I'm delighted to have this opportunity to speak with my colleague Charles Walton, who's from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Charles is the author of a very well known book, an important book, about the French Revolution, called Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution. Charles, I thought I'd begin by asking you whether public opinion means the same thing at the time of the French Revolution as it does today? >> I think there are a range of meanings of public opinion in the 18th century and also today. As you know, historians became interested in public opinion thanks to the English translation of Jurgen Habermas' book, The structural transformation of the Bourgeoise Public Sphere in the 1980s. And for Habermas public opinion was a rational, critical opinion. And today we tend to see public opinion as not necessarily rational or critical. It doesn't have that kind of unity to it. It can be just what, whatever people believe. Now, the people I look at in my book were concerned about both forms. They wanted to create a rational critical public opinion. That's part of what the revolution, one of their revolutionary aspirations to create a rational critical public sphere. But what they were confronted with was a world of opinions that didn't always live up to their standards of what was rational. >> Mhm. And who's they? The revolutionaries of '89 or- >> Well, I look at how authorities approached public opinion before the revolution and during, so they want to manage it, both before and after. >> And when do authorities start to become conscious of something they call public opinion? opinion? Is that a 18th century development? >> Yes, depending on the historian you speak to, it can begin as early as the 1720s with the popular Jansonist Literature, pamphlets, and underground newspapers that were critical of the state in the 1720s and its religious policy. Historians such as Keith Baker would say, it really begins in the 1750s, yeah. So but it's an 18th century phenomenon, and people at the time were aware that there is this force called l'opinion publique, public opinion, that needs to be dealt with in one way or the other. >> That free speech can be a problem. >> It's probably not surprising to us that the old regime would have thought the public opinion is a problem, but while most historians have looked at the problem of public opinion in the 18th century, they tend to look at it just up to 1789, and there are very few works that look at the problem of public opinion from 1789 onward. >> So what are the major transitions during the revolution, in terms of policing public opinion? >> Right. Surprisingly, and this was a surprise when I began this research, there's a great deal of similarity between the old regime and the new regime. Now, what revolutionaries repudiated in 1789 when they buy in large demand throughout France, we have from their cahiers de doleance, these lists of demands and grievances that were submitted to the King in 1789. We know that there was widespread support for freedom of the press, but what did Freedom of the press or freedom of expression mean to them? It just meant the absence of pre publication censorship. And many, if you look closely at these Calle, what they say is we will reinforce old regime laws punishing bad speech in order to have a world without pre-publication censorship. So you're getting the volume turned down on censorship but the volume turned up on responsibility for what you say, which helps us understand I think the dynamics of the terror with the Laws of Suspects in 1793 and the Prairial Laws of 1794 when the government starts attacking people for seditious or calumnious speech, they're really living up to the principles that they always espoused from 1789. Bad speech needs to be punished. >> Yes, certainly, Robespierre, for example, is very clear that he's committed to free speech, but the protection that people have is the laws of defamation and so on, that people should be free to say what they want, but there'll be consequences, if there is calumny, and calumny is another word that you use, I think, in the subtitle of you book, The Culture of Calumny. >> What is this culture of calumny? >> I think this is essential for understanding revolutionary dynamics and political radicalization in the revolution. Calumny is the attack on someone's honor, and it's a knowing, the technical definition is you know you are lying, and you are attacking somebody in order to destroy their honor in the public sphere. So you can't understand the stakes of free speech if you don't understand the importance of honor for this culture, in the 18th century. >> And is this a culture of honor which becomes broader than just the nobility? Because it's all from the concept that one associates with the, I guess the ideal of nobility is the culture of honor. But are you saying that actually it becomes a much more pervasive motion of individual honor? >> That's right. So as I state in the introduction to the book with the democratization of honor comes a democratization of vengeance, because in the old regime if somebody attacks your honor, you have to avenge yourself. It doesn't matter whether that person was right or wrong, if it's perceived that you are weak and have not responded effectively to the attack on your honor, then you're weak. Now, if you're a democratic leader, say a leader in your local section In the city of Paris and someone attacks your honor, you're instinctively going to feel that you need to avenge this calumnious attack. Not just to protect your name, but also so to protect the honor of everyone who elected you, because now your honor extends to your constituency. >> But one of the elements of this is that it is a deliberate attack, it's a deliberate lie about you, the attack on your honor. How do you know that someone is being sincere? >> Historians have pointed out that during the Terror, there is a judicial inquiry into intentions. Where was your heart of hearts when the Bastille fell on July 14th, 1789? This obsession with people's intentions is linked to assessing whether speech or criticism or denunciation is pure calumny and you intended to harm that person, destroy that person's reputation, or whether it was a good faith criticism, because the whole point of free speech, and Condorcet, this out before the revolution. The whole point of free speech is, well you can make a mistake. You might accuse somebody of something and be wrong, but if you meant it in the public good and you did not mean to destroy that person then that's fine. That's the point of freedom of the press. You have to have that freedom to hazard a denunciation. However, if you meant to destroy that person and lied knowingly, then you should be punished. So this is why the revolutionary tribunals are obsessed with intentionality. >> And transparency of motivation, and I wonder if its' connected to perjury as well. It seems to me that one of the least significant turning points is the significance of Louie's attempt at flight in June 1791 and the declaration he leaves behind, which is seen to be an act of perjury, when he's earlier taken on oath to uphold the Constitution that the National Assembly is working on. And for him to break an oath in a society like that where a transparent, oral statement of intention and goodwill is critical must have had a devastating effect on this whole question of how do you know if someone is being transparent. How do you know that they are speaking in good faith when the King hasn't been? >> That's right. That's right. I think this obsession with intentionality and transparency isn't so much a consequence of ideology. I think it goes with the terrain in a politically unstable, in any political context where there's transition and the stakes are big. People do become concerned with where people's hearts are, what their true intentions are. Interestingly, on the eve of the attempted flight to Vernon in 1791, Louie the 16th left a message note saying that one of the reason he was fleeing was because of the calumny against him had gone untarnished. >> Let's turn to learn a little bit more about what you're currently working on which is to do with sort of reintroducing the economic back into the French Revolution. What do you mean by this? >> That's right. Yeah, to kind of re inject the economic dimension of the Revolution into the story of political change and political radicalization. And I'm trying to stand back at it and frame it in anthropological terms, for several reasons. One, I have training as a cultural historian, so I have had exposure to anthropology, but, also, I think that helps us make the French Revolution comparable to other periods of history. That doesn't mean that history repeats itself all the time, but when we, by using anthropological terms, specifically redistribution and reciprocity, using those terms to read the revolution, we can make it understandable. So there's a politics to interests in the French Revolution, probably the greatest achievement of the revolution is to abolish privilege. And privilege was both economic and political in the old regime. Now the question is how are economic interests, material interests, going to be managed in the French Revolution? Is that a political question, or should material questions, being punted off into a separate sphere called the economy? And separated from policies. I think that is the issue that revolutionaries are struggling with. >> Of course, years ago, decades ago, the dominate interpretation of the French Revolution was fundamentally economic. It was the work of left wing or Marxist historians, particularly in France itself. What's different about the way that you want to think and write about the economy? >> Because I want to look at the politics of redistribution, and when you look at politics of interests that way it doesn't neatly fall into the classes that Marxist historians had identified. Let's take the most obvious class associated with Marxist historians, the bourgeoisie. It's a bourgeois revolution. People today in France will still tell you it's a bourgeois revolution. Okay, but when it comes down to the question of, say free trade with foreign countries or subsidies for manufacturing and for industry there were bourgeoisie who were for them and there were bourgeoisie who were against them, depending on where their interests fell. So, it doesn't seem to me that the Marxist categories are tight enough to explain political radicalization. >> Okay. And certainly a little bit more about that notion of reciprocity and an ethnological understanding of that. How does this work? >> Right, I initially began this project wanting to use redistribution and reciprocity as analytical categories. They're our tools, as historians. It's not the terms they used. It's our tools for cracking open what's the dynamics of the period. What I found, surprisingly, was that the term reciprocity was invented in the enlightenment. If you do an engram on Google, you'll see it follows what dictionaries will tell you, which is, in its philosophical sense, as a noun, Reciproc the adjective had existed for centuries, but reciprocity as a principle of society is a high Enlightenment principle, and largely Physiocratic, and it's the economic liberals who are dreaming up this idea of reciprocity. And when I looked at the various uses of reciprocity, I found echoes in twentieth century anthropological literature. So in a way, by doing an intellectual history of the concept in the eighteenth century, I'm showing the origins of this term that is fundamental to cultural anthropology today, but also to theories of moral philosophy such as John Rolls, reciprocity is central to his whole theory. So I'm not using reciprocity as an analytical category anymore. It's too freighted. It's too bound up with the period I'm studying. Redistribution, however, is a term that they did not use, but that cuts to the heart of what is going on. The old regime redistributed pensions, gifts, gratifications, privileges, venality. It was a redistributive regime. Once you get rid of privilege, and once you subscribe to the principles of economic liberalism, which they did in the first two years of the revolution, then the question who gives what and who gets what in society is opened up. And they couldn't come to a consensus on how those questions should be answered. And I think their inability to do so explains why the revolution radicalized. >> Oh, this is going to be a real illuminating project. I'm looking forward to reading more of it. When do you think it might be ready for us to read? >> There are bits of it that have already been published. And I have a year of fellowship next year, so I hope to just about finish up the book. >> Charles, thank you so much for talking with us, enjoyed it very much.
