Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (review)

After World War II, when a kind of social history largely focused on social structure and related subjects was in its heyday, explanations for the French Revolution virtually ignored ideas and political culture as explanatory factors. No one on this side of the Atlantic did more than Robert Darnton to reverse this general trend. While greatly influenced by social history as history from below, he delved beneath the philosophes to publishers and even “grub street” to find dissident activity that might explain the revolution. He has since been joined by a host of others, most notably Keith Baker and the late François Furet, who re-positioned ideas as important factors. Darnton’s students, most prominently Sarah Maza and David Bell, have focused on a layer of agitation—the legal jockeying in the public sphere—that helped prepare the framework for a revolutionary explosion.

Charles Walton, who first prepared this book as a thesis that Darnton directed, has brought a new perspective to this effort. As discussed below, this work’s most important theme is the struggle over free speech. Although others have discussed the freedom of the press, a considerable time has elapsed since such studies, and Walton’s approach is quite welcome. His basic argument is that because of the importance of honor, the French could not tolerate calumny and defamation. Struggles over press freedom produced powerful debates over speech and writings and their appropriate limits both during the Old Regime and the revolution. In this latter context, limits triumphed, leaving no room for acceptable dissent and critique. Out of this came waves of violent repression, that is the Terror. At times the author seems to want to make this causal chain of repression a contributor to the Terror; while other times, it appears the principal cause.

Clearly, such an interpretation, at the very least, proves quite novel. Class conflict, authoritarian ideas, foreign wars have all been used to explain the Terror, but never, to my knowledge, has the debate over freedom of speech been made so central. The bulk of Walton’s book, however, is not so provocative, as more than half of it simply defines the debate over freedom of the press up to the eve of the French Revolution in May 1789. The Old Regime section is notable for its wide-ranging and interesting discussion of various elements of the Old Regime and pre-revolutionary debates up to 1789 regarding limits on speech, particularly published speech. Charles Walton moves well between various milieux including philosophes, administrators, literary figures, and argues convincingly that a wide consensus prevailed that neither speech nor writing should be entirely free or totally limited. Even the philosophes and the cahiers called for restrictions. Oddly enough, in surveying this enormous field, Walton leaves out the substantial historical study on how these conflicting ideals worked out in practice. In particular, he does not examine the censorship battles between the authorities and authors/publishers of books and periodicals. Nor does he consider the machinations of those publishers crowded against France’s west and northern borders whom both Darnton and Elizabeth Eisenstein have done so much to delineate. The significance and underlying logic of the actions of all these writers and publishers remains untouched. This is unfortunate because they would, I think, overwhelmingly tip the scales in favor of free speech.

The remainder of Walton’s study follows the debate over press freedom well into the revolution. First the author considers the revolutionary debates, arguing the continuing influence of Old Regime roots, as discussions largely followed similar patterns to the pre-revolutionary ones. To be certain, libertarian notions outweighed restrictions in the early years after 1789. Here, again, I believe that a scrutiny of practice might have caused a reconsideration of the debate. Although it is true as Walton states that authorities pursued the inflammatory Jean-Paul Marat...