Police and political pamphleteering in late ancien regime France : the testimony of J.-P. Lenoir, Lieutenant-General of Police of Paris

Post-revisionist narratives of the origins of the French revolution, drawing heavily on the work ofthe German sociologist Jurgen Habermas, privilege the role of desacralization and/or oppositional politics as major forces under-mining the monarchy Within a burgeoning public sphere which extended well beyond established elites. In this paper I am going to outline an alternative narrative which draws on a key primary source, the unpublished memoirs of the Lieutenant-General de Police de Paris, Jean-Charles-Pieirre Lenoir (1732-1807), and stresses that at least in terms of strategies for using print the French political elite was conducting business as usual right down to the late 1780s. The dominant medium for domestic politiCal discussion remained the political pamphlet, and political pamphleteering was controlled by the elites. Episodic flurries of pamphleteering, including the sustained campaigns of the Maupeou crisis of 1771-74, often depicted as a dress rehearsal for revolution, were conducted by factions within the elite and were essentially ephemeral in purpose.