Abstract:

"Rumor and Foreign Politics in Louis XV's Paris during the War of Austrian Succession" focuses on on-dits about diplomatic and military affairs--politics, as contemporaries understood it. Officially, in 1740s France, the king's subjects had no political voice. Yet, what ordinary people said in everyday speech about high politics mattered. As evidence, the French crown kept Parisian conversations under surveillance and its agents recorded what they heard, through the complex filtering of official-repression and self-censorship. Though political communications remained tightly-controlled under the absolute monarchy, Parisians kept their ears to the ground for every bit of information that moved around the city--officially and clandestinely. In speaking about treaties, negotiations, and battle plans, Parisians de-classified what was classically known as the king's affairs--sometimes called "the king's secret." As a wartime, certain channels of communication shut down, but others were flooded by the increased military and diplomatic action on the landscape of Europe and the European world. A variety of print, manuscript, and oral information sources met the increased public interest in current affairs. Based on transcriptions of everyday speech in contemporary police surveillance reports, manuscript gazettes (nouvelles ? la main ), chronicles, and correspondence, this thesis moves chronologically through the events of the war, as they were refracted in on-dits and as on-dits revealed, in a fragmented way, Parisian political expectations. In the 1740s, French subjects faced a paradox: Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI's death (1740) opened up the possibility of unimpeded French dynastic hegemony in Europe, yet French leadership seemed uninterested in or incapable of seizing the advantage. Public zeal, frustration, and urgency around France's political accomplishments and failures in the decade that followed drove changes in how Parisians talked about and, sometimes, to the crown. Thus, this thesis charts developments in public speech, from its subtle encroachments on la chose d'?tat to open criticism or complex public commentary on the crown's decisions--that is, the development of something like public opinion.