The "Mémoires Secrets" and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France

"Every scholar of the French Enlightenment knows, at least through hearsay, the collection of cultural and political gossip entitled Mémoires secrets" (9). Thus begins Jeremy D. Popkin's contribution to this volume of essays, a volume that he coedited with Bernadette Fort and that challenges nearly all that this "every scholar" believes he or she knows about the Mémoires. In their introduction, Popkin and Fort point for example to the strangely persistent attribution of these essays to one organizing authorial mind, usually that of Louis Petit de Bachaumont. The more common title the Mémoires de Bachaumont was definitively retired only in 1975, on the rather convincing grounds that "a man who had died in 1771 could not have been the only author of a chronicle whose initial volumes alone covered events up to 1775" (2).

The most important of these ten essays for understanding the Mémoires as a whole is Popkin's lead piece, "The Mémoires secrets and the reading of the Enlightenment." Comprising thirty-six volumes published between 1777 and 1789 (although covering the period 1762-1787), the Mémoires are sui generis, as Popkin proves at length by contrasting them to the many different genres with which they have been associated. Neither gazette, nouvelles à la main, nor literary journal, the Mémoires in Popkin's estimation may not even have been clandestine in any real sense; the work exhibits little tendency to question vigorously the common practices of the day and may have been officially tolerated. Or not; authorless, of no specific genre, with no extant complete edition and no clear date or place of first publication, "The Mémoires secrets thus present themselves to us as a monstrous text that evades all established categories of classification" (11). Most importantly, the work does not offer to scholars the raw data of eighteenth-century public opinion, as has too often been assumed. Popkin does reach a general conclusion as to the value of the Mémoires for present-day scholars however, which is to reinforce the insight that "the Enlightenment was indeed a subversive mode of 'reading' the cultural and political world" (33). By questioning the intentions of the philosophes themselves in publishing their radical works, the Mémoires secrets reflect for Popkin not the Revolution with which they have been wrongly associated but a different shift: "The 'revolution' its compilers had in mind in 1777 was not the one we think of in connection with the Enlightenment, but the destabilizing subversion of political thought-structures occasioned by the Maupeou 'coup'" (34). Popkin's article is followed by Shanti Marie Singham's admirably clear treatment of this "coup" as it appears in the pages of the Mémoires secrets. Maupeou's suppression of the French parliamentary system began in 1770 and lasted until 1774, when the accession of Louis XVI resulted in Maupeou's dismissal and the recall of the parlements. In other words, by 1777 when the Mémoires first appeared, its anti-Maupeou commentary would seem to have been singularly outdated. Singham presents this commentary instead as timely and influential, part of a move toward a call for the Etats Généraux. The following three articles deal respectively with "L'Anecdote," "L'Opinion," and "L'Espace public semi-oral dans les Mémoires secrets." Pierre Rétat observes that the anecdotal emphasis of the Mémoires was so marked that a pirated edition was given the title Anecdotes du dix-huitième siècle. Rétat's goal, however, is to remind us that the term "anecdote" had quite different connotations for preceding ages than for our own. The reader of the Mémoires should understand "anecdote" as promising a piquant tale garnered from elite circles of influence that, while no less certain than a "fact," is also almost unbelievably striking ("saillante"), usually for its scandalousness. Jean Sgard's study, "L'Opinion dans les Mémoires secrets," argues convincingly that the only unifying factor present in this work is its tone of impersonal anonymity. The pronoun of preference in the Mémoires is the vague "on," with the favorite image "that of a rumor that circulates spontaneously, unstoppably" ["celle du bruit qui court spontanément, sans que rien puisse le retenir" (74)]. The implied agency behind the "on" of the text varies widely, encompassing that of an undifferentiated noise, a concert of discordant voices, or even, more rarely, a public whose reactions are cynically manipulated from above.

Hans-Jürgen Lüsenbrink combines the insights of Jürgen Habermas and Fritz Nies to argue that the unclassifiability of the Mémoires stems in part from its self-conscious role in diffusing Enlightenment thought. For example, the Mémoires played a major role in what Lüsenbrink calls the construction of the figure of the "grand écrivain," both through summarizing forbidden works and by "semi-oral" reporting such as an investigation into the true nature of Voltaire's rumored "death-bed confession." Raymond Birn's article then examines the fate of Voltaire's nemesis Rousseau in the pages of the Mémoires, and concludes that Rousseau's death in 1778 did nothing to lessen readers' interest in the biographical details of his life, pieced together in the pages of the Mémoires and, as always, reported as if the events had just taken place. Nor were prominent women neglected by the Mémoires; Pamela Cheek's contribution analyses the attention paid to the actress Mlle Raucourt, from "the nine-month bidding war that broke out among men eager to reap . . . the first sexual favours of the sixteen-year-old actress" (107-8) to Raucourt's own later reputation as a highly successful seducer of women. Jeffrey Merrick's subtle study of "Masculinity and effeminacy in the Mémoires secrets" examines the ridicule and anxiety associated with men whose sexual reputations did not equal that of Mlle Raucourt, the most spectacular example being of course Louis XVI.

The penultimate essay by Bernadette Fort emphasizes the importance of art criticism in the Mémoires secrets: "Covering without a single gap the Salons from 1767 to 1787, the Mémoires' eleven 'Lettres sur le Salon' constitute one of the major archives of art criticism published in eighteenth-century France" (143). This coverage is not only more complete, for example, than that of Diderot's Salons, it was also in all probability an important influence on the latter. Fort's long and important article redresses the strange neglect of this work-within-a-work by art historians. Along the way she amply reinforces her central argument: "The Mémoires secrets have no equal among contemporary periodical reviews for the incisive and sometimes vitriolic censure they aimed at the artistic production of their time" (160). Published when art criticism was itself subject to severe censure, the Salons of the Mémoires secrets enjoyed the unusual degree of freedom allotted to the larger work in which they appeared and were thus unique as well in addressing a French audience rather than a handful of carefully selected foreign readers. The Mémoires secrets and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France then closes with a short piece by Sarah Maza; after commenting on the articles that precede her own, Maza appreciatively sums up this volume's lessons: "The formal aspects of the "Mémoires Secrets"-- anecdote, gossip, conversation, debate--belong to the high Enlightenment, whose triumph the publication serves to record" (180).