Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth Century France

Extract

The argument of this book is simple and hammered home repeatedly throughout. It is that secrecy, over the eighteenth century, went from being seen as a useful protection for matters of public and private importance, to an impediment to legitimate public scrutiny of matters that ought to be ‘transparent’. Underpinning it is the now mainstream perception among historians of the rise of public opinion over the period. In the public sphere, secrecy was increasingly seen as a cover for wrongdoing or other suspicious behaviour. These attitudes culminated, as Marisa Linton has convincingly demonstrated, in the obsession of leading revolutionaries with ostentatiously demonstrating their patriotic virtue, while throwing suspicion on the hypocrisy of their opponents.

A series of case studies illustrates the argument. Lettres de cachet, mainly used earlier in the century to protect the honour of families by imprisoning wayward black sheep, later came to be seen as instruments of political despotism. And when, after Louis XV’s death, the existence of his calamitous private diplomatic network, the secret du roi, was revealed, it showed the world the dangers of royal duplicity. Meanwhile, Jansenist polemics castigated the Jesuits for secret machinations throughout their history, and no amount of denial by the beleaguered fathers helped to avoid their expulsion from the kingdom. Along with lettres de cachet, much public suspicion of abusive secret authority was focussed on its most visible symbol, the Bastille. In rich detail, Bauer shows that pervasive secrecy was indeed the very essence of embastillement, but it was laid bare on the eve of the Revolution by sensational memoirs by former inmates like Mirabeau and Linguet. So the storming of the fortress on 14 July 1789 was in a sense a symbolic assault on the whole principle of public secrecy, and justification was subsequently found in the discovery of grisly human remains during its demolition. Bauer’s most original insight is to link growing public suspicion of secrets to the contemporary popularity of Gothic novels and images. So far from an insistence on universal transparency, it was almost as if there was also a constant need for thrilling new, and not just fictional, dark revelations. More sober voices such as Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant continued to insist, after the traumas of the Terror, that public transparency was fundamental to stable representative government. But the author stops tantalizingly short of discussing how the issue fared, in their hands and others, under Napoleon.