"A World of Paper is one of the finest works showing the mechanics and culture of state power. It is a major work of administrative history and will stand as a classic in its field. It is deep scholarship and required reading for all students of the history of politics and information studies." Jacob Soll, Department of History, University of Southern California "A World of Paper raises our knowledge and understanding of the development of France's foreign office to wholly new levels and represents a massive contribution to scholarship of later-Louis XIV absolutism. It has been a very long time since I've read a "State espionage was initially inflicted on a limited demographic: the Privy Council spied on the British court, the Venetian doge on diplomatic and ecclesiastical circles. But when spying became surveillance—the word is seventeenth-century French, and wa
