Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution by Walton Charles; Walton Charles;

Author:Walton, Charles; Walton, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Lèse-Nation Affairs and Radicalization

If popular agitation led to the injection of “lèse-nation” into revolutionary politics, authorities were largely responsible for extending its scope to cover speech. In the first year of the Revolution, the charge was brought against Catholic reactionaries, antirevolutionary royalists, and radicals. Despite accusations that the Châtelet was biased, the archives show that, in matters of speech, the court was relatively evenhanded.96 There were nearly as many affairs against radicals as there were against counterrevolutionaries, and the social profile of most suspects put them in the educated middle or upper-middle classes.

What kinds of speech offenses made it onto the Châtelet’s docket? Insults against notable national figures and statements that sought to weaken trust in authorities made up the majority of lèse-nation speech affairs. In March 1790, for example, the magistrates of the Châtelet convicted Pierre Curé for seditious propos and insults against the queen. Curé had been arrested in Bourg-en-Bresse in November 1789 for trying to recruit locals in the Jura to join him in burning down châteaux. He was foreign to the region and claimed to have been sent from Paris by the duc d’Orléans. The comité des recherches ordered authorities in Burgundy to investigate the matter.97 No evidence of the duc’s involvement was uncovered, but the affair was nevertheless sent to the Châtelet. Curé was sentenced to publicly apologize, to wear an iron collar for three days, to be branded on his shoulder, to be publicly beaten and thrashed, and to spend the rest of his days in the galleys. Had the Châtelet convicted Curé only for threatening to burn châteaux, the affair might not have attracted the attention of the patriot press. But because the judgment stressed Curé’s “criminal insults” against the queen, radicals seized upon the occasion to accuse the Châtelet of violating the freedom of expression by imposing cruel and excessive punishment.98 In his Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Camille Desmoulins lambasted the Châtelet for sentencing “an ignorant villager” to life in the galleys for having “spoken against the wife of the King—a crime that he has committed along with the rest of France and all of Europe.” Desmoulins decried the hypocrisy of the Châtelet, pointing to its recent release of the reactionary journalist François Suleau, who “encouraged the provinces to revolt in a stupid and fanatical address.”99

Other lèse-nation affairs involved attacks on the majesty of the National Assembly. In March 1790, the mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, informed the Assembly that he had stopped the circulation of some issues of Sottises de la semaine, which contained “disgusting obscenities, atrocious insults against national deputies” and tried to “incite the parlements to revolt.”100 The case was turned over to the Châtelet on March 17. By interrogating the printer’s daughter two days later, authorities learned that the authors were Antoine-Jean-Mathieu Séguier, a former barrister at Parlement, his son Armand-Louis Maurice, and André Rolland.101 By the time the Châtelet got around to prosecuting them, two had fled to Italy, while the third had gone into hiding in Paris.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.