Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London's French Libellistes, 1758-92

The French blackmailer-libellistes operating out of London between 1758 and 1792 were involved in one of the most shadowy and, in the eyes of the Bourbon government, most criminal and dangerous aspects of a vast and influential international clandestine publishing industry. Their publications were among the most scandalous political texts of the eighteenth century. Such works have attracted considerable attention from historians, many of whom stress the central role of scurrilous pamphlets in undermining the monarchy and covering leading political figures in contempt, above all Louis XV and Louis XVI's queen, Marie-Antoinette. It has even been suggested that such pamphlets had a greater role in revolutionary causation than leading enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, whose writings empowered opposition under the monarchy, or Rousseau, who so inspired egalitarianjacobin politicians such as Robespierre and the militant, artisanal sans culottes. Thus scandalous pamphleteering has been heavily implicated in the origins of the French revolution of 1789.