Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France

​Nicole Bauer is Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Tulsa in the USA. A cultural historian of early modern France, she is particularly interested in pulling threads from different directions to understand and uncover the cultural origins of political and social movements.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Creatures of Infamy: Lettres de cachet, Family Honor, and the Uses of Secrecy.- Chapter 3: The Fate of Secrets in a Public Sphere: The Comte de Broglie and the Demise of the Secret du Roi.- Chapter 4: Those Who Know Your Secrets: Jesuit Secrecy and the Proto-nationalism of the Jansenists.- Chapter 5: “I Promise Never to Speak to Anyone”: Polices Practices and the Bastille.- Chapter 6: Desire, Dread, and the Grateful Dead: Bastille Cadavers and the Revolutionary Gothic Imaginary.- Chapter 7: The Marat of Versailles: Transparency During and After the Terror.- Chapter 8: Conclusion.

"The bibliography, however, leaves the reader in no doubts to Bauer’s firm handles both archival and historiographical material, and the book will be a valuable resource for colleagues and students alike. The result is a well-researched and engaging study that, to exhaust the optical metaphor, takes a wide-angled view on a rich and timely subject." (Nineteenth-Century French Studies, ncfs-journal.org, 2025)