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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Pavy, Claude
Darnton, Robert
Delavault, Hélène

Paperback

Poetry CriticismFrench HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0674066049
ISBN13: 9780674066045
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Sep 3 2012
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

We are given a vivid sense of how songs were circulated and performed on the streets of Paris...Darnton has opened up another rich vein of research in the eighteenth century. --Times Literary Supplement

In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an abominable poem about the king. So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense?

In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society.

This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of viral networks long before our internet age.

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