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In May 1758, a bailiff named Jean Moriceau de La Motte was
arrested for carrying seditious flyers and uttering mauvais
discours against Louis XV. When he was questioned at the
Bastille over the next several months, La Motte was
unequivocal in his loyalty to the king, but his insistence
failed to convince the police and probably hurt his case
more than would have a simple admission of guilt. He was
sentenced to be hanged on the Place de Grève after
making his amends on the steps of Nôtre Dame. His
punishment seemed severe, if not unwarranted, to an
increasingly literate and informed Parisian populace that
found censorship hard to support, either theoretically or
practically, in the face of intellectual and cultural
changes wrought by the Enlightenment.
By looking at the police files for cases such as La
Motte's, Lisa Jane Graham uncovers fascinating clues to the
conflicting attitudes of eighteenth-century French subjects
toward royal authority. Individuals like La Motte often
failed to see the subversive implications of their words and
protested their fidelity to the king in impassioned
language. The crown's inability or refusal to accommodate a
wider range of political speech turned the opinions of these
indivduals into bitter grievances and sometimes crimes.
Ironically, the decision to repress seditious speech not
only alienated essentially loyal French men and women; by
marking them as opponents of monarchical authority, it
strengthened their sense of their own autonomy and
legitimacy as social actors.
The complex and surprising web of motivations lying at
the heart of such loyalty, as revealed in the police files
Graham examines, undermines some deeply rooted assumptions
about the Enlightenment and its links to modernity. Graham's
book presents the eighteenth century as the critical
historical moment for studying how the premodern virtue of
loyalty gave way to new ideas and vocabularies about the
relationship between individuals and government. If the
King Only Knew attests to the powerful emotional and
ideological conflicts this difficult transition
unleashed.
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"Graham's extensive work in three archives and some fine writing and translations make her book important reading for anyone working on law, conspiracies, free speech, and public opinion in the Old Regime."
—American Historical Review
"This is an intriguing and well-argued study of the limits of free speech and the press in mid-18th-century France...[Graham shows] the growing tension between the popular perception (increasingly influenced by the Enlightenment) of how the monarchy should govern and the monarchy's refusal to allow any leeway for what it saw as the subversive use of words. Based largely on research in French archives, the book is well written, with extensive notes and bibliography. Recommended for advanced students and researchers."
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