FRAGILE

LIVES
Violence, Power and Solidarity
in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Arlette Farge
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/fragilelivesviolOOOOfarg
Harvard Historical Studies, 113
 Fragile Lives
Violence, Power and Solidarity
Eighteenth-Century Paris

Arlette Farge

Translated by Carol Shelton

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
1993
This English translation (G) Polity Press 1993
All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper
10 987654321

First published in France as La vie fragile © Hachette 1986

Published under the auspices of the Department of History from

the income of the Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest, Robert Fouis
Stroock Fund, and Henry Warren Torrey Fund

Fibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farge, Arlette.
[Vie fragile. English]
Fragile lives : violence, power and solidarity in eighteenth-
century Paris / Arlette Farge : translated by Carol Shelton,
p. cm. — (Harvard historical studies : 113)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-31637-1 (cloth). — ISBN 0-674-31638-X (paper)
1. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—18th century.
I. Title. II. Series: Harvard historical studies : v. 113.
DC715.F3713 1993
944'.36—dc20 93-16756
CIP
 Contents

Introduction 1

PART I FEELINGS AND METAMORPHOSES 7

1 Space and Ways of Life 9

2 Girls for the Marrying 21
3 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 26
4 Concerning Parents and Children 42
5 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 73
‘Foolish love’ 73
The dispute 83

PART II WORK AND ITS MARGINS 101

6 In the Workshop 104

7 At the Workshop Door 131

PART III CROWDS 169

8 Invitations to the Crowds 173

Scenario 177
When the Dauphin decided to marry Marie-Antoinette 204
9 The Crowds amongst Themselves 226
10 The Crowds in Turmoil 256

Conclusion 284
Notes 287
Glossary 303
Select Bibliography 304
Index 311
‘
 Introduction

This book was born out of the archives - not from a set of documents,
nor from chronicles, memoirs, novels or treatises of a judicial, administra¬
tive or literary nature. No, none of these.
It came quite simply from the judicial archives - the odd scrap, snatch
of a phrase, fragments of lives from that vast repository of once-pronounced
words that constitute the archives - words emerging from the darkness
and depths of three successive night-times: of time and oblivion; of the
wretched and unfortunate; and last (and most impenetrable for our own
stubborn minds), the night of guilt and its grip. Such are the archives,
or as Michel Foucault has put it: ‘Lives of a few brief lines or pages; mis¬
fortunes and mishaps without number, all bundled together in a handful of
words ... Inglorious lives put to rest in the few brief lines that brought
them down.’1
Historians who find themselves caught up with original sources become
so fascinated by the archives that involvement with them makes it almost
impossible to avoid self-justification through them or to resist the tempta¬
tion to suppress any doubts these might cast on their own perceptions and
systems of rationality or those of others. The impact the archives have
on the historian (scarcely ever recognized explicitly) sometimes has the
effect of actually denying their value. Fine though they might be, they
are nonetheless full of pitfalls, and the corollary of their beauty is their
deceptiveness. Any historian taking them on board cannot but be wary of
the improbable outlines of the images they conceal.
This ambiguous relationship with the archives, resulting from various
movements and ideological trends, has marked the course and develop¬
ment of historical writing over a long period. That is to say, one could, if
one so chose, study recent trends in historical writing by means of an
analysis of the successive tensions that history has created between itself
2 Introduction

and the archives. It was, for instance, in the hope of breaking free from the
imperialism of a certain type of social and economic history, as well as
from the somewhat tedious history of ideas, that the history of mentalities
came into being.
Fundamental to this approach was the conviction that the everyday
could be discovered in whatever one happened to glean from the indivi¬
dual subjects of history; that priority should be given to sources which
hitherto had not been considered as such; and that one should no longer
work on the ‘great’ figures and ‘grand’ events of history, but with the odd
word here and there’.2 Beliefs, emotions, the irrational and the marginal
came along to lend colour to a view of the world which had hitherto been
portrayed solely through the ideas of the great and mighty. An average
man was constructed who was supposedly representative of a certain type
of society; and the metaphors used for this discovery were those of the
apparent and the visible, of light and dark. The archives reigned supreme.
But then our sight became blurred and our spirits recoiled before this
over-generalized elaboration of the ordinary, everyday man as the typical
portrait of a nation or epoch, and hence the arrival on the scene of the
extreme, the atypical and the extraordinary which became in their turn
some of the standards by which social complexities might be assessed.
And once again in order that the historian’s irrepressible urge to avoid
wandering too far afield from the paths of explanation might be respected,
there arose the notion of the ‘exceptional normal’,3 which is so admirably
illustrated by the Italian school of microstoria. Parallel with this develop¬
ment came the rise of ‘case-studies’, under the growing influence of
anthropology and its particular ability to let the detail speak.
To provide a fuller account of the many and various inflexions of
history would obviously require a much more detailed explanation; at the
present time there seems to be a certain weariness with detail, perhaps
from fear of losing the thread of the great historical adventure as a result
of the tenacious pursuit of it or of losing sight of the solid bones of a past
which must be retained at all costs, lest by some misfortune the future
should slip through one’s fingers (which would be quite unreasonable).
There is, therefore, a steady if barely perceptible return to what one
might call more structured horizons, where once again the important task
is the creation of grand theses and syntheses and the attribution of global
explanations to a past which one would dearly love to see firmly within
the grasp of one’s senses. It is as though one needed to rediscover some
previous history of ideas with a reassuring profile but with its features all
fresh and rejuvenated thanks to all the recent ‘minimal’ and ‘minuscule’
work that has been carried out. And thus those sites which had barely
been opened up a few years ago are being closed, and rumour has it that
history is elsewhere and that work on them is no longer fashionable.
 Introduction 3

In the course of these developments, however, two questions concerning

the connections with the archives remain unanswered.
First, does the seductive influence of the archives risk falsifying or
distorting the object being studied; and might not the emotional and
aesthetic link with these once buried words be itself a handicap or a
rejection of reality, or prove too facile and ambiguous a means of entering
into a discourse with history?
Second, is there a tendency to attribute overmuch meaning to these
archives, emerging as they do from silence; and rather than a reflection of
the real, might they not in fact be the oasis for satisfying our own thirst to
see the poor and wretched spring to life? And might not one particular or
exceptional document risk ruining the source work by earning the label of
miserabihsme?
I have been in constant dialogue with these two questions (archives as
seductress and archives as deceptive mirror of reality) for several years. I
have chosen to work only from judicial archives, and my reading of
popular Parisian society in the eighteenth century is based on these. The
archives are the motivation for my practice and work as a historian. They
are the grain which I sift for form and meaning. It is through them that I
have met Robert Mandrou, Philippe Aries and Michel Foucault, and it is
thanks to them that I can today attempt a reply to the two questions
formulated above.4

In the discipline of history, anything in the way of feeling or emotion is

suspect; and in all fairness it is a mistrust that is well founded, for to it we
owe the avoidance of many a deadend, particularly when identification
and personal projection lead to embarrassing anachronisms.
Yet it is impossible to avoid entering the realm of aesthetics and
emotion, given the kind of documents which have been discovered. The
fine sand of history is made up of poor and lowly lives, impoverished and
tragic existences, and of mean, contemptible and lacklustre personalities;
they constitute its fragile yet essential thread. Surfacing as they do from
oblivion, they remain at a distance from literature because they are stuck
awkwardly in the cramped forms of the judicial apparatus. They are
fragmentary lives because they were broken, or quite simply interrupted
one day under interrogation. Coming into contact with them arouses
emotion although it is not quite clear why. Perhaps it is because they failed
in this way that these lives give the impression of possibilities or perhaps it
is because they are so strange and distant that they can seem so close.
Emotion. The word is out! It is a word which is almost taboo for
anyone who professes to be a student of social matters. But as I under¬
stand it, emotion is not, as is commonly believed, an exclusion of reason
nor a kind of sugary sentimentality to be used for coating over whatever
4 Introduction

sections of reality it encounters with a uniform gloss. On the contrary it is

one of the main supports for the process of research and understanding;
and it is through the breach opened up between oneself and the object
under consideration that enquiry enters in. Emotion does not necessarily
engender contemplation nor oblation; it is also the ardour and assiduity
required for understanding the violence and weakness of things and the
mediocrity and extraordinariness of situations; it is also an encounter with
the unfamiliar as well as a means of allowing oneself to be affected by
what one already knew.
Thus if we can agree that emotion requires our acknowledgement (itself
an achievement) then the emotional and the aesthetic can be seen dif¬
ferently, and are no longer what historians, quite rightly, prefer they
should not be. For emotion is not fusion between oneself and the archives
or the annihilation of all capacity to think in concrete terms, but rather the
development of a reciprocity with the object, by which access is given to
meaning. Emotion opens up into an attitude which is proactive rather than
passive, allowing one to lay hold of the written word in order to take it,
not as the result of research, but as a means of apprehending social life
and thought. It can project the receptive person beyond his or her own
preferences and ideologies, received thinking and stereotypes, and its
surprises can be disturbing (surprise or fright, disgust or fear always take
one outside oneself). We might find some of our usual habits coming
unstuck as we encounter some of the rather strange characters reconstituted
from the archives. The emotions which arise from such discoveries might
lead us along uncertain paths which call on an unknown part of ourselves,
which is a far cry from the ‘mollification’ which is so often described and
decried. Emotion is, in fact, animating!

The archives are not precise, in the sense that one would understand the
science of mathematics, for example; nor do they reveal the secret source
where the organization of the truth might reside. Nor are they any more
attractive for being tragic (evoking as they do, those chaotic lives in which
frenzy, wickedness and cunning combine with the pitiful, to reveal more
often than not, incompetence, insignificance and petty malice rather than
solemn heroism). There is nothing sublime about the archives, or if there
is, then it is only in the sense that each one of us is no more nor less
sublime (no more than Christine V and no less than Cartouche).
Putting on stage a few poor bit players might upset some of our
emotions; for it means dwelling a while on what is small or modest,
imperfect or vile, in order to consider its meaning and make sense of it.
Nor does the meaning deliver itself up immediately. The judicial
archives, for example, are entirely bound up within the judicial and police
systems of the eighteenth century which produced and managed them.
What they put on view results from their origins and they exist only
 Introduction 5

because a certain exercise of power brought them into being. They thus
allow us to see the manner in which personal and collective behaviour
overlapped and interlocked for better or for worse in the very conditions
formulated by the authorities themselves. They are not ‘reality’, but at
every step of the way, they demonstrate a particular type of adjustment to
certain forms of coercion or to norms which were either imposed or
internalized. This adjustment, consisting of words, deeds and cries of
hope or defiance, is the motive force of historical reflection and the instru¬
ment for considering the period and its social groups. This obligatory
coexistence between the State and private lives conceals shattered
figures whose outlines we may be able to perceive.
In fact, one may go even further: a single isolated document from the
archives has all the beauty of rarity — so rare in fact that there is a
tendency to attribute overmuch meaning to it. But it is not, in fact, the
word of the people nor of the poor. It defies and flies in the face of
scholarly argument and discourse and, should one read it thoroughly, it
shatters received opinion. Here, in support of my case, I take up once
again one of the approaches of J. Ranciere in his book La Nuit des
proletaires which sees more ‘sophistication’ in the archives than is cus¬
tomarily admitted.
The argument is that what is portrayed in the archives is in itself
evidence of an entrenched ‘need for the real’; (and there is certainly no
shortage of concerned prose on the subject offering us a picture of popular
misery and naivety which in itself contains traces of an imaginary or
perceived landscape and thus a rejection of the everyday). These traces are
worth pursuing and considering if we ourselves are to avoid becoming
stuck in well-worn paths or predetermined schemas.
It is possible that the archives may be a rejection of the meaning we
seek to attribute in advance to events and a shift away from any attempts
at global theorizing. For me, they are the emergence of existences which
offer our knowledge an extra bonus in as much as one is prepared to
admit the possibility of transforming the accepted rules of social evolution.
The archives are always explosive, and their meaning is never grasped once
and for all. In this case, they are neither faithful to reality nor totally
representative of it; but they play their part in this reality, offering dif¬
ferences and alternatives to other possible statements. They are not the
truth but the beginnings of a truth and an eruption of meaning maintain¬
ing the greatest possible number of connections with reality. The archives
present the exceptional and never the normal; in an excess of normality or
lack of it we may discover bits of reality which otherwise might be lost to
us in the overworked terrain of our knowledge.
I also like to think of the archives as an eruption; because eruption
suggests an attack, an incursion, or a sudden and unexpected entry or
invasion; for it is in this way that the archives come into their own. They
6 Introduction

burst bounds, break out, overflow. They are caprice, whim, tragedy -
neither endorsing nor affirming. They neither summarize nor smoothe
over conflict or tension. They ruffle the feathers of the real with their
inopportune sorties and sallies. From this the historian must tease both
sense and nonsense and, from all these loose ends, contradictions and
observations, knit together a text — a rugged text - in which each incident
is presented in its own terms.

In my study of popular Parisian behaviour in the eighteenth century, I

am reconstituting shapes and forms and sketching outlines from minute
accounts or forgotten conflicts. I am putting on view pictures from the past
not for the love of drawing (or the picture itself) nor for the sake of the
description, but because it is through these that one is able to follow men
and womp as they grapple with the whole of the social scene. We see
them face to face with each other - choosing or encountering one another;
meeting and parting; living with their children and their neighbourhood.
And then, faced with work in the workshop or factory, we see them
forming themselves into associations in order to improve their lot or
finding themselves controlled and dominated by the utopian thinking
of the authorities and the police, who were themselves also known to
entertain conflicting dreams and aspirations in which individuality and
awareness of self played their part. And finally, we see them in the face of
collective events — the street spectacles and displays of power by the
authorities of either a festive or a repressive nature, revealing beneath their
apparent impulsiveness and impetuosity, the rules of their rationality or
modes of thought.
From these sketches there emerges a picture of precariousness and
strength along with a determination not to allow oneself to be abused or
sold short. In Paris everything lived, moved and died in endless succession
before the eyes of everyone else in an open space where one’s neighbour,
whether friend or foe, was the permanent witness to oneself. Emerging
from the physical promiscuity, the inevitable sharing of fear and want, the
difficult separation between public and private life, there is a profile of
men and women stubbornly pursuing their way.
In these fragments clipped from their lives, disruption scarcely conceals
their wrath and determination; and behind the written words - sometimes
false, unjust or outrageous — there are traces of decisive encounters: those
between men and women according to the roles assigned them by their
sex; those made to accommodate the social and economic conditions
imposed on them; and those gatherings together as a crowd, when in their
own way they sought the greatest possible proximity with the justice of
things.
It is of these encounters that I have attempted a considered account.
 Part I
Feelings and Metamorphoses
 1
Space and Ways of Life

The apartment building in the Quinze-Vingts market, parish of Saint-

Roch, looks like every other apartment building in Paris - a profusion of
shops and workrooms intersected by passages and alley-ways and packed
to the roof with lodgings and dormitories.1 Laying bare its secret places
and displaying its wounds, it offers scant refuge but none the less affords
some sleep and rest of a kind, albeit without comfort and with practically
no privacy.2
This damp anthill of a place is populated from top to bottom, not even
the smallest space remaining unused. On the ground floor Widow Cochard
has a struggle to keep her cod dry on account of the water dripping down
the walls; but this has allowed the old Rambure woman to set up trade in
herbs and chicory. What surplus there is can be sold each morning on the
market square; and in the butcher’s shop the stalls hardly leave enough
room for the boys and journeymen who sleep on the wooden trestles once
their day’s work is over.
In the back room of a poultry shop overlooking the courtyard, there are
turkeys roasting until dawn, ready for sale the next morning; and through
the open windows of the carpenter’s workshop come the sounds of the
master joiner encouraging his two apprentices to get on with their planing
instead of waving to customers and calling to the lads across the way. The
flat above them belongs to Mme Simonne. She sells cooked meats made
from scraps left over from the plates of the rich which she keeps in huge
earthenware bowls prior to selling them off on her market stall. This she
guards jealously, as it is in such an enviable position; she has even been
known to resort to blows to defend it from street sellers who had risen
early and beaten her to it.
Her bedroom door opens onto the unlit hovel which is the home of a
coachman and his wife, a washerwoman. There are a lot of washerwomen
10 Feelings and Metamorphoses

living in this building, where the smell of dirty washing is barely dis¬
tinguishable from the river water brought up from the Seine each morning
by watercarriers, who keep the butts on each floor well filled. Through
two half-open doors, trails of washing ignore the damp and steal onto the
landing in a bid to get dry. Down below in the passageway, next to the
herbalist, bundles of linen await delivery that same evening. Windows
steam up, the stairs are slippery and the damp gets into everything. On the
landing, the aroma of roast turkey mingles with the stench of filthy water,
if not with the more pungent reek of dried cod.
On the quarry balcony — a type of verandah running around the inner
courtyard of the building3 - three little boys play quoits in between
errands for their parents. They hardly notice one of the herb-grower’s
servants pestering a little girl who has come up to the pinmaker’s on the
third floor to collect her supply of pins for sale in the street.4 Noise! Noise
everywhere — and eyes - following you from window to door, landing
to passageway. The dressmaker from the fourth floor decides to take
advantage of the better light in the courtyard and do some finishing-off on
the pavement. The journeymen joiners give her the usual chat but she’s
neither young nor old enough to mind.
Suddenly, everything stops. Between door and landing of the third floor
an argument breaks out involving the seamstress and the men billeted
beneath the roof. It’s the fourth time in two days that they’ve bawled
insults and abuse at one another.5 Three gent’s handkerchieves have
apparently gone missing and the seamstress seems in a peculiar hurry to
embroider some rather similar-looking items. Sitting in front of her door,
she discreetly smuggles the linen between her legs and gathers it up under
her apron. Her neighbour from the room opposite comes to her rescue; she
is a fishwife, hot-tempered and loud-mouthed.
Everyone has stopped work. Axes stand ready, needles poised mid-air,
wash dollies in hand. Everyone is waiting to see what will happen. The
racket grows louder - the joiner’s wife dashes upstairs four at a time,
hurriedly unfastening her apron, which she brandishes at the men. They
can’t make out whether she is angry or joking, which annoys them even
more. The youngest one grabs hold of the seamstress by her lawn bonnet.
She loses her balance, trips on the stairs and falls flat in the middle of the
children’s game. Then all at once, for whatever reason — fear of going too
far, or having to summon help yet again, or of being hauled up once more
before the police commissioner whose premises are close by,6 everything
calms down. Everyone carries on as before, coming and going as normal.
It was just another one of those unfortunate incidents.
The evening is drawing in now and is only likely to be disturbed by the
nightly flight of young Gervais, a slender young lad of 11, employed in the
master locksmith’s shop nearby. Every single night the locksmith’s wife
 Space and Ways of Life 11

and the most senior journeyman chase after him to get him to clear up the
workshop, and every single night he clears off, as crafty as a cat, cutting
across lodgings and passageways in one bound, knowing the building
inside out, as he does. He finally comes to a halt at the top of the loft,
where he presses his nose to the window and pronounces on all and
sundry, lord of all he surveys.

Dark silhouettes and everyday scenes. The customary restless activity of a

building which combined within its walls the hours of work and time at
home, daily contact and petty squabbles, chit-chat and callousness. What
it amounted to was having to live in full view of someone else’s gaze, that
ever-present visitor whose intervention shaped lives and transformed them.
One life interfered with another, and at times the two became merged. The
apartment building was a living person and, along with all the others, it
made up the district.
There were 20 districts in Paris and 48 commissioners to keep an eye on
them, closely monitored and under the strict supervision of the Lieutenant-
General of Police. They were all different and, as Lenoir wrote in his
‘Memoires’: ‘In each part of this city, there was a marked difference in the
customs and way of life.' Each district afforded an informed dialogue
with the police and provided an invaluable frame of reference for its
inhabitants.
The police commissioner, who was regularly in receipt of complaints,
advice, letters and requests, tested its pulse from day to day, and as agent
of calm, moderation, provocation and consolidation, he lived within the
rhythm of its minor hiccups or its serious traumas. It was his job to
keep it informed, running smoothly and in decent shape. He talked and
wrote about it as he would a person, and whenever the Lieutenant of
Police consulted him on a serious matter affecting the district, he used a
vocabulary which could equally well have applied to a harmless, yet
uncontrollable animal. The commissioner’s infinite capacity to ‘hear’ the
district was, without doubt, an altogether indispensable yardstick for the
Lieutenant-General of Police.
The district was a well-defined territory in which everyone found his or
her place in relation to a neighbour or to someone else - someone in such
and such a trade, for instance, or serving in this or that shop, or standing
anxiously at a certain place in the main concourse to be sure of keeping
a ‘business’ pitch which was, in effect, a livelihood. The channels of
information traceable from housemaid to journeyman, from servant to
street seller, were fluid and imprecise - having all the hallmarks, in a word,
of hearsay.
As well as an area, the district was a sounding board, a kind of living
entity reacting to events and to the good and bad fortune of its people, a
12 Feelings and Metamorphoses

background presence throughout testimonies and interrogations. It was

always a good sign to be known in one’s area, but on the other hand it did
no good to be seen as a bit of an oddity or a layabout, and worse still, to
upset the community. It received both people and their situations, weighed
up reputations and transmitted them. It was the director of a complicated
game with serious consequences for those who lost their way. An actor
of exemplary ability, it was at once faceless and multiform, and while
lacking any consistency other than geographic, it nevertheless extended
its influence daily. It held no civil or judicial authority, yet at the same
time possessed both. It was also an impressive transmitter, imparting its
wisdom at the point between action and assimilation — incidents later
diagnosed by the police and the State as feverish or mad, docile or passive,
innocent or loyal.
Nothing of what happened here was insignificant, either for the police
or for its inhabitants. If we take a closer look at some of these incidents we
shall hopefully gain a better understanding of the position it held, and of
the methods used to interpret and ultimately contain it.

All the basic aspects of life were under police supervision. Traffic and
commerce, amongst other things, had to flow freely, the collection of
refuse needed monitoring, and the rules applying to cabarets* and pro¬
prietors of furnished lettings had to be respected. The list was obviously
endless, but the chief fear of the Lieutenant-General of Police never varied:
should he do his utmost (or do nothing) to prevent the spread of rumours
in the various districts?
The whole subject of ‘weight’, for instance, was a notorious sore point
which could quite often lead to litigation, as it was here that fraud,
trafficking and injustice kept constant company, bringing in their wake
the wrath of the public who were naturally concerned about their food
supplies.9
In 1766 the Lieutenant-General of Police, Sartine, wrote hastily to
his commissioners that there had been a wave of public discontent over
meat which had been badly bled, as well as inaccurate measures and the
resulting unfair prices. He wrote:

On my instructions police inspectors are to monitor the purveyance

of meat in their districts. However, this precautionary measure is not
sufficient in itself, and I would be most obliged to Your Good Selves if
you could occasionally look into the matter by checking with your police
courts that weights and measures are accurate and that there are no
monopolies which I ought to clamp down on.10

But in spite of these precautions the price of meat continued to rise at an

alarming rate and two years later complaints were clearly audible. This
 Space and Ways of Life 13

time Sartine wanted everything under control, not just the complaints, but
also the comments on everyone’s lips which were lending a worrying tone
to the district. He exclaims:

The price of meat is going up and they have the audacity to inform the
public that it is with my approval. As this is most certainly not the case, I
would be most grateful if you would keep me informed of any complaints
which might be referred to you concerning this matter of price rises as well
as any mistaken assumptions held by the butchers, their stallholders or their
errand boys.11

The hunt for loose talk, comment and rumour was one of the essential
preoccupations of the government of the capital. The attachment of so
much importance to this activity, as in the planting of monches12 and
official observers whose job it was to ‘seize’ anything said in public
places,1' shows well enough how useful a tool the spoken word was for
the police. It was in fact a tide to be harnessed and stemmed. Such an
attitude to what one might call gossip is hardly surprising when one
considers that its importance in the eyes of those responsible for its
circulation was enhanced in proportion to the vigour of the police in
pursuing it. This interaction resulted in a never-ending game of elaboration
and embellishment between the ‘talking’ public on the one hand, whose
verbal communication was considered a highly prized instrument, and the
police on the other hand, whose responsibility it was to gather the gossip,
the more effectively to contain it. Neighbourhood gossip was not just a
product of the district, it was also the fruit of whatever the circumstances,
the inhabitants or the police chose to make it. It was a sophisticated
product which cannot be attributed entirely to the people, as though they
alone were responsible for secreting, nurturing and manipulating it, for by
gathering the gossip, the police were actively involved in its generation, a
parameter well worth remembering.
This constant ebb and flow of words affected everyone in the
neighbourhood but they knew how to deal with it. There was nothing
more powerful, for instance, than those exchanges of words between
neighbours, which could sometimes be taken as veritable declarations of
war, and where even a loose word might result in an arrest or a summons
to appear before the commissioner.
Martin Triollet (a humorous man as his cross-examination indicates),
knew this only too well. In 1750 he was accused of saying to a neighbour
who was out of work and bemoaning his lot, ‘Go and beat up the Provost
or, better still, grab hold of some children. You should be able to make a
living then.’ He was referring to the abduction of children in the very
middle of Paris. He chose his words badly, however, and was immediately
14 Feelings and Metamorphoses

suspected of abducting children himself; his sarcastic comments and witty

remarks were quickly taken as proof of his own illicit activity. Under
interrogation, he reacted strongly to the distortion of his words and
pointed out that ‘he knew very well that he had enemies who wanted him
out of the way’;14 but he added that ‘as the Good Lord had also had them,
he knew he must be patient’.
There is no doubt that patience in the face of the rapid spread of gossip
is wisdom of a kind. Some words are akin to waves. They swell, unfurl,
then break and die, leaving in their wake a brief moment of respite.
The district did not live by words alone, however. It lived to the rhythm
of its own internal events, which held it in their sway and affected it more
or less seriously. These ranged all the way from schoolboy japes to serious
scandal, by way of insulting behaviour towards prostitutes. Whatever it
might be, it was all an integral part of the ‘decor’ which lent each district
its own particular features.
Causing a scandal was good enough reason for the police to intervene
and was the motive usually cited for putting a stop to situations deemed
potentially harmful to the social climate. The ‘care’15 of the district
required the commissioners to deal with any problems in danger of stirring
up public opinion. Subsequently a part of their time was devoted to ‘the
friendly resolution of quarrels and disputes within the walls of their
hotels'}6 If this should fail, the parties concerned were to be ‘forbidden
from further insulting and abusing one another and then sent back to settle
things as best they might’.17
The task was of the essence — scandal and public order were mutual
enemies! ‘Whether scandal is the result of fact or fabrication, it stirs up
such ferment amongst citizens as to be detrimental to their peace of
mind.’18 It couldn’t be clearer. If anyone was petitioning for the imprison¬
ment of someone whose behaviour was thought to be outrageous and
unacceptable, the commissioner would summon that person to his hotel-,
and he would talk with the complainant. Occasionally he would summon
whoever was at the root of the scandal, attempt to hear one or two
witnesses and test the pulse of the neighbourhood with the help of a few
observers. Then he would calm things down, discuss, moderate, chide and
scold and finally send off a report to the Lieutenant-General of Police.19 In
this, he would state quite clearly which of the parties, if any, he thought
enjoyed a good reputation, which would obviously influence the decision.
The important thing about this endearing little procedure was basically
the reputation of the district, which brought it either peace and stability
or ferment. Nor was the parish priest inactive in such matters. It was
not uncommon for him to alert the commissioner to facts which he con¬
sidered intolerable and which were thus ruining good relations within his
district.
 Space and Ways of Life 15
In 1777 the priest of the lie Saint-Louis wrote to Commissioner Thierry
urging him to take a firm hand in the following matter:

Sir: Marie Anne Bassin, fruiterer, Rue des Deux Ponts, lie Saint-Louis, is
the wife of Marie Marc Plombier who lives some 20 leagues from Paris
as the result of a banishment order carrying the death penalty to which
he was condemned ten or twelve years ago for stealing lead. From the
moment her husband left, this brazen woman has lived openly in the
most shocking state of moral dereliction, and in particular for the last
five years, with Etienne Chair. He is a Protestant and former wine
merchant’s assistant. Now married and an established wine vendor
himself, he has premises next to the aforementioned fruiterer. By their
mutual consent, she has had three children by him in three years, in full
public light and knowledge. First, a boy, 24 January 1770, another boy
22 November 1771 and a girl 30 June 1773. She has two others by one
or two different fathers and one of these children is at La Pitie.20 The
commissioners’ registers are full of such children, as we know. More¬
over, her house is used as an address for prostitutes and her behaviour is
upsetting everyone in her district and the rest of the ‘He’ on account of
the widespread publicity given to her disorderly conduct. You must
impose your authority.21

The ‘He’, it would appear, was in disarray and her disorderly behaviour
was attracting widespread publicity. What was more, the man was a
Protestant and the children were born and bred ‘in full public light and
knowledge’. The community was outraged, things had come to a head and
everyone was of the same mind — it was time to intervene! But it was the
commissioner who had the final say and Thierry seemed not to share the
view that the He Saint-Louis was at boiling point. He replied laconically,
‘Give her a month to mend her ways for she has a business to conduct and
besides, she is the main tenant in the building where she lives.’ (Being in
charge of a block of flats was no mean thing, of course, and in any case,
most things work out in time ...).
Although it was primarily an ‘oral’ society, the spread of scandal was
not always restricted to word of mouth and it did sometimes arise in
written form as in the case of defamatory posters, for instance, which were
another source of anger and indignation. Usually written in an unpractised
hand and more often than not phonetically, they were glued hastily to the
doors of houses. Here are two such anonymous and defamatory posters,
placed on the walls of the He Saint-Louis in 1763 (the second in February):

Monsieur Barbot, Deliverer of Infants, Rue Gratier has got Peras the
young surgeon’s apprentice living round his place and this lousy
debaucher has been living for some time with the wife of Cayou the
16 Feelings and Metamorphoses

master mason’s son in the same street and they’re always together night
and day and Jannot Cayou puts up with it and one of them ought to be
put away and the other one sent off to the workhouse but what else can
you expect from a rascal like this who has seen both his parents on the
gallows at the Place de Greve, and the rest of them on the run for the
same thing.22

Lamare, joiner, Rue St Louis, is a whoremonger and he’s had the pox
three times. He’s got the wife of a poor serving man for his tart and he’s
given her the clap and her husband as well. The husband caught them
both at it and got the guard to take them up before a commissioner.
Now that the woman’s at the workhouse, he’s got some other woman in
to have some fun with. He’s got Julienne Rousselot acting as his Madam.
It’s my pleasure to inform the public so that they may know that the
women and girls going into that house are low-life.23

Posters and comments. All part of neighbourhood life, that intimidat¬

ing shadow, crossroads of reputations, and manufacturer of honour or
disgrace, which reared itself up like a person to be reckoned with. It was
called as witness, defied or ignored, but in a serious conflict such as
stoppage of work or a skirmish on the arrest of a beggar, for example,
it would be sought after and would emerge in great numbers and in
full cry. In a punch-up it would have already sorted out the rights and
wrongs of the matter well before the arrival of the guard; it would also
have separated the combatants, assessed the blame or further inflamed
the fighting. The noise of the crowd would determine the attitude of the
police, who themselves were torn between the need to make concessions or
to reprimand what they referred to as ‘la canaille’.24

Observed and captured in its secret moods and moments, spied on when
angry, the district was also invited by order of police to rejoice, dance and
pray to the rhythm of a specific sequence of events. Every year, for
instance, the commissioners were obliged to pay particular attention in
their districts to the celebrations associated with the festivals of Lent and
Corpus Christi. As Berryer, Lieutenant-General of Police, wrote on 1 June
1757:

Commissioners must see that booths and stalls are inspected and make
sure that any that are unsafe are taken down. There is to be appropriate
policing of all streets in the district where the procession of the Blessed
Sacrament is to pass. In the event of any resistance to your instructions,
the offenders are to be referred to me for dealing with in accordance
with your recommendations. Would you also inform me of any gaps
in the cobbles so that I can have them repaired. With regard to the
temporary altars in each district, I have instructed the police architect
 Space and Ways of Life 17
to examine them. As far as the ambassadors of Protestant states are
concerned, the police will patrol the forecourt of their residences and
notify them in advance.25

The regulations relating to the Lent period were renewed each year to
make sure that the use of fat in each inn and cabaret was respected and
police inspectors were instructed to pass the names of offenders to the
commissioners for immediate entry on their records; from there they
would be reported to the Lieutenant-General of Police.
The festivals of patron saints, such as Sainte Genevieve, also gave rise to
the same punctilious regimentation; and there were also other occasions
when the participation of each district was requisitioned. These were the
royal victories, those happiest of occasions for the King’s troops. During
the period July 1756 to March 1763, for example, Commissioner Thierry
was called upon seven times to organize illuminations and the singing of
the Te Deum on the occasion of military exploits:

24 July 1756. Monsieur is instructed to organize illuminations for

tomorrow when the Te Deum will be sung in acts of thanksgiving for the
capture of the island of Minorca and Fort Saint-Philippe. I enclose copies
of my instructions which are to be posted throughout Paris.26

France was at war. England, fearing that France might bring down the
House of Austria, thus allowing her to turn her sights on the colonial
interest, was attempting a series of alliances in Europe. Although France
naturally wanted to prevent this, it would have meant the surrender of her
own hegemony in Europe. However, the anti-Austrian faction at court,
manipulated by the military interests of the nobility, plunged France into a
series of harmful wars. Beaten in Europe and outclassed by a superior
British navy, France lost Canada in 1760 and England went on snatching
the principal colonial possessions of both France and Spain up until 1763.
A peace treaty was signed in 1763 and England, now mistress of the seas,
kept control of Canada but handed back other territories.
This period of military setbacks was thus punctuated by the occasional
French victory which the monarchy obviously wanted to make a great
show of. On 13 August 1757 it was a victory obtained with the troops of
the Empress of Hungary and then on 27 September 1758, Commissioner
Thierry was instructed to arrange celebrations in his district in honour of
victories in Canada and a month later for the triumph at Lutzerberg and
then another on 28 April 1759 at Bergen. For the ratification of the peace
treaty on 12 March 1763, the preparations were to be on an even grander
scale. It would be announced by cannon and rocket fire and there were
to be food distributions in each district in anticipation of the full-scale
18 Feelings and Metamorphoses

festivities on the publication of the peace treaty, so that on this occasion, it

was not necessary to organize illuminations.
Royal occasions, whether sad or happy, were also celebrated and each
district was cordially expected to participate. Thus, on 10 October 1757, it
was: Rejoice! The birth of a son to the Dauphine! And then later on there
was the recovery of the King from illness. In 1757 regular prayers were
requested for the exorcism of the evil incurred by Damiens’s assassination
attempt against Louis XV. The preparations for the execution of the
regicide were on a scale hitherto unprecedented. Then, in June 1763, no
doubt on account of the signing of the peace treaty, a statue erected to
Louis XV had to be inaugurated. Thierry received a long list containing
advice on procedure and protocol from Sartine, the then Lieutenant of
Police: bread and meat were to be distributed on every square and the
state of the streets was to be inspected; arrangements were to be made for
firework displays; bands were to play on the public squares (with a
particularly impressive one at the Place de Greve); shops were to close;
the pavement outside each house was to be hosed down the night before;
and most important, ‘no one is to be sent to jail unless the offence is
particularly serious’. In short, no effort to be spared. Every stick, stone and
inhabitant to be attended to in minute detail!

Let all the world

In every district sing,
The Glory of the King ...

These frequent appeals to the population to merge themselves as one in

acts of collective rejoicing or shared grief gave shape and rhythm to the
days. There was a regular celebration of all aspects of the King’s life and
times in respect of his person as well as his achievements. Whether it be his
health, his grief, happy occasions for members of his family or minor
victories, it was immaterial. What really mattered was Him — His Royal
Self, His Essential Kingliness. Consequently the whole district was required
to beat time in unison with the rhythm of the royal days and to harmonize
with the body Physical, Spiritual and Martial of God’s own Prince. Each
royal occasion and occurrence was to be an opportunity for celebrating the
marriage of the King with His people. The ‘people’s king’ and the ‘king’s
people’ were called to embrace each other in a collective celebration
where ‘wrong’ was no more and where bread and meat abounded beneath
the flash of lights and fireworks. This was the time of Bounty, a care¬
fully marked time which, for the poor, meant the suspension of poverty
and deprivation. It was a time prepared in minute detail by police com¬
missioners and inspectors who would make reports to their Lieutenant and
hence, ultimately, to the King.
However, the gift to the inhabitants of the district carried with it the
 Space and Ways of Life 19
obligation to give of themselves in return and to ensure that no trace of the
difficulties normally experienced in the course of their days and hours
should be apparent. The entire district, without exception, was invited
to live whilst barely existing. Tomorrow would be time enough for it
to resume its normal modes of thought and being, self-expression and
communication, but until then, today was elsewhere, caught up and con¬
fused with Royal Time.
The bearing of the district upon its inhabitants had a double effect —
whilst seriously limiting personal life and privacy it nevertheless insisted
that one’s reputation remain unsullied. Over and above the clearly felt
need of the people to be part of the crowd or undifferentiated mass, and
an object of the King’s power, there did, in fact, exist another level of
consciousness concerned with creating a space for oneself, or with
possessing a name, rank and place by which one might be recognized in
the eyes of the neighbourhood as well as distinguishing oneself from
everyone else. For it was here, in this space, so barely protected from the
public eyes, that honour resided.
But according to the memoirs and chronicles of the day, the people
were hardly likely to have any ‘honour’ because it was precisely on the
subjugation of the people that the honour of the great and mighty was
founded. By refusing the people their own individuality and considering
them incapable of their own thoughts, they thereby deprived them of their
honour. But the reality was in fact very different. There were so many
subtle hierarchies within the lowest social classes that they inevitably gave
rise to all kinds of factions, connivances and conflicts where honour and
reputation were often the most vital stakes at play.
Paris was certainly a case in point for here, year after year, the city
swelled to the successive uprootings of the peasant population. For many
of the migrants, Paris was a daunting place because it was unknown. It
was the centre at some time of numerous comings and goings; some
returning to the country in the summer and coming back to the city in the
winter. Then there were those who would decide to return to their families
at least once or perhaps bring back the rest of their relatives who had
stayed behind in the provinces. The most unstable of the lower social
groups, the unskilled tradesmen, made up a kind of microcosm where the
customs and ways of life were completely different from those of the
master craftsmen or well-heeled traders with a stake in the town.
Social instability, economic uncertainty and housing problems
undoubtedly provoked a climate of extremes. One had to hold one’s own
in such shifting conditions that violence and conflict were the inevitable
companions of uncertainty or the need to protect oneself against the
unknown. To all of that, one must also add the confusion existing between
public and private space and the impossibility of distinguishing between
‘open’ and ‘closed’ in a situation where each space communicated with the
20 Feelings and Metamorphoses

next, opened out onto another, or overlooked and was overlooked by

everyone else, offering no protection at all.
In this context where it was essential to maintain a decent level of
economic survival at all costs, honour and reputation were absolutely
indispensable, for without them the possibility of ruin was never very
far away. The defence of one’s honour against someone else’s injurious
comments was a common motive behind many conflicts, a fact well known
in law where it has always been customary to rank honour very high on
the scale of values (admittedly with the aristocracy and elites in mind
rather than the simple journeyman). The loss of goods or an inheritance is
always reparable by one means or another, but loss of honour or one’s
life — never!’27 So wrote the Provost of Paris, Jean de Mille, at the begin¬
ning of the seventeenth century. For the least privileged, the loss of one’s
honour had serious economic consequences which was all the more worry¬
ing in an oral society, as Beccaria underlined in his treatise Des delits et
des peines, which appeared in 1764: ‘It is often public opinion which is
the scourge of crude and wise alike.’ Where public opinion reigns, the
approval of others is not only useful, it is indispensable to anyone seeking
to maintain equal status with his fellow citizens.28 As for the Lieutenants
of Police, they were well aware of the extent to which their legal proceed¬
ings were encumbered by insults and slander, as Lenoir explains in his
‘Memoires’: ‘Complaints about verbal abuse and defamation of character
were common in Paris. Some sought restitution before the lower courts but
by far the greater number of Parisians beset the police with their domestic
quarrels and their points of honour.’29 Could there be a better example of
the sealing together of public and private life than by this honour,30 that
most inner and private of possessions which is ours alone yet which rests
in the hands of everyone else. That men and women should also quarrel on
this matter serves as further evidence.
In such a climate of insecurity, the union between a man and a woman
was necessary for survival. It was the minimal relationship allowing for
hope and the building of a relative degree of stability. The conditions of
the union (courtship, seduction, living together, worsening relationship,
marriage, legitimate or illegitimate pregnancy) contained within themselves
some of the conflicts and strategies employed in the defence of honour.
The space created or destroyed between a man and a woman was also the
place where self-esteem was built. The conflicts which arose, as detailed in
cross-examinations and witnesses’ accounts, reveal the ways in which both
men and women perceived the nature of existence, their concern for self
and other and their perceptions of normality in male-female relationships.
In short, one finds in such encounters and disputes the explanation of a
code of existence which is possibly the fruit of collective representation, a
product of individual creation, or both.31
 2
Girls for the Marrying

Whether one was Parisian or a fresh, young country girl, it was essential
to get established. The city positively encouraged contact and kindled
hopes of marriage whilst the ways of life across the Parisian space also
provided men and women with ample opportunities for meeting and
greeting, picking and choosing, and seducing one another.1 There was the
promiscuous closeness of the lodgings for instance, or walks and strolls in
the street or public gardens, or perhaps a stop at one of the cabarets.
The poor girl earned her living and went about town just as much as
the man, not at all the prisoner of convention and matrimonial strategy as
was the young bourgeoise. Her open charm and vivacity, as well as a
capacity to earn her own living, were a constant source of admiration for
one of her contemporaries, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, who was without
doubt one of the few writers of his time to be so preoccupied by her.
We are indebted to him for numerous close observations of the various
behaviours of women according to social class which he differentiated and
categorized in minute detail.
His concern at the growing number of bachelors in Paris and at the
number of girls awaiting marriage had led him to write at length about the
daughters of the poor. His thesis was quite simply this: that ‘the number of
girls beyond a marriageable age was past counting’ and that there were
umpteen others living alone.2 The truth was that marriage was being
viewed increasingly as a burdensome institution, preferably to be avoided
in favour of an infinitely calmer and more peaceful celibacy. ‘Men do not
marry any more, or do so with regret. What a turnabout in the social
order!’3 However, Mercier went on to argue that the current state of
affairs did not in any way affect society as a whole but that the dis¬
order was rather a peculiar phenomenon. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘only the poor
people who are getting married’,4 and this unbalanced situation, he felt,
exacerbated the whole question of poverty:
22 Feelings and Metamorphoses

The well-to-do, who don’t marry, or who marry late, usually have very
few children, whereas the poor, who go straight into marriage, far too
early, have a lot. The effect of all this is that wealth is being concentrated
increasingly in fewer and fewer hands and that the social group who
needs most receives least.5

What was causing this disruption of the social order? For Mercier,
everything stemmed from the abuses of wealth and luxury and the frantic
passion for money. The appetite for riches was ruining everything and
turning marriage into a business ‘deal’. Therefore it was hardly surprising
that the resulting marriages were poor, since economic considerations took
precedence over natural inclination and affection, and in this respect the
author echoes the themes of social satire of the period; namely, the lack of
affection between husband and wife; the rivalry that existed between
them; and the extravagance of each.
It was essential, therefore, to root out the evil which Mercier had no
compunction in identifying; he centred all his criticism on one institution
in particular, which he held responsible for a good many ills, and that
was the dowry. It deterred people from entering into marriage, distorted
relationships within the marriage and always ended up by ruining the
widower; its surreptitious intervention at each stage of married life was a
constant source of difficulty and failure. Where families provided dowries
for their daughters, they looked for the maximum number of economic
guarantees from the families of the young men, hoping to avoid a bad
match at all costs. This was certainly true of the middle classes, who were
fanatical in their attempts to calculate the social and economic viability of
the marriage. ‘It is as difficult to arrange the marriage of the stationer’s
daughter as that of a king.... I think there will always be an eternal divide
between the goldsmith and the locksmith, the grease-lined grocer and the
candle-maker.’6 Other families had great difficulty in finding a dowry:
‘There is nothing so difficult as a marriage. It is not tying the eternal knot
that is the problem, but the obligatory visit to the lawyer to pledge the
dowry. There is no shortage of plain nubile girls, it is the pretty ones who
are the problem.’
In the end, the people were probably better off as a result of not even
being able to contemplate a dowry. ‘The young milliner is happier in her
poverty than the young bourgeoise.’7 So says Mercier. It was probably not
so simple. Nevertheless the choice of spouse in the case of the former was
obviously very different. Even if an economic alliance were necessary,
the absence of material possessions or of a dowry meant adopting a
more complicated strategy which might eventually lead to other forms of
association. Marriage was to be seen as a later stage consecrating the
possibility of setting up home together. In the meantime, concubinage or
 Girls for the Marrying 23
living together seemed a perfectly ‘natural’ state from which one might one
day envisage an official union which might possibly be the guarantee of
economic stability, precarious though that might be.
Once the marriage had been contracted, the dowry immediately became
a source of friction and here Mercier again picks up another well-worn
theme of satirical writers, namely, the woman’s so-called privileged
position vis-a-vis the finances. We are assured that she was the one who
had a taste for luxury and possessions; that it was she who squandered the
domestic purse and who threw money around on numerous frivolities.
Coquettish and extravagant, she brought ruin on her husband and created
economic havoc wherever she passed. The dowry could not help but
reinforce this state of affairs, particularly in Paris where custom had
invested the woman with widespread powers, making it necessary to
consult her on all financial matters. Domineering at the outset, she became
more and more demanding and interfering. ‘The dowry ineluctably results
in female domination and that means mollycoddling which is an affliction
to the spirit of man and to his ability and character.’8
In Paris the situation was proving to be untenable even up to the death
of the wife; bereavement meant ruin for the man for, as we know, he had
to hand back the dowry. Mercier’s opinion on the matter was quite clear;
for him the dowry was a deterrent to marriage as it increased the number
of bachelors and it therefore had to be stopped.
He was sufficiently observant and realistic, moreover, to stress the need
for the finances to be equally balanced between both partners. Of the
wives of artisans and small traders he wrote: ‘They work in partnership
with their men and do very well as a result. They are used to hand¬
ling small amounts of money and there is a perfectly equal sharing of
responsibility for which the household is all the better.’
These suggestions are quite modern. Mercier was acutely aware of the
importance of the financial side of married life and the need for real
equality in the distribution of money. In the case already mentioned there
was no real difficulty in achieving this balance since both partners had to
work together of necessity and a considerable part of their relationship
was bound up in their mutual commitment to their economic survival. It
was the bourgeoise, whether girl or married woman, who was the target of
his attack, whereas the wives and women of the people were objects of his
esteem. But for all that, he did not lose sight of their harsh and often
wretched living conditions, which aroused his indignation:

What is distressing to behold are those unfortunate women who go

about the streets well before dawn. Their eyes are bloodshot, their faces
red and their backs bent beneath the weight of their heavy baskets. ...
One suffers on their behalf.... But even so, their weatherbeaten skin,
24 Feelings and Metamorphoses

their daily drudgery, their toughness and their calloused hands have still
not turned them into men and for the discerning eye, their sexuality is
still apparent.9

It is worth underlining the originality of the thought for, as we know,

the authors of the eighteenth century preferred to describe the women
of the people as not much more than animals who had lost all trace
of humanity and had become, at best, manly and haggard. This type of
description died hard and in the nineteenth century we see the Goncourt
brothers adopting the same attitudes in their book La Femme au XVIIIe
siecle. The poor and the loose woman are placed together in the same
chapter (ch. 7) and the ensuing portrait is bland and featureless:

A creature appeared whose only claim to womanhood was her gender

and who was more ‘people’ than ‘woman’. In his Cris de Paris,
Bouchardon has captured the strong profile and the manly carriage. His
powerful drawings reveal the heavy masculinity and virility that lie
beneath the thick layers of woollens and rough homespun of all such
labouring women.10

The same thinking is apparent in the Goncourts’ description of even the

very youngest girls who were supposed to be dim and vacant right from
childhood and destined for an inevitable state of idiocy, unlikely to know
anything other than wickedness and brutality:

The girls of the people are destined for seduction from early childhood.
They grow up in an atmosphere of cynicism, surrounded by ignoble
sentiment and crude language as their sole examples. They are defence¬
less and unable to protect themselves, and there is nothing and no one to
help them develop and retain a sense of honour, so that their judgement
is violated whilst barely formed. Of religion they retain only a few
superstitious practices, such as the saying of mass for the Virgin each
Saturday, a custom still secretly cherished in the very depths of their
decadence. Any idea of duty or womanly virtue is likely to be as a result
of disapproval by the neighbours or of being the butt of jokes and
mockery such as the horns made in the street at young girls who behaved
badly who, as the people used to say, ‘must be at the widow’s game, you
know’. The picture of marriage she is offered is one of marriage at its
most repugnant, with the household reverberating to the sound of insults
and blows.11

But Mercier’s approach was altogether more subtle and sensitive and
he did not fall into the traditional traps so common to his own con¬
temporaries. Arthur Young, for instance, in his Travels in France (1792),
 Girls for the Marrying 25

described the serving girls and country women as a bunch of walking dung
heaps whom the locals only referred to as women out of politeness; but
Mercier’s attitude was entirely different. For him the poor girl was rich in
character, concealing within herself a wealth of freedom and imagina¬
tion even though she might display the damaging effects of hard work.
Removed from the restrictions of an overly narrow education, she was free
to give and receive love as she chose.

Only the daughters of the petty bourgeois, the humble artisan and the
people are completely free to come and go as they please and to make
love as they choose [even though their forwardness might sometimes
alarm their suitors, causing] many a bachelor upon seeing their hair-do’s
and all the fineries and fripperies of which these dedicated fashion
followers are so fond, to stop and think, do his sums - and stay
celibate.12

The weddings of simple folk were living proof of the very real joy
which was their characteristic. They dance long and hard, being the last
to abandon their joyful traditions even though their pastimes are being
denigrated on all sides.’13
The underlying idea was quite simply that although poverty and
hardship might foster cunning and sharp practice financially, they left the
heart innocent and fresh. The poor girl was the embodiment of the ‘real’
woman. Available and artless, she was there for the taking, a point of view
confirmed by other writings on rustic encounters. Happy the man who had
a country girl for his mistress, through whose good offices he might
discover all!

The rich, who spend so much money on unappreciative women, have no

idea of the charm inspired by the surprised smile of a tender young
mistress as she casts her eyes over all these things that are new to her,
and then turns her gaze towards you, amazed at every word you utter.14

Mercier’s portrait of the ordinary young girl was always very sexual.
For him she was ‘charming’ and ‘appealing’ and his defence of her is a
perfect illustration of his own fondness for both Rousseau and Diderot.
Whilst he elevates female freedom, he preaches the benefits of a liaison
with a young girl from the country who, being that much closer to nature,
was all the more likely to be impressed by masculine savoir-faire.
 3
‘Seduced and Abandoned’

In that interim period when the young woman of the people was attempt¬
ing to establish herself in marriage, it was not uncommon for her to find
instead either breakdown or desertion, which left her alone and defenceless
and very often burdened with the fruits of her encounter - a child - either
on the way or newly born.
Girls like these, who had been ‘seduced and abandoned’, lodged their
complaints with the police commissioner in the hope of receiving some
form of material compensation in the face of this male desertion which
would drag them into poverty and despair. Their complaints tell the story
of a trust given and then betrayed and of a private conflict which swelled
out onto the judicial stage thence to be heard and labelled in the hope
thereby of avoiding the rumours and recriminations which could only
harm their honour and reputation.
These statements, which recur so often in the police commissioners’
archives provide us with a chronicle of discord and disruption just when
everything seemed on course for a marriage and when a pregnancy occurred
which provided obvious proof of the union. The contest that then followed
on the desertion of the woman was a strange affair owing to the absence
of one of the protagonists, and herein lay the crux of the drama. In such
cases there was no direct confrontation between the man and the woman;
the woman, who was usually about to give birth, would provide a state¬
ment about her encounter and name the father. Witnesses were called
to support her claim, and in the majority of cases the presumed father
was brought before the court to reply to the charges made against him.
If he admitted to being the father he would be asked to pay a fine to
cover the cost of the confinement and a few months’ nursing. As far as
the woman was concerned, the most important thing for her was to
convince the police commissioner that marriage had always been intended
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 27
as the natural outcome of the encounter and that the fact that it had been
imminent justified sexual relations having taken place in the course of their
meetings together.
This account would be opposed by the man who gave his own version
of events. He argued that the liaison (should he actually admit to it) had
meant nothing and that there had never been any question of their coming
together in marriage. What was more, the pregnancy itself was ample
proof of the wiles and loose ways of women.
There is a consistency in the composition and structure of the records —
female account, witnesses’ evidence, man’s reply — which first of all makes
it possible to analyse the conditions conducive to a marriage. Next, we
have the event of desertion itself and then the obligatory confession of
sexual relations which inevitably sharpened the tone of the narrative.
The woman described what had happened to her in two parts: first, that
the courtship of which she was the object could have meant only one thing
- and that was marriage; and second, that the sexual act which she had
agreed to undertake had taken place in all innocence.
The man naturally denied this version of events. He attributed a much
more instinctive, impulsive and almost animal-like character to the liaison.
Thus, we see the real blending with and sustained by the imaginery as well
as the merging of factual situations with the perceptions attributed to them
by each protagonist. And from these one is able to make out the roles of
each as well as the means by which both the man and the woman
attempted to portray their respective actions as perfectly normal, for
they both had to persuade the commissioner that no offence had actually
taken place. Certainly, the girl was abused - but her friend had given her
every reason to trust him and every indication that this was a legitimate
courtship. The man for his part felt perfectly justified in behaving as he
did, and summoned as evidence one of the best-known of traditional male
roles, that of the conqueror commanding female submission to the innate
impulsiveness of the male.
It should be understood that it is not our purpose here to sort out the
true from the false in all that was said to convince the commissioner, but
rather to uncover the woman’s hopes for marriage and how she might
have anticipated this from her interpretation of the telling signs in the
attitude of her partner. What she has to say about the marks of attention
of which she had been the object reflects what she might, by rights, have
expected. She is making a statement about what she considered to be
the norm and is speaking out for what she understood by intimacy.
In so doing, the declaration she makes is a testimonial to her social and
emotional existence. As for the man, his choice lay between recognizing
the facts or translating them in terms of pleasure which he believed he had
every right to look for in a woman. From such conflicts and their ultimate
28 Feelings and Metamorphoses

derisory material resolution, there emerges an order of things which was

likely to be perceived very differently by the man and the woman.
In the course of a survey in the archives of Le Chatelet, a hundred or so
petitions for seduction and abandon were unearthed, which constitute a
homogeneous whole.1 The information relating to age, domicile, socio¬
professional status, meeting place and form of seduction have allowed
consideration of the conditions conducive to a matrimonial alliance
between a man and woman of the people, thus helping us towards a better
understanding of who meets whom and how. From these indications, we
begin to get an idea of the encounter as it really was - or was dreamt to be
- it does not really matter; for what one needs to see, perhaps, is an
outline of certain possibilities within which commonly held schemes and
plans might be entertained, or even found to be satisfactory. The records
are sufficiently detailed for us to demolish a long-held stereotype, namely
the belief that in the city, where the lives of men and women were thought
to be promiscuous, sexual attraction had no regard for either form or
ritual and that Paris was still sufficiently rural to allow for the odd tumble
in the hay. This is a somewhat oversimplified view and the petitions show
the importance of the forms and conventions within which the seduction
and hopes of marriage were almost certainly inscribed.

Necessary pre-eminence
It certainly came as no surprise to find that there was a distinct age
difference between the man and the young woman; it was certainly true of
half the cases and no one seemed to find it unusual. On the contrary, it
would appear that such an age difference was likely to make a young
woman feel more confident.
Jeanne Benoist was cook for Lepine, clockmaker to the King. In 1775,
she met Georges Neveux, a baker, who proposed marriage to her on
several occasions. She finally succumbed and when she was later aban¬
doned she explained that ‘the fact that the aforesaid Neveux was more
than 32 years old had made her more inclined to accept his proposals as
she felt that there was every reason to trust his promises.’ Thirty-two was
not considered to be too old, and sometimes the gap between the partners
was even greater, as much as 10 or even 30 years. Age was a sign
of maturity and also a guarantee that one would be marrying into an
already well established professional situation. In two-thirds of the cases,
moreover, the girls were very young indeed, aged between 15 and 22, with
no secure professional future ahead of them.
It is also interesting to note that of the women who were abandoned in
the course of their pregnancy, more than half were servants — kitchen girls,
shop hands or chambermaids at best. The others helped their parents, who
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 29
were probably shop-owners or lodging-house keepers. Only a minority
were employees in the female trades such as worker in the fashion-trade
or in quilted petticoats, washerwoman, wardrobe apprentice or perhaps
lacemaker’s assistant. These young serving girls rarely went far afield to
find a partner and their encounter took broadly two forms: half of them
allowed themselves to be seduced by another servant, either from the same
establishment or one nearby; and for the rest, it was the lot of the ‘other’
lover that fell to them.- It was usually their master or the shopkeeper who
would enjoy their favours, so at this price, marriage could never be
anything but an illusion. If one looks at the body of evidence as a whole, it
is clear that the most common type of encounter (roughly two-thirds) was
between a man and woman of the same socio-professional level, apart
from the fact that the woman was nearly always much younger and thus
less secure economically, although her family background was the same
as that of her seducer. The milliner was attracted to the journeyman
clockmaker; the daughter of a journeyman gardener might aspire to live
with a postman working at one of the branches of the Parisian postal
service, whilst a kitchen girl might receive the attentions of the baker who
came to deliver the daily bread.
The other significant cases (approximately one-third of the total) were
those where the woman was seduced by a man of higher professional
status than herself; her master, for instance, or an already well-established
artisan, and even, on occasion, a solicitor or lawyer visiting Paris. There
were also a few surprise encounters that are worth noting. There was the
case of the wealthy merchant’s daughter who fell in love with a marquis;
and then there was the exceptional case (the only one in the entire survey,
in fact) of the wigmaker’s assistant who fell in love with his master’s
daughter, which obviously incurred a somewhat vigorous family reaction.
He was accused of having ambitions to better his station rather than
seeking a genuine marriage of the heart. The police commissioner asked
him sternly, ‘How could he possibly have allowed himself to abuse the
daughter of the master in whose employ he was? He surely could not be
ignorant of the severity of the Law on this point?’ The boy replied that it
was solely because he wanted to marry her; but his audacity was to result
in a prison sentence and it was only a plea for clemency on the part of the
parents of the seduced girl that finally led to his release/ One need not
labour the point; we know that if the positions had been reversed - a shop
girl seduced by her master, for instance — there would have been no prison
for the master, nor any such fuss; that is the way it was.
Of course, data such as age, trade, professional status etc. go some way
towards explaining how a man and a woman might select each other; but
the complaints made by the women following their desertion also have
something else to say. They are the narrative of a personal adventure
which was theirs and theirs alone. Admittedly, it was an adventure that
30 Feelings and Metamorphoses

turned out badly, but not before it had first assumed all the colours of
pleasure, attachment and hope. These statements can be read at two levels:
firstly, as the coverage of a sequence of events and a period of waiting; and
then as the depiction of feelings and disappointments which were at the
same time both the history of a reality and an illusion. From the narrative
of this intimate affair that had been found to be so badly wanting and
which was about to be so brutally exposed, one sees emerging, not only
a number of precise events, but also a mental horizon whose contours
are complex. The first frame of the story, the meeting, is taken amidst a
clutch of contending realities and images which outline the way in which
marriage might have been contemplated. As well as portraying a particular
situation, it is also a means of expressing a philosophy of the self and other,
without which existence is nothing. The women are saying why they were
entitled to experience pleasure and seduction; how they arrived at this
recognition and the extent to which they considered it legitimate. And even
if things had not quite happened in this way, what of it? That is how it
should have been, and it was necessary for the court to be of the same
mind if it were to be convinced that the man was to blame for the
misfortune that then ensued. The account of the meeting, the evidence
brought to bear and the witnesses’ statements open onto a secret place in
the woman’s private space where self and definition of self had their
existence. By means of the words and the actions of another, from the time
of the first approach to the stage of trust and confidence, she is making
a statement about what it was that determined her choice. These were
the times in life when nothing was obligatory but everything happened
because it corresponded to a scheme or dream and thus to a satisfactory
image of one’s existence, an equation between self and concept of self.
What is undoubtedly interesting here is that these statements touch on an
area that is both little known and always called into question when one is
dealing with the popular classes, namely, the capacity for self-awareness
and the ability to determine for oneself a code of ethics. These are matters
about which historians have been quite prolific where elites have been
concerned, with the result that disparities in social competence and ability
are all too well documented. Furthermore, the generally accepted gap
between the brutishness of the people and bourgeois civility4 has made
it practically impossible to imagine the formation of concepts of taste,
beauty and harmony amongst the classes for whom, it would appear, the
only route was that of necessity.

Time, words and gestures

A fondness for the other person grew with time, whilst words, both
spoken and written, and gestures also had their part to play in creating a
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned ’ 31

climate which allowed trust and affection to become established. It was a

landscape described in detail by the deserted woman. For if feeling and
desire were to grow, it was essential to take time over lovemaking and
almost all the women refer to this initial period when the courtship game
began, as a privileged period in the middle of their ordinary lives when
reality was suspended. Getting to know each other took time — and take it
they did. In this way they distinguished themselves from the brute beasts,
the common soldier or the street girl.
Denise Richard, a 21-year-old chambermaid, said of her lover who had
come to see her every day for a year that ‘he had crept his way into her
affections with fine words and attractive promises’.5 And not only did it
take time, the time had to be taken from the other in such a way as to
interrupt the normal course of things by capturing her attention and
inserting oneself into her personal space. For two-thirds of the couples,
one or two years went by before they made up their minds and there were
rarely any who ‘got involved’ within less than six months; a quarter of the
couples had waited anything from two to seven years, during which time
they were still busy trying to win each other over. When things seemed to
have been going on for far too long and there was still no decision to
marry, the man always seemed to have a perfectly plausible answer: ‘He
kept telling her father that he had every intention of marrying her but that
he just needed to wait until he was paid back the five hundred pounds he
was owed.’ ‘To be sought in marriage’, as they nearly all said, did indeed
open up onto a secret path and a personal journey. There was no doubt
that there was mutual attraction at the beginning (‘he caught her eye
immediately’; ‘he captured her heart and soul’; ‘he won her heart at
once’), but there was still a long way to go before a marriage seemed
likely, making it possible to envisage sexual relations before the wedding
ceremony, a course which in the end varied greatly.
One woman based her decision on the mature years of her partner and
another woman reached her decision because of his comfortable situation;
alternatively, the decision might be made because of the rather subtle
but dependent relationship the woman had with him on account of the
domestic service she provided. There were also some rather unusual
grounds for confidence, as in the case of Jeanne Benoist who allowed
herself to be seduced by the baker, Neveux:

She first got to know him about two and a half years ago because at the
time he was courting her cousin, Jeanne Bouquain, a kitchen maid for an
attorney at La Huchette. As this girl had been dead these last three years,
this same Neveux had been coming to see her at the mercer’s shop where
she was in service and he had proposed to her on a number of occasions.
There was no reason not to trust his promises because she knew that he
would have married her cousin had she been alive.
32 Feelings and Metamorphoses

The death of her cousin did not cast its shadow over Jeanne; on the
contrary, it brought the two destinies together, and was proof for her that
Georges Neveux had every intention of linking himself with the Benoist
family. One died, the other didn’t. Therein lay a concept of marriage and
death and a personal construction of the family and the world which was
quite serene and in whose wisdom the life of Jeanne Benoist was gently
inscribed.
For other women, their trust was born of a feeling of self-worth as
perceived through the eyes of the other, something which could not be
discounted if one were just a simple chambermaid to the widow of a
gentleman farmer, for instance. Monique Felix, aged 23, met a bourgeois
by the name of Cogny who ‘gave her every reason to trust him. He said
how sensible she was and regarded her as being well born. And so he
proposed to marry her — but not straight away.’6 The kindness and
consideration she saw in him, combined with the fact that he was taking
his time so as not to rush into anything, not only corresponded with the
image Monique Felix had of herself, but also with her idea of good
manners. She therefore gave in to Cogny. On the other hand, a young girl
like the laundress Marie-Jeanne Dubuisson aged 17, was led to think that
marriage with Jean-Jacques Toussaint was a distinct possibility ‘because
the two young people were of equal birth and status’/ This perfectly
reasonable equation was enough to allow her plans to take shape and
substantiate the subsequent actions.
Their explanations of all these choices is punctuated throughout with a
sense of what is just, beautiful and wise. Even if things did not quite
happen in this way (one should not forget that these statements were
intended to convince the commissioner of their innocence on becoming the
mistresses of men who had left them), the statements made concern an
ideal of the Self, of Good and of the Justice of things.
As well as the basic merits of the situation, the majority of the women
also had a good deal to say about all the other signs and signals there
had been, including words and actions, which had all contributed to
the construction of those brief moments of happiness and ‘the intensely
devoted courtship’ to which they nearly all made some claim; and here
the accounts are embellished with quite a richness of vocabulary: ‘He
always used to “flirt” with her on the stairs’; then there was the fellow
who brought her material for under-garments who kept on laughing and
‘teasing’ her. He made her ‘a million promises’ a day or even ‘used every
conceivable protestation of love’ or ‘did everything possible to seduce her’.
The most commonly used expression, which in fact sums it all up, was:
‘he did everything he could to seduce her’ or ‘have his way with her’. It
was usually something amusing, a piece of flattery or an expression of
tenderness which did the trick that helped start the acquaintance and
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 33

establish trust. All it took from the man were a few kind and well-chosen
words to convince her that she was indispensable to his happiness; but, for
these words to register and implant themselves in her life, it required time.
And so the daily routine came to a halt, during which the talk was all to
do with oneself, which was obviously an essential prerequisite for any
prospect of a marital bond. The appropriate gestures were also required
apparently: ‘he liked to kiss her when their master was away’; ‘he spent a
lot of time with her, playing her music and talking to her and kissing her’;
‘he went to a lot of trouble for her’. Madeleine Cogny, a kitchen maid, had
the following to say about all her lover’s efforts:

He kept on telling her that she was the one he wanted to marry and he
never missed a chance to convince her. He made little attempt to conceal
the tender feelings that he had for her and even went so far as to kiss
her in the kitchen in front of her master, the Baron de Romilly, who
reprimanded him. He also played her the mandolin and he would go
down on his knees to her in tears, calling her his dear wife and telling
her that he would never leave her and that she was as pretty and fresh as
a rose.8

These bold ploys were often accompanied by other activities such as

renting a room or apartment in which to install the chosen one and even
obtaining furniture and belongings as proof of one’s commitment. This
poor creature who was intended for marriage was tended with such great
care only to find that instead of a husband, she had obtained a creditor.
There were occasions when the behaviour was downright devious, like
that of the tapestry worker from the Gobelins who offered to teach
tapestry-making to the brother of his heart’s desire so that the former
could become a worker in the craft whilst he made advances to the latter.
Twenty or so statements mentioned the existence of letters, some
of which are contained in the records. They come from servants and
journeymen and, in one case only, from a worker in the printing trade.
Not only was the letter a proof, but in a milieu where literacy was far from
common, it was a particularly precious gesture by virtue of its rarity. To
write that one wished to be married or to be in possession of a letter where
words of engagement were signed and sealed gave the promise an official
stamp. Not only did the letter surpass any words and gestures, it sealed
them, a point made in the statement by Madeleine David, daughter of a
lodging-house keeper and which left no room for doubt:

He was quick to let the plaintiff know the feelings she inspired in him
and anywhere he managed to come across her in the house he always
talked about them and would add that his own happiness depended on
her being his and that he would have no other wife but her. Confident in
34 Feelings and Metamorphoses

his male superiority, he offered to read books to her and each time he
returned them he was careful to insert love-letters that were full of
tenderness and passion.

How could one resist this combination of male authority with the power
of the pen and the word?
Besides the signals exchanged between the couple themselves it also
proved indispensable for friends and family to be equally well aware of
them: ‘They made no secret of their inclinations, especially as the young
man’s father and stepmother didn’t seem to object; in fact they even
flattered the plaintiff with the hope that she would become united with
their son through the bonds of marriage.’
The parents sometimes knew about the whole affair and, in cases where
the banns had even been published, news often reached them by letter or
rumour. In some cases they acted as witnesses for the young woman and
spoke of the young man’s devoted courtship of their daughter in the hope
that their approval might be seen as lending the affair an air of public
respectability. When Therese Bisson, a servant and elder daughter, met
Etienne Juffet, she brought him home to meet her parents. Her story was
that

he sought her in marriage from the very beginning and he behaved with
all the appropriate courtesy and decency. Her parents took him at his
word and received him accordingly. She then set about making all the
arrangements for the marriage and had even been to Pithiviers to seek
her father’s consent. All that there remained to do was to obtain the
consent of Juffet’s father in Lyons.9

Another servant, Marie-Cecile Prevost, said that

Copreau had given her his word about the execution of the marriage on
numerous occasions and that he had paid her all the more attention and
was more devoted than ever. So that the marriage could take place, she,
the plaintiff, had written to his parents telling them to get a bann
published in their church the following day and another the same day in
the parish of Saint-Sulpice.10

The use of the word ‘execution’ in connection with ‘marriage’ certainly

indicates the existence of a set of priorities and a code of practice and a
ritual which, if followed, should eventually lead to the marriage ceremony.
Anything else was betrayal. Admittedly not every couple got as far as the
publication of the banns or an official announcement but in the mind of
the young woman, it was as good as, and the seduction itself was taken as
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 35

an indication that it was all obviously leading up to marriage. Therefore

she could relax in complete confidence.
Because of their intimate relationship, the young couple were obliged to
adopt an often contradictory approach, for they had to keep their secret as
well as showing their feelings in public. Friends, neighbours and parents
all saw the signs of affection between the two partners and when giv¬
ing evidence of their obvious closeness they said that the usual signs of
tenderness which would certainly have led to marriage had been clearly
recognizable. The sincerity of one’s feelings had to be seen and not hidden,
for the promise of marriage needed the support of the neighbourhood
whose recognition would thus render it authentic.
In this matter, the district was all-powerful. It passed judgement on the
normality of the relations between the young people and decided whether
everything was proper or whether there was a scandal. Its judgement was
fearsome and its definition of right and wrong absolute. For some, it was
able to confirm that they had appeared very close and that they had never
been seen with anyone else. Or it might affirm that they were like ‘a lover
and his mistress, that they were very much in love, kissed frequently
and addressed each other as “tu”.’ In short, they showed all the signs
of closeness which indicated their intentions.11 But for others, the dis¬
trict decided that there was a scandal, corroborating the view that the
behaviour of the young people had been shocking and that ‘they had been
fondling each other all over the place and had even been heard taking their
pleasures in the bedchamber to the point where they had heard the bed
knocking against the partition wall and the girl shouting out, “Have your
way, my sweet one, I would die for your beautiful eyes”.’12
The union between a man and a woman needed the respect of others
who, being in possession of their secret, interpreted it and restored it to the
community in accordance with what they had seen and made of it. It was
inscribed within the confines of both private and public spheres and
obeyed the rules of obvious material circumstance as well as the intimate
collective imagination which together created harmony and deployed
hope.
Reason, tenderness and decency are all evoked in the account of the
possible union but at that point where the woman allowed herself to be
caught in the trap of carnal love prior to the promised marriage, she
became entirely constrained by the need to convince the court that the
sexual act was a perfectly normal occurrence, that it was impossible to
avoid and that it was something which had to be done at the time. She was
preparing the ground for the commissioner to hear the most difficult thing
for her to speak of, namely the point at which she had succumbed - and
that it was not her fault. And thus the consummation of their love was
pronounced and the impossible statement made.
36 Feelings and Metamorphoses

The Sleeping Beauty

‘He closed the door of his apartment and told her that she would not
return the same way she had come.'11 Just one example of an event which,
itself, scarcely varied. And in the space between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’
when there was no hope of going back, everything was turned upside
down. The words used to describe this state were those of captivity and
imprisonment - having ‘captivated heart and soul’, the body also yielded
for it could hardly do otherwise under the pressure.
The man fastened the bolt. The house was empty as the masters were
away and all the windows were shut. There were no servants around. He
stuffed a handkerchief into the woman’s mouth, held his palm over her
face and ‘threw her onto the bed’; he grabbed her by the waist, jabbed her
with his knees and brought her roughly to the ground, caressing and
threatening her all the while; first he made her talk, then told her to shut
up again, and ‘he was all the more attentive, promising again and again
that he would never leave her and swearing his undying love’. When
describing those minutes preceding lovemaking, the woman nearly always
stressed that mixture of vows, embraces, violence, and rapacity which
alone, in her opinion, were capable of explaining what was to follow.
‘She remained unconscious, overcome by the shock of his brutality and
he took her without her knowing it.’ In the majority of cases, the woman
claimed to know nothing of the sexual act which had made her a mother
and brought about her subsequent ruin. Nothing. Why? Because she was
in such a state of shock that she had lost consciousness whilst the man
enjoyed himself with her. Nothing; because she was too distressed, dazed,
faint or blind, and because she had no idea what was happening. And then
at last ‘he had done with her’ and his ‘success was established’, unless of
course her own efforts to forge her innocence could undo it.
There. The impossible thing had been said; the commissioner had been
told. But in order to make this difficult statement which would affect the
successful outcome of the complaint, the woman had assumed the vacant
expression of someone who was not quite there, describing herself like a
lifeless doll plunged by fear and brutality into an everlasting faint and
profound state of torpor. Absent, languid, blind, unconscious and out of
touch with reality, she only awoke once it was all over; but from that
point on, none of her protestations or indignation could efface any of it.
Who is this if none other than the Sleeping Beauty with whom the
Prince made love without waking her?14 Impregnated, but unconscious of
it, Sleeping Beauty had no part in her deflowering; she remained unsullied
by the unfortunate events taking place in her body; and her passivity being
absolute, her loss of consciousness even precluded any enjoyment on her
part. The form these statements take reminds one of a very old version of
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 37
the story in which Sleeping Beauty is a virgin impregnated unawares and
hence without suggestion of sin. Untainted by pleasure or sin, the Sleeping
Beauty is thus ‘in the same position as the Blessed Virgin, who is both
Virgin and Mother at the same time’.15
Here one sees the real borrowing on the imaginary to create a convinc¬
ing yet commonplace drama. The woman’s presentation of the union and
the breakdown of that union is such that the sexual act, which cannot be
erased, might at least obliterate culpability. Here the imagination borrows
on descriptions stored in the memory of woman over a long period and
then transformed, so that although the theme of the Virgin-Mother can
hardly be used because of its sacred nature which sets it apart from the
common experience of most mortals, the story of the Sleeping Beauty,
heard over and over, provides a much more subtle adaptation. It has
almost pagan overtones; for one knows for instance that fecundity and
unconsciousness occur in a great many pagan legends, like the tale of
Danae’s golden rain, for example. The traditional tale and its sacred or
mythical counterpart say what the woman does not want to say; namely,
that furtive pleasures taken by two people can be construed without too
much shame and that they constitute an acceptable, albeit regrettable,
adventure.
At this point in the story, highly involved as it is, events have been
presented in such a way as to make the commissioner understand that
everything had happened quite normally as it should have, except.... And
even the ‘except’ becomes a symbol of innocence because it is part and
parcel of a whole scenario of loss: the woman was not there — only her
body. Yes, it was true, the man took the woman and that was itself a
serious matter; but it was unavoidable. A passion long repressed has to be
sated one day or other. It was more of a misfortune than an abuse, because
up till then everything had happened with a reassuring order and sincerity.
Yes, the woman did give her consent, but she was not to blame because, as
pale as absence — she was not in possession of herself.

Happiness undone
Time and the obvious appearance of the pregnancy eventually wore away
the enthusiasm of the first seduction and earlier promises and there came a
time when previous trust collapsed. There were some who saw this coming
and tried to avoid it by taking precautions. Take the case of Antoine
Sabatteau, for instance, who made Anne Aubry drink something to induce
an abortion directly after making love with her. She said that

when she came to her senses two hours later, she scolded Sabatteau over
and over again for his unseemly behaviour and told him that no decent
38 Feelings and Metamorphoses

man would dishonour a young person. He simply replied that he loved

her with all his heart at the same time as handing her the drink, and
telling her that if she were pregnant then it would get rid of everything.
This the petitioner refused to do and repeated her previous reproaches
which she had every right to do. He told her that she was trying to trick
him but, in any case, if she were pregnant he would marry her and if his
father wouldn’t give his consent, he would do all he could to get it and
until he did, he would pay all the necessary expenses for the birth; and if
it was a boy, he would take responsibility for the child and prove to her
that he was an honest man.16

His evidence provides us with a very good summary and illustration of

the difficulty of accepting the arrival of a child if only on economic
grounds. In this case, the man had already worked out his strategy; firstly,
there was his decision to offer the woman an abortifacient immediately
after the sexual act and then, secondly, if this failed, to make provision for
the future. If she were indeed pregnant, then he would marry her, or
should his father refuse consent, which was always a possibility, then he
would guarantee the costs of the birth. He added that these were the
words of an honest man, but failed to mention what would happen in the
equally likely event of the birth of a girl.
Other men were probably not quite so well organized, at least not
in their own minds, but the appearance of the pregnancy beneath frocks
and skirts often marked the beginning of negative attitudes ranging from
desertion pure and simple to more subtle negotiations which prolonged the
time, allowing for the beginnings of a tentative retreat.
The women’s statements relate in minute detail those first few anxious
moments when they say they initially sensed the beginnings of this dis¬
loyalty and betrayal, to be followed later by lying and ultimate desertion.
Sometimes the time would be dragged out by publishing the banns for
instance, but still there was no wedding ceremony. The reasons given were
largely economic, for example the need to pay off debts before getting
established, or waiting for creditors to pay back sums promised to the
man; or else it might be the parents who refused their consent, on the
pretext of moral grounds which often concealed their more immediate
concern for material benefit.
It was a long time before the woman understood what was going
on. She waited patiently, reassured by the publication of the banns, for
instance, or a present, or by the departure of her intended to obtain his
parents’ consent. In fact her dream could go on indefinitely even when, in
some cases, the child had already been born and the woman had taken on
the costs of the birth by herself, like Therese Bisson, for example. At the
request of Juffet, the father-to-be, she had sold ‘her room to pay for the
birth’.17 Juffet, however, had still not returned from his trip to Lyons
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 39
to consult his father. A few letters turned up explaining that he was
prevented from returning to be with her because his mother and father
were both ill. Therese went on waiting and carried on breast-feeding the
baby until the last letter finally opened her eyes. In it, Juffet expressed his
anger that she was nursing the baby herself and gave her orders to put the
child into an orphanage: 'What do you think people will say,’ he wrote,

when they see a young woman on her own? I have been advised by a
close friend, who found himself in exactly the same predicament, to do
what he did and put the child in an orphanage, making sure that he
could be recognized so that he could have him back when he wanted,
and in fact he took him out a year after he was married. And so, dear
friend, this is what I advise you to do. We can have the child whenever
we want and it won’t set people talking so much. Anyway, we won’t be
the first ones. It goes on all the time nowadays.18

That was that. Therese decided to lodge a complaint.

Anne Adot, a chambermaid ‘woke up’ even later. She placed her first
child in the orphanage on the advice of her friend, Jean Grosse, who kept
on putting off the marriage. When she became pregnant for the second
time, she decided to lodge a complaint in which she expressed her grief at
not being able to have her first child back with her. When summoned to
appear, her partner revealed to her that he would never marry her as she
had no fortune and he had no intention of ending up in poverty.
For others, desertion came more quickly, almost immediately upon
announcing the pregnancy. ‘When she realized that she was pregnant, she
told him about her fears, whereupon he made some indecent remarks and
said in public that he had had a good time with her on several occasions
but that he had no intention of marrying her and would get away with
paying 20 ecus’;19 ‘now that he had seduced her, he refused to marry
her’;20 ‘as soon as she realized that she was pregnant he went away and
refused to see her’;21 ‘when she was pregnant he told her that he would
live with her but he would never marry her’.22
Betrayed, deceived and abused, the woman had lost her honour. The
dream that had been made possible by someone else’s words had turned
into a tragedy, both materially and morally, and it had to be lived out in
full view of the neighbourhood. ‘Her misfortune is twofold in that she
finds herself deprived of her honour as a result of being five months
pregnant and while he now refuses to marry her she cannot conceal her
pregnancy from the public.’23 The only hope of restoring the lost honour
was to lodge a complaint with the commissioner. The actual amount of
damages and interest obtained was derisory (‘getting off with 20 ecus’, as
one man put it), but honour was re-established. In order to do that it was
necessary to admit one’s error at the same time as showing that it was
40 Feelings and Metamorphoses

not one’s fault, by denouncing the underhandedness of an untrustworthy

partner. The complaint before the law had the effect of restoring honour
and providing a few ecus; but it was also much more than that. It was the
only means available to the woman of stating her innocence in public. This
explains the length of the statements and the structure of the accounts
which constitute a slow and laborious presentation of a union that was
anticipated and hoped for, only to end in deception.

The self-assurance of the male

If the commissioner were convinced or if the facts seemed to be over¬

whelmingly against the partner, then he would be summoned to appear
and undergo an interrogation. The examination of the man reveals an
altogether different facet of the truth and draws on a vocabulary and code
of behaviour not found in the woman’s account. There is a strategy here
and a male—female game which have little in common with the evidence
established by the woman. All in all, the affirmation of the male role is
quite cut and dried.
Some denied ever having frequented the woman, but they were not the
majority; others recognized the facts but attempted to discredit the woman
with age-old arguments suggesting that she was no more than a libertine
or that he could not be identified as the father because she went with
anyone and everyone and besides, he’d paid her each time, hadn’t he? And
she was well known in the district for running around, wasn’t she? There
were female ‘libertines’, granted, but they would hardly have had any
interest in being domesticated and if this were the case, there would
have been no question of their seeking marriage or proof of paternity.
The masculine defence slid with easy self-assurance into the traditional
argument which said it was the woman’s fault because she was always the
one who was ‘surrounded by lovers’ and always took the initiative. In
other words, what we have here is simply another well-known slant on the
male—female perspective but instead of the woman as captive, passive and
overcome, we have the voracious female Siren whose favours it was no sin
to enjoy.
Perhaps what was more surprising were the numbers of male statements
confirming such opinions,24 although the commissioner appeared not to be
taken in. But the gross nature of the suggestions could only have had the
effect of devaluing the personality of the woman, as in the following case
of the gentleman’s valet whose partner had already had two children by
him and who, in his defence, accused her of being a prostitute. His
evidence was ‘that on one occasion he had had her whilst standing beside
the fire in a cabaret when she got her skirt burned all the way up to the
 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ 41

belt’. Another man was very pleased with himself for ’being her “first” and
seeing her underclothes covered in blood’. Someone else asserted quite
arrogantly that he had taken some of her pubic hair and could show it to
anyone who wanted to look. A fourth male declared that she was so stupid
that anyone could do what they liked with her and that it was very bad of
her to let herself go like that. This pathetic catalogue of petty triumphs and
the typically salacious details of jokes amongst the boys set the man at a
considerable distance from the space that the woman had so delicately
created for him back in her own evidence. It was a far cry from the tender
love-letters, the chit-chat, the teasing and the laughter on the stairs. When
called to appear in public, the man resorted, in his defence, to the most
stereotypical male role of them all, namely, that of the man who gets what
he wants and then goes on his way, pays up and has done, taking his
pleasure and leaving with contempt. Why believe him any more than the
woman talking about being swept off her feet and losing consciousness?
These two inverse images are typical of the preconceptions and pre-existing
order of things which the documents have preserved intact. Before the law,
no one wished to be marginalized.
But the commissioner was no fool. In certain cases, in spite of the male
denials, the man was obliged to pay the costs of the birth and, if necessary,
additional damages and supplementary interest; in this way the separation
was made public, and honour restored; and thanks to this passage through
Justice and the courts, an official reconciliation between the public and
State was made possible. At the heart of it all were the police, acting as
the cement necessary for this process of harmonization. The union, for
which public recognition has been demonstrated to be so important, could
only be severed in public, if it were not to become a mark of shame. And
thus the personal grammar of the self encountered an almost universal
repertoire which required one to expose oneself in order to be acknowledged
and rehabilitated within the traditional codes of honour and reputation
which the neighbourhood imposed. In order to do this, each party - both
male and female - slipped into traditional roles and presented themselves
in images that were almost petrified. However, the story told by the
woman was her own, as was that of the other. They had both seen each
other in private and they were now expecting to be regarded according to
the ways in which they had described themselves. They had both, in quite
different and opposing ways, appropriated their own novel. Our job is to
decode the novel, but not their secret.
 4
Concerning Parents and Children

‘Marriage is also a place’, we wrote in Le Desordre des families'.1 Before

looking at the marriages that broke down, we should first recall some
of the essential characteristics of the happy couple. Their story hardly
features in the judicial archives, of course, although there is ample evi¬
dence to suggest that they do have a history - and a remarkable one.
Setting up together was a risky business, not to be undertaken lightly.
One had to be able to guarantee a decent level of economic survival, for ‘it
was criminally thoughtless to marry without having the capital needed to
maintain the future children’.2 Being socially and economically established
lay at the heart of the relationship that was harmonious both sexually
and emotionally, with honesty and understanding playing a large part in
maintaining this relative economic stability.
Respect for other people’s property or for public property was an
abstraction. What really brought a brutal end to a union based on trust
was the man who squandered his wife’s dowry; the woman who got into
debt, or the man or woman who sold off the furniture or the sheets while
the other was away. Financially, men and women seemed on equal terms,
the woman being no more prepared to tolerate anyone having a prior
claim on her earnings than the man; nor was the man entitled to spend the
fruits of his labour entirely on himself.3 The couple was an association in
which each partner had rights and responsibilities, particularly where
children resulted from the union.
Domestic harmony was also the result of mutual concern and respect
for one another. It was quite common to find the wife accusing the
husband of abandoning his usual involvement with the children. Such a
brutal and abrupt change of attitude was regarded as a sign of misconduct
elsewhere, usually outside the home. Whether it was problems at work, an
affair with another woman or spending too much time in the cabaret etc, it
 Concerning Parents and Children 43
was still an accepted fact that the common man played a natural and equal
part with his wife in the nurturing and education of his children.4
In this respect, the amount of space played an important role, which
might seem surprising seeing that the lodgings, as we know, opened
straight out onto each other, allowing for very little intimacy in the
modern sense of the word. In spite of this, conjugal space did exist and the
man wanted to see it respected just as much as the woman. Staying away
from home, sleeping elsewhere or repeatedly coming home late were just
so many signs of disaffection. For no matter how transparent, indiscreet or
vulgar the room or lodgings, it was still ‘Home’ — the place to come back
to and a source of contact. It was frequent, unwarranted absence in the
course of the day (not including regular long-distance journeys, travelling
and long-term absence) that was the most common complaint made by
husband and wife.
Wife-beating, although widely recognized in ancient custom,5 did not
appear to be approved of. There was immediate outrage on the part
of the wife and neighbours and public opinion was firmly behind the
victim. It was not unusual for the commissioner to be alerted quickly to
such behaviour and for him to intervene in a decisive manner, usually
admonishing the husband and even, on occasion, throwing him into jail if
the beatings had been repeated and dangerous.6 Often promiscuity acted
as a guarantor of a certain degree of normality in marital relations and yet,
no matter how frequent, this type of violence scarcely went unpunished;
but paradoxically, this almost daily violence, although common, was not
even admitted, let alone rejected.7
Hard work and temperance together with honesty were the measure
of good intent in one’s relationships just as in one’s work. Instability,
idleness, thieving or regular drinking were hardly likely to guarantee the
fragile economic balance on which a part of the conjugal arrangement
rested. All this was well known to the district commissioners, who each
day received numerous complaints from husbands or wives no longer
prepared to tolerate the excesses of their partners. When this happened to
a couple, that was the end of their credibility in the neighbourhood and of
their good name amongst working people and artisans, without which it
was difficult to sustain employment or retain the goodwill of customers.
The union could not have a life of its own without the approval
of others. The couple found themselves mutually entwined in a narrow
triangle comprising the man, the woman and the neighbourhood. In their
capacity as witnesses for one another, they understood the nature of the
arrangement and the ease with which it could crumble, not to say, shatter.
But for all that the doors opened permanently onto the landing and the
dividing walls were thin and, in spite of the ever-present neighbours and
regardless of the inevitable fusion of fact and fiction, truth and rumour,
44 Feelings and Metamorphoses

interrogations and witnesses’ accounts seldom reveal indiscretions about

each other’s sexual behaviour.8 Terms like ‘debauchery’ and ‘lechery’ were
used in condemnation, and ‘honesty’ in approval. Details that might allow
a glimpse of the real life of the couple were rare. Even though every other
aspect of life was common knowledge, it is perhaps anachronistic on our
part to view such discretion with surprise. It could be anachronism or
possibly a form of intellectual blindness which prevents us from imagining
an unabashed sexual freedom and an absence of privacy where there was,
nevertheless, still a place for secrets.
As far as the couple were concerned, both the man and the woman had
their own individual honour to defend. If the husband or partner was
debauched, he brought shame on himself in the eyes of the neighbourhood,
where he was hardly likely to be excused on the grounds of his sex. If the
wife or mistress drank or fell into bad company, she in her turn provoked
a hostile reaction. It was up to both of them to maintain their own pride
and reputation, in short, to hold their head high. The man was no more
the keeper of the woman’s reputation than she his. Significantly, witnesses’
comments are no more harsh on her than him. Moreover, the disgrace of
the one did not automatically rebound on the other; the neighbours
certainly knew where to lay the blame without necessarily holding the
couple responsible for the bad behaviour of one of its partners.
This was due to the structure of the couple and the perception of the
prospects of each party. To assume mutual and yet individual responsibility
for one’s own honour so that repercussions were not necessarily felt
by one’s immediate family was to affirm a certain way of life which
meant making one’s own choices and accepting responsibility for oneself.
Marriage, as an arrangement for mutual understanding and economic
survival, created a set of relations where it was out of the question that the
bad conduct of the one should adversely affect the chances of the other.
If the drunkenness or self-indulgence of one of the partners inevitably
disrupted the economic stability of the family group, there was no need to
stigmatize the entire family as well. Where the offences committed were
serious enough to undermine the reputation of all, there was, in the last
resort, a call for the imprisonment of the whole family as a means of
correction. But usually, each party accepted responsibility for his or her
own honour, thereby reflecting the manner in which the association came
about - a courageous journey for the majority.
Having left one’s relatives behind in the provinces to go to the capital,
one set up house in order to become established. Between the man and the
woman there existed a kind of equality in their relationship to the outside
world; each one worked, went about town, joined in with celebrations and
was fully involved in the social round. One did not have a situation where,
on the one hand, there was the man as the dim figure flitting between the
 Concerning Parents and Children 45

inside and outside world in his capacity as defender of the family faith
and, on the other hand, the woman, turned inward on her world. Rather,
there were two people engaged in living and working to the best of their
ability in the face of a neighbourhood which they watched and by whom
they themselves were watched. To this extent one might say that the
progress of the couple did not inhibit the personal development of the
individual. Certainly, where an individual was capable of fending for
himself or herself, independently of the other, then the honour of that
person was capital to be invested only with extreme care.
In a society like that of the Ancien Regime, where the Third Estate had
no rights and where tradespeople and small businessmen had no political
representation or public voice such as the more hierarchical trades’
associations might have, there was less rivalry between men and women,
and for the couple, more equality in terms of personal worth. But as soon
as one moved up the social ladder, the story was different. Conflicts
between husband and wife were far from rare. An analysis of their dis¬
putes reveals their manner of addressing each other, the nature of their
quarrels and their mistrust of one another. It further underlines the extent
to which the neighbourhood was involved. When it came to going to law
or assessing the rights and wrongs of a matter, the neighbours established
responsibility and apportioned blame with scrupulous accuracy. They
testified to what they had always seen, heard and understood. They
defended the one and accused the other, revealing the strength of their
hold on social practice and the consensus around which the collective life
of the community revolved.
In these disputes the spoken word was undeniably binding. This
produced a strange situation and we have already mentioned, for instance,
how talk circulated in this urban microcosm. We have seen how it trans¬
formed and was transformed and the extent to which it could make or
break reputations. However, when one gave one’s word it was taken as
concrete evidence and tangible proof. The written word was so rare that
what was said between people took on a sacred character, proof of which,
paradoxically, remained impossible to establish, the more especially as it
was perceived and experienced as being the only proof worth establishing.
Mobile, swift, disfigured and disfiguring, it was talk that was the maker
and breaker of friendships, creator of upheaval as well as solidarity; and
talk, in spite of everything, was taken at its word.

The historian and the child

The lithe and mischievous silhouette of the child merging effortlessly with
the activities of the city is a familiar one for us; Louis-Sebastien Mercier
46 Feelings and Metamorphoses

also has a description of the child’s slender profile and his easy at-oneness
with the life of the town, whilst the iconography of the day delights in
sketching his agile presence in the urban landscape. But if we had only one
picture of him in our memories, it would surely be that of the petit
Savoyard encumbered by his sweep’s tools and brushes.y
The judicial archives contain other images. They are much more shock¬
ing and there is absolutely no feeling of folklore or quaintness about them.
They contain the annual registers of ‘Abandoned Children’ kept by the
district commissioners; they include records of cases against parents who
had failed to pay their fees for wet-nursing and requests for imprisonment
by lettres de cached0 (in this respect, one could remain a child up until the
age of 32). Abandonment, wet-nursing and imprisonment were all realities
for which we have some evidence even though it is rather patchy.11
The main body of complaints and actions brought before the courts of
the Petit and Grand Criminel12 contain references to the child in the
context of the evidence and examinations. This might amount to no more
than preliminary questions put to the accused in which they were asked to
state the number of their children, living or dead. The child was also a
cause of disputes between parents, for his games and pranks quite often
upset the neighbourhood; and his placement as an apprentice could also
give rise to conflicts between the master of the workshop and the mothers
and fathers. As a result the child was often to be found at the forefront of
a host of quarrels with which the urban scene was studded.
It is difficult to form a clear and precise picture of him, however, or to
make out his exact place and role, even though one does have a number of
detailed texts on the subject, such as one particular dossier on the affair of
the abduction of children in Paris in May 1750.13 It presents, in all its
brutality, a population and its police face to face with its youngsters.
Recent historiography has cast the whole subject of the child in a new
light, so that it is now possible to think one knows not only how he came
into the world, but how he was fed, clothed, nursed, loved and educated.
Segments from his history have been reconstituted and a very different
interpretation of his place in the family and in society has come to light.
Today, as is often the case, however, the images occasionally become
blurred and the actual reality becomes as elusive as ever. In the end one
discovers that the source work is confined almost exclusively to what is
said about him and, very rarely, from what he himself is, or from what
his parents can say about him or what he himself can say about his
activities and his own network of friends and acquaintances. We discover
him through moral and educational concerns written on the subject by
enlightened elites, or else from graphs showing birth rates, statistics of
infant mortality and the numbers of abandoned children. Rationalizations
are made based on ‘official’ attention given him by society without ever
 Concerning Parents and Children 47

really considering his links with the family and other social structures,
thereby denying him the possibility of becoming the subject of his own
history.14
This has made it possible to outline a number of themes which, although
divergent, depend in the main on the same basic questions; for instance,
does the love for a child remain one of the unchanging constants of human
history, whether or not its exteriorization is affected by the attitudes
and behaviour appropriate to the time? Or is its appearance a historical
occurrence which we can date? This automatic insistence on associating
‘childhood’ with ‘love’ has contributed to the absence of new modes of
enquiry which might allow different aspects of the history of children to be
discovered. Perhaps one part of the field of investigation has unwittingly
been rendered sterile by limiting this new object of history - childhood -
to one or two questions which are far too closely linked to our own
concepts of childhood, such as the following: In view of the frequency
with which children were abandoned in the past, or inadvertently suf¬
focated, could one say that they were loved? Or, could one be affected by
the death of a baby when death itself was such a frequent and familiar
occurrence?
By focusing the research primarily on the extent and amount of love,
which is in itself difficult enough to define, let alone evaluate, one limits
the possibility of uncovering other modes of relating and socializing
between parents, children and adults. This constant association of child¬
hood with sentiment and sensibilities ultimately produces a thick screen
from behind which the imagination finds it cannot quite escape.
It is particularly in the studies of poor families where this association
gives rise to most difficulty. As far as the nobility or the bourgeoisie is
concerned, historians of the eighteenth century have an abundance of
literature on the child at their disposal. They can take account of its
impact on the reading matter of the period, and assess its evolution and
influence on the parents. The mastery of reading and writing, the taste for
knowledge and new ideas, the practice of writing journals or memoirs and
the habit of letter-writing have all left numerous traces which allow us to
see the changes in thinking with regard to behaviour and custom, and
provide us with reflections on emotions and the expression of feelings
within the family.
Of course there is nothing of the kind for the popular classes. In spite
of the compilation of statistics for literacy and well-researched studies
of popular literature and the cultural differences between various social
groups, it still remains very difficult to describe ways of behaving within
families and their evolution. The task of interpretation is much more
sensitive here than elsewhere. From factors such as economic fluctuations,
price indices and rates of mortality and abandonment, the historian has
48 Feelings and Metamorphoses

to deduce a certain number of resulting practices. Apart from judicial

archives and the all too rare autobiography, one can call on very few texts
which allow a more faithful reconstruction of the exact place of the child
amongst the people.
In this context poor families, who were usually more affected by death
and disease than others, have often been interpreted in economic terms and
nothing else, thus precluding any kind of affection as we understand it
today. Some years ago, for instance, one of our most serious and imagina¬
tive historians working in this field said that ‘the family was a moral
and social reality, rather than emotional. In the very poorest families,
it corresponded to nothing more than the material installation of the
couple within a wider milieu. . .. For the poor, the family as the centre of
emotional life scarcely existed.’15
It is perhaps surprising to find that not even recent work on the subject
has succeeded in providing a different view, and while not necessarily
linking economic difficulty to an absence of feeling or relating childhood
simply to bonds of affection, it does still create stereotyped images of the
child of the people fleeing the house ‘to bronze himself in the sun’s rays’,
for instance, or learning about life in the workshop to the crack of the
cane or from jokes and obscenities. ‘It is said there were no children among
the popular classes. Children were abandoned or put out to nurse, they ran
away from home, were collected into schools or spent their free hours
in the streets, only coming home to sleep.’16 However, Jacques-Louis
Menetra, journeyman glazier, when writing the Journal of his life, begins
by recording the death of his mother when he was 2 years old and his
very great affection for his grandmother from whom he could hardly
bear to be separated. ‘I became sick with boredom from not seeing my
grandmother.’17
When it comes to characterizing the people, one is constantly coming
across contradictions and shifts in vocabulary and occasionally tone,
which suggest a remote, almost other-worldly quality and one finds that
their behaviour and actions are interpreted as being the very essence of
popular culture and thought. Popular activities are certainly described
better than previously, but at the risk of their being encased in a vocabulary
which exudes the odour of sweat and the gutter.
The same ambiguities affect the history of feelings amongst the people
as that of popular culture. For if it is generally agreed among historians
and sociologists that ‘the criteria of beauty are determined by knowledge
and discernment and what is generally considered agreeable to the finer
feelings, both of which lie well outside the field of competence of the
common people’,18 then it is hardly surprising that they have no reserva¬
tions in contrasting the refinement of bourgeois emotions with the brutish¬
ness of the people. 1 am convinced that like Jacques Ranciere in his
 Concerning Parents and Children 49

commentary on Kant, one has to ‘give up once and for all this notion
that the world must forever be divided up between “cultured” man and
“natural” man’.19
There is no reason to suppose that aesthetic forms are necessarily linked
to knowledge any more than that feelings should be associated with the
degree of civilization and refinement. We must stop attributing to the
oppressed our own laborious interpretations of their daily activities as
though these were their culture on the pretext that the people neither
possess nor have mastered the elements of traditional culture. It is time to
put an end to this way of looking at things, which is largely due to the
intellectual or specialist who applies his own rules and mechanisms to
what he has discovered, and puts together what he calls popular ‘habits’
under the heading of ‘thought’ or ‘view of the world’ so as to avoid
looking elsewhere. Just because the people have to associate, eat or house
themselves in such and such a fashion due to economic constraints, it
would seem that there is no other way of categorizing them apart from
these practices derived solely from necessity; and, for the common man, it
is as if, between necessity and himself, there were no space of his own in
which he might think, express preference, criticize, concede, refuse and
appreciate. ‘For the paid parquet-layer, liberty begins with and depends on
reversing roles, by being the one who looks, and not the one who is looked
at.’ So writes J. Ranciere of the carpenter Gauny, whose philosophical
propositions he had discovered.20
This almost impossible quest to understand that intimate space that the
human being puts between himself and his sense of self is the real work of
the historian and, occasionally, when faced with this blank space which
has to be unearthed and rediscovered, there is a strong temptation to let
the documents from the police archives speak for themselves. Quite often
they are so superb that one would like to give them to the reader as they
are, without changing a single word; this is as much for their aesthetic
value as for the depth of their significance. The temptation is there because
it immediately acts as protection against those possible shifts in meaning
about which we have just spoken. Rather than betray, distort or even
conceal, why not lay the texts bare, just as they are? But it would obviously
be a mistake to be lured into thinking that the nakedness of the document
was a test of the truth or failure of the assessment of its meaning; for
history cannot be reduced to a simple display of texts and ancient docu¬
ments. Like it or not, history is a considered account which each genera¬
tion dedicates to its past, thinks through anew and reformulates as new
events and problematical questions arise.
The work of interpreting texts and situating them in relation to others
and to social and political phenomena has to be done. It is essentially that
which engenders the search for models, rules and mechanisms which allow
50 Feelings and Metamorphoses

one to find order and rationality in the totality of popular behaviours so

often described as being the fruits of compulsions, irrationality or primeval
tendencies from which all reflection has been totally excluded. Hence we
have the people as instinctive animal, or the crowd as impulsive woman,
weak and violent; these images are so close to us that they form an
unconscious and undeniable part of our mental horizons even if one is
sufficiently alert or cautious enough to be on one’s guard against them.
In searching for this order, which might include the study of irrational
phenomena (the world of feelings, beliefs or superstitions etc.), one
gradually has to start filling in the generally perceived gaps between
bourgeois reason and popular primitivism.
The concern to keep popular childhood quite separate from questions
of love or the lack of it (which up until now have been an almost statutory
requirement and additional appendix), springs entirely from this pre¬
occupation. One is thus free to study, one by one, the child’s activities in
the city such as his comings and goings, his favourite haunts, his relation¬
ship with the neighbourhood, his work or trade, forms of collective life
and his links with institutional structures (be they parish, family, school,
police or prison). Once one has demarcated the processes and procedures
of his daily practice, one is free to introduce the question of the nature of
the links existing between himself, the family and the social group; the
interest shown in him by the adult world and the ways in which it
perceived or availed itself of him. From that, what one eventually finds out
about feelings will be as a result of thorough research into his place in the
fabric of urban life and not by asking a priori questions born of our own
concept of childhood or of the people which tend to suppose that the
structural reality of childhood can be reclaimed from rather poor updating
of this kind. The careful establishment of modes of rationality avoids the
arbitrary nature of hasty judgements or of changing ideologies and also
avoids falling into the trap of constantly describing the people in the
images of Epinal,21 left forever on the margins of self-awareness. And
although highly regulated and rigorous research of this kind cannot give
the life of the people its full dimension, I am deeply convinced that it is one
of the few methods likely to reveal any popular forms of coherence. But in
spite of that, my reading of the archives has left me with a kind of
conviction that no amount of analysis, no matter how detailed, can ever
take account of those extra qualities of life and thought that come through
in each document. One can never have the measure of everything - there is
always something left which is important but unpronounceable. Nor does it
do any good to appropriate it on the pretext that one is aware of it, even
by communicating it lyrically in a form which addresses itself to the
senses; this would sound too much like Michelet,22 or someone of the
same school. There is a risk that a rigorous and methodical intellect might
 Concerning Parents and Children 51

lose, on the lower slopes of knowledge, those high points of life and the
senses. We never fully discern them by means of the ‘sense’ we manage to
make of them through our own understanding, but we nevertheless still
need to grasp the ruggedness or gentleness of the terrain. We should not
lose them from sight nor leave them fallow; nor should one immobilize
them beneath a pen welling with easy emotion and all too ready to cover
over our enormous vats of ignorance with a passing fad. Thus what is
said here about childhood and the people is a deliberate attempt to avoid
these traps; but 1 cannot help thinking that scattered somewhere in these
documents are small strands of meaning which 1 have been unable to
thread together again, yet which upset the order of things even as I have
begun to set it in place.

Contrasting silhouettes
We are familiar with the great ferment of ideas and philosophical reflec¬
tion that took place during the eighteenth century and which put the child
very much at the centre of its preoccupations. There is no point in our
mentioning here the discourses by moralists and philosophers or treatises
by those involved with public health who were concerned to introduce
new regulations to help stem the tide of infant mortality and the death of
women in childbirth. Many historians have already worked on these
themes, highlighting, for instance, the conflict between doctors and mid¬
wives or the need for the child to be breast-fed by its own mother, to take
but two examples.23
The moral teaching of the Church at the time on family matters and
relationships is also interesting, and J.-L. Flandrin has produced a detailed
study of an important text written in 1713 by Antoine Blanchard, Prior
of Saint-Mars-les-Vendome. In it he expounds on matters of sin and
transgression and offers some commandments whose wordiness provides
us with a good deal of information.24 Respect and kindness, for instance,
were to be a natural part of the relationship between parents and children.
There had been efforts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to stifle
this natural affection, which was regarded as ungodly; in the eighteenth
century, to be overly demonstrative (particularly between man and wife)
was still viewed with suspicion but there was greater freedom in the
expression of feelings between parents and children. Confession manuals
lay particular emphasis on respect and fairness; parents should not stir up
envy or jealousy amongst their children, nor should there be any trace of
harshness or indifference in their behaviour. These negative recommenda¬
tions left the field wide open for all kinds of positive attitudes if so desired,
as there were no impositions of a specific nature contained within these
52 Feelings and Metamorphoses

moral teachings of the Church. There was some room for manoeuvre, with
parents and children having mutual functions to fulfil which were likely to
determine attitudes and other matters of significance.
As for the police archives, they offer such a variety and multitude of
conflicting, contrasting and contradictory images of the child that on first
reading one is overwhelmed by a feeling of incoherence and disorder;
being a child would appear to be a space which knew neither laws nor
limitations but was rather a zone of confusion in which it was difficult for
ways of being to assume any kind of order.
On closer examination, it becomes apparent that the reaction of the
parents vis-a-vis their children and their coming into the world lay within
the only two spaces available to them, namely the hope for life and the
immediate contradiction of their hope due to the deathly landscape by
which it was surrounded.
Economic difficulties, constant migrations, the search for work or lack
of regular employment forced the parents into putting their children out to
nurse;25 on some occasions they abandoned them,26 a practice which
could sometimes reach plague proportions and fill entire mortuaries with
abandoned children. Lack of hygiene, appropriate care and epidemics did
the rest. Up until 4 years old, the chances of survival were very slim. At the
birth of one of their children, the parents spontaneously welcomed the idea
of its life at the same time as accepting the possibility of its loss. The texts
reflect a state of tension between several possibilities: abandonment or
sending away to nurse; sickness, or indeed death, due to ignorance of basic
hygiene.
Louise Brule was the wife of a servant. Being ill, she wanted above all
else to have her son brought back from Montargis where he had been sent
away to nurse. On 8 June 1766, when he was only one year old, a driver
had brought him in a water cart as far as Port Saint-Paul in Paris,
accompanied by his nurse; but on arrival, all that remained was a little
corpse. The Watch went to let the mother know and the booking clerk for
the Briare coach waited for her to come. He put the child’s body on a
barrel.

The woman, who was unknown to us, came to the guardroom. She was
all in tears and told us that she had come to see her child and when we
told her that he was dead we asked her to give her name. Louise Brule,
wife of Damideaux, a servant to Jannier, rate-payer in the Rue du Sender
and herself resident of Rue de Clery, recognized the nurse of her male
child to whom she had entrusted his care on 25 February 1765 together
with the appropriate layette. She confirmed that she had been notified of
her son’s illness in a letter received ten months ago and that a short
while before that, this same nurse had let her know that her son was in
very good health and now needed putting into frocks, so she had sent
 Concerning Parents and Children 53

him one. She said she wanted to see him but the foster-father had said
that the child was in no fit state to travel and so she assumed that they
would do all that was required and she had offered to pay for his
treatment. Since then she had received two letters from the foster-father
giving her news of her child. He said that her child had been ill on and
off and that he had had a slight fever which was due to teething as he
had had four teeth for two or three months now. As they had not had
any further news and wanting to see him on account of her feelings as a
mother, they had decided to send their cousin with two letters, one for
the priest and the other for the foster-father. She could not recall the
content of the letters as it had been her husband who had written them,
and she herself had not read them. Her cousin had set out and she was
very surprised to see him again today telling her that her child had died
on the way. She could not recognize him in his present state as the only
time she had seen him was the day she had brought him into the world,
but she said that she recognized the linen of his layette. Her husband was
not there; she thought he was in the country with his masters.27

The nurse explained that she had not wanted to undertake the journey,
given the state of the child’s health but as the parents had insisted, she had
resigned herself to it, and that ‘in order to meet this request, she, the wife
of Beauvais, had left Ferriere with the child yesterday, the seventh day of
the month at 6 o’clock in the morning and boarded the Briare coach. This
same Jean-Baptiste had died in her arms at 2 o’clock.’
The identification of the body makes a moving account. Louise Brule
had been forced to separate from her new-born child after only 24 hours
because of her way of life and its economic constraints (she and her
husband could not have been living under the same roof). A year later
she had been obliged to state to the commissioner that apart from the
layette she had sent him a short while ago, she did not recognize him. The
clothes were her only proof of kinship. From this text, one gains a better
understanding of the basis of the relationship between parent and child
which consisted of enforced separation from birth, concern for him in spite
of the distance, ignorance of the risks involved in the journey and the
absence of any real married life for a couple where one of the parents was
a servant. There is also the lack of confidence in the nurse and her relative
incompetence. Louise Brule was a mother in mourning for a son she did
not know.
This scene, which was almost commonplace, illustrates the disruption
of the family. In such unfavourable conditions it is hardly surprising to
find texts referring to the mother’s lack of care for her children, or in
which one finds a father complaining before the law of neglect that was
potentially harmful to the welfare of his family. Familiarity with risk led
to fatalism and then to neglect but this negligence should not be con-
54 Feelings and Metamorphoses

fused with indifference, as indicated by the following example of Marie-

Jeanne-Franqoise Dupont, who although condemned by her husband, was
supported by the neighbourhood:

On 27 March 1778 at midday, Mathieu Legendre, chief clerk at the

office of the King’s Privy Council and resident of the Rue du Paon Saint-
Victor, came to lodge a complaint of neglect against Marie-Jeanne-
Franqoise Dupont, his wife. He had agreed that his child of 4 should
be weaned provided that he was properly fed and brought up by his
mother; but owing to her lack of care and failure to take him out
walking in the fresh air or keep him properly clean, he was unable to
walk or make use of his limbs. Although his wife had initially agreed to
put him out to board at the Barriere Saint-Jacques she had this day
prevented him from doing anything, for when they reached the end of
the Rue Paon she had started yelling, which brought everyone out onto
the street, and they had tackled him and snatched the child from his
hands, pulling off his wig and scratching his hands.28

At first sight the father appears to be a concerned figure but this rather
contrasts with the image of indifference of a man who had no qualms
about placing his children in an orphanage because at the time they were
preventing him from getting established.
There are also sketches of the woman with hordes of lovers who had
brought a large number of children into the world only to dispatch them
to the wet-nurse with never a second thought and without notifying their
respective fathers.
After several liaisons, Marie-Genevieve Demaisne, a mother already,
had set up house with Bordier, secretary to a member of the parlement
during the year 1768.

During the time of his liaison with her [affirms Bordier] she became
pregnant several times, but she took sole charge of the confinement and
the baptism of the children and sent them off to nurse so that all he had
had to do was to provide the money needed to cover her expenses. He
never knew where she sent the children and in fact she told him almost
every time that she had given birth that the children had died shortly
afterwards.

Bordier seemed to recall that Marie-Genevieve was probably pregnant ‘in

the course of the years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773 and that when
they were not dead as she had often told him she had put some of them
into the orphanage’.29
Migration, the high incidence of illegitimacy, the problems of con¬
traception, poverty, infantile mortality, together with the practice of
 Concerning Parents and Children 55

abandoning children, created a landscape in which people managed their

insecurity in their own particular way, torn between the desire for life and
all the other circumstances which made success a gamble. Closely parallel
with these examples in which the mother and father failed to look after
their children are contrasting texts illustrating the parents’ obvious concern
for the child. The new-born child, abandoned at the church door, might
have a note pinned to his jacket or else one might find parents concerned
about the good behaviour of their children, or even scenes of despair in the
event of a fatal accident to a child. (The accident of May 1770, the day of
the Dauphin’s marriage when 132 people suffocated to death, is a good
example of this.) Attitudes were shaped by the hope for life, about which
they obviously had good cause to be concerned.

‘They’re taking a childV

From December 1749 to May 1750, Paris lurched from one crisis to the
next; in fact the seasons and months were punctuated by 17 revolts in all.
Meanwhile the police took on the strange task of picking up children and
beggars right in the middle of the street. They were carrying out the orders
of Berryer, the Lieutenant-General of Police who had issued them on the
pretext that the children were up to no good and that the others were
asking for alms.
In the spring, popular anger intensified and the month of May turned
bloody; outbursts of anger which turned violent flared up more and more
frequently and brought the populace together, leading to conspiracies
and threats against the Lieutenancy of Police and its henchmen. Several
commissioners’ hotels were besieged, police officers were pursued and
shops looted. On 23 May, a police spy was beaten to death by the crowd
who had turfed him out of his rather precarious hiding-place in a building
on the Rue Saint-Honore. They took him to a commissioner who was so
terrified that he released him pretty quickly, thereby delivering him into
the hands of a crowd who were obviously determined to beat him to
death. That day, Lieutenant-General Berryer, surprised at discovering
events so widespread and finding his own life in danger, was obliged to flee
his hotel by a back door.
The day after the disturbance, the parlement ordered an investigation,
and for the next three months about 30 suspects were interrogated, includ¬
ing rioters and police agents accused of the abduction of children. Two
hundred and twenty-five witnesses were heard including those who had
seen the riots either close at hand or from afar, those who had been there
when a child was abducted and also those who had happened to hear any
‘dangerous talk’. The parents of the children who had been taken prisoner
56 Feelings and Metamorphoses

as well as the children themselves were also summoned to appear. There

were times when procedures went to as many as three interrogations in a
row as well as the inclusion of ‘additional information’, all of it recorded
in minute detail.
The parlement returned its judgement on 1 August 1750: three rioters,
one of whom was just 16, were sentenced to be hanged, and six policemen
were either reprimanded or received a warning. On 3 August the three
young men were executed at the Place de Greve before a crowd who had
begun by demanding a pardon but who fell silent in the face of an
impressive police presence. At the end of the day a few police subordinates
had had their feathers ruffled and three troublemakers were put to death.
Nothing had changed.
How could a society which was otherwise so preoccupied with educa¬
tion, population and the excessive rate of infant mortality have possibly
embarked on an enterprise such as the removal of children by its police? In
fact, ever since the end of the seventeenth century the population had been
shaken periodically by the sound of the arrest and abduction of children
which gave rise to numerous royal decrees requiring the commissioners to
investigate the matter.
It was the new policy of imprisoning beggars and vagrants which had
provoked the events; and as earlier in 1663 and 1675, the archers of the
hopital30 were the targets of serious rioting because they were suspected
of operating large-scale raids which included children. There had been
a similar situation in 1701, and in 1720 the situation was even more
serious,31 with the result that on 4 May, following serious confrontations
in the street, the King had issued a decree prohibiting anyone, on pain of
death, from interfering with the archers responsible for the arrest of
vagabonds and beggars, disabled and able-bodied alike.
The youngest were to be sent to the French colonies of America and
Mississippi but the arrest of any bourgeois, artisan or workman was to be
avoided. In fact, on 29 April a number of archers had been massacred by
the people of Paris at the pont Notre-Dame and the rue Saint-Antoine and
for several days there had been wholesale arrests of men, women, children
and young girls with the intention of deporting them.32 In their haste, they
had taken away the sons and daughters of wealthy traders, causing an
immediate popular reaction, for their children were certainly not going to
have any part in the opening up of Louisiana or Mississippi.
The authorities had been looking for a way of populating the colonies
for some considerable time already and the idea of sending out abandoned
children was not new.

It is a matter of considerable importance to find the means whereby

abandoned children might be sent to the West Indies and maintained
 Concerning Parents and Children 57

there until they are of an age to earn their own living. The climate and
temperature would help them to gain in physical strength and they
would no longer wish to return from a country they considered their
own. Harsh as it might seem to engage against their will children who
were born free, it could hardly be considered unjust if, for three or five
years, say, between the age of 14 and 19, they were to be in the service
of those people who had put them in a position to earn their own
living.33

Of the abandoned children, those who were the first to come under
attack were the beggars and tricksters, the dissolute and the idle. After the
riot of 1720 the Lieutenant of Police asked the syndics34 of the trades-
guilds to give him a list of their journeymen and apprentices. At the
same time each master was required to issue a certificate to each of his
employees in the absence of which, if taken by the archers, they would be
‘sent to Mississippi’.
All of this certainly makes it easier to understand the violence of the
days of May 1750. Paris had known for a long time that the disappearance
of her children might be due to police involvement - the knowledge was
still fresh in her memory. It was in their name that her citizens had risen
up and directed their anger at the door of the Lieutenant-General. The
response, though violent, was a rational attitude to this very real threat
which went on largely unseen. In fact, many of those police officers who
had been arrested appeared to feel guilty about obeying the abduction
orders. For them, this work was not at all in their normal line of duty and
in fact some of them even disguised or camouflaged themselves in order to
do it. They knew that their actions were provocative and would inevitably
exasperate the crowd.
The dossiers of both parents and children produced during the inves¬
tigations of the riot contain details of the reactions of each party to the
events as well as of daily activities which allow us an inside view of
the complexity of the relationships existing between children and adults.
The parents’ evidence given in the course of the enquiry provides us with
an account of their reactions from the point at which they first learned
about their child’s sudden disappearance. These texts, plus those provided
by the children who were also called to give evidence, outline the habits
and patterns of family life, making them rare and exceptional accounts
amongst the police archives. One can see that running throughout the
majority of the parents’ accounts, there is all the evidence of a consistent
and sustained concern, even if one does find contrasting evidence here and
there of the kind we have discussed elsewhere. And, in turn, when the
children give their evidence they almost always make mention of the
interest shown towards them by their parents. There are no elaborate
58 Feelings and Metamorphoses

comments, just simple acknowledgements which show in their own way

that the parent-child relationship was often symmetrical.
The news of the child’s arrest was always deeply felt by the parents.
The comments they make about the moment when they first found out
what had happened are vivid and they describe how they immediately
interrupted their normal activities to set off in search of the child. They
stress how in a matter of moments, they felt that they had been sent reeling
into another dimension of time which required precipitate action and
urgent steps to recover him. One parent started running after the archers’
prison coach which was still visible on the corner of the square; another
man was so overcome with fright that he came out of the bar where he
had been having a drink and started shouting for help; a third interrupted
a meal with friends; one mother immediately made her way to the prison
of Le Grand Chatelet, whilst another woman hastily found out about the
habits of Lieutenant-General Berryer in order to lie in wait for him and
ask for her child back. The first thought was often to warn the district
commissioner. Jerome Taconnet was a master butcher. He related how his
‘15-year-old son was at catechism and at about 5 o’clock a girl who was a
stranger to him had come and told him that his son had been taken away
by the archers who picked up young lads to send them off to the Indies.
Not realizing what the time was, he thought, good, the boy’s at catechism,’
and he went off quickly to look for him. The doors were closed, however.
This frightened him so he returned home and then went with one of his
friends to see Commissioner Le Comte.33
Balthazar Lucas, a soldier in the Watch, found out about everything
that had happened from his wife as ‘he was at vespers with the Jesuits of
the Rue Saint-Antoine’. He came rushing out of the service and ran across
to Commissioner Rochebrune, only to see his child in handcuffs.
One Sunday at the end of September, Anne-Fran^oise Cornet was
returning from a visit to one of her children who was apprenticed to a
clockmaker when she saw ‘a band of children from the area coming up
towards her. They told her that her child had been arrested and that he
was at Le Grand Chatelet [the prison] so she went over there straight
away’.36
Both father and mother reacted with the same speed and they usually
took steps together. Sometimes one of them would be reluctant to warn
the other for fear of contributing to the other’s grief, like the wife of
Millard who, upon seeing her son arrested, ‘returned home promptly in
order to prevent her husband from finding out, but he already knew’.
Once the family was reunited with uncles, aunts, cousins and brothers, it
acted swiftly and in unison. This is not surprising — the importance of
family networks is well established.
In the end, feelings of shock, fear and hate gave way to grief and its
 Concerning Parents and Children 59

associated behaviour, such as the child crying in the prison yard, or the
mother breaking down in tears on hearing of the arrest. Marguerite Ollier
spoke about the evening when her only son was taken away from their
home: ‘The officer said to the son, “Get up and get dressed, you young
layabout.” Her child got dressed and she was crying a great deal, but he
said, “Don’t cry, mother”, and she followed him outside holding him by
the hand.’37 It was not just women and children who responded in this
way. Elsewhere in the records, a witness referred to the pain and grief ‘of
his neighbour whose son had disappeared’, and Balthazar Lucas, a 58-
year-old soldier, ‘fell to his knees before Inspector Brucelles and kissed his
feet’.38
The imprisonment of the child, following his arrest, saw an increase in
the parents’ initiatives, and the days that followed were a race against time
in an attempt to avoid the worst, namely official entry and due registration
at the prison of Bicetre following several days in custody at the prison of
Le Grand Chatelet. The typical expressions used by the parents to describe
those moments spent attempting to extricate their child from the hands of
the police are like these by the following two mothers which illustrate the
depth of their anxiety: ‘The very next day she took it upon herself to make
every effort to get her son back’, and ‘as soon as she received the news she
went into action to find him’. The action was swift and imaginative and
neighbours and family were all brought in, in a variety of ways. Some
asked their neighbours to sign petitions of good character in an attempt to
bear witness to the honesty of their little prisoner; then, armed with this
precious bit of paper, they would go as often as twice a day to show it at
the Lieutenancy of Police where as often as not they would be met by a
minor employee or secretary.
Others used their distant relations to make approaches directly or from
afar to a police inspector or, better still, to Berryer himself.
Cousins, friends or servants working in large or small households were
sometimes able to provide the odd bit of information. Perhaps they had
heard that the inspector lived here or there or that he took this or that
route or came out at such and such a time. Occasionally they remembered
themselves to a former employer who was well established and perhaps
able to make an approach to the Lieutenant-General or some of his
entourage. This immediate resort to a conscious use of the social channels
and protective mechanisms (feeble though they were) does give an idea of
some of the links and points of connection between the nobility and the
ordinary people. Some of them told the commissioner, for instance, how
they themselves had kept watch on the movements of the police inspector
after a friend or neighbour had told them that he sometimes went to dine
at such and such a house. Thus, what we have here is the minute detail of
popular knowledge which was clearly capable of recognizing everyone’s
60 Feelings and Metamorphoses

comings and goings — evidence, in short, of the 'body social’ made visible.
Take the case of Anne Cornet, for example. ‘She was tipped off some¬
where between 8 and 9 o’clock at night that Brucelles [an inspector] was
passing by on his way home to the Hotel Nicolai. She ran over there so
quickly that she found him at the entrance porch.’
Along with all these comings and goings, the parents also took care of
their son in prison. They visited him several times a day, brought him food
so that he would not go without, gave money to the prison guards and
even to the other prisoners to make sure that he was well treated and,
above all, to ensure that he was not beaten.
Gabriel Laurent, apprentice joiner, aged 16, told how he was taken
handcuffed to Le Chatelet, where he stayed eight days and ‘came out as a
result of the interventions of his mother’s friends. During this time he had
been put on straw,39 and his mother had brought him his food every
day.’ Georges-Jean Bacheviller was 15 years old. He was arrested upon
becoming involved in a quarrel between some women in the street. He was
‘on straw for 15 days at Le Chatelet where his mother and father came to
see him two or three times a day’.
The amount of concern shown by the parents was not just related to the
age of the children. Marguerite Simon, mother of an older boy of 19 who
had just finished his apprenticeship as a cobbler, ‘took her son soup
twice a day and was distraught at seeing him covered in vermin’. Marie
Magnieu, a market trader, stated clearly that she had been ‘constantly at
the prison with food for her son’ and he too was almost a grown man.
Fear that prison might be the ruin of both body and soul was very evident
in each testimony. One father was saddened to say that whilst his child
had been there, ‘he had contracted scabies from which he was still not
quite recovered and that while he was there he had also learned a lot of
filth.’
Now and again one comes across a concern for education. Laundress
and widow of a journeyman joiner, Marguerite Ollier had only one son
and he had been taken away. She was very grieved by his loss and she got
her neighbours to sign a number of petitions proving that she was an
honest woman; but in spite of her efforts, her son was taken to prison at
Bicetre. At the time of making her statement her son was still there and
had been there for just over six months. She gave the following details:
‘She had given 30 sols [Old French for ‘sous’] a month so that he could
learn to read and write and the Governor and the prison masters had said
that they were very pleased with him.’40
This was not an isolated remark. The interrogations and the statements
both show an almost constant preoccupation with education. Whether it
was a matter of learning to read or write, or of forming letters (one
prisoner revealed that he could only read capitals and another explained
 Concerning Parents and Children 61

that he could write an A, a B and a C), or whether it concerned attendance

at school or at catechism, the dossiers give a good account of the obvious
importance attached to reading and writing amongst the least privileged
social groups and of the concern of most parents to provide their children
with some education. Of course, in these archives one does occasion¬
ally turn up some statements by parents who showed little concern for
their children, thus providing a contrasting picture, as was pointed out
previously. It is worth noting however, that they were in the minority
compared with the others and perhaps this is because it was a question
here of a collective threat coming from a police force supposedly there to
protect its population.
Marguerite Lebel, for example, heard a noise in the street the day
before the Feast of Pentecost. A neighbour shouted up to her that it was
children being arrested and so she went down to get two of hers in, never
thinking at the time about her other boy of 11, who had already been
arrested.41
We find care and neglect living together side by side. Another woman,
for example, who found out that her child had been picked up at a fair,
decided not to bother doing anything ‘as their eldest son had said that there
wasn’t any point, as the boy was already in prison’.42 There was no rush
in this case, just the inevitable submission to fate. Elsewhere one finds a
defenceless woman just waiting and making no attempt to get her son
released; she did not want to pay anything as she was convinced that the
courts would return him to her because he was an honest lad. The follow¬
ing is the account of her 13-year-old son, Francois Lefevre, imprisoned for
17 days:

His mother was asked for 6 francs at the prison to get him out earlier,
but his mother hadn’t got it, so she told the gaolers that her son hadn’t
done anything wrong or done any harm to anyone and when they got
tired of guarding him they would send him back to her. He came out
eight days later without costing his mother a thing.43

Whether one is dealing with the disturbance of 1750 or the occasional

rare text in amongst police proceedings, one comes to realize that rather
than a duality in the attitudes towards children there is a coexistence of
different views which sometimes contradict and appear entirely foreign to
each other as though there were no logical connection between them. The
same person, the mother or the father, seems to hold different attitudes,
sometimes at one and the same time, sometimes one after the other. This
raises a number of questions. When we read, for instance, that there were
some who did not know the number of their brothers and sisters or
whereabouts they were serving their apprenticeship, is it really a case of
62 Feelings and Metamorphoses

disorder or incoherence when, on the other hand, there were some who
had a surprisingly precise knowledge of their lineage, including distant
cousins? In actual fact, the whole of these reactions needs to be related to
the child and the family and to the circumstances engendering them as well
as to the position and functions held in the city by the members of the
family.
The child was as much a sign of life as of impending death, a fact which
was constantly brought to the minds of his parents by the environment in
which they lived. The existence of physical, material and moral danger
(accidents, illness and loss of employment) created an insecurity which
fashioned the shape of the collective mental horizons where the web of
both individual and social existence was woven from an awareness of the
potential threats to it. As a result, it was risk, whether real or imagined,
which produced that coexistence of attitudes which was in itself a means
of responding to the situation. One could deal with the risk or defy it,
tackle it head on, or resign oneself to it; it could drive one into submission
through anxiety, or else one could confront it with an indifference which
was intended to make the days and hours more liveable. It was in fact risk
which constituted the general matrix around which a large part of the
relationship between parent and child was constructed. Subsequently, it
is no longer a question of assessing or measuring positive or negative
attitudes in the hope of ultimately drawing a conclusion about the presence
or absence of affection in childhood. It is something entirely different. The
simultaneous existence of conflicting and contrasting behaviour was the
means by which the Parisian population attempted to cope with childhood
and to live with risk. ‘In a number of everyday situations, risk is found at
the heart of a mesh of constraints and contradictory motivations where
contending “realities” collide.’44 This is really what it was about.
As well as the risk and insecurity that each one had to deal with, one
should also include the way in which the family lived amid the structures
of urban life and the relationships which developed between parents and
children at the heart of this mishmash, such that the diversity of attitudes
matched their corresponding functions, which we must now describe.

The messenger
One’s eye is caught first of all by a somewhat nervous and slender form
whose familiar presence in Paris was punctuated by an incessant activity.
Aged between 10 and 16 years, he lived mainly out of doors on the streets,
squares or thoroughfares or on the restless banks of the Seine. He had
things to do ...
Depending on his family of origin, he might do this or that job or he
might intend to be a tradesman after a period of apprenticeship. In this
 Concerning Parents and Children 63

case, on completion of the contract between his parents and the master, he
would live with his master and be dependent on him for several years.
His removal from his parents’ influence could often cause problems and
conflict.45 If he were really poor, he might be an odd-job boy, a shop
hand, woodcutter or floor-polisher, unless he happened to come from
further afield like the mountains of Savoy, for example, or Limousin or the
Auvergne and then he might find himself swelling the ranks of young
chimney-sweeps, sleeping with his companions in dormitories overseen by
ancient old men and usually to be seen wearing the reminders of his work
about his person. He merged with the world of adults, and was only
distinguishable by the smallness of his stature and his cunning agility.
The child also took the time to go to school, however, and to receive
instruction; in fact the position of Paris in this respect was somewhat
exceptional as ‘the Paris school system offered those who had access to it
(almost all males of established families and a good proportion of females)
a wide range of choices: the system comprised nearly five hundred schools
of all kinds’.46 In fact, in the spring of 1750 at the time of the abductions, a
good many parents expressed their fear of sending their children to school
and the small schools became empty. Jean-Baptiste Feuchere, assistant to
the Parisian diocese and employed in the instruction of poor children of
the parish of Saint-Gervais, was called to give evidence on 27 May. He
told how

the fear of abduction of children was so great that a good many mothers
and fathers of the children who had continued coming had sought to
share their anxieties with him. He had told them that they could come
with them or keep them at home if they were afraid and, in fact, after
the feast of Pentecost, only about 12 of the 85 children who had
continued coming to the school still remained and they were all in fear
and trembling, and it had been the same in all the schools of the
parish.47

This evidence was corroborated by J.-L. Menetra in his Journal.

In those days it was rumoured that they were taking young boys and
bleeding them and that they were lost forever and that their blood was
used to bathe a young princess suffering from a disease that could only
be cured with human blood. There was plenty of talk about that in Paris.
My father came to get me from school as many other fathers did, along
with seven big coopers armed with crowbars.48

There was school but there was also catechism and religious ceremonies.
Some would go to vespers, others might go to hear prayers or prepare for
their first communion. The police archives make frequent mention of
64 Feelings and Metamorphoses

such religious activities involving children. We also know that at this

time a good many priests were involved in the somewhat difficult task of
catechizing this world of working children and in particular, those children
who had come from outlying provinces to perform the humble task of
chimney-sweep or cleaner under the control of their elders. An enquiry
into this matter made by the Abbe du Breil de Pontbriand reveals how
these little Savoyards lived: You will find them living

in the faubourgs (outskirts), eight or ten to a room which is supervised

by a leader. They do not return until late at night, bringing back their
paltry takings until they have enough to be able to make some use of it
according to the advice from the rest of their room ... their steward and
their tutor.49

Those children living with their families lived according to its rhythm;
and a few apprentices in nearby workshops might still remain at home
whilst others spent Sundays with their parents. Embedded as they were in
both family and neighbourhood networks, these children performed all
kinds of functions, ranging from running errands, carrying parcels and
making deliveries to looking after their parents, passing messages and
accompanying younger brothers and sisters. If we take the timetables of
the children abducted in May 1750 as an example, we see that Francois
Gautier, aged 12 years, was taken right in the middle of the street. He was
on his way to fetch some black soap costing 3 sols and some brandy to
clean up a leg wound his father had received while working on some
driftwood. After running his errand, he should have gone to school. Then
there was young Joly, aged 9, an apprentice workman in gauze. He was
arrested on 1 May 1750 by the archers while on his way to bring his little
niece back from his sister’s as his mother had told him.'10
Another child was waiting for his mother at the Place Royale. She had
asked him to wait outside until she had finished her prayers at the side of a
neighbour of theirs who was dying and she hadn’t wanted to leave him on
his own. In the meantime, a carriage had stopped and a hand had reached
out and taken the child.
Francois Lefevre was 13. He was a ropemaker’s boy and his master had
just finished giving him some work to do at home by his mother’s side. She
had told him to ‘finish this task’ and added, ‘then I’ll give you a sou and
you can take this bundle of clean washing to the tailor’s’. He hadn’t been
gone long, apart from a short stop to look at the cattle on the market for
the fair of Saint-Germain, when a hand had grabbed him by the shoulder
and arrested him.
Then there was the little Taconnet boy who was running errands for his
father. He had just finished sprinkling some holy water over an exposed
corpse in front of a carriage entrance when he was picked up.
 Concerning Parents and Children 65

Others tell how they sat down and played games with friends between
errands or after catechism and went off for a walk around the town gates,
stopping now and again to play a game of hopscotch or have a bit of fun
and mischief which was not always appreciated by the adults.51 Menetra
called them his ‘escapades’.52
Thus we see the many different facets of the child: apprenticeship,
parents’ daily help, mass, vespers, catechism, encounters with friends,
games in the street, etc., etc. — and the constant coming and going between
childhood and adult life, dependence and autonomy, economic responsi¬
bility and unbridled mischief; it is impossible to fix these children in a
definite role because they contained within themselves that diversity of role
and function which allowed them to exist simultaneously as both child and
adult. They are best characterized by the notion of movement - the
movement of their comings and goings and of their errands and wanderings
but also their to-ing and fro-ing between the world of the child and that of
the adult. At the in-between stage of 10 to 16 years, whether they helped
their parents or went strolling in the meadows, they nevertheless played a
full part in the economic transactions of their society in which they were
already perfectly adept actors. This detail from the account of Little Copin
(11 years old), who was taken off in a coach, provides good evidence of
this awareness. He eventually managed to escape from the coach bringing
along with him two little girls. He knew as well as they did the financial
implications of his action, and when the two little girls, whom he had
insisted on accompanying as far as their father’s door, began ‘to remove
the gold cross and earrings they had been wearing in order to give them to
him, he said that he did not want them and told them to take them back
home with them and to tell their father to send him something instead. So
the eldest came back with a 12 sol coin.’53
They all knew the price of life, the difficulty and uncertainty of their
parents’ work and the rules of ethical exchange and reward; and they
played their part in that life both as child and as adult. This way of being
both one and the other, and of being regarded (or used) as such by those
around them was thus their status. As a result, they were both rascals and
earners, pranksters and responsible persons, in short loyal adherents to
the social and economic space allotted to them in which childhood and
responsibility held them by the same hand.
A good many parents stressed the primary importance of the child’s
economic future, and numerous reports made at the time of their dis¬
appearance during the 1750 affair alluded to this. The child’s absence was
certainly costly and buying him out of prison was an intolerable expense.
The two examples that follow are good illustrations of this:
Jean-Fran^ois Joly, a worker in wire-mesh, himself pointed out the
problems which his abduction had raised. He said that:
66 Feelings and Metamorphoses

he stayed in prison for 11 days and that he was the last to come out. His
father was a porter and his mother shelled peas and earned her living as
best she could. They had had to replace him with a small boy at the
place where he worked drawing wire gauze; he knew very well that they
would have had to have given some money when he came out of
prison. 54

There was Millaud’s wife who was not the only one to relate how costly
her efforts to free her young son had been: 36 sols for the clerk, 50 sols for
the prison and 36 sols for his safe passage and she was unable to give
anything to the police officer’.5^ In addition she said that she had found it
very difficult to cope with the loss of money caused by the absence of her
son who used to run errands in the streets of Paris.
Thanks to the great variety of his tasks and the diversity of his attitudes,
the child was the one who kept people linked together, acting as a social
cement in his capacity as errand-boy, helper and assistant. In workshop
and family he was the most mobile and therefore the messenger known to
all. He glided between the family and the social networks, thereby fulfilling
a particularly important function at a time when inner and outer worlds
were so compounded. As a child, he belonged to his parents, was a part of
their intimate experience and thus confirmed their image of him; and as an
adult, he was entirely integrated into public life. In this way he brought
together within himself both public and private spheres which even today
are still not separate and whose fusion is one of the characteristics of
popular living.
Indeed, as messenger, he was the one who established the links between
family and neighbourhood, family and work, family and district. His
exceptional mobility plus the many and varied roles and forms his timetable
had him assume turned him into a privileged agent of communication,
living particularly off rumour and announcement and all such oral forms
of news. A reflection of his family, he either reinforced or ruined their
reputation according to his own modes of existence and thus he too acted
as a location of the family honour. This aspect is clearly evident in the
requests for imprisonment made by the parents and also in the statements
of May 1750 which show how intolerable it was for parents to find out
that a child of theirs was in prison when he had never been caught stealing
before or had never committed any other kind of offence. This accounts
for the rapid collection of testimonials from the neighbours to prove that
the child had never stained the honour of his family. Fran^oise Linotte, a
widow and vendor of seafood, explained that ‘what caused her most
distress was that one of the archers who had been disguised as a cook had
said that her son deserved to be hanged for what he was doing, which
might have made the public think that her son was a thief.’ Charles
 Concerning Parents and Children 67
Laporte obviously had the same feelings. He flung himself at the prison
grille and shouted through the door, ‘Have you arrested him for picking
pockets or for thieving, because if you have and he’s a thief or a swindler, 1
won’t answer for him, but you will have to prove it to me first.’
As well as the site of family honour, the child was also the locus for the
respectability of the district, for he belonged to it; thus at the time of the
abductions, we find the district standing up for him and defending his
cause. There is some evidence in the archives of people who, having
recognized their neighbour’s child, had run after the archers’ coach or who
had ‘with their own hands’ pulled out one of the little ones whom the
sergeants had grabbed by the scruff of the neck. Several cases underline the
speed with which the women reacted: ‘Thirty women got together to
prevent them from taking a child away.’ ‘The market women ran after the
Watch’, etc. A police officer, charged with the abduction of children,
stated at the time of his examination that one of his neighbours had
shouted at him, ‘Don't do that child-snatching job or the women will beat
you.0'’ The police were well aware of this female solidarity, which is
hardly surprising here, given the circumstances. The men did not stay on
the sidelines either; and the strength of their reaction was also felt very
quickly. As the signing of petitions indicates, the link between the child
and the district was a real one. Marie-Madeleine Bizet told the court that
‘she had a little boy who did errands for the whole district. He was very
sensible and did needlework when he had nothing else to do. When her
little boy was taken away, the whole district was concerned and had got
up a petition to send to the Lieutenant-General of Police aimed at securing
his release.’0
This alliance between neighbours and acts of mutual assistance turned
the arrest into a public event in which all appeared to be involved; and the
manner in which the search was undertaken and the protection given were
reminders of the way in which the child or the apprentice formed part of
the daily landscape. This was the case of the young baker’s apprentice of
11 who was able to slip from shop to shop in search of a refuge whilst
being pursued by the Watch. As a bread delivery boy, he was indispensable
to his district and everyone took care of him in their turn and protected
him. The baker’s wife hid him behind her counter, someone else opened a
shop door thus allowing him to escape by the stairway where he stood
with his nose against the window waiting for the sergeants to leave.
It was equally effective in the case of young Regnault. A neighbour, a
vendor of herbs and fish, claimed to have

seen two children being abducted in the cemetery of Saint-Jean on the

day of Palm Sunday. Young Regnault was being held by a burly chef and
an archer was holding the other child. All the women who were at the
68 Feelings and Metamorphoses

market got themselves ready to go and get the child. She said that it was
Officer Danguisy who was in charge of the operation and that a million
souls on the market that day had demanded the release of the child.58

A million ... so the story went, but not without reason, for the abducted
child belonged to the district and as such had stirred its soul. The outcry
was unanimous.
There we have it — the plural status of popular childhood in the
eighteenth century — a pluralism which allows one to distance oneself from
the temptation to define the child by viewing him through the prism of
affection given or received. His multiple roles and facets made him a
financial support, both autonomous and dependent, part of the family yet
apart from it, social link, site of family honour and of the respectability
of the district. Because of the great diversity of the often contradictory
positions he occupied, he occasionally aroused opposing attitudes with
respect to himself, but these nevertheless had their own coherence to be
found in the way in which each one dealt with the risks by which he or she
was encompassed.

When the law got involved

When confronted by the parents, it was often quite hard for the police and
the law to understand their often contradictory attitudes, which frequently
resulted in considerable misunderstanding.
We are now familiar with the mechanisms the parents used to demand
imprisonment and the workings of the lettres de cachet which offered a
family a means of escaping the disgrace of normal judicial procedures
if it were attempting to have one of its own members punished. In Paris,
in the event of the family honour being besmirched by one of its members,
the family could appeal directly to the King through the intermediary
of the Lieutenant-General of Police and by means of a petition written
with the help of a public scribe. In this way, and depending on certain
conditions, a request was made for the imprisonment of one’s son or
daughter in one of the King’s prisons. It was a means used by the poor for
at least two reasons: firstly, the lettre de cachet avoided the disgrace which
accompanied the ‘public hue and cry’ of judicial retribution (it would have
been intolerable, for instance, to have seen one’s son or daughter in the
stocks at the nearest thoroughfare or taken off to the prison hulks in front
of the whole neighbourhood); secondly, recourse to the King preserved a
family secret even though the route taken might be somewhat strange:

What an unusual journey for this secret which had to be divulged and
then confided to the King in order to regain its original obscurity. It was
 Concerning Parents and Children 69

the royal personage itself that guaranteed this unlikely metamorphosis,

thanks to which the secret completed its prodigious itinerary and having
travelled as far as the King himself - the supreme authority - it remained
within the family. The King was acting here as exorcist, cancelling out
what was ‘writ’; and the convents and royal prisons acted as a sombre
belly engulfing its abject secret, never more to reveal it.59

In this way contact was established between the lives of families and the
royal authority. The parties concerned appropriated for themselves the
instruments of royal sovereignty in order to re-establish their own system
of allegiances which had come under attack, and thus became in some
respects spontaneous agents of the public order, ‘the natural objects’ of the
police. These were the people who from time to time might turn round to
the royal authority and ask it to come down on one of their own so that
they could repair some of the shameful ruptures taking place in the family
group, although their attitude was no doubt equivocal. In this detention
requested by the parents and conceded by the royal authority by means
of a simple letter, private and public spheres came together. In 1750
the Lieutenant-General of Police, Berryer, took considerable satisfaction
in being able to state that ‘by this means, I have succeeded in render¬
ing a service to honest folk by ensuring that the disorderliness of their
kinsfolk did not rebound on them.’ Later, Lenoir wrote in his unpublished
‘Memoires’: ‘During the period of M. de Sartine’s administration, there
grew up between himself and many of the families a kind of relationship of
pure trust.’
In fact, during Berryer’s Lieutenancy regular use was made of requests
for imprisonment and they were still not subject to the criticism they were
to receive towards the end of the century. (It was Mirabeau, Malesherbes
and then Breteuil who established themselves as the mouthpieces for their
abolition or at least their drastic modification and Breteuil’s memorandum,
drawn up in 1784, when he was made Minister of the King’s Household,
laid down a number of amendments and several limits to their arbitrary
power.) But in the middle of the century, they were used as a matter of
course and police personnel who were familiar with this procedure had
numerous demands brought before them by mothers and fathers who
hoped to use it as a means of correction for their child. Sometimes they
complained about the child’s dissolute behaviour or the bad company he
kept or it might be that he ran away too often or got up to ‘tricks and
pranks’ which were putting the harmony of the family at risk. It was
within this traditional context that we find police instructions being given
to clear Pans of beggars, rogues and young scoundrels. It was the same
in 1750 as it had been in 1720, but in 1750 Berryer must have known
that thirty years previously, a riot had broken out. Notwithstanding, he
70 Feelings and Metamorphoses

ordered his officers, agents and employees to remove from the squares and
thoroughfares those young persons found playing around and disturbing
the public peace. When the facts emerged, the people duly rose up.
The investigation which was set up following the death of one of his
officers even placed the police officers who had carried out Berryer’s orders
amongst the ranks of the accused. And what was more, they had actually
been paid for the job, with remuneration being offered for each child
taken. When obliged to explain themselves before the Law, the police
inspectors and officers were indignant, and they were quick to point out
many times, in their statements, that these same parents who were so
shocked by the removal of children were also the ones who had petitioned
for the arrest of their own children. One inspector told the court how,
three days before the disturbance, he had found a runaway child some
considerable distance from Paris. The child claimed to have been mistreated
by his parents; but when the mother was summoned to appear, she had
said openly that her son was a good-for-nothing and that she had requested
a lettre de cachet against him on many occasions. Other officers related
how, when the raids first began in December 1749, a number of parents
had been very pleased and had approved of their action. They were plainly
burdened by their young children who were ‘in bad company, thoroughly
dissolute and always on the look-out for trouble’.
The police rested their case on the same procedure that the parents were
familiar with, in order to assure them that they were acting in good faith,
as they were only responding to the wishes of the parents themselves. They
were unwilling to see any difference between a deliberate decision taken on
high to rid the town of young troublemakers and the private initiative of
parents availing themselves of a means of repression emanating directly
from the royal authority. As far as the police were concerned, the two
initiatives sprang from an identical perception of public order, namely that
this order was controlled by the authorities and that the only thing the
people were required to do was to comply with it. As the parents had
complained about the excesses of their children, that step in itself took
them into a logical framework, the terms of which it was not up to them
to decide. If Berryer chose to arrest children and thereby clean up the
streets, the only thing the parents could do was to recognize the validity of
these measures.
However, it was quite the opposite. The parents’ logic was quite dif¬
ferent and they remained unconvinced by the police. For them, there was
no connection between their private initiatives and the reactions of the
authorities. Under no circumstances could the use of a royal lettre de
cachet authorize the police to decide the fate of their children. The gap
between the two procedures was quite significant; private and public order
were not to be confused. Berryer’s authoritarian measures were a totally
 Concerning Parents and Children 71

unjustifiable abuse of power, particularly in this century which was so

preoccupied with the common lot of its children. Earlier, in 1734, there
had been a commotion amongst the population when the bodies of 16
new-born babies and infants were discovered dumped at the mortuary
of Le Chatelet. ‘This spectacle attracted a great public gathering and
frightened the people’, wrote Barbier in his Journal.60 It was in fact a
doctor who had gathered all these little bodies together with the intention
of setting to work on them for anatomical experiments.
There were other stories and examples one could quote which testify to
the contradiction that, on the one hand, one could abandon a child and
yet, on the other, find it particularly offensive that the authorities of
the kingdom should decide quite arbitrarily to ship off young people to
Louisiana. It was only a contradiction in the eyes of the police. The people
did not see it that way. Whilst refusing to accept that the fate of its
children should be decided by the authorities, it could nevertheless be
driven into the position of having to abandon a child. There was thus an
absolute gap between popular thought and the system of interpretation of
those in power, and a complete gap between the two visions of public
order, even if both, parents and police complained about the problems
caused by children.
This discord and failure to reconcile the two forms of power, the one
private and the other public, were to give rise to the bloody days of May
1750. Discord there certainly was, but there was also failure on the part of
the police to understand the popular mechanisms and processes involved.

Bread and mothers

As already stated, the intention of this study is to find a means of looking
at the child other than by the automatic linkage of childhood to feelings of
affection. To this end his functions within the city as well as the social and
economic situation of his parents, have been examined, with a view to a
different kind of analysis of attitudes towards him. Reaching a conclusion
on this difficult subject is impossible; perhaps it might be better to let this
child speak for himself. He was summoned in 1769 to a hearing of the
Parc civil 61 where two women were claiming rights of maternity. The
judges held two interviews with him which were transcribed in their
entirety. According to the preamble,

the child stood alone, confused and awkward, but less so than ourselves
who cast our eyes over this precious investment on whose behalf Nature
and the Law would presently require us to give account. We felt a secret
shudder penetrate the very depth of our soul. Here before us was a child
whose very condition and mere youth left us with a lasting impression of
72 Feelings and Metamorphoses

respect and pity. After contemplating him for a moment we took up our
pens to write questions prior to asking them, and recording his replies
word for word as he gave them, we began.

In the course of the interview the child made it clear that he knew very
well who his mother was but that he did not want to live with her, and
that he was very attached to the other woman who took good care of him.

‘What is your reason for not wanting to go with the Widow Brie?’
‘I don’t want to, Sir, because when I asked her for bread, she hit me.’
‘But you did eat when you were with her?’
‘No, she was letting me starve to death.’
‘And if we should return you to the Widow Brie?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You don’t think of her as your mother?’
‘No, Sir, I like my mother Noiseux best (the one looking after him).
I’m not saying the name of the other one.’
‘But what if we asked you to give the name of the other one?’
‘No. I like my mother Noiseux best.’
‘But if she had always given you bread, would you recognize her as
your mother?’
‘Yes, I would recognize her as my mother.’
‘But even if she did not give you bread, she could still be your
mother?’
‘No, Sir.’
Thus ended the second interview.62
 5
Undesirable Alliances and Times
of Disruption

Foolish love

Some relationships were banned on both moral and religious grounds,

as well as being unacceptable to civil society and condemned by their
families. These were those couples who had decided to leave the paternal
home and live together as man and wife or those who had left their spouse
to live with someone else in ‘shameful concubinage’ (as we wrote in Le
Desordre des families), there being no divorce at the time. Their traces are
to be found in the files of the Arsenal archives, where family requests for
imprisonment are kept. Reference has not been made to this ‘illicit trade’
in lovers as such, and preference has been given to looking at the ways in
which parents and children, husbands and wives, were torn apart; but
often the cause of such family disruption lay in the illicit existence of an
unofficial couple formed outside the normal, legitimate channels. For,
although forbidden, concubinage was a reality.
Some periods have valued their bastards more than others; medieval
history, for instance, is full of their lofty deeds;1 but irrespective of all that,
not all social classes viewed concubinage in the same way. What was a
kind of polygamy for the very rich was usually a case of love and poverty
for the rest, made even more miserable by the fact that one did not have
enough money to marry. In the sixteenth century, however, the Church
crushed this practice and extolled the virtues of the social institution of
marriage. Concubines were denounced from the pulpit and priests for their
part could no longer be seen living blatantly in this way.
We have already shown how, for the least well-off, concubinage was
often a means of awaiting marriage, that is the day when, finally better-off,
one could actually afford the expenses of a wedding. Lieutenant-General
of Police Lenoir alludes to it in his ‘Memoires’: ‘Amongst the local people
there were households of young unmarried men and women who passed in
public for man and wife.’2 Lenoir tells the story on this subject of a water
74 Feelings and Metamorphoses

carrier and his ‘alleged wife’ who lived together in the parish of Saint-
Eustache. One evening, the man came home drunk and attempted to kill
his wife, who mortally wounded him.

The Law found that the killing had been unpremeditated and was there¬
fore pardonable and that the woman had not been married. She declared
that the deceased, whom she continued to call her man and her husband,
had only shirked the sacred rites of marriage on account of the church
expenses and the cost of a wedding. This particular incident occasioned
a display of zeal on the part of the police among the parish priests. The
priests conceded that marriage should be celebrated free of charge and
as a result, there were some, although not many, poor people who
presented themselves and their children to the Church and asked for the
sacraments of marriage.3

In eighteenth-century Paris, one also saw a number of couples actually

making an official declaration of their status of concubine before the dis¬
trict commissioner of police.4 Thus the situation of concubinage amongst
the poor found itself somewhere between express interdiction and a good-
natured tolerance, even if families would have nothing to do with it.
Lenoir also makes mention of another kind of concubinage which had
been fully considered and deliberately chosen. He was quite shocked and
surprised by it, and he describes what happened as well as all the forms
of repression used to defeat a choice of lifestyle which was considered
altogether too libertarian. Some ‘visionaries and devotees of no particular
religion living in the Rue Quincampoix’ got together to live in concubinage
around the year 1778 in the area of the parish of Saint-Leu. They were ‘a
number of male and female workers in the fan trade who lived together
as man and wife. They neither attended church nor partook of the sacra¬
ments.’ In actual fact, these artisans and workers had very strict habits,
took great care of their children and frequently held readings together.
Given their refusal of marriage and their lively contempt for cults, religion
and priests, their otherwise impeccable behaviour was to no avail. The
district commissioners set up enquiries and reported on their habits and in
spite of their seriousness, the young men and women were to be ‘enclosed
in institutions designed for the correction of immorality’; those men and
women who seemed less ‘set in the error of their ways were left at liberty
and entrusted to the clergy for instruction in religion’. Some of the others
put up a fierce resistance; ‘three of these girls stayed at the house of
correction for quite some time, and after their detention, they were exiled
a long way from Paris.... They continued to maintain that there was
no need for baptism or marriage and that they were united to their men
and fathers of their children by their own free inspiration.’5 This ‘free
inspiration’ had nothing in common with loose living or immorality but
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 75

they nevertheless warranted imprisonment in the eyes of civilized society.

The 32 dossiers containing family requests for imprisonment from the
years 1728 and 1758 reveal the two types of concubinage which were not
tolerated: but as they only deal with those couples who were driven out
and banished by their families and who felt the full weight of the lettres
de cachet, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the general
threshold of tolerance of society in their respect. All we can do is to look
at the lives of those couples whose destruction was desired by another
party and consider how those illicit passions which broke up homes and
families in the name of ‘foolish love’ (as someone wrote in a letter to the
King), were perceived.
As one might imagine, there was a world of difference between a
woman who decided to go and live with her lover well away from her
parents, and the husband or wife who left the domestic hearth in order to
live with someone else. In the first case one is dealing with a family who
saw itself as dishonoured by the ‘scandalous’ life of the son or daughter.
The family tried to regain control and to assert its authority over this
child, who was probably quite old already and who had chosen to live as
he or she saw fit but whose inclinations were not recognized by society (18
of the dossiers refer to cases of this kind). The other type of case (found
in 14 of the dossiers) concerned a home that had been ruined by the
adultery of one of the partners. Adultery was often the means chosen
for divorce and an attempt at a new life. In both cases the proscribed
couple were the subject of serious criticism, especially if the partners
concerned were already married. Such a union broke the recognized forms
of the established social order and broke the legitimate family chain
of reproduction. Although the couple might appear acceptable and be
regarded favourably by others, there was still likely to be a scandal
because traditional images were being shattered. Thus the family, the
neighbours and the police came together to bring about its demise. The
union had to be broken up and the only way they knew of going about it
was imprisonment, decided from on high.

The lovers’ fears

Overall in the records, there is a marked disproportion in the requests for
imprisonment which is of some significance. Although large numbers of
parents demanded imprisonment for the offending daughter, when it came
to their sons, they seemed in no great hurry, unless the moral problem
happened to be bound up in some more pressing question of self-interest.
This lack of symmetry was even more apparent where adultery was con¬
cerned; the wives demanded the imprisonment of the concubine and not of
76 Feelings and Metamorphoses

their husbands, whilst the husbands sought imprisonment of their wives

and not of their lovers. So, out of a total of 32 dossiers for concubinage,
only three were aimed at the male partner. (Catherine Morin was the only
wife to request that her husband be detained in Bicetre);6 she appears to
have suffered so much physically, morally and materially, that in her
appeal to the King she expressed the desire that not only the concubine but
also the husband of the latter be put away. In this drama with a cast of
four, Catherine Morin had been robbed of her rightful inheritance, beaten
black and blue, and was further humiliated to discover that ‘the concubine
and the latter’s husband had allowed all kinds of vice and corruption in
their home’. She was insistent in pleading for the indefinite removal of the
three persons who had wrecked her life over the last thirteen years.
There are two reasons which no doubt account for the general lack of
symmetry and explain why it was so much easier to demand the imprison¬
ment of a woman. The first, as we will see later, is connected with the
notion of the woman’s role in distracting the man from his duty and her
passionate image in what was an affair of instinctual attraction. The other
is quite understandable: the deserted woman could barely survive and so
attempted to re-establish the economic and social stability of the couple.
She only wanted one thing, and that was the return of her husband and the
removal of the one he had chosen as his companion.
Often in these weighty dossiers in which letters followed petitions, and
enquiries resulted from the views expressed, one can feel the unrelenting
hatred of the families towards the son or daughter who had dishonoured
them. The vocabulary one finds is not that of grief or sorrow but of an
anger and revenge which is exemplary in its severity. One finds requests
for life imprisonment and, where money or inheritance were concerned,
the expressions used were even more vicious and implacable. There are
references to that ‘squalid and scandalous business’ and to the son who
was ‘no more than a bad medicine for honest folk’; there was the girl who
deserved to be sent off to the Indies or who was ‘so ungodly that she
deserved to be sent to La Salpetriere [madhouse] for the rest of her days’.
There is a denunciation of a ‘wicked concubine and a spendthrift with a
heart of stone’, and of the woman who was ‘beyond the bounds of
respect’, a tart, a thief or ‘a prostitute for the asking’.
These descriptions which came from the families or the spouses contain
a violence which is especially disconcerting when one considers that some
of these couples who were denounced in this way had been living their
lives together for quite some time and often had several children already.
Words like ‘debauchery’ or ‘squalid behaviour’ were hardly fitting terms to
describe a couple who had been living together illegally for 10 to 15 years,
sometimes with five or six children.
What about the strange and unique case of Anne Gille, for example?
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 77

The lover she had been living with for 40 years suddenly demanded
her imprisonment, supported by the rest of his family. Claude Serre, a
gardener in Paris, said in his statement that

Anne Gille had crept her way into living with him more than forty years
ago and had continued to live with him as husband and wife wherever
he was. She had come to his place one day, asked him for something to
eat and come nightfall she had got into his bed, which she had continued
to do ever since and had become his mistress.

It would appear that the gardener could not bear the fact that his com¬
panion had managed to keep such a grip on his affairs over the last 40
years. However, the inspector responsible for the enquiry and investiga¬
tions made a note on 22 May 1728 of the following, rather strange phrase,
'having never wearied in 43 years of leading a bad life’. Finding herself
threatened in this way, Anne Gille had tried to throw herself down a well,
apparently still not tired of what they called ‘debauchery’ and of living in
flagrant companionship.
In similar vein, a brother denounced his sister, Jeanne Le Marechal,
because she had been living with a married man for eight years ‘in a
squalid affair in which she was pregnant again with her third child’.8
Elsewhere a young widow was threatened with prison by her in-laws who
could not tolerate her long-standing liaison with an officer and deputy
engineer in fortresses and fortifications, although she had had several
children by him.
In the majority of cases, the demands were made for reasons of succes¬
sion or vested interest and only arose when the parents felt they were
getting older. Invocations of immorality or scandal which were intended to
break up a long-standing companionship which had posed no problems up
until that point were used to conceal otherwise inadmissible reasons.
Lovers pursued in this way took fright and lived clandestinely or even
turned to violence. They lived from day to day, seeking refuge with
obliging landlords who ‘conspired to conceal their debauchery’ or paying a
high price for a discreet midwife who would keep quiet about their
periodic confinements. When harassed by her brother over a liaison which
had lasted for more than ten years, one woman decided ‘to get out of the
district and, in fear, camped from room to room like a fugitive. Others
became hysterical at the slightest hint of an enquiry and attempted to
frighten those who were threatening them. Marie Feuillade was a widow.
She had been living with a soldier for almost two years but her mother and
family simply could not tolerate this arrangement and talked of sending a
petition to the King. The hot-tempered soldier ‘with whom she had set up
home threatened them every day and told them that if they came to lock
78 Feelings and Metamorphoses

her up he would blast them to the back of beyond’.9 Understandably keen

to remain where they were, the parents hastily drew up a petition and
Marie Feuillade was imprisoned in La Salpetriere.
Those who lived in concubinage were perfectly well aware that a lettre
de cachet followed by imprisonment was no mere myth and so they
lived, caught between clandestinity and violence, an understandable
response, knowing as one does that there were no fixed rules to arbitrate
in this utterly expedient system which some individuals had learned to
appropriate.
In this context, widowhood, so frequent at the time, was a freedom that
was closely watched, leaving as it did so many available partners in the
field of sexual exchange. One-third of the dossiers concerning parents
who were objecting to the concubinage of a son or daughter concern a
widow or widower. Their reasons were plentiful; some parents and in-laws
were worried about questions of descent and future succession; they also
expressed concern for the education of the offspring of the first marriage.
A couple of silk-workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine were very
angry with their son-in-law for setting up home with a married woman as
soon as their daughter was out of sight. The son-in-law had made the
mistake of leaving his 4-year-old daughter in the care of his parents-in-law
and bringing up his son of 7 whilst his new companion abandoned the
fruits of their union to the orphanage. The parents-in-law were scandalized
and wanted the woman to be locked up. In fact, they had no rights over
her but in their argument they said, ‘What was most shocking was the
sight of a child of 7 sleeping with them and they were bringing him up
very badly.’ The son-in-law got into such a temper one day that he broke
all his father-in-law’s tools, obviously a very serious thing to do. However,
following police investigations, it was his companion who was summoned
to appear and who subsequently admitted to being ‘out of order’. She was
the one who was put away. The dossier ends with one short sentence: ‘I
think she should remain there for some time.’10 This one particular case
allows us to assess the impact of the lettres de cachet. In this instance, a
woman was to find herself detained on the request of persons who had
only very distant connections with her partner.
Apart from this one example, the theme of the ‘forsaken widow’ was a
recurrent one. For those parents who had already seen a son or daughter
satisfactorily settled, having managed, for instance, to achieve a balance
between the occupations of the father and son-in-law, breakdown of the
union as a result of death was a permanent danger. The concubinage
which followed and the children which ensued were seen as an intoler¬
able disorder and disgrace which deserved to be punished regardless of
the strength of the feelings or the duration of the liaison. Widows and
widowers were easy prey in the cut and thrust of emotional life.
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 79
Concubinage of one’s nearest and dearest was a disgrace which families
took action to expunge, in the name ‘of an honour more dear to them than
life itself’. But for the inspectors of police and district commissioners, who
were often involved in the affair, the first concern was the attitude of the
district, that living entity and civil personage whose actions and reactions
were as important to grasp as the inclinations of the parents. From these
dossiers, it is quite easy to see the police response and the reticence of the
administration which would think twice about interrupting the course of a
liaison if it caused no disturbance in the district or if the family seemed to
be exaggerating the scandal owing to its own feelings of resentment. This
hesitation was all the more apparent because the final decision rested with
the police and because the commissioner, who was one of the central
figures, was quite often the only one capable of assessing the impact of the
situation on the district. His approach to government was based on the
idea that one should not ‘upset’ the neighbourhood. There was one other
person who also had considerable influence over the final decision and that
was the parish priest who sometimes added a letter or recommendation at
the end of the petitions. He also took the reactions of his parish into
account and used them in his argument. One such was the priest of Saint-
Severin, whose verger had informed him about two lovers who had been
meeting in the church every day while he had been there. Thus all the
decisions revolved around the idea of scandal, whether it was in the
family, the parish or the area; but we have seen just how tenuous, relative
or arbitrary that notion might be and how, on occasion, it might serve as
an alibi or somewhat hasty justification. We know even less about how
much the police might have managed or even manipulated it in a manner
which would often appear to be contradictory.
Catherine Louis was an embroiderer.11 When she was 22 she left her
parents to live with a young man and soon afterwards found that she was
pregnant. The commissioner felt that, from the beginning, the young
woman had always been very serious, indeed very industrious, but her
parents had always been hard on her. ‘They wore down her spirit,’ he
wrote, ‘and in some respects they have pushed her into deserting their
house.’ Nevertheless he showed himself to be in favour of imprisoning
Catherine on grounds that were altogether political, namely that ‘the
district needs an example; it is full of people who can only be restrained by
fear. Do we know how many useful subjects the State loses on account
of the decadence to which the majority of the girls of the common people
surrender themselves?’ It seems a rather curious observation when one
considers the outrageous behaviour of the high and mighty and the aris¬
tocracy as reported in the bulletins of the secret police.12 In fact, the
commissioner’s argument had nothing at all to do with the concubinage of
Catherine Louis. No doubt he thought he would gain the approval of the
80 Feelings and Metamorphoses

Lieutenant-General of Police by applying the much-used rule: ‘The people

need an example’ - whatever that might be.
The district was quite capable of being stirred up of its own accord and
of showing its discontent when faced with a situation it did not like. Some
domestic arrangements could upset the equilibrium of a neighbourhood,
threaten the harmony amongst the inhabitants and disturb the collective
order which was forever being marred by outbreaks of violence and
upheaval and constantly needing to be re-established. The woman who
went from man to man was a social danger and a threat to existing
couples; her drifting disturbed the fragile consensus of the community and
whipped up anger or revenge.
The curate of Saint-Medard denounced a situation of this kind to the
first secretary of the Lieutenant of Police. It appeared that a woman called
Therese Boisselet went about quite brazenly with as many young lechers as
there were passers-by and, as everyone could see, she was anybody’s. So
said the curate and he went on to say,

I am sure you will not take it amiss if I continue to press you to do all
you can to procure a place for the Boisselet female in La Salpetriere. A
new scandal has arisen in the district because of her; the said Boisselet
was discovered with a man called Cauchois last Sunday night and they
were given a good thrashing by the populace. The time would seem right
to me to go ahead without further ado and inflict a punishment which
would act as an example capable of putting a stop to anyone else in the
district who might be disposed to do the same, (signed) Graffazt, curate
of Saint-Medard.13

There were occasions when an entire town was stirred up, as when the
local worthies of Saint-Quentin demanded the detention in Paris of one of
their inhabitants, who was the daughter of a respectable draper. She was
the concubine of an officer over whom they had no authority. Their
argument may be broken down into two distinct parts and goes as follows:
order had to be re-established in that town (‘all it needed was for this
outrageous woman to be punished to cause a panic amongst others who
were beginning to lose their way’); and secondly, didn’t the town pay taxes
each year for the upkeep of institutions in Paris? This fiscal arrangement
was surely sufficient in itself to justify the imprisonment therein of one of
its citizens: ‘In view of the considerable amount of tax that is provided
annually by this town for the maintenance of prisoners in the houses of
correction in Paris, the family and local dignitaries believe they have found
good grounds for anticipating this favour.’14
Support for the imprisonment of illicit lovers was often conveniently
provided by the town or district either by acting of their own accord and
meting out some kind of corporal punishment on the wrongdoers or else
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 81
by buttressing up the authority of the powers that be, whether politically
or financially.

Outbursts of passion
In more than one-third of the dossiers one comes across indications of the
passion that existed between the lovers. Threats of imprisonment and
denunciations only served to heighten the violent intensity of their feelings,
so that when they were asked to break up, the couple resisted or refused,
or else they promised to separate and then sought every possible means of
getting together again. When this occurred the hatred felt by the families
and the spouses became even stronger and the fervour of the vocabulary
used to notify the Lieutenant-General of Police mirrors the passionate
outbursts of the lovers themselves. This passion is referred to as a bewitch¬
ment, a charm or a spell which needed curing and healing as well as
stopping up at its instinctual source. The petitions plead for a return to
reason and suggest that the means by which this might be effectively
achieved was by putting one of the partners away definitively (into prison
or exile, for instance, sending off to the Indies or into corrective retreat
with ladies of virtue), in the belief that the cure lay in preventing the lovers
from seeing one another. In a century of rationalism which was still a good
way off from the dawn of Romanticism, was it really so difficult to foresee
how this cruel absence might heighten the senses and imagination and thus
whet the appetite for the missing person?
‘Foolish love’ only exists in dreams and novels or in the nineteenth
century; but in these inglorious texts produced by people of humble origin
there is a passion both real and imagined. Accounts, often given by a third
party to convince the police authorities, are often portrayed in all the
colours of hell. Then there are times of particular emotional intensity when
the vocabulary and descriptions are especially intense and acute such as
those moments of conflict aimed at causing a breakdown in order to re¬
establish - for better or for worse - the legitimate bond, of either the
marriage or the family.
In these descriptions one feels the convulsions of unbearable grief at
being torn apart in this way, and the writing confirms the violence of the
feelings or expressions of repentance and regret. There are also descrip¬
tions of the horrors of separation or prison, as in the case of a semi-literate
woman who wrote to her partner telling him to take care of the children as
she had nothing else to lose at the present time:

These lines I am writing are for you. I have fled. There is nothing left in
the room that needs attending to, all I ask you to do, for God’s sake, is
not to abandon the child, for it is not his fault, the poor wretch. I close
82 Feelings and Metamorphoses

now. I am lost forever. I sleep like a pig on a pile of straw. 1 have

endured great misery already. It is my own fault because of my bad
behaviour.15

Sometimes the writing is better, if somewhat clumsy. On occasion, the

words portray the women like so many animals seizing their prey, as in the
case of this mother describing the woman who had ravished her son ‘for
six years by using her womanly charms to flatter and deceive, in spite of
all her tenderness as a mother’. One finds the same devastating rivalry
between mother and concubine, mistress and wife or the father whose
daughter allowed herself to be fascinated by some other man besides
himself (‘he made himself more of a master than me’).
The dossiers draw very firm portraits of the persons concerned; they are
presented as hardened, impulsive or temperamental characters and they
also attempt a psychological explanation in which death is often proposed
as a final resort in the face of misfortune. One might die for love, or even
kill, as in the case of Marie-Antoinette Guichard, a woman already in her
thirties, whose mother said of her: ‘She was always inclined to violence
even as a very young child. One day when she was still quite young she
very nearly stabbed herself with a knife in a moment of defiance.’ When
they wanted to separate her from her lover, she tried to set fire to the
house, saying that ‘she couldn’t care less if she died, like Lescombat,16 and
so long as she had her way she would die at the Place de Greve.’17 They
attempted to cure her by bathing her and by trying to bring her back in the
way of religion with the help of two priests. But to no avail; she was
destined for La Salpetriere and was not to be released until much later.
The lawyer in charge of her case fell mildly in love with her and pleaded
for her to be set at liberty, adding the comment that ‘at 30 years old she
should be free to take care of herself.’
The deserted wives wrote long desperate petitions blaming the woman
who had been chosen in preference to themselves for every conceivable ill
and recording the changes in their husband’s character. Once captivated,
he seemed almost bewitched and became ‘very fierce’ and aggressive and
indulged in ‘mad bouts of spending’. The husbands felt the same bitterness
and thrashed their wives rather than the wives’ lovers.
With regard to passion, the woman was always perceived and portrayed
as being much more active and tempestuous than the man. Jean-Fran^ois
Oriol, requesting that his wife be imprisoned, stated that

she had slipped off in secret seven or eight years ago so as to be at liberty
to follow the stormy tide of her desires and licentious pleasures and live
a life of sin. Four children had been born of this adulterous affair. She
had taken leave of her senses and was no longer in control of her own
heart or of her tears and laughter.18
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 83
What was one to do in the face of such a flow of passion? Even when
Marie Jeanne was imprisoned she wrote to her lover every day, saying, 1
am writing to tell you about the horrors of my detention here.
In the end, although these dossiers are concerned with the couple, they
mostly refer to the women, who are made to bear the full brunt of the
blame by implying that they were more responsible than the men for the
intensity of the feelings which caused the collapse of family honour and
marital harmony. The story of Le Blanc, a sergeant in the Watch who had
already drawn attention to himself for his corruption and his part in the
affair of the abductions of 1750, says much about such traditionally held
views on women. Six years later this thoroughly unsavoury character
showed himself for the lecher he was.1 He attracted and seduced young
girls with no hint of remorse and when questioned he admitted that
‘marriage had never been his intention and that pleasure was his only aim.
He had done just the same with other girls and he happened to be having a
similar affair with a girl at the moment and he would do the same with
anyone else who came along.’ Inspector Meusnier was shocked at this
attitude and wrote to the Lieutenant-General of Police that ‘this kind
of life affected the social order and family harmony. I think it will be
necessary to impose some form of correction. In the margin of the letter,
Berryer’s secretary jotted this short sentence which needs no comment: ‘It s
up to the girls to watch out.’ Seduced or seductive, the women could
scarcely be defended in the eyes of civil society.
The lovers found life very difficult if they were harassed or if they did
not become absorbed in the life of the district. Death was occasionally the
recourse chosen by the couple as in this case of a young ironmonger of 26,
established in the lie Saint-Louis and married to an agreeable young
woman. He became besotted by his kitchen maid, a much older woman,
however, and one morning they were both found dead, poisoned by a
brew of arsenic made by their own hand. A note left on the hearth
explained that they did not want ‘to worry anyone’ because of their union.
It fell to the three priests of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile to bear the bodies of these
unfortunates to a corner of the cemetery’.20

The dispute

There was one exceptional document which came to light and relieved
the monotony of the usual complaints contained in the archives of the
Petit Criminel. In the middle of the records of Commissioner Convers
Desormeaux, there was a bundle of papers classified under the brief
heading ‘Documents of diverse nature’ and with an index which gave some
indication of the contents, ‘problems of inheritance (17th to 18th century);
 84 Feelings and Metamorphoses

documents relating to the administration and distribution of produce in

Seurre (17th century); complaints of a husband deceived by Demard,
journal kept since 1774.’21 The designation was incongruous; however,
there in the middle of this bundle was a slim handwritten notebook
consisting of about 70 sheets which should not have been there. It was
completely isolated, without explanation or comment from the com¬
missioner, and with no outline proceedings or trace of a signature. The
notebook (of the type used by a schoolchild), was written in a close
hand and had only one title which was as follows: ‘Details of all that
has happened since 30 March 1774.’ And immediately below it, one
reads, ‘She left for Gisors on 30 March with her eldest daughter, Mme
Cochereaux and M. Demard and she stayed there for three months and
three days before coming back. She created a terrible scene in front of her
father.’ Having begun, one keeps on reading all the rest of these lines
written between March 1774 and January 1775 and which tell the tale of
unrequited love between a certain M. Demontjean (or Montjean) and his
wife, residents of the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs in the centre of Paris
and working in the fashion trade.
It is a document of no little feeling. In it, a humiliated husband relates
in great detail his wife’s every deed and action and it is, in short, a kind of
journal. It was obviously recorded whilst he was still suffering the effects
of pain and grief, a time when the memory attributes an exaggerated
importance to even the smallest incidents which punctuated the story and
were proof upon proof of the wicked intentions of his wife. The overall
effect is hardly literary. It is simply a succession of events strung end to
end with the resonance of a score of litanies. On the last page, there is an
abrupt change of form and ‘I’ is no longer used although the handwriting
is exactly the same. References are made to ‘the plaintiff’ and ‘the wife of
the plaintiff instead of the previous T and ‘she’. The document comes to
an abrupt end, without any conclusion, as though it were never finished
and were possibly to be recommenced at some later date. Inside there was
an addendum comprising two loose sheets consisting of a few supple¬
mentary details which had been omitted.
As one reads, one begins to reflect on the nature of the text. Supposing
it were not a daily journal kept by M. Montjean but rather a kind of
enormous oral deposition, or an infinitely long complaint in the form of a
journal or an account dictated to an official writer and intended for
presentation as legal evidence. The oral style of the writing would certainly
make one think that might be the case but it is not sufficient proof in itself.
On the other hand, the style of the last page, which is completely different,
would seem to indicate that Montjean was in fact a plaintiff and that]
having made up his mind one day to speak out and tell all, he had related
this long oral journal in order to convince the police of the validity of
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 85
his grievances against his wife. Unfortunately we are never likely to
know anything more about this document, as further searches among
the archives were to no avail. Only the notebook is there. Alone and
enigmatic, yet rich in meaning. It reveals for us, as documents rarely can,
the history of a confrontation between husband and wife over the respec¬
tive roles desired by each of them in society and over which they were in
total disagreement.
This text has to be seen as an unexpected opportunity. It cuts a swathe
through so much of the usual collection of domestic disputes, the causes of
which were customarily regarded as violence, drunkenness or adultery,
because here the argument is quite different. The quarrel is about roles.
There is a tension between two diverging concepts of the functions of male
and female in the society of the small trader and artisan at the end of the
eighteenth century, resulting in an immense breakdown in understanding
over the allocation of tasks to be performed by the man and the woman. It
becomes abundantly clear that this total disagreement could only result
in one thing — breakdown. But, paradoxically, the ‘friendship’ or love
that Montjean has for his wife underlies the whole of the account, thus
maintaining a certain degree of unity.

Montjean’s complaint
Montjean and his wife lived in the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. They
had two children, the eldest a girl of 4 and a boy who was younger
and about whom not much is known. The couple manufactured fashion
garments assisted by one employee, and a servant or cook kept house for
them. It was the typical small unit of production of the artisan in which
the work was done at home, with the man taking care of orders and
deliveries (some from as far afield as Holland), whilst the woman worked
at the job in hand (often working on Saturdays and Sundays in order
to complete on time). There was nothing unusual about this domestic
economic arrangement. It was the traditional lifestyle of the artisan in
which the man dealt with business matters and went off into the outside
world to obtain orders and materials whilst the wife and employee busied
themselves at the needlepoint behind the window overlooking the street.
The drama unfurls with a journey. Montjean’s wife went away to stay
with her father in Gisors and whilst there she came into contact with a
rather nice kind of society which smiled appealingly at her. Her time spent
there was so agreeable that on her return to Paris she wanted to live as she
had done over there, refusing to work at the trade but preferring rather to
surround herself with friends who would take her arm and go walking,
eating oysters or drinking wine. A quarrel between husband and wife
 86 Feelings and Metamorphoses

ensued, the account of which follows the rhythm of the wife’s distractions
with the husband’s swinging between patience, sulks and anger, and finally
ending with a complaint brought before the commissioner, followed by a
visit to the Lieutenant-General of Police.
Whether dictated by Montjean or written with his own pen, the title of
this little book is quite significant, for it shows the intention of the author
(or whoever added it), to define the subject-matter. Although the text deals
with biographical facts it is not really an autobiography but a phased
account of a period of a few months (March to January), and a series of
episodes which effectively transformed a life and, as a result, necessitated
their being put down on paper. There is certainly no evidence of a desire
for publication in this notebook, which assumes no literary or ideological
form; there is simply the need to make a denunciation and a determination
to expose some of the daily events with the intent of showing how one life
had been rendered unbearable. The title, ‘Details of all that has happened
since 30 March 1774’, says nothing about the content, but everything
about its purpose. It is the nitty-gritty of everyday history and it was
intended to provoke a reaction in the reader (presumably a magistrate or
judicial figure), in respect of the merits of both writing the text and the
steps taken; and it is the minute detail of the days and hours of those few
months which was aimed at demonstrating the misery experienced by the
author and his own innocence in the matter.
The title announces from the very beginning the purpose and function
of the text and in itself evokes a kind of deja vu. Tales of the dark deeds of
bandits and brigands often began in this way - ‘Details of what really
happened’; ‘The true story of what happened’ etc., etc.22 These accounts
could be bought in the street from hoarse-throated hawkers and vendors.
No doubt Montjean was familiar with these broadsheets and would have
bought them and read them himself. In choosing to use this title, Montjean
puts himself in line with this kind of ‘rag’ which moulded the mentality of
the street by turning crime into something familiar yet unheard of and
by elevating the monotony of human events to the level of history itself.
And the title assures us right from the start that in this matter of self¬
explanation or reflection, there is nothing which might be considered too
petty or unimportant. Indeed, the title announces (perhaps even demands)
that detail is in fact history.
Presented with this text of ambiguous status (is it a journal or is it a
dictated account?), one experiences the usual excitement and eagerness of
all historians and researchers. After all, the discovery of an eighteenth-
century artisan’s account is so rare that there is the temptation to make it
say everything. Temptation there certainly is, but there is also risk - risk of
verification but, more importantly, the risk of looking for some largely
mythical truth in precisely those places where the document will always
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 87
remain indecipherable. It is a particular risk for the person who naturally
revels in the civilization of the written word and who reads what someone
else has written according to his own thought structures.
One must respect the text as the inalienable property of the one who
produced it and thus allow it to retain its uniqueness. One can then work
on its background and context whilst keeping sight of what there is that is
both specific and general. From the personal thoughts of an individual as
he recorded them in writing, one’s task is to gather up and pick out what
he saw when he took a look at himself and his matrimonial dream. It is
not our task to fix him definitively in one of those so-called satisfactory
interpretations which can be placed side by side with all the rest for the
pleasure of having one’s knowledge neatly arranged. Perhaps this amounts
to saying that one has to stay as close as possible to the text whilst taking
every care to remain at the furthest possible distance from it. To do
otherwise would be equally difficult to envisage.
Montjean chose a chronological setting as a means of making himself
understood but when he makes jottings or adds the exact date between the
lines, it is purely for the convenience of the reader. His chronology is first
and foremost his own rather than that of the calendar. Dates and times
which were clearly added later are quite specific and if there seems to be
no ending, the beginning is equally abrupt, commencing as it does with the
specific occasion of his wife’s visit to her father, which is forever being
brought to mind and constantly referred to as being the root of all ills and
source of all his problems. This journey is recalled time and time again in
the text and the date of it is even incorporated into the title, ‘Details of all
that has happened since 30 March 1774’.
On that day she left for her father’s and stayed there for a month and
three days. She came back on 4 May and that was when everything began.
From 4 May 1774 to 20 February 1775, the account proceeds date by date
describing daily events and recalling conversations between different
persons. In the course of the writing, dialogues and arguments between the
married couple and angry altercations with parents and friends are all
noted down without too much comment. Montjean neither embellishes,
rationalizes nor attempts to argue: he simply relates, exposes, amasses the
detail and gives a blow by blow account of the quarrels. The result of all
this is a dense and tightly packed narrative offering no relief from the
facts. All this cramming together and piling up of precise details one on
top of the other creates a particular state of mind for the reader. Awash
with this endless enumeration of incidents, one begins to identify with
Montjean and with his frustration in the face of a wife who is not just
fanciful and capricious but who also shows contempt and spitefulness.
Without even so much as an internal monologue to analyse the circum¬
stances, the subject, by his manic recital of daily trivialities, places himself
88 Feelings and Metamorphoses

in the position of innocent victim and, with ne’er a sigh, he querulously

stacks up the minutest disorders of his household.
The text gushes and spills out like an overflow and then reaches a kind
of crescendo. The situation worsens between the couple and the account
becomes heated; the tone becomes increasingly heightened and angry
whereas the vocabulary used remains the same from beginning to end; that
is, modest, familiar, unpretentious and with expressions that are overall
more or less trivial. A false friend is referred to as ‘that beast of a . ..’; the
comment after an outburst of female anger is, ‘I thought the glasses were
going to crack’; some friends who had gone off to the pleasure gardens
spent their time ‘throwing up on the floor’. There are few original turns of
phrase, the style is stilted and is more akin to the type of speech that
rolls off the tongue with the conviction that the weight of the content is
likely to take precedence over the vigour of the expression. It does take
precedence since it is only towards the very end of one’s reading that one
begins to question Montjean’s sincerity, particularly as it is not entirely
clear what the problem really was that was keeping himself and his wife
apart. It was also well known that a complaint brought before the law was
not necessarily synonymous with the truth.
But even if Montjean’s wife was not so difficult to live with as Montjean
hoped to make out, and although he was no doubt more difficult than he
would like to have been thought, it does not really matter. The truth does
not lie there any more than in the search for a truth which is supposed to
become clear at the end of it all. The essence lies in what Montjean has to
say and what he describes of the conflict between two distinct modes of
life, masculine and feminine, as they come up against each other because
they are separate and remote visions of the world. The rest is merely
‘detail’.
It is this opposition between two contradictory images of social life
which in the end provides one of the principal motives for the form of the
account. In the end, the chronological approach adopted by the author is
subsumed by a different scansion consisting of a succession of events in
which each episode, practically the same as its predecessor, runs into the
next, ultimately to be bound together by a single dialogue which remains
identical and recurs constantly. This dialogue is repeated, retold and
reformulated a dozen times over with scarcely a word of it being changed.
It is a dialogue consisting of five or six lines in which, following on from
the day’s events which are almost the same as those of the previous day,
Montjean’s wife repeats over and over again, with no alteration, how she
wants to live and behave, which is completely different from what her
husband wants. The text drags its way along through a never-changing,
almost ritualistic procedure, in which events and their respective interpreta¬
tion alternate continually as time passes. One is reminded of a long, slow
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 89

and involved lament in which the refrain serves to separate the stanzas
from their immutable rhythm. Though the verses move the story along,
thanks to new circumstances ever more intense and serious, they unfailingly
come up against the refrain which marks the boundary of the dispute,
definitive and impassable, with all the poignancy of a musical theme.
There is something almost fascinating about reading this obsessively
repetitive text which seems to have no end. Is it really a coincidence if it
resembles a long winter’s tale intended to amuse, frighten or disturb?
Montjean would surely have read more than one of them. At the same
time one cannot help thinking that it was a form that was imposed on the
author in the same way as the events which beset him relentlessly for 11
months were also imposed upon him.

A woman at her window

She told me that she would not work, that she had not been made for
work, and that it was up to a man to look after a woman. She said that
when she was at her father’s she had seen any number of women who
didn’t work and their husbands had employees. If I stopped her from
receiving Demard, she said she would definitely not do any work. She
said I was a jealous old devil and provided Demard could come, she
would work....
She wanted to be by the window reading a book....
She tapped her foot and told me that she was not made for work and
that she had seen lots of women in her father’s village who didn’t work;
they stayed in their apartments reading a book and that she was made to
be like that and that it was a man’s job to provide for his wife. She said
her sister was very happy and kept a good table and that she had
servants to wait on her and that there was always good company in her
house and that she put rouge on her cheeks....
She had plenty of work to do but she took a book which she didn’t
put down until 9 o’clock at night and did nothing all day....
I reproached her for going out walking with that young man and for
putting on rouge the way she had because if someone she knew had seen
her they would surely have taken her for a strumpet which would have
been a great dishonour... .23

What is important here is contained in these endlessly repeated phrases

in which Montjean’s wife opposes the traditional norm of the wife of the
artisan-cum-merchant as fellow worker in the trade with another way of
life she has seen elsewhere. This ‘good life’ consisted in having leisure and
domestic service, keeping good company and going out whilst the husband
was off on business.
Montjean confronts this feminine model constantly hankered after by
90 Feelings and Metamorphoses

his wife, and which he himself cannot recognize or accept, with two
realities of his own, the one economic and the other social. In the first
place he pursues the loss of earnings due to his wife’s indolence and the
heavy expenditure caused by drinks, strolls and outings; in the second
place, he reads dishonour and bad reputation into the flirtatious involve¬
ments of this woman who was on the arm of one man or another nearly
every day.
Strangely enough, although she never wearies of insisting with dogged
conviction after each quarrel that it was the woman’s place to be at the
window and the man’s to be at work, he himself never argues or reasons
with her and he makes no attempt to persuade her, so convinced is he of
the serious distortion she is making of their social situation as Parisian
artisans. He has a few orders for Holland, some customers in the city, and
a few small business dealings with some banker friends. They have only
one employee and a domestic servant, and although he might have said
somewhere that he had a little bit of money, in all truth he just did
not have the means to take on the social dream of his spouse, which
was grossly out of line. No amount of obdurate tenacity on the part of
Montjean’s wife could alter their basic position as artisans, a relationship
in which marital harmony was essential to their economic partnership.
Montjean was also very fond of his wife and could never make the
decision to part; he soothes, calms and concedes and often pays obedience
to her emotional blackmail as in the following: ‘If I can have company, I
will do my work.’ Once he even had to pay three employees for several
days in order to complete a job on time for a customer who would have
been extremely angry if there had been any delay. All this simply to
compensate for the unyielding idleness of his wife. Nor did he want to
listen when he was advised to have his wife put away in a convent; he just
seemed surprised that so much could have happened since those happy
times when he enjoyed sitting by her side on a Saturday or a Sunday while
she finished off a piece of work. He was also afraid of losing his reputation
and, although he remained fairly discreet on this point, he went to some
trouble to explain to his wife that she should not allow her behaviour to
alarm their employee who was quite new.
All this kindness and forbearance (Montjean’s own description, please
note) in spite of the pain, the arguments and the bad moods, rolled off
Montjean’s wife like water off a duck’s back. Her mind was elsewhere, off
into the country where she had seen those women at their windows. There
were two images that haunted her: the one of good society and the other,
like a scene from a minor work of art, the book held in the hand in front
of the window. Read and see. Read and be seen. The window was the rim
of the world in which she wanted to live and to be recognized, and the
book was the symbol of this recognition rather than a cultural object. The
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 91
book held in the hand was a way of being, a gesture signifying a pleasant
ease and time at one’s disposal.
It is difficult to know where she may have come across this model; her
father confirmed that her mother and her sisters (except one) all worked
and although we do not know the trade in question it is still adequate
proof that she was not from a milieu of the upper bourgeoisie. Could it be
that the Montjeans were somewhere in the middle, on the fringe of a
society where it was possible for the woman to dream that things might be
different and thus attempt to realize the dream at the expense of disrupting
the marriage? We are at the end of the century here and the wife of a
merchant in modes and fashions with customers on the Rue de Buci
was sufficiently familiar with current tastes and practices to want to
appropriate them for herself. In addition to her model of female leisure she
also sought an atmosphere of pleasure and conviviality. One had to keep a
good table and cellar and if there were going to be strolls and outings
it was also necessary to have the pleasure of masculine company (well
away from her husband). Of the exact content of these pleasures, we know
little except for the following refrain intoned periodically by each of the
spouses. Her: 'It’s a terrible thing to be jealous.’ Him: ‘What is everyone
going to think if they keep seeing you out walking on the arm of a friend?’
He says several times that he is not jealous of her body as he has plenty of
confidence in her and says the following, which is rather quaint: ‘I told her
that I was not jealous of her body because I was sure that she was not
made to be unfaithful in that direction.’
And Montjean was probably quite right there. What his wife wanted
above all was to participate in the great social spectacle like the libertines
at the end of the eighteenth century who knew so well how to go about
it.24 She was so utterly stage-struck by this model of parading and display,
of mostra,15 which forbade her from working, that she was entirely ‘at her
window’.
And thus, two different wills make themselves apparent; the one, the
woman’s, was to make an appearance in society, and escape from her
situation of too great a dependence on her husband; and the other, the
man’s, was to guarantee the economic life of the marital/artisan unit
without being made to feel humiliated. And so the theme of pleasure and
play on the urban stage without regard for cost or expense comes up
against that of economic obduracy.

Friends and pleasures

As always when faced with a text so rich and original as this one, it is
tempting to tell all; but one has to be selective and simply show the
92 Feelings and Metamorphoses
different stages of the dispute as they are determined by the bid for
emancipation by Montjean’s wife.
Each quarrel (‘the man was made to look after the woman etc.’) is
preceded by a recital of the wife’s pleasures and distractions. One of the
most amazing aspects of the journal is without doubt the way she manages
to surround herself with the company of a new friend from one week
to the next. It is possible to count up to nine of them in the account;
nine men to accompany her on her walks or to shows and then to come
back with her and eat and drink her wine and apricots in brandy whilst
Montjean went around with a long face, or even went so far as to state
that he objected to their coming and the daily invasion of his four walls by
the kind of company he had no time for. When pushed to the limit,
Montjean’s tone occasionally became resentful and then it would be
arguments and angry scenes all over again. His wife would tap her feet,
yell at her jealous husband and exercise a remorseless blackmail from one
scene to the next. She would decide not to do any more work so long as
her husband refused to let her receive her friends; and he would soothe
and calm, plead with her to resume her work, only to find ‘her friends’ at
his own table that very same evening. ‘Let me receive my friends, and I’ll
get on with my work,’ she would say, and each time Montjean believed
her and each time his trust was abused. He was still fascinated by this
vivacious woman whose wit and repartee meant that ‘she always gave him
as good as she got, tit for tat’.
If this scenario was acted out once, it was acted a dozen times but at
the same time events grew progressively worse. In the month of June,
Montjean received word that a tobacco warehouse was ‘up for offer’ in
Gisors. This enterprise had no particular appeal for him but his wife saw it
as a way out of her own situation. In a fit of temper, she made a scene in
which she said to him that ‘she did not want to work and that I could see
what I had to do’.
She harassed him until he finally decided to go. His thrift bordering on
the miserly, he refused to take a coach and set off on foot, with a heavy
heart. ‘If this place doesn’t work out, it will be money spent to no avail,’
he said. He managed six leagues in a day and felt very pleased to be able to
say that he had only spent 26 sols throughout the whole day, but he was
unable to get his father-in-law to lend him any money.
Things came to a head after this failure. In her disappointment,
Montjean’s wife went on one outing after another, running through money
as she went. The less than gracious kind of guests she invited home never
tired of guzzling his wine, their drinking and carousing going on ad
nauseam. ‘There was no point in my telling her that the money was going
fast and that we couldn’t go on like this much longer, for she just gave me
a short sharp answer, and I gave her a cold look.’
The limits were overstepped and one evening, when coming home with
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 93

friends he found no one at home and nothing to eat. Later he happened to

run into his wife at the Palais-Royal. ‘She was on the arm of some
handsome cavalier and she was dressed in a gown of bronze taffeta
trimmed with gauze with a hat a I’anglaise; and she had so much rouge
on that I couldn’t tell whether she blushed or not.’ The scene which
took place later between husband and wife quickly turned very violent.
Montjean’s wife called him a tiger and a monster and yelled at him that
‘she would leave him for a chimney-sweep and make a cuckold out of
him’. From that point onwards the life of the couple was turned totally
upside down. He said that she had continued to go out at all times of the
day and night without any sense of proportion. He became angry with her
friends, then pulled himself together again. He scolded and chided her and
then pleaded with her. She shouted, tapped her heels, got drunk and said
that since she earned the money, she was the mistress. This all went on
until one day when he had finally had enough, he had an argument with
her guests who subsequently set about him with a club and challenged him
to a duel. He was the one who went to the rendezvous in spite of his wife’s
sarcasm about his cowardice, but the others failed to turn up. He could see
no way out of it all and so he went to Commissioner Laumonier to tell
him of his woes whilst she went on a precautionary visit to the Lieutenant-
General of Police in an effort to avoid a demand for imprisonment. Their
matrimonial convulsions were still not over when the journal came to an
end on 28 February 1775; the final image is of Mme Montjean at the ball,
having deserted her children.
Running through this account are one or two key figures. What they say
and do provides us with a precise description of the social context without
which this dispute would be mere anecdote. And neither did the couple
live in isolation, a part of them is bound up in the family, the neighbour¬
hood and the district.
Take the father first of all. He is a central character who acts as a
reference point for his son-in-law, Montjean, and who is seen in two
different lights by his daughter: on some occasions as an obstacle and at
other times as a refuge, depending on the circumstances. He is present
throughout this long story and he is also the unwitting starting-point for
the subsequent misfortunes (the drama took shape following his daughter’s
departure to stay with him), but he is also the firm voice of authority and
advice.
The possible threat of detention in a convent for Montjean’s wife which
is outlined throughout the journal, and which Montjean himself cannot
decide on, is largely due to him.

He told me that he did not want to see my wife as she had shamed him
in his village by letting herself be influenced by all sorts of little madams
and coquettes. Because of her behaviour she had dishonoured herself in
94 Feelings and Metamorphoses

the minds of many of the people where he lived; and he wanted her
locked up but I did not want that.

Montjean’s father-in-law, Rohault, advised detention in a convent for his

daughter on several occasions and his interventions are a good indication
of just how well known and commonplace these procedures for imprison¬
ment were; in fact, they were very simple. He said to his son-in-law, ‘If
you want to, you can give me your signature and I’ll go and find your
father, and 24 hours from now, she will be in the convent. I will pay her
board and I won’t ask you for a thing.’ So all it took to have her
imprisoned was some money and the signatures of three men. ‘I was still
fond of my wife and I could not agree to it.’ Without this continued
attachment, Montjean’s wife would have been quickly removed from
society.
As well as an authority figure, the father was also important financially.
Montjean had to go through him when he was attempting to procure the
tobacco warehouse, and in spite of his failure he still remained on good
terms with him, which could not be said of his daughter. She was so
terrified as the prospect of the threat that he kept hanging over her that
she launched into a flood of invective against him and even wrote to the
commissioner speaking ill of him.
One can see here the detailed workings of the strategies adopted by
families vis-a-vis authority and how the commissioners found themselves
implicated in the private lives of those under their jurisdiction, whilst the
latter found it quite easy to appropriate the instruments of justice which
had been left at their disposal. Even family friends, in their roles as
dispensers of advice or as conciliators, used the argument of the lettre de
cachet as a means of bringing the wife back to her duties. Some even went
so far as to say that she deserved to be put in Sainte-Pelagie, the notorious
prison for women of ill-repute. This line of argument provoked her to
dreadful outbursts of anger but also reduced her to nervous girlish panic
and trembling which softened her husband’s heart. One day, overcome
with panic, she paid a visit to the Lieutenant-General of Police to make
sure that he would not sign any order against her should her husband ever
request it. Then she came back ‘in floods of tears and all of a tremble. I sat
her down and told her that I was ready to forget everything... that I
loved her and that I would do all I could to make sure that she had
her pleasures.’ The next day it started all over again - the wife’s little
pleasures, an angry husband, threats from the father.
Of Montjean, the author of the account, we really know very little. He
is so taken up with the tantrums and unreasonable activities of his wife
that he scarcely speaks about himself or dwells on private thoughts. He no
doubt presents himself as he is, namely a man broken on account of his
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 95

choice of wife, yet still full of affection for her and continually torn
between tenderness, reasonableness and reproach. Concerned as he is with
his reputation and the smooth running of his business, he has an obsession
with money verging on the fanatical; his arguments are almost always
economic and very rarely emotional. He keeps accounts of his expenses, is
economical with what he has, despairs in the face of unfinished orders,
takes stock of the number of bottles of wine and jars of apricots in brandy
that he has left, quotes the cost of meals eaten at the restaurant with his
friends and makes constant reference to the incessant expense imposed on
him by his wife for the hire of cabs. The meticulous detail with which
he lists one by one all his expenses, such as the loss of earnings and
the breaches made in his economies, are an excellent indication of the
importance which he attributed to a form of married life which was first
and foremost economic. The expressions he uses are revealing:
‘It's true that since that wretched visit to her father I no longer know
her. She doesn’t know the value of 6 livres, in all this time she hasn’t done
any work ... cabs don’t seem to cost anything to her, she sometimes takes
as many as three or four in a day.’ And then if she returned from a trip
out, it was, ‘You’ve made a fine old dint in my apricots, there are only
three left.’
However, this finicky, niggling fellow was also a sensitive creature,
always holding back from provoking a final rupture with his wife, always
talking to her kindly and always hoping for a lasting improvement from
her. But in spite of that, if one had to add up the number of reproaches he
made to her and the reasons for his daily surprise at seeing her thus elude
him, the economic details would largely prevail over the marks of jealousy
or arguments of an emotional nature, although these were there too.
Economic accord was one of the fundamental components of the marriage
of artisans as was the managerial and financial role of the husband, and
this particular example is an outstanding confirmation of that.
Also taking their place in this family whirlpool were the children.
Montjean talks about them, or rather about his little girl of 4, on several
occasions, although they never occupy the centre stage. Right at the
beginning of the account, on the return of his wife, he makes it clear that it
was he who put his little girl to bed, even though he was tired and weary
from the journey. Later on he becomes angry at his wife for dragging her
off so much with her on her totally unreasonable outings and making her
ill as a result. ‘She came back at half-past midnight with my little girl of 4
and I had hardly finished putting her to bed when she vomited all over the
place. She was so ill, 1 thought she was going to die. Goodness knows
what on earth she had allowed the child to eat and drink.’ What his wife
thought, we do not really know except on those occasions when she burst
into anger and shouted at Montjean that it was up to him to look after his
96 Feelings and Metamorphoses

children, or when she yelled at him that he was a monster and that she
hated her children because they came from him. Paternal attention in the
eighteenth century was not an illusion and this is certainly not the first
time it has been brought to our notice.
Montjean’s wife, around whom everything revolves, is a fascinating
figure — at least if one believes her husband. Entirely absorbed as she is by
an all-consuming passion bordering on the obsessive, the sole purpose of
her life was to nurture it at every possible opportunity and to impose it on
her husband. What passion? A passion for society, passion for position
and social standing other than her own, passion to be elsewhere, free from
marital dependence, passion to be the woman who was sought after and
courted and to be on view at the very heart of the show itself, namely the
society life of Paris. Headstrong, obstinate and obsessed by the style of life
she wanted to lead, she considered that everything else stood in her way.
This provoked extreme outbursts of anger in which the one cry (repeated
19 times) to be heard could be reduced to two sentences, namely that she
did not want to work and that it was up to the man to look after his wife
and children. She maintains this categorical refusal to work throughout the
account and it is firmly supported by a somewhat peremptory vision of the
social order, or rather the male-female order. Man has to work while
woman makes appearances, pleases and entertains. The cry she utters at
the height of her anger is particularly violent because it is the expression
of a need which is urgent both personally and socially. So completely
enthralled is she by the spectacle of the world above her and which, on
account of her trade, she is condemned to serve, that Montjean’s wife
wears herself out in the costly work of appearances.
Her daily timetable provides an illustration of some of the pleasures
of the period enjoyed by that middle rank of society who were just
comfortable enough to be able to afford the expense of regular outings in
Paris, for which the essentials consisted of strolls, meals, clothes, cosmetics
and outings by cab, especially if these also included the arm of a man
friend. This latter she chose with an acute sense of the social hierarchy and
was always ready to drop any one of them in favour of another who might
be better dressed, all in the space of the same evening.

She dined with the boy who worked for M. Simon, the printer, and after
the meal they went to take a boat to go to Saint-Cloud, but they didn’t
find one and so they took a cab in which there were two people. One of
these was Dubois, a dancer at the opera whom I had known when he
was a boy and as he was better dressed than the printer’s boy, she took
his arm and walked down the grand avenue with him.

The favoured places for walking out were apparently the Tuileries and
the Palais-Royal, with the occasional venture further afield to more exotic
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 97
places such as the Gros Caillou (where one could eat gudgeon), Saint-
Cloud or Pre-Saint-Gervais. There, one might go for a stroll, dressed in
one’s best and then stop off to drink a beer, a carafe of redcurrant or a
glass of white wine - an ample watering for a somewhat fanatical taste
for fish, oysters in particular. Montjean never stopped deploring the
indulgence in oysters which were so expensive and with which his wife
regaled her companions. ‘They have eaten 12 livres worth of oysters,
drunk the white wine and eaten the peaches in brandy.’ Grand reunions
were occasionally held at his house and while he did his best to put the
guests off, telling them, for instance, that ‘all we’ve got in the house is
some bread soup and stew’, his wife would have ordered ‘50 sols worth of
fresh pork, and sent to the oyster lady for 4 livres worth of oysters to eat
and five bottles of wine to drink’. Recurring constantly throughout the text
is this consumption of seafood and fish, much to Montjean’s regret, but
very much vaunted by his wife as a mark of good taste and savoir-faire,
which it most certainly was.
Who were these friends then with whom she ate and drank and generally
amused herself, and who constituted this society so dear to her heart, this
social mirage she preferred so much to her work? We know very little
about their trade. One of them was a printer, another a dancer and a third
one she met at the home of a young woman who ‘drew portraits’ and for
whom Mme Montjean posed. There were probably a lot of them in any
case, and most of them were men who, it would appear, had little con¬
cern for the husband. They were forever at the Montjean abode taking
advantage of the wife’s thirst for society in order to wine and dine and go
off on outings at the expense of the couple, without the least sense of
shame. They pretended not to notice the husband’s anger and were even
prepared to assault him when he disturbed their cavorting. Montjean was
often the plaything of these ‘young masters’ about whom we know very
little except for their frivolous behaviour. Some of them led him a merry
dance and on the pretence of getting la belle back to work, they called
more frequently each day to take her out.
One can see in the description of their fun and games a kind of infantile
marivaudage26 and small-scale libertinism. It had been the same when his
wife came back from Gisors (her father’s village where she had found this
model of womanly life which had thereafter continued to haunt her), and
she had told her husband all about the games and tricks she had got up to.
There had been a lot of ‘squeezing and pinching, silly pranks and friendly
smacks’ and with her sister ‘the two of them had unbuttoned M. Demard’s
hose and given him a whipping’. One of their friends had said apparently
that if they had done it to him, ‘he would have spanked them on the
behind’. At the thought of this, Montjean laughed out loud. Later, when
Demard was ill, she had sent him a nightcap and two very attractive
98 Feelings and Metamorphoses

kerchiefs. Once, while walking in the Tuileries in very good company,

‘they had all amused themselves by jumping down off the top of the
terrace several times, which had made my wife laugh’. When they had had
enough, they took a cab to the Boulevard to drink white wine. Card
games, gambling, tarot, etc., etc. — it was one long round of pleasure,
appearances, games and spectacle. Such was the way of the world in 1774
and Montjean’s wife wanted her share of its follies.
Making an appearance was a necessity and a way of life and Montjean
himself was not unsusceptible. Once when accompanying his wife and
friends to the Palais-Royal, he noticed that he had a hole in his stocking. ‘I
said to my wife, my goodness, I’ve got a hole in my stocking; I’m going
home quickly to mend it. Go round again with them once more and then
come back home to eat.’ Going out walking was the focus for the spectacle
they all offered each other. If it was unacceptable for a man to have a tiny
hole in his stocking, then the woman must have been on show in her
entirety - Montjean’s wife was happy to be totally engulfed.
From what Montjean says of her, two essential images emerge: one of
uncontained impetuousness which required the availability of everything
which helped one forget about the workaday colours of daily toil; and the
other of the butterfly, the prisoner of her own dreams as well as her status,
forever tapping against the window-pane of evasion. In short, a woman
eternally at her window.
What of the other important characters in this fresco, the servants?
There were not many of them (the Montjeans only had one maid in
addition to their workshop hand) but they made their presence felt, as
one might expect, and could always be relied on to play the role of
go-between, acting as intermediary between husband and wife or of con¬
fidante first of one, then of the other. Acting both as discreet counsellors
and docile servitors, they carried billets-doux, posted letters, tried to
obtain information and intercepted messages. Beneath them, and under
their orders, there lived the little Savoyard who was regularly called on to
keep a lookout for the comings and goings of the friends or instructed by
the wife to inform her when an escort was waiting for her down below,
which was not in the best of taste and put Montjean out quite consider¬
ably. ‘What?’ he said, ‘He sent a chimney-sweep to fetch her? An honest
woman sent for by a chimney-sweep at 4 o’clock, what kind of example is
this in this area?’
The domestics were party to all the adventures. The cook, for instance,
helped Montjean’s wife to doctor the wine when the latter had drunk too
much of it with her friends while her husband had been away on a trip to
Thiais. Later she reproached her for exposing her husband to a wicked
duel he did not deserve. The masters always had need of their respect,
 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption 99

evidence borne out by this strange little scene where Montjean returned
home unscathed from his duel for the very good reason that his partners
had not turned up. He collapsed in a heap on the dining room floor,
sobbing and yelling in order to make his servants believe he had been
wounded. Abandoned by his wife and despised and mocked by her for his
inability to fight, at that particular moment he had needed a theatre in
which to demonstrate his prowess, and the domestic servants, of course,
were the only public remaining to him. And thus he acted out the scene he
most needed to play, that of courageous virility, wounded but strong, and
the one he would have liked his wife to have watched. It did not matter
that the servants were the only ones who had to look and not see; at least
they were there — and gullible.

I had the girl and the young lady believe that I had fought and that I had
been wounded and so I stretched myself out on the sofa. One of them
got out the brandy and all the dressings to put on my wounds and all of
a tremble, they asked me if I was badly wounded. I started to laugh and
they saw straight away that I was doing it on purpose and that there was
nothing the matter. I told them because they were trembling more than
my wife.

Because of what they saw and heard and got to know, the servants had
difficulty in keeping the secret and, as in many novels, it was through them
that Montjean learned about a good part of his misfortunes. This would
end in tears and threats of dismissal and then everything would return to
normal again, all that is except for the Montjean couple. The account ends
with a picture of the wife dragging the cook off to the pleasure gardens in
the Bois de Boulogne and of the Savoyard left to keep watch over their
possessions in an empty apartment.
One could have commented on each phrase, explained each detail and
interpreted each event which is so rich in precise detail about daily life.
Instead, a number of images have been selected, to bring out this unusual
combat between two marriage partners whose quarrel revolved around a
fundamental disagreement over the distribution of male and female tasks.
The end of the eighteenth century dragged along in its train the mirages
and illusions of high society to which the world of the artisan and small
trader dreamed of acceding. The woman here is the decisive actor in a
desire to rise socially, passing in turn by way of the ‘spectacle’ put on in
good taste for oneself and for others, to reading and the descent into
horseplay and revelling with company. Into this dream, aspired to daily,
should one not also read the utter weariness of the wives of artisans
employed by their husbands at the same time as a distaste for marriage
very typical of certain aspects of the eighteenth century?
100 Feelings and Metamorphoses

‘Marriage is a tyranny exercised over Beauty; it is a monster which

devours the marks of favour given you by Nature. What should make
ladies tremble is the loss of liberty in marriage. Belle Angelique, there is no
marriage amongst the angels.’27
 Part II
Work and its Margins
 Work and its Margins 103

We know the broad shape and outline of the world of work as we do the
organization of the city; there are great numbers of studies which have
shown us the strength and vigour of the craft-guilds with their festivals
and ceremonies, as well as their constraints and restrictive practices. We
also have other studies which provide us with sketches of the tissue and
fabric of urban life, with its streets and trade, its passers-by and the
population on its margins. However, the desire to uncover events other
than those usually described has led to a journey across the spaces of town
and work via their internal conflicts, with the effect that the resulting
images are either sharper or in need of modification, thus making it no
longer possible to remain at the surface of things.
League and counter-league; the need to get together to celebrate, cheat
or rebel; the desire to rally others around oneself in order to avenge or
defend oneself against injustice - these all produced a particular climate in
which one might express or justify oneself, or reflect on one’s conditions of
existence and vulnerability. Then there were crucial moments such as the
formation of an alliance or its breakdown (whether in the workshop, in
the town or well away from work altogether); there were times when truth
and falsehood crossed paths, when proposition met with opposition within
which desire and intent were often sealed in the impossibility of their
realization. Whether such activities brought people together or stirred up a
hue and cry, they were all a part of the convulsions through which society
inevitably passes in the course of its transformation and construction.
These are the concerns of this book for it is in the rediscovery of this
kind of behaviour and activity that it might be possible to discern the
thinking and understanding that ordinarily are so well masked by the
documents.
 6
In the Workshop

The picture of the Parisian workshop of the eighteenth century is a familiar

one which the historiography and iconography of the period has made
more immediate (the image of the sansculotte workers of the faubourgs
has been fixed for ever for instance by the Revolution of July 1789).1
Nostalgia has also helped sustain the memory of the craft workshop as
that familiar place of old-world courtesy where the master shared his
expertise and pride in his work with his journeymen. Nevertheless, we
also know that the tissue of daily life was interwoven with intrigue and
grievances; but memory has somehow managed to accommodate these
clashes without too much difficulty, so ingrained is it by the school texts.
We know that the corporatist policies of Colbert played an important
role during the seventeenth century. Not only did the number of corpora¬
tions increase (in Paris the numbers rose from 60 in 1669 to 129 in 1691),
but the machinery was put in place for the regulation of the trades to be
made subject to the State Inspector-Generals, who were responsible for
bringing everything under central control. The Lord Chief Justices were no
longer allowed the right of regulating the trades and crafts which had
hitherto been under their jurisdiction. This attempt at centralization which
was so obviously intended to serve the interests of the absolutist monarchy
naturally provoked a good deal of resistance, and in Paris several enclaves
claimed the right to maintain their privileges like the square and cloister of
Notre-Dame, the Temple, Saint-Jean-de-Latran, Saint-Germain-des-Pres,
etc.
Ideally, the whole body of corporations was to be directly dependent on
the King, but this desire for unity was never in fact realized as the
corporations were so ill-adapted economically. The philosophers of the
Enlightenment were themselves advocates of freedom in this area which
had become so stifled by an abundance of rules and regulations and
nervousness about the possibility of conflict.
 In the Workshop 105

The workshop was both repressive and cautious; and the fear of conflict
weighed so heavily that the authorities often trod on each other’s toes and
lost their footing in the face of the extent of the problems. The law
affecting the trades and professions was normally administered jointly by
the craft-guilds themselves and by the King’s own officials; but it was this
apportioning which proved stormy and uneasy. Strikes, on the other hand,
were repressed by a wide range of authorities depending on the particular
region and occasion, with everyone getting involved from the King’s
Procurator and the Chamber of Commerce to the Lieutenant-General of
Police, who could be found wielding his lettres de cachet with great
aplomb.
Little by little, throughout the eighteenth century, disorder crept in
amongst the ranks of the guild-masterships and so long as artisans were
excluded from paying municipal taxes, a close esprit de corps prevailed,
paralysing everything. Even the guild officials (jures) abused their rights
and found themselves in serious contention with the masters, whilst
journeymen and apprentices continued to shake the yoke of the masters’
authority.
Throughout the period, philosophers and economists were rethinking
the industrial question and it was no mere chance that in 1757 the subject
of a competition held at the Academy of Amiens was concerned with ‘The
obstacles to work and industry created by the craft-guilds and corpora¬
tions’; and it was no coincidence either that the prize was carried off by
Clicquot de Blervache (under the pseudonym Delisle), whose paper was
a lengthy discourse on the sclerotic condition of the corporations and
the masters’ obsessive concern with training an excessive number of
apprentices through fear of competition.2
The police, for their part, had to sail daily in stormy waters. On the one
hand, acting on behalf of the Lieutenant-General, they had no hesitation in
issuing police orders, itself an indication of the extent to which the life of
the trades had been disturbed by conflicts, regulations, orders, interdicts
and instructions which were always transgressed and perpetually repeated.3
On the other hand, the police were prevented from intervening directly,
since traditionally the guild’s own police was directly responsible to the
juries of their own magistrates; but in actual fact, things were not so
simple, as the police were also responsible for all matters affecting public
order and what is more, some of the more serious and prolonged disputes
occasionally called into question the authority and honesty of the officials
themselves. But the dream itself remained pure and clear, thus ensuring the
firm hold of the existing system which integrated the police within the
corporation, which in turn subjected the members of the crafts and trades
to the body as a whole in accordance with a model upon which the whole
of society could be based. In his Memoires Lieutenant-General Lenoir
106 Work and its Margins

makes constant reference to this perfect ideal of the ‘domestic chain’ by

which masters were subject to their juries, journeymen to their masters,
apprentices to the journeymen: the desired (and disputed) model was that
of the relationship of servant to master.
As the atmosphere progressively deteriorated, it became increasingly
difficult to control antagonisms and conflicts. Those syndics who were
afraid that they might not be able to assert their own discipline chose to be
accompanied by the police commissioners and on top of all this, the
adjutants of the Lieutenant-General came along on the King’s orders and
put the more recalcitrant characters into prison. Under such conditions,
recourse to the police archives should allow one to examine in detail the
fever which was shaking this milieu.
It is still difficult to approach things in this way, however, as the
archives of the corporations disappeared in the fire of 1871 and it was here
that the greater part of those conflicts settled internally were to be found.
Direct recourse to the police commissioner was altogether more rare
and this explains why systematic searches have failed to turn up many
hundreds of conflicts. It is thanks to the commissioners’ archives, however,
that it is possible to describe this world of the workshop which has been
too much the prisoner of a historiographical image which has fixed it
either in the nostalgia of ‘the job well done’ or in the ideology of the
Revolution to come and the class struggle of the future.4
As with the case of the child, we need to question our own syntax and
collective imagery. Our memories have been left with a glossy picture of
the cheerful journeyman, proud to be so, who is safely ensconced within a
culture of work and cabaret where friendships and hostilities collided over
a glass of wine. Any resentful or unpleasant traits in his character could be
explained by his common origins, where brawls and beatings were known
to be almost a ritual. With its banquets, secret traditions and ‘well-chosen’
vocabulary, it is tempting to think of it as another world which ‘we have
since lost’ or as a popular way of life with which one has lost touch and
whose spontaneous as well as more exotic aspects it is now fashionable to
resurrect.5
By looking at the workshop ‘cell’, which was quite restricted, it is
possible to gain a clear insight into the nature of the social stakes at play;
for this reason, the repression of infringements of working practice is of
less interest to us than the emergence of conflict and encounter. But before
penetrating into the workplace itself, let us recall some of the difficult
conditions which inevitably made life so precarious for workers in the
eighteenth century. The two following examples will suffice:
Suzanne Lavallee, an invalid-attendant, was the wife of a journeyman
cooper. Their home was at the Cul de sac de la Forge-Royale, parish of
Sainte-Marguerite. On 11 November 1761, they made a complaint before
 In the Workshop 107

Commissioner Crespy that they had been robbed of all their linen. She said
that

fifteen days ago she had left the house where she lived alone (as her
husband slept at his master’s), and she had gone to look after her
invalids. She had left behind her a woman by the name of Manon, who
had come to stay with her whilst she recovered from an over-production
of milk. This same Manon had remained at the house while she was
away as she was fostering a child. Eight days after, on getting back from
work, she had gone into her room to look for her but could not find her
as she had gone and had left the key with a neighbour as well as the
child, and everything had been stolen.6

The situation for this couple, who were unable to live together, was
indeed precarious; the husband stayed at his master’s and the wife had to
be away several days at a time to take care of the sick, leaving behind a
woman who was convalescing and nursing a child. The convalescent went
off with the linen, leaving the key and the child with a neighbour who
seemed to accept everything. When the invalid-attendant returned, she no
longer had any clothes, all she had, in fact, was a child who meant nothing
to her.
The other example comes from the milieu of the lodging-house, where
conditions were by and large promiscuous. Fran^oise Torpied, a shop girl,
recently arrived in Paris, was lodging with a man by the name of Pelletier
in the Rue Saint-Martin-au-Grand-Cerf. He put her in a room with two
beds. One of the beds was occupied by a nurse and a guide for the blind
and the other by herself and a nurse who was a complete stranger to her.7
The following morning she could find neither her box nor her money and
strongly suspected her bedfellow.
Four women to two beds, and two straw pallets beneath which one
might place the odd item - risky cohabitation indeed; but for some, it was
a way of life.
And as for the way of life in the workshop, the traditional and hier¬
archical structure of work (the number of masters in Paris at the end of the
eighteenth century was put at 30,000 over all trades8), which grouped
together the master and his employees, this was also markedly precarious
and more or less affected by the general ups and downs of everyday life.

An open space
The order of things was not as one might have expected. The workshop
could hardly have been that place of domestic intimacy and expertise
where the apprentice took his time becoming a journeyman, and where
108 Work and its Margins

the journeymen took pleasure in getting together for celebrations whilst

awaiting their mastership. Nor was it always a warm, enclosed space
where the stability of the employees aided production and promoted the
interests of those working there. In fact, the statements made by workers
and journeymen reveal a space that was constantly disturbed by comings
and goings and the disruptions caused by various hirings and firings. Such
conditions were hardly conducive to calm and steadiness.
The timetables we have been able to piece together from the interroga¬
tions would seem to bear out this fragmentation of time as one moved
from job to job and from one master to the next, like the journeyman
joiner who had served more than ten masters in three years.9 He had been
in a workshop in the Rue Maubuee before installing himself in another in
the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher and then he worked in another one at Saint-
Germain for a year. He then left for Vernon and proceeded to Rouen
before coming back to Paris, where he again worked for several masters,
finally ending up at Villeneuve. His case was by no means exceptional; in
fact it was one of the most common causes of conflict between masters and
employees and one of the major preoccupations of the police. Notice of
leave and the statutory authorization required before leaving a master as
laid down in the edict of 1749 did not seem to have made much impact on
these customary practices of arrival and departure.
Not only was such mobility a fact of life, it was occasionally asserted as
a right, as in the case of the cabby who was arrested in the popular
uprising of 1750. When questioned about his reasons for leaving his
master, he replied that, ‘he hadn’t liked it there, and besides one didn’t
always stay with the same master’,10 a phrase which would seem to signify
an almost permanent desire to be off, to be elsewhere, to seek something
better and to make that mobility a personal choice (certainly, it was often
experienced as such). It was, in effect, a kind of refusal to adhere to
the ideal model of the workshop as a structure of authority in which
employment was motivated by dependence and domesticity as propounded
by the police and the monarchy.
The workshop was not then, as one may have been quick to assume, a
system based on the bond between the master’s family and his journeymen
where all lived together in blessed intimacy and familiarity. A bond was
made on the basis of a specific contract which only ran for a certain length
of time and which might be rather quickly undone. There was life outside
the workshop. Information circulated, and the desire to find better pay
elsewhere gave life a gypsy-like rhythm and almost nomadic quality. As for
the boys and girls who worked in the shops and the simple domestic
servants, their situation was even more unstable; they lacked qualifications
and regarded their job as no more than a way of earning a living for the
time being, with no future.
 In the Workshop 109

One might think that this situation was essentially Parisian, but this is
certainly not the case, and a study based on employment registers at
Rouen gives similar results.11 Not only did workers do the rounds in one
town before moving on to the next, but a half of the jobs only lasted for a
couple of weeks, while 20 per cent stayed where they were for a month.
Very few stayed in the same place for more than three months. Obviously
in the course of all this moving around, it was not uncommon for an
employee to find himself back again at some time with one of his earlier
masters.
That one went from master to master was a fact; but the uncertainties
of economic life also gave rise to other types of mobility, such as changing
one’s particular profession. It was not unusual to find a journeyman with a
different trade from the one he had learned from his father because he had
been unable to carry it out as there was no work or because he lacked the
means. For the majority, work was a necessary activity and not a personal
investment in a chosen field, with the exception of the sons of masters who
did not need to bother themselves too much with this kind of problem.
Theirs was a sheltered life within a trade which guaranteed them a secure
future. For the rest, work was not necessarily an expression of oneself.
Even if one had been doing a definite kind of work for some time, one
would find one’s time divided up in a particular way. The seasons, for
instance, were marked out by a whole variety of different tasks and by
lengthy dispersals from Paris. During the eighteenth century there were
many building-workers in the city and in winter some of them returned to
the country, while others stayed where they were, getting by on whatever
meagre means there were available (for example polishing the silver in the
grand houses of Le Marais or doing the occasional odd job). In the spring,
they returned on site to be set on by whichever master paid best or had a
shortage of manpower.
Having drawn attention to this itinerant way of life and its displace¬
ments, and having recalled the fact that the workshop was far from being
that settled and enclosed space where a journeyman always remained with
the same master, we need to take this description even further. Within the
workshop, a place of forced cohabitation between family, employees and
servants, specific tasks were not allocated to each person once and for all.
Although it is difficult to find detailed sources providing information
on the exact type of work performed by each person, or the manner in
which masters and employees perceived their relationship to their work,
it becomes apparent, as one works one’s way through testimonies and
interrogations that the tasks varied greatly. It is also apparent that much of
the time was taken up here and there with a number of small ancillary
jobs, some of which are quite surprising, such as taking letters, going to
fetch a jug of wine for the master, running errands, fetching the master
110 Work and its Margins

from the cabaret (if he were still on his feet.. .)• All of these activities,
which are referred to quite often, were all part and parcel of the work one
was expected to do. One of the strangest of these tasks was imposed on a
young apprentice who was made to hide behind the window and watch
what the neighbour was doing: ‘Yes, that’s you, the neighbourhood spy!
It’s a well-known fact. You’re the lowest of the low,’ exclaimed the master
wigmaker as he looked at Guesbois, the master hatter.12 He told them
how Guesbois spent his time making fun of him and looking out of the
window to see what was going on at his place:

He went up into his room at the time when he knew Guesbois would
be there watching him, but it was so bad that he had to look away
and draw the curtains. At 10 o’clock in the evening he had had some
trouble with one of his boys. This had created a noise which had caused
Guesbois to send his apprentice over to look through the window to see
what was going on. This seemed to be a source of great amusement for
Guesbois, who was laughing.

In this case, the apprentice was up late keeping watch, and in another
case there was the journeyman sculptor who was sent to play messenger
and go-between for his master and a neighbouring manufacturer of
fireworks.13 Elsewhere a journeyman joiner seriously mistreated one of the
house-boys whom he had ordered to go and fetch the boss, yelling after
him as he went that ‘that was what he was there for’.14
Each workshop obeyed the law of its master and of his wife, which
created diversity in working-practice and a looseness in the definition of
tasks which was often a cause of argument or fights. Such conflict was
felt particularly acutely because it brought the journeymen into outright
confrontation with some of the most dearly held convictions of the police
and the authorities, who tended to see employees as domestic servants
subject to the authority of the powers that be, whereas many journeymen
could not tolerate having to carry out tasks which they considered to be
the responsibility of the boys or apprentices.
The apprentice, of course, was himself directly threatened by this servile
perception of his work. He often complained of doing servants’ jobs all
day and of being expected to do anything and everything, although he was
not a liveried servant. Far too often his time was confined to cleaning and
running errands when, as he complained, he should have been learning the
trade. The apprentice was often treated like a servant and the following
case in point concerning a young girl of 15, the daughter of a bourgeois, is
particularly telling. She had been apprenticed in ‘hairdressing and fashion’
but asserted that ‘she had done nothing at all to do with hair or fashions,
and had merely acted as a servant’,15 and she had been courted by
 In the Workshop 111

the master into the bargain. With the exception of women who were
incorporated within those trades that were specifically female and con¬
trolled by female magistrates and officials, the main body of women
workers in Paris was spread thinly throughout a variety of largely un¬
differentiated small trades which did not require any qualifications and
which were ill-thought of by a bourgeoisie who did not wish to see its
daughters working:
‘Imagine, if you will, a creature so peaceable, so tender and so delicate.
Do you think it possible for her to survive more than two hours without a
migraine? Could a girl escape unscathed?’16 In the poorer milieux, they
obviously did remain unscathed, and in the workshop the lack of work
definition led more often to the status of servant than to a professional
qualification. Certainly this was one of the ways in which their work was
regarded.1
The workshop was nevertheless a place which was easier to leave than
one might think; it lived in keeping with a complex and fragmented
rhythm; nor did it operate in isolation like a recluse — quite the opposite! It
was a space that opened up onto the outside and was constantly cut across
by outside influences. The journeyman, the shop boy or girl brought into it
with them many different worlds; they did not live day-in and day-out
from dawn till dusk within the strict hierarchy of work or the household.
They all had their time taken up by a wide range of family commitments
and other matters which obliged the workshop to be a porous place where
all kinds of social relationships overlapped and thus prevented it from
being that tight structure which one finds described so often.
Because the employee was working virtually unprotected, he very rarely
took on a face-to-face confrontation alone with his master; that would be
too risky. As the archives plainly attest, however, the journeyman would
be supported by a decidedly strong family presence. There was often a
brother or a sister, an uncle or parents around to give support or show
solidarity in the event of a disagreement. The respective wrongs were
weighed up and assessed, with the characteristics of each party well known
to all concerned.
Even the architecture of the workshop opened it up to outside view.
Overlooking the street as it did, with its windows open, its journeymen
carried out their work in front of the rest of the district, who passed
comment and criticism, gossiped or remained indifferent. The narrowness
of the streets also made for close encounters of a mischievous or cheerful
nature but in either case, as neighbour or competitor, one saw and was
seen. Rumour, the current gossip, rude comments made on the market,
chit-chat — these were all a part of workshop life. One might try to lure the
neighbour’s customers away or put them off; or perhaps nip into the
cabaret for a brandy with a fellow journeyman who had been hailed over.
112 Work and its Margins

Then came the rallying cry that travelled faster than the wind or the
abrupt lay-off without notice on the same day as one found out that offers
of work were at a premium at the Place de Greve. This ebb and flow of
news and comment and movements affecting the individual heart or the
street were regularly experienced in a life where things seen and heard
were responsible for making or breaking solidarity, for prompting revenge
or the like, or else were just so many of the various ways of breathing in
the air and the difficulties of the time. The workshop found itself engulfed
with no possibility of holding itself aloof. Honour and reputation, tossed
by talk and chatter like trees in a storm, lent it a fragility which could on
occasion undermine the master’s discipline. In this open and exposed
climate so subject to knocks and buffeting, friendships and social groups
were fleeting and mobile, and while the networks and channels formed
outside decreased the forms of social dependence, such alliances and
understandings always needed to be recreated and reconstructed as arrivals
and departures were so frequent; in fact it was movement which was the
permanent feature and characteristic of social groupings of this kind,
which makes it necessary to reconsider the type of friendships and in¬
timacies which might arise as a result.
The workman, always torn between the desire for wealth and his own
free space, inhabited the workshop out of necessity and in keeping with his
own plans, the conduct of which remained therefore both solitary and
collective. Any intimacy he might know on the shop-floor was most likely
to be at some particular moment and liable to interruption for any number
of reasons. Whether it was fleeting or lasting, the experience of such
moments was constrained and confined by life inside and out, since the
workshop was neither a well-defined shelter nor refuge, but a place dom¬
inated by tensions and power relationships and by simultaneous systems of
alliance and dissension. In this place, private and public spheres were
conjoined without distinction and the structure of the space itself reflected
this intermediate state in which choices between the inside and outside
were not even open to consideration but simply became immersed in the
flux and flow of city life. It is difficult to catalogue habits and rituals; it is
rather a matter of showing how exposed this place was and how it served
as a focus of resistance for those who wished to establish a mode of being
and an order of things quite different from the dreams of the masters and
police. Defence mechanisms and utopian projects shook the guilds and the
authorities without cease.

Feverish interludes

One should not imagine the workshop as being solely disrupted by con¬
flicts between masters and employees; that would be oversimple. The
 In the Workshop 113

trades were in fact disturbed and shaken by scores of feverish move¬

ments and activities which spread and reverberated, provoking an almost
permanent state of malaise. Several dramas were acted out on this stage of
work and on each occasion loyalties shifted and the confrontations which
arose created new connections which thus modified the map of alliances.
Serious problems arose at every level and confrontations between master
and journeyman were no more frequent than those which brought the
masters into violent conflict with their guild officials and no more common
than the differences which divided the world of the journeymen them¬
selves. Cracks were visible at every point and no one was spared. Each
type of conflict established its own forms of agreement or rupture causing
earlier alliances to break up and new ones to form.
The complexity of the forms of social opposition which occasionally
brought together those who moments ago had been in conflict with each
other allows one to grasp something of a workshop thus caught in the
peculiar stranglehold of opposing forces which did not necessarily respect
the forms of solidarity or antinomy one might have expected; and if one
moves beyond the complexity of the situations, one might possibly find out
something of the modes of thought.
Given the state of conservation of the archives of the craft-guilds and
corporations and the diversity of the authorities responsible for maintain¬
ing order in the world of work, it would be unrealistic to think that the
police archives contain the only records of these conflicts. Thus the 170
workshop disputes that were singled out from the middle of the eighteenth
century (see n. 4), can only serve as a framework on which to reflect. It is
difficult to know at what point matters were considered serious enough
to go before the commissioner of police and how representative these
disputes were. What is evident is that a detailed analysis will benefit us
more than a quantitative outline of the conflicts of working life.
The evidence we have shows that all the disputes collated here involved
a great deal of violence. Conflicts did not take place with buttoned foils.
Violence and brutality erupted very suddenly into a climate of aggression
with no attempt at containment. It was as though there were no other
means of expressing what one found unacceptable other than by blows
and punches and that there was an underlying hatred which only needed a
pretext for it to spill over. The workshop, however, was no more violent
than the tenement block, the cabaret or the market-place, especially if one
considers how its authoritarian and hierarchical configuration might easily
give rise to opportunities for discord.
When a disagreement did arise, anger, blows and insults were all dragged
in and things would finally reach the pitch where the whole neighbour¬
hood became involved. The fight was rarely with bare fists, as there were
far too many wooden or metal tools about the place for them not to be
 114 Work and its Margins

used. If one did not want one’s adversary to die, things had to be brought
to an end quickly or the participants restrained by the others. Paring-
knives, hammers, nails, lumps of lead and glass were all lethal and costly.
The insults, however, knew no bounds and so there was no shortage of
them. Loud shouts of ‘Filth!’ ‘Beggar!’ ‘Rogue!’ or ‘Wretch!’ hardly made
much of an impression, for they were part and parcel of the whole
business, just like the expressions aimed at the women, such as ‘Bitch!’
‘Whore!’ and ‘Madam!’ From time to time one finds an effort to make
them more specific and then they resound all the more intensely: ‘Money-
grubber!’ Villainous cheat!’ ‘Dealer in human flesh!’ — terms which evoke
exploitation and economic difficulty. Or one might declare oneself ready
to do anything: ‘I’ll gouge your heart out and eat it, you rotten slut; go
hang, you’re not fit for Bicetre!’ In this case the insult was combined with
the hope for justice which would see the other dead or imprisoned.
As usual the more foul and salacious insults were reserved especially for
the women and these included images of the punishments traditionally
meted out to persons of ill-repute. It was not uncommon to hear such
remarks as the following: ‘I’ll rip the frock off your backside, see if I
don’t’, or else, ‘You soldiers’ moll’, and ‘Your bitch of a cousin will be
put on a donkey one of these days’, a reference to the punishment of
miscreants by a humiliating public donkey-ride.18
Blows, wounds, insults and a neighbourhood in uproar were the main
characteristics of these disputes. There were also tears and sobs but they
came mainly from the young apprentices who, because they lacked the
physical strength of the adults and were still quite close to childhood or
were indeed quite simply children, could not offer the same opposition,
force of arms or argument. As far as they were concerned, we are talking
of pain, sorrow and tears.

The master’s wife

In the midst of all this disorder, there was one figure who stood out
like a target — the master’s wife.14 Although her professional situation
was utterly ambiguous, this had the effect of making her an even more
important personage, carrying out as she did a wide range of managerial
tasks in the workshop and helping create a pleasant ambiance for entertain¬
ing customers and clients. In close parallel with her husband she exerted a
powerful influence over day-to-day matters and as wife of the master,
merchant or landlord she was the inevitable bustling, busy servant of her
husband (not of course to the liking of all, as we might recall from the case
of Montjean’s wife). She was also the mistress who exercised her authority
over journeymen, servants, apprentices and shop hands. Her tasks were
 In the Workshop 115

vast and imprecise, creating a distortion of power which gave her even
more influence and meant that she was present at the workshop much
more than her husband, who was often out on business (or as we shall see
later, involved in disputes between guild officials, syndics and masters).
Accountant, manageress, giver of orders, she demonstrated her authority
whilst lacking any qualification and only held this power on account of her
marriage. Because of her many titles, which in fact were nothing of the
kind, she was both a central character and a vulnerable figure. She was
vulnerable even at the very heart of the alliance formed with her husband,
for everything depended on the coordination of their lives and their mutual
understanding. In fact she was infinitely vulnerable, for although she was
one of the essential figures in the success of the business she represented
the weak link.
Given the importance of the fact that gossip and rumour were the
common property of the district, it was easy for anyone in disagreement
with the master to avoid taking on the master directly in person simply by
resorting to the alternative of lashing out indiscriminately at the honour
and reputation of his wife. There were all kinds of ways of undermining
the image of the couple, such as a careless word spoken in the cabaret or
at the market or the spreading of suspicion by dropping the odd sugges¬
tive comment. It was a serious business, for the artisan could lose his
customers. The life of the workshop being a constant combination of
‘inner’ and ‘outer’, the wife of the master represented one of its most
private aspects at the same time as being obliged to present an image of
herself to the public which was trustworthy and reliable. When conflict
arose, however, it was she who became the obvious target. Furthermore,
everyone knew that once she became a widow she would be the real
mistress of the place unless one of the journeymen managed to marry her.
As a woman and wife of the master, she had a dual image in which
weakness and power were intermingled. Her private life was more exposed
than that of others since her marriage gave her an effective power which
would be hers officially in the event of her becoming a widow or else it
could make her the object of a new matrimonial strategy for a man who
may have spent a long while awaiting the position of master and the death
of the husband.
Given all this, it is not surprising that she found herself implicated in
nearly all the disputes no matter what they were about. Insulted, mocked,
or even manhandled, wounded and beaten, it was always her sexuality or
dubious associations that were called into question. What else could one
say about her? On 1 November 1760, Marie-Angelique Pillet went to
register a complaint before Commissioner Hugues as a result of being
profoundly humiliated, which had also caused her to be subjected to the
full weight of her husband’s anger. He was a master wigmaker in the Rue
 116 Work and its Margins

Saint-Sauveur and a short time ago he had dismissed his boy, Baptiste,
whose only aim was to get his revenge in the only way he knew how,
this being to attack the virtue of Marie-Angelique in the absence of the
husband. He ‘kept on making the most disgraceful comments about her,
saying that Linelle, another boy who lived with her, had obtained her
favours and that she had given him presents every day. He had even
written a letter to her husband telling him that he too had had everything
he wanted from her and her husband had been furious.’20 The authors of
some of these stories did occasionally end up being right about what was
happening between the couple; but resistance to the over-inflation of this
gossip and rumour was difficult, as was standing up to the insinuations
which caused stirrings in the district and upset the neighbours. On 17
July 1765, Jean-Fran^ois Vandelle, master and merchant hatter living at
Rue Pavee, and Marie-Elisabeth Fleury, wife of a butcher in the Rue
Montmartre, but who herself lived in the Rue Pavee, brought a complaint
against Antoine Hardy, apprentice to her husband;

further to the complaints that they made to us about him, it was

plain that he was the author of the current misunderstanding between
Bougueul and his wife, the plaintiff, who has been obliged to leave her
husband as a result of the wicked comments made by Antoine Hardy, on
whose authority the husband had seen fit to strike the plaintiff while
she was pregnant. Since she had left her husband, which was two
months ago, he had kept repeating shocking comments to persons of her
acquaintance and she wished to have him punished so as not to lose her
reputation.21

When there was a fight or scuffle it was rare for the master’s wife to
remain untouched and more often than not it was those parts of her body
denoting her femininity (breasts and belly, for example), that were quite
deliberately abused. It was not just a push and shove or a slap round the
head, there were also the words and gestures intended to recall her sex.
Wherever the master s wife was to be found, one also found the union of
weakness and strength - an inevitable line of weakness and an obvious
target.
To be fair, there were some master’s wives who abused their posi¬
tion and took advantage of their situation in order to impose excessive
discipline even going so far as handing out blows and slaps to dreamy or
careless apprentices. On occasion there were husbands who complained
about their wives but it was rare. The following text allows us a better
understanding of the status of the wife of the artisan:

Summoned to appear before the court was one Sieur Delamothe, wood-
merchant and supplier for Paris, living at the Quai Saint-Bernard in
the parish of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. He brought before us a
 In the Workshop 117
complaint against his wife, saying that he thought he might have done
better than to put all his trust in this mistress Hardy and to leave all the
care of his household to her. When he had to go away on journeys
required by his trade, he had even handed over to her the keys of his
study and his strong-box. However, he soon noticed how he was suffer¬
ing as a result of this blind faith and, seeing how his wife was indulging
in every variety of outrageous dissipation whose consequences he wished
to forestall, he had seen fit no longer to leave the management of his
money to his wife and to take care of expenditure himself. This wise
precaution which alone was capable of preventing the ruin of himself
and his children would appear to have launched the wife of the plaintiff
into such a strange fury that it was no longer possible to have any peace
in his own home and his wife had turned all the other merchants away
from him and had spewed out enough insults against him to ruin him.““

Here was a powerful woman — no doubt too powerful; and when anger
exploded, it was the ambivalence of her person that it went for.

The apprentice
The 170 disputes studied can be divided almost equally into four types of
conflict, namely: master-apprentice, employee-master, master-official
and disputes between journeymen. Not only were there disputes between
those involved in the intolerable relationships of dependence but quarrels
also occurred between those of equal status, thus introducing rivalry where
previously there had been solidarity.
Entry into an apprenticeship was a solemn occasion whereby the con¬
tract made between the master and the parents of the child was signed in
the presence of a lawyer:

This day, before the King’s counsellors, notaries of Le Chatelet de Paris,

here present be Jean-Baptiste Desseigne, burgher of Paris, and his wife,
Marie-Franqoise Regout who, desirous of advantage for their son,
Claude Desseigne aged 17 years, do recognize and accept the obligation
made on the part of their son to be engaged in the service of Sieur J. N.
Richomme, master printer in fine print, for the space and time of four
complete years in succession .. .23

The contract stipulated the duties of each of the parties: the master had to
teach his craft ’without concealing anything at the same time as keeping
the child fed, warmed, washed, lodged and lit. The parents, for their part,
undertook responsibility for providing him with a bed and clothing as well
as a certain amount of money. The child, in his turn, promised to obey,
and not to absent himself nor work elsewhere. Parents and masters agreed
upon the necessity of good manners and healthy conduct.
The contract, which was generally quite precise, is a good indication of
 118 Work and its Margins

the apprentice’s situation. Here was a young lad suddenly subjected to two
authorities: his parents, on the one hand, and the master on the other. This
one short agreement, covering his work, his obedience and the money he
brought with him, offered ample scope for day-to-day difficulties. Rela¬
tionships between the three parties were often stormy and the apprentice
himself, still a youngster, found the framework allotted to him difficult to
endure. Moreover the great majority of complaints brought before the
commissioner relate to the physical maltreatment of the apprentice. It was
an intolerable situation highlighting certain aspects of the daily life of the
workshop and revealing how its apparent closeness was often troubled and
oppressive. But it was also a situation which revealed the anxious concern
of the parents for their children. They took on their defence, harboured the
child who might have fled from the blows that were being dealt out to him
and even protected those who might have been old enough to stand up for
themselves. Though the parents themselves might use their children to do
their work, badgering them or taking them to task until the work was
done, they were swift to demand that the training of their children as set
out in the contract should be respected without incurring either violence or
abuse, especially where the apprenticeship provoked a situation in which
there was an intolerable clash between parental authority and that of the
master. Even their excessive tiredness was closely watched and condemned
over and over again but the guild officials were apparently powerless to
put a stop to such excesses and found themselves on occasion advising the
parents to complain directly to the police.
The position of the parents was difficult, for the apprenticeship contract
cost money and the eventual dismissal of the child was a serious matter for
the family. Witness for instance the case of Jeanne Bro, a cooper’s widow.
Her son Nicolas had been in apprenticeship with a master confectioner for
three years, and for the last few months the master had been giving him an
excessive amount of work which was absolutely beyond the limits of his
strength. One evening when he was ‘thoroughly worn out’, he had refused
to do some extra work which consisted of washing-up and scouring some
kitchen utensils. The mistress, who was very angry, gave him orders to get
out and he returned to his mother at Poissy. Jeanne Bro was extremely
worried as the period of apprenticeship of five years was far from being
complete. An attempt at reconciliation needed to be made but the master
refused to come to any arrangement so long as the guild officials declined
to intervene. It was Commissioner Crespy who was finally informed of the
affair and who had to settle it on the advice of the officials, who refused to
exert their influence over the offending master.24
One further example, taken from among many, effectively sums up the
whole nature of the problem which apprenticeship was up against. It
illustrates the exhaustion, the unwarranted claims on the apprentices’ time,
 In the Workshop 119
the bad treatment, and the cruel role of the master’s wife: the son of
Franqois Hocquin (widow of a journeyman carpenter), had been serving
an apprenticeship for two years with a master enameller. He was aged 11
at the time and was subjected to so much violence and harassment that he
was totally exhausted. His arms were 'black and blue with blows and
cuffs’ he had received from the master’s wife. He had learned nothing and
he felt ill. His mother, heart-broken, explained to Commissioner Hugues
in July 1761 ‘that it pained her to have to see her child obliged to do work
that was so much beyond his years that even the most sturdy journeyman
would have had difficulty in doing it’. In fact the master's wife had been
expecting him to produce 4,000 pearl beads a day; if he didn’t, she hit him
with a bull whip so that some evenings he preferred to sleep on the stairs.
His mother was indignant and demanded the annulment of the apprentice¬
ship agreement.2>
Condensed in this one example are the principal problems posed by
apprenticeship, namely: forced production; the impossibility of escape
from a domestic authority which had been accepted by contract; the
absence of tuition in the trade; total dependence on an utterly unscrupulous
master or, in this case, on a woman ‘whose conduct was not reprimanded
by her husband’, as the mother pointed out. Not all the apprentices were
treated in this way, but all the conflicts relating to apprenticeship are
illustrative of this daily enslavement to the wishes of the master and of the
claims on the time of his employees which was abusive. For some, the
main tasks were to sweep and clean, run errands and act as servant. For
others, their time and hours were so constantly occupied that they were
virtually robbed of their lives; they were made use of without respite, not
even for a little religious education. If first communion had not been made,
as was the case of a little niece of Gulnet’s, a lemonade seller, the master
should normally have left some time for the child to receive instruction in
the mass. Tourie, an orange merchant, had not understood it this way and,
although he had given his word, ‘he had not even given her the time to go
to mass on feast days’.26
Another cause of serious differences between masters and parents lay
in the behaviour of the child, but here the complaints were mutual.
The master might express his concern about the doubtful habits of an
apprentice who had been tempted to spend the night away or who whiled
away his time. The parents also kept a watch on their children to see
that they did not come under the bad influence of the master. Thus the
apprentice found himself watched on all sides.
The apprenticeship contract could be renounced at any time, like the
following between the daughter of a journeyman fancy goods-maker and a
master button-maker. The latter was accused by the parents of allowing
her to make too many rendezvous with another master who worked with
 120 Work and its Margins

the plaintiff.27 There were so many eyes watching and following the
apprentice that they were too many to count. Servants and journeymen
also had their bit to say. Some of them warned the parents about what
their son was up to even at the risk of their initiative not going down
particularly well.
The apprentice found himself at the centre of attention as his young age
and his period of training made him the property of everyone around;
conflicts were thus complicated and compounded by the degree of this
collective appropriation of his body and his time which characterized his
social and professional status. Moreover if it were a young girl apprentice
she was at risk of being led astray by the master, pestered by the pressure
of his demands or his banter which was not always ‘very Catholic’. Thus it
was that Chantelle, master wigmaker, had to appear in court one day to
give account of his strange dealings with Charlotte, aged 15. According to
the girl’s parents, ‘he had sought to corrupt her morals and her heart by
asking her if she were a virgin. As she replied that she didn’t know, he told
her that he could see from her eyes that she had left her virginity behind in
the country and that she did it herself every day in her bed and that in any
case he would take a look at her nipples and see if that were indeed so.’
The following day his behaviour was too blatant for her not to inform her
18
parents.
To this feeling of total belonging to the master, so often resented, the
apprentice responded in several ways. Some sabotaged the work, wasted
time or offered passive resistance. Others resorted to insolence or guile,
treating the master and his wife with contempt, insulting or even striking
them. Many preferred to flee and go on the run or to look elsewhere and
thus break by stealth a contract which others had drawn up for them and
which was costing them far too dearly. And it nearly always caused a
drama because not only did parents and masters lose money as a result,
they also lost their good name — both of which were needed, the one as
much as the other.
There was the case of Antoine Flamant, apprenticed as book-keeper to
Lecointre for four years. He owed him the sum of 200 livres but after two
years he left without paying, ‘taking his clothes with him without the
plaintiff knowing or being aware of where he was living’. The master
therefore asked for the apprenticeship agreement to be annulled.
If the masters were very possessive of their apprentices and some¬
what less than delicate in the way they appropriated them, which led to
complaints and legal proceedings, it was because they derived enormous
profits as a result. This regular use of young people in their workshops
allowed them to bypass the journeymen and obtain servants and assistants
on the cheap. The journeymen were very well aware of their little game
and tried to protect themselves against this utterly unfair competition by
 In the Workshop 121

condemning the corrupt practices of their masters. Once again we find the
commissioner brought in as witness to resolve those questions which the
craft-guilds themselves, too paralysed by their own internal differences
were not able to resolve.
In 1750, for example, a complaint was brought before Commissioner
Mutel by five journeymen tilers.29 They drew attention to one of their
guild’s statutes which prevented any master hiring out his apprentices
unless they had served at least three years’ apprenticeship and had been
deemed ‘capable of journey work by the guild’s officials and custodians’.
They asserted that several masters were contravening the regulations, like
Vamousse and Magdeleine who hired out youngsters with barely a year’s
apprenticeship behind them and were employing them ‘in preference to
journeymen’. Quite unusually in the course of this affair, one of the
apprentices was called to give evidence after a visit by the commissioner.
In contrast, in March 1766, the Lieutenant-General of Police gave his
assent to the guild of master tilers who were seeking authorization for a
master to have three apprentices instead of two on account of the upsurge
in the building trade which had created a veritable ‘dearth of journeymen’,
and thus an increase in their daily rate. As Sartine wrote in his police
deposition:

There are two grounds for this demand, these being:

1 The current shortage of journeymen in the trade together with the
vast number of buildings under construction at the present time.
2 Journeymen taking advantage of these circumstances to demand 3
livres to 3 livres 10 sols per day although by decree of 4 October
1756, based on past performance, the daily rate has been fixed at 45
sols for the period between All Saints and Easter and from Easter to
All Saints at 50 sols.
This demand deserves favourable consideration.

In the end, the nature of apprenticeship came back to the status of the
young. It allows one to see the difficulty of making agreements without
the principal party being one of the signatories of the contract. The
apprentice’s only hope was that he should not be submitted to undue
dependence and that he might navigate the best course between whatever
authorities had control over him, even though they had made an agree¬
ment between themselves over his head.

Confrontation
They worked together, took their meals together, and often slept under the
same roof; and one of them employed all the rest. Their daily familiarity,
 122 Work and its Margins

however, if indeed it did exist, did not imply the use of ‘tu’, which in fact
was likely to lead to an argument. In the eighteenth century, the existence
of face-to-face confrontation between the master and his journeymen was
always a reality and police officers were very well aware of it, as were
social reformers and inspectors of industry and manufacturing. Anger was
provoked on all sides by insolence and insubordination on the part of
those whom one would have preferred to see obeying like servants in this
chain of authority which went right down from the King to the very least.
But this indignation was tinged with real fear, and syndics and guild
officials were afraid to intervene without the commissioner, who was
himself hesitant or discreet about his involvement or else made improbable
attempts at reconciliation. There was one way out, however, which was
used quite often and this was the lettre de cachet, that instrument of royal
command, swift, impartial and able to effect the overnight disappearance
of the troublesome worker. This practice, more common than one might
have believed, was used even more frequently when there were protest
movements or serious strikes.
The complaints brought before the commissioner show us a workshop
at grips with two kinds of conflict headed as much by the master as by the
journeymen. In the one case, this arose from the journeyman’s need to take
his leave, to be off elsewhere, free and better paid and to be able to depart
as and when he wanted. This led to fighting and quarrelling, with insults
and threats of revenge provoked by the master, frustrated at seeing his
world of work destroyed without warning. In the second instance, we
are presented with an authoritarian master insulting or maltreating his
employees or dismissing them on occasion without paying what he owed.
In this case the journeyman immediately lodged a complaint.
Each example is the inverse of the other but in either case it was always
a matter of departure which might be voluntary or inflicted, according to
the particular case, but it always had serious consequences. It was no
coincidence that it was the idea of departure which was central to shield¬
ing a turbulent workshop given that a workman’s time was punctuated by
dismissals, lay-offs, voluntary departures and disruption and the only need
for an agreement with the boss was in order to make another one which
was less restrictive. This refusal to be bound down indefinitely, which was
perceived as a form of imprisonment, was the hallmark of the world of
work and because of this continual need to be off, the journeyman marked
out a solitary route in which his desire to climb the social ladder and to be
integrated within his society was combined with his concern that he should
never be bound in servility.
To leave, yes, but also to return when one chose; if one had forgotten
something, say, or if the master owed one money or perhaps (and why
 In the Workshop 123

not), if working practices and conditions of dependence had changed. The

masters were not at all happy with such a tradition of liberty or with the
displacements and comings and goings.
Cadet had been a journeyman butcher for five months with the widow
Thenard in the Rue de l’Oursine. Four years previously she had dismissed
him for his disloyalty and yet there he was back again, but she did not
remember him and it was only later that she recognized him. By then he
was trying to ‘introduce new practices between himself and the other lads’,
wanting them all to have a share in the little bit of profit they made on the
side from their dealings. When she wanted to dismiss him once again, he
made a terrible scene and threatened to ‘finish her off’.
To stay? Yes, provided the type of work were different and there
were alterations in the relationships. This was the case for Adam’s three
journeymen, monumental masons in the Rue de Fourcy. They had been
there for eight years and in fact one of them had been there twenty years,
but from one day to the next they had managed to ‘cause trouble’, ‘play
around’, slip off from the workshop, distract the others and generally
upset their work habits. The master thought that all this would improve
by setting on a kind of supervisor, but his wife, who was getting on in
years, paid the price and she was insulted, humiliated, and beaten. If the
neighbours had not come to her rescue, she would certainly have been
beaten to death.
When the work was not to one’s liking, or if the master were too strict,
it was quite easy to have one’s revenge on the material one was making or
on the goods one was producing or selling. There was a journeyman
butcher who had to untie the calves’ hooves each day. One day, in a rage,
he slashed them through to the bone ‘which affected the quality of the
merchandise’. On being dismissed he shouted ‘that if he was thrown out he
would see to it that he [the master] got a knife in the gut at the first
opportunity’. Another employee who usually ‘kicked his heels and annoyed
everyone’ threw everything on the ground one day and went off to think
over something his master had just said to him.
To be dismissed was one thing but what if one could get one s revenge
by ruining the master’s reputation or driving away his customers or even
threatening him with death, and not just in any old way. Take the case of
Francois Berton, for instance, whose rather remarkable scheme deserves
a mention. When he was dismissed by Letesne, master button-maker,
Francois went from street to street denigrating him and saying how he was
going to get his revenge in the future. ‘In order to do this he signed himself
up for the Gardes fran^aises, which gave him the right to carry a sword
which he intended to put right through his body.’ What was the point in
obtaining one right in order to transgress another? Well, killing the master
124 Work and its Margins

was one thing, but killing him and having the right to wear a sword was
much better because it annulled the position of subordinate, established a
truly different situation and allowed one to reclaim one’s own self.
The right to carry a sword was one of the popular demands of the time.
In 1764, Police Inspector Damotte found himself embroiled with some
milliners’ boys who had gathered in a crowd at the Porte de Chaillot and
were making it loud and clear that they did not agree with the ruling of
their guild which forbade the carrying of swords or of hunting knives
on pain of a fine of 20 livres. On this occasion, one of the boys was
arrested, but his master took up his cause and went off to see his district
commissioner. He protested strongly for the release of his assistant and,
overcome with anger, he shouted out that his boys were ‘worth a lot more
by birth than Monsieur de Sartine’. The commissioner said nothing but
wrote off immediately to the Lieutenant-General. The boy was released a
short while later but in the meantime his master had written to Sartine:
‘We know that no one has the right to do it, but the practice is tolerated
and if we might be so bold as to say it, even necessary so as there can be
no confusion between servants and domestics’ (AB 12261). Wearing a
sword was a sign of distinction, and its absence was an affront to dignity
and a testament to servility. Moreover, in order to obtain this right, the
milliners had dressed themselves in ‘braided garments worth from 300 to
400 livres and with lace cuffs costing between 3 and 4 louis,\ an observa¬
tion on the part of Inspector Damotte which says a good deal. For
by means of their external appearance, the journeymen were seeking to
demonstrate that in no way could they be included with that coarse body
of tied servants and domestics.
Debt was sometimes the basis for some departures and dismissals and
the complaints made in this respect cast some light on the way in which
the accounts were organized in the workshop and how the journeymen
were paid. It was quite common for the master to make irregular payments
and it became very difficult to keep a track of the money. Others made an
advance for the week if that is what was required. In any case, it appears
that the accounts were often quite complicated, especially if the journey¬
man was paid on the basis of the number of his clients and the master and
his wife were not in agreement with his calculations. This whole system of
advances, debts, loans and sums conditional on a sale wove a web of
obligations between master and employees such that a simple quarrel
might arise quickly and make the whole financial situation inextricable,
even if the journeymen kept a detailed journal of their accounts and
showed them to the master at the slightest hint of a doubt.
Of equal importance with money, debts or salary were the tools. They
belonged to the journeyman and never left his side. If he decided to leave -
 In the Workshop 125
they went with him. His tools were a part of his patrimony and his
traveller’s back-pack when he felt the urge to take a look further afield.
Some tools belonged to the master and they remained in the workshop. In
the event of a dispute, some gestures assumed a symbolic significance such
as refusal to work which was accompanied by throwing the tools on the
ground and trampling them underfoot. Leaving with one’s head held high
having thrown down tools (the master’s as well as one’s own), often
indicated that one would be back in the morning to pick up one’s things. It
was not always to the master’s liking of course, especially if the journey¬
man had left with his work unfinished.
In any case, what the tools signified was the possession of a personal
qualification. One not only possessed the tools of the trade, but the trade
itself, which indicated a relative degree of liberty and freedom to choose
one master over another. On the other hand, work-clothes and overalls
usually belonged to the master and in most cases handing in one’s apron
had the opposite symbolic effect, for it marked the end of that particular
dependence.
These two types of item, tools and clothes, illustrate the two opposing
poles which constantly put a strain on the life of the workman. The
implement was the privileged means by which he created his own free
space between himself and his master, whereas the clothes were a constant
reminder of his dependence and of the fact that he was owned by another.
He was forever playing on this contradiction, hoping to achieve something
better out of a reality which was ultimately very limiting.
At other crucial moments, when workers were being taken on, for
instance, things seemed rather precariously balanced and rivalries and
disputes were easily engendered. The demand for employment was
increased by the fact that the masters played on the apprenticeship system
to avoid taking on too many journeymen. The Place de Greve, the place
where people were traditionally hired, rather resembled a cabaret in that
everything there was always ripe for the eruption of a fight or for tempers
to get overheated. Masters and officials were often thought of as ‘assassins’
who were ready to take advantage of the workforce without paying a
fair price and accused of spreading poor reputations about journeymen
who wanted to leave and look for better conditions. In either camp, the
weaponry was the same, namely to cause discredit, that deadly poison
which could shackle people for life and cost them very dear economically.
Journeymen were officially procured by the guilds’ own employment
bureaux but in order to speed things up, the masters often did business
directly at the inn or the cabaret, and certain hostelries were renowned for
this type of activity. There, one might find employers and those seeking
work engaged in animated discussion over a glass of wine. The contracts
126 Work and its Margins

that were signed, were necessary but never final and they were always
drawn up with the prospect of leaving which the master had some dif¬
ficulty in stifling.
The authorities were growing worried;30 there was a swell of paid
workers who were becoming increasingly isolated from the bosses and
who were quite blatantly seeking their autonomy. Keeping the worker tied
to his work was a recurrent theme but there tended to be more boldness
when it came to issuing writs and regulations than when it was a matter of
action in the street. It was in this spirit of constraint and of illusory
struggle against a rebellious and self-confident body of journeymen that
the lettres patentes of 2 January 1749 were issued, the purpose of which is
made quite clear in the preamble:

We are informed that a number of workers in the trades and in manu¬

facturing are leaving the manufacturers and entrepreneurs employing
them without first having obtained in writing notice to quit, or without
completing the work in hand and, in many cases, without reimbursing
advances made to them on the basis of earnings from their output. We
are also informed that some of these persons having formed a kind of
body are holding meetings and laying down the law to their masters,
doing as they choose, depriving them of workers and preventing them
from taking on those whom they want.

There then follows a number of specific prohibitions, for example, that in

order to leave a master one had to obtain written notice from him on pain
of a fine of 100 livres. If the journeyman had been maltreated, however, it
was possible for him to lodge an appeal with the police judge in order
to obtain a leaving certificate but he first had to complete his work.
Furthermore, groups and assemblies were forbidden and the masters were
to have the right to choose their own workers themselves.
In September 1781 during the reign of Louis XVI, it was felt necessary
to consolidate these letters and the notice of leave was replaced by a
booklet of successive leaving certificates issued by the masters - the pass¬
book ... promise of a fine future.
The whole of the second half of the eighteenth century resounded to the
noise of three opposing concepts. Firstly, there was the desire of the
authorities to see that the power of the masters was not undone as this was
the indispensable link in the chain guaranteeing the policing of the realm;
then there were the economists who were on the lookout for every possible
opportunity of suppressing the corporations which held back industrializa¬
tion, and also the wage-earners who, on the one hand, wanted to make use
of a system of alliances with their masters which allowed them to envisage
the possibility of setting up on their own one day, and who on the other
hand were intent on undermining this same system by constantly breaking
 In the Workshop 127

one contract in order to choose another which was more advantageous to

them.
The workshop was the place where all these disagreements were formu¬
lated and made concrete and where confrontation, which had previously
been face to face, often became limb to limb. At the same time it was
swept by intrigues and collective actions which punctuated city life in vast
convulsions,31 dragging along in their wake not only isolated individuals
but also groups of men and women.

The anger of the officials

The further the century progressed, the more the guild masters found
themselves grappling with difficulties on two fronts: inside the workshop
management was no longer a simple matter so greatly did the spirit of
individualism reign and the need for liberty express itself; outside, the
officials and syndics elected by them and responsible for their governance,
committed many abuses and took advantage of their authority which they
(the masters) could no longer tolerate. Thus the masters in their turn
proffered their own type of insubordination and resistance by shaking the
power of the officials, such as refusing them admission when they turned
up inopportunely on one of their authoritarian visits. They had had enough
of what were usually quite brutal descents on their workshops to collect,
amongst other things, the dues of royal visit and they were tired of their
ineffectual controls. These were usually carried out with such brutality,
and more often than not in their absence that it was their wives whom
they bothered and mistreated. Normally things should have taken place
without any trouble. In fact one of the responsibilities of the syndics was
to monitor the workshops to see that masters, journeymen and apprentices
did not break the rules of the guild. To this end, it was often necessary
to take legal proceedings, with the result that they were occasionally
accompanied by the district commissioner. The following is an example of
their normal activities:

Tuesday 25 January 1785, we, Commissioner Hugues, Medard Arnould,

resident of the Quai Pelletier, Augustin Passinge, resident of the Pont
Notre Dame, and Francois Debians, resident of the Rue de la Lune, each
being master sculptors, gilders, monumental masons and syndics and
wardens in charge of these guilds, on the request of said guilds, and for
the purpose of the execution of the police ordinance of 2 October
1784 published on the 27th of that same month concerning apprentices
and journeymen gilders, did proceed to various masters of the guild,
accompanied by other officials and Sieur Marcel Patte, Inspector of
Police, with the intention of verifying whether these same masters were
observing the prescriptions of the ordinance and in order to assess
128 Work and its Margins

whether there were any contraventions on the part of the masters and to
make a report in the hearing of the police and in respect of the journey¬
men and apprentices to instruct them in the course of our visits of their
obligations and matters affecting them. To this end we entered the
workshop of Sieur Presle, painter to the King in the Rue Poissonniere,
where we found eight journeymen who gave their names as Gori,
Meunier du Pre, Danton, Augibout, Boucle, Husneron, etc. All of these
masters and journeymen thus far named, having hitherto failed to
comply with the aforementioned ordinance of police, were duly warned
to conform at risk of the penalties which we explained to them. We
continued our visit up until 8 o’clock in the evening without further
interruption save for refreshment.52

Here everything was calm but quite often the artisans did not take
kindly to these official visits and suspected the officers of underhand
dealings amongst themselves or of setting rates which favoured some
masters depending on who they were. The visits were often occasions
for disputes and violence with neither side inclined towards conciliation
such that the situation could turn nasty very quickly. The guild officials
complained of lack of respect and hid behind their titles, which obviously
did nothing. Disputes broke out on all sides attesting to the growing rift
between the artisan and his representatives.
The whole thing might begin with quibbling over prices. In 1765, for
instance, the amount levied in dues from the cobblers was 20 sols. When
the guild officials arrived, the master’s wife came forward and presented
them with half of that amount, an obvious strategy on the part of the
master, as the officials were more likely to settle things amicably with his
wife than himself. This was not the case, however, and when the officials
refused to accept it, she flew into a rage and complained that they had
always favoured some in preference to others and that they did just as
they pleased. After discussing the matter, they admitted that there was a
problem and then proceeded to reason along the lines that it was true that
this had sometimes happened but that this was in the case of poor masters
who had no work, which was obviously not the case of this particular
workshop which housed four journeymen without counting the father-in-
law who was still at his job. At this moment, the master, who had
deliberately remained in the background, allowing himself to be taken for
one of the journeymen, stood up, and making threats, he grabbed hold of
a paring-knife and rushed at the officials shouting ‘insolent rogues of
syndics and book-keepers, inmates of Bicetre, if you get my 20 sols all
you 11 do is to go and swill down a bottle costing 12 sols at the expense of
all of us!’ In the face of this unbridled anger, the officials backed off,
intimidated or, as the legal proceedings state, they withdrew ‘with the
utmost moderation’.33
 In the Workshop 129
Many of the other dossiers record these same outbursts of anger and the
fear of the guild officials. Their anxiety had grown to such a point that
more often than not they preferred to exit backwards from the workshop
and on the tips of their toes. Subjected to sarcasm and abusive comments
and threatened with rough treatment, they did not even feel supported by
the police commissioners, who also preferred to make themselves scarce.
Accused as they were of ‘lining their coffers and money-grubbing’ their
image had completely deteriorated and nothing seemed to come to their
aid, not even public opinion which in fact had very little time for them.
They made their excursions to the accompaniment of rough and ribald
comments and at the first suggestion of a dispute, the neighbours weighed
in against them with a vengeance. In 1775, one official related the details
of a somewhat perilous escapade:

They had hardly got out when the public, who were only aware of the
more unpleasant side of their responsibilities, trooped over towards us
and, yelling and shouting, marched us back to our premises. [The gang
of traders who had gathered shouted that] they would wipe their arse
with any legal proceedings and that as for these clever dicks, they would
beat them all the way to Peru and back and that meanwhile they ought
to have their arms and legs broken.

The arrogance of the masters was equal only to that of the officials, and
when it came to the iron fist, their contribution was impressive. When
there were heated and violent exchanges, these artisans won the day over
their representatives and the police authorities and it was this fundamental
rupture which brought one of the greatest cracks in eighteenth-century
society into full view. The police acted on their own hopes and aspirations
whilst the population resisted and prevented itself from being taken over.
The masters entrenched themselves in a negative position, refusing to obey
the syndics and claiming that they no longer recognized them.
From there on, anything went. Witness the shameless attitude of
Chevreuil, master outfitter of the Rue Saint-Honore, who ‘replied quite
arrogantly that he did not recognize the officials and had no respect for
them. As far as he was concerned, he could just as easily shit in their
face.’34
Of course things did not always turn out to be so straightforward. In
order to put up this kind of resistance and to make such serious comment,
one had to be sure of the backing of others. On one’s own, things could
take on a completely different appearance for, in spite of everything, the
police succeeded in imposing a frightening presence which allowed them to
maintain order in the face of insubordination. There were some who
were so terrified that they preferred suicide to suspicion and constant
130 Work and its Margins

surveillance. On 8 April 1775 an employee at the gold-mark office slit his

throat with a razor, and a note on his person gave details of all his linen
and the following moving note consisting of a few scrawled words: ‘If I m
desperate, it’s because I can see that the mouchardsi5 are still after me and
I have done this. It’s because I am terrified of being kept in jail. I am
innocent. I have never done any harm at all in any way.’36
With the exception of particular cases, the balance of power between
masters and officials was decidedly not in favour of those who represented
the authorities. What lay behind this hostility were the strange goings-on
when guild officials were elected and started wheeling and dealing amongst
themselves. Some received back-handers; others disregarded the rules relat¬
ing to elections; and others, swollen-headed, insulted their colleagues and
formed cliques without consulting their fellowship, following their often
quite brutal visits to the workshops. Quarrels broke out almost every¬
where between old and young officials. The young ones refused to take an
oath and insulted their elders, treating them as though they knew nothing,
and spread themselves around Paris making use of their new powers and
enthusiasm.
In the face of so many irregularities, it was hardly surprising that the
visits made by the officials often turned out so badly, especially as their
tasks did not stop at workshop visits and the collection of dues. They also
had to pursue those who were on the margins of legality and membership
of a craft-guild and who were in fact attempting to exercise their trade in
their own home. It was a daily, unrelenting struggle which contaminated
the atmosphere of the city and was the cause of a good many periodic
explosions.
The workshop, that ideal place where work combined with authority,
and training with subordination, found its structures shaken and turned
upside down by this constant cry for individualization compounded by a
desire for social and economic stability without constraints. In this dual
movement, which was as paradoxical as it was strong, one refused to
acknowledge the master at the same time as one aspired oneself to be one.
This attitude of refusal coincided with the atmosphere and spirit of the
times and with the reforms of the intellectuals and philosophers. In the
desire to be a master oneself, however, there was the unchanged reproduc¬
tion of those same well-worn structures from which one had originated. It
was at the heart of this contradiction, which paralysed and stifled the
workshop, that the strategies of the one group and the insubordination of
the other found themselves bound together. Faced with the depth and
extent of this movement, the authorities grew frightened and ineffectual;
they knew that the exercise of conventional justice had little effect on it
but there remained, nevertheless, the rather more discreet machinery of the
orders of the King.
 7
At the Workshop Door

Gravitating around the workshop were those individuals who either looked
on enviously, or who, having perhaps decided to live on its margins, had
not been invited to its banquet. On the whole they did not burden them¬
selves with masters, but practised their trade only amongst themselves or
with their customers in a rather desultory way, stealing in and out of the
mesh of city life and as often as not finding themselves up against the
authorities rather than in accord with them. Their main preoccupation was
to live. It would have been impossible to contain them indefinitely in any
one place, thus shattering any definitions one might have liked to have
made of them. They came together, formed associations, separated, and
never saw each other again; and yet there were so many of them that they
occupied a significant position on the social scene. They ripped apart the
unrealistic dreams of the police whose obvious intention was the classifica¬
tion of each and every man in society by assigning him a place in it,
thereby guaranteeing the smooth running of the whole for ever and ever.
At the same time, however, they afforded the police great incentives for
their activity, provided ample work for its employees and spies and felt the
full weight of its repression in their respect. They ‘visited’ the prisons as
often as they filled the police registers with their names and nicknames;
and it was to them that justification of the King’s orders might be owed.1

Dealers and chambrelans

There are so many people living on the fringes - outsiders, beyond the
bounds of that chain of individuals who were considered easy to deal with
by those like Lieutenant-General Lenoir, who in his ‘Memoires’ constantly
harks back to this same theme. He states that ‘it was possible for the police
to exert their influence over a crowd of 200,000 people where some
were under the direction of others and where everyone, from first to
132 Work and its Margins

last, was well classified, registered and bound by rules of discipline and
subordination.’2 It was precisely because they were not integrated into the
craft-guilds and their associations that they were the stumbling-block for
this social utopia. The police already had their work cut out controlling
manual workers, day labourers, small traders, odd-jobbers and errand-
boys; how was one to control them, given that they were not bound by
any overall body? Simply seeing that they did not create any disorder
or provoke a potentially harmful gathering or assembly was in itself a
constant worry: ‘They somehow managed to keep them in separate groups
and thus avoided the possibility of large gatherings of these men who, due
to their sheer brute strength, were considered highly dangerous.’ As far as
Lenoir was concerned, these lawless men were capable of anything, even if
some of them were ‘classified’, such as the cabbies and market hands from
Les Halles, for example, who having an order, a number and reserved
place were thus under the surveillance of the inspectors. As for the rest,
they were inevitably under suspicion, particularly if they were prone to
getting together and becoming a crowd, that malevolent spectre of the
century.
But what could be done with these people who had neither status nor
domicile, who were workers without work, or possibly chambrelans, that
is, those who had set themselves up on their own account in private rooms
outside the traditional circuit of the craft-guild? How was one to watch
out that they did not turn into ‘hordes of miscreants’? And what was one
supposed to do with all those wheeler-dealers who were more or less
scattered throughout the whole of Paris, on its bridges and in its faubourgs?
How, in fact, was one to avoid trafficking, receiving, fraud and all manner
of swindling and conniving?
The authorities were indeed worried when faced with this mass of men
and women on the borders of the world of work, who were constantly on
the move and defied all classification and permanent control. Economic
instability was such that no single building project and no amount of
workhouses could ever manage to contain all these folk who were pushed
and pulled between the urgent need to stay alive and settle down and a
total disregard for conventional rules. The police themselves had to admit
that they spent so much of their time pursuing this ‘floating population’
that on occasion they failed to arrest the real delinquents, deceived as they
were by their official status as workers. When Inspector Poussot wrote to
the Lieutenant-General to let him know of the arrest of a number of
thieves in February 1750, he apologized for not having jailed them earlier
and gave the following explanation for his failure:

I should point out to you, Sir, that two of the persons in question are
journeymen joiners and the other a marble-cutter. They all live and work
 At the Workshop Door 133
in the Villeneuve district, which is why there was no reason to suspect
that it was they who were the thieves, thus making it all the more
difficult to find them. Parisien [a mouchard], had told us several times
that he thought that they were thieves, but as we had nothing against
them and because we knew they were working, we did not arrest them.3

From indications like these,4 we are given to understand that the police
registers were more likely to be darkened by the names of unemployed
workers such as odd-job men and those with no particular status and
hence the obvious importance of placing them on police records.
Not everyone was a Menetra, that journeyman glazier and son of a
master who, after many adventures but without too much difficulty, finally
acceded to the position of master in accordance with a route which was,
in spite of everything, quite traditional.5 For others nothing was quite
so simple. One might be a journeyman yet never achieve a mastership.
Accession was very costly and positions as master were exceptionally
limited; it was by thus refusing to open up the profession and to take on
much greater numbers, at the obvious expense of progress, that the cor¬
porations protected themselves. Let us take the example of the wigmakers
in 1765, whose written memorandum appears in the manuscripts of the
Archives de la Bastille.6 It was felt by the modernes of that guild that the
number of situations (of master) was quite enough and that on no account
should others be created. It was also their desire to convince the King’s
Procurator-General on this matter as well as the Lieutenant and the syndics,
with the effect that a dispute set in between ancients and moderns. The
latter described themselves as ‘convinced from their all too painful experi¬
ence that there were too many of them already since the greater part of
them did not have the wherewithal to make ends meet.’ ‘And this,’ they
affirmed, ‘would lead to the total ruin of the whole guild community’,
much to the annoyance of the anciens, who vehemently upheld the oppos¬
ing view. Moreover, the modernes expressed their deep regret that the new
statutes imposed too short a period of service on the masters-to-be which
thus devalued the profession. It was a shocking fact, they said, that
‘positions were being bought by valets and manservants.’
The situation was growing worse from one day to the next. After
passing through the hands of a few masters, some apprentices took away
their customers and set up on their own account without attaining the
position of master. Having become chambrelans, they were then liable to
distraint, but their defence was that they were awaiting a position and that
it was absolutely essential to create new ones. The syndics were weighed
down with more complaints than they knew what to do with.
This statement, which was printed and posted everywhere, was not
to the liking of the Lieutenant-General of Police, Bertin, who put his
134 Work and its Margins

inspector, Bourgoin, in charge of the case with instructions to find its

authors. Suspicion fell on Gngnon, an assistant wigmaker to his father, a
master wigmaker in the Rue Saint-Honore. The inspector was faced with a
difficult task. If he arrested Grignon it might upset the whole of the
wigmakers; therefore some shrewd tactics were required. First of all, they
had to disguise the spies in order to discover the hiding-place of this man
who had temporarily disappeared; it was also important not to alarm folk
by a rather inopportune enquiry which was liable to be disapproved of by
public opinion. Matching disguise for disguise, we learn from a subsequent
police report that Grignon had taken refuge, also in disguise, with an
ambassador who was also one of his customers. The Lieutenant-General of
Police was angry. ‘He’ll have his head swabbed, for his insolence,’ he
wrote to Bourgoin. But in spite of being permanently posted in front of the
Grignon domicile the latter’s efforts were in vain. However, on 9 January
1765 he made so bold as to call into question the Lieutenant’s somewhat
injudicious conversation, which had destroyed all hope of finding Grignon.
‘What has made Grignon suspicious’, he said, ‘is the fact that on the Eve of
Epiphany, you told your wigmaker that Grignon was to be arrested on
your orders, and your wigmaker warned Grignon.’ ‘This has been a costly
business for me,’ he added. Hairdressers’ tittle-tattle has presumably been
the same throughout the ages and Lieutenants of Police were no less
susceptible than anyone else when it came to being washed and powdered.
One is tempted to ask whether that rather strange affair might not
explain with hindsight the behaviour of one Abbe Belichon, who in 1732
sent out countless numbers of letters to wigmakers asking them for the
names and addresses of all the others. The letters were interspersed with
comments on the Bull Unigenitus and invective against women who
bedecked and bewigged themselves. They were intended

to root out the crime in our midst by preventing women from doing
themselves up with hair-curls and every other sort of ornament. He
protested that such affectation caused more fuss and palaver and the
wearing of three times as many garments as was necessary to the modesty
of the sex. In fact the whole business was more immodest than if the
women had been wearing nothing at all.7

If the wigmakers had listened to him, the problem of admissions to the

mastership would perhaps have sorted themselves out.
In any case, Grignon remained invisible, whereas two of his accomplices
were finally arrested, but they only remained in jail for a few days. It
would seem that Lieutenant Bertin himself must have bent under the
pressure of events.
Leaving aside the rather amusing nature of this unusual affair, it does
demonstrate the difficulty the authorities had in getting people to respect
 At the Workshop Door 135
the regulations. Although the pursuit of all those who had set themselves
up privately without holding the mastership was the responsibility of the
syndics and guild officials, backed up by the police, it was one of the most
unpopular measures there was and thus one of the most risky for those
who had to see to its enforcement. The commissioners’ archives, like those
of the chamber of police, are awash with legal proceedings drawn up by
the syndics duly rebuffed by those whose tools and merchandise they had
been sent to distrain. This forcible and authoritarian expropriation of the
means by which a man or a woman managed to survive was resented by
the population as an intolerable violation. It did not really matter that the
chambrelan lived outside the rules; but removing the means by which he
earned his living could definitely not be tolerated. Such incidents added to
the existing number of small street protests in which the neighbourhood
wasted no time in showing its solidarity; its riposte was rapid.
Distraint was considered one of the most unfair and abusive practices of
them all and everyone sought protection against it. It was a persistent
threat which pursued the out-of-work journeyman or the vendor with no
seal of quality as well as those who did not have the means to make the
entry into the mastership.
The wife of Leroy was a vendor of glazed ware but she did not have a
seal; nor did she or her husband have the means of keeping a shop, so she
had been setting up stall illegally in the street for some time. On 16 May
1766 her basket of pottery was abruptly seized and the ‘money-grubbing
officials’ called for her arrest. ‘She started to cry and said that she had been
selling glazed ware for almost ten years now and in that time had had the
misfortune to have been ‘seized’ more than 30 times.’8 If we work this out,
we can see from this example just how common it must have been to
witness such seizures. At the same time it must have been extremely
provocative and would have disturbed the order in the street by creating
an atmosphere of almost permanent confusion, but more especially, a
climate of defiance in the face of authority.
Those who had been distrained felt no sense of guilt or shame, for they
knew that they would start up again as soon as possible and that it was
their only means of avoiding being reduced to begging; they even said as
much. Martin Pillon was setting out his poultry stall at Versailles when he
was asked whether he held a mastership or whether he had permission.
‘He admitted that he had neither the right nor the seal of quality for the
sale of poultry but as he had no other profession by which to live he
confessed to contravening the law and selling goods dishonestly. He said
that he had been doing this for 11 years now and, if it please God, he
would do the same again unless he were able to do otherwise.’9
Seizures and contraventions occurred on a daily basis, but so did revolts;
popular resistance was tenacious and no incident was allowed to pass
136 Work and its Margins

unheeded. On the markets, stall-holders defended themselves and abused

the guild officials as soon as they turned up, for they were recognized a
long way off by their aprons, a pathetic disguise which utterly failed to
deceive the street-people, who rioted immediately and surrounded them
with jibes and jeers, making faces at them and throwing stones. The
various trades had an understanding amongst themselves and chased off
the officials, creating an atmosphere which was often very tense, for the
guilds’ men were not gentle and hardly acquitted themselves with finesse.
Nevertheless, when they saw a threatening crowd advancing towards
them, they were often the first to back off and quite often the police
themselves were called in. In 1772, jurors from the guild of instrument-
makers got inside the cloisters of Saint-Martin-des-Champs to seize some
violins from a tailor. No sooner had they reached the interior of the
cloister than the occupants closed the gates and threatened the officials.
The revolt turned nasty and three sections of the Paris guard were required
to restore calm.10 One could recount no end of such happenings — the
archives overflow with them — but they have been completely forgotten by
the historiographical memory. In fact, it was these daily incidents which
led to the creation of lasting allegiances and the advance planning of
strategies by which one might better defend oneself, as with the cunning of
the flower-girls, for instance. They had no authorization to sell but joined
together to write a letter to the Lieutenant of Police.11 They based the
merits of their case on the fact that they were married to soldiers who gave
both their time and their bodies in the service of their country. When they
found themselves confronted by officials from the florists’ guild they stood
their ground, shouting out that ‘they would gladly spill the guts of any
mistress’.
In the face of so many difficulties the guild officials felt afraid. Their
rallying cry of ‘Houette! Houette!’ when escaping or trying to identify
themselves with their fellows hardly allowed them to pass unnoticed.
Consultations with the police often resulted in instructions to withdraw,
which gave cause for much misgiving. When the guards of the mercers’
guild, accompanied by Commissioner Dudoigt, wanted to seize the
merchandise of Lefevre, there gathered ‘such a great crowd of people that
the commissioner thought it better to give orders to retreat without doing
anything’.12 In the margins of this file which led to the imprisonment of
Lefevre by order of the King, the commissioner noted, ‘I tend to be of the
opinion that in order to bring authority to bear on those who set up stall
illegally it is necessary to send them to Bicetre.’ Seizure was proving
impracticable, and so the solution was an imprisonment order issued by
the King. The Archives of the Bastille thus contain many personal files
on chambrelans and workers without qualification who were put in the
Bastille by means of lettres de cachet. It was an impeccable strategy, and in
 At the Workshop Door 137
order to carry it out, inspectors and commissioners made use of the
unstable nature of the milieu. The large number of street-traders who were
always on the fringes of legality were readily open to pressure, and it was
easy to find narks and informers who thus made it possible to make a
few ‘proper’ arrests by order of the King, without going through the
burdensome procedure of distraint, which was much too dangerous and
provocative. And even if none of them could be found to make any
denunciations, there were always the mouches, who were there to keep a
close eye on the milieu of the street-traders, where there were any number
of unemployed youths and workers involved in the illegal sale of the odd
worthless item pinched from some place or other.
The year 1763, selected at random, is interesting in this respect. Arrests
following the issue of lettres de cachet are recorded in 458 files preserved
in the Archives of the Bastille.13 The greater part of the imprisonments
concern those people, both young and old, who did not have any particular
status and who were taken whilst they were trying to sell some small
object, no doubt stolen, on the market or below the Pont-Neuf. This might
be a handkerchief, a key, an implement or some item of clothing or
whatever, but as often as not a wretched theft by some poor wretch.
Defending oneself was an impossibility, even though the odd sentence in
the dossiers does show that the arrested persons protested they had done
what they did in order to survive and that it was a legitimate way to earn a
living, justified by their loss of employment. The commentaries by the
inspectors, on the other hand, indicate an utterly arbitrary desire on their
part to rid the streets of all this hoi polloi. ‘Because they are poor, these
sort of people are inevitably suspect.’ ‘I consider imprisonment necessary
even though the item concerned is trifling [in this case, a pillowslip], but
this sort of thing is going on every day.’ It was all a far cry from the great
legendary prisoners of the Bastille - the lettre de cachet was decidedly an
easy and well-tested measure.
No one escaped its net, especially not the Jewish population, whose
every activity came directly under surveillance. Lieutenant-General Lenoir,
in recalling the broad outline of this surveillance, states that

During the period of my administration, they were no longer subjected

to treatment as foreigners, but every Jew in Paris had to present himself
for registration and he had to be certified as being well-known to a
Jewish syndicate. This syndicate had to see that the religious practices in
their synagogues took place calmly and quietly and had to act as a
special police force responsible for the Jewish community. By the edict of
August 1776, they were excluded from the corporations.14

An inspector of police was given special responsibility for Jews and kept
registers in which he made a daily record of the names and addresses of
138 Work and its Margins

those who had settled in Paris together with the reason for their being in
the city, the date of their passports, reasons for their absence as well as
regular observations on their behaviour.1’ When the police received a
request for a visitor’s permit or rights of residence, the inspector would
make enquiries and then send his recommendations to the Lieutenant-
General of Police.
But in spite of all these regulations and efforts at surveillance, they were
still surrounded by a great deal of suspicion and, following the orders of
1763, two Jews were arrested, even though they had never given any
occasion for complaint. The reason offered was simply that ‘they were
poor and found wandering around with no passport and that people of
this ilk could only be very suspect.’16 The craft-guilds kept a keen eye
on this milieu and distraint of goods caused as much uproar as usual.
However, the verbal reactions tell us a great deal about the way in which
the Jews were commonly perceived. In 1778, a fight broke out over a
seizure and the Jews who had been accused fought hammer and tongs. It is
stated in the report that ‘They struck out in such merciless frenzy as to
make the blood of humanity run cold, whilst two other angry Jews set
about the goodly cook.’17

If hawkers and chambrelans worried the authorities so much, it was

because they were to be found on the margins of work in those shady
areas which obsessed the police. Even so, they were still more or less
observable, whereas a population which drifted in and out of begging,
prostitution and crime was more threatening and more difficult to control
on account of its mobility and its ability to associate freely and easily. It
was a population which had lost its moorings but which the inspectors
hoped to channel. Whether on their own or in alliance with each other,
they represented a permanent danger. It is interesting to study their way of
life as well as the methods used by the police to arrest them. We do have a
register in our possession which makes it possible to narrow down the
enquiry on this particular milieu which is so difficult to pin down. It
belonged to Inspector Poussot and was kept between the years 1738 to
1754 in the district of Les Halles.18

Thieves and crooks

For 16 years in succession, Inspector Poussot kept a great register, in

which he noted down, in alphabetical order, all those men and women
who had been arrested by him in his district of Les Halles. It was a
painstaking and detailed work of great precision. Each page was divided
into five columns. In the first column on the left were written the name,
 At the Workshop Door 139
forename and nickname, age, occupation, abode and place of birth of the
arrested person. (One should point out that occasionally certain informa¬
tion is missing such as the age or type of activity, for example.) After this,
one finds the name of the prison to which the offender was taken and then
the exact date of the arrest and the name of the authority whose decision it
was. And then at the end, in the final column, which is the most important
and often full of long, detailed notes, one can read the reasons for the
arrest, the conditions surrounding it, the offender’s past and many other
pieces of information. At the same time as allowing one to see the methods
used by the police to infiltrate this milieu, these commentaries recreate for
us a particular social atmosphere and climate.
Since 1740 there had been 20 inspectors in charge of the districts, and
Poussot found himself in charge of Les Halles.1 ’ It is difficult to assess the
work of these inspectors as the sources are patchy - some of them have
been burned, others, no doubt found to be compromising, have dis¬
appeared. Moreover, the activity of the inspectors was so wide-ranging
and intense that it hardly lends itself to being quantified. According to the
surviving registers or the reports to the Lieutenant of Police extant in the
Archives of the Bastille one could put the number of matters dealt with
annually by each inspector at 1,500. But even that is an approximation, as
certain inspectors were responsible for a particular department in addition
to their normal work in a district. Furthermore, one has to take into
account the zeal of the three, then four inspectors appointed after 1776 to
the Bureau de la Surete,20 which specialized in the pursuit of large-scale
crime, organized aggression and theft.
The arrests made were obviously fewer than the staggering totals of
cases, enquiries, reports, surveillances and appeals which passed through
their hands and which, particularly towards the end of the century, were
intended primarily for the prevention and deterrence of crime.
Inspector Poussot’s register contains information on 2,692 persons
arrested between 1738 and 1754; that is approximately 168 persons per
year. We cannot even attempt to interpret this figure. Was it a lot? A little?
Or was it representative? Enough said. It would seem more important to
use such impressive material (which is actually very informative in spite of
being presented in a series of large tables), partly to find out about a type
of police work which was different from that of the commissioner and
partly to shed sufficient light on a population and social scene which
in some respects were the same as those dealt with by the police com¬
missioners (many of the arrests were made in common), but in other
instances opened up on to horizons which were slightly different.
The register sheds light on the inspectors’ methods, indicating the
importance of the social groups about whom they provide information.
The need to proceed in alphabetical order suggests that particular atten-
140 Work and its Margins

tion was being given to the compilation of a record-system, a systematic

approach to the work and the need to clarify procedures.
This enormous filing-system of Poussot’s opens up with the letter ‘A’
and here we find solemnly recorded the movements and tracks of thieves
and robbers whose names were written down in the book day by day.
Thus the names of those who had defied the law could be retrieved quickly
along with previous offences, current habits and activities. All it needed
was a glance through this great book which was so impeccably maintained
to make everything clear and legible.
There is a definite desire here for classification, for the keeping of
records and the production of ‘memoirs’ which was common to the period.
In this case the concern was with deviants but, as we know from other
sources, the idea of the modern index-system was making great strides. It
was an idea that was in keeping with one of the utopian dreams of
Guillaute, who in 1749 wrote his ‘Memoire de reformation de la police
envoye au roi’. (Memorandum to the King concerning reform of the
police)21 He dreamt of the setting up of a central register, not only of all
offenders but of all inhabitants, in other words, a complete picture of the
whole of society, no longer just that of its lawbreakers. In his own way,
Inspector Poussot was faithful to the spirit of the age.
Half of the arrests (1,648) were made by order of the King; others
were imprisoned following a police decision which was something quite
different. Poussot was working as a direct agent of the King, which
completely set him apart from the commissioner. For the most part, the
complaints did not arise from the populace; it was more a matter of
royal directives granting permission for the search and arrest of suspected
persons. Thus Poussot’s lists enable one to see those areas which were
causes of concern for the monarchy.
In this particular field of work, observers and mouckes were absolutely
indispensable. The arrest of a propagandist, for example, implied long
hours of observation and following, a knowledge of Paris and its secrets,
and the ability to operate clandestinely. In this register one tends to be
aware of their presence rather than to see them directly, and that is usually
as a result of the arrest of certain people who got too closely involved in
the pursuit of moucbards.
On 3 April 1744, Francois, a porter at the Hotel Parc-Royal found
himself imprisoned in Bicetre by order of the King ‘for insulting a number
of mouches who were on observation in those parts and for drawing
attention to them’. Unforgivable behaviour! It was also an indication that
Paris was pretty well packed with these individuals.
Ten years later, in October 1782, Jean-Baptiste Preault, nicknamed
Luxembourg, a ticket-tout at the Opera, met with the same fate and was
taken to Bicetre. The note in the margin reads: ‘Insolent rogue. Drew
 At the Workshop Door 141
attention to the archers and other police agents in the process of making
an arrest. Thieves and other suspects able to get away.’ Things could go
even further than that. In 1746, for instance, a woman called Marguerite,
who went by the name of Lenfant, assassinated a mouche who was
arresting deserters in the cabarets. The police escorted her to Le Grand
Chatelet, where she was duly brought to trial.
The mouchards themselves were far from reliable or trustworthy. Some
of them had to be brought to book and were even imprisoned on occasion
for submitting false reports or for conduct that was patently abusive
or licentious. Michault was a mouche for Inspector Poussot. He was
arrested on 8 April 1744 on police orders because of his disloyal conduct.
Observations made on his account read: ‘mouche for Sieur Poussot.
Made false reports, led astray other mouches causing operations to fail
and warned particular individuals involved in these affairs. In addition
potentially dangerous dissolute.’ Because they were always mixed up
with a crowd for whom discipline was not the primary objective, these
mouches had the greatest difficulty in maintaining their integrity. It became
necessary to keep a close watch over the company they kept and the
women they met. On 26 January 1747 Catherine Martin who was referred
to as Gage, was imprisoned in the jail of Saint-Martin. She was a ‘whore
who had corrupted a man working for the police’. Of the police employee,
on the other hand, we know nothing.
Paris was a city in which spies and spied-upon occasionally mixed and
where at other times the two had the greatest difficulty tolerating each
other, with the result that there were occasions when attempts were made
to reverse roles and to disturb or disperse those whose job it was to
establish themselves discreetly in those milieux which were regarded as
dangerous by the authorities. As one leafs through this register, reading
the names of all those men and women whose nicknames crop up so
frequently on its pages, which either say a great deal or very little, one
finds a landscape emerging.
There were about 3,000 who ended up in this book, mostly young
people and usually living some distance from the capital. They were
engaged in every kind of trade and activity apart from the most respectable,
and there they stayed, having known at some stage the vagaries of life on
the road, the precariousness of seasonal work, or the oppressive atmosphere
of the cabaret with its trafficking and hasty alliances with those for whom
life had scarcely been more indulgent, and who were equally predisposed
to mischief. There were the petty thefts and fraudulent deals accepted in
haste or destitution; there were also the leagues and gangs one came
across in the countryside, and the women of the world as much a part of
one’s wretchedness as they were the inglorious companions of the ‘bad
boy’s’ aspirations. In short, it was a lifestyle without fame or fortune.
 142 Work and its Margins
Pickpockets, the common soldiery, beggars, ladies of fortune, accomplished
thieves, ringleaders and poor devils, they were all there, filling these
columns in the course of their brief passage so peremptorily interrupted by
an arrest or prison term. That was not the end of the peregrination,
however; one might abscond, be set free or transferred, recaptured or
eternally at large, ‘roaming the countryside’, according to the expression of
the period.
The register is paradoxical in this respect: it fixes peoples’ lives per¬
manently and suddenly, at the same time as it gives an impression of
incessant movement and constant coming and going. Although this relates
more particularly to migrant workers, the information occasionally avail¬
able from previous records reveals a world on the move, in flight, every¬
where and nowhere. In particular the bands of thieves stand out clearly
from the main body and add to this impression of major and minor
upheaval, of transience and elusiveness.
Beneath Poussot’s neat charts and carefully drawn tables one uncovers a
rising tide of malefactors and unfortunates whose swollen and power¬
ful waves broke and branched, swelling and receding or disappearing
endlessly into the distance only to regroup in order to reappear once again,
all the stronger. And then once again we have the image of a Paris caught
in the night - the searches and forays into its furnished lodgings and inn
rooms, and behind the closed doors of its houses of ill-repute - revealing
its nocturnal life. The inspector could go anywhere he liked; he could
disturb folks’ slumbers, take lovers and their liaisons by surprise and
insist on knowing the whys and wherefores of everyone’s activity. He
deliberately awaited the hours of darkness in order to hound his prey with
the assurance of one who knows that time and darkness will prove him
right. Poussot meticulously assembles for us, right before our eyes, all
those creatures thus caught in the trap and who, no doubt, had naively
believed themselves protected by the night. Here there are none of those
thieves arrested in full public hue and cry while pinching poultry off
the market, or bits and pieces off a rag-stall or items of linen off a
washerwoman’s line (although the list did occasionally contain the odd
handkerchief stealer caught in the act in church or reported by passers-by).
Here we are dealing mainly with that crowd of people who were well
known to the police, who were actively looking for them. They would
probably have been pointed out by some needy mouche or by a superior
authority. All that remained to do was to pick them up, usually after
nightfall at some illicit spot such as a gaming-room or in those cabarets
which had not closed their doors for the night, or perhaps in those places
which afforded a bed for the night, such as the furnished lodgings, inns
and hostelries. This was all made possible thanks to the registers kept by
innkeepers and hoteliers, which were strictly monitored by the inspectors,
 At the Workshop Door 143

who moreover hardly ever bothered to obtain the proper rights for this
purpose.22

There we have it, a picture of Paris by night, cramming into its countless
shadowy outposts this canaille, subject of so much fear and consternation
but also an object of fascination. It was this same canaille who, it would
appear, compounded its actions with the direst debauchery, thus truly
warranting the title of ‘criminal’; and it was this same canaille who knew
the thousand and one hide-outs of the capital where evidence of one’s
complicity, booty or future projects might he concealed and who, as the
bourgeoisie was convinced, were one and the same as ‘the people’, that
seamy backstage world which was the justification for all this police
activity, including the most sordid.
Gathered here, we have a population whose criminal activity was, for
the most part, a way of life. It bore no resemblance at all to the Paris of
the mornings and afternoons whose sounds and echoes were received
almost good-naturedly by the police commissioner even though there
might be the shouts arising from theft of victuals,23 workshop quarrels,
arguments in the street or cabaret, infringements of public order, coach
accidents, drownings or noisy exchanges in the market-place; all these
sounds peopled the day and occupied a population who from time to time
was involved in criminal activity, often violent and quick to assemble,24 up
to tricks and whose emotions were easily aroused. By night, however, the
image the police registers fix in the mind is that of people who were
permanently rooted, rather than occasionally involved, in the margins of
criminal behaviour. Were these then the ‘murky depths’ of the capital
which writers like de la Bretonne and L.-S. Mercier were so fond of
describing?

It is not our intention to establish a neat set of important and elaborate

statistics; there are too many imprecisions and gaps within the document
to allow it to be treated with any certainty. Although it is true that we
could provide a certain number of figures and make a number of calcula¬
tions, we have deliberately given preference to an approach which is more
qualitative. It consists of a reconstruction of the forms of police control
and the workings of the social channels and networks and it is based
essentially on a close reading of the reasons for the arrest and the small
number of jottings and notes made by the inspector to this end. Our aim is
the reconstruction of a social landscape rather than the presentation of
precise rates of criminality by the use of figures. It is the register s margins,
with their imprecisions as well as their specific but secretive jottings, that
have guided our reading and have allowed us to reflect on and raise
 144 Work and its Margins

Table 1 Comparison of police records in Paris (1738-1754) and Languedoc

(1750-1790)

Ages where known

0—20yrs 21—30yrs 31-40yrs over 40yrs

(%) (%) (%) (%)

Paris: arrested 26.3 40.7 19.0 13.9

26.3 59.7 13.9
Languedoc: imprisoned 8.3 65.9 25.7

questions about this obscure and precarious world. Some of the figures
provide the broad outlines of a preliminary sketch:
Of the 2,692 persons recorded on the register, we can count 795
women and 1,897 men. Compared with the usual rates of female crimi¬
nality, this obvious feminization of crime (more than a third instead of the
traditional fifth) needs to be pointed out first of all.25 It was certainly
making more of a mark on the scene and the police made note of the fact
that there was a distinct female presence around many of the men who had
been arrested and that their role was an important one.
We also know the geographical origins of 915 of the persons arrested;
that is, of approximately one-third of all men and women arrested. Of this
total 631, that is 69 per cent, were born outside Paris and 284 (31 per
cent) in Paris itself. Putting aside the odd discrepancy, this proportion is
not surprising; and given that more than two-thirds had not been brought
up in the capital, the well-known phenomenon and image of migration in
France in the eighteenth century is once again borne out by these figures.
We know the ages of only 999 of the individuals, a little more than a
third of the total, and they are distributed in the following manner:

• 263 were aged between 0 and 20 years (26.3 per cent), with a significant
number of very young people, born mostly in the capital.
• 407 were aged between 21 and 30 years, which represents 40.7 per cent of
the total.
• Above the age of 30 years there were 190 persons ranging from 31 to 40
years (19 per cent); of those aged over 40, there were only 139 over 40, i.e.
13.9 per cent of the total.
• In sum, two-thirds of those whose ages are known were 30 or under; one-
third were over 30.

Table 1 makes an interesting comparison of the Paris data with the figures
for the prison population during the parlements of Toulouse, 1772-90,
 At the Workshop Door 145

presented by Nicole Castan in her study on the criminals of Languedoc.26

On either side of the 20-40 age group, there are two things that stand
out: the under-20s are prominent - more than a quarter - and they
constitute an impressive band, whereas the over-40 age-group is really
quite small. Inspector Poussot’s work was in fact taken up with young
people; they were the ones who became debauched, indulged in trafficking
and theft, lived in criminal bands and were most likely to be found looking
for pleasure and excitement. His job was to capture them and stifle their
hostility, which was all the more intense for being juvenile. The places he
inspected were the favourite haunts of that high-spirited section of the
population; and it is for that same reason that the number of older and
more mature persons is under-represented.
There is no point either in expecting a traditional socio-professional
classification, as professions are not always given, and when they are, they
are hardly precise, as a variety of designations is often used and these do
not provide an exact location of the individual within the social hierarchy.
In any case, we only have information on a half of the persons recorded on
the register, which rules out any comprehensive analysis.
It seemed preferable to take as a reference-point those who could be
defined more by their status, temporary though this might be, rather than
by any professional activity, notwithstanding the possibility that the
person might possess a trade elsewhere - information which is not always
noted by the inspector.
What stands out in the first place is the number of soldiers: 300 of them
were arrested by Inspector Poussot in the district of Les Halles. These
figures are evidence of the importance of their presence in the centre of the
city as well as of their almost daily activities outside the law. Then, almost
level with them, was the group of 200 dissolute men and women, the
debauches, which included prostitutes, and the pimps and madams who
lived off this activity; there was also the group of beggars, again 200,
whose lot it was to see the inside of a prison for reasons of idleness or
illegally requesting alms.
Of the 1371 whose type of occupation we know 700 (that is half of
them) were not categorized by any stable profession with a recognizable
definition but by the practice of some form of social life of a temporary
nature (being a soldier, for instance, was only an episode in a man’s life).
Alternatively it might derive from neediness which imposed its own laws
(the beggar often had a profession which illness, the death of one of his
relatives or debility had obliged him to give up), or it might be due to
transgression of social norms, as for instance in the case of the debauche
who, having wandered away from the usual channels of employment, lived
a life well off the beaten tracks normally trodden by other people.
The fact that there were as many as 700 who had never had any regular
 146 Work and its Margins

professional activity of any kind should come as no surprise. These were

the folk whose haunts were those shady spots which were so difficult
to control and to keep trouble-free. Seething with problems though M.
Poussot’s workplace might be, unmasking those individuals who lived on
the margins was all a necessary part of the job of inspector. For all that
beggars, soldiers, ladies of the night and degenerates of every sort were the
direct objects of police attention, they still did not live outside the normal
processes of urban life and communication. They too were the city, even if
the authorities did attempt to exclude them and repress them by singling
them out as being the principal adversaries of public peace and order.27
They were referred to as being ‘outside’ or ‘elsewhere’ in royal decrees and
police orders,but the rest of the population did not regard them as such;
although not constrained or categorized by the bounds of the professions,
they were nevertheless the city and like everyone else found themselves
organized according to the laws of tension and equilibrium of the urban
game.
Unstable and insecure, they kept faith by virtue of their nomadic status
with that other group, the migrants, who represented more than two-
thirds of those least privileged classes of society and who, having arrived in
Paris, still continued to go off for long periods at a time either outside the
city or within its walls. It was by way of a response to the instabilities of
economic life, as well as to the frequent urge to return to the countryside
and thereby increase the chances of survival. For all of them, their experi¬
ence of the city was one of hope (although those who had actually
chosen their own social lot were few and far between); for here risk and
anonymity were simultaneous possibilities. In this way, they merged into
the crowd, made attempts to find their way into the social networks which
were made just as easily as they were broken, and were ready to take on
all kinds of risk and adventure which might one day perhaps land them in
jail. By seeking pleasure and income from the city, they became immersed
in the urban system, living as much off its conflicts as its solidarities,
taking refuge where they could from denunciation, searches or enquiries
until the day arrived when . . .
The other half of those arrested had some kind of profession but
the vagueness of the information makes classification as difficult as it is
unsatisfactory. Thus once more one has to say goodbye to the finer points
of interpretation and proceed much more broadly by bringing together
certain kinds of information and stressing where it is deficient.
The notes made of the trade give no indication of the level attained by
the individual who professed to belong to it. There is just the name
followed by a brief note, such as: locksmith, tailor, lacquerware, and so it
is impossible to tell whether one is dealing with a master or an apprentice.
In this group 180 individuals are included, and one thing worth pointing
 At the Workshop Door 147

out is the abundance of those represented by the building trades, account¬

ing for well over half of the total (carpenter, roofer, mason, joiner,
locksmith).
In all 140 persons were unqualified and were involved in the small
trades, which takes us into that whole wide range which includes water-
carriers, washers-up, laundry-workers, cleaners, odd-jobbers, hawkers of
sheet-music, vendors of herbs and meat etc.; in other words, the precarious
small trades of the street, almost always seasonal and unstable, here today
and gone tomorrow; a world where the future was hardly secure and
where resourcefulness was essential if one wanted to maintain one’s place.
Domestic service stands out as another significant grouping consisting
of 130 men and women, 53 of whom referred to themselves as having no
particular condition, with another 27 who classed themselves as man- and
maidservants in the great houses. Their numbers correspond not only
to their representation in the town but also to their role and obvious
participation in activities outside the law.29
The rest of the population can be divided as follows (note that the
same proportion of building-workers can be found here as above): 53
journeymen; 51 apprentices and boys; 51 from the professions, which
inevitably entailed a certain number of persons of note, including 20
priests and those in holy orders; 43 masters or merchants; and finally 23
cabbies or carters, who had been deliberately singled out and were par¬
ticularly notorious in Paris for the disturbances they caused, the accidents
they provoked and the numerous quarrels and fights for which they were
responsible.

When a cabbie mows you down in cold blood, the purpose of the
commissioner’s enquiry is to find out whether he did it with the small
wheel or the large and the cabbie will say that it was only the small
wheel. If you do expire underneath the large wheel there is no financial
compensation for your next of kin. There is a going rate for an arm, a
leg or a thigh and that price is always fixed in advance.30

As the names of the trades, 180 thereabouts, are mentioned without any
further clarification, it is perhaps better to present them in.the following
way: there were 140 persons exercising some form of small street-trade as
against 147 persons who had entered upon a definite professional future,
of whom 51 were still apprentices; the others were journeymen (53) and
finally those who had reached the summit of their professional aspirations
(43 masters or merchants). Culturally and professionally, the 130 domestics
can be situated in another area, for their ability to operate within two
distinct cultural environments is now well known, as was their manner of
appropriating many of the instincts of the elite along with the vivacious¬
ness and impetuosity appropriate to their own estate. These three groups
148 Work and its Margins

were equally represented and in certain cases were just as liable to break
the law.
However, these reflections should not allow one to forget the clear
distinctions at work within the two halves of this population, where the
one half defied all attempts at strict classification according to profession
and only allowed its identity to be grasped through its precarious aspects
where drifting, distress, economic and sexual adversity and resourcefulness
were sovereign. It constituted a fundamental part of the Paris of Inspector
Poussot and the one which he had made it a priority to track down.
Quite typical of a society which was just making its first halting attempts
at classification, identification and statistics, M. Poussot’s register is a
supple blend of classification and narrative. Even though this enormous
book is presented in tabular form and consists of columns which are very
clearly set out and which demonstrate the organizational scope of the
enterprise and the attempt to achieve an overall picture of the problem, it
still leaves a good deal of room for improvization and comment. The space
reserved for the reasons for arrest lends itself to an enormous number of
variations bordering on the fantastic. Sometimes there are no indications
and the space remains blank and sometimes there is one hasty word which
attempts to sum up the situation such as ‘theft’, ‘receiving’ or ‘whore’.
Quite often one finds a whole paragraph of comments written in a neat
and careful hand on the person’s situation, the circumstances of his or her
arrest and subsequent conduct. It is impossible to summarize this wealth of
material in hard figures as though it were a faithful and rigid mirror of
reality. Even amidst this abundance of comment and commentary it is still
difficult, in some cases, to understand the exact reasons for the arrest. On
the other hand, the mass of detail, the originality of the notes and a
continuous reading of the material without hope or intention of ascertain¬
ing accountability allows one to gain a profound understanding of this
population, and of its vast numbers of networks and interdependencies as
seen through the eyes of the police. One has to use this register as
a discourse offering information on the population in an uncustomary
manner, perceiving it through its own eyes and allocating important roles
to some of its actors or events by borrowing on the weaknesses of each
individual and relying on them like some kind of connecting cable, thus
allowing one a better grasp of the workings of a certain type of deviance.
We shall see, for instance, how the woman, even if she herself were not
directly accused, held a role of the utmost importance.
For the time being a few of the notes and comments concerning the
reasons for imprisonment are simply reproduced here:

Aubert Mte ]ne: concubine of Picard, known as Boulanger, and of others

in Rafiat’s band; an accomplice.
 At the Workshop Door 149
Auret Joseph: beggar, able-bodied, currently in the King’s service.
Auguste Charles: living in sin with the Croiset woman whose husband is
a guard with the Prince de Conti. Very suspicious. When arrested,
covered his head with a cloth. Transferred to Bicetre 23 October 1767
and sent abroad with the Soissonais regiment 20 November.
Beligant Jeanne: accomplice’s mistress. Kept guard while he was thieving.
Bontemps Philippe: bad lot.
Corblet Fes: propagandist.
Chery: beggar, smearing his face to make believe he was a leper.
Condemned to the galleys.
Cousim Mie Cath: prostitute. Left house of correction three months ago.
Arrested while on night visit, hiding in cellar.
Claudor Jean: five years a deserter. Found in bed with Agathe Thiebaut
during a night raid at the home of Chartran, Rue Montorgueil. She is
pregnant as a result and suspected of theft. Could be an accomplice.
Cuvilliers Charles: for last 12 years, only trade has been as pimp for
both sexes. Committed several thefts over the past three months.
Dutoit Marie Aime: arrested on night raid as suspect. Found in bed in
her room in the Rue Grenier St Lazare with Belle Amour a soldier in the
Gardes franchises. When entry requested, sought to throw herself out of
the window and then found hiding in the chimney.
Gandoche Nicole: found in bed with militiamen.
Gilles Pierre: trouble-maker and rabble-rouser.
Grenier Fabbe: has written three tracts against religion.
Giard: suspected of highway robbery.
Paul Jacques: arrested three years ago and taken to Grand Chatelet for
stealing fish from shops and other effects from housebreaking. Stayed 2
years in prison at end of which he received an extension of 6 months,
then a term in Bicetre where he became ill; transferred to the strong
room at the Hotel Dieu from where he absconded 3 or 4 months ago.
Remy Nicolas: thief and pickpocket.
Renault Marie: whore, arrested on night raid hiding underneath a bed.

As these brief examples taken at random from the pages of the register
show, the work that needs to be carried out on the reasons for arrest
requires a much broader and more complex system of interpretation.
A third of the offenders were arrested for theft (the total figure for both
men and women was in fact 963), and under this heading we find a whole
jumble of rogues and rascals, petty crooks, receivers and dealers in stolen
goods - in fact every type of thief imaginable: they were all there. They
picked pockets, robbed churches, or committed highway robbery in groups
and gangs, committed assault, with or without battery, took vast amounts
150 Work and its Margins

or not so much, shared out their catch amongst the gang or singlehandedly
committed acts of petty theft and larceny. The booty varied; it might be
money, handkerchieves, medals or snuff-boxes - anything went. Often, no
one bothered to write in what had been stolen and the clerk simply wrote
in the comment column: ‘well-known thief’ or ‘one of the country gang’.
Rather than picking off the isolated thief however, the inspector took it
upon himself as a point of honour to dismantle the bands of thieves and
their accomplices by finding the ringleaders or their successors on the
arrest of one of their number. Always on the move and acting with carte
blanche from the King, he would already have had wind of such and such
a crime and the necessary connections between a recent infringement
of the law and the passing of a gang of thieves. It was decidedly not
the same work as that of the commissioner of police, who himself was
more accustomed to receiving complaints in his hotel, and attending to
everyone’s grievances. Although he too had contact with a considerable
number of thieves, they were definitely not from the same population of
offenders. When folk came to his hotel, it was to make a complaint about
a basket of cherries that had been stolen, the theft of a silver earring or a
sheet that had been taken by one of the servants; it was the occasional
crime, rather than a case of organized gangs operating their rackets and
putting the people of Paris in jeopardy.31 It was these latter who were the
principal targets for the police inspectors’ activity and in particular for the
agents of the Bureau de la Surete.32
In his district of Les Halles, Poussot did not have much to do with
violence. There are only 54 acts of violence (representing scarcely 1.5 per
cent of the total) recorded on the register, and these include acts of
rebellion, murder and assassination attempts, some of which had been
previously committed by the robbers. Libertinism, on the other hand,
occupied a substantial place, on a par with begging and loitering by
soldiers absent without leave or deserters. In the course of his pursuit of
thieves and libertines Poussot inevitably crossed paths with confidence
tricksters and gamblers. On these grounds 71 people were arrested,
grouped under a number of different categories such as ‘rogue and a
cheat’; ‘crook profiting from misfortune’; ‘billiard-room crook’ etc. It was
also part of his brief to arrest those responsible for the sale of prohibited
goods or for circulating handwritten pamphlets against the King and
religion. The number of these ‘propagandists’, the majority of them male,
amounts to 71, all of whom were arrested by order of the King. In con¬
trast, Poussot had very little to do with requests by families for imprison¬
ment, as there only seem to be 47 of these, which is quite a paltry figure
considering their popularity at the time.33
How does the rest of this nefarious activity break down? We have no
idea at all about 300 of the incidents, as there is nothing in the observa-
 At the Workshop Door 151
tions and motives columns. As far as the rest are concerned, we find quite
a few practitioners of the magic arts and fortune-tellers, whose exact crime
is not mentioned apart from that of nocturnal gatherings. These promisers
of fortunes and riches reveal a semi-clandestine world where one left one’s
daytime work in order to organize or participate in nocturnal gatherings in
which dream and reality became confused and where one was able to
invent and fantasize for a brief while about one’s good fortune to come
and happiness at last received. Noel, known as La Suze and blind in one
eye, was born in Paris. He was exiled by order of the King on 1 August
1741 because he was mixed up with ‘spells and magic’, a somewhat vague
accusation if ever there was one. The same thing happened to Marie
Petra, a linen worker, aged 26. She was imprisoned in Fort L’Eveque for
superstitious practices and for ‘treasure-seeking which she had been born
to do’.
Next to be pinpointed were the concubines of thieves or of former
thieves and even some who were just suspects and whose only reason for
being considered guilty was their occasional association with theft. The
same went for the soldiers who were found drinking with prostitutes or
bedded down in the grass ‘in bad company’. In other words these were no
more than the ordinary people of the night. There then follows a long
procession of people arrested by the patrols and as a result of night raids
and rough searches in the lodging-houses and furnished lettings. Here we
have the inspector purging the night of its prowlers and shadows, a
political clean-up which affected the streets of the centre of the capital as
much as the gaming academies and ‘vice-dens’ or the cabarets and seamier
parts. Amongst those arrested there were as many persons innocently in
search of a few furtive pleasures and encounters under the cloak of night
as there were rogues and brigands.
Amongst all these people thus caught in the net of repression, there is a
noticeable absence of the deranged and mentally insane; there are two or
three rapes and one or two instances of homosexuality, as in the case of
the Chevalier de Castille, who was arrested by decree of 9 July 1751 and
jailed in the prison of Le Chatelet ‘for committing the crime of pederasty’;
there is one condemnation for incest, in the case of Marthe Dardenne,
aged 24, who was living with her mother and her stepfather. She was
found in bed with him having lived in sin with him for some considerable
time; there was another arrest for the crime of bestiality concerning one
Joseph Picard from Lorraine, aged 34 years. He was arrested by order of
police on 6 February 1748. The notes in the margin read: ‘Beggar, able-
bodied. Dressed in militia uniform. This man said that he had committed
serious crimes. He had lived with the mares and deserved to be punished.’
The rest can be divided up between endless numbers of diverse, highly
questionable, and reprehensible acts, which include insulting behaviour,
152 Work and its Margins

blasphemy, sexual misdemeanours or nothing more than suspicious

behaviour in places where the patrols were passing. The register contains a
wealth of unsavoury details about some of the arrests and the actual
process of reading it firms up one’s impressions of a Paris that was
multiform, sensorial and impetuous.
On 7 September 1750, the writer Lebel was imprisoned in Bicetre for
striking an image of the Virgin Mary with his sword in the Rue de la
Jussienne — a blasphemy and an act of sacrilege which was immediately
punishable. Pierre Montenet, a wine-merchant’s boy, was also to find
himself punished on police orders in September 1744 because ‘he had
associated with a certain two persons for the purpose of collecting money
from wealthy wine-merchants wishing to have a Te Deum sung for the
King’s convalescence and who had subsequently appropriated their money.’
It was the kind of squalid behaviour which did not go down very well and
which often ended up badly. Sexual deviation also led to imprisonment, as
in the case of Michel Maisonneuve a master writer, who was sent to
Bicetre in December 1751 for failing to abide by his exile from the city.
‘He was banished a year ago for self-defilement outside the doors of
the classrooms where the schoolmistresses were giving the cane to their
pupils.’
Not even the priests were beyond participating in sexual perversions
which could lead to arrest, as in the case of the widow Vatan: ‘She has
hired out two girls of 14 for prostitution and has been arrested this day,
September 1748, at the Porcherons, where she lives and where she kept
a young girl whom a priest came to see and who whipped her while
completely naked on about 12 occasions.’ And then there was the long list
of individuals who were considered ‘very dangerous’ or the ‘libertines who
were very crafty and degenerate’, like Nicolas Godeau, aged 28, born in
Paris and a deserter to boot. He was taken to the prison of Fort l’Eveque
on 29 December 1750.
Absconding; indecency; threatening behaviour; nimble antics in the
hay; defiance; branded shoulders; breaking a banning order; making rude
faces; ‘found on the slope of the Pont Marie at 11 o’clock at night with his
sword by his side and taking his pleasure with a woman on a heap of
straw’; woman disguised as a man; young man impersonating a count;
drunkenness, false signatures; ‘only went out at night’, tout - there they all
are, the potential prisoners which any night raid might throw up. They
serve as witness to the flimsiness of the motives for their arrest as well as
to a particular way of populating the capital.

Family or Gang?

If one leaves aside those who acted independently (who were the majority),
the two obvious systems of organization that stand out are the gangs of
 At the Workshop Door 153
criminals on the one hand (some of which were notorious and others
relatively unknown) with a total of 71 persons belonging to these. On the
other hand, there were 71 families who were implicated in illegal activities
and proceedings, not to mention the associations formed amongst con¬
cubines which were fairly common; the total number of identifiable
members of these families came to 170.
It was the association between husband and wife which came up most
frequently as well as that between two brothers, who were usually quite
young, not much more than 14 or 16 and sometimes as young as 13 and
9. They were usually arrested on charges of ‘begging and roaming the
countryside’. These young vagabonds who either had no parents or who
were living away from them, took to the roads in the hope of finding some
means of keeping themselves alive; or alternatively, like Pierre Legeaye,
aged 14, and his brother, Martin, aged 13, who were both boot-blacks,
they might go off thieving in Paris. This particular pair had stolen some
items from a surgeon and were jailed at Fort-l’Eveque in February 1754.
Some families got together to arrange the sale and distribution of pro¬
hibited books, like Mazuel, his wife and her nephew, who were arrested
and taken to three different prisons - Fort l’Eveque, Le Grand and Le Petit
Chatelet. They were accused of ‘the sale of books that had been banned on
account of their contravention of moral and religious standards’. In 1744,
Jean, Jeanne, Marie and Marguerite Paumier were arrested on charges of
‘distributing propaganda for Rambault; relaying news and gossip; acting
as mistress to the copyist, and newsmongering’. Rambault was certainly a
well-known dealer in banned books and he had effectively recruited the
assistance of the Paumier family by using their potential for carrying
information not to mention some sexual involvement to boot. In this case
Poussot had managed to dismantle quite a complex web of relationships:
the man was sent to Fort l’Eveque and the three women to Le Grand
Chatelet.
Some sisters also formed gangs, but they tended to be older than in the
case of brothers. Catherine Morset, aged 27 and the wife of Leger, ‘had
completed a month’s detention for passing on charms and cures’ and on 9
April 1750 she had joined up with her sister Marguerite, the wife of
Cobet, aged 52 years. They were arrested for theft and note was made that
they had already been whipped and branded for the same offence.
There was one group which was not in any way typical of the rest;
these were spies from the English court who were imprisoned in the
Bastille in October 1746. There were quite a few of them - Lady Morton
and her son, Mistress Morton and her sister and the governess of the
young Morton, and their servant, Moisson, and four servants belonging to
Lady Morton and her husband. The family group was not held separately
from the main body of the servants even in prison, thus perpetuating the
idea that the household was comprised of servants and masters all of
154 Work and its Margins

whom were considered equally responsible. Even when imprisoned in the

Bastille, the servants did not change their roles, but continued to serve
their masters, and the governess carried on bringing up the young child.
The type of collaboration previously referred to underlines in particular
the vitality of the family group amongst the least privileged classes. It was
a vitality which neither migrations, wanderings, the nomadic life nor
extreme poverty or utter precariousness had called into question. Living
together as a family, which might include brothers, cousins and nephews,
meant an undertaking to stick together for survival through thick and thin.
Criminality was typically a characteristic of such families.
Tracking down a family group was one thing, but the business of the
composition of gangs was another.34 The inspector threaded his way in
and out of the entanglements of 71 networks, sending out his spies and
observers to vantage-points from which they might discover the hide-outs
of the ringleaders, or the mistresses of some and the concubines of others.
Certain names keep cropping up like the Langevin gang or the gangs
controlled by Poulot, Jolivet, Rafiat, Lalande and Sandrin. Their tentacles
seemed to extend in every direction, making it impossible to control them,
for they always rose up again from their ashes thanks to new arrivals and
fresh links in the chain. Although now and again word might get round
that one of the leaders had been hanged or that he had had all the bones in
his body broken, this did nothing to snuff out their activity and they still
continued to attract other contenders. A special mention must be made of
Clavier, who eventually became one of Cartouche’s accomplices and who
caused so much fear that a special stronghold had to be constructed for
him and his comrades: ‘Pierre Clavier, thief and formerly of Cartouche’s
gang. Imprisoned indefinitely, God willing. First taken to Bicetre, 22 May
1749 by order of the King and from there to the dungeons of Le Chatelet
built expressly for them, and chained by the neck.’
The odds on gaining a clear picture from amongst this jungle of thieves
and crooks are not very high, but one can see three different types of
group emerging, even if there are no watertight compartments between the
various organizations.
Immediately recognizable were those specializing in church robbery. In
their activity they were not unlike a colony of ants: swift, furtive and
conscientious, they were fiercely pursued by priests and sacristans and
were particularly active in the churches of the centre of the city such as
Saint-Eustache or Notre-Dame. The church at this time was a place for
socializing; it was busy and noisy, with scant regard for calm or medita¬
tion. Into this brouhaha slipped the filchers and pilferers, for in the midst
of all this bustle what could have been easier than picking a few pockets or
emptying a coffer or two. Its architecture and dark corners provided good
cover for the accomplice who, with his back propped against a pillar, had
 At the Workshop Door 155
the job of giving advance warning to the thief. Between 1750 and 1775,
21.05 per cent of the thieves arrested and appearing before the chamber of
the Grand Criminel had committed their crime in a church. The rest of
them could be divided roughly between the river banks, the fairgrounds
and the boulevards. In Inspector Poussot’s register, opposite the name of
the thief, one often finds the mention that he was ‘part of a gang of church
thieves’. Upon their arrest they were nearly always imprisoned in Bicetre
where they stayed for some time, detained by order of the King, which was
proof of the importance attributed to the punishment of this type of
activity.
Another type of gang consisted of young homeless thieves, who were
quite often arrested in the limekilns from which they wreaked havoc in the
countryside. Such roving bands, living by what they could beg or pillage,
usually consisted of quite young children, sometimes brothers, sisters or
cousins who had been left to wander the roads as a result of financial
hardship. Surfacing as they did quite spontaneously and intermittently,
they had no rigid structure or leader and were formed by chance en¬
counter, as a result of abscondence from orphanages or during the search
for work. They were seemingly without future and were only formed out
of necessity and in response to economic pressure. When Jean-Baptiste
Blanchard, aged 18 and born in Burgundy, was arrested on 9 July 1749
with Bonaventure Ballet, a decommissioned soldier and a beggar born in
Paris, he said that they had ‘come from Lyons with neither money nor
possessions’ and that they lived off thieving and begging. The same was
true of three youngsters aged 13, 15 and 16, of whom one had escaped
from La Pitie, the second was an apprentice button-maker, and the third
was unemployed and unqualified. They were arrested as ‘thieves without
morality, of no fixed abode and sleeping in the limekilns of Belleville and
Menilmontant, where they had been committing all kinds of damage in the
countryside and the peasants had complained about it.’ The peasants were
quick to spot these chance bands of unfortunates, which were not very
organized, stemming as they did from poverty and not with the deliberate
intent of planning theft and robbery.
What Inspector Poussot applied himself to most diligently, however,
was the dismantling of the great gangs of ‘infamous robbers’ who were
capable of reforming their networks and adding other leaders to their
numbers even though their previous leader might only just recently have
been imprisoned. Like octopuses with innumerable tentacles, these gangs
who were constantly chased and pursued stand out from the first page of
the register to the last, as though it were impossible to put them to rout
definitively. Moreover the notes written in the margin explain the reasons
for such pursuits, which though fruitful at times were as often as not
inadequate. On 10 January 1750, Jacques Dumont, known as Saint-Paul, a
156 Work and its Margins

soldier in the guard and born in Paris, was arrested by order of the King.
He was accused of robbery and of being ‘linked to a considerable propor¬
tion of thieves and robbers who were in Le Chatelet and Bicetre and in
correspondence with them’, and he was immediately sent to the prison of
Le Grand Chatelet. Thus even in prison, the thieves maintained contact
with the outside world, made attempts to escape, and wrote to each other
regularly about such and such a deal. The police tried to seize the ring¬
leaders and persons of influence and their guards even to the extent
of imprisoning them or having them broken; but their very memory
provoked new crimes. The arrest of Guillaume Reyne, known as the ‘Little
Blond’, brought the police considerable satisfaction, as the note in the
margin indicates: ‘The most dangerous thief in Paris. Taken prisoner in
1739 and implicated in the Rabat affair.’ The inspector must have spent a
great deal of time trying to track him down with his spies and observers.
The police campaign was a long-term operation. All we have to go by
from the register are a small number of fragments and details giving the
story of some of these gangs. Take, for example, the case of Jean Poulot, a
soldier and ‘deserter from several regiments’. First he was a thief with
Jolivet’s gang and then gradually, after being compromised in a number of
affairs, he seems to have become leader of a gang of his own, with
accomplices and mistresses of his own. Following his arrest, he escaped
from prison several times, which led to the arrest of people who knew him
and who had compromised themselves on his behalf. On 4 September
1744 he was arrested on the King’s orders and his bones broken; but the
talk about him persisted for a long time afterwards. Sandrin, referred to as
Pognon, confirmed that Poulot ‘had accused him of several robberies’ in
declarations made before he died but he was not arrested until 27 June
1746. Some considerable time later, it was the turn of Franqoise Rousselle,
aged 23, the wife of Pierre Dion, an odd-job-man, to be taken to La
Salpetriere, because she was ‘implicated during the trial relating to Poulot’s
escape’. It was recorded that at the time she came out of detention her
mother was still there.
Friends of thieves, former thieves suspected of being a member of
X’s gang, mother or mistress of the thief, concubine, go-between... The
register is full of persons and situations capable of reinforcing the deter¬
mination of the police on the one hand but of prolonging the life and
ramifications of these gangs on the other.
Women played a significant role in these gangs, either because they
passed from one man to the next or because they were linked to several of
the thieves on account of the services they provided or the deals they were
involved in. The arrest of Louise Levasseur, a street seller, aged 24, and
her widowed mother, aged 45, provides information about some of these
female links: ‘The two women were drunks; the mother was a procuress
 At the Workshop Door 157
and the daughter a whore. They made purchases indiscriminately from
every crook and thief in Paris and had relations with them. They were
arrested at 11 o’clock at night in a cabaret on the Rue du Grand Hurleur
where they were making a din.’
Fellow-travellers were often denounced by their own kind like the
accomplice of the well-known brigand Langevin, who was shopped by
Fanchon, Langevin’s mistress. Offering each other little protection because
they were primarily concerned with getting their own prisoners off the
hook, these fellow-travellers of the thieves dotted Poussot’s register with
their misadventures. However, what we are dealing with here is not the
odd criminal incident but with large-scale crime which spread from one
gang to another across the whole of France, taking advantage of a highly
organized system of networks.

Disguise and getting a name for oneself

The inspector’s lists do not have a lot to say about the social habits and
characteristics of this miscreant population although there are two par¬
ticular features which stand out: a tendency towards impersonation and
disguise on the one hand, and the use of nicknames on the other. It was a
practice that was very much alive, as indicated by the 10 per cent of people
on the register who gave their nickname as well as their actual name.
As to the disguisers, one finds a number of them among the beggars
and vagabonds, who were always ready to use any sort of deception or
subterfuge in order to arouse compassion, sometimes with a great deal
of imagination. Chery was sent to Le Grand Chatelet in 1746 for
impersonating a leper. He had daubed his face with the white of an egg to
give the impression that he was affected by the disease; and Antoine de
Claire was also a beggar who in spite of his youth (he was only 20), had
fearlessly burned his abdomen in order to inspire pity. Others impersonated
the halt and the maimed, even adding a few wounds, as in the case of
Jacques Gaillard, aged 40, who ‘inflicted a wound on his leg which he had
daubed with animal’s blood from off the market’. He had been begging
in the parish of Saint-Eustache and found himself imprisoned in Fort-
l’Eveque in August 1746.
Those who had been branded for a previous offence mutilated their
scars by deepening and lengthening them, claiming to have been bitten by
dogs or horses. Some even wore masks in order to avoid being recognized
by a policeman, as in the case of Nicolas Moussant, aged 32, who had
recently come up from Berry. He was sent to the prison of Le Grand
Chatelet in June 1746 for ‘begging and impersonation of the one-armed
man who had led a rebellion. He was found to have a mask in his pocket.’
158 Work and its Margins

There were a few women who had disguised themselves as men; this
was not altogether surprising at the time, for during this period of the
eighteenth century one finds quite a taste for disguise. This was the case of
Suzanne Goujon, chambermaid to the wife of the King’s architect, Tirot,
who was arrested on 22 January 1749 by order of the King ‘for writing
two anonymous letters and for having dressed up as a man and found
lodging in furnished lettings in the Rue Saint-Sauveur with no female
clothing in her possession and saying that Tirot had abused her and had
made her wear men’s clothes so as not to be recognized’. She was to be
sent to La Salpetriere like Marguerite Goffier, who was arrested the same
year in a cabaret in the Rue Salle-au-Comte dressed as a man.
Some women did it in order to live the life of a man, as in the case of
Franqoise Fidele, the daughter of a captain in the Irish regiment. She
dressed as a man and enlisted in the Paris militia. She wanted to go to
Flanders in this attire in order to find one of her parents. She told the
police who arrested her in November 1748 that ‘she was a good girl and
had done nothing to offend her honour and that she was not the first in
her family to disguise herself in order to enter the service’, thus presenting
the act of disguise as something of a family tradition. What is more,
Franqoise would not have been the first to have asserted this as a pos¬
sibility and to have assumed that this subterfuge in no way reflected on her
honour.
Bellerose, Vive Lamour, Menage, Lesperance, Jupiter, Le Bourguignon,
Petitpas, Loiseau Bleu, La Gaillardise, Fanchon la Boiteuse - these
colourful nicknames are the bitter-sweet windfalls that break up the
monotonous terrain of the lists of arrests with their trenchant irony or
their scathing assessments. Because Fanchon shuffles along with a limp,
she is ‘Shuffler’; because Nicolas Merlet is dark and swarthy, he is ‘Le
Moricault’ (from ‘Moor’); and because J. Drumont comes from Poitou, he
is ‘Le Poitevin’ - obviously! Consequently, there are a lot of folk by the
name of Picard, Le Bourguignon, Lauvergnat, Flamand, La Lionnaise or
Le Breton, closely followed by others who are quite simply called after
the names of towns like, Namur, Bellegarde, Saint-Louis, Cartagena, or
Chambery. Or they are described by their place of birth - origins which
were not forgotten in spite of all the migrations, expeditions and periods
of roaming the countryside or returning to it.
The nicknames derived not only from one’s village or town of origin; all
types of physical appearance, for instance, and all manner of human
behaviour and characteristics went into forming some of the names, which
were as lively as they were descriptive and as surprising as they were
farcical, their very sound opening up onto wide horizons of adventure and
fantasy. Reading these nicknames helps us penetrate even further into this
unstable and precarious world where one’s role, faults or temperament
 At the Workshop Door 159
were the means by which one might be recognized by one’s fellows. To be
nicknamed ‘Sans Souci’ (Carefree), ‘Commissionaire’ (The Commissioner),
‘Belle Amour’ (True Love), ‘Tapineuse’ (Hell-raiser) or ‘La Libre’ (Free-
for-all), ‘Le Sage’ (The Sage), ‘Cochon’ (Swine), or ‘Capon’ (Chicken)
meant the achievement of recognition at a certain point in the human ad¬
venture even though distance and derision might have been its precedents.
Francois Esteve, known as ‘Le Sage’ had probably been wise only once in
his life; and more than likely ‘Harmony’ and ‘Fantasy’ were not expected
to abide by the implications of their name. It is possible that Michel Faure,
known as ‘Sans Peur’ (Fearless), was such a coward that he had got his
nickname from constant gibes. A nickname offered more scope than a
banal surname and allowed some degree of differentiation from one’s
fellows. It often came up quite by chance as a joke or a statement of fact
and could be quite determining. Some people possibly helped create their
own nickname in order to equip themselves with a history, to leave
anonymity behind, endow themselves with a role, give themselves some
colour, or laugh at themselves; or indeed — and why not — to pursue an
immense dream.
A good many of the nicknames probably came along in this way, and if
some of them raise a smile, almost all of them cause some surprise for they
go back to systems of perception existing amongst the individuals them¬
selves and are so rich and varied that they fire the imagination and defy
reality. Just listen to the evocative sounds of the nicknames as they roll by
one after the other: La Petite Beaulieu, Gueule Noire, La Belle Blonde, Le
Vineux, La Lime, La Fleur, Repit, La Grande Gogo, La Goulue, Le Petit
Pot, La Caresse, Ciel, Le Chaton, Blambec et Baublanc, La Demoiselle, Le
Teigneux, La Raie and La Quarante Coups . . .

Companions in crime
Marie Dyard, sent to Fort-l’Eveque by police decision 23 July 1747:
‘concubine of Lyot and Sans Regret and other thieves’.
Marie-Anne Forget, known as ‘La Quarante Coups’, imprisoned in Le
Grand Chatelet by order of the King on 14 May 1746: ‘mistress of
Merlet and a fair portion of the thieves of Pans, already in detention two
or three times’.
Elizabeth Guyeux, sent to Le Grand Chatelet by the police on 3 October
1744: ‘concubine of thieves and deserters’.
Marie-Anne Giroroux, prisoner at Le Grand Chatelet by royal decree in
this same month of October 1744: ‘concubine of Beaufort, thief’.
Florence Guerin, sent to prison of Le Grand Chatelet by royal decree,
December 1744: ‘concubine of Jean Laine, member of gang’.
160 Work and its Margins

The concubines of small thieves as well as those of the gang leaders

themselves were also useful prey for the police, who made assiduous
efforts to find them, convinced that they would obtain a great deal of
information through them which would enable them to track down not
only their present but their past companions as well.
Concubines and mistresses are the leading lights in this register and on
the whole there is no record of whether they themselves had committed
any crime, for it was in their role as the consorts of brigands, well-known
or not, that the police had decided to arrest them and that the orders of
the King fell about their heads. In spite of the lack of detail, the portraits
of the women sketched in the register are the kind one imagines coming
straight from the great popular romances of the day - heroines in spite of
themselves, whose counsel was always valued and well respected and
who traced their descent from that small class of petty thieves renowned
for their spirit and valour. There seems to be little departure from the most
traditional typology in keeping, almost without exception, with the most
well-worn and familiar of images and stereotypes. They were the passionate
lovers so often obliged by misfortune to change the arm on which they
leant on account of the frequency with which ‘their’ thieving-man went off
to jail. These women — always so ready to bear the blows and always well
informed about the latest plans of their proud companions, paid the price
of their love for this canaille with frequent spells in prison.
Marie Laplace, aged 25 and born in Paris, cuts a fine figure of a
woman. She was detained in La Salpetriere by order of the King in
December 1751: ‘Mistress of Poulot, who was broken, and at present the
mistress of Renard, a thief in the country. Has already spent four years in
prison.’ They gave themselves to the most vile it is true, but they remained
faithful to their chosen one and these grandes amantes seemed to change
lovers only to perpetuate the memory or deeds of their previous love. The
men fell, were broken or hanged, or at best imprisoned or sent to the
galleys. The women were left behind, acting as unfailing links in this
network of rogues.
This could certainly be said in the case of Marie-Marlaine, who claimed
that she was married to a butcher’s boy. She sold greengrocery as well as
being ‘the mistress of a good few men in the galleys’, but in 1752, the
prison of La Salpetriere momentarily put an end to her passions. The
almost mythical figures of these great lovers, these women with neither
hope nor future, populated the inspector’s calligraphed columns. It was
well known, and even recorded in writing, that for some of them there was
no real evidence of their falling foul of the law; but the simple certainty
that they were the concubines of such and such was proof enough. It was
this relationship which determined their identity and their criminal status,
much more than their name, marital status, trade or even their criminal
 At the Workshop Door 161
activity. In the eyes of the police it was this link which was of prime
importance and it was a sufficient definition for them to warrant prison on
its account.
It was on this charge that the two Renaud sisters, Marie and Catherine,
aged 16 and 18, were to go to prison by order of the King - one to Le
Grand and one to Le Petit Chatelet — for being the ‘concubines of the
aforementioned Leaute and Capon and the brothers Babelle, who were
thieves and crooks. Arrested at an ale-house in the Rue Saint-Placide and
found with handkerchieves on them but, there being no proof, taken into
detention.’ Here we have the particular logic of the police system working
at its best: pulling in the two sisters was especially important because it
inevitably led to a pair of crooked brothers and two other thieves. The
police were sneaky and well informed; it was no mere coincidence that
they fell upon this or that woman and the concubines of these robbers
were almost certainly as sought after as the thieves themselves, given the
ease with which they passed from thief to thief, which made them the
repositories of precious knowledge. They were the living links in a chain of
thieves which could never be broken, for if the men died or went off to the
galleys, the women bound them back together again by offering themselves
to those who remained as their new companions. Is it not the case that this
function, which might initially produce a smile (a response which is just as
stereotyped as the feminine model which provoked it), has an internal
coherence of its own which allows a better understanding of the masculine
and feminine roles within this criminal society? And is it not also the case
that the internal circulation of the women within this milieu of criminals,
which at first sight might appear anarchic, was in fact the guarantee of the
stability of the milieu and its desire to endure? In the face of the risks
taken by the men, was it not the role of the women to do whatever was
possible to make sure that the gangs and their networks did not fall apart?
Once some amorous adventure had brought them into the thick of things
and integrated them, the women found themselves drawn into a destiny
which seemed logical and from which there was no going back. They
could not leave without risk to themselves and, as a result, it became their
responsibility to see that things ran well and to ensure that they were able
to keep well clear of the police net.
This probably explains the activities and grands amours of Marie-
Anne Petit, known as La Dumont, and the widow of Le Cceur. She was
arrested in 1746 as the ‘former mistress of Marrondinde who was in the
galleys. Linked with all the rogues of Paris and also former mistress of
Poulot, who was broken live.’ The same thing happened to Therese
Saint-Pere, who was taken to Fort-l’Eveque in 1747 as the ‘concubine of
Lyoteaux, Morneaux, Sans Regret, and other thieves’.
As a concubine of thieves, it was accepted that one would strengthen
162 Work and its Margins

the complicated ties between members of the same gang or between

different gangs; these ties were one form of the organization of the system.
Seen in this way, the concubines of the thieves fulfilled a quite considerable
role which cannot be overlooked, although their central tasks were the more
traditional functions of persuading, influencing and supporting in contrast
with the more valiant and dominant duties of the men.
Some of the women’s duties can be seen from the lists drawn up by the
inspector. Where we have one jotting following from another, it becomes
possible little by little to add some finer touches to some of the female
portraits. If their lovers were in jail, for instance, the women tried to assist
in their escape, a hope they clung to. In fact in the eighteenth century
prison escapes were something of a daily occurrence. Thus in October
1746 we see Marie-Anne Dubuisson and Madeleine David meeting up at
the prison of Le Grand Chatelet ‘to prepare the escape of thieves who had
been detained at the Conciergerie’. In December 1750, Jeanne Carrier,
‘who claimed she was the wife of Baronneau, a soldier in the guard’, was
sent to Fort-l’Eveque, and then transferred to detention at La Salpetriere,
finally completing her sentence two years later. She was no stranger to the
police, who had her under suspicion: ‘she has already been in Le Chatelet
twice before for supplying Carter with women’s clothes for his escape and
still associated with former thieves.’ There was no end to this system of
escapes, for in their turn the bandit lovers tried to get out their companions,
as in the case of Rose, who was imprisoned at Fort-l’Eveque ‘for having
violently snatched the woman Denis from the hands of the doorkeepers of
Saint-Martin, who were transferring her from the strong-room at the
Hotel-Dieu’. Adelaide Denis had first been taken to Saint-Martin, where
she had fallen ill and had been transferred to the strong-room at the
Hotel-Dieu before being brought back again to the prison of Saint-Martin.
After this abduction Rose found himself arrested whilst ‘in bed with
Adelaide’. As the men were imprisoned more frequently than the women
(and there were plenty of reasons for that35), it is hardly surprising that
the women were determined to get them out. These ‘mistresses’ were
considered as schemers or sources of trouble and the accusations reveal the
age-old idea of the woman as a temptress, cause of original sin, trouble¬
maker and inciter. This was said of Jeanne de Lespiniere, ‘the cunning and
scheming mistress of Boyer and mixed up in all of Boyer’s operations’. The
same was true of Elizabeth Demainville, the mistress of a soldier who was
hoping to join the Watch. Arrested in 1752 by order of the King ‘for
causing an argument between her two lovers who fought each other with
swords, one of them being killed by the other’.
Occasionally there is the odd detail which crops up unexpectedly and
when it does, often in isolation, it is very precious as it helps enrich the
significance of the notes and jottings. It is not possible to tell why one
 At the Workshop Door 163
particular piece of information should be pinned to this or that thief and
not to another, but the fact that it is not repeated is not important. When
Marie la Lame was arrested for concubinage with a thief in the country¬
side, it comes as some surprise to find the following comment written just
beneath the indictment: ‘found carrying the thief’s pistols’. It certainly
surprised the inspector’s sergeants enough for them to make mention of it;
in fact it was very rare for the weapons to be entrusted to the women, if
only for the purpose of carrying them. It would appear that even the
concubines of thieves had unexpected roles which this particular piece of
information seems to bear out, unique and tenuous though it might be.

Prostitutes and women of ill-repute, pimps and soldiers’ girls were also
pursued by Inspector Poussot. The district of Les Halles was admirably
suited to their activity and the register is proof of the frequency of the
raids made into the places of prostitution. Searches, forcible entry into
bedrooms, raids by the police on ‘bawdy houses’ and ‘brothels’ are all a
part of the police lists, which are explicit in revealing police actions which
were conducted quite overtly and with absolutely no delicacy.
Here too, the police went straight ‘to the girls’ to find every kind of
undesirable male - soldiers absent without leave, deserters, well-known
crooks, or thieves on the run. It was always the same procedure: where the
girl was, there the trouble was also. It could have been no clearer, there
was no room for any doubt about it: ‘Found in bed with a whore’; ‘found
in bed with a procuress’; ‘found in bed with Manette’; ‘said they were
husband and wife, when in fact she was a woman of ill-repute’ - the list of
accusations becomes quite tedious. Nor should it come as any surprise that
the police intrusion went as far as the very beds of the offenders. As the
scene of the transgression, it was the bed that made it possible to pursue
two targets at once: both prostitute and suspect. It was pointless and a
waste of time to pursue them separately since more often than not it was
the harlot’s bed which brought them together.
The numbers of ‘whores and prostitutes’ arrested in the street was also
quite high, and since they were largely protected by soldiers in the guard,
this made it possible to run a number of surveillance and reconnaissance
operations amongst these groups where there was a tendency to agitation
and upheaval and all kind of criminal activity.
Even if they were not arrested, the women still appeared on the register,
mainly in the margins as additional or supplementary information.
Although they only appear alongside, or in the shadow of those who were
arrested, one nevertheless senses that they were still regarded as an im¬
portant cog in the criminal machine. Of one man it would be said that ‘he
had been roaming round the countryside with a woman’; and with regard
to another, it would be underlined that ‘he was consorting illegally with
164 Work and its Margins

another woman’; and of a third, that ‘he had said that they were husband
and wife but this was not in fact true’; or else that someone had been
found in bed with a woman. Jean-Franqois Ede, aged 26, a native of Paris
and a French grenadier, ‘was suspected of several thefts, did nothing and
lived with Catherine le Pain, who was supporting him’. If the inspector
saw fit to write these things down, that was because they were important.
It was possible to identify criminals by means of their associates and other
such tokens as might turn out to be useful for making a denunciation.
When Francois Simousse, an accomplice of Fangevin, was exiled from the
kingdom on 6 January 1746 it was because Fanchon had betrayed him.
And because the woman is always expected to be the betrayer in the end,
is it not politic to chercher la femme?
Because she was the heart and soul of the organization; because
she moved and circulated in this marginal world, often acting as the
implicit reference-point for those who possessed her; because she was
the companion, support and close shadow of the man, yet neither his
mother nor legitimate spouse, she was also the temptress, the corrupting
influence, the unfaithful one, the traitress and the source of all dishonour
and trouble. She was both link-point and the point at which the links were
broken. It was in her dual capacity as fermenting agent and hotbed of
hunted villains, as well as traitor and informer, that she was of interest to
the police. Caught in her ambivalence, she was regarded as an essential
link and cog but also as the one who might destroy everything at any
moment and denounce the one whom she had adored; and thus she
remains true to the descriptions of her as devoted and erratic, perjurer and
renegade. In any case, and no matter what she did, she was sure to give the
man away - the police banked on it.
This explains the importance of her presence on all the pages of
Inspector Poussot’s register, a presence which is somewhat surprising as it
exceeded the usual rate for women implicated in criminal incidents. In fact
this ‘excess’ was due to the efforts of the police and the inspector, who by
focusing their attention on the women were sure that they would improve
their chances of tracking down the gangs and their ringleaders. In keeping
with the traditional idea that the woman was the surest pointer to the
man, they gave her a major place without ever - or almost ever — having
definitely established her guilt. Because immorality and concubinage were
criminal offences at the time, that was enough to allow the penetration of
this criminal milieu in order to pursue this or that person. One finds the
same line of thinking when it came to cleaning up the centres of prostitu¬
tion. It was not so much because the inspectors wanted to strike a blow at
prostitution that they were interested in the brothel-keepers and the pimps,
but because such establishments were very fruitful breeding grounds
alongside which a whole range of marginalized and suspect people took
 At the Workshop Door 165
shelter. Inspector Poussot’s register singles out in particular very many
women whose only criminal activity consisted of the illegal sharing of their
lives with crooks, so that, in spite of themselves, they were sure pointers to
their delinquent companions. By tracking down their love affairs the police
turned up the criminals - they knew what they were doing.

Attention to detail
What we have here in this register is not a vast amount of bloody crime;
for out of the 2,692 persons actually arrested by Inspector Poussot there
were no more than 36 cases of murder or attempted murder, and 26
condemnations to the wheel or hanging. It seems clear that the gang-
leaders (Langevin, Poulot etc.) had finally been brought to book by the
police and that it was rather a matter of dismantling the ramifications of
organized theft bit by bit.
These groups were not so much bands of assassins as ‘thieves and
country rovers’ and every possible means was used to get to know who
belonged to them and what kinds of alliances there were, which all helped
whet the curiosity of the police and which would go some way towards
explaining its methods and approach. As for the manner in which the
police worked, the register is obviously no more explicit than in other
respects, but it does bring to light a contradiction between the luxurious
wealth of infinite detail and precision on the one hand and the vague notes
on the other which reveal real uncertainties and unforgivable inaccuracies.
The police paid particular attention to the relationships among the
thieves whether these were family, emotional or sexual attachments. There
are references to so and so’s past, or to the fact that one of his parents was
put in prison; his connections were noted, as was the role of his wife or
concubine. In fact they dwell at length on the person’s past and although
the notes in the margin may not have been systematic, they clearly show a
determined effort at recording events as well as taking account of the
historical impact of crime at both family and emotional level. Thus the
ancestry and very memory of the thief recalled in this way already intimated
his guilt, even on occasion serving as proof.
Aubry, a militiaman and poacher suspected of highway robbery, was
arrested by order of the King on 28 October 1748: ‘His father was broken
for highway robbery and murder; and since he came out of the militia he
has been constantly engaged in roaming the highways by night.’ It was his
ancestor rather than his activities that had brought him to the prisons of
Senlis. The same thing happened to Charles Baccard, a young thief of 20.
He was born in Paris and sent to Le Petit Chatelet in 1747 with the endorse¬
ment that he had ‘watched his father and mother being hanged’ and that
166 Work and its Margins

he had been ‘taken to Bicetre without ever having joined his regiment’. The
police remembered and made use of their memories in order to incarcerate
certain persons. At times one can see their quite frenetic pursuit of
the activities of certain persons, their ability to gather information and
the obvious degree of their organization. When Julienne Barge, aged 50,
was imprisoned at La Salpetriere in November 1750, the observations
noted in the margin show that she had been known to the agencies of the
inspector for some time. ‘Previously hanged, she was arrested in 1733 for
illicit activities and banished.’ One has to suppose that she had managed to
escape from her hanging. Forget, a native of Lyons, had also been known
for ten years: ‘He has been roaming around the countryside with his wife
these last ten years and two years ago he was arrested by the beadles of the
poor. He is the son of a large manufacturer in Lyons and has been wanted
for some time.’ In July 1746 he found himself in Fort-l’Eveque.
They were also kept under surveillance and were followed, like Jean
Poitevin (a carter and militiaman, aged 22), from the village of Lument
near Orleans. ‘He spent the whole of the winter in Paris doing nothing but
play bowls and roulette’, and ended up in the spring of 1752 in the prison
of Bicetre by order of the King.
In addition to these clarifications on the offenders’ past there is a whole
wealth of detail included in the register the purpose of which is not quite
clear; however, on essential matters the register often remains silent.
Perhaps they were situations or events which had simply struck the
inspector’s men as important. The apparent lack of order or consistency in
these details indicates that as an instrument the register still fell short of
any real organization, and was rather a halfway house between disorder
and a methodical filing system.
Jeanneton Prudhomme, also known as La Verdure, must have caused
quite a stir by her behaviour, for the day of her arrest in March 1746 it
was noted that she was the ‘mistress of Camaille, who had eaten a loin of
veal and peas with her the day Bonnefond was assassinated’. This appetite
thus shared with her lover was a scandal worthy of being noted down. It
was details such as these which compounded her guilt, for not only was
she the concubine of a murderer, she also testified to a healthy appetite the
day of the murder - putting her not far short of an ogress.
Details revealing that Marguerite Burette was ‘well-versed in thieves’
slang’ and had been ‘found sleeping with Pierre Echy and passing herself
off as his wife when she was in fact a beggar roaming the countryside’,
suggest surprise heightened by the conviction that one had here abundant
proof of foul play; for knowing slang obviously put her in the same
category as men from the Cour des Miracles.36
There is a delicate balance between a sense of precision and detail and a
feeling for precedents and connections and the actual apparatus of proof
 At the Workshop Door 167
which together contribute to relative vagueness in the drawing up of
charges. The important thing was to infiltrate these marginal places, get to
know them as best one might and proceed from time to time towards
making arrests, at which point the suspect was likely to find himself in
prison on the same grounds as the real offender. Drouy, a soldier in the
Parisian militia, was arrested at Brie fair in November 1747 ‘having left his
military battalion after the review without leave, confirming my view that
he was a good-for-nothing’. An assurance of this kind was sufficient to
establish proof. If Jean Groute, known as Bourguignon, was put in the
prison of Pontoise on instructions from the provost of the Ile-de-France on
13 November 1747, it was because his particulars suggested ‘strong con¬
nections with those involved with theft from churches’. When Edme
Gaudier and his wife and son were arrested in 1748 as ‘beggars roaming
the countryside together for 14 years, vagrants and vagabonds the pair of
them, and both consenting to live together without being married, already
in and out of prison 7 or 8 times’, what the police actually wanted was to
be rid of Edme once and for all. The notes read, ‘there would seem to
be enough proof to send Gaudier to the galleys’, indicating both their
certainty and yet their uncertainty.
The same attitude can be found towards the Renaud sisters; one reads:
‘found in possession of handkerchieves on arrest and, there being no
proof, taken to jail’. They were in fact taken to the prison of Le Petit
Chatelet in 1751, as were Marie Barbe Batiste and her friend Pierre
Beaulieu, both arrested at Pontoise fair ‘both half-caste, speaking German,
Hebrew and quite good French, of no fixed abode and refusing to answer
the questions put to them’.
There is a vagueness about the evidence and a significant disproportion
between the type of offence and the form of repression. There hardly seems
to be any distinction between the deserter, the snatcher of a couple of
shirts, the prostitute, the soldier absent without leave, or the beggar or
gang-leader. The inspector concerned himself with all of them and the
prisons filled up pell-mell even to the inclusion of children like little
Martial Desbois, aged 12, who was admonished for being a ‘vagabond
associated with others, having nothing else to do but play at the end of the
Pont-Neuf, or slipping into the laundry presses to pinch handkerchieves’.
We do not know very much about the depth or the extent of the
repression. For certain of the accused, mention is made of their being
hanged; for the rest there is silence. It is impossible to know whether they
remained in jail for a day or a month. Some of the death sentences seem
excessive in relation to the charge. Side by side with murder or attempted
murder, one reads of the hangings of church thieves accused of taking gold
braid and gold pieces or of stealing garments. It is impossible to draw any
real conclusions other than for the purpose of underlining this dispropor-
168 Work and its Margins

tion between the very different charges which led quite arbitrarily to the
same punishment.

Does the analysis of such a register really require that we reach any
conclusions? The decision to interpret everything without any systematic
use of statistical methods and to give preference to qualitative information
be it ever so incomplete or patchy is quite deliberate. Attempting to read
the register in something of a ‘workman-like’ fashion is both a challenge
and an opportunity, for it offers the possibility of understanding certain
aspects of the politics of the inspectorate as well as some of the more
delinquent ways of life. In fact the 3,000 persons arrested by Inspector
Poussot’s men remove the veil from the Paris the prevailing order did not
wish to see - the Paris which it sought out at all costs, in order to isolate it
the more effectively from the rest of the population. Behind these arrests,
one perceives a desire on the part of the police to infiltrate all the secret
places of the capital, a desire to intervene at every level, in homes and
houses as well as in the street. At the same time one can sense the utter
futility of such an undertaking, especially when one comes to understand,
from snatches pieced together from other sources, how this world of petty
crime actually functioned. Shifting and furtive and already well organized,
whether by a type of family association or according to some kind of
ritualization of male-female relationships, crime and delinquency always
seemed to rise again from the ashes. Poussot’s register allows one to
accomplish an amazing trip across the histories of certain groups of male¬
factors that not even death itself could interrupt.
As well as providing evidence of police organization the register reveals
its impotence in strangling the existence and activity of the criminals, who
were impossible to get hold of because they were so thoroughly a part of a
way of life which was uncertain and nomadic, which abounded in broken
relationships and which offered ample opportunities for producing rogues
and thieves, but also the means of keeping them invisible.
Part III

Crowds
 Crowds 171

Crowds and gatherings were a regular part of the everyday scene, and
around the urban throng and the powers that be there grew up such a
complex web of stories of affection and disaffection that their origins are
difficult to trace. The authorities and the mob provided each other with
numerous opportunities for regular meeting. These rendezvous might be
an occasion for seeking mutual agreement or else they might be a chance
for some rather flamboyant behaviour deliberately intended to press home
a point. It was then up to each side to make what it would of these signals
by means of its own system of thought and its own reading of events.
Parallel, and indeed contradictory readings of all these encounters between
the crowd and the monarchical authority ran right through the social
process, feeding it and nourishing it; it was a process whose dynamics
were bluff and counter-bluff, and whose sequences formed the texture of
the social and political climate of the city. The crowd had its thinking done
for it by the authorities, whilst believing what it was given to believe, and
between these two perspectives gaps grew up, were filled in, and opened
up again in ways that contemporaries often found difficult to fathom. And
if, like dancers in a perpetual set, they did come to some mutual arrange¬
ment and recall each other to the paths of law and order, they each did so
in terms whose vocabulary differed widely.
The monarchical authority as well as that of the elites who dominated
the thought of the time, and who commented on the events of which they
were a part, defined the crowd in terms that were eminently contradictory
at the same time as linking it irreversibly to the smooth running of the
public order for which it was considered indispensable. And thus we have
the crowd as animal — impulsive, squalid and dangerous; the crowd as
passionate - good and grateful, offering its approval and acclaim; the
crowd as friend who might be called on to express its joy and good offices;
the crowd as enemy, subject to indefensible furies and gross pleasures. The
crowd as indispensable.
Seen like this, the crowd appears to be one solid block; the authorities
had great difficulty in seeing any of its differentiations or internal divisions.
They found it harder still to make any sense of its many tensions or the
various and indeed contradictory attitudes which prevailed within. Its
response to being thus treated by the monarchy was subtle and enigmatic.
For although its various levels and subdivisions were in fact very different,
 172 Crowds

and even though it got on with the job of sorting out its own internal
conflicts, it did of necessity come together as one body at those great
public festivals of life and death which took place at regular intervals and
where, for a few, brief moments, life was lived in symbiotic privilege with
the King and his pomp. Symbiosis it admittedly was, but it was also a
means of obtaining a specific reading of matters to which it had no access.
Politics, the unthinkable and the supernatural, also received a visit from
the crowd and the interpretations which ensued might pave the way for a
number of strategies for its defence and integration, some of which might
go so far as disruption.
Invited to attend the crowd most certainly was - on an almost semi¬
permanent basis: religious festivals; entrances of the King into the city;
marriage celebrations; occasions of royal mourning; Te Deums for
victories; the saying of masses following childbirth or on account of
illness; public executions at crossroads or right in the middle of public
squares. All of these made up a compelling calendar.
Called on to gather together in this way for such spectacular occasions,
and obliged to follow the ups and downs of the body monarchical in all its
joys, griefs or sorrows, crowds had a duty to mark, by their presence, the
irreversible alliance binding them to the royal power. And even when they
were not specifically invited to a royal spectacle, the crowds showed
a fondness for anything unusual that might be going on in the street,
whether it was some kind of game or anything else out of the ordinary.
The street was a familiar setting where it was possible to stand around and
gawp or chew over all the latest questions and marvels of the time. There
was certainly no shortage of these, during an epoch when doctors and
thinkers offered new intepretations of society and the social order almost
daily according to the progress of their research, and which no longer
corresponded to the traditional forms of religion which, though weakening,
were still practised.
Whether they were summoned by the government, attracted by what
was happening in their own space or stirred up with fear, hatred or
revolt, the masses were constantly altering the relationship they had with
authority and thereby constantly modifying it. Each event that brought
them together transformed them and transformed the object of the spectacle
that was exposed to their view.
Always described in the same way by those who looked on from a
distance, the crowds were in fact always different, although they did share
the same convictions, namely to be legitimate, to associate freely and to
make sense. The study of crowds means trying to understand how a
population in the process of change is able to produce something intelligible
and believable on the basis of its own anxiety to decipher and appropriate
for itself events which it had been offered as display and performance.
 8
Invitations to the Crowds

In response to the frequent invitations issued by the royal authority to

view it in all its aspects, from the sacred and religious to the powerful and
political, immense crowds came along ‘columns deep’ in the course of a
day and in accordance with set routes and precise ritual. They came to
contemplate the scene of this monarchy which could not exist unless it
were seen; and the means used to achieve this, such as spectacles and
festivals, marvellous firework displays and illuminations, were just part of
the apparatus by which this indispensable alliance between the King and
his people was implanted.
And in this respect, the eighteenth century was the inheritor of a long
tradition. One only need think, for instance, of that Tour de France royal
(the subject of a recent study),1 in which Catherine de Medici, ac¬
companied by her young son Charles I and their royal cohorts, decided to
leave Paris for two years to travel to the furthermost reaches of her
kingdom. An assembled body of loyal subjects was summoned to greet the
passage of the royal nomads who, on entry to each town, put on a full
display of their splendour and political will for its citizens. Festivals,
tournaments and the processions by the town’s institutions provided all
the signs and symbols necessary for a monarchy intent on having itself
recognized by the established urban elites at the same time as enlisting
popular consent. At the town gates, the royal cortege was swelled to
almost double by the ranks of the urban militia, guild-masters, town
worthies and aldermen. The procession became one great public exhibition
of the social hierarchies which made up the town, whilst the people who
were not a part of the march-past were called together as one to witness it
go by. Likewise the King passed, followed by the urban oligarchies, and
the people looked on, contemplating the presentation of this spectacle put
on for them by the monarchy and the town hierarchies by whom they were
governed.
 174 Crowds

These emblems and insignia were references to a shared culture whose

imagery and symbolism served as reminders of the necessary subjection of
the power of the urban authorities to the royal power. The people them¬
selves were solicited to attend by the sumptuousness of the festivities,
giving their consent by token of their massive presence, yet not participating.
They saw the king, drew close to him physically, but at the same time
realized just how far away from him they were. The gap was obvious and
it was a gap which could not have failed to make an impression and which
such festivities could only have served to increase and heighten by pro¬
voking an ambivalent reaction. But in spite of being kept passive, allowed
only to look, the presence of the people was nevertheless required. It was
still the same in the eighteenth century: every festival decreed, each entry
by the monarchy, each mass and Te Deum at the church of Notre-Dame,
as well as being a gift offered to the people was also a call upon them.
In Paris, in addition to the celebrations on the 52 Sundays and the 32
religious festivals,2 there were a great number of royal displays and pro¬
cessions. Henry IV himself was concerned about the number of working
days lost, which seriously affected farming and other necessary work. In
several dioceses there was a constant ‘cutting back’ of festivals but the
custom (obviously considered essential) of turning each and every good or
bad fortune of the monarchy into grounds for a celebration was retained.
In Paris during the eighteenth century all this was on top of the ceremonies
and processions due to the occurrence of serious events. One need only
think of the number of times that the Parisians, preceded by their bishops
and priests, went to fetch the reliquary of St Genevieve to process with it
along precisely ordained routes in order to encourage her to interrupt
prolonged periods of drought or heavy rains. Nicolas Delamare says quite
clearly that ‘Recourse to St Genevieve at every public disaster was a
custom nearly as old as the monarchy.’2 He notes that the first procession
took place in 887 in order to bring about the lifting of the siege by which
the Normans had beset Paris. ‘It was a common experience in times of
war, famine, infertility, flood, contagion and threats to public health.... It
was left to the parlement to judge when it was necessary to resort to her.
The Archbishop of Paris gave his orders and instructions regarding matters
spiritual and the police magistrate then added his.’ Thus the way that the
government handled public disasters was by publicly requesting the inter¬
vention of the Church and her saints in organized processions for which
the populace were duty bound to be grateful. And once the danger was
over St Genevieve also needed thanking.
There were also many other occasions for processions when the religious
and political authorities came together to make an event the theme for
popular gratitude and thanksgiving, as the following example shows: on
22 October 1725 a slow procession consisting of slaves bought in the
 Invitations to the Crowds 175

kingdoms of Morocco and Algeria by Trinitarian monks or friars set off

on its way.4 The order, signed by Herault, the Lieutenant-General of
Police, laid down both the precise route (from the church of the Friars to
the Abbey of Saint-Antoine) and the conduct of the procession. It was
to be led by the 63 slaves, the captain of the town and his sergeants,
trumpets, kettledrums, the banner of the brotherhood of Notre-Dame-de-
la-Delivrance, the clerics of the brotherhood, brothers carrying relics, the
banner of the captives, standards, oboes, choir-boys, religious corporals,
two sergeants and six guards. The procession, starting at 10 o’clock in the
morning, was to go down the Rue Saint-Jacques, turn onto the Quai de la
Tournelle, cross the bridges and follow the Rue de Fourny and the Rue
Saint-Antoine before returning to the abbey.
Life in the street was lived in that particular climate where public
displays and demonstrations were an extra part of everyday life. The
population, always available because they were there, gave each of these
events its own specific history. How it took part, the ways in which it
hissed and booed or roared its approval, were all taken as significant
markers, the computation of which quite often gave the public authorities
cause for concern. Should the King come to doubt the fervour of popular
approval then he would surely doubt, in the privacy of his own closet, the
effectiveness of his counsellors and his own political path.
An echo of such princely apprehensions can be found in Louis-Sebastien
Mercier:

The court is most mindful of what is being said by the citizens of Paris;
they call them ‘les grenouilles’ [frogs]. ‘What are the froggies saying
then?’ was often the cry. And what a happy band they were when the
froggies applauded their appearances or clapped their hands at the
spectacle in the wake of St Genevieve. But occasionally their silence was
punishing. In fact they were able to tell what the people were thinking
about them from their bearing; the happiness or indifference of the
public had a distinct character. It was claimed that they were sensitive to
the reception they got in the capital because there was a vague feeling
that somewhere in the crowd, wit and common sense prevailed and that
there were men there capable of appreciating them and their actions and
that these men, somehow or another, determined the opinion of the
populace.
In some circumstances, the police took the precaution of paying the
loud-mouths to spread themselves around the various districts on festive
occasions in order to liven things up whilst bribing the spoilsports. The
real displays of public happiness and contentment, however, had a
quality that nothing could upset or interfere with.5

This fine text needs little interpretation. If the grenouilles (just one of
the many animals used to typify the crowd) didn’t croak too well or didn t
 176 Crowds

croak at all, then the princes felt punished and humiliated. The people
were most certainly vile and coarse but, seeing that the success of so many
of their political victories depended on them, it was worthwhile attributing
to them some good sense, even though the attribution was likely to be
withdrawn as quickly as it had been bestowed. But after all, wouldn’t
there be some people planted in the crowd in order to promote disaffec¬
tion? Ringleaders and conspiracies! It was a well-known (and still used)
theory; but the spontaneity of the people was a fact which no agitator
could really thwart.
When the kings felt that their presence was unwelcome they made
themselves scarce if they were worried about their popularity. After the
events of 1750 when the people rose up against a police force responsible
for snatching its children, one might recall the reluctance of Louis XV to
travel through Paris; and after the accident of May 1770 at the festivities
given on the occasion of the marriage of Marie-Antoinette, which cul¬
minated in the crushing and suffocation of 132 people, it was a long time
before Marie-Antoinette came back to Paris. The death of Louis XV in
1774 took place in an atmosphere of indifference and contempt, as noted
in scrupulous detail by S. Hardy in his Journal.6 It was already apparent at
the time of his illness that hearts were scarcely moved, and that ‘the
indifference of people of all estates was very noticeable, which was in
complete contrast with the much-remembered demonstrations of affection
shown towards him in 1744 in the course of his journey to Nancy where
he had fallen seriously ill.’7 Hardy also notes that in 1757, at the time of
Damien’s assassination attempt, 600 masses were celebrated in Paris as
against a mere three in 1774, and a number of people were arrested each
day for expounding rather too freely on the King’s illness. The police
intervention might have been to encourage caution but it is more likely
that the number of discontented had grown. One of the stones going
around was that a man in the Rue Saint-Honore had said to one of his
friends, ‘Why should I be bothered? We couldn’t be any worse off than we
are.’8 On 11 May, the day after the death of the King, the general opinion
was that ‘far from being affected by the death of this Prince, the people
welcomed a change of master with an almost indecent degree of satisfac¬
tion; and that although the old King had been naturally good, over the
years he had unfortunately become the sad plaything of his inordinate
passion for women recommended to him by wicked courtiers interested in
distracting him with a view to gaining more power for themselves.’9
Contemporaries like Barbier, Mercier, Retif, Hardy, some thinkers and
those close to the King were all familiar with the business of interpreting
signs from the people but in fact they very rarely managed to grasp the
different levels of awareness amidst the crowd, nor did they understand
the desire not to appear as an undifferentiated whole. The crowd was the
 Invitations to the Crowds 177
crowd in the same way that the people were the people. That there were
dealings and transactions between an infinite number of hierarchies within
that ensemble remained a closed book up until the day when there would
be a specific outbreak of unrest which served to clarify some aspects of
these differences more precisely.
This was the case, for example, in October 1781 when the festivities for
the birth of the Dauphin were in full swing. Lenoir, the Lieutenant-General
of Police, freed all the prostitutes imprisoned in Saint-Martin and Hardy
relates the incidents which led to this amnesty:

When the women came to the magistrates in a deputation to offer their

thanks and to take part in the public rejoicing, the fishwives and girls
who were there when they arrived were unanimous in saying that they
did not want anything to do with whores and harlots and demanded a
separate district for them to do their dancing in. And the cry that went
up on this occasion was that there were still some standards.10

Festival time was a compartmentalized space whose individual shapes

and separate outlines corresponded to the images and ideas the population
had of itself and its own heterogeneity.

Scenario

In complete contrast with the royal festivities, and yet complementary to

them, was the whole scenario of punishment in public decreed by royal
authority for those who had transgressed against it. Just like a Te Deum
which summoned the people to attend its performance, it depended on
them to reinforce its significance, and was by its very nature a part of
public spectacle.
The execution of public punishment was not, as one might easily
believe, exclusively a display of death. In the eighteenth century punish¬
ments were many and various, and essentially designed for maintaining a
hold over the body and, with one or two exceptions, only making any
sense because everyone could see them. Crimes such as begging, prostitu¬
tion, petty theft and other misdemeanours and offences might warrant the
iron’ collar, the pillory, the placard, the branding-iron, galley-slavery or
carting-round. Capital punishment, although less common, was part and
parcel of all this.
Pain and punishment were on show almost daily and whether it was on
the square or at the crossroads, it was all part of the scenery for Parisians,
coming in the same category as street-theatre, setting up stall, job-hunting
at the Place de Greve, arguing on the doorstep of the cabaret and trooping
 178 Crowds

off to the well to fetch water. It took place wherever there was life and
was, in short, both exemplary and legitimate.
The death penalty had a full part in this legitimacy and exemplariness,
crimes being defined in relation to it and not the other way about,
according to Bernier in his lecture in 1719 on the legislation of Louis XIV
where he states that ‘the capital offence is, more often than not, considered
to be that crime for which the usual punishment is naturally death’.11 It
was legitimate because it embodied the ancient right of the sword, the
divine right of authority, the common right of all nations and the respected
tradition of all. It existed as the fundamental proof of royal power and
evidence of its might. The King, and only the King, had the power to
appropriate the rights of life and death over his subjects and to deny them
the same rights over their peers. In order that order and tranquillity might
remain the guarantors of the royal authority, it was necessary that the
monopoly of supreme violence belong to the King along with its obligatory
converse, the right of mercy, which was all the more important for its
constant reminder that death, like life, was a mere event at the disposal of
the royal personage.
The death penalty had three aims: to get rid of ‘the wicked’, to avenge
the victim and, most importantly, to deter others from crime by the
horrors of the punishment. Its harshness was intended to make an im¬
pression on the minds of the people and in that respect it kept company
with the rest of the body of royal ceremonial whose goal was also to stamp
the mark of its authority and bounty on a heedful public. Thus, the strands
of the social fabric were drawn together around this force which gave and
withheld in turn, never delegating, merely endowing the people with the
possibility of seeing some of the fragments, so that it might reconstitute
them writ large in its imagination.12 Such daily or weekly shows of royal
strength were intended to provoke submission and consent, and not only
as a result of the whole spectacular show, whether celebratory or punitive,
but also thanks to the work of the imagination developing around it. ‘It is
the power of the imagination itself that lends power to the discourse of
the powerful and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the field of
custom and tradition where the whole arbitrary power of the masters is
internalized as though it were required thinking.’13
For the execution of capital punishment to assume its full dimension, it
had to be celebrated by means of an intricate ritual of signs and symbols
whose repetition was to leave no room for any other thoughts other than
those offered for contemplation. As with festivities, the purpose of the
execution was to perpetuate the alliance between the people and the King,
with punishment being only one of the more extreme objects of the
exercise. The unchanging nature of the ritual was intended above all to fix
the significance of this act firmly in the minds of the onlookers and public
 Invitations to the Crowds 179
before whose eyes it was taking place, for here at the very heart of this
utopia of power and authority, there was to be nothing which might
permit any deviation from its initial intent and primary meaning. And thus
it was essential that ‘history’ should not insert itself between the punish¬
ment that had been ordained and the body of the people. By ‘history’, one
should understand all kind of contingent reality, such as the eruption of
feelings other than those of commiseration or of a redemptive nature or
the welling up of feelings of identification with the victim which might
cause any deviation from the obligatory sequence of punishment: royal
will—repentance—submission and public order. By ‘history’ one also has to
understand a personalization of the event such as might give rise to a
certain number of relationships and connections between the social and
political climate, the crime committed and the seriousness of the penalty
inflicted. The ritualization of the death penalty also required one to see no
difference where differences did in fact exist. Given the arbitrary dis¬
pensation of the death penalty, it was essential that a domestic theft should
not be deemed less culpable in the eyes of the public than a parricide
or a rape, for example. In that spacious wasteland created by the royal
authority and the supreme punishment, absolutely nothing had to interfere
with the acts committed there, not even a hierarchy.
This sacrificial system, used by the monarchy as one of its instruments
of power, can only owe its explanation to the individual and collective
religious acts taking place at the same time. The participation of the priest,
the ritual admission of guilt and amende honorable,14 the rites of con¬
fession, prayers and the Salve Regina intoned by the crowd at the point
where the executioner made ready to inflict death, were the sorts of gesture
designed to hasten the reconciliation of the guilty man with God and
through him reconciliation for those participating in the sacrificial death
of the victim by virtue of being there.1’ By admitting his guilt, the
condemned man (the ‘Victime emissaire [scapegoat] of M. Bee ) was
taking on the guilt of all, and by being thus immolated as penitent and
martyr, achieved a posteriori his only means of social reintegration.
Just as the King had the miraculous power of curing scrofula,17 he also
had the power of offering salvation by expiating guilt.
We are dealing here with a particular kind of alchemy which owed its
success partly to the fixed nature of the event and to the absolute refusal to
allow the intervention of any possible space between the punitive act and
its reception by the people. The whole edifice of execution could only
stand up if, based around it, there were a quasi-historic certainty that
nothing should be allowed to impede or divert it. It was a certainty which
presumed that the monarch, as revealed in this display of punitive activity,
could be none other than the very image of perpetual gift, bounty and
justice.
180 Crowds

It was from this perspective, that is, the refusal of all political thought
or interpretation of events, that a lengthy treatise and a massive amount of
official action were elaborately formulated the day after the assassination
attempt by Damiens in 1757, with the intention of isolating the crime
as an act of insanity. Damiens had to be mad... the people could not
possibly be harbouring a regicide in its bosom ... it was simply impossible
for the King to be killed. Derangement was in fact the only possible
explanation of such a crime, for the death of the King was unthinkable, in
the literal sense of the word.1* In the masses and ceremonies invoking the
King’s recovery, there was much rejoicing at the improvement in his
health, and constant entreaties were made to God asking Him to pardon
the awful defilement this monster had inflicted. The newspapers and
official journals only reported popular consternation and dismay and kept
quiet about the crime itself. It would have been too risky to do too much
probing; the causes of the murder attempt had to remain unknown at all
costs and it was therefore essential to avoid any speculation by politicians
who might be rather too keen to bring it to the centre of debate in the
partement with particular reference to the Jansemst dispute.19 From that
point on, censorship was at its height and no interpretation of any such
kind was to come out. Blindness was obligatory and blocks and stopgaps
were imposed to prevent the news travelling through any obvious breaches,
or by more devious routes. History, in short, was denied and forbidden
from intruding, for history would only come along and provide meaning,
which might overturn the only possible meaning there could be — that
an attempt on the King’s life was unthinkable. It was constitutionally
impossible! The resort to every possible means of denial meant that all the
odds were against the intervention of any sort of thought between the
monarchy, its representation and its public. One must not forget that even
to have considered, let alone to have carried out an attempt on the life of
Louis XVI was the occasion of an unprecedented traumatic shock.

When the revolutionaries killed the King by means of the Law and its
formulations they found themselves caught absolutely in the vertiginous
grip of evil. They set right against right, order against order and the
world seemed turned upside down... as in those Shakespearian plays
where the death of the king is presaged by sinister events such as torrents
of blood and plagues of toads, or the sight of cemeteries disgorging their
contents to reveal the ghastly faces of their corpses.20

The only ‘ghastly face’ one was allowed to see in 1757 was that of
Damiens expiring in the course of an unspeakable punishment which had
been legitimized by official decree and which inevitably surpassed all
previous expression of royal might.
 Invitations to the Crowds 181
Having said that, however, it would be something of a surprise to find
that the model execution or at any rate one faithful to the ideas of
the monarchy had ever really existed. Nevertheless it had functioned
effectively with the consent of thinkers and jurists up until the end of the
seventeenth century, when some doubt came to be cast over its legitimacy
as well as concern over its cruelty. The debate widened with Montesquieu,21
and culminated in 1764 with the appearance of Beccaria’s ‘Traite des delits
et des peines\22 Criticism was both more thoughtful, wider ranging and
more dynamic and had within its sights the whole range of criminal
legislation with its injustices, arbitrariness and barbarism. Jurists were
divided, but the majority of them agreed with Beccaria and the statement
with which he prefaced his book: 'What I have chosen to examine in this
work is that ill-defined code which is nothing more than the monstrous
product of the most barbaric of centuries.’ And thus developed the idea
according to which the penal law should be the reflection of collective
sovereignty constructed on the basis of a contractual relationship with
one’s peers. At the same time there were reflections on what was wrong
with execution in the chronicles of events made by those who were there.
It was felt that witnessing the punishment was not noble, and that men
were depraved by watching such horror close at hand. Nor was the
unhealthy, and at times bestial, curiosity of a people considered a legitimate
support for the authority of the monarchy. Accounts of executions dwelled
at length on the attitude of the people, whose complaints and rumblings of
discontent were frequently heard; occasionally there would be outrage and
revolt, with the guard being obliged to maintain order. Any incident could
turn into an outburst of popular emotion, for taking place at the foot of
the scaffold was a history of violence and passion which could so easily
be turned against the current order. The glory of the punishment might
be transformed into ugliness by the people who might appropriate that
moment and make it their story, make history in fact, and thereby pervert
the sacred meaning given to death by the King.
Philosophers and historians have reflected on such changes in emotions
and sensibilities and all of them in their turn have offered their own
particular mode of interpretation. Norbert Elias (1939) and Michel
Foucault (1974) have placed particular emphasis on such phenomena.
Elias has explained how a change in the social structures brought about a
corresponding change in emotional patterns, so that from the point where
there were rival social groups each contending for a small portion of
power within the social edifice that had grown up between the King and
his people, the whole execution performance was liable to arouse a good
many reactions which were threatening for the monarchy. Foucault,
researching the shift in emphasis of the punishment from an assault on the
victim’s person to sequestration of his soul, stressed the importance of
 182 Crowds

punishment as a social and political function such that the method of

punishment was not the result of a point of law or an indicator of the
social structures but a technique of the power process. When the violence
of the King met with that of the people, a transformation of the techniques
of power was needed, giving rise to another politics by which to hedge the
soul about and to insert the powers of punishment the more profoundly
within the social body as a whole.

The horrors of punishment, or ‘barbarism ’?

‘The populace left shops and workshops and gathered around the scaf¬
fold.’25 In the eighteenth century, chroniclers and contemporaries castigated
the crowd for its fondness for public executions and punishments and
subsequent historians have to a large extent taken up these allegations,
describing the crowd as insensitive, cruel and indeed barbaric. There is no
one who has really enquired in any depth into this alleged barbarity and
the theme still recurs today. In spite of all possible attempts to explain
changes in sensibilities, there is nothing which really explains what this so-
called barbaric encounter between a people and a victim actually consisted
of. But within this problematic relationship, it is nevertheless possible to
sort out and identify some of the elements conducive to a clearer definition
of popular behaviour.

There is precious little difference between one account of an execution

or another.24 We find the crowd hurrying along early in the morning,
occasionally taking the trouble to hire a window that afforded a better
view of the spectacle. Then there would be a long wait for the scaffold to
arrive and no one would leave the scene until the whole display of agony
was over. Chroniclers took the crowds’ readiness to be present at punish¬
ments as a sign of their grossness and coarseness. They did, however, note
the presence of people of ‘quality’ mixed in with the others, and this
amalgamation consequently embarrassed their attempts to attribute any
single definition to so composite a crowd, reproducing as it did all the
usual social stratifications.
Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s description of the executioner, for instance,
reveals some rather muddled thinking, for he says that ‘for the lowest class
of people, the figure of the executioner was a familiar one’, and that ‘for
the grosser sections of the population who went along in their droves to
watch such dreadful spectacles, he was their grand tragic actor’. Not only
they, but even polite society was drawn in by inexplicable feelings of
curiosity whenever the crime or the criminal was out of the ordinary’.25
Any hasty equations between the death of those condemned for the public
 Invitations to the Crowds 183
good and ‘polite society’ who came to watch them die, are highly suspect;
it would seem that all executions had a very wide public.
It was these same contemporaries who decried such spectacles as these,
in which they saw baseness and barbarism reflected, who were the first to
find themselves a place and take part. Some of them were particularly fond
of describing what they had seen on the day of the execution in minute
detail and with a lavish sprinkling of anecdotes. There are torrid accounts
of the facial expressions, mannerisms and posture of those condemned or
the state of their hair. It is all done with a gloating kind of curiosity which
these writers seemed incapable of discerning as a contradiction; for while
they castigated the vile behaviour of the mob they were actively indulging
in descriptions of an atrocious kind themselves, and yet this dubious
coexistence was never called into question.
Louis-Sebastien Mercier seems to have had no problem in handling this
type of contradiction; in fact he did not really give it much thought, as the
various sequences in his account of the execution of the famous Desrues26
would seem to testify. He begins by protesting that the Place de Greve was
too small to accommodate everyone, and calling for improvements, saying
that ‘executions should be held elsewhere’.2 Besides, it did the spectators
no good to have their noses right up against all the ‘revolting paraphernalia
of an execution as that was utterly grotesque and totally unworthy of the
majesty of the law’. In short, he feels that a larger space would make
the whole business more dignified and seems to be in agreement with the
performance itself. He then shifts the argument into another gear and
berates both polite society and the vile rabble for having run along together
to watch Desrues die. ‘And we think we are civilized!’ he expostulates.28
He concludes his sketch with an angry condemnation of the carrying out
of executions at night by torchlight on the grounds that executions were
only of any value if they were carried out in full light in front of a public
which was wide awake and fully aware of what was going on. If you can
spare him the publicity, then why not also spare him his life?’29 Here he
restates the traditional model of punishment which only attains its funda¬
mental purity by means of exposure to public scrutiny, and thus his
request for publicity and spectacle rejoins the first part of his argument
concerning the limitations imposed by the location, which thus contradicts
his opinions on the baseness and bloodiness of justice.
One finds in these authors what is in fact a very modern trait, namely
involvement in one’s own times whilst denigrating the greater part of its
forms and traditions. They made sure that they were at the executions and
provided full and detailed descriptions, but at the same time they were
indignant at seeing all the crowds on the move for the very same reason.
They seem to have found it impossible to keep any real distance between
themselves and this kind of spectacle. It is something which needs further
184 Crowds

research and an attempt to interpret this attitude as being symptomatic of

the population as a whole is required.
In fact, is there not evidence here of the very real difficulty of separating
punishment from everything else that was going on in the street? There
were so many official and unofficial events requiring one to be an onlooker.
That they were taking place beneath everyone’s eyes and that they invaded
the street with their presence to such an extent meant that it would have
required a deliberate expression of political will together with a considered
and generally accepted collective refusal in order not to participate and to
withdraw physically from what the execution was putting on view. Not
only was retreat a physical impossibility, but recourse to such an attitude
was also unthinkable. Even to have considered isolating public execution
as an attestation of tyranny and to have chosen instead to make it the
manifestation of opposition to the established order would have shown
that the relationship with the social machine was close to breaking-point.
A language by which one might express consent or disapproval did exist
however, and it was used, whether this was in the general rumblings or
shouts of the crowd or the rude signs and gestures made at the executioner
or priest. There were also the tears of anger and pity or of heartbreak and
satiation. Such emotions were predictable and the police were well aware
of this, with the effect that the ranks of men from the Guard and the
Watch were regularly reinforced. But to be absent, to refuse collectively to
be there was impossible to envisage for the very reason that everyone, of
necessity, lived on the public stage.
One could almost argue that there was in fact no actual displacement
for an execution, but that what was taking place was an act of an
existentialist nature, something quite normal - and no more than the living
out with others of given events there on the very spot where the fabric of
social reality was being created. At times of great drought or deluge, off
one went in a long procession carrying the reliquary of St Genevieve; at
the feast of St John there would be the ritual burning of a few cats and
general merrymaking round the fire and at the feast of the Virgin, Count
d’Osier’s statue would be paraded around the streets of Paris to annoy the
Protestants. On the tomb of Deacon Paris men and women in a state of
trance would harangue the crowds who had gathered there to listen, with
lengthy testimonies to their faith; straw was spread out on Mondays in the
Place de Greve to make it more comfortable to sit down and listen to all
the business involved in engaging labour. In the Rue de Buci, a purse-
snatcher was put in the pillory, whilst at the Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve,
a young washerwoman gave birth to a stillborn child in the middle of the
street and, in her distress, put him in her barrow to show him to the
district police commissioner and so avoid being accused of infanticide; at
the Place de Greve, brigands and highwaymen were executed. Given all of
 Invitations to the Crowds 185
that and the fact that social reality was so ingrained with the constant flow
of public displays and popular reaction, how could one possibly imagine
deserting the Place de Greve on the day of an execution?
The massive attendance at public executions is borne out by the evi¬
dence and to suggest the contrary would be utopian; but this still does not
mean that it can be classified as indifference. Historians have from time to
time interpreted this massive attendance at punishments as evidence of the
familiarity that contemporaries seem to have had with death: familiarity,
indifference, insensitivity — literature and historical works abound in these
kinds of assumptions and they are never questioned. Admittedly they do
keep at bay, and quite rightly, all those anachronistic value judgements
about the ultimate ‘savagery’ of our ancestors but they give way to many
ambiguities and stereotypes which adorn even the greatest works. Was it
not on the basis of this theme of familiarity with death which verged
on the indifferent that we saw the construction of that rather curious
intellectual framework concerning the absence of maternal feeling in the
eighteenth century and its impact on the culture of the nineteenth? The
memories of our ancestors were supposed to have been so stuffed full of
accumulated deaths that they finished up with a ‘mentality’ where human
life counted for precious little and this was the reason (according to this
kind of thinking) why they had no problem at all in being part of the
whole show’ of public execution, the spectacle of death being one of the
best shared things in the world.
If this had truly been the case, why then would the act of capital
punishment with its highly complex and elaborate rites of supplication
have been at the centre of one of the most fundamental mechanisms of the
monarchy? What then was the point of constructing such a costly ritual
with such extraordinary pomp, if it was all played out against a back¬
ground of collective detachment?
Certainly death was omnipresent, in the countryside as well as in the
town, and it actively made its presence felt in the rhythm of accidents at
work, for example, or epidemics and street violence, carriage accidents
and incurable diseases. Graveyards afforded an open exhibition of the
centrality of its existence and the number of children abandoned on street
corners revealed its threat. Death had a public character. One could hardly
ignore the death of one’s neighbour, for instance, when it was customary
to place the corpse before the entrance of the dwelling with passers-by
slackening their pace and making the sign of the cross as they went past.
Yes, of course, death was manifest, as was the sight of hardship and
physical deformity. Sociability and neighbourliness were founded on this,
the utterly discernible nature of the whole social body and its vicissitudes.
Such ups and downs were there for everyone to read, in keeping with the
whole uninterrupted rhythm of the give and take of urban life.
186 Crowds

Death was everywhere and there was certainly a ‘familiarity’ with it; of
that there is no doubt. But how did the idea arise that ‘familiarity’ could
be linked so easily with ‘indifference’? There is even a dissonance in the
juxtaposition of the terms. To be familiar with someone implies, quite
rightly, the existence of privileged ties with that person which is indeed a
far cry from indifference and it is a word which suggests a whole range of
intense feelings bearing no relation at all to lack of interest.
Thus as the condemned man faced his death it was quite clearly a
matter of anything but indifference; in this respect, the eighteenth century
contains within itself a formidable number of tensions whose explanation
casts quite a different light on the execution accounts. ‘The inexplicable
curiosity of polite society and the vulgar populace’ referred to by Louis-
Sebastien Mercier is the result of the paradoxical and contradictory
coexistence between the fear and horror of death and a real taste for it.
These two emotions which were expressed publicly on the Place de Greve
each reaffirmed the other in a way that was so complex that it exhausted
all attempts at explanation, with the result that contemporaries preferred
to describe the phenomenon as ‘inexplicable’. It was in fact ‘inexplicable’
because any such coexistence was unspeakable; one was only allowed to
talk about the horror, which by the end of the century had invaded
everything and was clearly visible. The public cried openly, broke down
in tears and were moved to revolt. On several occasions Hardy relates
moments of great despair when the signs and signals emanating from the
crowd left very little room for any doubt about their feelings.
There was an old tradition, for instance, whereby an appeal for
clemency might be granted if a woman happened to shout out a proposal
of marriage to the prisoner on the way to his death and occasionally
women’s voices could be heard calling out above the crowd to save the life
of the prospective victim. Here and there people closed their eyes or pulled
their children out of the way. One priest took ill in the middle of the
crowd and another collapsed with a fever simply as a result of hearing
the news that a man had been hanged for his part in the corn riots of
1775.

11 May 1775.... No one was allowed into the Place de Greve during
the execution and the guard kept bayonets fixed ... A few days after this
execution, the mother of one of those who had been thus punished went
off to see the priest of the parish of Saint-Eustache where her son had
lodged and she said to him, ‘Sir, if you had been there my son would not
have died’. The priest was so overcome that he was struck down on the
spot with a fever and he fell ill. That the news had such an impact was
confirmation of the good-heartedness of this pastor who was held in
such great esteem by his parishioners.30
 Invitations to the Crowds 187
Some individuals who were rather more bold or perhaps had more
conviction attempted to sabotage the structure of the gallows itself.

Two hours before the departure for the Place de Greve [the hanging in
question was for burglary], a chap of about 50 climbed up the ladder
onto the gallows and took out the iron pins which held the various parts
of it together and shouted out that they were for sale. The apprentice
carpenter who had been put in charge of keeping an eye on this instru¬
ment of execution fought with him to get back the pins. The man said
that ‘he wanted to have the pleasure of watching the hangman cut a
merry caper’.31

In addition to the horror and indignation which came with the dawning
of political awareness there was also the horror pure and simple which
made the sight of death intolerable from whatever point of view. On
26 May 1773, four thieves were due to be broken live at the Porte
Saint-Antoine but ‘they were not executed on the main concourse of the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine in front of the grocer’s house because the lady of
the house had been delivered of a child just a short time before’.
Fear and dread of death was a constituent part of the society but one
did not become accustomed to it simply because it erupted onto the scene
so frequently. Sudden deaths (disappearance in the course of migration,
drownings, accidents at work and violent deaths) all had a traumatic effect
on friends and neighbours alike. People were horrified and scandalized by
this kind of sudden and unexpected death which snatched people away
from their loved ones before they could prepare themselves for it with
them. Backs would be turned on corpses that had been laid out in this way
without first having received reconciliation through the religious symbols
of the Church. These were dreadful deaths because ‘they upset the usual
patterns of consolation as set out by the Church’.32
Even if one were prepared for it, death still provoked feelings of grief
and revulsion; and the death of a child, a spouse or a loved one are
recurrent themes in literature as well as in correspondence and personal
journals. The fear of it was so intense that although medical progress
offered some hope of rolling back its frontiers, at the same time it also
provoked near panic because of fears of being ‘buried alive . If the indica¬
tions of death could be deceptive, for instance, how was one to distinguish
those that were precise from those that were merely approximate?
Two accounts of an execution, one by L.-S. Mercier and the other by
S. Hardy, portray this fear that Death, not having quite finished the job,
might have the last laugh:

About 17 years ago there was a very attractive-looking young peasant

girl who went into the service of a man corrupted by every vice known
 188 Crowds

to the big city. [A number of serious circumstances had conspired to

bring her to the gallows.]
Things went badly for her as it was the hangman’s son’s first attempt.
A surgeon had bought the body and it was taken over to his house. He
wanted to get to work with the scalpel that same night but he became
aware that there was still some warmth in the body. The blade fell from
his hands and he put the girl he was about to dissect into his bed.33

For his part, Hardy tells how one evening following an execution, the
barking of a dog at the Cemetery of the Innocents stirred the district to
revolt as they were convinced that the dead man was still alive.34
Fear and dread of death was a fact; and contrary to received thinking,
it would seem that it was all the more terrifying the more obsessive and
invasive its presence and the more one was unable to take a step without
catching sight of its hideous visage. But because death clung to life in a
way that was so unbearable one had to defend oneself against it no matter
what, and it was here in this place of anguish that one finds the meeting
of the waters where the taste for death sprang up.
‘Death, fascinating and seductive’:35 the taste for death is a difficult
subject to explore because it flagrantly transgresses so many taboos.
Perhaps one should begin by asking whether it was not precisely this
paradoxical encounter between the mystery of dying and the permanent
spectacle of death that effectively sustained such interest. No amount of
bodies laid out in front of buildings nor the vast number of children
deceased between nought and four years could stop the questions of what
it was to die - that one unique and solitary act which proximity to it could
never explain. This is what Mercier is trying to say when he talks about
the people gathering together on the Place de Greve to ‘see how the patient
would accomplish this grand act of dying’. At the heart of that slow
ritualization of agony and the prolonged gaze of the crowd upon it there
resided without a doubt, the desire to taste and see, to penetrate the
mystery of what it was to lose one’s life.
When the chroniclers noted this strange impulse which they classed as
‘barbaric’ and when they discerned some degree of relish in the attitude of
their contemporaries, they always held it at a distance so as not to carry
even the tiniest fraction of responsibility for it themselves. No one wanted
to recognize in himself or herself that ‘unmentionable’ bit of the truth and
so they all kept it at the furthest possible distance in, it would appear, one
of two ways: either by transferring it onto ‘the other’, the stranger in the
midst, radically different and usually ‘woman’; or else they described the
phenomenon as being part of an ancient heritage which a progressive
civilization had a duty to see off.
 Invitations to the Crowds 189
The cruel woman and the Iroquois
The women went along in their droves to see Damiens being punished;
and they were the last to avert their eyes from this horrible scene.16

The most delicate of women and some of the daintiest ladies from the
Court. .. turned it into a great holiday, like going to watch some grand
display or spectacle.17

None of the women who were there (and there were a good many of
them, some of whom were among the prettiest in Paris), none of them
withdrew from their windows, whereas the majority of the men could
not bear to watch such a spectacle.18

In short, the men did not lose sight of the fear and horror of the scene they
were presented with, whereas the women saw it as a great opportunity for
a very heady kind of pleasure. The year 1757 was not the only time that
women were castigated in this way; the theme of female cruelty stuck fast,
as did that of their unbridled violence whenever there was a revolt; but
one has to look beyond this traditional formula and examine not only its
validity but also the way in which it allowed the taste for death in men to
be concealed.
Women, they say, looked on at the spectacle of death more than men. It
is certainly true that where riots and revolts were concerned, the women
played an active part, especially if these happened to be connected with
the price of grain, the high cost of bread or the abduction of children.
Woman’s flesh knew more intimately than that of man the mystery of
what it was ‘to live’; her privileged relationship to the child and therefore
to survival itself permeated her being through and through. Sometimes the
gift of life and the rapid onset of death became confused in her because she
so often gave birth to children who were to die only a short while later. It
was this, her sullen and violent work, which shaped her body and her
spirit, and this strange amalgamation between her reproductive nature and
the significant level of infant mortality that gave her a direct hold on the
permanent mysteries of life and death.
If a woman were thus capable of feeling within herself both the good¬
ness of nature as well as its maleficence, she then became, in the eyes of
men, the one who most easily combined within herself some of the strands
of the current thinking of the period whose self-styled harbinger was the
Marquis de Sade.1^ For him, the world of Man and the world of Nature
were enemies because Nature sought to annihilate everything in order to
revel all the more in her ability to give new birth to everything. Crime,
punishment, violence and the erotic were some of the ways of participating
in this universal destruction and of thus assuring the continuity of Nature.
190 Crowds

Death was then imaginary because in the decomposition of the corpses the
processes of life were at work. Man had to adapt to Nature and not vice
versa, and hence his great delight and pleasure in communing with her in
the paroxysms of her unyielding will.
Men have quite rightly distanced themselves from this hopeless outlook
to which de Sade’s thinking led but at the same time they were incapable
of, or horrified at, having to admit that in some sombre recess within
themselves, there was a part which was linked to that intellectual and
moral reality; and so they preferred instead to see this cruelty and barbarism
as something which belonged to the female side and they compounded
their observations with the conviction that women entertained particular
ties and links with death.40 Such a conclusion meant that one need not
entirely reject the notion of barbarism in human beings but that one could
instead situate it in the female, which understandably raised a considerable
number of questions for the doctors and thinkers of the century.
Nor were women included in the legitimate or public forms of violence,
as they took no part in wars and were not involved in conscription. And
so, except in specific cases of criminal responsibility, they were more the
spectators of death than its purveyors, in contrast with the warriors brave
and true who had no need to legitimate their actions. She, the onlooker,
however, had to answer for the directness of her gaze, which neither her
public nor her social role could justify. The difference was an important
one for it was saying, in other words, that it was one thing to be familiar
with death in private - that was a recognized fact - but that this did not
entitle one to adopt an attitude in public that was more like a man’s.
However, having recognized this attitude, the men were then able to lay it
squarely at the door of the women and thus disburden themselves of any
guilt in this respect.

At the same time, one not only finds the expression of some unease at
seeing women give way to cruelty but it was becoming increasingly hard to
understand the enthusiasm of polite society for the brutality of execution,
which ought not to have appealed to anyone but ‘the filthy rabble’.41
This visible communion between polite society and the common people
gave cause for concern. ‘And we think we are civilised!’ exclaims L.-S.
Mercier in amazement when expostulating on the death penalty. The facts
that executions were still being carried out in this way and were watched
with enthusiasm by such a mixture of the public, were good enough
reasons to doubt the degree of civilization of a nation in which current
debate revolved around the idea of progress and which prided itself on its
image compared with that of barbaric peoples in far-off lands. Progress,
civilization and barbarism were the standards by which contemporaries
measured themselves with acute anxiety and from this angle it is interesting
 Invitations to the Crowds 191
to study what is now a well-known text published in 1724 by a Jesuit
missionary, J.-F. Lafitau, and entitled Habits and Customs of the American
Savages Compared with the Practices of Fortner Times.41 It was a book
which enjoyed considerable success at the time and in it Lafitau drew a
parallel between the cultures and traditions of antiquity and those of the
Iroquois. He demonstrated to the world that the Greeks had also been
savages and yet these very same creatures were revered by philosophers,
naturalists and thinkers who made constant reference to them in their
books. Furthermore, he draws comparisons between the French people
and the Iroquois, most notably in a chapter devoted to the ‘Punishment of
slaves in the nations of Northern America’. As well as precise detail about
their interminable punishments, such as the roasting alive of their slaves,
Father Lafitau punctuates his descriptions with comments and opinions
and makes several comparisons between the methods of the West and of
France.
The Iroquois punishment was horrific. The torture that was inflicted
went on endlessly, with each person present seated on a traditional rush
mat, calmly smoking a pipe or chatting. He could decide whenever he
liked to intervene in the punishment of the condemned person, taking
‘pleasure in burning him on any part of his body he might choose; in the
end, everyone took part indiscriminately’. There was no hurry: the slow¬
ness was an integral part of the ritual and the punishment. It was a bloody
tragedy which continued long after the death of the victim. This all
provoked considerable emotion in the author, who writes, ‘This scene took
place in circumstances of such enormous barbarity that the very thought of
it makes me shudder’, and a little later he goes on to say that these people
‘perpetrate horrors [and] have no more humanity than the wild beasts’.
Thus, according to traditional modes of thought which governed the
thinking of almost all the chroniclers of the day, we have the Iroquois
relegated to bestiality. All those who were neither learned nor bourgeois,
or who did not belong to the dominant elites, were ranked along with the
animals; any thinker observing what he believed to be someone different
from himself was quick to call him or her an animal, be they people,
crowd, woman, foreigner, savage, negro or Jew. They all provided the
lawyers, doctors and thinkers with ample scope for developing a fairly
comprehensive bestiary.
But then suddenly one finds the barbarism of the Iroquois confronted
with a reality which is quite surprising and which confounds the author
and causes him to search deeply within himself for the answers. He notes
that the French treated the Iroquois prisoners with equal barbarity and
indeed, he has to say, with a refinement of cruelty which even they
themselves could not have surpassed. In his attempt to justify their actions,
Lafitau resorts to a political bias, arguing that as a result of this ‘rigorous’
192 Crowds
treatment, the Iroquois were obliged to submit. For, he says, ‘Even the
most mild of peoples are obliged to go beyond the bounds of their natural
gentleness if they believe it would only serve as a pretext for their
barbaric neighbours to become more proud and intractable.’ Hence French
barbarism was not natural, merely a political response and thus one could
not call the French barbarians. The most one might say of them was that
they behaved ‘badly’ (Lafitau’s expression), thus banishing once and for all
any other suggestion, although there is some semblance of a doubt when
he says that he never knew quite what to say to the savages who criticized
the French for their ferocity for, ‘it was such an established fact that we
did not know how to reply.’
Thus any face-to-face encounter of the French —Iroquois type would be
one of barbarism versus bad form; anything else required silence, for there
was too much risk in giving a name to it and too much danger in putting
down another adjective which might alter the meaning and cause one to
shudder.
Lafitau, a careful observer, pushes his comparison between the two
civilizations even further in a desire to ‘do justice’ to the Iroquois and to
see his own people through their eyes. The Iroquois had told him in fact of
their surprise at seeing the Europeans fight each other in duels or destroy
each other over some misunderstanding, or a point of honour, insult or
wrong word. How could they be so little concerned about their own
countrymen who had been killed by their enemies and find it perfectly
acceptable to live with such indifference towards one another? For the
Iroquois, the brutality of their punishments was reserved only for their
enemies and they did not fight amongst themselves. To do otherwise
would have been considered outrageous. Lafitau has no comment to make
and once again replies with silence: ‘There was nothing one could say to
that, and they were shocked.’ No other conclusion was suggested nor any
means of pursuing an argument that was bound to end up at some point
by attributing a measure of equality between the savage and the French¬
man, which would obviously have been considered inconceivable. Hence
the silence, which was not a confession but a response to the unthinkable.
Father Lafitau’s writings are only one illustration of a whole host of
feelings it was not possible to read about or speak of, including for
example barbarism and the fascination with death. Should one become
aware of them it was essential to project their existence quickly onto
others rather than on oneself and, in this case, female cruelty or Iroquois
barbarity could provide a suitable vehicle.
But perhaps the truth lay elsewhere. Understanding this dread of death
and yet the taste for it might be overstretching or exhausting the imagin¬
ation, but the place where they so obviously met up was, in fact, at the
execution. It was a tension which might give way to revolt or open up
 Invitations to the Crowds 193
the desire for revenge. The observer of death would himself die, as
well he knew, and here in this incontrovertible destiny which so visibly
threatened, anguish and rejection were embedded and thus, as Michel
Foucault was to point out, violence could rebound, and as Norbert Elias
has shown, behaviour could change. In social and political structures that
were losing their coherence it was no longer possible to find execution
inoffensive and thus the displacement of the taste for death was made
possible by its reincarnation in the form of movements of resistance and
revolt.
There were two high points in the execution ritual which went right to
the very heart of this tension between the horror and the seduction of the
whole affair and reactivated feelings of allegiance to the victim. Firstly,
there was the nuit blanche [‘sleepless night’], then the exposure of the
corpse, on which subjects much has been said by witnesses; copious notes
and comments by S. Hardy and Procurator Gueulette are also outstanding
in this area.

The nuit blanche at the Place de Greve

At 11 o’clock on the evening of 16 April 1775, a man guilty of highway
robbery was broken at the Place de Greve.

On arrival there he asked if he could go to the Hotel de Ville. He was

not executed until 11 o’clock at night, by which time he had sent for
various people and had eaten an omelette, thereby proving the firmness
of his resolve right up until the very last moment, for they say that he
had even wanted to get undressed by himself. He was strangled before
any blows were delivered.43

It was a familiar scene. On arrival at the place of execution, the

condemned man could refuse to mount the steps leading him to his
punishment and demand instead to go to the Hotel de Ville to meet with
his judges once again and make a fuller confession, giving the names of
new accomplices or making interminable statements which held time in
suspense. Such time as this snatched back from death was scrupulously
respected by crowd and judges alike; secretaries took down the words of
the condemned man, whilst sergeants made it their business to go off and
look for these newly denounced accomplices on the spot so that they could
be brought before him immediately. Confessions and questions came one
after the other in this night of last-minute admissions which was also
known as the nuit blanched4 The public would remain there, endlessly
waiting for the guilty man to emerge. If it took a long time, the punish-
194 Crowds

ment would take place in the light of torches and his cries would be
accompanied by the flickering of their flames.
Commentators have always been fascinated by these last tragic moments
salvaged from death and they made every effort to find out the details.
Gueulette, the King’s Procurator, was very well placed to do this, and it is
from him that we have the most precise information on those hours
snatched back in this way from the jaws of death.
For a few hours the world was turned upside down. The condemned
man became the master whilst the judges attached the greatest importance
to these desperate measures. Everyone was bent on doing his bidding: they
lent him their ear, wrote down his proposals, incoherent though they
might be, went to look for whatever food he might occasionally request,
tried to calm him down or else he was given orders to take some rest;
rapid attempts were made to find the accomplices he had named, or he
might be urged to make his confession. This morbid haste to meet his
needs was the ultimate gift made to him by society before it stripped him
of everything. In these extraordinary scenes de I’hotel de ville (‘town hall
scenes’), where fears were heightened and raw emotions were on show,
anything was possible — long farewells, drugging of the terrified body, or
perhaps displays of absolute contempt when the condemned man cursed
God and all that lay before him. These macabre scenes, so wretched and
inept, were the place where the judges tried to make out who on earth this
man was whom they were sending to his death and who made no end to
his desire not to go there.
In this situation food and rest assumed a privileged yet paradoxical
place which is commented on in turn by each observer. On 30 May 1775,
Recollet was hanged for burglary.

When he arrived at the place of his punishment he asked to be taken to

the Hotel de Ville and was not executed until half-past six in the
evening. I found myself on his route as he was descending the steps of
the grand staircase of Le Chatelet. He appeared repentant and contrite
and I heard him ask God out loud to pardon him. I learned with some
surprise that not only had he had the courage to eat some soup and
boiled beef for his dinner but that he had even asked for something else
which had been refused him. I didn’t hear whether or not he had accused
his accomplices.4S

Too many requests for food smacked of indecency and wickedness but
for the condemned man it was a kind of revenge. Dying with a full gut,
something perhaps never before experienced, was an act of defiance in
which poverty and cynical mockery combined. There were some deter¬
mined to eat a full spread and, to the embarrassment of their judges,
invited them to join them.
 Invitations to the Crowds 195
Jean Marguenne died on 19 March 1765 looking every inch the
scoundrel. Before leaving Le Chatelet to go to the Place de Greve, he told
the Lieutenant in charge of criminals to make sure that there would be a
good meal provided as he had a good twenty-four hours’ worth of
declarations to make at the Hotel de Ville.46

On the other hand, if one became too weak, by refusing to take food
for instance, or by talking non-stop to the point of exhaustion, this might
constitute a mortal risk that the doctors and surgeons would then take in
hand. Hard as it is to imagine, attention was paid to caring for the body
precisely at the point of its entry into death and can only be explained by
the intimate conviction that the guilty man should be ‘in good health’
when he got onto the wheel. Execution was a deliberate punishment and
not an unlicensed and unbridled act to be dealt to a body which was
already in a state of depredation. Besides, there were things the public
would simply not tolerate, such as those occasions when an execution
turned into the mere finishing-off of a body which was not even capable of
standing up and supporting itself; nor would they put up with incompetent
executioners who needed several attempts at the job. There was a definite
order to this slow procedure leading to the infliction of death on a guilty
man, an order which had to be observed and a respect whose limits were
somewhat obscure.
Jean Falconnet was taken to the Hotel de Ville on the night of 23
February 1732 and during the night of the 24th he begged them ‘to let him
have a few hours rest as in his present state of mind he would not be able
to endure any act of justice, collapsing with fatigue and overcome with
sleep as he was’.4 The doctor who was quickly summoned looked him
over and found that his pulse was very weak. He said that ‘unless he had a
few hours’ rest, he did not think that he would be able to keep going for
much longer and that there might even be some risk to his life’. The
confrontation therefore did not recommence until the morning of the 25th;
the punishment was to take place later when all risks to his life had been
avoided in order that it might be removed definitively a few hours later.
The same kind of precautions were taken in the case of torture.
Desrues, a grocer who had poisoned a woman and her child in order to
rob them, was himself of a somewhat ‘delicate complexion’ and had been
subject to only minimal torture, but he was so feeble-bodied that even the
reading aloud of his sentence had made him ill, thus justifying the precau¬
tions that had been taken. While the details of his sentence were being read
out, ‘it is said that he had undergone a movement of the bowels which had
greatly offended the noses of all present’, notes Hardy prior to relating this
long-awaited execution which took place in May 1777.48
The nuit blanche was a time of confusion and intense feelings when
196 Crowds

everything became blurred and was concentrated in a sense of tragic

urgency. There were tears and sobs, involuntary movements of the body,
or a need to pray and read psalms of repentance and entrance into the
Kingdom of God. Printed copies of ‘revelations’ of this kind of conversion
of body and soul sold in their thousands both before, during and after the
execution. Gueulette contented himself with commenting on just a few, in
particular the extremely long ‘Account of the conversion and edifying
death of a young girl, an assassin’s accomplice, executed in Paris in the
month of January 1737’.44 All the details were there: the young woman
cried and prayed, expressed anxiety in moments of doubt or fatigue,
became exultant with joy at feeling in good health at the approach of
death:

At that point she enjoyed perfect health, which caused her to say, with a
kind of joy, that God had delivered her from all her weaknesses and had
given her to understand that he wanted a victim who was sound and
healthy and that there was nothing weak or feeble about her sacrifice.

And according to this text, she died crowned with happiness at the
prospect of her future encounter with God.
This period of waiting in the face of death was a place of redemption; it
was also the place for love. But among the guilty and condemned there
were those who had no inclination to pray, such as Michel Rouleau, a
tailor who had been condemned by an order of the court of the parlement
of 30 June 1760 to be broken live whilst his lover, Marie-Jeanne Oville,
was due to be hanged at the Place de Greve. They had both been involved
in the premeditated murder of Marie-Jeanne’s husband. Gueulette had
noted with some surprise ‘a rather strange story’ on the back of this
printed order. The woman had

asked to be placed on a mattress by Rouleau’s side and the request had

been granted and everything agreed. The strange thing was that although
this woman claimed to be repentant, what she actually said to Rouleau
bore no relation at all to her actual situation. She kissed him repeatedly
and in her own way said all kinds of sweet and tender things to him,
assuring him that she would love him right up until the very last moment
of her life.50

The prospect of death did not always call forth resignation and
repentance. There were those who, somewhat more rebellious than the
rest, used the nuit blanche as an act of ultimate defiance and as a means of
spewing up over a world which had arrogated to itself the right of meting
out such dreadful punishment. Others, whose sole aim was to put off the
 Invitations to the Crowds 197
evil hour of punishment, made denunciations of distant accomplices who,
when confronted, proved to be innocent.
The scenes between the potential victim, the accomplices who were
dragged along in the middle of the night, and the confessor responsible for
recalling the future victim to the paths of repentance were indeed violent.
Often the condemned man was so distraught that he would go back on his
declaration, saying that ‘there was nothing true in all of what he had said
and that he had only done it to prolong his life as he had been advised at
Bicetre.’51 Or else, after testifying to the innocence of those he had sent
them looking for, he might provoke the Lieutenant in charge of criminals,
insult him and roar with laughter at having been able, while all this was
going on, ‘to get a good meal in at the Hotel de Ville’.
In amongst all these turbulent scenes of heady words and imprecations
which were as desperate as they were violent, the demand was for life. The
supposed accomplices who had been freshly denounced and seized in the
middle of the night threw themselves at the feet of the condemned man,
proclaiming their innocence, as in the following case recorded in the
margin of notes made by Gueulette on an order made on 17 October 1764
condemning Pierre Padoix, a cobbler’s boy, to be hanged at the Place de
Greve for burglary. Apparently a surgeon’s wife was dragged out to the
Hotel de Ville to appear before him and ‘the surgeon’s wife was so stunned
by this declaration that she collapsed in a faint and died the same day
after being taken to the prison of Le Grand Chatelet with all the
others.’52
Death for death’s sake. Indeed, why not make a denunciation? One
can quite easily understand the fear felt by the accomplices and fellow-
travellers of those robber-bands on the great highway whose networks of
marauding brigands were so efficient and widespread. Their fear could
often be the occasion of some rather unusual scenes of trafficking and
dealing, as for instance in 1743, when Volteface, a journeyman joiner, was
condemned to the wheel for theft and murder. His accomplices went in
fear and trembling of being denounced by him and so they made the most
of his fear of the world beyond and of Divine Judgement:

The night before his execution a message was passed along to him from
cell to cell promising him eight masses to be said the day after his death
if he did not make accusations against two of his accomplices who were
still alive. He promised not to do this and kept his word by accusing
only those of his companions who had died at the Place de Greve. In the
time it took to get him down from the cart, it is said that a small boy
presented him with a note which was then taken from him. It was
a receipt for the eight masses. This information was obtained from
Mr Vautroux, Commissioner at Le Chatelet and one of his judges.53
198 Crowds

Those nights at the Hotel de Ville took place somewhere between the
devil and the deep, in a space between life and death. There were even
occasions when the condemned man had been tied to the wheel and yet
still demanded to be heard; the clerk would kneel down beside him to take
down his final words. Death was not a simple business. The nuit blanche
was a time and a place which was taken very seriously by the judges and
treated by them with great respect. To some extent, a man’s word and his
repeated confession rendered him innocent of the judgement made by men;
but there was also something more to this face-to-face confrontation
between a man and his judges, and to this final encounter, be it desperate
or provocative, submissive or vengeful, between the wise and wretched.
Perhaps it was, in fact, the only moment capable of explaining what
remained inexplicable and disconcerting for magistrates and for the public,
and by that I mean that enigmatic space between the crime and the man
committing it. It was a gap crowned by a nuit blanche, where the repeated
confessions of the criminal made him more man than monster. There
beneath their eyes, the judges could make out their own image, that of a
humanity which the death they had decided upon would not be able to
efface.

Stripping the body

Since the punishment was the divestment of the body itself, the amende
honorable was made ‘naked or lightly clad’ and, in the case of breaking on
the wheel, punishment was inflicted on the body in a state of total undress.
The women, however, managed to escape this particular punishment ‘on
the grounds of the respect due to their sex’, and instead they were hanged
in a light gown, their hair covered by a bonnet.
Public nudity was at this time becoming less and less common and since
the end of the seventeenth century, for instance, there had been regular
police orders outlawing the male practice of nude bathing in rivers, which
was generally considered shocking.54 It was no easy battle, however,
as bathing trips on the Seine were part and parcel of popular Parisian
pleasures.
The struggle was taken up on another front during the eighteenth
century by the religious brothers in the Christian schools who attempted to
impress a sense of decency and respect for the body on the children of the
poor, teaching them, for instance, that they should at all costs avoid
looking at another person’s body as well as at their own. Boarding-school
regulations and the dissemination of treatises concerning aspects of
Christian conduct helped convey the new message of bodily discipline
and training in an attempt to introduce some order into the kind of
 Invitations to the Crowds 199
promiscuity engendered by popular housing and accommodation in Paris
and the urban way of life. By the end of the century, male nudity in
public caused something of a scandal and it was a sight that had become
increasingly rare.
But for all that, there was still that rather gay abandon of the more
rumbustious festivals, or during the dog-days of harvest, for instance,
when the harvest workers were allowed to undress and take their refresh¬
ment in the nude on account of the excessive heat. On such occasions
nudity was tolerated because it was a normal part of festive pleasures or
traditional harvest custom in the heat of the sun. It bore no relation
whatever to the statutory shameful nudity required in order to pay the
price for one’s misdeeds. In this latter case, the naked body was offered as
a public spectacle bearing all the marks of humiliation and shame.55
Thus the only occasion when the exposure of someone else’s body was
permissible was in that final moment when the punishment of the victim
came crashing down upon him as a visible demonstration and clear
example of its full horror and monstrosity.
Guilty, abominably execrated and humiliated, the body of the victim
rapidly attained the status of both the sublime and the obscene, capable of
assuming a dimension that was both pitiful and heroic and of arousing as
much terror and revulsion as cynical contemplation. As the punishment
took place, the world turned upside down and the body, that privileged
target of the torture, became the one unique place where all eyes con¬
verged in a mixture of dread and fascination.
There are so many relevant manuscripts and printed documents in so
much detail on this subject as to reveal quite unwittingly the place of
primary importance accorded to it. Because society at that time was so
visual and mannered, it was customary to interpret much on the basis of
the body’s signs and signals; for, before it is anything else, and least of all
a public spectacle, the body is a language. Naked and dying, it was both
language and spectacle.
Its appearance and constitution afforded the spectators a vast amount
of information and nothing was considered unworthy of comment or
lengthy interpretation, whether it was a tearful or effeminate face, a wild
look, a body that shook and trembled or threatened revenge, or perhaps
angry gestures or pleas and imprecations.
There were a variety of ways in which the condemned person might
either accept or reject the turning of his body into a public spectacle, as in
the case of Billiard, the cashier at the office of postal administration
(quoted by Michel Foucault). He refused to lower his hat over his eyes
and instead, with clear ostentation, attired himself in the finest apparel
previously used to mourn his wife, who had apparently died the year
before. He shod himself in fine new shoes and made sure that his hair was
 200 Crowds

‘well curled and powdered’.56 All this public show was an attempt to
transform a pathetic breach of trust into an act of heroism which was to
‘impress itself on the public.
Then there was the young servant of only 20 who was condemned
to the wheel for murder. He sobbed and sobbed and was so convulsed
with grief that he softened the hearts of all those watching him so that the
public were moved to revolt on account of his youth which approaching
death had transmuted to innocence (20 April 1773).
In 1775, after the bread riots, the population was sickened at the sight
of a thief who was hanged while unconscious and ‘frothing considerably at
the mouth’.57 His loss of ‘sang-froid’ had transformed his death sentence
into the vilest butchery. Two years later, in 1775, the same population
were concerned at being unable to read anything from the face of Desrues,
the famous poisoner: ‘His physiognomy was so mute and cold that it was
extremely difficult to discern the agitation by which his soul was most
surely afflicted.’ Giving nothing away about oneself was a fault which the
public found hard to forgive, for how could one know what one felt
towards this victim, how should one identify with him? Not knowing
anything about him took away any sense from his death and removed any
meaning from his punishment.
Even in this final chaos, suffering still had its rules and the body was
not to be abused needlessly. To be endowed with a robust constitution, for
example, was not a reason for the executioner to prolong the punishment;
that would have been considered particularly unjust. The judges were well
aware of this and attempted to fit the form of the punishment to the
resistance of the guilty man. This was certainly the case for a Franciscan
friar who was sentenced to the wheel for murder on 7 October 1779. The
sentence passed on this man was

that he should be placed alive on the wheel and remain there so long as
it pleased God to spare his life; but, as the life and suffering of this
unfortunate man, whose constitution was so robust, would have been
drastically prolonged if such a sentence had been carried out, the
parlement had included in its certificate of confirmation permission for
him to be strangled in the event of his remaining alive on the wheel for
more than 3 hours.58

Moderation for the body in its state of total violation. What respect!
Upon this increasingly precarious balance established between spectacle
and punishment, any unforeseen infringement of ‘the rules’ might lead to
rumblings among the crowd or become a source of rebellion. Incompetent
executioners who needed several attempts at the job or who set about
dismembering the corpse with neither caution nor restraint were hissed
 Invitations to the Crowds 201

and booed by the crowd and castigated by a population who were only
prepared to ‘accept’ a spectacle provided it remained faithful to their own
expectations. In 1751, when Jean Masson was hanged at the Place de
Greve for domestic theft, Procurator Gueulette protested about the dis¬
graceful conditions of the hanging, for the rope broke and the man
was hurt. He was finally strangled to death on the ground only to be
‘re-hanged’ once he was dead. ‘The people cried out for mercy and the
archers, with bayonets fixed, turned on the people and pursued some of
them, thereby causing considerable upheaval.’59
There was certainly an unwillingness to accept a breakdown of the rules
but there was also a collective sense of God’s judgement. If death itself did
not want any truck with him, could Jean Masson really have been so
guilty? One also needs to add that by 1751 the death penalty for domestic
theft seemed unjust to more than one or two and for it to be badly
administered into the bargain was intolerable.
When it came to handing over the female body in a state of semi-nudity
as a public spectacle, this gave the opportunity to some writers to describe
details they would not otherwise have thought of mentioning had the
criminal been of the male sex. Gueulette, for example, seems to have found
it very difficult to put aside the image of the women who were being
punished and he usually noted in the margin some observations about
their physical appearance such as the harmony of their proportions, an
attractive face, the subtle roundness of a breast or even a lock of hair
which might suddenly have fallen from the bonnet they were wearing for
the hanging: ‘La Groison [hanged in 1755] was a strapping young girl,
quite pretty and rather well developed.’ There were some instances when
the women claimed, and were granted, the right to set off for execution
wearing a veil; but Gueulette, for instance, was quite scandalized by
the according of this ‘honour’. In 1743, some women who had been
accomplices of the notorious brigand Raffia were taken to the gallows.
Marie-Franqoise Lefort, a receiver of stolen goods and accomplice of the
murderer, was hanged on 4 July 1743 and Gueulette complained that

La Lefort was very reserved but neither I nor anyone else could see her
face as she had fastened her mob-cap over it with a pin and all the rest of
Raffia’s wretched followers had also obtained the right to be taken to the
gallows in this way; they still had their faces covered when they were
strung up. La Lefort was taken to the Hotel de Ville and she left there at
1 o’clock in the morning to be hanged with her face still covered.60

Here we have a particular relationship to the female body which

involves a number of rather grey areas in which anger and indignation
intermingle more or less ambiguously with some of the more traditional
202 Crowds

forms of seduction and pity. One need only read Hardy to see that
Gueulette was not alone in feeling this way. The former relates how,
following the death of the infamous poisoner Desrues, who has already
been mentioned, his widow was herself charged with complicity. Whilst in
detention she gave birth to a child and afterwards was sentenced to
branding and imprisonment for life at La Salpetriere.61 She was due for
public branding on the shoulder on 13 May 1779 in the courtyard of the
Palais de Justice but just as she stepped down from the prison cart to be
branded, she threw herself to the ground between the axles and refused to
move. Whilst she was out of sight of the public, the executioner of the
High Court of Justice stripped her shoulder bare in order to burn it. A
further irony was that all those who had climbed up the bell tower of
La Sainte Chapelle to get a better view ‘were left looking all the more
like fools as the emplacements for reconstruction work at La Palais had
prevented them from getting close up’. Only Hardy, it seems, managed to
get a good look and he saw that she wore ‘her hair like a bather’s with
only a couple of locks [showing] on either side’.
Female crime and its punishment certainly stirred the imagination most
vividly: on the one hand, there was the hatred of this female monster,
often expressed in seductive language but which also allowed to creep in
the image of the repentant and penitent criminal who possessed redemp¬
tive qualities. Popular ‘rags’, ‘true stories’ and laments, for example, were
particularly fond of celebrating in one and the same account both the
heinous crimes of the woman and her virtues. In this way, the punishment
was turned into sacrifice, as in the ‘Account of the conversion and edifying
death of a young girl, an assassin’s accomplice, executed in Paris in the
month of January 1737’,62 which has already been cited. It tells how the
faces of the magistrates were bathed in tears whilst she, the condemned
woman, consoled chaplain, judges and fellow detainees in turn. Thanks to
her mediation, prison, ‘that place normally inhabited by wild beasts’, was
shown to be a place of affliction, redemption and peace where through the
agency of feminine wisdom and gentleness, the crime was transmuted.
This same duality in relation to the punishment of women and its
effects on the individual imagination was shared by the popular literature
of the period concerning women. In it one finds a perpetual coexistence
between these two faces of woman. In answer to the seductive trouble¬
maker and dispatcher of Death, one has the angelic tenderness of the
one in whom true virtue abides. These images call out to each other
continually, constantly re-echoing and contradicting one another.
Nor did the death of the victim interrupt the work of the imagination or
the antinomy it had so ambiguously constructed. This young woman who
had thus repented was to receive burial in a Christian grave. ‘Some of her
own sex came by cab to fetch her for burial. They placed her in a coffin to
 Invitations to the Crowds 203

take her to the cemetery where she remains to this day awaiting the Day of
the Lord.’63
In contrast, an entirely different lot awaited the widow Lescombat
(notorious for having murdered her husband, aided by her lover). While
she was still alive and in detention, a cast had been made of her hand and
her arm as she was very beautiful. After her death, as was the custom with
other criminals, her body was reclaimed by a medical surgeon, in this case,
one Sieur Herissant, whose treatment of her was bizarre. Gueulette, who
went to his house to see her, had the following to relate:

I saw Lescombat beneath the glass. She was dressed in the gown she had
worn for the execution and placed upright in a cabinet with bare feet and
legs which were rather on the large side. Her skirt was a little tucked up
on the right because on her hip she was holding a little fox cub which
had a goldfinch in its mouth. She had strong arms and beautiful hands
and in general her skin was pale and fine. Her belly looked as though she
had risen straight from her bed without thinking; her breasts were
beautiful and finely veined though her bosom was quite well covered. As
to the head, that was somewhat gross — the eyes had been made of
enamel and were black, the nose rather snub, the lips bright red and
the mouth small and very beautiful. The face was set square and still
wearing that affronted look it had had whilst alive.64

Undoubtedly beautiful as Lescombat was, she was still ‘affronted’; it

was in this encounter between Beauty and the crime that the seduction was
played out. And so this doctor, over and above the excesses of the punish¬
ment and death, had taken the body and painstakingly reconstructed it in
a macabre and erotic work of the imagination in which every detail
counted, from the fox cub to the finch, not to mention the raised skirt. The
tortured body had been forgotten and had been transfigured by means of
the affronted seductiveness it suggested. What Dr Herissant’s macabre
piece of work illustrates at the crudest level, and in a way one would
neither have expected nor sought, is the extent to which the punishment of
women was a public spectacle of seduction and death. Lescombat is the
other face of the repentant Dupuis and rather than conflicting, the images
are actually an expression of the male—female conflict itself.
By now executions had not only become too disturbing for the imagina¬
tion; they also created a real disturbance in social terms. Anything could
happen; the crowds who gathered there were no longer capable of serv¬
ing as receptacles for the single message emanating from a repressive
monarchical authority. They saw the horror of it and felt the impact of
feelings which were both clear and confused. The crowds thus summoned
by the King could no longer be guaranteed to grant him their popular
204 Crowds

approval. The allegiancies they had begun to practise were other than
those predicted.

When the Dauphin decided to marry Marie-Antoinette

[Marking the appearance of a crack at the heart of the performance and

when nothing was ever the same again.]

Cracks begin in the dark. Long before they gape and yawn, they are what
one might call mere faults, whose disruptive work is begun along narrow,
almost invisible channels. After the split, comes the final breach and
collapse. Too late then to warn anyone - only time to fill in at top speed
what are by now positively indecent gaps through which come chaotically
tumbling out, the many aspects of the truth.
Feasts and festivals were all repeats of the same thing - from the
mounted portraits of royalty to the bounteous hand-outs accompanied by
the sound of trumpets and the burst of fireworks. They shed their light,
wealth and pomp on a people who were requested to assemble together
with unshakeable loyalty, rejoicing and content. To have taken time to
perceive these men and women as any other than as passive receptacles of
the royal spectacle would have been rare indeed; and should one have
happened to discern a crack there, then all that was required was the
lavishness of the royal bounty and the blaze of the illuminations, to stop it
up. The mask was superb, if nonetheless derisory.
In 1770 the crack had already been deepening for about 20 years.65
There were murmurings among the people and in the street it was hardly
quiet. Preparations were underway for nuptials, and the Due de Choiseul
was putting everything into what was an affair of the utmost importance -
the opportunity for securing an alliance between France and the Flouse of
Austria. The marriage was to be the occasion of great pomp, more superb
and dazzling than any other celebrations given even during the time of the
Great King. On 30 May 1770 Paris witnessed the marriage of the Dauphin
and Marie-Antoinette, ‘one of the most important marriages in the reign of
Louis XV’, according to Moufle d’Angerville.

Inauspicious omens

Arrival in France; meet the Dauphin at Compiegne; entry into Versailles;

marriage in Paris: the celebrations were spread out over more than a
month and they were not always so fine as envisaged. In that year, poverty
had invaded the towns and the countryside; but that was a mere shadow
to be brushed aside with impunity - the show must go on.
 Invitations to the Crowds 205
To give you some idea, it was estimated that 30,000 horses would be
needed for the journey and there was some talk of a detachment of
tapestry-workers travelling in relays from town to town in order to appoint
and decorate the various places at which the Princess was to stay. That
part of the cortege that had gone to fetch her from Strasbourg consisted of
60 brand-new chaises.66
While back in Paris the crowd were all off at the Royal embroiderer’s
having a look at the princely ‘outfit’, the provinces were being shaken by
a number of revolts brought on by famine. Tours and Besan^on were
particularly affected by the disturbances, whilst in Manche and Limousin
around 4,000 persons died of hunger. It was vital that this news should
not get about and there was a diversionary article in the Gazette de France
of 14 May 1770 which stated that there were large grain reserves in
Nantes but that distribution had been held up because the rivers were in
full spate. It was just possible to prevent the cries of the people reaching
the throne for a brief while but it was not possible to stop the spread of
news from the provinces to Paris. Pamphlets and broadsheets sold under
the counter were easily obtainable; these attempted to show, for example,
how all the money that was being spent on the celebrations might actually
be spent at a time when famine was making its presence felt throughout
the realm. One such was entitled The Singular Idea of a Good and Honest
Citizen Concerning the Public Celebrations to be Held in Paris and at the
Court on the Occasion of the Marriage of Monseigneur le Dauphin. It was
a lively attack on royal ostentation and pomp and a plea for a deduction
of the cost of the festivities (estimated at 20 millions) from that year’s
taxes, and the taille in particular.67

Thus in place of entertaining the wastrels of the Court and capital with
idle distractions of a fleeting nature, joy might swell in the soul of the
farmer; and the whole nation might participate in the happy event....
History would dedicate this deed to posterity more gladly than all the
frivolous details of a magnificence which is burdensome to the people
and far removed from the true grandeur of a Monarch who is indeed the
father of his subjects.

Was it a sign? At the rendezvous at Versailles, there seemed to be no great

pomp or ceremony and neither the illuminations nor the fountains worked
very well on the arrival of the Princess. As for the poor, according to
accounts by contemporaries, they were obliged to beg instead of receiving
the customary hand-outs of bread, wine and sausage.
In Paris, however, every preparation was being made for the day of the
marriage.
The grand finale of the celebrations was set for 30 May 1770. In the
206 Crowds

evening there was to be a grand firework display by the celebrated Rugieri

on the Place Louis-XV whose crowning glory was to be a gigantic volley of
30,000 rockets and just for that one brief fairytale ‘twinkling of an eye’ an
immense crowd was expected.

A night of disaster
‘Carnage’, ‘dreadful butchery’, ‘the aftermath of battle’, ‘a city under
siege’... Contemporaries were dumbfounded by the injustice and the
extent of the accident that occurred on the night of the firework display.
The fireworks had just finished: everyone was a little disappointed as
the best part of the display had gone up in flames before there was even
time for the explosions to cascade in patterns of light. The crowd was
preparing to leave the square to head for the boulevards and wait for the
illuminations; the shortest route was by way of the Rue Royale and they
proceeded quietly along it. Equally quietly but in the opposite direction,
those crowds of people who had been at the entrance to the boulevards
and who had not been able to see the best of the displays were trying to
make their way towards the square. In order to do that, they too took, or
attempted to take, the Rue Royale. At the same time the carriages which
up until then had been parked behind the colonnades quite brutally cleared
a passage for themselves.
An altogether ruthless scrummage then ensued; the two columns of
people in party-going mood came together in a dreadful crush. A ‘river of
people’ was now split up by vehicles ‘driving in different directions along
the street in tightly packed clusters. Some of the men and women who had
been tossed about in this way were already too weak to stand up to further
pushing and shoving and some had the misfortune to catch their feet in
drains and gutters and on stones.’68 There was general disorder, with
whole sections of this human tide affected by panic. Some of the frames
supporting the illuminations and a couple of carriages were overturned.
These were immediately trampled over by some of the crowd who perched
on top of the debris which they used as a refuge for catching a breath of
air.
The horses went mad in the crowd of men and women who, already
half-suffocated, expired beneath their hooves. There were some who were
so squashed that they died standing on their feet, one against the other as
they had no other recourse. A police report notes that ‘there was blood
coming from their mouths, noses and ears and they only fell to the ground
when the crowd no longer supported them.’69
Death such as this, occurring right at the heart of the celebrations, was
perceived as a serious tragedy. Such negligence on the part of the police
 Invitations to the Crowds 207

and the organizers at an event like this was taken as an obvious sign
of lack of concern for the safety and security of ordinary people who
had been invited along to the feast to clap their hands. So bound up were
the celebrations in the desire to see the people go through the required
motions that the very conditions which might have made their enthusiasm
possible were forsaken. Once the accident had occurred, it was time for all
the actors on the social stage to undertake their own interpretations of
events, which obviously conflicted with one another as various interests
were at stake. It was impossible for the King to emerge any the greater for
this day, if for no other reason than forgetting that the terms of the
alliance could not work unilaterally.
The figures given the following day conflicted, and there was no real
agreement on the number of victims. 0 In his Tableau de Paris, Louis-
Sebastien Mercier mentions the accident on two occasions.71 As an eyewit¬
ness, he first of all refers to 1,500 persons who died of suffocation and
then some considerable time afterwards he recalls that there must have
been about 1,800: ‘I witnessed the catastrophe of the 28 May 177072 ...
and I almost lost my life myself. Between twelve and fifteen hundred
people perished either that same day or as a result of that dreadful crush.’
However, one thing seems almost certain (corroborated moreover in the
police archives), and that was that 132 bodies were picked up from the
area of the celebrations and they were set out in a line at the Cemetery of
La Madeleine for identification by their neighbours and relatives. Each
corpse had a card with a number on it and a detailed report on the
physical appearance and clothing of each was kept in the dossiers. Further¬
more, any articles found on the person of those who had perished were
returned to each family by the registry office.
In spite of these precautions, rumours still circulated and contemporaries
make reference to them here and there. Someone was sure that he had seen
the number 134 on the front of one of the unfortunate victims. And
elsew'here Hardy reports in his Journal of 4 June 1770 that the public had
received definite information from a police bulletin ‘that the estimate of
the number of deaths had risen to 367’.73 In fact the number of injured
was so great that it was scarcely possible to know the exact number of
those who had died as a result - 500? 1,000? 1,200? It was impossible to
be any clearer than that, as d’Angerville explains in his commentary on the
incident:

In addition to the injured, there were those who had been lamed or were
suffering from suffocation and were taken into hospitals or neighbouring
homes to die shortly afterwards. There were also those who thought they
were unscathed but who afterwards found they were spitting up blood
and within six weeks or so discovered that they too had become victims
208 Crowds

of their curiosity, making in all anywhere upwards of eleven or twelve

hundred.74

The public were kept regularly informed — indicating the extent of

police diligence in the affair — and then after a short while a fresh estimate
was circulated in the city through the distribution of police bulletins: 688
persons were pronounced dead excluding those who had subsequently
been taken to their homes. The bulletin was at pains to classify them and
Hardy gives the details: ‘Religious, 5; priests, 2; distinguished persons,
22; bourgeois, 155; common people, 424; unidentified, 80.’ As one can
see, there were no subdivisions among the ordinary people; artisans and
odd-jobbers were all lumped together under the same heading. Police
bureaucracy remained true to the prevailing ideology of the day; only the
people themselves were aware of the numerous subtle differences by which
they were constituted.
In any case, at the time of the first count Hardy assures us that ‘they
had picked up enough corpses to fill 11 vehicles’; in fact there were 132
dead: 89 females and 43 males including 11 children aged between 6 and
14.
Were there more women than men at this celebration? In the event of
buffeting by the crowd, were they more vulnerable? Items in the dossier
occasionally mention that a husband was waiting for his wife to return, an
indication that people did not necessarily go as couples to such festivities,
but then there are other examples that would seem to contradict this and
of course there are any number of examples where no evidence of this kind
is available, so regrettably one must leave this to one side. One can be
more or less certain, however, that these ordinary folk were not well off
and yet strangely enough half of the women were designated by their
husband’s profession, although it is hardly likely that they would have had
no employment themselves.
In any case, for the most part they would have belonged to the world
of the menial trades or domestic service. Where in fact the personal
profession was indicated, these were most often as workers in establish¬
ments connected with laundry, lacemaking, dressmaking, spinning or as
kitchen maids. The wives of artisans (engravers or locksmiths) were few
and it is unknown whether their spouse was a master or journeyman.
There was only one woman who was a member of the master class and she
was a master dressmaker. It was easier to distinguish between the men: 4
of them belonged to the world of the bourgeoisie (lawyer, shipowner); 4
were traders, 2 were masters, 9 were journeymen, 3 were apprentices or
shop hands and 9 worked in menial jobs such as cleaning or as clerks.
For the most part these were ordinary, undistinguished folk, who had
slipped in with all the others to go along to the festivities that had been
 Invitations to the Crowds 209
provided for them - people from the world of work and small artisans
from the shop and workshop. They took with them those small items in
their possession which were both the marks and signs of belonging and the
means by which they were socially inscribed.
In the middle of the general panic, petty thieves took advantage of the
night and its disturbances to grant themselves a small haul with very little
difficulty. Some of the injured who were still sufficiently conscious of what
was happening recounted their misadventures to the police a few days
after the accident. Marie-Franqoise Rivaudon, 36 years old and wife of P.
Bardeuil, a casual worker and odd-job man, and herself a vendor of apples
and resident of the Rue Planche Mibray in the parish of Saint-Jacques-de-
la-Boucherie, gave the following evidence:

she said that she had lost consciousness but had got up four times, her
body broken and shattered. She had felt someone cutting beneath her left
ear with scissors in order to rob her of a lace trimming which was tied
beneath her chin . . . she had been taken by street cart to the botel-dieu in
the Salle Saint-Nicholas where she was wrapped in a lamb’s fleece. This
did her a lot of good and she had been more fortunate than those who
had died next to her. 5

The police officers made scrupulous notes about each of the bodies,
recording every item of clothing, all pieces of jewellery worn and whatever
happened to be stuffed inside pockets. All personal belongings had to be
handed over to the family. Of course, one would never really know what
had actually disappeared in the frenzy or as a result of foul play; and there
are no hats, caps or shoes on the lists - they probably remained on the
streets. Many of the women must have had their pockets (worn over their
aprons like a handbag) snatched, but in spite of this there was still a large
number of items and traces of lives. Four-fifths of those picked up on the
spot had something on them and each person also had several items in
their possession.76 It is worth noting that the average was around five
items per person.77 It allows us to gain a better idea of which items were
usually carried around and considered necessary to have about one’s
person. It would in fact appear that the people did not get themselves
dressed up to go to the festivities (as evidenced by the lists of clothes as
well as the condition of the fabric, which was often referred to as worn or
of poor quality). The pockets were those worn every day although here
and there there might be a lace bow or tin crucifix on an extra ribbon; but
nothing to suggest definitely that one had dressed any differently for
the occasion, which is another indication (if one is required) that the
population received its celebrations in the same way as it greeted every¬
thing else that took place daily in the street. When all was said and done,
210 Crowds

festivals and celebrations were just like everything else, with everyone
enjoying it in his or her usual way. And so on that evening, at 9 o’clock,
what one had on one’s person was what one had been using all day in the
normal concerns of each passing moment. That is the reason why the
pockets of men and women alike contained so many small tools and
instruments which would have been in constant use each day: 153 knives,
dice, scissors (large and small) and corkscrews were recorded. These were
indispensable items and everyone would have had at least one of these on
his or her person, going everywhere and used for everything. But does this
come as any surprise for a population which lived essentially by its hands
and know-how and which, on account of the small trades it pursued, was
more or less obliged to live in the street?
In addition to the utilitarian, there was a quantity of other items
indicating strong links with other spheres of cultural life such as the
literary and the spiritual: 90 items had some connection with the worlds of
reading, writing or the practice of religion. The 25 reliquaries, pocket
crucifixes and rosaries were matched by 24 small books, of which 9 were
books of the offices or pious works whilst the others were almanacks,
stories or, in one case, a calendar. The rest (41 objects) consisted of all
kinds of papers with addresses written on them, receipts, a few letters,
notes, cards or just simply one’s name written down. Maybe it is unaccept¬
able to combine ‘devotional items’ with the books, but as the sample
is small there is no question here of attempting a cultural approach in
respect of these victims; it simply appears appropriate to point out that the
objects carried on the person would seem to indicate references to another
universe beyond the material world of work. Whether this ‘other place’
can be divided and categorized according to items and objects relating to
reading or to evidence of religious practice is, in fact, another matter.
As far as the items which testify to the existence of the religious life are
concerned, and in spite of the fact that there were not very many, it is
interesting to draw a distinction between the men and the women. A
quarter of the women had on them a book of offices or some other
devotional item whereas only an eighth of the men had bothered with such
things.
In contrast, a large number of small containers were being carried
around: 34 snuff boxes and 83 cases, mugs, cardboard boxes and flagons
of every kind. Some of these boxes were quite flimsy, and there was one
old case with nothing in it. But there were other items which were better
made, sometimes with enamelling or silver-work. The types of snuffbox,
for instance, would seem to suggest that these were not so much utilitarian
as little luxury items. As for the cases, which contained all manner of
things, they were a fair indication that life in the city provided the where¬
withal to raise one’s flagging spirits and that the street afforded the passer-
 Invitations to the Crowds 211

by with the odd temptation, whether found or purchased. Why else should
there have been so many empty cases and such great numbers of mugs and
jars unless they were used to draw water at the public fountains or wine at
the pleasure gardens?
And not forgetting hygiene, the pursuit of which fell largely to the lot of
a single object, the handkerchief — 77 of them in fact, whereas only one
comb was found (and that was broken); there was also a tongue-scraper
and three ear-cleaners. It was the handkerchief which was the central and
indispensable item, serving on all occasions and for every purpose. It was a
highly prized accessory — one may recall, for instance, the numerous
references made in the archives of the police commissioners to handkerchief
snatchers who were always vigorously pursued and severely punished
when arrested. Thus, there were more handkerchieves than there was
money (only 67 persons had some coins on them, roughly half of the
individuals involved); even keys (52) were a long way behind. Such low
numbers, especially if one thinks that two or three items were contained in
one pocket whilst some had none at all, again sketches a picture of an
urban landscape which was open and where the distinction between inside
and out was blurred. Doors did not lock and neither did drawers; there
were no watertight spaces and Harpagon-style strong-boxes were not the
lot of the bulk of the population. s The key was not a distinctive feature of
the Parisian worker.
There were not many spectacles or watches (these may have been stolen
early on); there were a few tokens or lottery tickets and an insignificant
array of bric-a-brac which defied classification (a dog-collar, a lamp, a
pencil, a lorgnette and three pieces of bread).
For the most part, it is possible to see some degree of homogeneity in
the categories of item: tools, books, papers, handkerchieves, cases, etc.
Persons whose possessions were different or original enough as to fall
outside the common lot were few and far between. Even more than the
type of trade or employment, it was the street and habitat that determined
the interior of the pocket.

Identifying a friend or relative

The day after the disaster, at the request of the King’s procurators, an
enquiry was opened headed by Sirebeau, advocate to the parlement.
The work of the enquiry was divided between Belle, Guyot, Thiery and
Coquelin. Sirebeau himself went in person to hear the accounts of the
wounded and the workers who had helped recover the dead and wounded.
The other commissioners were instructed to listen to the evidence of those
persons who had identified the corpses which had been taken to the little
cemeteries of La Madeleine and La Ville-l’Eveque.
212 Crowds

All these statements were brief and for the most part repetitive. But if
one also reads between the lines, it is possible to make out the ways of life,
habits and customs on festive occasions and also the mode and manner of
social relationship; there are also discreet, almost imperceptible glimpses
of poverty and grief.
On the one hand there was the family, and on the other, the neighbour¬
hood around one’s work or place of abode (the two often merging) which
formed two living networks upon which men and women were essentially
dependent. In fact, half the bodies in the Rue Royale were recognized by a
member of their family and half by a neighbour lodging in the same block
or working in the same workshop. All in all, it is a further confirmation
of a way of life among the popular classes in which individuals found
their place amid a network of family relationships and encounters in the
workplace or dwelling.
The knowledge they had about each other was often telling and quite
precise, allowing of course for the fact that the majority of the statements
were made two weeks after the catastrophe, by which time everyone
had had a chance to find out about whomsoever had died; but what
matter. The place of birth was recorded as well as the trade or profession,
remarriages and the number of children. Each identification process also
took into account what was known about the family - its comings and
goings, its ups and downs; and, as already mentioned, the contents of the
pockets often indicated names and addresses which had been written
down.
Within families there were occupational similarities: for an uncle work¬
ing in casual employment there might be a niece who was a laceworker
and an aunt who was a washerwoman; dependent on the father who was a
journeyman in inlaid-ware, there was the mother who had been married
twice before, twice a widow and a vendor of fruit with three children
from two different marriage beds. The four daughters of the mother who
worked as a carder were employed as domestic servants in the big houses
or inns. There was certainly little social extravagance in this milieu and
definitely nothing to spare. The only thing of any importance and in fact
itself something of an adventure was to have one’s family (brought to Paris
from the country) around one and to try to provide them with a life that
was more or less decent. For some of them, there was not even time to
accomplish this aim: two cousins who were natives of Limousin, one a
journeyman mason and the other a quarryman, had migrated to Paris and
stayed in La Nouvelle France in the same dwelling. Jean Burau, the
quarryman, planned to bring his family up to Paris with him, but on 30
May he was asphyxiated in the crowd and his cousin, who came to
identify him, stated that he had left a widow, Jeanne Lafoulle, resident of
the village of Laveau Bourgoin, and two children, a boy aged 5 and a girl
of 8 whose future was totally dependent on Jean Burau’.
 Invitations to the Crowds 213
There was the same solidarity between partners as in the following
moving example of G. Peignen, a blind man and his wife. She died on the
pavement, having left her husband at home as he was not in a position to
enjoy the spectacle. His brother-in-law, a journeyman mason, came to the
cemetery to identify her body and to fetch her belongings back for her
husband. He remarked that ‘Sieur Peignen was in a worse state than
previously because of the accident to this his wife who had acted as his
guide.’
The statements often stressed the state of material deprivation in which
wives and children were likely to find themselves. In the following case, it
was a market assistant who had died and was recognized by his workmate,
who added that he knew how much poverty his wife was in at the present
time and that she had been obliged to do some cleaning jobs. Then there
was another case of a wife who ‘did the finishing-off on the small number
of jobs that her husband was able to do’, and now that he was dead, there
was a great risk that the family would slide into complete and utter
poverty. Such cases show not only a precarious financial state made
absolutely intolerable by the incident but also the almost total dependence
of the members of the family on each other, it being the group as a whole
which ensured its survival. When one of them faltered or, worse still,
disappeared, the future became extremely difficult for the others.
Belonging to the same trade or being under the same roof was also a
means of being recognized and identified, and in these networks of urban
life where everyone knew everyone else, servants and domestics had a
special place. Going as they did from place to place they usually ended up
getting to know each other quite well, and so they would all know that
young lad who was workshop assistant for 18 months with the master
tailor and who had left a few days before the arrival of a new servant who
had not stayed long herself. Some of the servants even admitted that they
had come to the cemetery of La Ville-l’Eveque ‘to look at the bodies out of
curiosity’, pretty sure that they would recognize someone or other of those
who were being brought in.
A master haberdasher who was a shopkeeper in the Rue Saint-Denis
stated that he had recognized four of his employees and, without attempt¬
ing to elaborate, simply gave the numbers written on the cards that the
police officers had fastened to their chests. Other masters identified their
journeymen or apprentices in a similar manner. Shop and workshop were
matrices of social life.
Some of the statements were made away from the scene by people who
had come to the help of neighbours or friends in mourning, who were
also seriously hurt themselves and unable to leave their homes. The
injuries were often quite staggering: vomiting blood, crippled feet, crushed
hands, broken legs and shoulders, collapsed rib-cage, etc. Then there was
the shock of being trapped for a long time beneath a pile of dead or
214 Crowds

unconscious people or having been too close to men and women who were
desperately trying to breathe: ‘their eyes turned up towards the sky, their
stomachs protruding and bleeding from the mouth.’ Panic, the fear of
losing a member of one’s family, or the grief at discovering one had lost a
child or spouse marked a good many of the statements. Their accounts
referred not only to those they had lost, but also to those they had almost
lost, only to catch up with them and find them in the last throes before
suffocating to death, including the following clothier who

had the misfortune to lose his son aged 7 in the Rue Royale and who
very nearly lost his wife who had been picked up as dead and whom he
hadn’t managed to get to until 3 o’clock in the morning. He had her
taken home where she was still ill and he had then gone and identified
Eustache, his son.

Sometimes the bodies were so severely injured that it was difficult to

recognize one’s own relatives. A brother-in-law recognized his sister-in-
law by a beauty spot on her left breast (the visible breasts suggesting a
promiscuity even among the dead). Then there was Potel, a contractor,
who went looking for his friend and thought he had found him laid out at
the cemetery. He picked up his belongings and made a statement, only to
bump into him on the way back and find him alive and well and hard at
work. His friend came back to give evidence of the fact that he was in
good health and to bring back the things as they did not belong to him.
On that day they had gone off to the illuminations in good spirits. Some
of them had gone together in a group ‘sometimes six at a time, as many
boys as there were girls and as many men as women’; usually there were
parents or relatives with them or else, according to workshop practice,
the master would go to the festivities with ‘his young male or female
apprentices’.79 After an hour or two master and apprentices would usually
have become separated from one another with each going his or her own
way. One of the young girls might be among the corpses; when she did not
return, the night would find the master searching the places where she
might have been hurt. In this and many similar cases, the parents would
not be informed until later; the apprentice was first of all a resident of his
master’s house.

When the priests did their reckoning

A royal celebration which ended up by causing the deaths of men and

women was a threat to the established order and status quo. The Dauphin
intervened immediately in an act of compassion and money was dis¬
tributed to the poor unfortunates. The Lieutenant of Police was quickly
 Invitations to the Crowds 215
informed of this decision and Hardy makes a note of it in his Journal of 3
June 1770:

The news is that Monseigneur le Dauphin, being so moved with com¬

passion at the terrible consequences for those poor wretches who perished
amid the disorder of the festivities has written to the Lieutenant of Police
sending him the 6,000 livres that he is usually allotted each month so
that he can spend it as he sees fit in the relief of the suffering of the
poor.80

In her Memoires, Mme Campan, a chambermaid to Marie-Antoinette,

was more hagiographical:

The Dauphin and Dauphine sent their entire year’s revenues for the relief
of the unfortunate families who had lost their relatives on that day of
disaster.
It was an act of generosity which will be numbered amongst the many
outstanding rescue efforts dictated as much by compassion as by the
politics of princes; the grief of Marie-Antoinette was profound indeed
and lasted several days.81

In order to distribute the funds, the Lieutenant of Police first sought the
help of the police inspectors and subsequently the parish priests, who were
sent a circular to this effect followed by a second issued on 12 June 1770.
They were asked to draw up a list of those who had died as a result of
their injuries. They were also asked to point out those families in a state of
financial hardship.82
The priests made enquiries in their parishes and then sent their replies
to the Lieutenant of Police, often accompanying their findings with a
personal letter and comments on the situation. On 2 July, the Lieutenant
drew up a table of the parishes in the city, but it comes as some surprise to
find that this document combines detail with the most amazing lack of
statistical precision (see Table 2). The age of meticulous statistics had
obviously not yet come and one might indeed wonder by what standards
one should assess the ‘few’ or the ‘many’ when on the same table one finds
66, 2 or ‘several’.
The powers that be were disturbed. The Lieutenant-General of Police
quickly tried to get together as much information as possible. Loaded
with money and beset on all sides with demands and requests, the police
inspectors visited the most unfortunate and delivered alms. What was
more, it was all done rather too quickly so that the parish priests immedi¬
ately took umbrage and made complaints in their letters to the Lieutenant
of Police. It was all a matter of their own power over their own parish
territory of which they were the proud and ferocious defenders. The undue
216 Crowds

Table 2 Survey of the parishes, faubourgs and outskirts of the city of Paris in
which there were those wounded in the events of the 30 May 1770 in the Rue
Royale, some of whom died from their injuries

Dead Injured

Parishes
La Madeleine 9
Saint-Germain-le-Vieux 8
Saint-Pierre-aux-Bceufs 4
Saint-Barthelemy a few
Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois 8
Saint-Roch 1 many
Saint-Leu 3
Les Innocents Saint-Jean-en-Greve several
Sainte-Opportune a few
Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs 2 several
Saint-Sauveur 22
Saint-Gervais several
Saint-Paul many
Saint-Benoit 10
Saint-Andre-des-Arts 2
Saint-Hyppolyte 3
Saint-Sulpice 10
Saint-Jean-de-la-Boucherie a few
Le Temple 8
Saint-Jean-de-Latran 2
Les Quinze-Vingts 3
Saint-Merry several
Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile several
Saint-Severin several
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet several
Saint-Eustache
Saint-Symphorien 2
Faubourgs
Sainte-Marguerite 43
Bonne-Nouvelle 1 10
Saint-Etienne 6
Saint-Medard 10
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas many
Saint-Laurent 66
La Madeleine several

haste of ill-informed police officers was not to their liking and undermined
their considerable influence over their parishioners, to which they attached
so much importance.
The letters from the priests were short but precise, attempting to put
 Invitations to the Crowds 217
things back in order and to show how much they were masters in their
own house and would brook no rivalry with the police, as this letter from
the parish priest of Saint-Louis-en-rile illustrates:

The person whom you sent to me, Sir, conducted himself in the act
of distribution with the utmost prudence but 1 fear there has been
rather undue haste and that it would have been better had he known
beforehand the extent of the poverty and deprivation of each person.
In this respect, there is no one better informed than myself and con¬
sequently the allocations would have been made proportionate to the
actual situation of the persons concerned, which would seem to be more
in keeping with your own views. I fear that he may have been wrong, for
instance, in giving 2 louis to a mother and her daughters who admittedly
had been injured but who since then have been receiving our support,
whereas he gave only 3 to a poor man who has been left with seven
children on his hands.

What use therefore was royal charity if it was being administered by in¬
competent officials who were too hasty and unmindful of the consequences?

I believe that if you had been kind enough to consult each of us variously
you would have been better served. Instead, your officials suddenly
turned up full of fervour, hardly giving us time to draw up a hasty list.
They really ought to have come back to find out about any new cases
that had been discovered and yet I have not seen a soul. (Parish priest of
Bonne-Nouvelle)

Each passing day lengthened the list of the deceased or those for
whom misfortune had become a definite reality. In spite of the firmness of
purpose there was more than an ounce of servility in the affirmations of
loyalty and deference expressed. The preamble to the letters is quite
stereotyped and gushes with flattering attestations to the good grace and
bounty of the Lieutenant-General. Expressions such as: ‘We all know the
inclinations of your heart’ or ‘We know the soundness of your sense of
honour’ are matched by references to ‘your zeal for law and order’ and
‘your great love for the poor and unfortunate’. The priest of the parish of
Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs was even more enthusiastic; he latched onto
an expression which history retained for someone else much later: ‘You
are the first father of the people this capital has had, being touched by
their misfortunes as a natural consequence of your great kindness and
tenderness of heart.’
Although there might be differences and divergences between the
Lieutenant-General and the parish priests there was no question of any
disagreement over the ideology which they held in common and for which
218 Crowds

they strove with the same tenacity, namely that order must be upheld and
that the public had no grounds for complaint. The clergy clung to this
authority and whilst making sure that their own share of this power was
preserved, they signalled their indispensable connivance with the man who
held the highest police authority after the King.
Submerged beneath this flood of comments and polite formulas, there
appeared one or two details on the state of the injured. The notes are
strangely loose and fluid like the table already mentioned: ‘the washer¬
woman’s husband is quite poorly’; ‘seven or eight of them are injured’;
‘most of them are all right’; ‘three or four are in distress’. There are no
names, no exact figures and yet at the same time there are also precise
details which suggest a real concern on the part of the priest. For example,
the parish priest of Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs made a point of stressing the
courage of one of his priests and of his servant who were responsible for
saving the lives of many people. He also refers to ‘a poor family who have
lost a great deal, even having to pawn their chairs which they had been
renting as the result of a fire’. There were many others for whom that day
had dealt the same misfortunes and it was true that it was only the priests
who could have really known the exact details.
There was no doubt that on the day following the accident, rumours
spread around Paris and the number of dead, which was not something
that could be controlled, rose or fell in accordance with the gossip and
the feelings aroused. Statements and contradictory statements ebbed and
flowed; false lists as well as genuine probably circulated and everywhere
there was talk of pillaging, rifling and plotting. In short, there was talk - a
lot of it - and that is what had to be stemmed. As soon as the news got out
that there were sums of money to be distributed, there was the increased
risk of the least seriously injured becoming convinced that they had been
afflicted with a malady that was incurable or indeed fatal. The police
inspectors were flooded with demands and their hasty attempts to try and
please everyone and stop the whisperings were hardly likely to assist the
just and fair administration of help and support.
This was an area in which the parish priests had a long history of
experience: This is how I go about it,’ wrote the priest of Saint-Nicholas-
des-Champs, as he proceeds to explain the ingenious and authoritarian
system that he had set up to stop things getting out of hand. Each
family who had requested help and support was required to write a note
accompanied by a certificate signed by a doctor known to himself. If the
parties were reluctant to take these steps he let it be known that he himself
would come and pay them a visit in order to establish the truth of the
situation and that in the event that they were lying, he would deprive them
of any help whatsoever, now and in the future. Furthermore, he sought the
help of the nuns who regularly distributed alms in the district. They
 Invitations to the Crowds 219
provided him with a list of the most needy so that he was able to verify
whether the requests were indeed justified. ‘I heard not a single murmur,’
he said, the phrase itself a clear expression of infallible authority as well as
an admission to the most acute fear of all — of murmurings or complaints
on the part of the people, for the spread of rumour was considered most
dangerous and threatening.
An incident of some significance occurred in the parish of Saint-Paul;
the rumour got around that there had been an unfortunate incident involv¬
ing some young communicants. ‘But, thank God,’ wrote the priest, ‘not
one of them has gone from us.’ His expression conjures up the typical
image of the young female communicant, caught like a bird in a cage.
The papers seized on this potential newsworthy item - death of young
communicants during the celebrations - and it would have no doubt made
a good story. The priest himself was worried and upset and began to
suspect the girls themselves of making up the stories and spreading them,
being prey as they were at their age to all kinds of impressions and
imaginings. He put considerable energy into ‘keeping an eye on the whole
circus’ and finally had the pleasure of announcing that ‘the charade was
falling apart bit by bit’. After several days, the communicants of Saint-Paul
were of no more interest to anyone.
In every parish, priests used the pulpit and the system of public announce¬
ments to control what was going on as well as the parishioners themselves.
As one of them said: ‘I made it quite clear before a public audience that it
was my intention to make donations to the poor of my parish twice a
week.’ But as everyone well knew, it was not possible to quell a rumour
and pursuing it required authority and influence: ‘Permit me to disabuse
folk and put a stop to all the shouting that is going on all over the place’
(parish of Vaugiraud). Others gave up the struggle more easily and simply
shrugged their shoulders in the face of a continuous succession of vague
pieces of information and incessant fancies: ‘I became so used to hearing
folk tell me what they had heard and seen when they had never done any
such thing that I gave not the slightest credence to any of these tales.’
Authoritarian or indifferent, the fact remained that the ideas they held
about the poor and the people were more or less the same. ‘The genius of
the people, and particularly of the poor’ consists first of all in taking
advantage of everything and then in deception - the conviction was that
they were all rogues unless they were kept well bridled. The accident of
1770 moreover had given rise to waywardness and a descent into cruelty
and deception. People had taken advantage of the injured, rifling bodies
and stealing from corpses; they had removed jewellery and cut off purses.
When faced with the task of separating the wheat from the tares, comfort¬
ing the deserving poor and leaving aside the bad, one needed authority and
the ability not to be taken in by attempts at deception. But in the distribu-
220 Crowds

tion of alms it should have been possible in the end to classify those
‘poor families who were essentially honest folk’. So who then were
these difficult, if not wicked, people who went about murmuring dis¬
content?
There were several answers to that. The priest anxious about the prac¬
tices of his parishioners might say that in the face of the considerable
spread of irreligion it was hardly surprising that the world was so unjust.
Other priests were even more ready to attribute some fundamental charac¬
teristics to the people for which, apparently, religion would be of absolutely
no help at all. In this respect they wrote some political proposals which the
Lieutenant of Police would be quite happy with: ‘Long experience has
made me recognize that one always has to treat the people well but also
remain alert and ready to ward off any surprises without stirring them
to revolt’ - tightrope equilibrium as befits the notion of the people as
impressionable and liable to revolt at any moment. But the final word
remains with the priest of the parish of Bonne-Nouvelle whose irrevocable
definition of the people is charged with significance, foreboding things to
come: ‘As you well know, Sir, the people will always remain people, which
should not give you any cause for concern.’
On 22 June, armed with the information collected from the priests of
Paris, the Lieutenant addressed himself to his commissioners. It was now
up to them to give out the exact figures (132 buried at La Ville-l’Eveque, 2
in the parish of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, two in Bonne-Nouvelle and
another in Saint-Roch). They were also required to give news of the
injured: ‘It is hoped that there will be no further deaths,’ he stated. It was
then necessary to stop the rumours by being firm and convincing: ‘Do me
the pleasure of destroying the impression that these lists have been making
on the public by their exaggeration of a misfortune which is already too
great by half and by which I have been greatly afflicted.’83
How the commissioners dealt with this remains to be seen; more than
likely it was by means of public notices posted in their districts and a quiet
but reassuringly firm word in the ears of persons under their jurisdiction.
As for the priest, he possessed a distinct advantage in being able to get up
in the pulpit.

Whose fault?

If public opinion was aroused, if genuine and not so genuine lists were
doing the rounds in Paris and if there was a growing discontent, it was
because the population had realized as soon as the accident had happened
that there had been gross negligence on the part of the police; in fact, there
had been an indifference that just about everyone had been able to note.
 Invitations to the Crowds 221

There had been indifference at the time of the accident and worse still,
which made it all the more hard to bear, indifference less than a week
later. The casual attitude of those responsible proved this quite clearly and
the population noticed and, like a whipping which added insult to injury,
they bore the full brunt of it.
On the eve of the festivities it was quite apparent that the Place Louis-
XV had not been properly cleared to receive the crowd and it had been
considerably narrowed by the construction work in hand. The city archi¬
tect had not taken the trouble to level the terrain nor had he capped off the
trenches on some of the passageways.84 There were also obstructions on
the site which restricted movement and the circulation of traffic. As for the
swing bridge which usually gave access to the square in the garden of the
Tuilenes, that had also been closed.8'
Furthermore, immediately after the fireworks, the carriages parked on
the side of the colonnade had decided to force their way through in order
to get onto the Rue Royale and it was this movement that had made the
crush lethal. Guards had been stationed there to bar their way and to
prevent them from using that route but the coachmen, spurred on by the
incitements of their masters, had ended up ignoring their prohibitions.
It came to light later that not only was the guard insufficient at that
precise point but that Jerome Bignon, the prevot des marchands and
the city administration chief, had withdrawn the order preventing the
carriages from passing because of pressure from persons of quality who
were travelling in them. The fact that the carriages had been allowed to
crush the crowd without the authorities even intervening was an unforgiv¬
able insult and a decision not likely to be forgotten. The symbolism is so
poignant that there is little point in dwelling on it; it is sufficient to
read the pamphlets of the day to understand how the whole business
was instantly perceived. The following song reproduced by Hardy in his
Journal of 9 June is from one of them:86

Sartine’s87 concern will not avail -

God knows full well how he’ll be met.
Mistake it was to fear the herd,
Who gathered in great numbers there,
Where honest man, or so I’m told,
Did cab and carriages prefer.
Take care all good Parisian folk,
Lest ye be murdered, broken, choked.
Did ever France see such punishment?
Oh woe for those poor wretches all,
Their cry for vengeance goes unheard,
And there’s none other ’cept they alone
To pay the price of broken polls.
222 Crowds

Nor did the hurt end there; not only was Jerome Bignon, administrative
head of the city, vigorously attacked, he also ‘had the indecency to be
seen at the Opera the following Friday, which so aroused indignation
amongst the citizens that rumours of his fall from Royal Grace and his
possible demise began to circulate’. It would seem that on that particular
Friday, the population was only too well aware of the factors responsible
for precipitating the catastrophe and was truly in a position to allocate
personal responsibility. They were therefore expecting the findings of the
enquiry that had been commissioned by the King’s procurator to indict
and punish those who were to blame, or at least strip from office those in
the front line who had lost the confidence of the public. Such expectations
did not prevent pamphlets from circulating, however, and one of their
favourite targets was Jerome Bignon. Fie was the subject of a pastiche
based on the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah and entitled: ‘Jeremiad
concerning the conflagration of June 1770 in the city of Paris for the
marriage of M. le Dauphin as ordered by M. Jerome Poignon, prevot des
marchands\ the disorder being so great that seven to eight hundred persons
were either crushed or grievously injured in the ensuing debacle.’88
The pastiche itself was decidedly mediocre; it made use of simple
literary techniques and was based on an inversion of meaning intended to
hedge one’s adversary about with derision and ridicule. In the course of
reading it, one begins to realize that each time the description of what
happened appears absurd (‘I arrived in a large square that was small’;
‘they had shortened it with planks to contain the multitude’, etc.), this is in
fact borne out by the concrete facts of what had actually happened.
Indeed, the large square was small because it had been narrowed and
blocked by building work which was still in evidence; and indeed the
crowd was expected on a building site that was not yet ready to receive
them, etc.
This play at standing logic on its head is pursued at length, justifying
each of the incidents in turn: if the horses happened to terrify the people,
that was because they were too content; and when the show of lights that
was expected to rise heavenward only produced a cloud of smoke that
rebounded on the people, that was because it was the one and only
distribution of royal gifts, for as everyone knew, there had been no hand¬
outs of bread and victuals that day.
Lacking as it does any literary polish — in fact it rather resembles
an almanack with the odd pleasantry thrown in here and there — its
repetitious use of illogicality and fallacy ultimately proves quite effective in
achieving its purpose. The text itself, although weak and struggling to
sustain the irony, is rather droll at times and succeeds in the end in
conveying a certain sense of tragedy; and though it is imperfect — even
crude from the point of view of form — it nevertheless carries along the
 Invitations to the Crowds 223
content, even lending it additional meaning at times: ‘They have eyes, but
see not’; ‘the mothers would crush their daughters and the young men
would rip open the bowels of their fathers’. At another level it denounces
those responsible for the catastrophe and, more than that, manages to
portray them as smug and detached, rendering them not only odious but
dangerous to boot. The humour turns to satire; and from treatment as an
unfortunate mishap that was obviously of no consequence, the accident
becomes charged with criminal intent. It ends with a view of the rows of
corpses in the cemetery yawning and falling asleep one by one. And thus
any feelings of pity or horror one might have felt are undone by the
lightness of the allegory and replaced with a kind of perverse yet innocent
game in which J. Bignon might regrettably have participated - ‘He put on
a show, but it’s not the way I’d have done it’, is the final flourish which
brings the text lightly to its close.
Like a papal ‘bull’, this jeremiad is unpretentious; and although the
words trip lightly and produce a smile, its effect is quite profound, for it
succeeds in convincing us that not only was there a casualness on the part
of those in power but that nonchalance and indifference were the very
hallmarks of power itself. It was a flippancy that was quite ostentatious,
sure of itself, and confident that it knew what was right no matter how
absurd or deadly it might be; it was equally self-assured in its indifference
and libertinism which it knew were guaranteed to provoke. The eyes of the
great and mighty were wide open — and blank. Exactly! That was precisely
the root of the problem and — make no mistake — everyone knew it.
While the crowd awaited the conclusion of the enquiry, they whispered
among themselves the names of the two men they considered responsible,
namely Jerome Bignon and Chevalier Rocquemont, who was in charge
of the Guard and the Watch. But while they hoped for their disgrace
and disappearance off the public stage for having been so publicly and
glaringly at fault, the conflict shifted its ground elsewhere. It was, in effect,
to be taken away from the populace who were gripped by a legitimate
desire for punishment, in order to be carried on well away from the people
where it would be used in support of machinations of a quite different
kind between the parlement and the Crown, from which the people them¬
selves were obviously excluded.
And so the initial attempt by the crowd to denounce those whom they
knew to be responsible and whom they had named found itself juxtaposed
with a quarrel in high places. The latter was sufficient to erase all traces of
the initial conflict based as it was on ancient rivalries between the Parisian
police forces over the division of judicial responsibility.
One should note that Paris was an area of conflict for the police on
two fronts.89 The prevot des marchands, who was the city’s chief admin¬
istrator, had responsibility for the banks of the Seine and its immediate
224 Crowds

vicinity. This jurisdiction, which was quite specific, brought with it untold
quarrels and legal cases. For instance it was not uncommon to see crim¬
inals or thieves who had escaped from the street police finding a brief
moment of respite on the banks of the Seine as this restless and turbulent
place came under this other jurisdiction. The interaction between the
Lieutenant-General of Police and the provost was one of constant rivalry
and abuse of privilege with endless arguments over powers and priorities.
On the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, the policing of the
firework display had been entrusted to the prevot des marchands as it was
to be situated by the banks of the Seine and thus in his locality. It was
anticipated that the rockets would fall back into the Seine where every¬
thing was to be arranged so as to avoid the possibility of an accident or
drowning. But as it happened, a serious quarrel had arisen between the
office of the Lieutenant of Police and that of the provost. Jerome Bignon
had lacked the generosity to award the regiment of guards the pay¬
ment of 1,000 ecus required by the Due de Biron for putting them
in place to supplement the bourgeois Guard. What was more, besides
leaving responsibility for the Place Louis-XV in too few hands he had
also given way to pressure from persons of ‘quality’ who were travelling
by carriage.
The parlement rapidly shifted the enquiry’s brief and after finding, upon
examination, that the activity of the Guard had been deficient, it attempted
to find out who was in charge of this body of a thousand or so men (both
Guard and Watch combined).
The Guard and Watch were both under the authority of the Lieutenant-
General of Police but they were totally different in their composition. The
officers of the Watch had responsibility for those in their charge and
answered directly to the parliamentary court whereas the Guard, much
bigger altogether, consisted of salaried men and were dependent on the
Crown. The latter had been trying to diminish the Watch for some time
and in 1765 it had nominated Rocquemont, who was already Commander
of the Guard. The purpose of this was perfectly clear — namely, the
amalgamation of these two bodies to create a single body tied to the
Crown.
From that point on, the parlement concentrated all its efforts on bring¬
ing out the responsibility of the Guard for the accident of 1770 and
making it loud and clear that the Watch had behaved not only correctly
but efficiently at all times. In discrediting the Guard, the parlement sought
to gain absolute power over the Watch.
Just when the quarrel was at its height, the Lieutenant of Police took
everyone by surprise by publishing a hasty edict maintaining the separa¬
tion of the two bodies and which was intended to resist at all costs any
attempt at recuperation by the parlement. The death-knell had been
 Invitations to the Crowds 225
sounded and in 1771 the Watch was to be suppressed by the chancellor,
Maupeou, and the parlement lost its battle.
During this significant episode between the Crown and the parlement
which took place at a level at which the population could obviously not
participate, the city authority issued a variety of bulletins in answer to
the attacks to which it had been subjected. It attempted to explain by
every possible means that ‘this misfortune was the result of extraordinary
circumstances .
It was not long before an official version of the facts saw the light of
day; its main task was to restore and relay calm amongst the population
and it dwelled at length on the theme of fate and fatality and the risks
arising wherever there were crowds. The following is an example:

finally all precautions had been taken and orders given in a manner so as
to ensure that everything ran smoothly and this would have been the
case had it not been for the sudden and unexpected influx from the
opposite direction with the effect that all the measures which had been
taken were momentarily thrown into confusion. All this occurred so
suddenly that some distinguished persons who at that same instant had
set off from the colonnades without even realizing what had happened
and believing that they would be hemmed in, only extricated themselves
as a result of the brave efforts of the people who were accompanying
them.91

Order and control were re-established for the time being - political
machinations taking precedence over the events in the street, from
which attention had been diverted. In a sense, the accident had been
taken off the street which had been thus summoned to celebration and
catastrophe, thereby removing the means of keeping up the murmurings
against the monarchy.
Contrary to other events where there was collective involvement and
where it was often the rule to leave it to the crowd to punish the person
responsible, the system on this occasion operated quite differently.
There could be no doubt but that those who had been designated as
guilty by the crowd were too well placed in the political hierarchy to
be abandoned to popular condemnation. Thus it was necessary to
rearrange the order of play and so divert attention towards other types
of responsibility.
It was no mere coincidence that the parlement should appropriate
this conflict, thereby depriving the population at a stroke of all possi¬
bility of influence or action.
 9
The Crowds amongst Themselves

In Paris no one needed an invitation to get together or to go off in a group;

the natural corollary of living outdoors was the permanent attraction of
whatsoever was happening and whatever presented itself before one’s eyes
or ears or called for one’s attention in one way or another.

Thus the Parisian inhabitant is never indifferent to what is going on

around him. The least little novelty is likely to make him pause on his
way. Take, for instance, the example of a man who has his head in the
air and is looking intently at some object or other. You are bound to see
several others stop immediately and turn their eyes in the same direction
thinking that they will see whatever he is looking at. Little by little, the
crowd will grow, each of them asking the other what they are looking at.
All it needs is for one poor canary to escape and perch on a window-sill
for the whole street to be blocked by the crowd. The moment he flies
from one lamp to the next, shouts and cries will go up on all sides,
windows will open and there will be faces at each. The brief and
momentary independence of one small bird will become a spectacle of
general interest.
If a dog were to be thrown in the river, the banks and bridges would
be covered almost immediately with people, some of them concerned
about what might happen to it and others saying/ it must be saved,
watching it closely in whatever direction the current happened to take it.
This spirit of curiosity is not necessarily lacking in sensitivity; it is not
unknown for instance for the people to separate two combatants and for
the women to harangue them so fiercely on the advantages of peace and
harmony that they would settle their grievances on the spot.1

It is easy and, in fact, customary to interpret this kind of up and run

behaviour as evidence of the immaturity of the crowd with their taste for
the fortuitous and the accidental. Chroniclers, contemporaries, the literati
 The Crowds amongst Themselves TU

of the period and modern historians have all described these irrational
impulses of the crowd and its inability to separate the real from the
imaginary, allowing itself to be carried along willy-nilly to whatever
speechifying or spectacle might be on offer.
Scientific progress had also had a hand in putting all sorts of odd
inventions within the bounds of possibility and, whilst religion was
becoming less satisfying, there was still the possibility of acts of God with
their power to incite or punish. And so from time immemorial one has
been led to believe that the crowd or common herd has submerged its fears
and ignorance by submitting to immature systems of relationship with
reality which were no more than pure fancy, thus providing obvious proof
of the need for constant control of these potentially dangerous excesses
and enthusiasms.
Strangely enough, it was a work by Nicolas Ledoux on the city and
urbanization (something of a utopian dream) which expressed another
view of these continual gatherings of Parisians and what it was about the
daily goings-on that attracted them all so much.2
For Ledoux, festivities were not so important if everyday life were sweet
and pleasant. The real value of the festivity was in the fact that ‘the
community had the opportunity to contemplate itself and rejoice in one
another.'3 It is an approach well worth considering and singling out from
some of the other well-worn tracks. What better way of re-appropriating
for oneself not only one’s essence but also one’s meaning than by seeing
oneself and each other for oneself, and by being oneself the spectacle
of one’s perceptions of self and one’s own attempt to make sense of
events. The King’s celebrations or punitive events offered the people
an opportunity for consensus. The taste for freaks and curiosities (the
expressions of the period), evinced different attitudes, among them a desire
to offer one’s own pronouncements on the significance to the day’s events.
Furthermore, there was a feeling that the experience of the many lent sense
and meaning to whatever was seen or heard, thus making it possible not
only to gain a collective grip on reality but also, and why not, a potential
mastery of events such that one need never wait for meaning to be
attributed or suggested by those who knew, controlled, commanded or
governed.
This unfailing attraction for the strange and the improbable was referred
to in the texts of the period as ‘credulity’. It was a recurrent theme to be
found as much on the pens of justices as in texts by ministers or writers.
The people had to be gullible: this was the basis on which the elites needed
to act and react and an assessment which they quite often ‘worked on’.
Because it was so apparent to everyone, popular credulity was itself the
subject of vast analysis. The difficulty of questioning it or even approach¬
ing it is that there is a permanent risk of being tricked by the initial
228 Crowds

position of ‘looking at’ or of the desire to dissect things up into small

parcels of meaning. Even if every precaution is taken to distance oneself as
much as possible from this position, other risks arise, most notably in the
subtle shifts and shades of vocabulary employed and it is this surreptitious
betrayal by means of language that is perhaps even worse.
However, one thing is certain - popular credulity is not an entity in
itself; nor does it constitute anything objectively capable of defining, once
and for all, the essence of a social group. It is an opinion and that is an
entirely different story; it suggests a relationship, made by others, between
a form of action and a mode of being, but learning unfortunately does not
usually preoccupy itself with its own received ideas or its stereotypes
and archetypal assumptions. That the people were obviously gullible was
useful more often than not as a point of departure for other forms of
reasoning shored up by this principle, which is no principle at all. That
credulity was a form well suited to the intelligence and social arrangements
of the aristocracy, for example, is very rarely taken into account - or at
least very rarely analysed in these terms.
Credulity, as one knows, was far from being the prerogative of a
single social group and the kind of peculiar events and curiosities which
the people enjoyed so much and which are so complacently related by
chroniclers and archivists of the time were in fact central to a complex
system of beliefs that were more or less shared by those of different social
spheres. It was not really until the eighteenth century that the break with a
common basis of belief took place, thereby marking the appearance of an
elitist culture which strove to distinguish itself from the people and the
weight of past archaism. It was a rupture which is relatively recent. It is
more apparent in its desire to maintain a distance and instigate a definitive
separation between the upper and lower ends of the social hierarchy and is
more convincing in its strategy for the installation of cultural supremacy
than in the actual content of its knowledge. Although cultural unity may
have been breaking down, abundant traces remain, clearly measurable in
the beliefs and activities of the elites, as well as in their treatises.
Even the Encyclopedie found itself grappling with fascination for the
extraordinary; and not even its reasoned attempts managed to refute what
was, and still is, a common vision of the world.4
Furthermore, life in the city (particularly between society and the
authorities), saw the emergence of a number of variations and combina¬
tions as to what ought, and ought not, to be believed. The field of play
might include, for instance, phenomena that were purely intended to
incite; deliberate construction of events in order to make them believable;
sudden attempts to repress and control what came to be termed ‘sheer
fantasy’ where previously it had been considered ‘news’ or novelty; all this
helped give ‘credulity’ a number of facets and thus enabled it to engage in
a field of activity which was both productive and destructive and in which
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 229
the ordinary people and the elites played their part, each echoing the other.
For the elites as well as the mob were equally keen partners in their
enthusiasms for the extraordinary, the sensational, the ‘scientific’ (or at
any rate, the ‘hitherto unheard of’) but in the treatises and discourses
of the great and mighty responsibility for credulity is assigned to the
backward and boorish masses. It was rare for the elite to perceive its own
taste for these same items; and when it did, it did so badly. It was even
worse at seeing the ambiguous nature of its own conduct in the thick of an
event in which its own complicity helped render it an object of credulity.
It is possible to gain some idea of this complexity from some of the
famous events of the century and some have already been analysed from
this perspective;^ one need only think, for example, of the phenomenon of
mesmerism or of the ecstatics in the cemetery of the church of Saint-
Medard. There were also some small events that were so insignificant that
contemporaries did not think to write about them but which nevertheless
reveal, at the most basic level, an overview of the whole of the social scene.
Because they were so small and unimportant one might believe that they
were entirely the upshot of popular emotion and only relevant to that
particular type of credulity, but not so - even the least of these rather
strange and peculiar little affairs can conceal within it a set of mechanisms
which provides a rich picture of the social world as a whole with its
hierarchies, challenges, disruptions and acts of common faith.
In 1756, the story of a little girl of nine and a half, Madeleine Ernault,
was to arouse a great deal of astonishment and one can find traces of it in
the judicial archives.6 The story was such that she managed to mobilize
around her the police, the aristocracy, the medical bodies and the people.
The bizarre nature of the phenomenon, the tender years of the child, the
occurrence of something that had hitherto been unheard of, and the
obvious references to sexuality, all helped set up certain ideas and beliefs
and led to the printing of accounts and spread of various rumours which
were effectively taken in hand by the police. The field of play might well be
tiny but in so far as the archives allow us to make sense of it, it was in fact
immense. First, there was the event itself - everyone believed it. It was
true. Then it turned out to be false. As one follows the route from belief
to rumour and then to error, one can see the complex social tangles
which shatter the simplistic assertions which so confidently establish clear
divisions between people and elite, rational and irrational, truth and error,
news and rumour.

Little Madeleine
On Friday 12 March 1756, at 5 o’clock in the evening, Commissioner
Roland received in his office a little girl of 9, accompanied by her parents,
230 Crowds

salt and tobacco retailers in the Rue Saint-Victor. They had come to
register a complaint against Denis, a bar hand for a wine vendor in a
cabaret not far away known as Le Petit Trou (‘The Little Hole’)- Madeleine
asserted that she had been touched and fondled by this 18-year-old and
that he had penetrated her. This had taken place each time she had gone
on an errand to the establishment over the summer. Denis of course had
intimated to her that she should not tell anyone, with the result that there
she was, pregnant and unwell.
Louis Ernault and his wife, La Fleche, had taken every precaution,
presenting the Commissioner with a diagnosis and report made by Jeanne
Bary, midwife in the Rue du Fauboug-Saint-Martin.
From here everything proceeded very quickly. The Ernault parents who
were anxious to have the matter dealt with at the highest level had taken
further steps and had also appealed to the Lieutenant-General of Police for
the immediate arrest of Denis. The usual procedure was to register a com¬
plaint with the district commissioner - an appeal direct to the Lieutenant
was quite unusual. Their intention was to obtain from him an order of the
King against Denis which, as we know, would have effectively prevented
any trial.
From this point, Lieutenant Berryer took the matter in hand with his
usual firmness but also with a degree of circumspection. It is important to
remember that this affair took place six years after the popular revolt of
1750 caused by the abduction of children on the streets of Paris and which
had been carried out by the police on the instructions of Berryer himself.
The authorities had been on full alert that year and it was still a source of
trauma for the King, the police and the people. Berryer had nearly lost his
position and the King was still reluctant to travel through the city. Thus
the fact that a little girl had been raped and violated by a youth and was
pregnant as a result meant that the matter should be taken in hand quickly
and receive immediate attention for, as Berryer knew, one did not touch
children with impunity.
There then followed enquiries amongst the neighbours, a statement by
the midwife, and visits by the police inspector to the parents and the little
girl. The probity of the parents was acknowledged and not a soul would
have dared suggest that it was the little girl’s fault for ‘enticing him’;
therefore action was needed. A brief comment in the margin of a letter
from Berryer to Commissioner Machurin indicates that legal proceedings
should not go ahead and that in this case it was a lettre de cachet that was
required: ‘What needs to be issued here is an order [from the King]; this
case is not suitable for consideration at law.’ Indeed, how was one to make
a legal decision on the basis of this unspeakable incident which not only
defied both nature and the law but medicine itself - after all it was a 9-
year-old child who was pregnant. On 25 April, Denis (Denis Guillemard in
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 231
full) was taken to prison at Bicetre to be detained there. He made no
attempt to deny what had happened, at least as far as the fondling was
concerned and as for the pregnancy, his opinion was not sought on that
matter.
Denis in prison and Madeleine pregnant. The news spread like a cloud
of dust. The 'epic’ did the rounds right up until the end of the month
of October 1756, or perhaps one should say until February 1757, if one
takes the final conclusion of the saga to be the release of Madeleine’s
mother four months after her imprisonment for deception. It was a tangled
history: populace, folk in carriages, important men of medicine, all trooped
along to the Ernaults house to watch the child’s belly swell and to make
on-the-spot comments about this prodigy. Nine, ten, eleven and then
fifteen months went by without the child having given birth. The police
were mobilized and the crowd too. Printed accounts were sold in the
streets; the birth was announced, then denied and finally attempts were
made to justify the fact of having been deceived.
This story of a little girl, commented on day after day by the police, was
a strange business. False and unfounded, it was a story of credulity and an
example of the mechanisms and processes by which a piece of news might
become an item of belief, an error, a rumour, and the motive for police
activity. Above all it perhaps best illustrates with what natural inclination
an insignificant affair among the popular classes of the Maubert district
was taken up by those of bourgeois and aristocratic estate and their
predilection for the extraordinary. As we shall see, the house of little
Madeleine was a veritable social observatory.

Setting the scene

From 4 May, the crowd began to gather in the Rue Saint-Victor and the
mother, without wasting any time, gave her permission to allow in only
‘those who had something for little Madeleine - to put in her purse’. The
child herself sat with outstretched hand, whilst outside, the Guard were
obliged to keep the peace; the shop windows were shattered and the ‘mob
were prepared to use violence to get in’. There were not enough men from
the Guard at Pont Saint-Michel or from the New Market and the sergeants
of the Watch indicated their disquiet in their accounts of the day’s events.
These accounts are quite detailed and from day one they mention the
arrival of persons of importance:

5 May 1756. The Guard maintained good order until 9.30 in the even¬
ing. At around 6 o’clock there was a visit from Monsieur le Comte de
Lancy and Madame la Marquise de Senelet, accompanied by several
other lords and ladies. Good order was maintained.
232 Crowds

7 May 1756. I [Durier, sergeant in the Watch] went over to the

Ernaults’ this morning at 9 to prevent a disturbance among the populace
who were wanting to see the child; there were also a number of honest
members of the public and persons of quality who had arrived by coach
and horses.

And thus the whole world came running - important doctors and
surgeons came out of their way; the Dauphine and her midwife were
interested in the affair, and coaches and carriages passed in procession
beneath the windows of the Ernault family. The clergy also took up their
positions. Shocked by the displaying of the pregnant child, the superior of
the Bons-Enfants seminary and the Grand Master of the Cardinal Lemoine
College together with several clerical professors wrote to the Lieutenant-
General on 6 May when the file-past of visitors first began: ‘The young
mother Ernault, who according to medical reports is in fact pregnant, is by
virtue of her singular condition causing a scandal bordering on a state of
public commotion which seems to us as prejudicial to the State as to
matters of religion.’ They strongly recommended that matters be taken
firmly in hand, for ‘the evil is widespread’, they protested.
And thus, all at once and all together, the whole world came rushing to
take a look: ordinary people, doctors, the high and mighty, the bourgeois,
the police and the clergy. There was no shortage of ‘visitors’ to join in such
a prodigious and disturbing phenomenon as was this, the pregnancy of a
young child. Between them, each social group, either jointly or separately,
lent authenticity to the incident for no other reason than by virtue of their
being there. No one made any attempt to prove anything; each of them by
their very presence confirmed the singular reality of the situation without
the slightest doubt being expressed. It had happened. It was unheard of.
One had to see it. At the same time there was really no need to rush for, as
everyone knew, it took nine months to deliver, although that in itself was
enough to alarm the clergy. As they saw it, most strange events usually
passed like a thief in the night, but in this case, the scandal promised to
go on indefinitely, which was an unbearable prospect.
Then there was Medicine. That was certainly one of the preferred
terrains for various forms of credulity, for in many areas there was still a
great deal of ignorance, whilst at the same time great advances were being
made. A privileged space was readily available for the prodigious, or
such as might defy knowledge or nature, and when it came to the female
body and sexuality or maternity, the space was even more propitious. A
woman’s belly was a centre of contradiction in which unprecedented
fragility met up with extremes and excesses that were impossible to chart.
Nine-year-old Madeleine was a captive person, appropriated because her
body had become the meeting-place between utmost vulnerability and
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 233
exceptional and hitherto unheard-of forces. Why should one not believe it?
How could one not believe it? Then there was the fact that this incident
had been preceded by a rape - innocence stained; then there was the fact
that the crowd, which included doctors, people and marquesses, had
only appeared the day after the boy’s arrest. Denis’s confession had thus
cemented the incident. From probability, it had become certainty.
One might with good reason suppose that this tale was untypical and
that the fact that it had brought together a cross-section of the public was
exceptional; but if one reads the newspapers and journals of the day as
well as the memoirs and chronicles, one would see that this was not in fact
the case and that the opposite were true. Nor is there any need to go far
afield in looking for examples; they abound in the manuscripts of S.
Hardy’s Journal and there is also L.-S. Mercier, who has the additional
advantage of offering the odd item of useful speculation on the problem.
Usually laconic, although occasionally chatty, Hardy’s manuscript gives
consideration to minor items of news as well as to the more grand and
newsworthy pieces, with the result that episodes in the street feature as
much as political intrigue and scandal. Precise and to the point, Hardy
makes his reports with apparent detachment and little comment, from
which neither public executions, nor popular uprisings, nor the death of
Louis XV gave him cause to deviate. His ability to maintain this distance is
due in part to his style and the manner in which he prefaces his news with
phrases such as ‘it is said that’: ‘it was reported yesterday’; or ‘much has
been said about’. These expressions invariably followed the day’s date and
preceded all information whether it was political, anecdotal, social or quite
simply surprising, because it arose from the realm of the sensational or the
irrational (miracles, cures, departure of hot air balloons etc.); so that in
between hangings, the announcement of an epidemic, periods of brutal
cold, or the birth of a prince, one could read, for example, that on 27
February 1777,

a natural phenomenon has been reported which is most extraordinary. It

would seem that the wife of Sieur de Barentin, the first President of the
Cour des Aides, has recently given birth to a bush which has been
identified as a currant bush, although it was not bearing currants at the
time — only cherries — so it is said. This monstrous new species bore
absolutely no resemblance to anything human and was quite inanimate.
This strange birth has obviously been the cause of great sorrow to all the
family.

That is all — just these few lines; the Journal then continues with other
news. There is little point in looking for a refutation or confirmation of the
facts in the following months for that was not Hardy’s intention or
234 Crowds

purpose. For him, the news occurred, it set itself down with all the rest,
and owed its status as evidence to the fact that it had been set down in
writing. Hardy did naturally take the trouble to explain that it was an
extraordinary phenomenon; however, the infant shrub, laden with cherries
instead of red currants, that had made its way out of the belly of a lady of
Barentin one winter’s morning found itself joining company, not too
surprisingly, with numerous metaphors from the vegetable kingdom which
have been used from time immemorial to symbolize the human body,7 but
in this case with one important difference - here one was not dealing
in metaphors but with reality. The fact that it had taken on all the
appearance of metaphor and was closely associated with it and based on
‘traditional associations between gestation and vegetable production’ and
with ‘the medieval practice of likening the tree to gestation and the female
sex’8 did not seem to disconcert anyone, not even Hardy. And so whilst
the family of the President of the Cour des Aides was understandably
upset, the social status of the lady who had given birth removed from the
phenomenon any possible connotations of the type referred to as ‘popular
naivety’.
It should also be recognized that this was a field (medicine and
childbirth) where the medical records and dossiers abounded in equally
stunning events which were never completely rejected by the medical
profession on the grounds of their extraordinary character. One thinks in
particular of the dossiers received by the members of the Royal Society of
Medicine,9 in which there are references to all kinds of curiosities and
strange occurrences which fully accord with the kind of female world
which was so influenced by mystery and subject to displays of physical
violence. ‘I believe in that phenomenon as much as I do in the existence of
the sun,’ wrote Dr Bousquet in 1785, overwhelmed by a young girl of 14
‘whose breasts were producing foreign bodies akin to the seeds and flowers
of the umbellar thistle’.10 His letter to the Royal Society of Medicine was
accompanied by a little bag containing these precious golden grains. The
case was discussed, naturally, and even though in high places a hoax
may have been suspected, there was a perfectly normal discussion about
the young girl as there was in so many other cases in which the body
had apparently been responsible for producing disorders of an incredible
nature. Therefore it is not surprising to find the pens of memorialists
flowing with some of these strange phenomena in which the normal
existed side by side with the bizarre, particularly where diagrams were
concerned or drawings of persons or events. The excesses and aberra¬
tions of nature11 are recorded in books and encyclopedias which feature
strange creatures with unusual abnormalities like the ‘30-year old male
monstrosity born in Naples in 1742 with the lower quarters of a male
child protruding from somewhere in the gastric region’.
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 235
Some texts might have been revised on the grounds of getting to what
was real, and then offered back for consumption to a wide and cultured
public. Thus credulity could also be a matter for scientific activity; it was
certainly the preliminary step (and no doubt indispensable) of any attempt
at rational explanation.
Bothered as he was by credulity in all its forms, L.-S. Mercier dedicated
several chapters to it in his Tableaux as well as in his Tar allele de Paris et
de Londres' (‘Comparison between London and Paris’).12 His rationalism
led him towards a controlled mistrust of religious phenomena, manifesta¬
tions of which he related critically and with a hint of irony. For him,
miracles, cures, king’s evils and ghosts were manifestations of the same
thing, usually quite ridiculous and more often than not motivated by the
need for the extraordinary.
It is quite interesting to spend some time wandering through the maze
of his assertions, which are sometimes contradictory. Two of the ideas he
proposed are stimulating as far as the present discussion is concerned but
he does not take on board either their consequences or their implications,
and in fact in the same chapter goes so far as to take up the opposite
theses, which were more traditionally held and faithful to his period.
Castigating (albeit gently) the devotion of Parisians to St Genevieve, he
describes perfectly the particular forms it took according to social status;
for although everyone might believe it, how one in fact manifested that
belief was dependent on the position allotted to one in society:

Ordinary folk and common people come shaking their sheets and covers
in pursuit of the saint; they come to ask for cures for every kind of
disease and fever and to drink filthy water from a fountain alleged to be
miraculous. But the worthies from the parlement and other sovereign
courts ask her for rain during time of drought and the healing and
restoration of princes! ... Neither reason nor philosophy has found
anything to replace these profound and happy little illusions.13

Along with this idea that belief was shared differently according to
social class14 comes a doubt, almost a conviction: what, in the end, if the
people themselves had precious little belief in all this but simply went
along with it all as a spectacle offered to them and which they themselves
had appropriated? He puts forward this hypothesis on the basis of a
Parisian summer custom which took place each 3 July and which involved
the burning of the effigy of a Swiss who, while drunk, had struck the
statue of the Virgin with his sword. Blood had immediately issued from
the statue and so, each year, reparation was made for this profanity to the
sound and accompaniment of drums. Mercier, who found this custom
ridiculous, added that this showed that even
236 Crowds

the most common and regular practices gave at most an equivocal

picture of the real belief of a people and that more often than not it was
simply a spectacle for the populace and nothing more.
Our most majestic ceremonies have no other basis and it is thus that
the Holy Ampulla is still used to anoint our Kings. No one in the
assembled throng any longer believes that it descended from on high on
the beak of a dove and no one believes any more in the miraculous
healing of scrofula.15

Just when one is given to understand that Mercier might be dissociating

himself from any traditional formulations, the paragraphs or chapters that
follow would seem to reveal other aspects apparently in contradiction with
previous statements and propositions. On the one hand, there is never
any question of analysing the contents of the beliefs of the great, whilst
those of lesser men and women make their appearance only to be taken
apart and consequently controlled. On the other hand, popular faith
and credulity are treated with severity tempered by nostalgia. Mercier
claims to envy those who sobbed openly at the feet of St Genevieve, but
unfortunately for him his reason prevented him from abandoning himself
thus. He realized that such cults and practices were ‘adapted to the limits
of the intelligence of the herd’, which somewhat devalues his approach.
Leaving aside the specific domain of faith in order to describe ‘the love
of the miraculous’, he shows how its victims are the ‘feeble’ and how
reason and credulous fear can be divided in terms of sex with female
frailty corresponding to male reason.
To these bold if scarcely innovatory comments is added a slight annoy¬
ance at the compulsion to believe anything and everything at all times and
on all occasions. Making a comparison between phenomena of belief and
‘moral epidemics’, Mercier invites the police to crush all such extravagance,
thus setting momentarily to one side his usual severity towards them. ‘A
police which addresses itself to breaking impetuous gusts of this kind and
thus extinguishing a public extravagance as one would the start of a fire is
a real benefit to government.’16 This task of destroying prejudice was,
according to the author, so noble that as the priests took no responsibility
for it, then the police should.
In actual fact — and the developments in the Ernault affair go to prove it
- the game played by the police was a complex one. When anything
strange occurred, they made a point of being there; but the result of their
presence did not always take the form of an obstacle - far from it - even
though their repressive activity might be clearly visible.
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 237

When the police moved in with the residents

The initial police reaction to healers, charlatans or any kind of superstitious

practice was to oppose it, as edicts and police instructions clearly indicate.
One need only open Delamare’s Traite de police, Book III, section vii, for
instance, to see that there was no room left for douht. Police orders, in the
form of a royal edict of 6 July 1682, read as follows:

Let us ban all superstitious practices in thought, word or deed which

either abuse the writings of the Holy Scriptures or the prayers of the
Church or indeed say or do those things having nothing to do with
natural causes. With regard to those who might be responsible for the
spreading of such teaching, together with all such practitioners of it who,
having availed themselves of it for whatsoever ends or purpose they see
fit, let us see that they are punished in such a way as will be an
example.1

This was the age of treasure-seekers, discoverers of the philosopher’s

stone and of magicians and diviners of every sort. It was a bubbling over
that was both real and imagined and a possible attempt to hem in a police
force who were none too clever. This never-ending problem is recalled in
the correspondence of the time as shown in this letter from d’Argenson to
Delamare in which he expresses his fears about the extent of possession:

7 July 1713. You will be aware that extraordinary happenings of an evil

nature should not be made public in Paris where there is a readiness to
believe in things that do not exist rather than in those that do and where
one usually finds imagination and superstition taking precedence over
religion and faith. I beg of you to see to it that those persons who are
allegedly possessed be removed as soon as possible from where they are
and accommodated somewhere apart; great care should be taken to
ensure that all knowledge of their whereabouts is concealed from the
public.18

Even before the great period of the ecstatics of Saint-Medard, those

who were possessed as well as fortune-tellers and other practitioners of the
magic arts found themselves being imprisoned. On the margins there might
be the odd treasure-seeker convinced that diamonds and great fortunes
had been secretly buried by wealthy princes;19 or elsewhere, poor men
whose efforts to grow rich had led them to concoct harmless secrets
which allowed men to live to 500 whilst remaining extremely youthful -
provided, of course, one took the precaution of drinking every 25 years an
elixir guaranteed to ‘make one’s skin as good as new’.20 And it was not
just those at the top who had to deal with this kind of problem; inspectors
238 Crowds

and commissioners found themselves dealing with ghosts and phantoms on

a day-to-day basis.

For instance, at one of Lenoir’s hearings, there was a leather-worker

from the vicinity of the Jardin des Plantes; the man, who was very
devout but extremely stupid, was married to a woman whose ugliness
and sluttishness were public knowledge. He was tired of having the
authorities in his district laugh in his face when he told them about
a ghost. He declared that he was not going to leave the Lieutenancy
unless he received some assistance. This thing had prevented him from
consummating his marriage, or so he said, whereas it was in fact his
wife.. .21

There were others who took so much advantage of the credulity of

others that they were condemned to the galleys for life. Such was the case
of the priest Robert Pons,22 who extorted money from the dying by means
of an extensive network of accomplices. His operation was based on the
unlikely but unique and ingenious trade in accounts of experiences beyond
the grave. Thus we see inmates of the hotel-dieu undertaking in their dying
agony, and upon payment of a sum of money, to point out places where
there was buried treasure - a fiction invented out of nowhere.
So it was that the police took on board little Madeleine and her family.
The type of activity involved in this case is particularly interesting because
of its variety and because it corresponds to a function of traditional
policing which is little known. As has often been said, the Paris police was
not solely an instrument of repression; as well as being an agent of control,
there were also elements of dithering and occasionally, incitement.
The calendar of events probably explains it better. Quickly submerged
by an agitated crowd and solemnly reproved by the clergy, Chaban,
Secretary of State for the Police, demanded that the child’s mother should
cease receiving people. Inspector Ferrat, who was responsible for carrying
out the order, simply reported that the mother, in a letter, had announced
to spectators that at the present time the little one had gone off to
Versailles. This had failed to stop the regular gathering of crowds, how¬
ever, and on the evening of 10 May, Madeleine left her house in a sedan
chair to go and live for the time being in the Rue de Seme, where her
mother immediately opened her doors once again to the public. The
authorities, fed up with all this upheaval, threatened the Ernault woman
with arrest. She resisted, however, shed a few tears and refused to leave
her door shut, ‘because if she did that, her daughter would become ill’.
Others attempted to reason with her, arguing that she was a very bad
example for other unnatural mothers who would then have no hesitation
in prostituting their children ‘in the sordid hope of profiting from the
simplicity of the public’. Nothing of the kind. She calmly replied that the
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 239
gifts she had received had not even managed to meet the costs of the house
and the removal...
At no time during these months of May and June did the police adopt a
firm position. They were no doubt uncertain about what steps to take and
did not wish to upset the Ernault family. The Inspector, the Commissioner
and the Lieutenant-General alike only managed to contain the disorder;
they never intervened directly at its source nor denied the phenomenon
itself. Moreover, by the beginning of July an ‘account’ of the story was
being sold on the streets; and the crowd was even thicker, but this time it
was divided - ‘the majority of those who came did not think she was
pregnant, but believed instead that it was a matter of a foreign body. The
doctors and midwives, however, expressed no such doubts.’
In mid-July, the midwife announced that the birth was imminent. A
duchess, whose name is not known, asked to be present at the birth as well
as Mile Gossin from the Comedie-Franqaise, who had been to see the
young girl quite frequently. Then came a police resolution which was
surprising, to say the least. It was a resolution which had not been taken at
the top of the hierarchy and was probably not ordered by the Lieutenant-
General of Police; it seems to have been the personal initiative of one of
the policemen himself, Inspector Gillot. He had been following the affair
closely for some time and had been sending him notes every other day. On
3 August 1756, following his report that Jacquotte (the name that had
been popularly given to the child) ‘was more upset than usual and had had
one or two slight pains but nothing further’, he wrote, ‘I have made the
decision to sleep there so as to be in a position to provide you with an
exact account of this event.’ He reminds one on several occasions of this
decision in his letters: ‘19 August 1756. I am sleeping here every night so
that in the event of anything occurring, I can warn Monsieur immediately.’
Apparently no one, not even one of his superiors, commented on the
bizarre nature of his decision, let alone the fact that it might be superfluous
or even inopportune. Gillot remained at the Ernaults’ and was there for
quite some time. Perhaps even he himself became somewhat impatient; on
25 August he refers to his own home and makes the note that ‘I will
continue to sleep here up until the time that Monsieur gives me orders to
the contrary.’
Here we have police activity pushed to its upper limit and in some ways
faithful to its own perception of its work, that is to be present at the event,
infiltrate and become a part of it even to the extent of becoming fully
incorporated in it. The aim was the achievement of perfect control which
would conform to the idea of order and the image of policing defined as
the ‘science of the right moment’. In the days of the ecstatics of the
cemetery of Saint-Medard, inspectors and clerks made daily notes of their
actions and words, as the archives of the Bastille testify. That it was
240 Crowds

Gillot’s own decision to award himself this task, and thereby attract
attention to himself by splashing himself with some of the glory if ever this
prodigy actually occurred, is of little importance. He was only able to take
it on because his decision conformed with the current modes of police
functioning and were in keeping with that particular social utopia from
which the police scarcely ever departed.23 He stayed with the family
because he believed the news of the impending birth. By being there both
night and day he was participating in the belief, and in some ways giving it
life and breath, perhaps even encouraging and reviving it, if it should
falter. What followed was to illustrate this even more clearly.

From rumour to error

The news was prodigious enough in itself. The parents were also deter¬
mined to broadcast it and the crowd was both curious and receptive.
When the police stepped into the whole business this was not particularly
unusual. They did it for the most part by maintaining a physical presence,
which allowed them to witness events at the same time as maintaining
some control over them; and for the rest by consenting to the circulation
of the news by means of leaflets and broadsheets, at least up until the time
when it became necessary to recognize the mistake. Following this, another
pamphlet had to be issued specifically for making a public justification of
the error, which was something of a rare event.
From the first complaint registered with the commissioner by the Ernault
parents in May 1756 to the imprisonment of the mother in October
and her subsequent release six months later, the course of events was
indeed tortuous and involved. Rumour became news; certainty gained its
authenticity in the written word before being finally abandoned as an error
which was then presented to the public in the form of a confession to
having been deceived. A strange course indeed, and perhaps what makes it
so original is the fact that not only were the police present at every stage
but that proceedings were endorsed, justified and authenticated by them
from beginning to end - from the credible to the true, and from the true to
the erroneous.
The fact that a written version of little Madeleine’s unlikely story was in
circulation should come as no surprise for, invaded as it was by crime,
accidents and major or minor catastrophes, the city was not simply con¬
tent to pass on these incidents by word of mouth, inflating or deflating the
news as it passed from ear to ear: it also carried on the trade in written
form.24
Newsmongers, duly licensed against the distribution of unsound or
libellous material, regularly cried their wares, these ‘accounts’ of strange,
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 241

astounding or disturbing stories for which the city served as a theatre. All
of these leaflets carried the mention 'With Permission’, and were only
allowed to circulate if they had in fact been authorized by the police. The
ignominious, the unheard of and the desperate were the privileged sources
of these stories of a sheet and a day and could be bought for next to
nothing on the street corner, all of which helped multiply to infinity the
reactions of the citizens to their environment.
The written evidence in support of the adventures of Madeleine/
Jacquotte went more or less like this:2" news of the pregnancy was sold in
the streets in June or July 1756; this was followed in August 1756 by
another sheet entitled Details, or Further Explanation of the First Account
Concerning the Girl by the Name of Magdeleine-Charlotte-Jacquotte,
Daughter of Louis Renaud26 and Magdeleine Lafleche Being Happily
Delivered of a Son who has been Named Jean-Louis ... This broadsheet
was an authorized publication; it gives an account of an event which, as
we know, never took place; and Gueulette, commenting on it in 1758 in
notes written on the back of the account, shows no sign of surprise or
regret for the mistake: 'It appears that this account was intended to have
been passed off as having police approval. It was most certainly sold off to
bidders in the street where I myself bought it. The pregnancy has proved to
be false, however, and the birth, in consequence, extremely false.’27
A denial of the whole affair (also in August, it would appear) was
published under the title Justification of the Two Accounts and it too had
received permission to be sold. It explained how the error had managed to
creep in and mentions a criticism of the account of the birth which the
parents had been careful to distribute. There is some attempt in the
criticism to rehabilitate the memory of the young man, who had died in
prison broken with grief, and in this justification, mention is made of the
fact that the parents had shown no concern for the law. A month later, the
mother was imprisoned in La Salpetriere and only came out six months
later on an appeal from her husband who had had responsibility for the
children.
One needs to unravel this tangled skein of contradictory information
published with the approval of the authorities. If there were credulity, then
one is forced to admit that it had nothing more to support it than the
wind.
In the absence of the text of the first ‘Account’ announcing and
explaining the unfortunate pregnancy, an examination of the ‘Details’, or
announcement of the happy news of the birth is extremely interesting,
particularly as it was false and had to be officially recognized as such.
How was it possible to have had any doubts, when in the first few lines
there is the announcement of the baby’s birth and baptism and a declara¬
tion that the names of the godmother and father would be given. All the
242 Crowds

details then follow - the length of the labour, the time of birth, the
invaluable services of the male midwife who was none other than that
of the Dauphine herself and the whole of this extraordinary delivery
accomplished by Madeleine after so much exhausting trial and effort.
The whole affair was then developed at length in order to give it more
weight and credibility; the midwife was shown to be surrounded by well-
recognized and highly competent scientific authorities from such institu¬
tions as the Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Surgeons and by the
most illustrious scholars with the approval of the royal family itself. The
child-prodigy, thus encompassed and overseen by the great and mighty,
became the property of the State: ‘It became a duty never to abandon this
young girl for a moment and from that point onward, she was regarded as
a sacred charge to be held in trust by the State.’
This first part of the account which enlists every means of authentica¬
tion possible (detailed information, presence of the Faculty of Medicine)
also plays on a note of concern for the child which could not fail to go
down well with those who bought the text, grabbed by the news, for it
was only six years after the abduction of children from off the very same
streets of Paris; it must undoubtedly have had a traumatic effect on ears
and minds. That Madeleine should be considered a sacred charge entrusted
by the State to a lofty medical authority was some proof that children were
still at the heart of the social system, even if they were the children of the
poorer classes. If one bears in mind that it was the worker or artisan who
had lost a son or daughter and who had participated in the revolt of
1750, one can see how the reasoning and logic of this leaflet announcing
the birth took into account the prevailing social climate of the Parisian
population of 1756. For the news to be well received, not only did it need
to contain elements showing the event to be authentic, it also had to be
presented in a form which was on the whole reassuring and which would
allow the reader to assimilate it in a wider context which was both socially
and politically satisfying. One can read from this that the King and
the State were reluctant to see off young Madeleine, the tobacconist’s
daughter, and in a context which was so conciliatory by comparison with
1750, the ‘credible’ easily became established.
The second part of the account deals with the quite extraordinary
aspects of the course of the birth itself and then proceeds to marvel at this
utterly exceptional and hitherto unheard-of forcible intrusion into one
of the most fragile and vulnerable of human frames. Sets of contradictions
- weakness and strength; ordinary and extraordinary; natural and
phenomenal - were manipulated and appropriated with no concern for
detail or precision.
The whole thing comes to a rather rapid conclusion by proceeding to
give the names of the godmother and godfather - as it said it would at the
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 243

beginning - whilst in fact ensuring that no such names were there on the
grounds that permission to give them had not been granted. The presence
of the names of ‘Monsieur le Comte de-and Mile la Marquise de-
who held the child at the baptismal font (although we cannot mention
them by name)’ was sufficiently logical and authenticating as to remain
unperturbed by any actual absence of names which in the end were
superfluous to the act of believing. Who would have doubted for one
moment the presence of this count and marchioness? Did the blanks
representing their names not possess a reality equal to the actual letters of
their respective patronyms?
Time went by. Towards the end of September and the beginning of
October, some doubts were expressed among the doctors and midwives
and attempts were made to protect themselves from public criticism. On
10 October, for instance, they declared unanimously that the child was
definitely not pregnant ‘but that there were only swellings throughout the
body and that all it could be was an accumulation of fluid’.
Now was the time to beat a dignified retreat from the whole of this
fable. Doctors were certain that the ‘bulk’ they had felt had been sufficient
to suggest a pregnancy but the police wasted no time in obtaining an order
for the detention of the mother and daughter. Meanwhile on the streets
they were selling the Justification of the Two Accounts which calmly
explained why the deception had been possible; the text is exemplary in
showing how far it is possible for ‘truth’ and hearsay to travel down the
same road, even at times merging as one.
The title of this pamphlet bears no resemblance to the others; nor is it
concerned with detail, narrative, or telling a strange tale. The purpose of
the flysheet was contained entirely within its title which was primarily to
justify itself. This involved a dual approach, the one being to admit the
error and the other to present the argument in such a way as to show that
it was impossible not to have been taken in. If the justification was also a
form of defence and legitimization and a means of dissociating oneself
from blame, then what it said was essentially determined by an attempt to
contrive that, and thus the mam concern of the argument was to present
the evidence in such a way that proof of initial innocence was more
important than the formulation of some ‘truth’ which, though forever
elusive, was to triumph in the end.
It was in fact around this difficult theme of the constitution of the truth
that the text was composed, and did so in two distinct stages, for it was
necessary to show that it was quite normal to publish the announcement
of the pregnancy and then of the birth, given the truth of these facts.
How did the pregnancy come to be believed? In this case the pro¬
cess was quite simple. It was all the result, as usual, of that indefinable
phenomenon generally referred to as ‘talk’. In Paris there was this girl of
244 Crowds

nine and a half who was seven months pregnant — and so the rumour,
by definition, got around. Those who were curious came to have a look
and, to quote, their eyes were the surest means of establishing proof of
the truth. The medical profession came along too since this supposed
pregnancy ‘naturally’ fell within their field of competence. Thanks to the
eyes of the visitors and the confirmation of the pregnancy by medical
opinion, the rumours blew all the more swiftly and ever further afield.
From then on, the truth was established, which ‘gave rise to the first
account’. What was in it? Only what was circulating orally - hearsay - in
fact, nothing more than the truth, the truth that their eyes had seen. It was
all sewn up - talk was truth, thanks to the eyes, to medical authentication
and to the publication of the news. The truth was none other than what
had been seen and what had been said and truly that was the truth -
because they had seen it and said that it was so.
We also know, from evidence of other events of the same sort un¬
connected with medicine, that for rumour to become truth, there was no
need for the stamp of approval from the authorities. In this case the
support of the medical declaration was an additional bonus but it was in
no way indispensable to the process of elaborating the truth.
It was more difficult, apparently, for the authors of the text to justify
the publication of the announcement of the birth. However, a similar kind
of machinery was put in place in order to present an argument which
hopefully might achieve some semblance of the truth, although it was
likely to be a semblance of an altogether different order. In this instance, it
was a case of convincing everyone that there was good reason for having
been on the outside of the truth.
For part two of the demonstration of proof, one sees the appearance
of a person who is named and accused of acting as an agent directly
responsible for promoting the ‘deception’, a surgeon and the ‘so-called
midwife of Mme la Dauphine’. How could one possibly have believed
him? There was nothing haphazard about the way things had been done,
for we read in the justification that everything was by ‘general agreement’.
This ‘general agreement’ was incontestable by virtue of the fact that it was
‘generally agreed’.
In the case of a suspected pregnancy however, there was only one event
which would obviously serve as proof, and that was the birth of the child
itself, for which, as we know, it was just a matter of waiting... It was
announced by a second account which, as it made quite clear, was exactly
in keeping with public opinion and thus the very opposite of a lie. The
mechanics remained the same - the child was born, yes, well and truly
born, because it was the voice of the public that made the announcement.
However, it is not possible to invent a birth, and in the end there could
be no mistaking that Madeleine had not had a child and never would have
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 245
one. The parents issued a note criticizing the account of the delivery but
the flysheet confessed to a deception by this surgeon who was full of
ambition and had wanted to draw attention to himself. They had been
deceived, just as everyone had been deceived - probably more so — and
therefore had taken it upon themselves to disabuse the public.
One sees very clearly in this justification of the Two Accounts that it
was impossible to separate the ‘generally agreed’ from aspects of the truth
because each was welded to the other so as to construct a process by
which, following the birth of the truth from hearsay and rumour, the
same rumours once again might become a posteriori the sole means of
authentication — except, of course, in exceptionally rare cases where a little
girl happened to decide that she was not in fact harbouring a child in her
belly.
The mechanics of this spiral (in which truth was based on news and
information which themselves ultimately provided the possibility of
proving the truth) were not simply the prerogative of the man in the street.
When the authorities, whether intellectual, political or judicial, denounced
the countless rumours appropriated and sometimes made more dangerous
by the people, they were a long way from realizing that their own modes
of thinking, interpreting and speaking contained identical forms of
apprehending the truth or reality. The story of these three bulletins (two
erroneous reports and one justification admitting guilt) is proof of this.
The three texts had been approved by the police and were part of the same
line of thought. In each case they were written to encourage belief, even
though two-thirds of the material was shown to be completely false.
In order to gather support they had played on traditional patterns of
deference to the written word. The techniques used in the final account,
whose job it was to nullify the first two, departed little from the initial
approach. In putting an end to the belief they relied on self-defence, which
once again meant the integration of the ‘truth/generally agreed’ equation,
the very same as had been responsible for creating the false news about the
pregnancy and the birth in the first place. At that level, therefore, there
was no difference, although what one was required to believe now was
exactly the opposite of what had been believed previously. These accounts,
which had received police backing, had alternately encouraged belief and
then attempted to establish the truth once evidence of the error had
become manifest. Just like the Parisians themselves, they did it by the same
means as they had used to lay hold of what was real, namely by availing
themselves of the rumours which the affair had provoked.
The Lieutenant-General of Police acted in response to this news-
gossip—rumour and generally agreed. He drew up strategies on the basis of
the moods of all and sundry plucked from here and there, all over the city,
not concerning himself much with their substance or merit or their exact
246 Crowds

origins. In the Archives of the Bastille, there are reports kept on a daily
basis which illustrate this particular way of thinking and acting. What
happened was that the Lieutenant-General gave commissions to several
officers from various police units, making them responsible for gathering
and collating current opinion in the form of what was being said in a
number of public places.28 These officers kept minutely detailed reports on
what they had seen and heard and these reports were made exclusively to
the Lieutenant-General, on whom they were directly dependent;29 these
were the famous gazetins de la police secrete,30 the form and phraseology
of which are as revealing as their content.
Reading these reports, which were so punctiliously kept, one notices
immediately that not only was the Lieutenant-General being sustained by
rumour (which lent itself admirably to the construction of his policy) but
that he was working on material and information (provided by his officers)
whose precise source was never exactly known, its extent being scarcely
mentioned, let alone its initial author. One might be tempted to think, and
with good cause, that if these reports were being produced in roughly the
same way from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century then
it must have been in keeping with the wishes of Lieutenant-Generals
and appropriate to their ways of working and of getting to know the
world around them. The approach used in these written records certainly
indicates a system of policing whose function was to take more than a
close interest in the slightest whispers passing back and forth between all
and sundry, with no effort to cut out the extraneous, to separate the valid
from the invalid, the possible from the plausible or the a fortiori, or the
true from the false. The whole tone is monotonous and the content
homogeneous; the same techniques used throughout mean that each item
of news received was given equal status. It might be confidential informa¬
tion; a fag-end of gossip or public uproar; an impression or an exact
factual account that was either very important or derisory; it might be
spread abroad by one person or thousands; it might have sprung from the
imagination or result from the urgency of a situation, it made no matter.
In these writings, which ultimately are very monotonous, there is
nothing in particular which stands out; everything is atonal for all the
information is treated in the same way whether it comes from the court or
the street, the army or the royal family. Furthermore, the wording and
composition are also a part of this levelling process; it is the impersonal,
and endlessly repeated pronoun ‘it’ {on) which is the subject and which is
in fact king, throughout these reports, taking precedence over the King
himself. Should a rumour be notified, a tale told or an accident occur
which provoked some comment, it is the immutable ‘it’ which without fail
calls the tune. Stuck there from the first line till last, ‘it’ is the producer of
black or white without any distinction whatever - ‘it is said’; ‘it is certain’;
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 247
‘in addition it’; ‘it was definitely felt in the neighbourhood that.. and so
on and so forth. On and on roll these texts, based on countless words and
rumours which exited from mouths one knows not where. It is very rare to
find a more precise subject than this inevitable ‘it’; occasionally, in the
flow of the pen, one does come across ‘a few artisans and particular
persons complaining about...’31 But it is the exception, as are attempts
to find the authors of the received information. These amount to no
more than, ‘These facts were obtained from someone called Soloz who
is a hawker of salt; he says that he heard someone speak the words in
question’;32 or else, ‘This information was received from Sieur Laisne who
said that he had heard it from Sieur Abbe le Colan who said that he knew
no more about it.’33 Sometimes the approximations double up on them¬
selves in phrases such as these: ‘the majority of people feel that people are
not happy’ and ‘they also said that the public are saying that...’.
If the subjects are effaced, the locations also remain undifferentiated:
‘It is being said in the palaces as well as in the various cafes, public
esplanades and private houses that.. .’34 Reference to the strength or
vehemence of the statements are extremely rare and the reports are notice¬
ably lacking in any variety of rhythm or intensity of tone. With some effort
it is possible to discern from afar subtle differences between ‘they did not
hesitate to say that. ..’ and ‘they also said it but under their breath’. The
impression produced by reading these gazetins is that everything had the
same effect, namely that what was heard was sovereign, a constituent of
the truth and grounds for action that required no further information
about the place whence it had originated, the social milieu in which it was
circulating, nor the seriousness of which it might be an indicator.
Not only did the police find it desirable to be present in this oral system
(police officers infiltrated cafes, streets and esplanades; the inspector slept
in with the residents when there were strange goings-on), but the police
also turned themselves into an immediate mouthpiece for it, carrying the
news to the very top of the hierarchy without in this instance offering the
means of assessing it - that was not required. The police were positively
inhabited by hearsay and rumour, unable to keep their distance since it
was in these that they found their motives for action. At this level of
analysis, we can perhaps understand better how ridiculous were their
attempts to prove or denounce popular fears and credulity and see to what
extent they themselves acted as proprietors, links and relays of the same,
thus embodying what they at the same time were denouncing. It is no
longer possible to see them as invested with a knowledge which sought
to repress credulity and superstition, false information and fraud (even
though a part of its activity was based on such assignments). It has to be
understood in its complexity; that is, in its primary movement towards
fusion with what it was seeking to extirpate in the bosom of the populace
248 Crowds

and which gave it so much cause for fear and apprehension, namely an
immediate attachment to gossip and rumour.

But the neighbours remained sceptical

Madeleine’s story offers the historian something of a chance, for it allows
us to discover, with some degree of accuracy, the main actors in the event
as well as those around it, either by virtue of giving their consent, or by
keeping their distance from it. As we have already examined the respective
roles of the doctors and police, let us for the time being single out the
reactions of the people in the course of the months of waiting and see
whether or not these conform to what was often said of them on these
occasions.
Whether or not the parents believed in the pregnancy of their child, it is
impossible to tell from the records and notably from those of Inspector
Gillot, even though he was living on the premises. There is every likelihood
that they did believe it; but what is most important is to see them as they
set about presenting this event - seeing what they could make out of it for
themselves, finding the best way of promoting Madeleine to the public and
doing everything they could to make the spectacle of their pregnant child
really important. The father himself openly admitted to having set things
up in this way when he requested the release of his wife in February 1757.
He confessed to having gained money from it but blamed the initial error
on the doctors who had spread the news as far as the court.
The attitude of the parents was a determining factor and the mother,
in particular, was responsible for creating misgivings in the immediate
neighbourhood. In fact, once they were installed in the Rue de Seine as a
result of a police injunction, Mme Ernault gained in confidence - too
much so - and in June, when their influence was at its peak, the mother’s
cravings for making a profit intensified. She began sizing up the crowd and
sifting them out, only allowing in ‘those who were dressed in a particular
way’ and refusing the others on the grounds that they did not have
permission. Some of the women from the market of the abbey of Saint-
Germain-des-Pres who were pushed out of the front door were not fooled
by her tactics. They bawled at the woman through the window that, ‘if
they had had an ecu to put in her purse or a tippet on their shoulder, they
knew very well they wouldn’t have needed permission or anything of the
kind.’ They could also see that the better-off visitors were bringing pretty
little gifts with them for Madeleine and her future infant; there were little
knick-knacks, a nightdress-case trimmed with muslin and a little Indian
silk jacket.
Doubt began to creep in as a result of this social differentiation of her
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 249
public by the Ernault woman and the doubt was also retriggered by the
death of young Denis in prison at Bicetre, where he had expired in grief.
As time went by, the crowds began to thin out but still the doctors were
active. The public, however, had done its calculations and by the begin¬
ning of August they no longer believed that the birth would happen:
‘Once, according to the calculations of the public, she had passed her term,
there were no longer any visits to speak of.’
No one (according to the reports of Inspector Gillot) seemed to react to
the false account of the termination of Madeleine’s confinement, as though
the whole affair had already been summed up, leaving just the doctors to
grapple with their doubt and a so-called male midwife to wrestle with his
ambition. It was the justification of the two accounts in which it was
announced that the details of the birth and the delivery had been wrong
that provoked a veritable eruption of disorder. While the doctors were
awaiting the delivery for 8 September, the mother of the young girl went
off to do her shopping at the market of Saint-Germain-des-Pres at 5
o’clock in the evening of 18 August. She was recognized by a baker’s wife
and was insulted and booed by all the women at the market who ran
behind her shouting that ‘she ought to be killed because she had caused the
death of this innocent boy whom she had accused’.
The violence was so fierce that Commissioner Hubert was obliged to
intervene and the market gates were closed while the Guard came to the
protection of Mme Ernault, who had been forced to take shelter in a shop
selling lingerie and underwear. She had to go out in disguise through a
back door in order to avoid the wrath of the crowd and that same evening
four women were arrested for leading the breach of the peace. It took
some time for calm to return and Gillot notes that there was a furious
outcry over the sentencing of the young wine vendor’s boy who had died
before he had even been executed. A few days later, the Ernault parents
published a criticism of the account of the birth and requested prayers for
Denis, the wine vendor’s boy. However, as soon as the medical declaration
was made that the girl was not pregnant, the police put the child and the
mother in prison.
It is interesting to note the gaps and time shifts, as between the various
occurrences and social groups. The doctors and the police were the slowest
to go back on their initial positions - in fact they lingered on until
October, two months after the term should have been up. The publications
were spread over a short period, from June to August, and once the
announcement of the birth had been made, it needed to be denied almost
immediately. For its part, the population had its own rhythm as it awaited
the arrival of this prodigy which was marked by events proper to itself and
out of step with what was going on between medical opinion, the parents
and the police.
250 Crowds

The neighbours in the district and the women from the market of Saint-
Germain-des-Pres were of more or less the same social status as the
Ernault parents, who were retailers of salt and tobacco. Because they were
on a similar economic level and shared the same way of life, they were
very sensitive to all the external signs of wealth or refinement put out by
this family who, to boot, had only just settled in the district, having
deserted their original faubourg. The effects of this distancing were
apparent from the time little Madeleine arrived in the Rue de Seine, with
the neighbourhood in a state of alert, and more ready and better placed
than others to interpret all these new goings-on taking place before their
eyes.
The fact that the mother of the child had wanted to divide the curious
into two clans, ‘the well-heeled’ and the rest, aggravated this feeling of
strangeness felt in connection with what was taking place. Those people
from the district who had found themselves rebuffed (when in actual fact
they were tit for tat just the same as that family) were not prepared to put
up with the initiation of this kind of demarcation by one of their own
kind, of the same status and condition as themselves. They experienced
this segregation based on money-making as a form of betrayal which
obviously brought with it criticism and animosity and then doubt and the
search for fraud and deception. Thus it is possible to state that the first
breach occurred at this point in contrast with the support one might have
thought would have been naturally in evidence. Those who were ‘curious’
were not blinded by what was happening to the point of accepting it
unquestioningly.
In urban milieux, medical science was gradually taking root and in
Paris, seat of the Faculte and the Academie, the official medical bodies had
considerable importance. A number of edicts, followed up by the prosecu¬
tion of offenders, had recently outlawed medical charlatanism and
those who dealt in wonder drugs and cures. Wherever dubious practice
was spotted or the public abused by quacks and the pharmacopoeia
of impostors, the police arrested and condemned these tricksters and
criminals along with their frightening drugs. There was widespread con¬
cern over popular gullibility which created a ready market of willing
victims all prepared to buy and swallow dubious pills and potions.
In its turn, the Faculty of Medicine wished to have its knowledge
and learning acknowledged and for all forms of religious and medical
superstition to be overcome. It was a difficult battle and in the process of
establishing their superiority over the hoards of drug dealers and manu¬
facturers, they uncovered vast chasms of ignorance. It was particularly in
the field of obstetrics that medical effort was most intense if for no other
reason than to diminish the alarming statistics for death in childbirth.
Clinical observation and the attraction of anatomical discoveries led the
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 251
medical profession on and on into making endless observations and palpa¬
tions for themselves in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the womb,
the giver of life.
The fact that little Madeleine had been ‘visited’ (as the phrase went) and
observed day after day should really come as no surprise; nor should the
attitude of the women in the district. After the nine months were up, they
lost interest in the event. According to Officer Gillot, they had ‘done
their calculations’; familiarity with childbirth and its bodily imprint
in their memories kept them close to a calendar from which there was no
separating them — neither curiosity nor the ignorance of the medical
profession. They knew in their bodies the time for the child to be born,
and although they may have been willing to accept the idea that a child
might be pregnant they could not wait indefinitely for the infant to be
born; their sense of time was of another order.
What was taking place here was an autonomous action in relation to
the body of medical knowledge as well as to the affair itself and this
autonomy was being built and pieced together bit by bit. The attitude of
the Ernault family had forced a distance which had in its turn given rise to
doubt; knowledge of oneself and of ‘the things of life’ such as motherhood
and birth had done the rest. The brief movement of revolt came when the
time was ripe and it found immediate support in the publication of the
justification, which only served to confirm what everyone already knew.
Not only had the child not been born, there was no way it could be born
as it did not and had never existed. The resulting emotion in the market of
Saint-German-des-Pres was typical. It was founded on the basis of the
publication of the news-sheet but it released the pent-up anger and doubt
that had been contained for some time, revealing an absence of credulity
which the printed sheet had just shown was entirely justified and which
had arisen as a result of the tying and untying of the bonds between
the Ernault family and the district. Here we have the subtle systems of
knowledge and sociability which are only revealed by watching an event as
it unfolds day after day.
Even though tales of pregnant girls did not exactly run up and down the
streets in the eighteenth century, there were many others of a similar
kind which did. They may have drawn on other facts involving other
value systems or modes of understanding, but they too in their own way
conveyed their particular realities, fantasies, illusions, and frauds, and
were equally carried along by assent and affirmation here or scepticism
there. In general it is these incidents, anecdotes and extravagances that are
totally ignored; the broad-swept memory of the historian can find room
only for corporate phenomena of vast proportions; all the rest remains
outside the memory, stuffed away in the archives, occasionally turning
up in the odd bit of marginal research. But crowds come running to
252 Crowds

see incidents both great and small; it would be interesting to know,

for example, whether the ecstatics of Saint-Medard assumed greater
importance in the collective memory of the residents of the period than the
Ernault affair or the deceit of Abbe Pons in respect of the dead and dying
at the hotel-dieu. It might be worth finding out.
Whatever the case may be, a microscopic analysis of the scandal in the
Rue Saint-Victor (Madeleine-Jacquotte Ernault had lived with her parents
in the Rue Saint-Victor) allows one to see how it was possible to galvanize
around it the various social strata in all their complexities and respective
comings and goings. When faced with such an event, one is able to see the
deployment of a whole array of actions and reactions, some of them
common to the whole of the various social classes and others that were
decidedly different. The notion that credulousness can be dismissed as
being the property of the least favoured of the social groups becomes
redundant when one is given the chance to analyse the whole game of
interdependence between the various authorities, the circulation of written
material and the propagation of rumour. And finally, if one chooses to
retain the expression ‘the crowds amongst themselves’ as a means of
defining those times of spontaneous assembly around some street incident
or some previously planned event, then one has to keep in mind that these
crowds were largely heterogeneous and split between any number of social
and cultural divisions. The social commentators of the day, however,
could only perceive them as one vast human body animated by a single
soul in one single movement, which in their eyes made them all the more
impulsive, dangerous and unpredictable. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, making
fun of those who had gone along to a certain rendezvous to see a man shut
himself up in a bottle, referred to a people who were gullible and naive,
who reacted as one and who were incapable of putting a distance between
themselves and the objects of their contemplation: ‘Such are the people’,
he said; ‘as a body, they do not believe they can be taken in.’3'’ And for
that, they were required to have no more than one body.
The Ernault affair allows one to discern the potential for autonomy
among the different social groups in relation to an external event, certainly
as far as the least well-off from the social classes were concerned, who
were ‘naturally’ or traditionally described as being the least wary in the
face of the broadcast of news of a more or less extraordinary nature.
At the same time, the episode also exposed the modes of intervention
employed by the authorities (principally the police), which contain an
ingenious and paradoxical mixture of incitement, control and repression
which occurred simultaneously or in a series of ripples depending on the
creative possibilities of the wide range of social attitudes. Being themselves
nurtured by and party to the same view of the world as those they
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 253
administered, the police were, oddly enough, strangers to the event rather
than an integral part of it; and the control they exercised over it contained
as many factors likely to regenerate it as powers to contain it. In certain
cases, the police were responsible for stirring up problems as much as for
repressing them, for they contained within themselves, like a mirror, the
whole tangle of social complexity; but as far as official documentation is
concerned, there is not much recognition of this reality.
Such a plurality of attitudes, particularly in this area comprising
extraordinary happenings and phenomena which were responsible for
drawing the crowds, no doubt stemmed from the fact that after 1750 (a
time of great trouble and mistrust between the King and his subjects),
rationalism had found itself in contact not only with a certain degree of
scientific thinking but also with a sense of the global and the universal
in which there was a combination of the rational and the marvellous,
allowing one to think the unthinkable. The police found themselves
involved at each of these levels (enthusiasm for reason - inclination to
doubt - the implications of the marvellous and miraculous) and responded
tit for tat with their own ideas of the disorder that was likely to ensue,
with no attempt at an assessment that might be any more rational than
anyone else’s, thus resembling the masses they were responsible for
keeping in order.
These same crowds might best be typified by three particular crazes, of
which there were many. During the same year as the Ernault affair, on 18
March 1756, the Lieutenant-General of Police was called on by priests and
lawyers to put a stop to the practices of a group of people who had been
making a mockery of Lent, and celebrating weird nocturnal sabbaths in
the quarries of Charenton.36 It was apparent that there was evil afoot, and
in spite of warnings each night became a theatre for excesses that were
considered sacrilegious. Some of the girls dressed up as boys and got
together in the cabarets, engaging in conversation which embarrassed
the men; others sang wicked songs and spewed up before the doors
of religious establishments. On Ash Wednesday, wearing cassocks and
funeral surplices, hordes of young lads with great heads made out of straw
gathered in long lines and went hobbling and limping along, spraying
evening strollers with calves’ hooves soaked in dirty water. Alongside them
there were women and girls ‘dressed up as though they were pregnant’ and
laughing and wailing in the light of their torches. Not everyone found it
amusing and those responsible were imprisoned on the King’s orders,
signed by the Lieutenant-General of Police.
In the same period, the discovery of anatomy and its fascination with
corpses produced some strange consequences with the result that police
kept watch on cemeteries which had become the scene of somewhat
254 Crowds

unusual nocturnal trafficking. Corpses were selling for as much as 150

livres each:

Each assistant received 10 for each dead body and sometimes they
carried off as many as six or eight in one evening without counting small
children, as they were able to get more of them in one coffin. When they
had furnished Paris with its needs, they then went on to do the outlying
areas.37

With the mind fixed on these macabre visions and medical progress in
general, all levels of society found themselves gripped with the fear of
being buried alive, producing a crop of medical literature which tended to
be more haunting than reassuring.38 The fear of remaining alive in the
darkness of the tomb gave rise to a number of ingenious devices such
as the lugubrious bells which were intended to indicate signs of life to
cemetery wardens. It was a fear which affected everyone and rumours
spread in all quarters. There is also an echo of it in Hardy’s Journal where
he tells the tale of one of the procurators of the parlement, a M. Trespagne
who died one day in January 1772 and was buried shortly afterwards. He
was found by one of the beadles who had come to bring another body.
‘His coffin was open as though by an effort made with the side of the
head, there was blood everywhere and all the evidence that he had gnawed
his own arm in desperation.’ Such images as this - the dead man devour¬
ing himself because he was still alive — were enough to freeze the living
with fear, and they occur quite frequently in contemporary writings. There
were enough memoirs, reflections and advice published on this subject to
make the imagination run riot. There were bolts that had been shot,
broken seals, goblets of water tied to the body with a cord, watchmen
ready to hear the slightest moan, moving coffins, etc. It is known, for
instance, that Mme Necker, terrified by this idea of life beneath the
shroud, was to organize her tomb in minute detail and arrange to be
buried so that her face could be seen.39
There was derision and fear, but there was also enthusiasm for scientific
discoveries both true and false. There were as many people who came to
watch the flight of air balloons as there were those who tried to get small
balloons, usually made from a pig’s bladder, off the ground from their
bedroom floor. Both men and women shared this new craze and ‘the fair
sex willingly gave up the important business of its toilette in order to try
things out.’40 Physicists gave private classes or even stood up and lectured
the odd number of loafers who were keen to keep up with current trends.
Why not turn up in droves to watch the famous man who had chosen to
cross the Seine in elastic boots? He was selling them by advance subscrip¬
tion to innocent purchasers who had been taken in. The inventor found
 The Crowds amongst Themselves 255
himself imprisoned at the police station by the Lieutenant-General of
Police and was told that ‘he should not amuse himself at the expense of the
people of Paris by finding out just how far it was possible to take their
credulity’.41
 10
The Crowds in Turmoil

The one thing about the crowd, and in the towns of the eighteenth century
in particular, was that it was a key part of the urban system. It was also an
essential component of the monarchical process, which could not dispense
with its existence, at the same time as being one of the major pre¬
occupations of those in government. In short, it was inevitable, necessary
and yet extremely risky. In its very existence it displayed a certain quality
that was irreconcilable with the planning and protection constantly
formulated on its behalf as a group or collectivity held to be naturally
hard-working, loyal, submissive and approving of power from above.
Underlying this scheme of things whereby peace and order founded on
obedience might prevail, one finds both the conviction and the argument
that the crowd, consisting as it did of ordinary people, was a homogeneous
whole which needed close watching so as to prevent it going off course
and doing itself harm in mindless outbursts of anger.
Poor and wanting in intelligence, occasionally woman and sometimes
child, the crowd had to be protected from itself and then brought to order
by a simple system of distribution of provisions in the form of work and
the means of subsistence. A regularly nourished and appropriately paid
crowd would have no difficulty applauding at each royal passing.
Because the thesis held about it was founded on a very narrow
representation of its nature and a crude understanding of its mechanisms
and peculiarities, it was inevitably proved to be deficient by everyday
practice and by the countless reactions and responses of the crowd. But
instead of being called into question as a result of this failure, the argu¬
ment stuck, reinforced and redoubled itself in strictures of stunning inertia
in which the gap was dug deeper between the real, both cruel and flippant,
and a utopia that had to be maintained at all costs. When the crowd
stopped applauding and rioted instead, those in power were gripped with
 The Crowds in Turmoil 257
fear and what they had to say was then full of hate; and the fear which
was so intense at times provoked much reaction.
Mobs and crowds were dreaded by the police and as a result constant
thought was given to the problem, with no shortage of legislation on
the subject. But in spite of all that, it would appear that the police
and the authorities allowed themselves to be taken by surprise when
insubordination and indiscipline erupted right out onto the street. All this
gave Pans, particularly in the years following 1750, a rather strange
atmosphere in which the fear of an uprising was on everyone’s lips and in
which precautions were taken. But if emotions did well up, the police
became almost hysterical at the consequences the incident might provoke
and so adopted attitudes that were more conciliatory than provocative. In
the minds of the authorities, an assembled crowd was the potential seed of
a howling mob which might be ready for anything, and it was therefore
up to the police to see that the situation was not aggravated and the
occurrence of a disaster prevented.
The very idea of an uprising engendered a plethora of writings and
theses, albeit repetitive, on the subject of a populace given over to a state
of animal-like brutality and spurred on by leaders who had emerged from
banditry or the lowest depths of the prisons of Bicetre or Fort-l’Eveque.
Whilst this opinion held firm, another fundamental idea cherished by the
state and those in power broke down, such that the concept of the crowd
as necessary friend, indispensable support and sacred pedestal whose
consent and adherence was constantly sought became that of dangerous
enemy and the pernicious pole around which everything could be sent
reeling. Power thus found itself gripped in a vice, for it had only two
ways, both of them certainties, of thinking of the crowd: namely, as
fundamentally assenting and approbatory or as all too readily ungrateful
and cruel. Everyday reality, however, had the effect of diminishing both
these models, which were so firmly anchored in the minds of the elites, to
reveal a much more varied and complex landscape which unsettled those
in charge. Subsequently, what knowledge the great and important might
have had about the masses of the people finally lapsed into uncertainty due
to its entrenchment between these two grand and rigid formulations which
banked as much on the wisdom of the crowd as on its folly.
And thus when agitation did occur, anxiety became the only element
that was clearly identifiable; and in fact, the reality of the street obliged the
police to transform their ritual type of analysis. Up to this point they had
named the crowd as such, had identified it and characterized it in simple
and antagonistic terms, the main concern, in short, being to contain it in a
single term - acclamation. Movements, breaches of the peace and riots
spoiled the cards in one’s hand; the people became ‘unnameable’ and the
whole machine snarled up in the face of definitions that escaped it. The
25 8 Crowds

powers that be did the thinking for the crowd, but the crowd was else¬
where, something other and thus in no way could power or authority lay
hold of it in its capacity as thinking subject capable of using strategies and
personal analyses of the situation. The gap was immense and whatever
L -S Mercier says (‘in general, it has become impossible for a not to
deteriorate into sedition’),1 the Parisian street was rarely calm. Obviously
the stability of the state was not called into question every day, and L.-S.
Mercier is right in this respect, but his optimism with regard to the
potential of the police, leaves one wondering:

If the Parisian, who at times has his more effervescent moments, were to
mutiny he would soon find himself enclosed in the huge cage he inhabits;
he would be denied grain and when there was nothing left in his trough
he would soon be reduced to asking for mercy and pardon.

Note, by the way, the inevitable animal metaphors of the cage and the
trough. In fact, the reality was very different from that asserted by the
chronicler and it was precisely this ‘effervescence’ that bothered the police.
The effervescence was sporadic but continual, occurring in all places
and for all reasons, and in the end it set up a kind of tenacious harass¬
ment with regard to all forms of authority, or almost. Further, Nicolas
Toussaint des Essarts was not mistaken when he noted in his Dictionnaire
universel de police that ‘the examples of mobs, riots and sedition are
regrettably only too common in spite of the active vigilance of the police.’2

The proceedings of the police commissioners preserve a monthly record

of all of these disputes which made the climate increasingly gloomy; there
was a riot at the town gates here or defiance of the guard on patrol there;
all havoc was let loose at markets because of the high prices; elsewhere
there might be serious incidents amongst workers who had decided to
strike, or gatherings in the street. One must also add the prison revolts
which were more frequent than one might have supposed; and then there
were rising tempers outside the cabarets when prices went up or when
rumours of the stockpiling of grain went around the city.3 It is impossible
to assess the number of these movements for which historiography has no
memory and for which the records of legal proceedings allow no exhaus¬
tive analysis either.4 For the time being, it is simply interesting to note
their worrying presence, a presence on which statements and opinions
about the crowd were based whilst never properly corresponding to the
definitions attributed to it. And thus one saw the entrenchment of a severe
tension between fear of the people and the need for them, at the same
time as the forging of powerfully defined images of popular cruelty and
disorder.
 The Crowds in Turmoil 259
Much has been written over a long period on this matter of revolts and
uprisings. The end of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a whole body
of reflections and sociological works referred to as the science of the
crowd,s and historians seized on these in order to improve their under¬
standing and analyses. In fact this new science was elaborated outside the
field of history without any description of historical movements or analysis
of detail. In 1934, G. Lefebvre gave a paper which he entitled ‘Foules
historiques, foules revolutionnaires’.6 He reintroduced the historical
dimension and studied crowds outside the animal-type classification attri¬
buted to them by Le Bon and his famous theories of collective hypnosis
and unleashed instinct. G. Lefebvre states that a collective mentality can
form within the crowd but that the economic, social and political con¬
ditions produce additional phenomena which vary and whose history and
activity is appropriate to the context in which they take place.
Later G. Rude,' who dedicated his book to Lefebvre, concentrated
on a scientific description of revolutionary crowds on the basis of police
archives and rejected the idea that a crowd was somehow a disembodied
abstraction personifying en bloc either ‘Good’ (as Michelet had succeeded
in doing in his French RevolutionH) or ‘Evil’ (as Taine, Burke9 and Le Bon
had decided in their respective works).
Since then the theme has been taken up on numerous occasions by
historians and sociologists in a succession of approaches to these move¬
ments, usually obscured by the ideological ambivalence surrounding
them.10 The crowd is fascinating and terrifying and it unleashes all kinds
of agoraphobic stereotypes. Power, moreover, never ceases to solicit it,
attempting to appropriate it, whilst itself remaining a stranger.
Like Georges Rude and E. P. Thompson, one has to consider things in
the detail of their history in order to construct other perspectives.
It is from the fine grain of an event that one learns the details which at
the same time as they teach or even explain phenomena to us, also throw
us off the track and send the observer off into exile - exile from his or
her own stereotypes and ready-made definitions or his or her existing
knowledge. Whether they are gathered together, disturbed or up in arms,
the people are always seen in a reductionist fashion. When, of its own
accord, it chooses to escape the destiny assigned to and imposed on it by
the wishes of others, it runs the risk of being retranslated indefinitely in
traditional terms of savagery and primitivism. If, for example, it refuses to
accept the high cost of grain and the price of a pound of bread, it is
thrusting aside the economic effort required of it and thus the image of
thankless drudgery; at the same time it assumes the appearance and visage
it is presented with, of the crowd as wild animal, prepared to butcher and
massacre in order to eat. On first reading, this seditious population would
appear to have no autonomy and no space which might allow it to live in
260 Crowds

any other way other than as conditioned by an authoritarian politics and

an impulsive instinct.
However, the reality of the emotion at the time of its surfacing and
the manner in which individuals become associated with it give another
measure to the event, allowing one to come up against forms of social life
other than those usually referred to in theses and dissertations. Disruption,
anger, strikes and subversion are something other than the unleashing
of instincts manipulated by villains and ringleaders. They are types of
behaviour motivated by a personal reading of visible events affecting daily
life and a discernment of meaning inciting one to action. Unbeknown to its
leaders, the people abandon the definitions of themselves and pack our
traditional formulations off into exile.
In the course of observing all these traces of insubordination in the
police files and by noting the points at which the people rebelled either
furtively or en masse, one is struck in the end by the ordinariness of these
situations. At the end of the day, the uprising is perhaps not, as one might
simply believe, either a breakdown or a definitive rupture with the order of
things. Popular emotion would seem to be the necessary junction point
between an order which is breaking down and a future which is insecure.
And in the midst of this disorder, there is order - a greater desire for
justice and honour - and the assembled mob would seem to be the gesture
giving shape and form to what is lacking and what it is that has to be
overcome. The occasional disorder, expressions of anger and the begin¬
nings of revolt follow a logic and rationality which need to be made clear
moment by moment at each juncture. Finally, what the assembled people
is seeking is the exchange of what it lacks in a tension between its desire to
be momentarily undifferentiated and its differences.11 The force of this
union employs all manner of means in which violence and excess certainly
have their place and during which there is a struggle against dissolution, in
the full knowledge that this will intervene sooner or later in order that the
differences might be rearranged and dealt with under a new order.
When seen from a perspective of order as well as against a quite
ordinary system, disruption as it was customarily perceived by the police
becomes quite a different object. Obviously, for them the order of things
was written quite differently and the images that resulted could not possibly
be destroyed by events no matter how surprising.
Once popular emotion has been prised out from the traditionally
accepted view (disorder, brutishness, impulsive and uncontrollable
reflexes), the actual events of the insubordination can be taken one at a
time and studied closely for what they are and what they were intended to
be. Whether simultaneous or successive, great or small, it is possible to see
how they obey their own knowledge and understanding of the real and
their own properly constructed plans. In their anger, defiance or emotion
 The Crowds in Turmoil 261
the people put together what they consider plausible within the political
situation, and on the basis of this ‘suppositional reality’, its conviction is
built and the shape and form of its action determined. Its protest measures
and actions are a response to the whole social body and political processes
as they are represented, with the effect that such behaviours are both
rational and demonstrative.
What is more, reason and demonstration take on something of a
mission in which the revolt reveals truth over error in an obstinate desire
to have what it has seen and thought made known, showing that at the
present time, more than ever before, what was required was the surveillance
and transparency of political operations by which it was supposed to be
governed.
It was in this sense that time in Paris was marked by workers’ strikes
and popular insurrections. These were the catalysts for brief alliances
which were put into place with such habitual ease as always to catch the
authorities off guard. As far as we are concerned they present us with
different images of the construction of reality and upset the order of things
by their effort to establish more firmly a different set of values.
These are quite specific political moments, caught in a history which
needs disengaging from a view which is too retrospective and too
mechanical - too reductionist, in fact.
‘The dishonesty of the poet is not that he knows nothing of the sorrows
of the working man, but that he speaks of what he does not know.’12

Intrigues among the workers

‘Plots and cabals positively multiplied in the eighteenth century which, if
they did not provoke general uprisings, nevertheless disturbed the peace
and shook the world of work almost daily.’13 The 1760s represented a
turning-point in the century when strikes and conspiracies increased at a
rate and rhythm that was impressive. There was a general increase in
insubordination and the archives of the commissioners contain a plethora
of complaints indicating that lack of discipline was pretty soundly estab¬
lished. These conspiracies and cabals were, more often than not, fairly
locally based and usually took off from the workshops or the cabarets
(where business matters were frequently discussed), and ended up by
affecting the streets and indeed the whole district but rarely the whole
city.14 Some were short, others were protracted, and after several attempts
at re-establishing calm, they usually erupted all over again.
Whatever the reason - problems getting work, the day’s prices, freedom
to give notice, relationships with one’s masters - as far as the police
authorities were concerned, striking and conspiring together were
262 Crowds

insupportable, for they were the ruination of the dream of an impeccable

domestic order based on subordination. Worker indiscipline is a key term
in the Dictionnaire de police, legal treatises, the works of chroniclers
and memorialists, and particularly in police orders and instructions. By
prohibiting secret societies and brotherhoods, those in power obviously
hoped to build a permanent attachment between the worker and his work
- and his workshop in particular, that structure which was so necessary to
hierarchy and authority. The number of injunctions issued to prevent a
journeyman leaving his master before the completion of the task is beyond
count. Police rights over the ‘deserter’ were total, with the effect that being
landed in jail on police orders was the prompt and obvious response
to any lapse on the part of the employee. Patent letters from 2 January
1749 confirm some previous measures: journeymen, for example, were
forbidden to leave their masters unless they had been granted written
notice for that express purpose; nor were they allowed ‘to assemble
together as a body with the intention of conspiring or forming fraternities’.
These provisions were confirmed by Louis XVI in 1781 following the re¬
establishment of the corporations a year after they had been suppressed by
Turgot in 1775.
Whatever the timing of the regulations, the important thing was that in
Paris the police were responsible for disputes and under the instructions of
the Lieutenant-General. Prison was one of the most frequent measures -
the chief argument,15 as one might say; the reality, however, was much
less simple.

There were few large general movements but as soon as discontent crept
in, or an injustice was perceived, or there were the beginnings of a new
lowering of wages, there were stoppages of work, and acts of defiance.
Any provocation was met blow for blow.
Almost always everything revolved around the idea of subordination,
which was coming to be less and less tolerated; there was no justification
for maintaining an individual in a state of dependence which inhibited
his own creativity and inventiveness or - quite simply - his freedom.
The guild officials complained about these humiliating confrontations in
which their authority was called into question without opposition. The
vocabulary they used to characterize these movements is contemptuous,
describing the workers as crude and vile animals. In 1727 there was a
rebellion amongst the packers at the customs and excise and the General
Merchants and Traders made a complaint by letter to the Lieutenant-
General in the following terms:

The General Merchants do most humbly bring it to your attention that

among the dockers who are paid weekly at the offices of the customs
 The Crowds in Turmoil 263

where they are responsible for packing the merchandise brought there by
traders and other persons, as is their right, the greater part are brutes
and drunkards who cause quarrels every day and who are losing respect
for the customs’ authority and for those whose living depends on it... as
these aforesaid dockers lack either restraint or consideration and claim
that they are answerable to no one, they are asking the merchants for
double that to which they should legally be entitled for their efforts and
offices ... we do therefore request the Lieutenant-General of Police to re¬
establish order.16

Examples such as this can be multiplied; they came from all quarters
throughout the whole length of the century, emanating from all the trades
on all horizons - tradesmen, fabric-makers, enamel workers or journeymen
clockmakers, building workers or pinmakers. The mentions made in the
records of deliberations kept by the trades guilds are almost monotonous
in this respect, as in the following, for instance:

26 March 1756, seen and approved by us, payment in full by the Guild
of Merchants and Manufacturers of Cloth dated 16 March 1756 and also
containing information refuting the denial by all cloth workers in the
said works of stoppages among workers and attempts to conspire over a
considerable period and to force workers not wishing to stop work to
pay them by the various use of threats, violence and even assault, on the
pretext of getting the merchants to increase the rates of pay. If such an
undertaking were to continue for much longer — and it is of the utmost
importance to put a stop to it quickly, then these gatherings by workers
could be the occasion of riots and seditious activities. Cloth merchants
are daily exposed to these and to insults and bad behaviour; it is in the
interests of the community and the public good to prevent a disorder of
this kind and to see that those who find themselves contravening your
orders are imprisoned.17

In general, the arguing and wrangling began in an almost microscopic

way in the workshop before spreading out onto one street or to the entire
trade. The atmosphere of rancour and defiance were such that things could
turn sour very quickly, as the journeymen knew only too well. When
the shout of ‘Bacanal!’ went up, other workers, on hearing this cry of
discontent through their workshop windows, would reply immediately and
lose no time in leaving their shops and workshops in order to join them.
The very structure of the workshop was normally quite an adequate
support in itself and even when the workers had turned against their
master, they still felt at home there. For their part, they wanted to be able
to come and go as they pleased and to leave their master if they were
dissatisfied; but at the same time they treated this place as they saw fit,
with a feeling of belonging, which says much about the confused relation-
264 Crowds

ships between workshop and master. In this sense, the conflict which set
Symphorien Huot, master locksmith, against several journeymen from the
Rue de Vaugiraud tells us a good deal.18 On account of a debt which he
had failed to pay, the journeyman, Champagne, took to the streets on
22 April 1755 and stirred up all the other workmen in his district.
The following day, they insulted the master and his wife and went on
the rampage through the workshop wielding clubs and sticks before
being dispersed by the Guard. Champagne was arrested and explained his
actions before commissioner of police Crespy. He said that while his
master was absent, he had come with his companions to eat at Sieur
Huot’s workshop. They had waited for him and then had gone into the
shop where they had beaten him and called his wife a lackey s clown and
a ‘bare bum’. Lying in wait like this to beat up the master and his wife
was not the result of any particular plan or strategy and they had felt no
need to hide; they just did as usual, getting the other journeymen together,
waiting quietly at the master’s table and then letting rip - setting things to
rights in one’s own place, as it were. Paradoxically, it was precisely this
familiarity between master and journeymen which was the natural support
of worker insubordination and it was the microcosm of the workshop
that naturally invited it. The master was almost impotent against this
indiscipline, which was shaped by the very structures which should have
established dependence and submission. This is what made things so
difficult for the police and the guilds; for the enemy was at the very
interior of the workshop like a worm in the fruit. And thus, as it is plain to
see, the domestic structure was being eroded by those very processes which
had been responsible for its elaboration.
The job of breaking up or harassing these collective movements by
workers was common enough but something which the authorities actually
had difficulty achieving. Searching thoroughly through the archives of
Commissioner Hugues of Les Halles between 1757 and 1767, one can see
such a movement coming to life; it consisted of boys and journeymen
cobblers who caused some agitation throughout the whole district in the
year 1763,19 and not only put the commissioner to the test but also a
police inspector named Bourgoin who was responsible for cleaning up the
atmosphere. He did this by having workers followed and by means of
imprisonments by lettres de cachet.
There was a whole series of skirmishes between April 1763 and January
1764 revealing the complexity of the demands and the very loose-knit
strategy and organization. As usual it was an apparently trivial incident
which tiiggered the conflict. On 9 April 1763, a traditional dispute arose
in the workshop of Nicolas Ferry, master cobbler in the Rue Tiquetonne.
Harmless it may have appeared, but behind it there lurked a malaise which
lost no time in spreading from master to master, in time extending far and
 The Crowds in Turmoil 265

wide. At the outset it revolved around the desire of one of the boys to do
the work his own way and not according to his master’s instructions. This
boy had been in the employment of Nicolas Ferry for a fortnight and he
had plenty of work in hand. One morning, the master gave him a pair of
shoes for which he had to make ‘the heels, which he had already cut out
and which had been covered in grain leather’. The boy refused point blank
as ‘he didn't want to make them into shoes but into dancing pumps
instead, so he threw his tools into the shop and went out’. The six other
journeymen went with him as a result of this incident.
This refusal to obey and the desire to have some rights in the organiza¬
tion of the work and what was being undertaken in the workshop did not
remain an isolated incident. A month later, in the Rue des Deux-Ecus,
Pierre Guillet found himself faced with the same kind of problem. His
three journeymen refused to do the work they were given and threw the
plaintiff’s plans on the ground. When Guillet made it clear to them that
they were departing from the guild statutes, the three journeymen replied
that they had taken an oath to cease work and that that was something
sacred. An entente had been born.
In fact, the cabal was in full swing and the guild officials were torn
between anxiety, the desire to repress it and attempts at conciliation.
Identical scenes were being reproduced in each workshop in the district;
tools were flung on the ground and demands made to do other jobs than
those required. Nicolas Ferry was one of the masters who was to be most
singled out in this affair for he was responsible for the accounts in the
chamber of his guild. The most unruly and rebellious of the workers
installed themselves in June in a cabaret situated immediately opposite his
workshop and harassed him with insults as well as trying to disaffect other
journeymen in the street. The job of tracking them down was made the
more difficult by the fact that no one knew their names or addresses, only
their nicknames inherited from their place of origin: Messin de Metz or
Picard, for example. Although hardly known to the authorities, they were
well adapted to the social networks of the streets and cabarets; they took
oaths of unity and held as many meetings as they could in order to keep up
the pressure on the masters whose style of command they refused. Their
main weapon, as was often the case in cabals of this kind, was irony,
name-calling in the street and the cutting comment which went straight to
its target. In their efforts to create disaffection among those who wanted to
remain at work, the journeymen camped in front of the windows and
shouted, ‘Are you afraid of going to Bicetre then, because you will land up
there if you don’t watch it.’ Baiting and satire of this kind were all
intended to affect the outcome of this type of disorder and the raillery was
indeed effective! That day, in response to the calls, many boys joined in
with the schemers. The arms used were defiance, provocation and straight
266 Crowds

talking - but also threats of violence and the desire to hold up work
practically everywhere.
The Lieutenant-General of Police was informed of the affair and whilst
the number of complaints by masters against worker indiscipline and
insubordination were on the increase, the usual apparatus was discreetly
being put into place. An inspector was instructed to follow the rebels, find
out their names and addresses and the places where they met. He was in
possession of royal orders in the form of lettres de cachet permitting
immediate imprisonment of suspects. In August, the problems multiplied;
work was left unfinished, tools were downed, pass keys to the workshops
stolen, boys hardly taken on before they abandoned their aprons, and
there were arguments with the authorities and scuffles in the cabarets
between those who wanted to see the movement spread and those who
wanted to work.
At the same time, as often happened during such intrigues, some of the
masters sheltered the rebels and lent their support to their movement, as
much from fear of seeing their workshops ransacked as from a desire to
cock a snook at their guild with which they were not in agreement.20
These movements of rebellion provide a clear illustration of the existence
of groupings and solidarities precisely in those places where one might not
always have expected to have found them and, in particular, they reveal
an increase in the strength of somewhat threatening individualisms. On
29 August, the guild of masters met to consider ‘the maintenance of
good order’ and the usual recommendations were restated: one should not
leave one’s master, nor cause disaffection amongst the others or form
assemblies.
The text issued as a result of their deliberations was posted up through¬
out the whole of the district, but it was a complete waste of time. By the
end of the day all the notices had disappeared, either torn to shreds or
made utterly illegible. It was an undertaking in which there was an intense
feeling of solidarity amongst the journeymen. This made it impossible to
arrest the one without there being an immediate rallying together of rebels
on the street, which is what happened in the Rue Pavee-Saint-Sauveur. A
soldier attempted to arrest a journeyman shoemaker who was tearing
down a notice, but the Guard was obliged to retreat in the face of an angry
crowd.
Emotional reactions of this kind among the workers comprised aspects
that were both private and particular. As we have seen already, achiev¬
ing solidarity was not necessarily a simple process, with some of the
masters, for instance, giving their support and approval to the journeymen.
Furthermore, some of the minor officials were also contaminated by the
prevailing climate with some of them unashamedly leaving the trade
altogether and quitting the paternal household or abandoning their
 The Crowds in Turmoil 267
charges with nothing more than the odd sarcastic comment. Some of the
masters were incensed and filed complaints. The guild system seemed in
disarray. At this precise point in the movement (9 September 1763), one
observes a definite fragmentation with a realignment of positions adopted
and a real dismantling of the original structures which affected both the
organization of the trade and even the families of the master craftsman.
The domestic structure had been turned upside-down and the police could
do nothing about it except lock up the rebels; but the impact of this was
hardly effective at moments of sporadic revolt like this when abandonment
of responsibilities and seizure of tools followed each other in turn.
In mid-September, legal action was drawn up by several officials who
had remained loyal to the guild, one of whom was Nicolas Ferry. They
expressed their fears about all those cabarets in the district where rebellion
was being fomented and attacks plotted by day or night. Some of the
masters had been laid low by blows from journeymen who before striking
them had shouted together that ‘they [the masters] were themselves worthy
of the title of assassin and had to be punished’. The metaphors used
were still those of common-law justice and the world of delinquency; the
‘conscience’ of the workers, so often threatened with prison and arrest,
was seeking its revenge. If it were a case of prison and assassination, it
should be the masters, and not they themselves, who should be concerned.
Their subjection had become so intolerable that it was their aim to over¬
turn the situation and have the masters experience their own state of
dependence. It was they, the masters, who had been designated the
principal agents of their unjust subordination.
From that point on, when anxiety was at its height and when the
masters felt themselves being squeezed in the ever-tightening grip of a vice
that showed no signs of weakening, things began to resolve themselves one
case at a time. In October, the archives of Commissioner Hugues were full
of withdrawals of complaints by the masters or attempts at amicable
conciliation. The conflict came to no real conclusion - there were no
agreements signed nor new regulations; each workplace attempted to find
its own precarious harmony by establishing a modus vivendi with the
express purpose of keeping at bay the spectre of a too widespread collec¬
tive revolt.
The master shoemakers of the Rue Tiquetonne seemed rather relieved
and although the odd skirmish was reported here and there it was not
serious and quickly damped down. However, in complete contrast, a
month later, the Rue Coquillere was at boiling-point. The young cobbler
boys had come out onto the street and were drawing up plans against their
masters. Others did the same and the harassment was daily. And in
this case, it was not an economic matter; the issue was the way of
life. Confronted by demands of this kind, the masters found themselves
268 Crowds
defenceless, uncertain and, more often than not, incompetent. In the face
of this, the journeymen and boys decided to conduct their own day as
they pleased, rejecting any sense of servility. These gatherings, whether
momentary, fragmented or even violent, were still the same expressions of
a thinking that had been developed as the result of daily experience that
had been judged to be unsatisfactory and pernicious.
Whether it was the cutlers,21 cleaners and polishers,22 hosiers,23
locksmiths,24 masons,25 or farriers;26 whether the issue was the right to
carry a sword, the rate for the piece of work - whatever the movement, it
grew from such momentary periods of association when potential strength
could be assessed and strategies drawn up. Of course, these associations
were strictly forbidden and always denounced by the guilds to the police,
who daily tried to track down their places of assembly, although these
usually held strong, whether they were the cellars of cabarets, enclosures
or secret passages. The archives reveal both a bitter struggle against these
illegal meetings and the impossibility of seeing off this mode of association
which was an integral part of life in the trades. Large gatherings made
things relatively easy for the police, as the assembly of 300 journey¬
men locksmiths in cabarets close to the Arsenal will testify. They were
engaged in making banners with canes and batons which they would have
preferred to have been swords.27 The jailing of the suspected ringleaders
did not always do anything to alter the problem, for although it might
cause groups to change their meeting-places, it did nothing to alter their
determination.
In 1731, the officials of the farrier’s guild took fright at the extent of the
clandestine activities of their journeymen. They dispatched a number of
petitions to the Lieutenant-General of Police granting him permission to
move in on attempts at collective mobilization within the guild where
there was a threat of insurrection and lawbreaking by workers who were
determined to safeguard their way of life and means of representa¬
tion.
For some months now the apprentice farriers had been getting together
on Sundays and feast days to arrange horseshoe competitions with each
other and to this end they had been invoking some distant custom. Some
of them had become so engrossed in this that they had neglected their
work, staying away from their masters for as much as three weeks at a
time without giving any notice or warning, as well as disaffecting other
journeymen whom they had dragged off with them. They found a suitable
refuge in the Samaritaine area of the Seine and there 30 or 40 of them,
depending on the day, forged their irons and drank, competing and
brawling with one another. Imprisoning the leaders was to no avail: they
simply got together elsewhere with others.-8 Forming associations, holding
meetings, wearing a sword - these were all means of escaping a hier-
 The Crowds in Turmoil 269

archical structure which imposed obedience to it without offering any real

identity to those who found themselves in submission.
Faced with this kind of activity, masters and police responded blow for
blow. But even when the repression was carried out by means of an arrest
without a hearing or on orders of the King it was never massive or open
and quite often it was necessary to retreat because, after registering their
complaints, the masters themselves often came to request the freeing of
their journeymen. Alliances of all kinds were formed during these periods
of worker insubordination without any kind of uniform rules or regula¬
tions. Each movement had its own particular features and produced a
history that was autonomous in relation to the others. Few strikes spread
to the whole of the city and each time, in the wake of swift and decisive
action on the part of the Lieutenant-General, it was fear and anxiety (on
the part of the masses as well of those in power) that usually gained the
upper hand. Everyone dreamt of having harmonious workshops and for an
end to this incessant friction which not only upset family and domestic life
but also the precarious economic equilibrium of each artisanal unit. If the
rebels were freed, why should they not find their place in this stable
hierarchical chain which at all costs had to be the model for society?
This was certainly the course of events during the mutiny of journey¬
men hosiers in 1724.29 Having been obliged to suffer a reduction in the
price of their merchandise due to royal regulations, the merchant hosiers
knew only one method of softening the blow to their own earnings and
this was to reduce the piece rate by 5 sols per pair of silk stockings and 2
sols 6 deniers the pair in fine wool. There was an immediate reaction, with
many men leaving their masters. They got together, refusing to return
while ever their wages remained cut in this way. So that they could hold
out and in order to convince the greatest possible number of journeymen
hosiers, they decided to raise funds among those who had remained at
work by contributing 6 sols each per week to help meet the needs of
strikers. Michel, who collected the funds, took the precaution of seeking
refuge in the Temple cloister in order to be more secure.
The affair went further - the Lieutenant-General summoned Michel and
his two accomplices; but it was a woman who came to let him know that
no one would be coming to this interview. She stated quite coolly that
‘they knew they would not be hanged for refusing to obey these orders.’
Women were quite often the mediators in this kind of conflict. They
passed on news and information, knew where the men were hiding and
were able to move around the city quite easily, assuring the cohesion of the
movement as a result of their activities. Loud and outspoken, their tone
was often sarcastic and threatening but on this occasion they came to grief.
One did not refuse a rendezvous with the Lieutenant of Police with
impunity. Having assessed the atmosphere and the potential danger,
270 Crowds
the journeymen hosiers decided to file a complaint themselves (and thus
become players in the negotiations) whilst at the same time humbly excus¬
ing themselves for not having been present at the audience. They wrote
that ‘they had been so unfortunate as to miss the appointment by a
moment or two and offered their most humble apologies’. The mobs and
illegal assemblies continued to multiply and the agitation escalated whilst
the number of journeymen who were ‘clubbing in’ and keeping a collection
going to support those who had stopped work was put at 2,000.
By order of the King and by way of a swift example, indicative of the
severity to be expected, Michel was secretly arrested, orders being sent to
the bailiff of the Temple. He was quickly dispatched to the prison of Fort
l’Eveque where he was interrogated. He denied everything, explaining his
own attachment to his master for whom he had been working for the last
four years. He said that he knew nothing beyond the odd amount of
hearsay. Yes, he had certainly received a small amount of money but
provision for this had been made a long time ago for the relief of the sick
in the guild community.
This was the usual kind of defence. Whenever an illicit gathering or
assembly was discovered by the police, the protagonists defended them¬
selves by saying that they were acting in the name of charity and that it
was necessary to take care of the sick and elderly in their community.
Among the archives there are outlines of plans for the formation of
associations of working men and women and this provision for a common
fund for the support of the most vulnerable usually figures prominently.
For example, there is the undated proposal for an association of women
workers in the lace industry,30 in which it is stipulated that ‘the expenses
incurred by illness shall be borne equally in cases where the illness lasts no
longer than eight days’.
The defence of the workman Michel resembles that of so many others;
however, he took fright and gave the names of his associates at the same
time as explaining that they were also people of good faith motivated by
charity and setting a good example.
In the margin of this interrogation, the Lieutenant-General had written
that it was necessary to arrest the bit players as well because ‘the situation
was urgent as the rebellion was increasing each day that passed’. Another
note states clearly that the King wanted everything sewn up with a
punishment that would be exemplary’, if only to contain the workers from
other trades. A month later when the principal agents were all locked up
and institutionalized, the merchants set a contrary operation in motion
demanding the release from prison of their workers, declaring that they
had been sufficiently punished and insisting that they be returned to their
work and duty which they were certain they would accomplish with the
best will in the world. Following swiftly on this appeal and personal
 The Crowds in Turmoil 271

appeals from the prisoners themselves, which made reference to their

family responsibilities, came the order for their release.
This constant coming and going between the authorities and those in
league, as well as those solidarities instigated between the master and
police and then renounced once the repression had begun to take effect,
indicate a vision of work experienced as fragmented but where there was
also the possibility of experiencing harmony if one succeeded in frighten¬
ing some of the hotheads. In this context, the workers, journeymen and
apprentice-boys played their own part, knowing how to conduct these
collective contests in what was above all a bid to place what was on offer
against their own vision of themselves, which might involve, for instance,
ways of working, the means of achieving freedom from dependence on the
master, or the right not to be considered a servant and therefore entitled to
carry a sword. In short, how to exist otherwise in a free relationship — the
vision of a workshop that did not necessarily cause a breakdown in the
obvious solidarities and close relationships of work, but beyond the all too
narrow constraints of the master’s family. In the face of these strong and
arrogant individualisms that were ready to brave prison in order to claim
other definitions for themselves than those traditionally assigned them, one
can see to what extent the much-repeated theses about the workers were
far from the reality. During the short period of time when the trades-guilds
were to be suppressed (the time of Turgot’s disgrace and the return of the
Lieutenant-General of Police who had been in exile for a year), the only
thing the elites could dream of was of their reappearance for quite specific
political purposes, namely order and tranquillity. In spite of the upheavals,
the conspiracies and the increase in conflicts and strikes since 1760, every¬
one believed that it was the workshop structure that was the guarantee of
public security. No one else could have put it better than Lenoir when he
said

that at least the restoration of the guilds and corporations would achieve
a political goal as they tend to instil good inner discipline among at least
two-thirds of the population of Paris; that he would see to it that they
returned, for without them it would be difficult to achieve a general and
individual level of security in a capital which set the tone for all the other
towns of the Nation_Re-establishing the corporations and guilds of
merchants, artisans and workers is to some extent a means of organizing
the people and allowing oneself an important means of getting to know
them in spirit and of keeping them calm. This would not be at variance
with what one is given to understand as the spirit of free trade.31

In 1775, Lenoir still believed that the trades’ corporations ‘organized

the people’ and kept them quiet; a utopianism which seems all the more
surprising since he had been at the head of the police since 1774 and had
272 Crowds
been perfectly well acquainted with the Parisian climate for some time.
The workers, however, were instigators in rejecting this structure and yet
knew perfectly well how to make it work to their advantage when need be.

When the people got steamed up

Who then are these instruments of public calamity and disaster? They
are always those men whose names and addresses one does not know;
individuals who seem strangers in the very town which provides them
with their means of subsistence; creatures of the moment who disappear
with the same ease as they appeared in the first place. In short, they are
the sort who stick at nothing, who are without property and who take
flight with the speed of lightning. ’2

This kind of police account never varied. It showed an inability to

think of popular emotions in any other terms beyond the traditional
sketch of the ‘stranger come from other parts’, faithless and unlawful,
and dragging along with him a whole mass of unscrupulous individuals.
Confronted by this tumultuous body that was society, the police con¬
sidered it their function to control the multitude as they saw fit and ‘to be
its guiding, yet unseen spirit’.
The reality, however, was rather different; for although rioting was
always a formidable spectre for the authorities, it was also one of the
traditional forms of existence for the population. Serious disturbances
which were bloody and threatening affairs for the monarchy were obviously
rare and what there were have been well researched. Their mechanisms
and the motives underlying them are well known, as is the firmness with
which they were repressed. What are less well known are the minor
incidents of the street, arising haphazardly for a variety of reasons and
provoking a hue and cry which would attract a rowdy mob and a whole
host of trouble to which the Guard and the Watch were usually called in
as reinforcements. There was no shortage of pretexts or of methods to use
in dealing with them. The police would be preoccupied with the disorder
whenever it broke out and just as afraid of it as they were active in
dispelling it. The commissioners were always on their guard and their
reports are imprinted with an anxiety mixed with prudence and caution.
They knew that any mismanagement in the event of an incident could
produce serious skirmishes. In February 1745,33 a minor incident which,
as chance would have it, Commissioner Le Comte himself happened to be
involved in, shows how much the police feared outbursts and ‘shady
business’. He writes:

Being yesterday at four in the afternoon on my balcony with five or

six other persons, we heard loud cries coming from a house which is
 The Crowds in Turmoil 273

separated from mine only by a dividing wall. A moment later, a young

woman appeared at the window and cried ‘Help! Help!’ When this
young woman spotted me, she yelled, ‘Monsieur le Commissaire, they’re
coming into my house to murder me.’

The commissioner immediately sent for the Guard but the ensuing disorder
had led to a gathering of a surprising number of young bucks who had
come out of the neighbouring cafes all ready for a good set-to. Suitable
arrangements needed to be made. He continues:

I bade the Guard enter my study, so as to avoid a full-scale affair and

I thought it in my best interests not to allow them out until the trouble¬
makers had withdrawn. The most troublesome of them all was called
Trinquely, who had only recently come out of Fort-l’Eveque and was at
the head of a dozen or so rapscallions who had caused a good deal of
trouble throughout Paris.

The spirit of revolt could arise from anywhere — workshops, cabarets

(always spoiling for a fight), and the prisons which had seen no end of
trouble during the century (for example, in 1740, 1749, 1763 and 1767,
without counting other less serious incidents).34 Then there were the
libertines who held their assemblies in the faubourgs, and at the town
gates there was a great deal of trafficking and the harassment of farm
employees etc.35 The most serious agitation arose on account of price rises
or when the population was concerned about government activities of a
dubious nature such as the disappearances of children organized by the
police in 1750. Whether great or small, however, public disorder remained
a relatively familiar event. When an incident arose no one could possibly
know the proportions it might assume an hour or so later, but everyone
was able to recognize it when it did happen and to adjust their behaviour
towards it accordingly. Only the police saw anything odd about it, and
were at pains to devise strategies in which they might remain as invisible as
possible. There was quite a wide gap between the often banal appearance
of a scuffle and the manner in which the police and the authorities spoke
about it, always hovering between caution and severity without quite
making up their minds.
Rebellion exists even before it has been incited. It is born of a single
movement, and it is above all noise and anger and the cry of those who
want justice done, and the panic of those who witness the tumult and
become associated with it. The evidence of witnesses and the results of
interrogations, although imprecise (for who in fact is likely to admit to the
commissioner interrogating him that, yes, he had actually ‘rebelled’?),
reveal how a revolt developed and progressed both over and above those
participating in it but also with their close support. Autonomous, or almost,
274 Crowds

the disturbance had its own momentum, because it suddenly found itself
corresponding to the urgency of a situation whose contours had long been
discernible. Undoubtedly what was most striking in these sporadic urban
revolts of the eighteenth century was their strength and determination,
their suddenness, as well as the manner in which they were experienced as
being a normal state of affairs, indeed legitimate.
The riot was the ceaseless link between the possible and the impossible
for the very fact that it was based on the particular mode of existence
of the inhabitants. As such, it was handed back to the investigators
(commissioners and inspectors), as a movement which was inherent to
normal activity and participation in the world about, but also as an event
that had taken place outside their field of action and responsibility. The
kind of a posteriori reconstruction and representation of events by those
who had good cause to fear a severe repression is less fallacious than it
might at first sight appear. On the contrary, it comes closest to expressing
what a street incident in fact was, namely what one actually lived through
and what happened to one and what one saw happening. During these
periods of anger, the urban structure was the most convincing and effec¬
tive social actor. The apartment building, the market, the bridge, the
crossroads and the commissioner’s hotel were not just the right kind of
places to serve as collection points and catalysts of rage and frustration,
they were also places which positively favoured such feelings, providing
a model and lending them strength and authenticity. Emanating from
these places in the urban environment, there was a social and collective
knowledge which acted as a base for determination and vindication. One
found oneself caught up in a riot on the stairs rather in the way that one
might gather round a well to draw water. ‘There’s a riot going on over
there,’ the residents in a neighbouring street might say on hearing the noise
and sounds of emotions whose cause they would instantly recognize; and
they would find themselves in the thick of it because they were practitioners
of a collective destiny accustomed to reacting to anything which affected
their survival. It is not an exaggeration to say that rebellion took on an
ordinary appearance, especially when it sought to re-establish an order
which was scoffed at by the authorities. It was not a total overthrow of
attitudes or practices but a practical and symbolic setting in motion of
a thought and an action which could no longer tolerate the injustices
observed in its immediate surroundings.
In that, there is more order and reason than one might have normally
read into it; but at the same time, violence often became entrenched with
more cruelty than if cohesion and conviction had been the long-term
companions of its maturation.
A riot is never unconsidered even if it is unpredictable. In its paroxysm
of vehement fury, it relies on whatever has already been creating the daily
 The Crowds in Turmoil 275

fabric of life; and as a social form with which one was accustomed, it was
immediately identifiable and its risks assessed. What is more, the extent of
the risk increased the violence and the desire to be a part of it. Even before
one had the time to see what was happening, everyone knew what was
going to happen and determination grew in relation to that certainty. As it
is quite plain to see, it was amidst this whirlwind and mixture of habit and
utter eruption that the crowd found its way in, and in so doing totally
escaped all reductionist definitions assigned to it by the authorities for, in
the midst of this agitation brought on by external events, it lived totally
unto itself.
Tumults and rebellions have their own particular vocabulary and a
specific catalogue of gestures which seek to find a concordance with the
social and political contexts giving rise to them. Once the crowd has made
sense of the social and political meanings from what it sees and hears, it
adopts forms it considers necessary for claiming its rights and gaining
respect for those norms it considers necessary. For a large part of the time,
the question is not the renewal of society nor its reinvention on new bases,
but to defend oneself, to maintain in the best possible state conditions that
are already difficult, and to prevent things getting any worse. The outbreak
of the not can be seen as an ordinary act; it was the revolutionary postures
themselves that contained the multitude of hopes and dreams, even when
the demands expressed were by no means innovatory.
Revolt is all of this and yet something other. If one attempts to lay hold
of it by means of ideological theory or in some sort of cultivation of the
‘true life’ of the people, it would be to forget that revolt is born out of
fatigue, and dreams out of suffering and the clash between thought and the
search for meaning. One forgets that it defies our knowledge because our
most tenacious desire is to leave everyone in their place whilst at the same
time we persist in defining the other as weird, outlandish - a stranger.
The spring of 1750 was very tense as has already been mentioned. The
abductions of children and the anxiety felt by each person set off days of
rioting between 16 and 23 May.36 The cause of each incident was either
the arrest of a child in the middle of the street by poorly disguised archers
who were instantly recognizable, or the unwelcome presence of someone
who had been recognized and suspected of being part of the band of
policemen who had taken away the children. The skirmishes were violent
and the Guard was overwhelmed, whilst on each occasion the people tried
to carry the guilty men off to the hotel of the police commissioner, a place
both familiar and symbolic, where one could reasonably and legitimately
have expected there to be order and security.
The Saturday of 23 May proved to be the most agitated and bloody of
them all. Labbe, a police officer, was recognized by the crowd and chased
into the Rue Saint-Honore. He was already wounded but with the help of
276 Crowds
a woman, he dived into one of the apartment buildings on the market¬
place. When he was eventually turfed out of there, he was assaulted and
dragged off to Police Commissioner La Vergee. Then the crowd got hold
of him again and this time they whipped him and pelted him with stones.
In the evening, his body was put on a ladder and carried to the front of the
hotel of the Lieutenant-General of Police, Berryer, where they left it. It was
an act of defiance against the supreme authority and against the very
person who they knew perfectly well had himself been giving the orders
for the abductions.
Berryer took fright and furtively left the house by the back door. Paris
was calm the next day and a decree was drawn up by the Lieutenant and
the first president of the parlement in an attempt to avoid any fresh
disorder. An enquiry directed by Seven, a Counsellor at the court, was
also set up. The immediate arrest of rioters and suspected police officers
then followed but it seemed that the enquiry was only concerned with
condemning the rioters and allowing the guilty police officers to go free
subject to the payment of a small fine. On 3 August, three young rebels
were hanged at the Place de Greve to the angry murmurings of a hostile
crowd. The fact that the police had been to blame was no excuse and had
made no difference to the illegitimacy of the revolt. The people who had
been a part of that revolt now only sought the orderly return of a world
that had suddenly gone out of control.
In this affair, the details of each scene and event reveal, beneath the
apparent disorder and impulsiveness, behaviour that was organized and
logical; and in this respect, the apartment building on the Saint-Honore
market-place had all the advantages of an observatory. In the course of
putting together the different accounts by witnesses and the results of the
interrogations, one sees the emergence of attitudes and roles which not
only proved to be in keeping with a thorough knowledge of the area but
also were conducive to the eruption of a riot. The sequence of events
which unfolded gives an indication of the internal mechanisms of the
revolt, giving it a controlled and regulated appearance, whose every
episode one is able to understand.
The dawn of this book saw us encamped in the apartment building by
the market square; teeming and porous, vibrant and susceptible, we saw it
in the course of its everyday life — hardworking and quite frequently
disturbed and agitated. The riot was to shake it significantly but without
causing any fundamental alteration to the roles of each occupant. Because
of its architecture and the way in which it was inhabited, it found itself
called on to be the theatre of one of the most serious incidents of the
whole affair. There was one detail not given earlier, and that was that two
years previously, on the second floor, Police Inspector Poussot,37 who was
well known to the Parisians, had been living there. He shared a small
 The Crowds in Turmoil 277

apartment with a woman of little virtue known as La Marechale, who was

a ‘confidante’ of the police and who was mixed up in the world of
prostitution and always ready to pass on information and observations
to the police. The building had retained its memory of having offered
shelter to ‘those people’ and it was not at all happy about that kind of
promiscuity.
When Officer Labbe, one of Poussot’s men and a spy for some time,
was suddenly recognized in a street adjacent to the market as he was
looking for refuge, he plunged into this enclosure that was bordered by
three buildings and accessible by three doors. One woman, Genevieve
Olivier, widow of a master carpet-maker, soon recognized him and knew
immediately the danger threatening him. She had also worked for the
police and when Poussot had lived in the building she had ‘done the
cooking’ with La Marechale and today she was still in contact with La
Denis, one of the washerwomen in the building who worked for her.
Taking Labbe by the arm, she pushed him in the direction of the building
and yelled at him to go up to the fifth floor where La Denis lived. With
clothes torn and his arm wounded, Labbe was out of breath and exhausted
and so he stopped on the fourth floor and hid at another washerwoman’s,
La Roseau, who got him out of the way. Telling him to take shelter here
had been bad advice because today of all days the building had every
reason to avail itself of its memory and it did so with cruelty and violence.
That spring, policemen were no more than cruel murderers and the
occupants of the building wanted nothing to do with them, especially not
to give them shelter.
On the market square, a disturbance blew up all at once. Living and
working in this area was a population that had been implanted there for
12 or 18 years or more, with its own customs, codes of behaviour,
memories and interests. All of those who went about their business there
had a variety of jobs which changed according to the days and the seasons.
Thomas Lamotte, for example, was a mason but more often than not he
was both cleaner and odd-job man, regularly installing himself in the
Quinze-Vingts market in the Rue de l’Echelle. Thus, in between jobs,
he could ‘do the job of putting up the awnings for the fishmongers in
the mornings and taking them down in the evenings and, besides that,
sweeping up after the market’.38 On Saturday, 23 May, he said that he
had got back from ‘doing a trip for the nurses who had come from Saint-
Germain-en-Laye’ before getting caught up and carried along by the angry
crowd. In the case of the cod-sellers, they had other small jobs to help
them through the lean days, like selling song sheets in the street or doing
the laundry for a few customers during the great seasonal washing periods.
As one works one’s way through the stories of personal apprehension
and diffidence, and all the usual strategies used to greater or lesser effect
278 Crowds
to avoid accusation, one can begin to see from the accounts by witnesses
how the revolt managed to break out so suddenly in this partially enclosed
enclave. Everything happened in a flash. The shouting, the pursuit, the
accompanying gestures — all occurred at top speed, but with all the
naturalness one might expect from people who were used to this kind of
event. When the butchers saw that they were chasing Labbe, they yelled at
the women on the market stalls, Get my children out of the way, there s
going to be all hell let loose!’ ‘There’s a riot on the way!’ This was the cry
that signalled that the revolt was no longer a threat or a prediction, but a
reality. The women passed the message to each other and took a few
makeshift precautions to protect their tools and merchandise. One of them
rammed two of the long knives that she used for gutting fish into her
baskets for fear of being picked up by the police and of not being able to
justify having them on her. Another woman told how frightened she had
been and how she had been out of breath when she had got back to her
lodgings. Strangely enough, in the course of the interrogation, she seemed
to come to herself and while explaining her haste to get away she also
added, without thinking, that before running away she had gone off to
have a drink with her friend the cooper’s wife, itself a confession of how
accustomed to riots she had become; and although she knew that she had
to say how afraid she was, she did not quite know how to do it. Her little
stop-over at the innkeeper’s showed that she had not been too terrified and
that, all in all, there was a desire here to be present at the rebellion.
The women had responded to the protective warnings of the men by
acknowledging their advice and acting as safeguards. However, they all
remained vague about the details of their behaviour and, in their replies to
the police, they said that in the face of all the noise they had calmly carried
on with what they were doing and that it had all happened without them -
so they said. Their lack of precision and reluctance to speak only thinly
veiled their active presence and participation.
In fact, both men and women were to find themselves caught up inside
the building, which proceeded to spring to life in a way which corresponded
quite logically to its structure and the manner in which it was inhabited.
There was nothing fortuitous about what was going on here centre-stage.
At the announcement that a police agent was hidden between its walls,
the principal tenant of the building, Devaux, master locksmith by trade
and resident of a nearby building, quickly got himself over there. In
his capacity as main tenant, he was responsible for the building to the
proprietor, M. le Marquis de Putange. He was in charge of collecting
the rents and for letting and sub-letting as he saw fit; he also filled in
the police registers with the names of the occupants and kept an eye on the
place, thus exercising a certain amount of authority over everyone. His
responsibilities were recognized and respected.
 The Crowds in Turmoil 279
As soon as he got inside the building on the heels of a heated popula¬
tion who were in the process of searching its every nook and cranny, and
omitting no alley, passage-way, window or bedroom in their efforts to lay
their hands on the policeman, he, by virtue of his own authority, altered
the rebels’ game. For an hour, Devaux became a leader, taking control of
operations, calming things down or stirring them up according to his own
strategy. Torn between two different aims, he became the essential pivot of
what was about to happen and which took place quite naturally. He was
undoubtedly solidly behind the riot but his role and responsibility as
master of the premises meant that he could not take too many risks - at
least those were his wishes. Thus, above all, he wanted to find Labbe
himself and evict him as quickly as possible from his building to avoid
anything unpleasant happening which would compromise him beyond
doubt in the eyes of the authorities. He made use of his position with
confidence and just when all the doors were banging or when the rebels
armed with sticks were shouting, ‘After the murderer!’, and attempting to
break down doors and smash in windows, he intervened to calm things
down. ‘Steady on, my friend, that’s not the way to go about it, not so
much noise,’ he said to three men who wanted to force their way in to La
Roseau’s rooms and he covered the door to her room with his own body.
In the face of this resolve, things calmed down and then he said, ‘We’ll
go and search everywhere and if he’s there, you’ll find him.’ At that point,
he had given his own consent and approval to the chase. In one instant he
had become the leader, a role which he was to lose just as easily an hour
later, to be replaced by another individual in the course of another scene.
Here, in his own building, he was the master and his social function made
him undisputed holder of that office. Devaux’s determination convinced
Roseau’s wife that it was indeed better to open her door than to resist and
that it would involve less violence for her. Besides she could then testify
that she had acted on orders if things turned out badly. Once the door of
the room was open, it was child’s play to find Labbe and three men
dragged him out from under the bed. His face was bloodied and livid.
They held him by the arms and someone grabbed him round the neck. The
sight of him inflamed their spirits and incited them to violence; out on the
stairs they all shouted that they should throw him through the window or
‘into the latrines’.39 Devaux calmly intervened, strictly forbidding any such
attempts to get rid of him.
‘No, don’t throw him down, take him out and get him off our hands so
we don’t have any trouble here.’ That one phrase summed it up - it was
absolutely essential that Labbe left the building for which Devaux was
responsible unscathed. As for what was going to happen next in the street
below, Devaux didn’t want to know; but first he took care to go up and
give his journeymen instructions not to come out and to get back to work.
280 Crowds
Later at the enquiry, Labbe’s colleagues were to latch onto this expression
to show that Devaux had cowardly ‘delivered’ the man who, as a woman
was to say, had been treated ‘like an ecce homo'.4 The picture was all in
place: as far as the colleagues of police officer Labbe were concerned,
Devaux had all the appearance of a Pontius Pilate.
Devaux’s attitude was certainly suspect enough to warrant the suggested
comparison; seeing Genevieve Olivier, who had pointed out the hiding-
place to Labbe, made his hackles rise and he subjected her to a violent
torrent of verbal abuse, calling her a whore and a Madam so that she also
found herself put out on the street at the same time as Labbe. He then
went on to turn all the washerwomen in the building against her, seizing
them by the arm and shoving them over to the windows overlooking the
street, telling them to ‘let rip’ at her. The washerwomen needed no asking,
although they said later that they had been made to do it. ‘Kill her, she’s
one of La Marechale’s band.’ ‘No more mischief-makers here watching
what everyone is up to.’ The insults merged one with another whilst
Olivier just managed to escape being massacred thanks to two butcher’s
stallholders who saved her in the nick of time. From the landing, Devaux
both stirred things up and controlled them at one and the same time.
‘You’re all the same kind, all of you, just a bunch of idiots,’ he yelled, but
suddenly he took fright and stopped in his tracks; one of the washer¬
women had just been shouting, ‘She’s a whore who once lived here, M.
Devaux says so.’ He gave her a kick and shut her up, saying, ‘Do you have
to go and open your mouth and mention someone’s name, you idiot? You
mustn’t name anyone.’ There we have it — the phrase is exemplary; in a
world such as this, where everyone knew each other whilst remaining
anonymous at the same time, it was essential not to give the police
opportunities like this. To mention someone’s name in the thick of a riot
was a serious danger which flew in the face of all reason. No one must
hear any names, no one must say anything out loud and the name of
Devaux, master of this building, must certainly not be mentioned. He
wanted to keep well out of the way of what was going on whilst neverthe¬
less exerting some control over things.
Whilst the building was being rapidly evacuated and with Labbe and
Genevieve Olivier finally out onto the street and in the hands of the
populace, another episode was taking place, this one more bloody. Dragged
before the police, abused and mistreated by the women and put out onto
the street again by the police commissioner, Labbe was to die. In this
sequence, Devaux no longer had any role to play and another figure had
taken his place, this time a lackey from one of the great houses who was
en§aged in talks with the commissioner and who had made himself there
and then the intermediary between the riot and the authorities, a role
which he had assumed quite spontaneously on account of his knowledge
 The Crowds in Turmoil 281
of current practice and good manners, his wearing of a hat which he knew
how to doff, and his good plain speaking. One way or another he had
gained credibility quite spontaneously.
Behind the panic and general brouhaha, the clamours and the pushing
and shoving, it is possible to see order and coherence. The kind of hostility
one has observed against the police and their somewhat unscrupulous
auxiliaries who, according to the expression used by Devaux, ‘watched
what everyone was doing’, was an attitude that was familiar. Obviously it
had not just taken the abduction of its children in 1750 for the popula¬
tion of Paris to feed its animosity and hatred towards the police spies
and agents who were scattered everywhere throughout every cabaret,
concourse and building. The events of 1750 simply gave the people an
additional opportunity for showing the highest authorities (notably the
Lieutenant-General of Police) that no one was fooled.
Not being taken for a fool was one of the main motive forces shaping
popular life, and familiarity with defiance, dispute and even rebellion
was one of its consequences. It was an attitude which generated protest,
overturned order, made violent proclamations and engendered turbulent
activity. It also underpinned the foundations of the riot, that outward and
visible side of discontent and determined expression of an order which
refused to be flouted. The riot sought first of all to set things to rights,
things which it guessed were out of order, unjust or quite simply shameful.
To do this, it proceeded by a series of scenes and gestures, each sequence
leading towards its culminating point (usually the massacre of a man
presumed responsible for inflicting violence on the population) and
possessing its own internal logic.
Anarchy is only what it appears to be. In the midst of the visible
disorder, there reigns some sort of organization geared towards a specific
goal. In the building on the market place, for example, it was a matter of
finding the suspect, Labbe; elsewhere it would be something else. In each
place where the rebellion took place, there would seem to be an individual
particularly well placed and suited to become for a certain span of time -
usually quite short - the one who carried the others along and determined
the actions to be undertaken. Crowds are not in fact manipulated by
any previously foreseen leader who has spent a considerable amount of
time premeditating a succession of acts of violence to be inflicted on the
authorities. The men and the women who are in revolt find the very
persons they need to make their action effective there on the spot at the
precise time they need them. At each stage as the rebellion advances, one
man steps quite naturally out of the group to take control of the activities.
It is never a mere fluke of a man but an individual whose normal function
has destined him to become for a brief moment the privileged, if furtive,
leader of events. Afterwards, he falls back into anonymity, merging once
282 Crowds

again with the crowd to follow, if he so chooses, other episodes and thus
other individuals who at that particular moment are more effective than he
in the development of the action.
In the midst of the crowd, behaviour differed markedly and it would be
impossible to note all the details. Suffice it to say that the traditionally
accepted male and female capabilities were put to good use. At the market,
the men sensed the gravity of the situation and warned the women, who
spread the news like a trail of dust. The men’s role was clear and quite
unequivocal: they provided protection but also incitement, knowing full
well that in the event of things going badly, the women would quite
ruthlessly assume the violent role for which they had always been known,
and particularly in this case as it concerned their children.
It was Devaux’s immediate realization of this female role that astutely
led him to station the women at the windows of the building. He shoved
them over there quite roughly, aware of the effect that they would have
and knowing full well that the crowd would yield to their shrieks and
yells. It should be stressed that in this case, the women did not position
themselves at the window as it says in the song, but rather were put there
by a man who was sure of the results, which is hardly the same thing. In
any study involving male and female, the manipulation of sexual roles
needs to be taken into account.
When there was a chain of violence linked together episode by episode
which ineluctably produced a veritable explosion leading to the death of a
man, the women were often very closely associated with the most cruel
scenes, especially if these happened to take the form of a ritual. Nor was
the murder of Labbe any exception to this particular kind of dramatics.
Completely spent and beaten half-dead by stones and fists, the wretch
begged for mercy and on his knees pleaded for a confessor. Duparc, a
seafood seller, denied having been the last one to finish him off, although
the evidence of witnesses seems to agree over this. It would seem that she
had put all her rage and fury into insulting him and as she chucked a
heavy cobblestone at his head, she may even have said, ‘Here you are, you
rotten swine, here’s your confessor.’
Guilty or not guilty, true or false, it does not matter much. The scene,
told and retold endlessly in the course of interrogations, shows that when
a disturbance reaches a paroxysm, it reconstructs scenes of cruelty which
give way to a symbolism that is easy to understand. Violence, blame and
imminent expiry mingle together until the advent of blood and death itself.
The women played a great part in this cruel disorder, taking on the
symbolism with which they were so often associated, and whose virulence
perhaps linked up with that place in their guts where the forces of life-
creation coexisted in confusion with the impulses leading to death.
This symbolic role was reinforced by the almost total impunity attri-
 The Crowds in Turmoil 283

buted to the women and by the rout of those who were savaged by them.
Women who struck an adversary profoundly wounded his honour, and a
police officer thus maltreated by women became an object of derision.41
Derision can sometimes give way to pity as in the case of Labbe, of whom
it was to be said that he had been made an ecce homo.
Violence is also a spectacle. It is not necessarily an overflowing of
hysteria or the irrational behaviour of the crowd, leading to the disappear¬
ance of the individual will. Each one has a chance to play his or her own
part and thereby take advantage of the exceptional climate allowing the
discharge and unaccustomed physical expression of unwonted emotions.
In this context, the women had everything to gain. They made themselves
visible by placing themselves in the front row of the fighting and by taking
on some of the most lethal behaviour.42 In this way they used their
symbolic role to reinforce a social and political role, of which the least one
can say is that it was hardly recognized.
In several ways the female ferocity and harshness thus described cor¬
responded with the social and political system of the Ancien Regime.
Valiant and invulnerable, the woman as mother encountered violence at
the very heart of her maternal role; close as she was to blood and death,
she was a figure who remained blameless because at heart she was not
responsible for her weakness. These two contrasting images bring with
them neither worth nor account in professional and political society but in
times of revolt, it is sufficient for her to serve as their incarnation in order
to occupy a role centre-stage.
Thus by using to her advantage the symbols that normally diminished
her, kept her dependent or even condemned her, she appropriated for
herself for a certain period of time a primordial and essential function
recognized by others.
A riot is an obscure and complicated syntax. For the observer, it offers
aspects of both order and excess, conjuring up dreams of victory over
the humiliations of which its participants consider themselves to be the
object. It is one of the rational forms of utopia - irreversible and perhaps
impenetrable. Even so, neither its rules nor its coherence deliver it from
what is essentially earnest and pathetic.
 Conclusion

To begin with, there are the archives: documents, fragments and cuttings,
taken from the very heart and living tissue of the city. Thanks to these, it
becomes possible to see, sometimes obliquely, some of the shapes and
moments of popular Parisian life, and it is in this process of reconstitution
that the objects of history (personal life, work, crowd) which usually
belong to their own specific or different disciplines, find themselves
released from their traditional boundaries.
This book follows a course, that taken by men and women as they
embark on life’s path. We follow them as they move from childhood into
the first brushes with seduction; from being a couple to fighting and
quarrelling; from work to festivities; from royal spectacle to the attrac¬
tions of the street with its freaks and curiosities; and from emotion to
revolt.
It is a journey which only appears complete. It does indeed cover most
of the principal events by which the individual finds himself daily con¬
fronted from birth till death; but this is far from being exhaustive and in
no way is it the last word on what might be said of popular attitudes and
behaviour. In fact, this work has no end — that never was its purpose — and
the method employed is ample proof of this.
It has never been my hope or intention one day to produce the de¬
finitive work on the popular practices of urban life during the age of the
Enlightenment. I have always considered my research as a personal and
intellectual journey which authorizes me to uncover, in the course of its
development, those particular spaces where it becomes possible to under¬
stand in detail the relationships between men and women face to face with
each other, with others and with the political life in which they are the
principal participants. I have worked as closely as possible with what the
archives have to say and with what they conceal, guided both by current
 Conclusion 285

questions and by a distrust (which daily becomes more insistent) of

dangerous anachronisms which falsify meaning and send history off
course. I wanted to give form to what was concrete with the help of each
small piece of text, however tenuous. Reading these in the light of so many
others, what has struck me most, and is in fact one of the aspects that has
been least explored, is that constant adjustment that takes place between
intelligence and disorder; and it is in fact this adjustment and entangle¬
ment which I have chosen as the focal point for considering some of the
intineraries made by the man and woman of the people.
Disorder is not simple and this book does not retrace the history of
disorder; with the help of what is apparently a perfectly obvious and
traditional plan, it unearths the manner in which some people use their
intelligence and sensitivity to live out (often in a state of great tension)
their simultaneous desires for encounter and rupture. It traces the shrewd¬
ness of their behaviour, the judgement of individuals and collective dis¬
cernment. It deciphers modes of thought and makes a statement about the
real and imagined perceptions underlying acts of submission at times of
defiance, resistance and revolt. It assesses professional and sexual roles and
attempts to see what is actually being said or denounced beneath the usual
rigid, statutory heading of social class.
But let there be no mistake: this pursuit of rules and rationalities is not
a means of ignoring hate and anger, violence and cruelty, irony and
unreason. It would be impostorous to erase men’s fury, and ignorant not
to present the situations which produced it, for to fail to take account of
deceit and dishonour would be to give way to naive populism. The history
of a society is also the history of the clash that exists between its instinct
for survival and desire for union and collaboration with its taste for
destruction and ashes. The Parisian people of the eighteenth century lived
off this clash.
The contours of the population outlined here show it forever on the
look-out for what might prove threatening to it and in search of whatever
might strengthen it. It was looking for equilibrium at the heart of a
fragility by which it was almost totally defined and its behaviour and
decisions are indications of its response to a precariousness which per¬
manently threatened its stability.
Not being taken for a fool was one of its passions or rather one of its
necessities, and thus the whole of its intelligence was put into not being
abused or deceived. From this came its taste for news and gossip; its desire
to know and understand; to give things a name; and the speed with which
it circulated its information. Behind the effervescence, the bustle and the
emotion can be found a seriousness and much understanding. History
owes it to itself to seek out and, without attempting to define it, take hold
of this fragile life and thus lend it sense and weight.
286 Conclusion

The archives say something to someone. It is up to that person to say

what it is, thereby opening up endless possibilities of analysis. There are no
secrets about archives; they simply lay bare a language which the historian
feels and experiences and then explores. It is in this sense that a book so
written has no end.
 Notes

Introduction

1 M. Foucault, ‘La Vie des horames infantes’, Cahiers du chemin, 29 (January

1977), p. 12.
2 J. Le Goff, ‘Les Mentalites, une histoire ambigiie’, in Faire de I’histoire (Paris,
1974), vol. 3, p. 89.
3 The expression is that of C. Poni.
4 A journey is always punctuated by dialogue; my thanks here go to Michelle
Perrot for the warmth of her concern and to Jacques Revel for the keenness of
his approach in the course of seminars and work undertaken jointly (in
particular with regard to the file on the Parisian uprising of May 1750).

Chapter 1. Space and Ways of Life

1 Archives Nationales (AN), X2B 1367, June 1750.

2 A. Farge, Vivre dans la rue a paris au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1979).,
3 F. Boudon, A. Chastel, H. Couzy, and F. Hamon, Systeme de Varchitecture
urbaine — le quartier des Halles a Paris (Paris, 1977).
4 A. Farge, ‘Le Bazar de la rue’, Urbi, 1 (1979), p. xcvii.
5 A Farge and A. Zysberg, ‘Les Theatres de la violence a Paris au XVIII siecle ,
Annales ESC, 5 (1979), pp. 984-1015.
6 A. Williams, The Police of Parts, 1718-1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979)
7 Lenoir, Lieutenant - General of police, ‘Memoires manuscnts’, Bibliotheque
municipale d’Orleans, MS 1423, fo. 343.
8 [Translator’s note, cabaret-, tavern.]
9 W. Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton, 1986).
10 AN, Y 11253, 10 May 1766.
11 AN, Y 11255, 27 May 1768.
12 [Translator’s note, mouches: police spies/informers.] ,
13 lam thinking in particular of the gazetins (see p. 246) of the secret police and
of Inspector Vanneroux’s reports on comments overhead in the cates.
Archives de la Bastille, MSS 10155 — 70.
288 Notes

14 AN, X2B 1367, 16 June 1750.

15 Encyclopedie methodique, vol. IX: Jurisprudence contenant la police et les
municipality, by J. Peuchet (Paris, 1789). Peuchet uses the term soin (care) in
his introduction to the article entitled ‘Police’.
16 hotel: offices/administrative headquarters.
17 Encyclopedie methodique, vol. IX, pp. 563ff.
18 Code penal ou recueil des principals ordonnances, edits et declarations, sur
les crimes et delits, 2nd edn based on an Essai sur I’esprit et les motifs de la
procedure criminelle, Paris, 1760.
19 Archives of the Prefecture of the Paris Police, AB 405. Quartier Saint-Denis.
Reports on posters, 23 July 1779 to 19 April 1786.
20 La Pitie: Parisian jail.
21 Correspondence of Commissioner Thierry, 1756-1776, AN, Y 11261.
22 Ibid., Y 11250.
23 Ibid.
24 canaille: the mob/riff-raff.
25 Correspondence of Commissioner Thierry. 1756-1776, AN, Y 112438.
26 Ibid.
27 Jean de Mille, Pratique criminelle, ed. A. Lebigre (Paris, Les Marmousets,
1983), p. 37.
28 C. Beccaria, Traite des delits et des peines, 1764; reprint (Paris, 1979), p. 123.
29 Lenoir, ‘Memoires’, MS 1422, fo. 302.
30 J. Pitt-Rivers, and J. G. Peristiany, Honor and Grace in Anthropology
(Cambridge/New York, 1992).
31 M. Foucault, ‘Usage des plaisirs et techniques de soi’, Le Debat, 27
(November 1983), pp. 46-72.

Chapter 2 Girls for the Marrying

1 A. Farge and C. Klapisch, Madame ou Mademoiselle? Itineraires de la solitude

feminine, XVIIT-XXe s., collected texts (Paris, 1984).
2 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris 12 vols (Amsterdam 1782—1788); vol. 11:
Filles a marier, p. 55.
3 Ibid., vol. 11: Repugnance pour le manage, p. 63.
4 Ibid., Filles a marier.
5 Ibid., vol. 4: Filles nubiles, p. 23.
6 Ibid., Filles a marier.
7 Ibid., vol. 8: Grisettes, p. 77.
8 Ibid., Filles a marier.
9 Ibid., vol. 4: Portefaix, p. 17.
10 E. et J. de Goncourt, Fa Femme au XVIIT siecle (Paris, 1862; repr. Paris,
1982, preface by E. Badinter).
11 Ibid., p. 233.
12 Mercier, Tableau de Paris , vol. 3: Demoiselles, p. 86.
13 Ibid., vol. 4: Noces, p. 38.
14 Ibid., vol. 12: F’Education campagnarde, p. 185.
 Notes 289

Chapter 3 ‘Seduced and Abandoned’

1 The years in question are 1775, 1780, 1785 in the National Archives taken
from complaints lodged with the Petit Criminel, series Y.
2 A. Farge, ‘Histoires de servantes: sentiments de service’, Les Revoltes logiques,
8-9 (1979), pp. 79-86.
3 AN, Y 9956, Wednesday 7 December 1785.
4 J. Ranciere, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris, 1983).
5 AN, Y 9891, July 1780.
6 Ibid., Y 9890, 22 May 1780.
7 Ibid., Y 9896, 28 October 1780.
8 Ibid., Y 9887, 14 March 1780.
9 Ibid., Y 9829, 10 May 1775.
10 Ibid., Y 9831, 29 July 1775.
11 Ibid., Y 9832, 13 April 1775.
12 Ibid., Y 9846, 18 February 1785.
13 Ibid., Y 9832, 3 June 1775.
14 There are in fact two accounts of this tale, including Basile’s, in the literature
of the fourteenth century which contain this detail. Beauty moreover gives
birth while asleep.
15 M. Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault (Paris, 1968), ch. 6, p. 130.
16 AN, Y 9832, 3 June 1775.
17 Ibid., Y 9829, 10 May 1775.
18 Ibid., Y 9956, 26 September 1785.
19 Ibid., Y 9893, 17 August 1780.
20 Ibid., Y 9893, 27 October 1780.
21 Ibid., Y 9956, 7 May 1785.
22 Ibid., Y 9890, 22 May 1780.
23 Ibid., Y 9835, 15 August 1775.
24 One might well believe that such comments were common during interroga¬
tions in the eighteenth century but this is not in fact the case and this is why
attention has been drawn to them here. In contrast, Menetra’s journal
contains many such comments, but in this case we are dealing with an
autobiography and not a court appearance.

Chapter 4 Concerning Parents and Children

1 A. Farge, and M. Foucault, Le Desordre des families. Lettres de cachet des

Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1982), p. 28.
2 J.-L. Flandrin, Families. Parente, maison, sexualite dans I’ancienne societe
(Paris, 1984), p. 182; Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and
Sexuality (Cambridge, 1979), p. 17.
3 A. Farge, Vivre dans la rue a Paris au XVllle siecle (Paris, 1979).
4 The study of the popular revolt of May 1750 might be regarded as further
evidence of the important role of the father.
5 Flandrin, Families, p. 122.
6 Farge, Vivre dans la rue.
7 A. Farge, and A. Zysberg, ‘Les Theatres de la violence a Pans au XVIIL
siecle’, Annales ESC, 5 (1979), pp. 984-1015.
290 Notes

8 Farge and Foucault, Desordre, p. 25.

9 petit Savoyard: little sweep.
10 lettres de cachet: King’s order; see p. 68.
11 Each commissioner had his own particular way of keeping his archives. One
should also add that the registers of abandoned children have not all been
preserved in the Y series. For a more comprehensive study one also needs to
consult the orphanage archives.
12 Petit/Grand Criminel: Lower and fdigher Courts.
13 Nos. X2B 1367 and X2B 1368 in the Archives Nationales and MS 1101-2 in
the Joly de Fleury Collection in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Bibliography for
this question is as follows: Commander Herlaut, ‘Les Enlevements d’enfants a
Paris en 1720 et en 1750’, Revue Histonque 139 (1922), pp. 43-61 and
202-23; J. Nicolas, ‘La Rumeur de Paris: rapts d’enfants en 1750’,
L’Histoire, 40 (December 1981); Ch. Romon, ‘L’Affaire des “enlevements
d’enfants” dans les archives du Chatelet (1749-1750)’, Revue Historique,
587 (July-September 1983); A. Farge and J. Revel, ‘Les regies de l’emeute.
L’Affaire des enlevements d’enfants en 1750’, in Mouvements populaires et
conscience sociale (Paris, 1985), pp. 635-46.
14 The various autobiographies that have come to light and which offer precious
details and insights are obviously in a different class; of these the work
of Jamerey Duval comes to mind or more recently that of Jacques-Louis
Menetra, a journeyman glazier of the eighteenth century, in his Journal de ma
vie, pref. D. Roche (Paris, 1982). Translated as Journal of My Life (New
York, 1986).
15 Ph. Aries, Centuries of Childhood (Flarmondsworth, 1979).
16 D. Roche, The People of Paris (Leamington Spa, 1987), p. 240.
17 Menetra, Journal, p. 19.
18 J. Ranciere, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris, 1983), pp. 283ff.
19 Kant, I. The Critique of Judgement (1790) §2 (Oxford, 1978).
20 G. Gauny, Le Philosophe plebeien, preface by J. Ranciere (Paris, 1983),
pp. 14-15.
21 Epinal: nineteenth-century centre of popular painting.
22 Michelet: French historian (1798-1874) renowned for his lyrical prose.
23 Aries, Centuries-, J. Gelis, M. Laget and M. F. Morel, Entrer dans la vie
(Paris, 1978); C. Fouquet-Kniebiehler, L’Histoire des meres (Paris, 1980);
E. Badinter, The Myth of Motherhood (London, 1981); Flandrin, Families.
24 A. Blanchard, Essay d’exhortation pour les etats differents des malades . . . On
y a joint un examen general sur tous les commandements et sur les peches de
plusieurs etats . .. (Paris, 1713), 2 vols.
25 M. Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1970.
26 Badinter, The Myth of Motherhood.
27 AN, Y 9525, 8 June 1766, 7 o’clock in the evening. Proceedings.
28 Ibid., Y 13700, 27 March 1778. Register of the Guard (1763-1784) begun
on 27 July 1763.
29 Ibid., Y 9829, 12 June 1775. Case brought before Commissioner Graville.
30 archers: armed guards/police, formerly bowmen; hopital: orphanage/house of
correction/workhouse, depending on context.
31 J. Buvat, Journal de la Regence, 1715-1723, 2 vols (Paris, 1845), vol. 2,
pp. 77ff.
32 AN, U 363. De Lisle Collection. Secret Council of the Parlement, 1687 to
1774. 1720 Revolt.
 Notes 291
33 Manuscripts of the Bibliotheque Nationale. MS 49328. Emigration to the
colonies, 17th—19th century. 1717 survey by de la Boullaye.
34 syndics: guild officials and magistrates.
35 AN, X~B 1367, 30 May 1750. Information.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Bibliotheque Nationale, Joly de Fleury Collection, MS 1101, 42nd witness.
39 Etre a la paille’ meant being held in the worst conditions in jail. One simply
had a squall amount of straw to sleep on and had to pay to have it changed.
40 AN, X 136/, 2 June 1750. Information and additional information.
41 Ibid. 29 May 1750. Information.
42 Ibid., 1368, 23 June 1750. Additional information.
43 Ibid. 22 June 1750. Additional information.
44 Ch. Lefaure and J.-P. Moatti, ‘Les Ambiguites de Pacceptable’, Culture tech¬
nique, 11 (September 1983).
45 This question of child-labour and apprenticeship, and the conflicts engendered,
are dealt with elsewhere.
46 Menetra, Journal, p. 295.
47 AN, X2B 1367, 27 May 1750.
48 Menetra, Journal, pp. 2Iff.
49 Abbe du Breil de Pontbriand, Projet d’un etablissement deja commence pour
elever dans la piete les Savoyards qui sont dans Paris (Paris, 1735), pp. 17ff.
50 Bibliotheque Nationale, Joly de Fleury Collection, MS 1101.
51 Farge, Vivre dans la rue.
52 Menetra, Journal, p. 34.
53 AN, X2B 1367, 29 May 1750.
54 Bibliotheque Nationale, Joly de Fleury Collection, MS 1101, 25 June 1750,
78th witness.
55 AN, X2B 1367, 2 June 1750. Information.
56 It is worth noting that female participation in the disturbances recurs con¬
stantly even where the abduction of children was not involved.
57 AN, X2B 1367, 29 May 1750.
58 Ibid., 1368, 22 June 1750.
59 Farge and Foucault, Le Desordre des families, p. 352.
60 E. J. Barbier, Chronique de la regence et du regne de Louis XV, 1718-1763,
Coll. ‘Histoire de France’.
61 Parc civil: magistrates’ court.
62 AN, Y 9303. Chambre du Conseil. Records of 22 March 1769 of the hearing
at the pare civil, by us, Counsellor to the King and Advocate to the Chamber
and Parisian Assizes, comprising two dialogues on the 7th and 17th of the
said month between ourselves and the child claimed by the Widow Fe Brie on
the one hand and by Jean Noiseux and his wife on the other.

Chapter 5 Undesirable Alliances and Times of Disruption

1 J.-F. Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality

(Cambridge, 1979).
2 Lenoir, ‘Memoires manuscrits’, Bibliotheque municipale d’Orleans, MSS
1421-4.
292 Notes

4 A. Farge, Vivre dans la rue a Paris an XVIIV siecle (Paris, 1979).

5 Lenoir,‘Memoires’.
6 Archives de la Bastille, MS 12008, fo. 18 (for the year 1757).
7 Ibid., MS 11011, fos 225-47 (for the year 1728).
8 Ibid., MS 11019, fos 8-12 (for the year 1728).
9 Ibid., MS 11940, fos 331-42 (for the year 1756).
10 Ibid., MS 11017 (for the year 1728).
11 Ibid., MS 11939. J , n
12 Kept in the Bibhotheque de PArsenal in the Archives de la Bastille.
13 Archives de la Bastille, MS 11000, fos 225-9 (for the year 1728).
14 Ibid., MS 11010, fos 14-25 (for the year 1728).
15 Ibid., MS 11996 fol. 110-11 (for the year 1758).
16 Lescombat: see p. 203.
17 Archives de la Bastille, MS 11999, fos 145-67 (for the year 1758).
18 Ibid., MS 12087, fos 38-77 (for the year 1758).
19 Ibid., MS 11940, fos 359-70 (for the year 1756).
20 AN, AD III 8. Handwritten commentary by Procurator Gueulette, 1755.
21 This journal was found in the Archives Nationales amongst the police com¬
missioner’s archives in the Y stacks, No. 11741.
22 AN, series AD III, and Nos 6,7 and 8 in particular: arrests and rulings on
criminals 1191-1789, factums, street broadsheets, posters and engravings in
common use: collection put together by the deputy for the King’s Procurator
at Le Chatelet, Gueulette, c.1766.
23 In this section, all the references come from the text quoted in n. 21: AN,
Y 11741.
24 Rather than give references here to the books on court society, attention
should be drawn to the amazing gazetins de la police secrete which are so
revealing about the lives of the libertines: Archives de la Bastille, MS 3532.
Anonymous.
25 mostra: Ital. show/display.
26 marivaudage: farce in the manner of French playwright Marivaux (1688 —
1763).
27 Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, MS 3532. Anonymous.

Chapter 6 In the Workshop

1 Select bibliography on the question: R. de Lespinasse, Les Metiers et corpora¬

tions de la ville de Paris, 4 vols (Paris, 1879-97), coll. ‘Histoire generale de
Paris’; E. Coornaert, Les Corporations en France avant 1789 (Paris, 1968);
id., Les Compagnonnages en France du Moyen Age a nos jours (Paris, 1966);
N. T. des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de police, 7 vols (Paris, 1786—9);
M. J. Flammermont, 'Memoires sur les greves et les coalitions ouvrieres a la
fin de 1 Ancien Regime’, Bulletin des Sciences economiques et sociales (1894);
F. Funck-Brentano, La Question ouvriere sous PAncien Regime d’apres les
dossiers de prisonniers par lettres de cachet (Paris, 1903); J. Hayem, ‘La
Repression des greves au XVIIL siecle’, in Memoires et documents pour servir
a Phistoire du commerce et de Pindustrie, (Paris, 1911); S. Kaplan, ‘Reflexions
 Notes 293

sur la police du monde du travail, 1700—1815’, Revue Historique,

529 (January-March 1979), pp. 17-78; E. Martin Saint-Leon, Le
Compagnonnage (Paris, 1901); B. Geremek, Le Salariat dans I’artisanat
parisien au XIIIe—XVe siecles (The Hague, 1962, 1982); H. Hauser, Ouvriers
du temps passe, XVe—XVIe siecles (1899; repr. Paris, 1982); N. Z. Davis,
‘Women in the crafts in XVIIth century Lyon’, Feminist Studies, 8 (Spring
1982); J.-L. Menetra, Journal de ma vie pref. D. Roche (Paris, 1982). Trans¬
lated as Journal of My Life (New York, 1986).
2 Delisle, Simon Clicquot de Blervache, Memoires sur les corps de metiers,
awarded first prize by the judges of the Academy of Amiens in 1757 (The
Hague, 1758).
3 Lamoignon Collection in the Archives of the Prefecture of the Paris Police. Of
the 823 orders and instructions that appeared between 1730 and 1763 (an
average of 3 per month), 477 concern the crafts in particular and 73 relate to
trade and commerce, making a total of 550. Cf. also the article by S. Kaplan,
(n. 1 above) and see above for the ordonnances de police.
4 In the following ways 170 workshop disputes were documented:

• systematic search of the archives of Commissioner Hugues of Les Halles

between 1757 and 1767 (AN, Y 10999-11029);
• systematic search year by year of the complaints brought before the Petit
Criminel (in the years 1775, 1780, 1785) deposited in the AN, series Y;
• in-depth survey of the archives of the police commissioners Mutel,
Delagrave, Lemaire, Delaubeypie, Divot, Joron.
5 Part of this work was undertaken for a paper given to the symposium at
Rouen in November 1983 on socialization: ‘L’Atelier a Paris au XVIIIe siecle,
une structure de sociabilite en conflit avec elle-meme et avec les pouvoirs’; this
appears in the preparatory papers for the Actes du Colloque.
6 AN, Y 14088, 11 November 1761, archives of Commissioner Crespy.
7 Archives de la Bastille, MS 11936, 11 December 1756.
8 Ch. Desmaze, Les Metiers a Paris d’apres les ordonnances du Chatelet avec
les sceaux des artisans (Paris, 1874), which draws upon the Dictionnaire
historique de la France by Ludovic Lahanne (Paris, 1873).
9 AN, Y 9525, 8 January 1766.
10 AN, X2B 1367, interrogation of J. Jacquet.
11 M. Sonenscher, ‘Journeymen’s migrations and workshop organisation in
eighteenth-century France’, delivered to conference at Cornell University on
‘Work in France’, April 1983.
12 AN, Y 11002B, 16 July 1761, Commissioner Hugues.
13 Ibid., Y 11004B, 13 February 1763, Commissioner Hugues.
14 Ibid., Y 10004A, 12 July 1763, Commissioner Hugues.
15 Ibid., Y 11006A, 24 February 1765, Commissioner Hugues.
16 Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, MS 3532, anonymous.
17 Cf. Davis, ‘Women in the crafts’ (n. 1 above).
18 In Paris, this custom had practically died out although Jeanne Moyon, guilty
of snatching children in July 1750, was made to mount and ride an ass. One
should add that this took place shortly after the riots over the abduction of
children.
19 Very few of the books dealing with the lives of women workers in the
eighteenth century have approached this subject. In contrast, a work by Henri
Hauser, which is now quite old, devotes an excellent chapter to the work of
294 Notes
women. For more recent work, see R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, and
Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Harmondsworth, 1985).
20 AN, Y 11001B, 1 November 1760, Commissioner Hugues.
21 Ibid., Y 11006B, 17 July 1765, Commissioner Hugues.
22 Ibid., Y 14078, 1 October 1752, Commissioner Crespy.
23 Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Pans, MS NA 66. Contract of ap¬
prenticeship of 15 July 1776.
24 AN, Y 14078, Saturday 19 August 1752.
25 Ibid., Y 11002B, 1 July 1761, Commissioner Hugues.
26 Ibid., Y 10999, 29 June 1758, Commissioner Hugues.
27 Ibid., 3 February 1758, Commissioner Hugues.
28 Ibid., Y 11005B, 17 December 1764, Commissioner Hugues.
29 Ibid., Y 11167, 2 April 1750, Commissioner Mutel.
30 E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrieres en France avant 1789 (Paris,
1901).
31 For a more extensive treatment of this subject, see next chapter.
32 AN, Y 11027, 25 January 1785.
33 Ibid., Y 11006A, 22 January 1765, Commissioner Hugues.
34 Ibid., Y 9525, Thursday 30 December 1762, Commissioner Hugues.
35 mouchards: police agents/spies.
36 AN, Y 9535, 8 April 1775, Commissioner Roch.

Chapter 7 At the Workshop Door

1 This chapter draws upon the archives of the aforesaid Commissioner Hugues
and those of the chambre de police: journeymen pursued by their community
between 1753 and 1789 (Y 9523 to 9531) and interrogations in the chambre
de police between 1748 and 1786; work was also carried out on personal files
in the Archives de la Bastille, for 1756, 1763 and 1775, as well as on all the
files relating to the question of workers and their corporations.
2 J.-P. Lenoir, ‘Memoires manuscrits’, Bibliotheque municipale d’Orleans, MSS
1421-4, fo. 458.
3 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10138, the register into which Inspector Poussot
consigned the proceedings sent via him to the Lieutenant-General of Police
and also the methods used to carry out the instructions given him by the
latter.
4 Ibid., MS 10144, prison register of the Surete de Paris in 1762; this was begun
1 November 1762 and continued to 9 January 1765.
5 J.-L. Menetra, Journal de ma vie, Pref. D. Roche (Paris, 1982). Translated as
Journal of My Fife (New York, 1986).
6 Archives de la Bastille, MS 12245, for the year 1765.
7 Ibid., MS 11172. Abbe Belichon was taken to Lazare, where he seems to have
succumbed to madness; his family were later to request his release.
8 AN, Y 9525, 16 May 1766, Commissioner Pelletier.
9 Ibid., Y 9529, 18 February 1779.
10 Ibid., Y 9527, 4 May 1772.
11 Archives de la Bastille, MS 11152, the Violette affair, 1731.
12 Ibid., MS 12127, 15 February 1761.
13 Ibid., MSS 12173-99.
 Notes 295

14 Lenoir, ‘Memoires’, fo. 260.

15 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10230. Surveillance of the Jews.
16 Ibid., MS 12177, 15 July 1763, for the year 1756.
17 AN, Y 9535, 26 November 1778.
18 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10140, Inspector Poussot, district of Les Halles
1738-54, alphabetical register of arrested persons.
19 The source material does not really indicate which inspectors were appointed
to the special branches such as the Bureau de la Surete or others. As far as
Inspector Poussot is concerned, his register is evidence of his own activity in
the district, with no apparent specialization in any particular problem or with
a specific section or category of the population.
20 A. Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718—1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979),
p. 100.
21 Guillaute, ‘Memoire de reformation de la police envoye au roi’ [Memorandum
to the King concerning police reorganization] (1749).
22 R. Cheyne, op. cit.
23 A. Farge, Le Vol d’aliments a Paris au XVlIV siecle (Paris, 1974); id., Vivre
dans la rue a Paris au XVIII siecle (Paris, 1979).
24 A. Farge, and A. Zysberg, 'Les Theatres de la violence a Paris au XVIIIe
siecle’, Annales ESC, 5 (1979), pp. 984-1015.
25 N. Castan, Les Criminels du Languedoc, les exigences d’ordre et les voies du
ressentiment dans une societe pre-revolutionnaire (1750—1790) (Toulouse,
1980), p. 27. Farge, Le Vol d’aliments, p. 66.
26 Castan, Les Criminels du Languedoc, p. 39.
27 R. Chartier, ‘La Monarchie d’argot entre le mythe et Phistoire’, Cahiers
Jussieu, 5: Les Marginaux et les exclus dans Phistoire (10/18, 1979), p. 275.
28 A. Farge, 'Le Mendiant, un marginal? Les resistances aux archers de l’hopital
dans le Paris du XVIIL siecle’, Cahiers Jussieu, p. 312.
29 J.-P. Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France de PAncien Regime
(Paris, 1981).
30 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols (Amsterdam, 1781-8) vol. 12, ‘Gare!
GareP.
31 G. Picq, M. Pradine, and C. Ungerer, La Criminalite aux bords de I’eau a
Paris au XVIIV siecle, p. 26.
32 P. Peveri, Vol a la tire et repression dans le Paris de Pepoque des Lumieres
(1750-1775), Finals thesis, March 1980, pp. 141ff.
33 A. Farge, and M. Foucault, Le Desordre des families, lettres de cachet des
Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1981).
34 Peveri, Vol a la tire, p. 76.
35 M. Perrot, ‘Delinquance et systeme penitentiaire en France au XIXe siecle’,
Annales ESC, 1 (1975), pp. 67-93.
36 Cour des Miracles: rough area of Paris, in medieval times the haunt of beggars
and vagabonds.

Chapter 8 Invitations to the Crowds

1 J. Boutier, A. Dewerpe, and D. Nordman, Un tour de France royal, le voyage

de Charles IX (1564-1566) (Pans, 1984); C. Jouhaud, La Fronde des mots
(Pans, 1985), ch. 5: ‘Mazarinades et fetes frondeuses’.
296 Notes

2 N. Delamare, Traite de la Police, 4 vols (1705-38), Book II, section VIII,

pp. 368ff.
3 Ibid., section X, p. 393.
4 Delamare Collection in the Bibliotheque Nationale, MS frs. 21650, fo. 124,
order of procession of ransomed slaves ...
5 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols (Amsterdam, 1782-6), ch. Population
de la Capitale.
6 S. Hardy, ‘Mes loisirs ou journal des evenements tels qu’ils parviennent a ma
connaissance’. Bibliotheque Nationale, MS frs. 6680-7.
7 Ibid., MS 6681, 5 May 1774.
8 Ibid., 7 May 1774.
9 Ibid., 11 May 1774.
10 Ibid., MS 6684, 25 October 1781.
11 Bernier, Conferences sur les ordonnances de Louis XIV, 1719, vol. II, p. 371,
quoted by D. Muller, ‘Magistrats franqais et peine de mort’, XVIIT siecle
(1972), pp. 79-107.
12 L. Marin, Portrait of the King (Basingstoke, 1988).
13 Ibid., p. 46.
14 amende honorable: public apology/ritual act of penance.
15 A sole reference suffices here: Michel Foucault’s book Surveiller et punir:
la naissance de la prison (Paris, 1974), the opening pages of which are a
masterly explanation of this process. Trans, by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and
Punish: the Birth of The Prison (London, 1977).
16 M. Bee, ‘Le Spectacle de 1’execution dans la France d’Ancien Regime’. Annates
ESC, 4 (1983), p. 843, an article which largely takes up the Foucaldian
problematic, but presents it slightly differently.
17 M. Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (Paris, 1961).
18 P. Retat, (ed.), L’Attentat de Damiens. Discours sur Pevenement au XVIIT
siecle (Paris, Lyons, 1979).
19 Jansenist dispute: arising from the controversial ideas of theologian Cornelius
Jansen (1585-1638), similar to Calvinist doctrine, most famously championed
by Pascal and opposed by the Jesuits.
20 B. Edelman, La Maison de Kant (Paris, Payot, 1984), p. 16.
21 Ch. de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989; first published
in French, 1748).
22 This treatise was published in the Flammarion ‘Champs’ collection (Paris,
1979).
23 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, ch. 278, ‘Sentence de mort’.
24 Ibid. But particularly 2 key observers, viz. the deputy procurator to the King
at Le Chatelet, Gueulette, who had the strange habit of making handwritten
comments in the margins of the printed editions of sentences passed between
1726 and 1766 (AN, AD III); and then S. Hardy, who gives accounts of
almost all the executions between 1764 and 1784 (Bibliotheque Nationale,
MS frs, 6680-7).
25 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, ch. 279, ‘Le Bourreau’.
26 Famous poisoner.
27 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, ch. 280, ‘Place de Greve’.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 S. Hardy, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS 6682, 11 May 1775.
31 Ibid., 30 May 1775.
 Notes 297

32 A. Poitrineau, ‘Des accidents aux homicides: la mort inopinee en Auvergne au

XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles’, in La France d'Ancien Regime. Collection of studies
in honour of P. Goubert (Toulouse, 1984), pp. 577-86.
33 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, ch. 281, ‘Servante mal pendue’.
34 Hardy, Journal, BN MS frs. 6682.
35 R. Favre, La Mort au siecle des Lumieres (Paris, 1978).
36 L. -S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, ch. 279, ‘Le Bourreau’.
37 Dufort, comte de Cheverny, Memoires sur les regnes de Louis XV et Louis
XVI et sur la Revolution, 2 vols (Paris, 1886), vol. 1, p. 191.
38 Ch. Colle, Journal et memoires sur les hommes de lettres, les ouvrages
dramatiques et les evenements les plus memorables du regne de Louis XV
(1748-1772) (repr. Paris, 1868), 3 vols, vol. 2, p. 86.
39 On this subject see the pages of Philippe Aries in The Hour of Our Death
(London, 1981), ‘Sade’s view of man and nature’, pp. 391 ff.
40 A. Farge, Le Miroir des femmes, Textes de la Bibliotheque bleue (Paris, 1983).
41 Dufort, comte de Cheverny, Memoires, vol. 1, p. 191.
42 Joseph-Fran^ois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages americains compares aux
moeurs des premiers temps, 2 vols (Paris, 1724). Extracts published by the
magazine Le Debat, 8.
43 Hardy, Journal, BN MS 6682.
44 R. Anchel, Crimes et cbatiments au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1933).
45 Hardy, Journal, MS 6682.
46 Decree issued by the Parlement on 19 March 1765. Handwritten comment by
Gueulette, AN, AD III, 11.
47 Comment by Gueulette quoted by Anchel, Crimes.
48 Hardy, Journal MS 6682, 6 May 1777, Execution of Desrues.
49 AN, AD III, 6.
50 Ibid., 9, decree by the cour du Parlement, 30 June 1750.
51 Ibid., 11, decree by the cour du Parlement, 19 March 1765.
52 Ibid., decree by the cour du Parlement, 11 October 1764.
53 Ibid., 7, decree by the cour du Parlement, 7 May 1743.
54 J.-P. Desaive, ‘Le Nu hurluberlu’, Ethnologie franqaise, 6 (1976).
55 Note that in 1779, S. Hardy remarked that the wearing of hose whilst on the
wheel had been in practice for 2 years which, as he comments, was ‘altogether
more decent’, MS 6683.
56 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. A. Sheridan
(London, 1977). Hardy, Journal MS 6681, 18 February 1772.
57 Hardy, Journal, MS 6682, 4 June 1775.
58 Ibid., MS 6683, 7 October 1779.
59 AN, AD III, 8, handwritten comment by Gueulette on the decree of 3 August
1751.
60 Ibid., 7.
61 La Salpetriere: women’s asylum and house of correction.
62 AN, AD III, 6, the La Dupuis affair.
63 Ibid., handwritten comment by Gueulette.
64 Quoted by R. Anchel, Crimes.
65 Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the unraveling of the Ancient
Regime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, NJ, 1984).
66 Moufle d’Angerville, Vie privee de Louis XV, les principaux evenements,
particularity et anecdotes de son regne, 4 vols (Paris, 1785), vol. 4, p. 209.
67 taille: tax, particularly hated by the Third Estate, which bore the brunt of it.
298 Notes

68 Ibid., p. 211.
69 AN, Y 15707, report by the commandant-major on the events of 30 May
1770.
70 Ibid., general presentation of all the operations carried out on the occasion of
the unfortunate incident which occurred on leaving the Place Louis-XV, Rue
Royale on Wednesday 30 May 1770, reports of which were produced as a
result of proceedings during the months of May, June, August and September
of the same year, the minutes of which have remained in the hands of M.
Sirebeau, commissioner at Le Chatelet.
71 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris ch. ‘Gare! Gare!’ et ch. ‘Population de la
Capitale’.
72 One quite often comes across errors in L.-S. Mercier in particular with regard
to dates, as on this occasion where he mistakenly claims that the date of the
accident was 28 May whereas it actually occurred on 30 May.
73 Hardy, Journal, BN MS 6680, 4 June 1770.
74 Moufle d’angerville, Vie privee, vol. 4, p. 220.
75 AN Y 9769, information prepared by Me Coquelin, Commissioner, at the
request of M. le Procureur du Roi on the subject of the unfortunate incident in
the Rue Royale ...
76 Of the 132 bodies 26, or a fifth of the total, had nothing on them or in their
pockets.
77 Notes on 621 objects were found; given that those were in the possession of
106 persons, this in fact represents an average of 5 items per person.
78 Harpagon-style strong-boxes: after Harpagon, miser and central character in
Moliere’s play Le Misanthrope.
79 All the quotes regarding the identification of corpses and interrogations of the
wounded have been taken from the information file, AN, Y 9769.
80 Hardy, Journal, MS 6680.
81 Mme Campan, Memoires sur la vie privee de Marie Antoinette, 3rd edn
(Paris, 1823), vol. 1, ch. 3 pp. 55—6.
82 Extracts kept in AN, Y 15707.
83 AN, Y 11257, Commissioner Thierry’s correspondence, 22 June 1770.
84 Moufle d’Angerville, Vie privee, vol. 4, p. 220.
85 AN, Y 15707.
86 Hardy, Journal, BN MS 6680.
87 Antoine Gabriel de Sartine, 1729—1801, Lieutenant Criminel at Le Chatelet
in 1755, mditre des requetes in 1759, Lieutenant of Police of Paris from
November 1759 to 9 August 1774, and then Secretary to the Navy until 1780.
88 Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal, Histoire de France, Extracts relating to ..., MS
3724, p. 240.
89 A. Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718-1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979).
90 Bibliotheque Nationale, Joly de Fleury Collection, MS 2541, Accidents of
May 17/0. Memos by the police officers of Le Chatelet. The City’s response.
91 AN, Y 15707, ’Tableau general...’

Chapter 9 The Crowds amongst Themselves

1 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols (Amsterdam, 1782-6), ch. ‘Melange

des individus’.
 Notes 299

2 N. Ledoux, De /’architecture consideree sous le rapport de l’Art, des Moeurs,

et de la Legislation. Comments by Mona Ozouf in an article which appeared
in Annales ESC (November/December 1966) and reprinted in her book
L’Ecole de la France (Paris, 1985), p. 295: ‘Architecture et urbanisme:
1’image de la ville chez Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’.
3 Ozouf, Ecole de la France, p. 295.
4 On this point, one simply needs to refer to the extremely enlightening article
by J.-M. Goulemot, ‘Demons, merveilles et philosophic a Page classique’,
Annales ESC, 6 (1980).
5 Among others: R. Darnton, La Fin des Lumieres. Le Mesmerisme et la
Revolution (Paris, 1984; 1st edn 1968); Catherine Laurence Maire, Les
Convulsionnaires de Saint-Medard (Paris, 1985).
6 AN, AD III 9. Bibliotheque de PArsenal. Archives de la Bastille, MS 11933,
the Ernault affair.
7 M.-Ch. Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
1985), pp. 160-7.
8 Ibid., p. 281.
9 Files kept at the Archives de PAcademie de medecine. I worked on these for 2
years in collaboration with J. P. Peter, which gave rise to the following
article: J. P. Peter, ‘Entre femmes et medecins’, Ethnologie francaise, 3-4
(1976), pp. 341-8.
10 Archives of the Royal Society of Medicine, p. 179.
11 The title of a book with engravings which appeared in Paris in 1775:
Regnault, Les Ecarts de la Nature ou recueil des principales monstruosites
(Paris, 1775).
12 Mercier, Parallele de Paris et de Londres, with notes and comments on this
previously unpublished work by Claude Bruneteau and Bernard Cottret (Paris,
1982), ch. 54: ‘De Phistoire des revenants a Paris. Et des revenants a Londres’,
pp. 162—3.
13 Mercier, Tableau de Pans, ‘L’Eglise de Sainte-Genevieve’.
14 As regards the Carnival he restates the idea of the sharing of social customs:
‘the canaille laughing in the roads and thoroughfares and the beau monde on
the velvet benches of the orchestra and amphitheatres’.
15 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ch. ‘Le Suisse de la rue aux Ours’.
16 Ibid., ch. ‘Miracles’. .
17 N. Delamare, Traite de la Police, 4 vols (1705—1738), Book III, section VII.
‘Magiciens, Sorciers, Devineurs’, p. 562.
18 Bibliotheque Nationale, Delamare Collection, MS frs. 21605, fol. 79.
19 Archives de la Bastille, Ravaisson, vol. XVI, 1749 to 1757, p. 144 ‘Affaire
Godefrin’, 1753.
20 Ibid., vol. XIV, p. 317, ‘Affaire Forcassy’.
21 J. Peuchet, Memoires tires des archives de la police de Paris, 6 vols in 3 books
(Paris, 1838). , 1_co
22 AN, AD III 9. Decree by the Com du Parlement, 20 December 1/58,
pp 98-103 condemning R. Pons to the amende honorable and to life in the
galleys for having taken advantage of the rituals and prayers of the Church
and the gullibility of the common people. Indignant handwritten note by
Gueulette that this drunken and degenerate priest had failed to be sentenced
to death. ,
23 Also on this subject, one should recall the previous passage concerning the
position of the police in relation to the world of work; they dreamt of the
 300 Notes

existence of a long chain of individuals who could be controlled by one man

at the top by a series of orders which would be calmly transmitted from one
level to the next. This vertical view of society should be seen parallel with the
idea of being ‘on the spot’ even to the extent of living in with the occupant.
24 R. Chartier, ‘La Ville acculturante’, in Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. 3
(Paris, 1981).
25 ‘Approximately’ because the first paper could not be located: that is the first
account announcing the child’s pregnancy. We only have the sequel to the first
account (AN, AD Ill 9) with handwritten notes and comments by Gueulette
and the police ‘Justification’ which appeared later and which was found in the
Archives de la Bastille (AB 11933). Mention is made there of a fourth printed
document which was presumably published by the Ernault parents at the end
of the affair, but it was not found. One should also make it clear that these
‘accounts’ are not dated.
26 The file in the Archives de la Bastille (AB 11933) is classified under the name
of Renaud as suggested by the occasional reference, but for the most part the
file and excerpts from interrogations and the police reports, bear the name of
Ernault.
27 AN, AD III 9.
28 Archives de la Bastille, 10155—70. Bulletins of the secret police produced for
the Lieutenant-General and several broadsheets containing day-by-day
comments from court and town as they went respectively about the
esplanades, drawing-rooms and cafes. It is effectively the journal of public
opinion.
29 P. Peveri, ‘L’Organisation et le fonctionnement de la police parisienne dans le
premier quart du XVIIIe siecle: quelques perspectives de recherches’, 12
typewritten pages, 1984, produced as part of a seminar researching the history
of the police, conducted in Paris by D. Roche.
30 gazetins de la police secrete: secret police bulletins.
31 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10155, fo. 131, 10 November 1725.
32 Ibid., MS 10167, fo. 200, 20 September 1740.
33 Ibid., MS 10167.
34 With the exception, however, of one of the registers which was kept by
Officer Vanneroux, who was given special responsibility for the surveillance
of cafes. One reads: ‘At the Caffe de Cotton they were saying, “Well, what do
you think of the orders from the Archbishop?” And the reply was . ..’, AB
10170, fo. 96; ‘at the Caffe de Foix they said that neither the priest of. ..’, AB
10170, fo. 97; ‘in several of the cafes on the Rue Saint-Honore the only talk
was of bread and meat. ..’, AB 10170, fo. 110.
35 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ch. ‘Du merveilleux’.
36 Archives de la Bastille, MS 11940, for the year 1756.
37 MS 10269, 3rd Police Bureau of Health, for the year 1752.
38 Dr Pineau, Memotres sur le danger des inhumations precipitees et sur la
necessite d un reglement pour mettre les citoyens a I’abri du malheur d’etre
enterres vivants (Paris, 1776); Carmont, Memoire sur le danger d’etre enterre
vif & sur les moyens de s’en garantir ou de s’en tirer (Paris, 1787), BN
TC 11; Thesis by M. Vinshow, Terrible supplice et cruel desespoir des
personnes enterrees vivantes et qui sont presumees mortes (Paris/London,
1752), BN TC 5; Janin, Ch. Reflexions sur le triste sort des personnes
enterrees vivantes (Paris, 1772).
39 R. Favre, La Mort au siecle des Lumieres (Paris, 1978).
 Notes 301

40 S. Hardy, ‘Mes Loisirs, ou journal des evenements tels qu'ils parviennent a ma

connaissance’, BN MS fr. 6684, 16 September 1783.
41 Ibid., 22 December 1783.

Chapter 10 The Crowds in Turmoil

1 L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols (Amsterdam, 1782-6), ch. ‘Emeutes’.

2 N. T. des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de police, 7 vols (Paris, 1786-9),
vol. 7, S.V. ‘Ouvriers’.
3 S. Kaplan, ‘Le Complot de famine: histoire d’une rumeur au XVIIP siecle’, in
Cahiers des Annales (Paris, 1982).
4 These were quite often detailed complaints, occasionally resulting in the
immediate imprisonment of one or two persons picked up by the police, There
would be no judgement or ruling following the imprisonment and therefore
no further traces. Only the great revolts of 1720, 1740, 1750 and 1775 left
behind lengthy files which can be found in the Archives Nationales.
Note, however, that a systematic enquiry undertaken through the efforts of
J. Nicolas, professor at the University of Paris VII, will allow the assessment
and mapping of these movements throughout the whole of France.
5 H. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1876-94); G. de Tarde,
La Philosophic penale (Paris, 1890); S. Sighele, La Foule criminelle (Paris,
1891); G. Le Bon, The Crowd: a study of the Popular Mind (Harmonds-
worth, 1977); G. de Tarde, L’Opinion et la foule (1901); S. Freud, Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921.
6 Quatrieme Semaine internationale de Synthese, 1932, directed by H. Berr,
papers by Bohn, Alphandery, Lefebvre, Hardy, Dupreel, pub. by Alcan, 1934.
This lecture was also published in 1934 in Annales bistoriques de la
Revolution franqaise. One can also find it in the book by G. Lefebvre, Etudes
sur la Revolution franqaise (Paris, 2nd edn, 1963), pp. 371—2.
7 G. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, preface by G. Lefebvre,
Oxford Univ. Press, 1959.
8 J. Michelet, La Revolution franqaise, 9 vols (Paris, 1868-1900), vol. 1, pp.
377—9. Originally published from 1847 to 1853.
9 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1951), pp. 66-9.
10 R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820
(Oxford, 1970); E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd
of XVIIIth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971); N. Z. Davis, Society and
Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975); Y. M. Berce, History
of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France,
tr. A. Whitmore (Cambridge, 1990); id., Croquants et Nu-pieds. Les souleve-
ments paysans en France du XVIe au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1974); id., Fete et
revolte. Des mentalites populaires du XVIe au XVIII siecle (Paris, 1976),
S. Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd (Cambridge, 1985); J. Beauchard, La
Puissance des foules (Paris, 1985).
11 M. Maffesoli, and A. Pessin, La Violence fondatnce (Pans, 1978), pp. 9/-
120: ‘Le desir du collectif’. „ .
12 J. Ranciere, La Nuit des proletaires, archives du reve ouvner (Ians, 1981),
30
13 S. Kaplan, ‘Reflexions sur la police du monde du travail 1700-1815 , Revue
Historique, 529 (January—March 1979), p. 32.
302 Notes

14 In 1708 and 1724, strike also by journeymen hosiers; in 1746 plots by

locksmiths and in 1768 action by painters in building industry and in 1785 by
building workers, at least according to Kaplan, ibid.
15 J. Hayem, La Repression des greves au XVIIIe siecle. Memoires et documents
pour servir a I’histoire du commerce et de I’industrie en France (Paris, 1911).
16 Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal. Archives de la Bastille, MS 10152, 24 May 1727.
17 AN, Y 9500, 20 March 1756.
18 Ibid., Y 14081, 22 April 1755.
19 Ibid., Y 11004A and Y 11004B, Commissioner Hugues, for the year 1763.
20 On this subject see ch. 6.
21 AN, Y 9533, 1 November 1748.
22 Ibid., Y 13242, 28 December 1755.
23 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10846, for the year 1724.
24 Ibid., MS 11590, for the year 1764.
25 Ibid., MS 12202 and 11261, for the year 1764.
26 Ibid., MS 11132, for the year 1731.
27 Ibid., MS 11590, for the year 1746.
28 Ibid., MS 11132, for the year 1731.
29 Ibid., MS 10846, for the year 1724.
30 Ibid., MS 10321, undated.
31 J.-P. Lenoir, ‘Memoires manuscrits’, Bibliotheque municipale d’Orleans, MS
1423, fo. 225 (memoirs, jottings and letters for and against the proposal for
the re-establishment of the trades and crafts corporations).
32 N. T. des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de police, vol. 7, S.V. ‘Ouvriers’.
33 Archives de la Bastille, MS 10014, Correspondence of the Lieutenant-General
of Police for the year 1745-6.
34 1740: prison revolt at Bicetre, AN, inventory 450. Archives de la Bastille, MS
10167; 1749: revolt by women at La Salpetriere, ibid. MS 10138; 1763:
conspiracy at Bicetre, ibid. MS 12184.
35 P. Krumnow, ‘Les Rebellions populaires contre les employes de la ferme,
1775-1789’, ‘maitrise’ in history at the University of Paris VII, 1976.
36 A. Farge, and J. Revel, The Rules of Rebellion: Child Abductions in Paris in
1750, trans. C. Mieville (Cambridge, 1991).
37 Cf. p. 9.
38 AN X2B 1367, 8 June 1750.
39 Places: commodities. Cf. H. Guerrand, Histoire des lieux (Paris, 1985).
40 ecce homo: St John 19: 5.
41 Y. M. Berce,: ‘Les Femmes dans les revokes populaires’, in La femme a
I’epoque moderne XVT, XVIIT siecle. Discussion papers from 1984
symposium. Issue 9 of the Association of Modern University Historians,
PUPS.
42 A. Ehrenberg, Les Hooligans ou la passion d’etre egal’, Esprit (August/
September 1985), pp. 7-13.
 Glossary

amende honorable public apology/formal act of penance

archers police/armed guards (formerly bowmen)
cabaret tavern
canaille the mob/riff-raff (lit. dogs)
chambrelans workers plying their trade outside the craft-guild system
faubourgs districts outside city limits. Nowadays, suburbs; eighteenth-
century connotation, workers’ districts
Garde franqaise militia
hopital workhouse/orphanage/house of correction
hotel offices, administrative headquarters (e.g. of police);
originally = mansion or grand house [hotel particulier)
hotel-dieu general hospital
hotel de ville town hall
lettre de cachet royal order issued under the King’s personal seal
miserabilisme a tendency to focus on the mean and wretched
monts-de-piete charitable institutions, which developed into ‘municipal
credit’ organizations, and eventually into pawnbrokers
mouchardslmouches police spies/informers (cf. ‘fly on the wall’)
nuit blanche sleepless night; night before an execution
Parc civil magistrates’ court
La Salpetriere women’s prison for prostitutes and vagrants; later
developed into a lunatic asylum, then a general hospital
syndic guild officials and magistrates
 Select Bibliography

This book has been written from manuscript sources and the judicial
archives of the 18th century, the details of which can be found below. The
reading of recent work has obviously contributed to the development of
the discussion and titles are therefore given of those which have been most
helpful.

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Archives Nationales

Series Y
Chatelet de Paris and provostship of the Ile-de-France.
Chamber of the King’s Procurator: adjudication of institutions related to trade,
commerce and crafts (9372-95).
Chambre de police: Overall jurisdiction of matters relating to security of Paris.
9397-9492: Records of sentences passed on the basis of reports received, 1750-
89.
9499: Records of police instructions and sentences, 1731-89.
9500: Advice by the Lieutenant-General of Police on the security of Paris, 1750-
89.
9523-31: Proceedings on the basis of information received in the Chambre de
police against journeymen joiners, wigmakers, etc.
9649—10718: Criminal courts:
• complaints brought before the Petit Criminel 9649-10017
• complaints brought before the Grand Criminel 10018-10509
• 10620-35: Reports by the guet (Watch).
10719—17623: Matters dealt with by the Police Commissioner at Le Chatelet; it is
impossible to give a detailed list here of all the bundles of papers studied - the
references for each particular matter are given in the chapter notes.
 Manuscript Sources 305

Series X
The Parlement of Paris and in particular X2B 1368-9 on the revolt of 1750 and
the question of the abduction of children.

Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal

Archives de la Bastille
Hundreds and thousands of documents dealing with everyday police business in
the eighteenth century are kept under this title; files on prisoners held by order of
the King and lettres de cachet-, the registers of the police inspectors which were
kept on a daily basis; archives of the various police bureaux; security reports;
actions and proceedings by street patrols; papers issued by the ministry of the
Lieutenance generate de Paris.
10001-16: Correspondence of the Lieutenant-General of Paris.
10018: Papers of Lieutenant-General of Police Herault.
10092-118: Reports by police inspectors and proceedings by the commissioners at
Le Chatelet referred to the Lieutenant-General of Police, 1727-75.
10119-28: Security reports and lists of arrests and declarations made in the three
departments of the officers responsible for security, 1760-73.
10129-33: Records kept by the commissioners at Le Chatelet of the patrols
carried out in the streets of Paris and of visits by inspectors, commissioners and
officers to cabarets, billiard-halls and other suspect places, 1750-75.
10137: Register in which Inspector Roussel kept the records of proceedings sent
from him to the Lieutenant of Police as well as complaints and declarations
which had been sent to him along with his own observations concerning the
peace and security of Paris, 1746-51.
10140: Register containing the alphabetical table of persons arrested by Poussot,
Inspector in the district of Les Halles 1738-54.
10149-54: Cases appearing before the Lieutenant of Police and subsequent
decisions by the Lieutenant, 1725-57.
10155-70: Bulletins of the secret police produced for the Lieutenant-General and
several broadsheets containing notes made on the day-by-day comments from
town, court, esplanades, drawing-rooms and cafes, 1725 — 81.
10282: Sixth bureau, public safety and security, the Watch and the militia.
10283-93: Surveillance of strangers and foreigners.
10998-11020: Prisoners’ files for the year 1728.
11696-734: Prisoners’ files for the year 1750.
11660-2: Absconded workers, 1750.
11920-46: Prisoners’ files for the year 1756.
12173-99: Prisoners’ files for the year 1763.
12441-3: Prisoners’ files for the year 1775.

Manuscripts at the Bibliothec[ue de l Arsenal

3244: Book of police discipline and procedures containing details of the necessary
steps to be taken in order to conform to the orders of the King, 1 March 1777.
3532: ‘Paradox: that young women should either marry or go mad , eighteent
century. .
3656: ‘Man’s superiority over woman’, by Bocquel in 1/W.
3657: ‘New thoughts on women, by a lady at the court’, 1728.
 306 Select Bibliography

3724: Fevret de Fontette Collection, vol. II, fo. 240, ‘Lamentation on the subject of
the fire in the city of Paris for the marriage of the Dauphin’, 1770.
6115: Various items for Feydeau de Marville, Lieutenant-General of Police.

Bibliotheque Nationale

French Manuscripts
6680-7: S. Hardy, ‘Mes loisirs on journal des evenements tels qu’ils parviennent a
ma connaissance’ (1764-89).
11366-7: Collection of items concerning the monts-de-piete.

Joly de Fleury Collection

1101-2: 1750 revolt.
1249: Hopital de la Trinite for the apprenticeship of poor children.
1307-8: Begging, 1724-41, 1750-1.
1329-30: Guild police.
1413-14: Police, cleaning of the streets, revolt of 1774, Shrine of Sainte-
Genevieve.
2074-7: Subversive talk, procedures taken in Paris and the provinces from 1756
to 1775 to deal with seditious comments and proposals against the King, the
Parlement and religion.
2414-32: Law and administration.
2541—3: Accidents of May 1770, Mont-de-Piete, trade and craft guilds.

New acquisitions in French

1989: Essay on the poor and begging, eighteenth century.
9328: Emigration to the colonies, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

Archives of the Prefecture of the Paris Police

Series AA
Royal Prisons, boxes 4-8 (1660-1756).

Series AB
362-83: King’s Orders, 1750-87.
390. September 1750, February 1775, register of memos of police business.
392-3: Names and judgements passed on persons arrested for theft.
396-404: Registers of criminal proceedings, eighteenth century.
405: Reports on posters and further police clarifications, 1779-86, in the district
of Saint-Denis, Inspector Santerre.

Lamoignon Collection
List of edicts and police orders and instructions dated 1184 to 1763.
 Printed Sources 307

Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris

MS 29618: Documents on police organization as it existed in 1789.
MS 29736: General police matters and those arising from the hotel de Paris in the
year 1753.
NA 66: Contracts of apprenticeship, eighteenth century.

Bibliotheque municipale d’Orleans

MSS 1421-4: 'Memoires manuscrits’ of J.-P. Lenoir (1732-1807), Lieutenant-
General of Police in Paris between 1775 and 1776, then from 1776 to 1785.

PRINTED SOURCES: PERIOD DOCUMENTS

1 Dictionaries and general encyclopedias

Brillon, P. J., Dictionnaire des arrets, ou Jurisprudence universelle des Parlements
de France et autres tribunaux, Paris, 1711.
Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers par une
societe de gens de lettres, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, 34 vols, Paris, 1751.
Encyclopedie methodique, 206 vols, Paris, 1787-1825. Police and municipalities.
Jurisprudence.
Ferriere, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, 2 vols, Toulouse, 1779.

2 Police treatises
Bielfeld, Baron de, ‘Traite de Police’, 1762, in a work entitled Institutions
politiques, 2 vols,
Delamare, N., Traite de la Police, 4 vols, 1705-38.
Essarts, N. T. des, Dictionnaire universel de police, 7 vols, Paris, 1786-9.
Poix de Freminville, E. de La, Dictionnaire ou traite de police generate des villes,
bourgs, paroisses et seigneuries de la campagne, Paris, 1758.

3 Legal treatises, works by jurists on the police and criminal

justice
Beccaria, C., Discours sur les moyens de prevenir les crimes en France, Paris, 1781.
Beccaria, C., Traite des delits et des peines, Paris, 1773. repr. Paris, 1979.
Brissot de Warville, J. P., Les Moyens d’adoucir la rigueur des lois, Chalons-sur-
Marne, 1781.
Ciamarelli, Traite philosophique et politique de la peine de mort, Mantua, 1789.
Dareau, F., Traite des injures dans Pordre judiciaire, ouvrage qui renferme
particulierement la jurisprudence du Petit Criminel, Paris, 1775.
Dupaty, Ch., Lettres sur la procedure criminelle de la France, dans lesquelles on
montre sa conformite avec celle de I’Inquisition et les abus qui en resultent,
Paris, 1788.
Jousse, D., Traite de la justice criminelle de France, Paris, 1771.
Lemaire, J.-Ch., La Police de Paris en 1770, pub. 1863 [memoirs of a
commissioner written on Sartine’s instructions].
308 Select Bibliography

Letrosne, M., Vues sur la justice criminelle, Orleans, 1771.

Mille, J. de, Pratique criminelle, pub. Paris, 1983.
Muyart de vouglans, P. F., Institutes au droit criminel, ou principes generaux en
ces matieres, Paris, 1757.
Risi, P., Observations sur les matieres de jurisprudence criminelle, Milan, 1768.
Salle, J., Traite des fonctions, droits et privileges des commissaires au Chdtelet de
Paris, 2 vols, Paris, 1759.
Vermeil, F. M., Essai sur les reformes a faire dans notre legislation criminelle, 2
vols, Paris, 1781.
Willebrand, J. P., Abrege de la police accompagne de reflexions sur Paccroissement
des villes, Hamburg, 1765.

4 Sources relating to Paris

Brice, G., Description de la ville de Paris et de tout ce quelle contient de plus
remarquable, 4 vols, Paris, 1752.
Denis, L., Itineraire portatif, ou guide historique et geographique du voyageur dans
les environs de Paris, Paris, 1781.
Dulaure, J. A., Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris, Paris, 1786.
Hurtaut, et Magny, P. N., Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses
environs, 4 vols, Paris, 1779.
Jeze, Etat ou tableau de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1760.
Pujoulx, J. P., Paris a la fin du XVllIe siecle, Paris, 1801.
Thiery, M. J., Almanacb du voyageur a Paris, Paris, 1783-5.

5 Chronicles, documents, memoirs

Barbier, E. J., Chronique de la regence et du r'egne de Louis XV, 1718-1763, 8
vols, Paris, 1857.
Boislisle, A. M. de, Lettres de M. de Marville, lieutenant general de police au
ministre Maurepas, 1742-1747, 3 vols, Paris, 1896-1905.
Larchey, ed. Loredan, Documents inedits sur le regne de Louis XV, ou le journal
des inspecteurs de M. le lieutenant de police de Sartine, Brussels and Paris, 1863,
from partly published MSS 11357-60 in the Bibliotheque Nationale.
Lescure, M. A. de, Correspondance secrete inedite sur Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette,
la cour et la ville de 1777 a 1792, 2 vols, Paris, 1866.
Manuel, P., La Police de Paris devoilee par Pun des administrateurs de 1789, 2
vols, Paris, year II [1793-4],
Menetra, J. L., Journal de ma vie, compagnon vitrier au XVIIT siecle, ed. and pref.
D. Roche, Paris, 1982.
Mercier, L.-S., Tableau de Paris, 12 vols, Amsterdam, 1782-6.
Mercier, L.-S., Parallele de Paris et de Londres, ed. Cl. Bruneteau and B. Cottret
Paris, 1982.
Peuchet, J., Memoires tires des archives de la police de Paris, 6 vols, Paris, 1838.
Raunie, E., Chansonnier historique du XVIIT siecle, 10 vols, Paris, 1879-94.
Retif de la Bretonne, N. E., Les Nuits de Paris, 2 vols, Paris, 1930.

More recent works

Aries, Ph., Centuries of Childhood, Harmondsworth, 1979. Paris, 1960.
Aries, Ph., The Hour of Our Death, London, 1981.
 Printed Sources 309

Bardet, J.-P., Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIT siecles, 2 vols, Paris, 1983.
Berce, Y. M., History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early
Modern France, tr. A. Whitmore, Cambridge, 1990.
Berce, Y. M., Fete et revoke. Des mentalites populaires du XVT au XVIIT siecle.
Pans, Hachette, 1976.
Bolleme, G., Fa Bible bleue, anthologie d’une litterature ‘populaire’, Paris, 1975.
Camporesi, P., Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe,
Cambridge, 1989.
Castan, N., Justice et repression en Fanguedoc a Pepoque des Lumieres, Paris,
1980.
Castan, N., Fes Criminels du Fanguedoc, Toulouse, University of Toulouse, 1980.
Castan, N., and Castan, Y., Vivre ensemble, Ordre et desordre en Fanguedoc,
XV1T-XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1981.
Castan, Y., Honnetete et relations sociales en Fanguedoc, 1715-1780, Paris,
1974.
Chartier, R., ‘La Ville dominante et soumise’, in Histoire de la France urbaine, vol.
2, Paris, 1981.
Chartier, R., Julia, D., and Compere, M. M., F’Education en France du XVT au
XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1976.
Chassaigne, M., Fa Fieutenance generate de police de Paris, Paris, 1906.
Chaunu, P., Fa Mort a Paris, Paris, 1978.
Chesnais, J.-Cl., F’Histoire de la violence, Paris, 1981.
Claverie, E., and Lamaison, P., F’lmpossible mariage. Violence et parente en
Gevaudan, Paris, 1982.
Cobb, R., The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820,
Oxford, 1970.
Compere, M. M., Du College au lycee, 1500-1850, Paris, 1985.
Darnton, R., The Business of Enlightenment: a publishing history of the
‘Encyclopedic’, London, 1979.
Darnton, R., Fa Fin des Fumieres. Fe Mesmerisme et la Revolution. Paris, 1984;
1st edn. 1968.
Darnton, R., Boheme litteraire et Revolution, le monde des livres au XVIIT siecle,
Paris, 1983.
Darnton, R., The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History, Harmondsworth 1985.
Davis, N. Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford, Calif., 1975.
Dessertine, D., Divorcer a Fyon sous la Revolution et PEmpire, Lyons, 1981.
Delumeau, J., Fa Peur en Occident, XIVe—XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1978.
Delumeau, J., Fe Peche et la peur, Paris, 1983.
Duby, G., The Knight the Fady and the Priest, London, 1984.
Elias, N., The Civilizing Process, Oxford, 1978.
Farge, A., Vivre dans la rue a Paris au XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1979.
Farge, A., Le Miroir des femmes, textes de la Bibliotheque bleue, Paris, 1982.
Farge, A., and Foucault M., Le Desordre des families. Lettres de cachet a Paris au
XVIIT siecle. Pans, 1982.
Favre, R., La Mort au siecle des Fumieres, Lyons, 1978.
Flandrin, J.-L., Les Amours paysannes, Paris, 1975.
Flandrin, J.-L., Families in Former Times, Cambridge, 1979.
Flandrin, J.-L., English edn: Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and
Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern, Cambridge, 1979.
Flandrin, J.-L., Le Sexe et I’Occident, Paris, 1981.
Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the prison, Sheridan, London,
1977.
310 Select Bibliography

Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality: vol. II, Care of the Self-, vol. Ill, The Use of
Pleasure, London, 1987.
Garden, M., Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVI1T siecle, Lyons, 1970.
Gelis, J., History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern
Europe, Cambridge, 1991.
Goffman, E., Forms of Talk, Oxford, 1981; The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life, London, 1969; Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, New
Jersey, 1964; Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour, New York,
1967; Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York, 1971.
Goubert, J.-P., and Roche, D., Les Franqais et PAncien Regime, 2 vols, Paris, 1984.
Ginzburg, C., The Cheese and the Worms, London, 1980.
Gutton, J.-P., La Societe et les Pauvres, I’exemple de la generality de Lyon, XVIIT
siecle, Paris, 1980.
Hoggart, R., The Uses of Literacy, London, 1957.
Hufton, O. H., The Poor of the Eighteenth Century, 1750-1789, Oxford, 1974.
Jouhaud, C., Mazarinades, la Fronde des mots, Paris, 1985.
Kaplan, S., Le Comp lot de famine: Histoire d’une rumeur au XVIIT siecle, Paris,
Colin, 1982.
Kaplan, S., Provisioning Paris, Ithaca, NY, 1984.
Kaplow, J., Les noms des rois, les pauvres de Paris a la veille de la Revolution,
Paris, 1974.
Lebrun, F., La Vie conjugale sous PAncien Regime, Paris, 1975.
Le Roy Ladurie, E., CrzrmW/ of Romans, Harmondsworth, 1981.
Maire, C. L., Les Convulsionnaires de Saint-Medard, Propheties, miracles et
convulsions a Paris au XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1985.
Marin, L., Portrait of the King, Basingstoke, 1988.
Mandrou, R., La France aux XVIT et XVIIT siecles, Paris, 1967.
Martin, H.-J., Livre, pouvoir et societe a Paris au XVIIT siecle, Paris, 1969.
Meyer, J., La France moderne: vol. Ill, Histoire de France, Paris, 1985.
Moscovici, S., The Age of the Crowd, Cambridge, 1985.
Nicolas J., (ed.), Mouvements populates et conscience sociale, XVT—XIXe siecle,
Paris, 1985.
Ozouf, M., Festivals and the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1988.
Ozouf, M., L’Ecole de la France, Paris, 1985.
Perrot, J.-Cl., Caen au XVIIT siecle, genese d’une ville moderne, Paris, 1975.
Petonnet, C., On est tous dans le brouillard. Ethnologie des banlieues, Paris, 1979.
Poitrineau, A., Remues d’hommes, migrations montagnardes en France au XVIIT
siecle, Paris, 1983.
Ranciere, J., La Nuit des proletaires, archives du reve ouvrier, Paris, Fayard, 1981.
Retat P., (ed.), L’Attentat de Damiens, discours sur Pevenement au XVIIT siecle,
Lyons, 1979.
Roche, D., The People of Paris, Leamington Spa, 1987.
Roche, D., Preface to Menetra, Journal de ma vie [see section 5 above].
Rude, G., The Crowd in the French Revolution, Greenwood, 1986.
Sewell, W. H., Work and Revolution in France, Cambridge, 1980.
Van Kley, D., The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancient Regime,
1750—1770, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984.
Williams, A., The Police of Paris, 1718—1789, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1979.
 Index

administration of Paris and responsibility for religious, 16—17, 172, 174-5, 184,
accident of 1770, 220—5 235-6
adultery, 73, 75-6, 82—3 royal and state, 17—19, 172, 173—7;
see also concubinage dress, habits and customs for, 209—11,
aesthetics and historiography, 3—4, 30, 212; marriage of Dauphin and Marie-
48-9, 181 Antoinette, 55, 204—25
apprenticeship see under work see also executions
archives, corporation and craft-guild, 106, Chaban, Secretary of State for Police, 238
113 children, 42—3
archives, judicial, 1—6, 261, 284—6 abduction (1750), 13-14, 46, 55-71, 83,
La Bastille, 73, 133, 136, 137, 139, 239, 176, 230, 242, 273, 275, 276
246 contemporary attitudes to, 51—5, 230,
Petit Criminel, Le Chatelet, 28, 83 242
and crime in Les Halles, 167
Barbier, E. J., 71, 176 historian and, 45—51
Barentin, Sieur de: extraordinary birth to imprisonment by lettres de cachet see
wife of, 233—4 imprisonment
Beccaria, C., 20, 181 in marriage of M. Montjean, 95-6
beggars, begging, 55, 56-7, 69, 138, 145, recognition of mother, 71-2
146, 150, 151, 155, 157, 166, 167 social role, 62—8
Belichon, Abbe, 134 chimney sweeps, 46, 63, 64
Berryer, Lieutenant-General of Police, clergy, 64
16-17, 55, 58, 59, 69-70, 83, 230, and crime, 147, 152, 154, 238, 252
239, 245-6, 253, 276 and distribution of royal charity in 1770,
Bertin, Lieutenant-General of Police, 133—4 215-20
Bignon, J., 221, 222, 223, 224 and morality, 14-15, 73, 79, 80, 232
Blanchard, A., 51 and popular credulity, 232, 238, 252
body-snatching, 71, 253—4 see also religion
bourgeoisie, 22, 23, 25, 30, 47, 56, 91, 208, Clicquot de Blervache, S., 105
232 Colbert, J.-B., 104
Bourgoin, Inspector, 134, 264 concubinage, 22—3, 73 — 83, 151, 159—63,
Bousquet, Dr, 234 164, 166, 167
Breteuil, L.-A. Le Tonnelier, baron de, 69 conflict see violence and conflict
broadsheets see gossip, written contraception, 54
Bureau de la Surete, 139, 150 corporations see craft-guilds and
burial: fear of being buried alive, 254 corporations
Burke, E., 259 corpses, 71, 253-4
courtship, 27—35
cabarets, 12, 125, 141, 253, 281 craft-guilds and corporations, 103, 104, 105,
and crowd unrest, 258, 261, 265 — 8 121, 133, 138,262-72
passim, 273 role of officials, 57, 105, 106, 115, 122,
Castan, N., 145 127-30, 135-6, 262, 265, 267, 268
Catherine de Medicis, 173 see also work
celebrations, 227 credulity, 227—9, 233—6, 250—2, 253—5
312 Index

case of Madeleine Ernault, 229—53 marriage festivities of Marie-Antoinette,

Crespy, Commissioner, 118 212-14
criminals executions and public punishment, 172,
Inspector Poussot’s register of, in Les 177-204
Halles, 138-68 cruelty and barbarism, 182-93
punishment, 167-8 exposure of the corpse, 193, 198—204
see also executions; imprisonment crowds, nuit blanche, 193 — 8
171-2,285
and celebrations see celebrations Faculty of Medicine, 242, 250
credulity and interest in spectacles, family, 32, 42-72, 94, 212-14
226-55, 283 and crime, 152—4, 165, 167, 168
and executions see executions and Montjean case, 93—5
perceptions of, 16, 19, 50, 171, 182, Ferrat, Inspector, 238, 239
256-61 festivities see celebrations
and riots see riots Flandrin, J.-L., 51
see also district(s) Foucault, M., 1, 181-2, 193, 199

Damiens, R.-F., 18, 176, 180, 189 gangs, criminal, 142, 152—3, 154—7, 164,
Damotte, Inspector, 124 165
death, 32, 48, 54, 82, 83, 185-93, 206 Gauny, G., 49
fear of being buried alive, 254 gazetins de la police secrete, 246-8,
Delamare, N., 174, 237 292n.24
Delisle, M., 105 Gazette de France, 205
Demontjean, M. and his marriage, 84—99 gender roles, 284, 285
Des Essarts, N. T., 258, 262 and credulity, 236
Desormeaux, Commissioner C., 83 and crime, 161
Desrues, A.-F., 183, 195, 200, 202 and death, 189—90
Dictionnaire universal de police (Des and marriage of M. Montjean, 85, 88 — 91,
Essarts), 258, 262 96, 99
disorder, 285 and riots, 282—3
see also public order; riots; violence and seduction, 27—8, 40-1
district(s), 11-12, 19-20, 139, 212 see also men; women
and children, 59—60, 67—8 Genevieve, Sainte see celebrations, religious
and concubinage, 79-81 Gillot, Inspector, 239-40, 248, 249, 251
and courtship, 35 Goncourt, E. and J. de, 24
and credulity, 248—50, 251 gossip, 12-15, 20, 26, 35, 43—5, 66,
crime in Les Halles, 138—68 111-12, 115, 116,218-19,278,282,
lie Saint-Louis, 15 285
and marriage, 43-5 and Ernault case, 243 — 8
Place de Greve, 184-5, 188 written, 15-16, 86, 196, 202—3, 205,
and riots see riots 220, 221-3, 231, 233-4, 239, 240-8,
Saint-Honore market area, 9-11, 275 — 82 249, 251, 257
and trade, 113-14, 129, 135-7 Guard, 184, 221, 223, 224, 231, 272, 273,
divorce, 73, 75 275
Du Breil de Pontbriand, Abbe, 64 Gueulette, Procurator, 193, 194, 196, 197,
Dudoigt, Commissioner, 136 201,202, 203, 241
Guillaute, 140
education, 60-1, 63, 78, 198-9
Elias, N., 181, 193 handkerchieves, 142, 211
elites see upper classes Hardy, S., 176, 186, 187-8, 193, 195, 202,
emotions 207, 208, 215, 221, 233-4, 254
historian and, 3-4, 47-51, 62, 181—2 Henry IV, King, 174
in illicit relationships, 81—3 Herault, Lieutenant-General of Police, 175
Encyclopedie, 228 historiography, 1—6, 181—2
Enlightenment philosophers and intellec¬ and child, 45—51
tuals, 104, 105, 130 and crowd, 259
ephemera see gossip, written and trade, 106
Ernault, M., 229—53 Hubert, Commissioner, 249
everyday life, 6, 9—11, 14, 86, 103, 106—7, Hugues, Commissioner, 115, 119, 127, 264,
227, 284 267
and historiography, 2, 5
of middle classes seen in aspirations of illegitimacy, 54, 73
Montiean’s wife, 93, 96-8, 99 imprisonment
revealed in accounts of accident at convent as place of detention, 90, 93-4
 Index 313

by order of the King, 46, 68-71, 73, middle classes see bourgeoisie
75-80, 94, 105, 122, 130, 131, 136, migrants, migration, 19, 54, 109, 142, 144,
137, 140, 230, 253, 264, 266, 270 146,212
see also prison Mille, J. de, 20
Iroquois Indians and punishment, 191-2 Mirabeau, 69
monarchy
Jews, 137-8 and crowd, 171-2, 256-8
journeymen see under work imprisonment by order of the King see
under imprisonment
Labbe, police officer, 55, 275-81, 282, 283 and ritual of public execution, 117—82
Lafitau, J.-F., 191-2 and trade and work, 104-5, 110, 126,
Languedoc: crime in, 144-5 132,262
Laumonier, Commissioner, 93 see also celebrations, royal and state
La Vergee, Commissioner, 276 Montesquieu, C. de Secondat, baron de, 181
Le Bon, G., 259 Montjean, M. and his marriage, 84—99
Le Comte, Commissioner, 272—3 Moufle d’Angerville, 204, 207-8
Ledoux, N., 227 Mutel, Commissioner, 121
Lefebvre, G., 259
Lenoir, Lieutenant-General of Police, 11, 20, Necker, Mme, 254
69, 73-4, 105-6, 131-2, 137, 177, nobility see upper classes
238,271-2 nudity, public, 198—9
letters, importance of, 33—4
lettres de cachet see imprisonment, by order pamphlets see gossip, written
of the King parents
Lieutenant-General of Police, 11, 12, 14, 17, and apprenticeship, 117-20, 214
18, 20, 55, 68, 80, 93, 94, 105, 138, relations with children, 42—72, 75, 93-4
224, 246, 255, 262, 263, 266, 268,269 parlement and enquiry into accident at
see also Berryer; Bertin; Herault; Lenoir; marriage festivities of Marie-Antoinette,
Sartine 211-12, 222-5
Louis XV, King, 176 abduction of children see under children
Louis XVI, King, 180, 262 police
accident at marriage festivities, 55, 176, and accident at marriage festivities of
204-25 Marie-Antoinette, 206 — 9, 214—18,
220-5
Machurin, Commissioner, 230 and credulity and superstition, 229-32,
magic, 151, 237 236-48, 249, 250, 252-3, 255
Malesherbes, 69 and crowds and riots, 257—8, 260-83
Marie-Antoinette, Queen: accident at passim
marriage festivities, 55, 176, 204—25 and executions, 184
marriage, 21-5, 26, 27, 28, 32, 34, 42—5, gazetins de la police secrete, 246-8,
73-4, 100 292 n. 24
and criminality, 153 and Jews, 137—8
economic aspects, 22—3, 42, 76, 91, 95 jurisdiction in Paris, 223—4
M. Montjean’s, 83—99 and trades and crafts, 105-6, 110, 122,
see also family 127-8, 129, 131-2, 135, 136
Maupeou, R.-N. de, 225 see also Lieutenant-General of Police
medicine, 234, 250—1, 254 police agents and informers, 13, 55, 56, 130,
case of Madeleine Ernault, 231, 232—3, 137, 140-1, 142, 154, 275, 277, 281
239, 242-5 passim, 248, 249 police commissioners, 11, 12—13, 14, 16,
see also scientific progress 17, 18, 26, 79, 139, 150, 220, 258, 261,
men 272
attitude to seduction, 27, 40-1 see also individual commissioners
illicit relationships, 75—6, 82—3 police inspectors, 12, 17, 18, 79, 139—40,
relationship with women, 20, 73, 168, 150, 168, 215, 218
203, 284 see also individual inspectors
role in riots, 278, 282 polite society see upper classes
see also gender roles Pons, R., Abbe, 238, 252
Menetra, J.-L., 48, 63, 65, 133 Poussot, Inspector, 132—3, 276-7
Mercier, L.-S., 21-5, 45-6, 143, 175, 176, register of criminals in Les Halles, 138-68
182, 183, 186, 187-8, 190, 207, 233, poverty, 18, 21—2, 25, 54, 63, 68, 74, 204,
235-6, 252, 258 205,212,213,215,219-20
mesmerism, 229 prices, 12—13, 258, 273
Meusnier, Inspector, 83 priests see clergy
Michelet, J., 259 prison escapes, 162
314 Index
state see monarchy
prison riots, 258, 273
privacy, private and public, 19—20, 41, 43, strikes, 105, 122, 261-71 passim
sword, right to carry, 123-4, 268, 271
44
prostitution, 138, 145, 163, 177
public order, perceptions of, 14, 70-1, Taine, H., 259
79-81,217-18,260, 261,271 Thierry, Commissioner, 15, 17, 18
see also disorder Thompson, E. P., 259
punishment, 167—8 Turgot, A.-R.-J., baron de l’Aulne, 262, 271
see also executions; imprisonment
upper classes, 47, 59, 79
Ranciere, J., 5, 48-9 credulity, 229, 231—6 passim, 239, 242,
rationalism, 253 243
religion, religious education, 24, 63-4, 119, and executions, 182—3, 189, 190
198-9,210, 227, 235-7, 250
ecstatics in cemetery of Saint-Medard, violence and conflict, 19, 20, 285
184, 229, 237, 239, 252 domestic, 43
and executions, 179, 187 violent crime, 150, 165
and family and marriage, 51-2, 73, 74 at work see under work
robbery of churches, 154—5, 167 see also riots
sacrilege, 152, 253
see also clergy Watch, 184, 223, 224-5, 231-2, 272
religious celebrations see celebrations, widowhood and concubinage, 78
religious women
reputation, 19, 20, 26, 35, 41, 43—5, 66—7, and crime and its punishment, 144, 148,
68, 75, 76-81, 90, 95 151, 156-67, 177, 198,201-3
and trade, 112, 115-16, 120, 123, 125 and cruelty and death, 189—90, 192,
Retif de la Bretonne, N. E., 143, 176 282-3
riots, 189, 205,257-83 and illicit relationships, 75—6, 82—3
associated with abduction of children, and insults, 114, 115 — 17, 123, 264, 280,
55-61, 69-70, 71, 230, 275-83 282
associated with distraint of goods, 135—6 and marriage see marriage
causes, 273 and marriage festivities of Marie-
district and, 272—83 Antoinette, 208, 210
workers’ unrest, 261 — 72, 273 as mediators in workers’ disputes, 269
Rocquement, Chevalier, 223, 224 reaction to abduction of children, 67
Roland, Commissioner, 229, 239 relationship with men, 20, 73, 168, 203,
Roman Catholic Church see religion 284
Rouen: employment, 109 role in riots, 189, 278, 282—3
royal see monarchy seduction and abandonment, 24, 26-41
Royal Society of Medicine, 234 see also gender roles
Rude, G., 259 work, workers
apprenticeship, 57, 63, 64, 107, 110—11,
sacrilege, 152, 253 114, 117-21, 125, 127, 128, 133, 147,
Sade, Marquis de, 189—90 213, 214, 268, 271
Sartine, Lieutenant-General of Police, 12, 13, chambrelans and unqualified workers,
18,69,121,124,214,215,217,220, 131-68
221,224 civil unrest and formation of workers’
scandal see gossip associations, 261—72
scandal sheets see gossip, written conflict and power relationships, 105—6,
scientific progress, 227, 254-5 111, 112-30
see also medicine journeymen, 57, 106-11 passim, 113,
servants, 28-9, 98-9, 108, 120, 147, 120-8, 133, 147, 213, 262-71 passim
153-4,213, 271 master’s wife, 114—17, 119, 123, 128,
Severt, Counsellor at court, 276 264
sexual relations, 27, 31, 35—7, 44 mobility of workers, 108-9, 122-3
Sirabeau, advocate to parlement, 211 regulation of, 104-5, 126, 262
social class
and belief, 228, 235, 252 Young, A., 24-5
see also bourgeoisie; upper classes
sociology of the crowd, 259
spies, English, 153-4
The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in
eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the
experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters
and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict
and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street Arlette Farge
offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and
vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.

Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population’s daily existence,

the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted
their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them
into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their
working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She
shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events,
from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police.
As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed injudicial records, we
come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the
time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties
about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a “fragile” society. Eleg¬
antly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious
general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

Arlette Farge is Director of Research in Modern History at the Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and the coauthor of The
Vanishing Children of Paris (Harvard).

Harvard Historical Studies, 113

Cover illustration: E. Jcaurat: Carnival in the Streets of Paris. Cliche: Musees dc la Ville dc Paris.
Photograph: Photothcque, Paris ©by SPADEM/DACS, 1993.

Cover design by Miller, Craig and Cocking

Printed in Great Britain

ISBN ID - b 7 4 - 3 1 b 3 fl - X
miiiiiiminii 90 000

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
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