WGBH Forum Network; Robert Darnton: Poetry and the Police; Harvard Book Store

Now it's my pleasure to introduce Robert Darnton Robert Darden is currently the Carl H force timer Hino versity professor and the director of the university library here at Harvard educated at Harvard and with Ph.D. from Oxford University professor Darden began his career with a brief stint in journalism before returning to academia and to Harvard as a fellow as a junior fellow at the Society of fellows. He was then on the Princeton faculty for almost 40 years as a European history professor and he took up his current post at Harvard in 2007. A major facet of Professor Darnton scholarly interest has been his communication has been in communication and the history of the written word. His new book poetry in the police communication networks in 18th century Paris examines this topic in the context of the mid 18th centuries affair of the 14 in which 14 precisions were arrested for disseminating songs and poetry against the monarchy. Their story helps shed light on the way information and opinion could be spread through written text oral tradition and song in a semi literate society. After the talk we will have time for lots of questions followed by a

signing and it's always had like to take this opportunity to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening. By doing so you are supporting both the local independent bookstore and this author series. And now without further ado please join me in welcoming Robert Darden. Thank you Rachael I'm delighted to be here. Independent bookstores are a good cause and I'm glad to see that the cause is thriving. It's fun also that the bookstore can function as a kind of nerve center for intellectual exchange and just for fun. The this book actually has two purposes and one is fun. It's written not just for other history professors but for the famous general educated reader. You the readers will have to decide whether it actually is a good read. But it's meant to be. And in fact it tells you a detective story. The

archives of the police in Paris are full of detective stories. This is the best one in many many years of research I've ever come upon it was so good I thought that I well write a book about it and try to communicate some of the flavor of detective work. Two hundred and fifty years ago. So that's part of it. To follow the detectives as they follow suspects through the streets of Paris and finally fill the busty with 14 of them and the name of the affair of the 14. The second purpose is. More serious but it's not super serious. The idea is to develop a history of communication to understand how information actually traveled two centuries and more ago. Now we know in general that it travels through the printed word. But France at this time roughly 750 didn't have real newspapers that is papers with

what we would call news in them. They didn't even have a daily newspaper until 1774 much after England and Germany and in fact there was heavy censorship of such papers that did appear. So that if you wanted to find out what was really going on in the corridors of power. You couldn't go to the press. Where did you go. Well to a variety of places. One for example was the tree of cracked call which was an actual tree in the gardens of the political aisle where people would gather to gossip about events new lives the kind of things that you could not find in the press but they were. My point is they were gossiping. So information traveled through oral communication systems. But orality the spoken word is the most difficult thing for historians to trace because by definition it

disappears into the air. So it's very very hard to know how oral messages actually traveled in a society that existed 100 200 300 years ago. A society that was semi-literate. We have various estimates about the literacy rate in France and in Paris around this time. It's guesswork but it's fair to say that well of the population in general perhaps half of the adult males could read at least in a fairly primitive way. Women had a much lower literacy rate literacy was much worse or lower in the South than in the north. But we're talking about a world in which it's normal not to be able to read or not to be able to read very much. So even if there were newspapers most people couldn't read them. How do they find out about what was going on. Well that's the the real subject of this book how oral

communication networks actually function. And it's fun but I think because it all began with an order that came down from the most powerful man in France aside from the King. He was the Colts doctor also Minister of War in the spring of 1749 the order came from Versailles to the lieutenant general of police the head of the police force. And it said find the author of the poem that begins with these words. Mall store dollar. A few would be. Monster whose black fury that's all they knew and was up to the cops to discover the author. Well they had. We don't know exactly how many Some estimates say as many as 3000 spies known as Mouche or MU Shar that is flys that buzz around the cafes of Paris picking up gossip listening into conversations and reporting what

people were talking about in these oral communication networks to the police so the police were tuned to what people were saying and that when you think of it isn't surprising because oral communication was so important. So the order went out the spies spread through the cafes the marketplaces the public gardens of Paris. And after a certain amount of time a note arrived I found it in the archives. One small piece of paper a scribbled note. In fact I reproduce it in the book made up of two sentences and it says. I have found someone who had the abominable verse against the King against the king. So the monster whose black fury was indeed Louis 15 and I can procure him for you if you like. The RI Ward was twelve louis d'or

which was almost a year's wages for an unskilled laborer. And then the police set to work. Well it's a lot of fun to see how they set to work. They had the name of the person they had his address and they followed him as he left a cafe. They stationed a carriage around a corner and Inspector Joseph Dimitri who specialized in this kind of thing. A very interesting man who had great taste by the way in literature accosted this person whose name was false what Berniece who he was a medical student. And there the idea was to capture him without making a lot of noise because they assumed that he was part of a network. And so they had to induce him to disappear quietly into the bust see what the inspector Dimitri did was to say miss your the money shot the no I would like to speak with

you about an affair of honor. One woman a captain of the cavalry you understand wouldn't you please step into this carriage where the money Sheldon though I dealt with duels and people who wanted to kill one another over women and that kind of thing. But the student knew that he wasn't involved with any woman didn't know any soldiers so he followed demurely into the carriage and puff. He disappeared in the bus D. There he was interrogated. Now the interrogations of busty prisoners are fascinating to read because they're written in the form of dialogue. Question Answer question answer. It's all taken down by a scribe. The prisoner signs each page or initials it to testify to the accuracy of it all and therefore you can learn a lot about well the circumstances of the transmission of messages of information in this

case the police said to this medical student. Where did you get this poem. And if you don't tell us we are going to treat you as its author and authors like you tend to wind up in the iron cage that suspended and most San Michele. It's enough they say to drive a man mad. So I suggest that you tell us the source of this poem. Bunnies immediately squealed. He said he got it from a priest whom he happened to meet in a hospital. The priest is arrested the next day. Same treatment he says where he got the source the next person is arrested and so on until the police fill the bus D with 14 persons. They never found the author of the poem that began more stored on New our theory in a way because it didn't have a single author. It was like many poems of the time a

case of collective creation. You got lots of people adding verse to it and it's a sort of palimpsest of poetry that develops over time as people add new stanzas. Well OK I came upon this wonderful dossier in the archives of the busty and I wasn't of course looking for the best discoveries you make in the archives are of things that you're not trying to find. And so if you see something interesting you just follow that trail. In this case because the police at themselves had made the trail it was possible to see exactly how a poem traveled through Parisian society at this time. Now the interesting thing a GETS A from B B gets a from C. C gets it from D but D gets it from E and at the same time he says and by the way I got these three other poems from x. X is arrested he got more from

Y and so on. And soon you can actually follow this with tremendous detail and in fact I drew a diagram of six poems as they make their way through Parisian society. It's quite fascinating I think unprecedented as an opportunity to watch messages travelling through a particular social system. Still you gotta ask yourself what was all the fuss about. Well it turns out that. People were not only composing poems all the time they were reciting them in cafes. They would scribble a new verse on a piece of paper and keep it in their pockets or up their sleeves so that when they arrived in a cafe you could pull out a poem and research or a new verse to an old and older poem and re cited to impress the gang at your favorite

cafe like the poll Cup where people had certain tables or frequently they were re sighted in groups in the public gardens. A lot of these people arrested were students people like you and they re cited poems to one another in their dining halls at the University of Paris. There was one case I found to my amazement of a professor. A man called Pierre C. Gordon you know who actually dictated the poems to his students in a lecture hall. It was what the French call a dictate. And one of the poems he dictated by memory had 84 lines in Alexandra it's the heart of memory at this time is still going strong. And I found that several of these students at memorized it like that so I don't know how many of you could do this. It's quite a feat it seems to me. The poems then are being copied. They're being read aloud. They're passed around on bits of

paper and finally they're sung because many of them are written to be sung to the tune of. You see this on the pieces of paper you might get a title and then it will say sung to the tune of and you hear the name of the tune not the musical annotation but the name your lair will do. And then it could be Les Paul. Or a Big D. You bet. But how about well come back to this in a minute. But it's clear that one form of the oral transmission was actually song. Now this to me was completely new I never I'm not very musical myself and I never thought that I would be doing research and musicology but that's the direction things took. I'll get back to that in a minute. But you might be asking why the police were so intent on this particular detective work. In on the 24th of April 1749 the government fell Louis

15 dismissed his most powerful minister a man called the Colts to Mopar and sent him into exile. It was the biggest political event of the year. And if you read all of the contemporary memoirs the journals all possible references in search of an explanation of why the king did this. Because this was a man who had been part of the ministry believe it or not for thirty six years. He was a real pillar of the government probably the most powerful man in France until he got canned. Why. Well all of the memoirs and the new letters and so on agree as to the cause shall song songs. Now that over simplifies things a little bit. However it's basically true and one particular song. The song referred to an incident that had occurred soon before this explosion

political explosion and it referred the incident was actually a very small dinner party in what were known as the put tees up Octomom. The little apartments of Versailles that's the private quarters of the King where he could relax speak in a normal way behave like an ordinary person and enjoy himself. Madame de Pompadour his new mistress had invited the king her cousin Madame dest Todd and this minister Mopar to a dinner. So there are just four of them. And when she arrived she had a bouquet of white hyacinths in her hand and she gave a flower to each of the other three persons. A nice gallant gesture if you like. So the next day the poem appeared and it went as follows. Give it to you first in French powerful fast so noble a fall should

erase reason they know. No bar to Simmy they flow. May sue song. They flew over the launch. By your noble and frank manner. Iris you and chant our hearts on our paths. You strew flowers but they are white flowers. That was a Pom that brought down the ministry. Now one of my principles in doing research it's derives somewhat from anthropologists is as soon as you encounter something that you can't figure out something opaque You may be on to something. And that's where you should concentrate your. Researched energy. So what was it about this poem that was so spectacularly awful that it brought down the ministry. Well it turns out that to the finely tuned

years of the XIV it was indeed outrageous because white flowers Fleur blong or Bruno referred to venereal disease in menstrual discharge. And so the poem really said that Madame de Pompadour was giving Louis fifteenth VD that was too much even by the standards of Versailles where things were very nasty India. I don't know if you've seen the film ridicule which was quite a hit some years ago but to really stick it to somebody was part of the game played by courtiers. But this was going beyond the rules of the game. So more power was dismissed. Meanwhile though this poem was accompanied by a whole flood of other poems and made our bows most of powers rival was this other minister to the constitutional song who wanted to score points with the pompadour and the King by

initiating a witch hunt of poems and poetry and poets. In fact what he hoped is that he could trace these poems to some one who was hatching a plot against him and the king within the court. So the idea is to use this man hunt for poems in order to win and the constant power struggle which is court politics. Well that kind of politics is usually dismissed by most historians today as what they call Le Petite East why our little history or if any event history it's supposed to be very bad. And I found myself getting involved in deeper and deeper into this kind of event history which back in the few deaths decades ago was the kind most scorned by long guard historians. And I wanted of course to be as long guard. I think it actually is an avant garde book

because I didn't really care why the government felt what I cared about was the way information flowed in this pre-literate society. So I began actually asking myself what is it about songs that make them so powerful as a means of disseminating information. Yeah. As in I began doing research trying to find little scraps of songs that were actually exchanged at this time. Some of them the police confiscated when they frisked someone who is they arrest him they put him in the busty they frisk him and out comes a poem I found several examples of these bits of paper with a new verse written on them. But most of the examples of the actual poems I like and songs I could turn up were in special scrap books known as shall Sun Yang sort of song scrapbooks

because songs were so popular in the streets of Paris that people were always copying them down and then pasting them in a scrap book or having a secretary if they were wealthy copy out their latest song or the latest verse to another song. And I discovered. I went through I think about a dozen of these so-called scrapbooks shots and yea they're enormous. One of them one of the most famous has forty eight volumes and one volume can have 600 pages just crammed with songs. So I did some statistics and it turns out that the French were producing by my calculation in the mid 18th century at least one new song every three days. And that's just the songs that survive. So they were probably producing several songs every day and that's because it was so easy to do. Anyone can use their simple ballots most of them. Anyone can

work out their eight foot ballots. And if you just rhyme something's but to the music and then the song spread with incredible power. Why. Because music is a great pneumonic device. You know I don't know if you have feel this but when you think of it isn't it true that you carry around in your head a repertory of tunes. We all have them. They might vary a little bit from person to person or from generation to generation. Now I come from a generation where we picked up a lot of our tunes I'm sorry to say from commercials. I will now give you an example. Brace yourself I'm going to say I don't know if any of you would know this but some maybe. Pepsi-Cola hits the spot 12 full ounces that's a lot twice as much better to Pepsi Cola is a drink for you if you're you've

heard it right. OK. I can't get it out of my head. You know when I was a little kid you heard it all the time. Now one day in my grade school I think I was in the second grade or maybe the third grade. A wise guy appeared one of these you know sort of marginal types that any class has. And he sang the following song. Christianity hits the spot. Twelve Apostles That's a lot. Holy Ghost and a virgin to Christianity's a thing for you. I was deeply shocked. I've never heard or encountered your religion before. And when you think of it you know pretty soon you can't get that version of the song out of your head. You are mocking the sacred mysteries of the Christian church and not only that I think there's a more subtle message which is Christianity is being

sold to you like a pile of goods. The way Pepsi Cola is being sold to you so it is in fact a way to in a kind of insidious manner to under cut your faith. Well I don't know how effective it was but I assure you I did. I still have it crammed into my head. This is what was going on in 18th century France because everyone knew these tunes. And in following the evolution of the songs through these scrapbooks I discovered that you would take a very popular song. And it would be identified by the tune. And people would add verses after new events occurred so that if you found enough copies of the song you could date them. There was one in particular called Puna but to cut down that a bastard strumpet the first line there known often by their first line that's a reference to mad up

the Pompidou. This I found nine different versions of this song scattered through the scrap books. They vary from 11 to 23 verses and each verse pillories a minister or a general or a bishop. Everyone gets it. And as the song evolves over time so I was able to trace it over nearly two years. You can watch new events occur and new people being made fun of. So it's. In other words the songs are running commentaries on current events and they are a means of communication that spread like wildfire through Paris. You should imagine walking in the streets of Paris and you wouldn't have to go far before you would hear someone singing. Now there were professionals sent songsters shelters or salsa NYI who were in effect beggars

who would station themselves at the pole nerve for in the Pali why ya'll or some other important part of the city and sing away usually with a fiddle while singing or with a hurdy gurdy known as yelled in French and they were just a hope to collect money from people the way you see that going on today in Harvard Square. Those were the professionals but then they had other people workers who improvise new verse to old tunes while they were at work the most famous was a man called us. I'm forgetting I'm blocking on his name his father our father was a as a little boy his father was a baker and he used to knead the dough in his father's bakery while improvising songs just for the fun of it. At the same

time and once a man called the marshal to appreciate a year was passing by and heard this kid singing and thought wow this is talent. He recruited him for the good meek and became the greatest songwriter if you like of 18th century France. There still is a room dedicated to him in the Kmiec of Paris. So people are singing all the time. I think this is an important subject one that really deserves a lot of study. But the question then arose What did it sound like. The manuscripts only said sung to the tune of. But I never heard of tunes like love. They keyed you bareback. That's the crutch of father Baba and no one today alive in France would have heard of such tunes. So if you wanted to do a full history of this you needed to know. I think what the music was. Why. Well

because you could imagine that if you heard certain words to a particular tune once you might associate that message with the next version of words to the same tune. And so on so that the music would be a kind of Pal incest of sound that would build up associations. So I then try to figure out what the music was and for Fortunately in another part of the National Library in France the music department they had keys to the songs. So you just look up a title or the first line and then you get the musical annotation. Now I have a friend who for a while she was actually an opera singer but she's become a cabaret performer in Paris. She's very well known and she's tremendously talented talented Her name is ill and delightful. She agreed to sing these songs that are surrounding the

affair of the 14 to the actual music. So it's possible for us today to recapture it the way the songs actually sounded. Two hundred and fifty years ago now I'm not claiming that it's a perfect reproduction of this past experience because Ellen has a wonderful not so soprano voice. And these people in the streets of Paris just belted the stuff out. However I think it's getting as close as we can get to the actual sounds of the past and that one of the jobs of a historian is to try to recapture sound the way the past actually sounded. So I hope that this will this book will be a at least the beginning of an attempt to add a new dimension to historical study. At the end it has a program that accompanies the songs that you know and do level sings. So the reader can actually

listen to the songs. They're available on open access online for free. You can just type it in. Listen to your computer and then follow it in French and in English translation as you hear her sing. So we're going to give it a try now. And first I will play it for our have our own play for you that this jockey right play for you the song that brought down the government there a lens sings three versions of it. First it's a sweet very innocent kind of gallant love song. It's only four lines so it won't take long but you get the tune. Wake up beautiful. Later if you buy a discourse which is more of your sleeping he's sleeping.

That's not alien to love. So in other words a very lovely simple little ballot then the ballot which everyone knows this is one of the most best known tunes because I also did statistics to figure out which tunes were most common is used for satire in this case the song says the same thing. Wake up beautiful. Well actually I'll try to translate it as we can. Can you hear can you hear me all right. This is making fun of a duchess. The new one you're on you're following your footsteps beautiful Duchess. Show versus Hillary on your steps beautiful Duchess you are followed by a swarm of bats. So you see the traditional version being used for a

satire in this case against the Duchess. But now it's the one with the white flowers and this is how it sounds. Yeah. On yours number three. So parvo first saw notably for sure by your frank and noble manners song.