Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library.

• IntroductionPART I. INTERLOCKING LIBELS1. The Armor-Plated Gazetteer2. The Devil in the Holy Water3. The Parisian Police Unveiled4. The Secret Life of Pierre Manuel5. The End of the Line6. Bibliography and Iconography7. ReadingPART II. POLITICS AND POLICE WORK8. Slander and Politics9. The Book Police at Work10. A Double Agent and His Authors11. Secret Missions12. Hugger-Mugger13. Entrapment14. The View from Versailles15. The Devil in the Bastille16. Bohemians Before Bohemianism17. The Grub Street Route to Revolution18. Slander into Terror19. Words and Deeds20. Postscript, 1802PART III. THE LITERATURE OF LIBEL: BASIC INGREDIENTS21. The Nature of Libels22. Anecdotes23. Portraits24. NewsPART IV. THE LITERATURE OF LIBEL: PRIVATE LIVES25. Revolutionary Metamorphoses26. Sex and Politics27. Decadence and Despotism28. Royal Depravity29. Private Lives and Public AffairsConclusionNotesIndexAcknowledgments

"The tale is an intriguing one, and Darnton, our leading historian of the book, is the man to tell it."-Publishers Weekly"Darnton's bravura demonstration of how Old Regime slander was grafted onto the main stem of Revolutionary political culture is one of the highlights of his engaging book. . . . The libellistes seem to have been most effective when their work fitted in with wider political and ideological trends. But their writings certainly complicated and dramatized questions about the limits of free speech as it was used for personal vilification and innuendo. Those were questions with which the Revolutionaries wrestled and never resolved. And they are with us still, and not only in the blogosphere."-Colin Jones, New York Review of Books"In political slander everything is of the moment, and only someone as immersed as Darnton is in the particularities of eighteenth-century publishing, politics and cultural life could possibly do justice to its noisome unruliness. . . . The reader gets a taste of the thrill of the chase not just from the text but also from a number of telling illustrations taken from the illicit publications themselves. The return on Darnton's investment of time, energy and determination is extraordinary."-Lynn Hunt, London Review of Books"This is a book for experts on eighteenth-century France; but it is also lucid and scurrilous enough to have much wider appeal. The spectacle of a public figure cut down to size by revelations-true or false-about her or his private life is a literary genre that continues in rude health when more refined forms of writing-literary fiction, criticism and poetry, for example-threaten to become obsolete. Readers will find much to titillate and shock in the slanders that brought les grands of eighteenth-century France to their knees. But there is also a contemporary resonance to consider: as our own voracious yellow press goes from strength to strength and life-writing converges on celebrity biography, the more defamatory the better selling, what can the history of slander and libel teach us?"-Ruth Scurr, The Nation