Calumny, Culture, Continuity, and Control

Charles Walton's deeply researched work is an extended effort to understand why, after the overthrow of the royal system of press censorship, the French Revolution came to substitute the crime of lèse-majesté for the crime of lèse-nation. Walton is convincing in his argument for seeing profound continuities in French culture's concern with calumny, honor, and the regulation of public morals and expression. He also demonstrates well that the Revolution's rejection of prior restraint in publication did not mean an end to vigorous policing of expression post-publication, His treatment of Old Regime notions of calumny, however, conflates the aristocracy's profound concern with calumny against honor, above all else, and—the definition of calumny that he prefers—the false accusation of an actual crime. Further, when aristocratic honor disappeared legally from the equation—a genuine cultural discontinuity effected by the Revolution—notions of personal superiority, honor, and slight still remained a part of everyone's private and public life. There is a false concreteness here: There never were, in lived lives as opposed to formal theory, three Estates; rather, there was and there remained a great-chain-of-status-and-dignities.