 7-9, 27-29.
[21] . Salmon, Society in Crisis , 309-328.
XIV's government from about 1660 to approximately 1700—the governments of Henry IV and even Louis XIII (1610-1648) look relatively undeveloped.[22]
From the present perspective, it is less important to determine which king had more real power than to understand how the forces of centralization worked. Why was it increasingly difficult to oppose the government in the political sphere? To this end, our analyses of the various means of coercion, manipulation, and persuasion that supported royal power need to be integrated into a broader cultural framework of investigation.[23] The power of the monarchy did not rest, ultimately, on the ability of the king and his officials to impose their will on local subjects through violence (the repression of popular revolts notwithstanding).[24] In the process of centralization, the king's ministers were often forced to undermine opponents through short-term concessions, financial rewards, and other benefits.[25] The exact relationship between local and central authority remained ambiguous in many situations.
The trend toward absolutism also involved psychological factors, and the contribution of printing in this regard is of primary importance. The technology of movable type certainly meant that uniform messages could be sent to a large population that was geographically and socially diverse.[26] Did printing thus provide the basis for a more homogeneous national political culture? Could the government use printed communications more effectively to reinforce patterns of obedience? It now seems improbable to historians specializing in the field that printing alone caused the cataclysmic mental and cultural revolution envisioned by Marshall McLuhan.[27] But printing brought a new awareness of ideology to many social strata. In combination with other social and cultural developments, this new awareness gradually altered the meaning of political conflict and the scale of public participation in national politics.[28]
Governments sought to control the printing press from the beginning.[29] It is well known that this effort broke down in the sixteenth century, once pamphlets began to be used systematically as weapons in the arsenal of Protestant reformers. A. G. Dickens concludes that "between 1517 and 1520, Luther's thirty publications probably sold well over
[22] . But cf. Lossky, "Absolutism of Louis XIV," 1-15.
[23] . Baker, "Introduction," xi-xxiv. Cf. Tucker, "Culture," 173-190.
[24] . Cf. Tilly, "History of European State-Making," 24-37; Anderson, Lineages , 95-101; and Porchnev, Soulèvements populaires en France .
[25] . Beik, Absolutism and Society , 3-31; Richet, France moderne , 79-105; Hickey, Coming of French Absolutism , 3-13; and Collins, Fiscal Limits of Absolutism , 6, 65-107, 214-215.
[26] . Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change .
[27] . McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy . Cf. Martin, "Culture écrite et culture orale," 225-282.
[28] . Kelley, Beginning of Ideology , 215-251.
[29] . Ibid.
300,000 copies."[30] From the point of view of established governments and the church, such publications were seditious and heretical—something to be suppressed.[31] But censorship was relatively ineffective, and the forces of law and order, most notably royal governments and the Catholic church, were compelled to compete with the opposition in the same public arena. The decrees of the Countil of Trent (fundamental to the Counter-Reformation) sanctioned popular religious polemic as well as the censorship of "heretical" publications.[32] Our modern term for propaganda probably stems from the Latin phrase propaganda fide , part of the name of a Catholic missionary congregation devoted to spreading the Catholic faith around the world.[33]
New research has helped to elucidate the social dimensions of this expansion of printing. In France the work of Henri-Jean Martin and others has demonstrated that the early decades of the seventeenth century were pivotal.[34] The production of preapproved editions by official and semiofficial publishers increased dramatically. New regulations brought the printer's guild under greater government control.[35] A more enforceable system of censorship on the one hand and official patronage on the other gave the government new economic controls over publishing. The system of policing and privileges so well exposed by Robert Darnton and so hated by the intellectuals of the eighteenth century was largely invented between 1618 and 1635.[36] The production of popular literature did not fall outside this regime. The inexpensive popular books known as the bibliothèque bleue began to reach a broad audience of rural as well as urban folk in the later decades of the seventeenth century.[37] But there is no evidence that this type of popular literature contained much overt political news or commentary.[38]
[30] . Eisenstein, Printing Press , 303, citing A. G. Dickens, Reformation and Society in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1968), 51.
[31] . The "Index" of prohibited books is discussed in Grendler, Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 , 63-181.
[32] . Pallier, "Impressions de la Contre-Réforme," 215-273.
[33] . New Catholic Encyclopedia , 11:839-840.
[34] . Martin, Livres , 1:197-274. Much of the best recent research is elegantly summarized in Martin and Chartier, eds., Histoire de l'édition , vols. 1 and 2.
[35] . Martin, Livres , 1:51-57, 460-466; and Barbiche, "Régime de l'édition," 1:367-377. On the attitudes of magistrates toward censorship and legal proceedings, see the excellent article by Soman, "Press, Pulpit, and Censorship," 439-463.
[36] . Ibid., and Darnton, Great Cat Massacre , 145-189.
[37] . Mandrou, Culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles .
[38] . Ibid. Mandrou's original conclusions in this respect have been sustained. See Marais, "Littérature et culture populaires," 65-105; Martin, "Culture écrit et culture orale," 225-282; Davis, "Printing and the People," 189-226; and Chartier, "Stratégies éditoriales et lectures populaires" and "Bibliothèque bleue and Popular Reading," in Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print , 145-182 and 240-257.
For fresh political information and opinion, the seventeenth-century French reader had few publications from which to choose. The first periodical, the stilted, semiofficial Gazette , did not appear until the 1630s.[39] More serious histories and chronologies were available, such as the Mercure françois , but these rarely appeared sooner than a year or two after the events they covered.[40] In short, political pamphlets both official and clandestine were the only significant printed source of news and commentary.[41] A good print shop could turn out more than one thousand sixteen-page pamphlets in a day's work, and many printers turned out dozens of pamphlets during years of political crisis.
Pamphlets were not the only, best, or quickest source of news, nor did they make oral and handwritten forms of communication obsolete. Personally delivered letters and messages could be sent more quickly by royal post from centers of power such as Paris to other parts of the country. But a printed pamphlet could follow upon an important event in a matter of days to inform an extended public about political activity that they were unable to witness firsthand. More important, pamphlets described events in detail and gave stories a "spin" or "slant" (in today's media jargon) or the imprimatur of some government or church official. Such published information was especially significant in part because of France's size. People far removed geographically from actual events and centers of power used pamphlets to determine the local political meaning of distant occurrences. The most dramatic example of immediate pamphlet production as journalism occurred during the Fronde—a four-year (1648-1652) political struggle that produced more than five thousand different political pamphlets (mazarinades ) that regularly recapitulated events in a journalistic fashion for regionally specific audiences.[42]
[39] . Chartier, "Pamphlets et gazettes," 413-419.
[40] . The Mercure françois was a chronological narrative of important political, religious, and international news edited by the Parisian publisher, Jean Richer, first appearing in 1611. It appeared almost annually well into the 1630s and often gave relatively full accounts of important political events and pamphlet campaigns, complete with excerpted passages from important pamphlets. Its publishing history is complex and, to my knowledge, has never been fully reconstructed. It appears from the front matter of later editions that the first four volumes were reprinted more than once between 1617 and 1627.
[41] . Bellanger et al., eds., Histoire générale de la presse française , 1:63-79. Censer and Popkin provide a very useful introduction to more recent research, "Historians and the Press," 1-74.
[42] . On the mazarinades as journalism, see Grand-Mesnil, Mazarin, la Fronde et la presse . According to Carrier, the world's libraries contain about five thousand pamphlets from the years of the Fronde—many more than are listed in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale; see his "Souvenirs de la Fronde en U.R.S.S.," 27-50. On the regional character of these pamphlets see Jouhaud's work, n. 46 below.
The first modern investigation of seventeenth-century pamphlets was conducted at the turn of the century by Gustave Fagniez. His work showed how Père Joseph and other influential clergymen (many eventually allied with Cardinal Richelieu) used pamphlets to help build public support for a strong (Catholic but independent) state aggressively involved in the Thirty Years' War.[43] The link between public opinion and state power appeared self-evident to Fagniez, as it has to many students of propaganda. "If there is one dogma of political science that can be accepted by everyone in this age," he observed in 1900, "it is that the only governments with a future are those that have the support of public opinion."[44] Fagniez's approach was sensible and ahead of its time. But it lent itself to an essentially one-way analysis of "producers" and "consumers" of propaganda, that is, of government agents manipulating an undifferentiated public. Students of the media have strongly challenged this approach to the political press because it leaves relatively unexplored the problematic connections among public discourse, political attitudes, and patterns of behavior.[45] These connections are no longer self-evident. How does public opinion function as a source of political stability or instability? What are the links between collective psychology and the social reality of power?
Christian Jouhaud's recent work on the mazarinades and other seventeenth-century pamphlets is a vital new contribution to this enterprise.[46] Focusing on the pamphlet campaigns of the Fronde, especially those dealing with developments in Bordeaux, Jouhaud makes new sense out of the strategies and tactics of pamphleteers. Whereas the older studies tend to view pamphlets as an "expression" of partisan points of view or a "reflection" of political mentality more generally, Jouhaud emphasizes that the production and dissemination of a pamphlet was first of all a type of political "action" that must be understood in the monthly and even weekly context of political events.[47]
The problem of persuasion and its purposes, however, cannot be put
[43] . Fagniez, Le Père Joseph et Richelieu, 1577-1638 ; "Le Père Joseph et Richelieu," 470-521; "L'Opinion publique et la polémique au temps de Richelieu," 442-484; "L'Opinion publique et la press politique," 352-401; and "Fancan et Richelieu," 107:59-78 and 108:75-87.
[44] . Fagniez, "L'Opinion publique et la press politique," 352.
[45] . Cf. McQuail, "Influence and Effects of Mass Media," 36-53; and L. John Martin, "Moving Target," 3:249-294.
[46] . Jouhaud, "Ecriture et action au XVIIe siècle," 42-64; and Mazarinades: la Fronde des mots , which takes up (in the context of the Fronde) some of the themes I address in this study, although not always from the same perspective. See also Jouhaud's "Imprimer l'événement. De La Rochelle à Paris," 381-438.
[47] . Emphasized by Jouhaud in "Ecriture et action," 43-53, and "Imprimer l'événement."
aside, nor can it be easily formulated. Where does persuasion stop and manipulation or coercion begin? We need to study very precisely the strategic purposes of pamphleteering as part of more general attempts to encourage or inhibit specific kinds of organized political action.[48] Pamphlets often targeted well-defined groups for political mobilization. They used specific rhetorical forms in an effort to motivate these groups into action or to placate them into passivity. A more comprehensive view of this partisan, tactical function of pamphlets can be formed by patiently exploring these processes.
The cultural and linguistic turns in the recent historiography of early modern Europe have helped us to view words and actions in the political sphere in more complex and more enlightened ways. A rich variety of methods now pervades the analyses of verbal expression and political behavior. The result does not appear to be a new paradigm that will dominate research, but rather a rich cross-fertilization of ethnographic, interpretive, and sociological techniques for investigating the uses of discourse in historical context. Taken as a whole, these divergent approaches to discourse have greatly broadened our understanding of the "vocabulary of power," for example.[49] Along these lines Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Robert Darnton, and others steeped in the cultural approach to history have sensitized us to the layered complexity of political behavior in Old Regime France.[50] Politics was about government, but it was also about playing games, maintaining one's social status, and representing one's self-image to the world and to God. Sarah Hanley's work on the lit de justice royal ceremony exemplifies the value of the cultural approach to the study of long-term political and constitutional development in early modern France, as does Lynn Hunt's reinterpretation of the political culture of the French Revolution.[51]
Yet with respect to national political conflicts in the prerevolutionary period, the cultural approach has some significant limitations. To the extent that one envisions politics as ritual, one tends to depreciate the strategic importance of discourse. Verbal polemic in the Old Regime was more than a by-product of politics. A primary purpose of public discourse was to generate power by influencing organized violence. However shaped by deep cultural patterns, this was also an arena in which people consciously risked their lives and fortunes for very specific pur-
[48] . See my review of Jouhaud's Mazarinades , in Journal of Modern History 58, no. 4 (1986): 933-935.
[49] . Pocock, Machiavellian Moment ; Foucault, History of Sexuality , 81-102, and Power/Knowledge , 78-145; and Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought .
[50] . Davis, Fiction in the Archives ; Darnton, Cat Massacre ; and Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans .
[51] . Hanley, "Lit de Justice "; and Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class .
poses. Persuading others to act in concert with these purposes was a concrete medium, not merely a dramatization, of this struggle.[52]
This study makes use of several techniques of historical investigation. Classical models of propaganda analysis were employed in the initial stages of research, but none of these provided a comprehensive framework for the project as a whole.[53] The emphasis on "communicative action" and the "public sphere" owes much to the work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.[54] Both the formation and expression of public opinion require the presence of specific institutions that enable discourse. Habermas has emphasized that many of these institutions exist apart from the formal state apparatus and have a history of their own. Habermas's formulation of the problem has helped historians to relate the study of public opinion to changing social and cultural structures beyond the context of representative government. A fundamental thesis of this book is that during the 1614-1617 conflict, France possessed a broadly accessible sphere of public, politically oriented communications. We can clearly identify a public acting and reacting in this sphere to political news and public debate. This process in turn greatly influenced the possibilities for political action on the part of local officials and the royal government. In later periods, notably the 1630s, the public's access to political discourse and information was greatly restricted.
In addition to the pragmatics of power, there is also the important issue of legitimation. The use of pamphlets to help justify the consolidation of royal power over the longer term is explored in the final two chapters of this book. Historians should remain circumspect about public opinion in this context. We can do little to reconstruct empirically the aggregate of individual attitudes in seventeenth-century France, and
[52] . Habermas, "Arendt's Communicative Concept of Power," 3-24.
[53] . Macdougall, Understanding Public Opinion , describes a framework that has been widely used to generate and analyze political propaganda. Cf. Laswell, Propaganda Techniques in World War I . This basic method has been sharpened over the years in three important ways, (1) by more rigorous quantitative analysis, (2) by the addition of a more subtle psychology of motivation, and (3) by more attention to the social and cultural dimensions of "communications." The literature on the media and "verbal behavior" in politics is now vast. Among the studies I found most useful were George, Propaganda Analysis ; Ellul, Propaganda and the Formation of Men's Attitudes ; Meuller, Politics of Communication ; and Pye, "Introduction," 3-23.
[54] . Baker has called Habermas's work "the indispensible analysis" on the subject of the public sphere in "Politics and Public Opinion." He has in mind especially Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit , 42-69, 76-101, 112-127, 278-294. See also Hohendahl, "Jürgen Habermas: 'The Public Sphere' (1964)," 45-47 (followed by a translation of Habermas's own summary of his theory, pp. 49-55); and "Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture," 89-118. Habermas now considers Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit an early work differing markedly from his current philosophical concerns; see Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity , 149-189.
even if we could, many problems would remain. How can the opinions of a public manipulated by those in power be counted as authentic? Can those who were excluded from political life have had "public opinions" in any significant sense? The concept of "the public sphere" holds an important advantage over that of public opinion because it addresses the more concrete framework of communication and patterns of discourse that guided and sanctioned political behavior.
Any investigation of the specific functions of printed propaganda presupposes a method of interpreting texts. My own approach is best characterized as rhetorical. The emphasis is not on style and figures of speech, but on the ways in which pamphlets were designed to influence the perceptions and manipulate the behavior of an audience.[55] My analysis of pamphlet discourse is intended more to reconstruct the communicative relationship between pamphleteers and their readers than to delineate the conceptual universe of popular political thought as a whole. What this means, exactly, will be better illustrated in the chapters that follow. There were in fact many genres of seventeenth-century pamphlets. Harangues, discourses, letters of advice, and other forms of polemic can be classified and analyzed as arguments in the formal sense. These texts can be profitably sifted through the grids of classical rhetorical theory and modern theories of argument.[56] Other pamphlets, often in verse or in a satirical vein, are better classified as literary productions, less calculated to persuade than to entertain. The use of rhetorical and poetic devices in the pamphlets is wide-ranging and skillful, and interpretation requires careful attention to authorial strategies and exact contexts. For help in sorting out such matters, I have often found helpful the work of Louis Marin, Stanley Fish, and other modern theorists.[57]
This book steers away from the analysis of political events as a sequence of development. My primary concern is not with political or ideological change over time, even though I believe pamphlets played an important role in the long-term political development of France. I emphasize the basic point that I believe is essential to further investigation—namely, that the production and dissemination of print were fun-
[55] . The following practical and theoretical works have been especially useful: Brandt, Rhetoric of Argumentation ; Auerbach, Mimesis ; Burke, Counter-Statement and Rhetoric of Motives ; Duncan, Language and Literature in Society ; Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction ; and Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation .
[56] . Perelman, Champ de l'argumentation , and with Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric . See also Toulmin, Uses of Argument . See Angenot, Parole pamphlétaire , 9-14, 28-45, 145ff., for a theoretical differentiation among three basic strategies of persuasion—polemic, invective, and satire. An adaptation of Angenot's categories to seventeenth-century French pamphlets by Walker, Typologische und terminologische , came to my attention too late for integration into this study.
[57] . Marin, Récit est un piège , and Portrait du Roi ; Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts .
damental to the political process in France long before the age of periodicals and newspapers. In a national political struggle to influence the personnel and policies of royal government, publishing strategies and tactics were essential.
In order to clarify how Frenchmen understood the public dimension of their political system, chapter 1 explores the conceptual framework and social context of pamphleteering in the early seventeenth century. Chapter 2 explains more specifically the political dynamics of the 1614-1617 conflict and the strategic role played by pamphlets in the struggle for power. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on production, distribution, and censorship in order to clarify to whom and to what extent pamphlets were accessible. In these two chapters I seek to integrate recent work on the history of the publishing business (distribution, the cost of pamphlets, and the social status of readers) with my own archival study of distribution networks, the mechanics of censorship, and local politics. Chapters 5 and 6 explore from two different perspectives the audience and its reaction to the pamphlet campaigns. Chapter 5 investigates the use of invective and satire for persuasive purposes. Chapter 6 unravels some of the formal arguments about the alleged absolute power of the king and explores how absolutist rhetoric dominated the political arguments in the 1614-1617 pamphlet wars.
The final chapter concludes with an analysis of the long-term significance of the processes at work in the 1614-1617 crisis, and the government's reactions. This part of the argument is obviously haunted by our recognition that something "went wrong" in the Old Regime. Already by the middle of the eighteenth century the philosophes were regularly and openly criticizing the closure of the French political system.[58] With eyes often on England, they were intrigued by a freer press and representative assemblies. The importance of public opinion was asserted with increasing intensity after 1770 and was ultimately translated into the radical demands in 1789 for full freedom of the press and a republican form of government.[59]
In his analysis of the ancien régime several decades after the Revolution of 1789, Alexis de Tocqueville had the insight to focus on some important details of public political participation and to ask why "despotic" centralized power and the elimination of a public political sphere went hand in hand. The answer, he concluded, was that people were so completely prohibited from taking part in politics and from political expres-
[58] . Ozouf, "L'Opinion publique," 424-426.
[59] . "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" (1789), article 11. See also the analysis in Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion."
sion that they hardly had any legitimate political opinions. "In no other country of Europe," wrote Tocqueville, "had all political thought been so thoroughly and for so long stifled as in France: in no other country had the private citizen become so completely out of touch with public affairs and so unused to studying the course of events."[60] Tocqueville felt that without a functioning political sphere in which to "practice" politics, even the elites of the Old Regime could not organize into effective political pressure groups or influence government policy through the mobilization of public opinion.[61] When the effort to restore a truly public political sphere was finally made during the Revolution, the result was so chaotic precisely because the new class of leaders lacked political experience.
This insight into the weaknesses of the public sphere is essential to understanding the Old Regime and must be read back into our interpretation of its political development. There was a public, and it had opinions. But what did it matter? The history of pamphleteering helps explain at least part of the story. For roughly three hundred years pamphlets were a principal vehicle for public political discourse in Old Regime France. Understanding how they functioned, on the one hand, as instruments of manipulation and oppression and, on the other, as a medium of authentic public debate that expanded and contracted under different circumstances should tell us a great deal about political power.
[60] . Tocqueville, Old Regime and the French Revolution , 205.
[61] . Ibid.