The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (review)

In our age of electronic and digital media, the “news” often consists of sensational stories about elite personalities, which are gleaned from inside sources and recycled across multiple media. In the latest installment of his oeuvre on print culture in eighteenth-century France, however, Robert Darnton reminds us that neither the personalization of politics nor the cut-and-paste method of journalism is new. Devoted to the genre of the libel, this book demonstrates that, long before the advent of YouTube and Twitter, the “art of slander” flourished in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Evoking comparisons with contemporary “news” media, Darnton writes of the vies privées and chroniques scandaleuses of the eighteenth century: “While pretending to inform readers, they attempted to sway them for or against political factions in response to the pressure of events” (435).

Reconstructing the long and colorful history of libel, The Devil in the Holy Water reads in parts like a detective story. But, like Darnton’s other studies of the “literary underground,” it also provides a scholarly explanation of how this type of forbidden literature contributed to the downfall of the Old Regime and the development of a revolutionary political culture. This explanation is based not only on the texts of the libels themselves but on manuscript sources from police and diplomatic archives (some of which have been transcribed on a website companion to the book). Beginning with a close reading of the plots—as well as the frontispieces—of four interlocking libels published between 1771 and 1793, the book then provides a long explication of the political context surrounding the production and diffusion of libelous literature, especially the role of the police in the effort by the French state to contain the effects of such literature on public opinion. Devoting a third section to the basic ingredients of libels, the book concludes with a series of chapters on the relationship between private lives and public affairs from the mid-eighteenth century into the Revolution, arguing that the line between “private” and “public” became blurred in revolutionary political culture, as individual politicians were targeted by both pro- and counter-revolutionary denunciations.

Noting that the word “libel” derives from the Latin libellus, meaning “small book,” Darnton traces the origins of the genre back to classic authors such as Aretino and Procopius. Initially linked to academic disputations, the libel developed as a genre during the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the court intrigues of the seventeenth. But its heyday came in the Age of Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, a libel was defined not so much by its size or typography but by its content, signified in the title. Advertising itself with words such as “private,” “secret,” “spy,” “correspondence,” or “chronicle,” a libel was characterized by a personal attack on the honor and reputation of an (usually elite or “grand”) individual. Such an attack, which often took the form of a puzzle, rebus, or roman à clef, was constructed in a process of bricolage from three basic ingredients: anecdotes, portraits, and “news.” A “supremely flexible medium,” the libel was gleaned from a variety of oral, written, and printed sources (268). In a particularly good chapter on “Anecdotes,” Darnton explains how this ingredient of the libel, which in the eighteenth century meant a secret story, was derived from oral rumors, which were turned into scribbled paragraphs, then circulated as manuscript newsletters (nouvelles à la main), cut and pasted into printed libels, and in turn plagiarized by each other. This chapter, along with the following ones on “Portraits” and “News,” advances our understanding of the process of authorship in eighteenth-century France.

As Darnton illustrates in delicious detail, libels were authored mainly by the dregs of Grub Street, in Paris, London, and other capitals of the Enlightenmentera literary underground. Arguing that these hack writers foreshadowed more modern bohemian authors, he devotes a chapter to a wonderful...