- The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon
Viewed from the present cultural moment, when gossipy infotainment crowds out factbased political reporting, Robert Darnton’s book on ‘the art of slander’ brings to light an eighteenth-century subculture that, while relatively unknown, is not unfamiliar. Pursuing his previous work, Darnton returns to Grub Street, this shady subculture of London, Paris, and other European cities, a world composed of indigent hack writers and pamphleteers, speculative and unscrupulous publishers, and readers avid for a slanderous, indecent read. This world is significant, however, not for what it prefigures. Its story reveals ‘a great deal about authorship, the book trade, journalism, public opinion, ideology, and revolution in eighteenth-century France’ (p. 1). Darnton’s book also illustrates the challenges confronting historians seeking to reconstruct this world and determine its causes. Darnton’s object of analysis is the libelle. Staple of the underground book trade, these slanderous writings — such as Le Diable dans un bénitier, from which the book title is drawn — were tendentious, inaccurate, and indecent, as well as hugely popular. Part I provides close readings of four interlocking libels. With insight and vast contextual knowledge, Darnton analyses the workings of these libels, decoding them in the minutest of details. Libels, he claims, allowed readers to make sense of a complex world by reducing it to a simple narrative involving famous people and the clash of powerful personalities. Part II investigates the relation between libels and politics. Slanderous writing was not seditious or crypto-revolutionary, yet it was an effective weapon in power struggles, causing considerable concern in high places. Darnton examines the role of a corrupt police in suppressing libels and preserving entrenched power, showing how some hack writers made their way by working in collusion with the police. Parts III and IV pursue Darnton’s analysis of the textual workings of libels. Designed to bring to light the hidden and the secret, libels encouraged readers to ferret out buried truths and invisible causality. The anecdotal was seen as possessing a certain evidentiary power, and unveiling the hidden, private life of individuals was a way of unmasking desires and self-interest, understood to be powerful motors of events. All libel literature engaged with politics by illustrating how a desacralized monarchy had degenerated into despotism. Playful and sensationalist at mid-century, libel literature would adopt the rhetoric of denunciation, with moralizing slander serving as propaganda in support of the Terror. What Darnton calls ‘the changes that swept through eighteenth-century France’ (p. 257) are unquestionably the backdrop for the story he tells, yet no claim is made that a ‘straight line of causality’ runs from reading libels to the formation of public opinion (the Habermas thesis), from literature to political theory, or from discourse to revolutionary event (the Furet thesis). The Devil in the Holy Water has already [End Page 95] generated yet another ‘Darnton Debate’ (online, on H-France), with other historians calling for a less artful avoidance of questions of historical causality. Nonetheless, along with his previous work, Robert Darnton’s latest book will remain an important vector in understanding the cultural history of the eighteenth century.