The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon Book

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre.

Publishers Weekly

In this complement to his NBCC award–winning Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Harvard librarian Darnton chronicles in scholarly detail (with 74 pages of notes) and well-selected illustrations the role of libel and slander in 18th-century France. He focuses on the political force of books, pamphlets and periodicals written by expatriates in London, Grub Street–type journalists who destroyed reputations and helped bring down governments. But he also shows how they created meaning and myths for the common people, revealing the wicked, privileged and lewd lives of kings, aristocrats, monks and ministers as well as their servants, mistresses and dancing masters. These anecdotes were distributed for political reasons, inventions that titillated and inflamed the public. They had such titles as Secret Memoirs, The Parisian Police Unveiled and The Private Life of Louis XV (the king's body “corrupted by pox and sapped of its virility”). Although the names and events are sometimes overwhelming, the tale is an intriguing one, and Darnton, our leading historian of the book, is the man to tell it. 47 illus. (Dec.)