Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London's French Libellistes, 1758-92 (review)

The careers and networks of a disparate group of blackmailing London-based libelle writers, and their efforts to produce pamphlets sufficiently salacious to warrant a substantial suppression fee from French authorities, are the main focuses of this work. The central thesis is inscribed in opposition to the post-revisionist position of Robert Darnton and his 'pornographic interpretation' —the term is not Darnton's, but that of his critics —of the causes of the French Revolution. Darnton has employed the concept of the 'Grub Street hack' to describe the literary landscape of pre-Revolutionary Paris. This literary type manifested itself in the third wave of Enlightenment authors (after the first of Voltaire and Diderot, the second of Marmontel and Morellet). This third wave included hacks turned revolutionary actors, such as Marat, Brissot and Carra. They produced seditious, salacious or plainly pornographic tracts, which, while lacking a coherent ideology, communicated a revolutionary message: French society was consumed by despotism and rotting from the top down. Much of Burrows's argument attempts to disprove the validity of the 'Grub Street hack' model, and the legitimacy of the 'pornographic interpretation'. First, Burrows attempts to show that London's French libellistes do not correspond to Darnton's literary type. He clearly shows that the authors he studies, including Théveneau de Morande, La Fite de Pelleport and the comtesse de La Motte, 'were not failed writers, frustrated hacks, hate-filled nihilists or Jacobins avant la lettre', but in doing so he adopts a limited and extreme definition of the 'Grub Street hack', a term which, as Darnton understood it, included high-profile authors like Mirabeau or Linguet as well as the pauvres diables whom poverty forced into blackmail and police spying. Burrows is more successful in attacking the 'pornographic interpretation', as he shows the success of the French authorities in stemming the flow of libelles from London. Similarly, we learn that the pornographic pamphlets attacking Marie-Antoinette were only widely available after her execution, thus calling into question their desacralizing effect on the monarchy before 1789. Extending this point, he looks at the most extreme pamphlets coming out of London and argues that these libelles did not tend to desacralize the monarchy by attacking its religious underpinning. He concludes that they did not offer a nihilistic critique of monarchy and rightly questions Darnton's over-reliance on a debatable interpretation of Morande's Gazetier cuirassé (1771). While these blackmail libelles prove his point, the corpus is too small —only six pamphlets —to justify any general conclusions about the influence (or lack thereof) of pornographic literature. When Burrows draws on Darnton's theories, rather than opposing them, his work proves most interesting, as in the final chapter where he implicates the suppression of the works of London libellistes in key cultural developments on both sides of the Channel: in France, the conviction that the old regime was despotic and required reform, and in England, the buttressing of nationalist discourses that celebrated the libertarian aspects of the British Constitution.