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In 1749, Francois Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself 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? This book deals with this topic.
Book Details
Publisher:
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publication Date:
04-Sep-2012
ISBN:
9780674066045
Guardian review
Poetry and the Police by Robert Darnton review
the guardian Tue 27 November 2012
Thanks to Twitter and smart phones, "communication has become the most important activity of modern life." But our much vaunted information society is not new, argues Darnton, an American historian: "Information has permeated every social order since humans learned to exchange signs". Darnton turns detective in this fast-moving account of a 1749 police investigation into a poem critical of Louis XV. The "Affair of the Fourteen", as it became known, began with the arrest of a medical student who had recited the poem. Interrogated in the Bastille, he revealed the source of the poem. This man was also arrested and interrogated. Soon 14 "purveyors of poetry" priests, students, clerks and even a professor were arrested. But despite this the authorities never identified the author of the poem. It was, suggests Darnton, "a case of collective creation" what we might now term a crowd-sourced work. This fascinating study reveals that the streets of Paris were buzzing with news of public affairs. As Darnton says, "the information society existed long before the internet."