<i>Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London's French libellistes, 1758-92</i> (review)

Few debates in our discipline are as long-standing or as central as that concerning the origins of the French Revolution. Simon Burrows’s Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London’s French libellistes, 1758–92 is intended as an intervention in this debate. It is most particularly a challenge to the arguments of the socalled “pornographic school” — a chorus of historians, led by Robert Darnton, Lynn Hunt, and Sara Maza, who have collectively argued for the role that the scandalous writings of a literary underground played in the collapse of the ancien régime. Many of these scandalous writings — libelles — were produced in London, thus providing Burrows with the opportunity for his study. His aim is to profile the networks of these London libellistes and to relate their history to pre-revolutionary developments. Chapter 1, a thorough prosopography of the 16 known libellistes, makes for a colourful start. Defrocked priests, aristocratic pretenders, and the cross-dressing Chevalier d’Eon compete for attention in a collective biography determined to overturn the earlier characterizations suggested by Robert Darnton. What Darnton viewed previously as a group of genuine revolutionaries nursed by frustrated literary ambitions, Burrows reveals to be a disproportionately female group of criminals, debtors, successful writers, and literary hacks, almost none of whom turned out to be genuinely Jacobin when the moment arrived. Chapter 2 proceeds in a similar vein. Pace Darnton, Burrows argues that London’s French publishing networks were not political backwaters, that London-based libellistes were connected to court factions, that the timing of most slanders on Marie-Antoinette does not allow them a causative role in the revolutionary crisis of 1789, and that those libelles that were published served a restorative and legitimizing purpose in ancien régime politics. Chapters 3 and 4, although separated chronologically, cover a common ground, revealing in considerable detail the dynamics of production, dissemination, and suppression. This is done through a series of narrative case studies that reveal the French government’s response to successive blackmail attempts and libelles. Not surprisingly, the government’s response to particular libelles appears to have depended on perceptions of their seriousness, estimations of the credibility and capability of the libelliste, and calculations by individual ministers (often concerning the threat to themselves). But Burrows detects a shift — from about 1783, the government tended to disregard, prosecute, or pursue libellistes, rather than paying to suppress publication. This was a perhaps natural response to the emerging reality that submitting to a blackmailer’s threats of publication tended to result in more blackmail attempts! By the very nature of the subject, most of Burrows’s chapters make interesting reading. The winner in this regard, by far, is chapter 5, on the scandalous history of the libelles against Marie-Antoinette. Here it is not the nature of the subject 280 Histoire sociale / Social History