Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard University talks about his book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard, 2012).
"In 1749 Parisians feasted on a half-dozen poems that ridiculed Louis XV for being humiliated in foreign affairs by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle as well as in the royal bed by an ignoble mistress. The king ordered a crackdown on unauthorized poetry recitals, and the police rounded up fourteen suspects, mostly students, clerks and priests, and gathered evidence. The investigation is the subject of Robert Darnton's fascinating Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. As Darnton retraces the steps of the police, he branches off into explorations of the world of ordinary people under the ancien régime and the formation of public opinion in an oral culture. He also has a polemical aim. 'The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past,' he writes, 'even a sense that communication has no history' before the days of television and the Internet. Darnton deflates that illusion by showing how poems seeped into the public sphere as they passed through oral and print media: first copied on scraps of paper, then dictated by one person to another, then memorized and sung to an audience. For Darnton, poetry was an information network long before networks were news." -- John Palattella The Nation
58:43 minutes.
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See: http://www.robertdarnton.org/
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