Sugden ơn Bauer (2023)

On 28 May 1789, some 1200 men were gathered on the first floor of a converted storeroom near the royal château at Versailles. Summoned by Louis XVI, the Estates General had assembled at the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, where they found themselves at an impasse in their attempts to agree on a constitution. In response to a request that the deliberations take place in secret, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, thundered: “Je ne puis estimer quiconque cherche à se dérober dans les ténèbres; le grand jour est fait pour éclairer la vérité, et je me fais gloire de penser comme ce philosophe qui disait que toutes ses actions n’avaient jamais rien de secret et qu’il voudrait que sa maison fût de verre.” In framing the glass house as a model for the deliberative foundation of a truly representative politics, Volney’s metaphor literalizes the phenomenon explored in Nicole Bauer’s lucid and accessible study: the emergence of a culture of government transparency in eighteenth-century France. 

The book’s guiding thread is the vocabulary of public opinion, to which Bauer looks to trace the shifting ideological work of secrecy from the last decades of the ancien régime through to the Terror. In following what she terms “a longue durée of the discourse on secrecy” (14), Bauer excavates the cultural origins of the supposedly institutionalised openness of representative government in France. “Like a kaleidoscope,” she writes, the book “points the lens at secrecy in the eighteenth century and seeks to illuminate multiple facts and angles that often shifted and changed as public opinion grew in importance” (6). A formidable weapon in the Enlightenment arsenal of abstraction, the political empowerment of collective judgement has been the object of a considerable body of work in social and intellectual history and social theory. Jürgen Habermas, Keith Baker, Arlette Farge, Daniel Gordon, James Van Horn Melton, Mona Ozouf and Dena Goodman, to name but a few, have centered its role in the rise of political perspectives that challenged the Old Regime. Lynn Hunt, Marisa Linton and Timothy Tackett, meanwhile, have documented the quasi-paranoid register of revolutionaries’ investment in discourses of transparency as a marker of ideological purity. If these lists of names testify to the extent to which Bauer’s chosen topic could represent well-trodden ground, she is careful to set out her store from the book’s opening pages: “there has been little consensus, however, on how transparency took on the force that it did by the end of the eighteenth century, and while many have studied the public sphere or the emphasis on transparency in the Revolution, few works focus on transparency in the eighteenth century” (3). A more nuanced positioning of the book’s argument in relation to these foundational studies would, on this occasion as on others, have been welcome, but the overarching thesis remains compelling and well-substantiated: from an early modern faith in its role as a safeguard of honor and “tool in maintaining order” (18), secrecy had, by the 1780s, “come to be a reason for suspicion rather than a form of protection” (9). 

The study’s point of departure is the practice of lettres de cachet, sealed letters conveying royal orders whereby subjects could be arrested and imprisoned without explanation. From an “instrument of mercy and even relief” that spared the collective familial humiliation of a trial and public punishment, Bauer draws on police dossiers and public-facing material (printed books, pamphlets) to argue that lettres de cachet came to be seen as “one of the most odious practices of the Old Regime” (21). Chapter two takes the story of the demise of the secret du roi, Louis XV’s clandestine diplomatic networks, as “symptomatic” (52) of the rise of both the idea of government accountability and a new, Rousseau-coded kind of masculinity, “where revealing oneself and being honest and open had become the new mark of an honorable man” (80). Changing notions of masculinity, Bauer notes, ran parallel to religious conflicts, the subject of the book’s third chapter. Jansenist polemics, it argues, admonished the supposed "Jesuit use of the secrets […] attained in the confessional for their own advancement" (106), fueling proto-nationalist depictions of the shady, ultramontanist Jesuit figure as the “foil to the patriot-citizen who fought despotism, favoured Gallicanism, and advocated transparency” (108). Chapters four and five center on the Ur-metonym for “perceived extremes of secrecy and abuses of power” (115), the Bastille. Bauer carefully reconstructs the ways in which the police’s use of secrecy as “an instrument of terror” and “rein[s] [on] public opinion” eventually “backfired and fueled” (142–3) the very rumors that culminated in the events of 14 July 1789. The study goes on to explore the “idea of the Bastille as a place of emergent Gothic imagination,” probing the prison’s imaginative uptake in literature in the context of “a hunger for mysteries, secrets, and the unknown that had come to be repressed” (155). Chapter six, finally, examines what Bauer terms the “surprising continuity” (175) between attitudes towards transparency during the Terror and after Thermidor. From the kaleidoscope of its opening chapter, the book closes with a second optical metaphor, that of the sundial and its shadow moving “from one end of a spectrum to the other” (207). “By not only focusing on the bright light of transparency […] but also tracing its shadow,” the author concludes, “we can see the strange and unusual origins of the path secrecy took through to and after the Revolution” (207).

It is, to be sure, unsurprising that the book consistently invokes the vocabulary of “light vs. darkness” characteristic of accounts of eighteenth-century state-society relations. The reader is, however, led to wonder if this insistence doesn’t risk reifying in the study’s framing a polarity that might have been further complicated at the level of analysis. Whilst the antithesis has long been foundational to critiques of government power, particularly on the Left, this kind of rigid opposition also glosses over the tension between transparency as ideological imperative and secrecy as practical necessity of statecraft. Given the nuance in Bauer’s definition of secrecy as information “expressly hidden from a larger group of individuals” (my emphasis) and not merely “something unexplained” or “mysterious” (3), the argument might have attended more closely to the mutually constitutive nature of its two central concepts. Similarly, the vital yet notoriously nebulous category of “public opinion” is largely treated as a unitary phenomenon, which risks understating the complexities of a question that has been subject to extensive historiographical debate. Substantial bodies of scholarship on the “development of the autonomous self” (6) and “new understandings of masculinity” (8) in the eighteenth century would also have merited a more detailed overview. The bibliography, however, leaves the reader in no doubt as to Bauer’s firm handle on both archival and historiographical material, and her book will be a valuable resource for colleagues and students alike. The result is a well-researched and engaging study that, to exhaust the optical metaphor, takes a wide-angled view on a rich and timely subject.