Secrecy in the late Ancien Régime with Dr. Nicole Bauer

Gary Girod: Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Nicole Bauer. Bauer is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa. She is a cultural historian of early modern and revolutionary France, interested in finding unexpected connections between politics, Gothic literature, religion, gender, and espionage in the history of secrecy. In this episode we discuss her new book Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France, which is all about secrets from the late Ancien Régime into the French Revolution. What did people think of secrets? Is transparency in society a good thing? What secrets can we keep and why? These questions became incredibly important when the Revolution aimed to remake society, though they remain important to this day.

Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. Nicole Bauer. Your Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France is a truly fascinating work. Your book is all about secrets, particularly those held by the government. I think in our modern age many people might think that secrets are dangerous and those who work in secret are nefarious people. Yet, in the late Ancien Régime many people viewed secrecy as a natural and even good part of society. Can you explain secrecy’s place in French culture before the mid-18thcentury?

Nicole Bauer: Yes, happy to do so, and I'm so glad to be on the podcast, Gary, thanks for inviting me. Yes, this is just such a fascinating, rich, multi-layered and also strange topic that I think I'm trying to say with the book that secrecy and our current contemporary attitudes toward secrecy have strange and deep roots. It's sort of like this lotus blossom and if you know about the lotus, this metaphor people often use it. It's beautiful blossom above the surface of the water, but in order to thrive it has these deep roots into the muddy, murky surface or place underneath the water. So yes, that's kind of the main crux and the overarching story of the book, that attitudes towards secrecy have changed dramatically since the Ancien Régime, going up to the French Revolution and then after, and that these changes that happened over the course of the 18th century have really influenced and continue to influence and inform the often thorny debates we have now about secrecy and government transparency, and so on. Ancien Régime, the early 18th century, the 17th century. We could really take this back to, and I'll try to be brief. We can take this back to really the reasons and humanists, people like Machiavelli and those who read Machiavelli, like Cardinal Richelieu. They, they've really popularized this idea, not that it was exactly new, but they were very keen on this idea of secrecy, and Rachel especially has this idea of affair of state. An affair of state is maybe something the government does that is maybe murky in a moral way. It's morally dubious. But they keep it secret and they do it for the advantage of the state and the government's power, or to consolidate power or negotiations with other countries, and often it's kept secret. So, the interesting thing is for thinkers like that in the renaissance and the early-modern secrets are power, secrets are currency. Everyone is expected to have secrets, everyone is trying to find out everyone else's secrets. It's not a sense that there's no sense, that no one not have secrets. Everyone does. And then you could, some historians talk about an economy of secrets. So let's say, if you're in the centers of power like a royal court, you're playing this game where you're trying to hide your secret, you're trying to find out the secrets of your enemies. That would lead to those are their weaknesses. You are trying to gain advantage. They are trying to meanwhile find out your secrets, and on top of that there's all these cultural imperatives that are very much tied to gender and masculinity, about masculine, a successful man has a facade and that is totally legitimate and that is totally valid. And the way you are a successful person at performing masculinity, and it's kind of related to this idea of Sprezzatura in the IIalian renaissance. You're nonchalant, you don't show your emotions, your face is almost a mask. Often they compare the successful elite, nobleman or gentleman to a clock where there is all this workings in the movement happening behind. But the dial or the face of the clock is smooth, quarterly, composed, and so that is really the ideal for women as well. The fascinating thing, if I could go on the little gender aside, is that's the ideal for men to be secretive, nonchalant, not showing your emotions, keeping your cards close to your chest and then finding out the secrets of your enemies. And when you read Richelieu, for example, he'll say something like, “women should not normally generally be in government because they cannot keep secrets, they are too talkative, they're too emotional, they can't keep a hold on things,” and so it's just fascinating how he will say there are some exceptions. There were some women we can see even in our own time, who are pretty adept at government, but in general women cannot keep secrets. And then it's this hilarious, I think about-face when you get to the Enlightenment, especially after the High Enlightenment, 1750s and ‘60s, when people are starting to read Rousseau...Marat was already writing in the 1770s, and when, and I can talk about this more later, when we get to these shifts away from secrecy being away, people express successful masculinity, they shift to secrets, are actually weakness. They feminize secrets, and so they say, oh no, actually, women are too secret, they keep secrets, they are always pulling strings behind the scenes at court, like Madame de Pompadour, and then they say that to be a successful man, to truly be a man, you have to be a patriot. Right. There's this new language of patriotism during the Enlightenment and you have nothing to hide. You are upfront, you are authentic and that's a lot. A lot of that's also coming from Rousseau's novels. So, there's that gender aspect which I think is fascinating, and the other aspect is honor. So, I'm a cultural historian, I love looking at shifting cultural shifts and shifting attitudes towards concepts like religion. Honor, gender and honor was of course essential to every French persons in every social class, reputation or what they call credit or their social standing and secrecy, always a way to preserve honor. If, say, someone in your family did something a little shameful, it was actually best for the family honor to sweep it under the rug because you don't want to get out. Honor, of course, is very much tied to what people in your community say about you. There's no sense of you being honorable just alone in a vacuum. Today you might think of honor as integrity. Back then, honor is much more about how people in your community see you, what they say about you, and you certainly don't want to put your dirty laundry out in public. And secrecy is an essential aspect to maintaining family honor. And again there are changes towards attitudes and towards honor in the Enlightenment. So I'll pause there, but those are these two really fascinating aspects. Gender and honour, I would say for sure, are really important in the Old Regime.

Gary: No matter what women were doing, they were doing it wrong, whether it’s keeping too many secrets, or not keeping them…so you did start to touch on the next question, which is Many people have probably heard about the infamous lettres de cachet, letters signed by the King which often led to individuals being imprisoned or exiled. It may come as a surprise to some that many French people appealed to the king to order lettres de cachet for their family members and loved ones. Why was that?

Bauer: Yes, this is such an interesting, weird practice that again, spanned social classes, genders, professions, and so just to define them really quick. Many of your listeners probably know a little French. So when you hear it it it sounds like it's ‘hidden.’ And that's kind of interesting that there's sort of this hominum there for ‘cache,’ right, ‘hidden,’ but actually it's referring to ‘cachet’ ending in the letter ‘t,’ meaning ‘seal,’ like not, not like the seal, the performing seal, like not with a seal with a red ball on its nose, the seal like a stamp or a wax seal. That's what ‘cachet’ is in French, and so it was. It meant that it was secretive, because it was sealed no one, except for certain figures and in theory the king, the minister of the government who signed it and then maybe the governor of the Bastille who would let them in. Those are the only ones who are allowed to read it. And so it was this practice where a family member, usually someone in a position of authority but not always a father, could be a mother, could be a husband, could be a wife, could be the employer of servants, request this, usually from the police. So, in theory it's only the king who can sign a lettre de cachet and issue this order, and then it would have to be countersigned by a minister in the government. But what happens in actual everyday practice in the 18th century, and this is this, is increasing in practice as the government is becoming more and more centralized, bureaucratized in the late 17th century, really increasing through the 18th century, and they would request, usually from the Paris police, but also other police in the cities of France, for this family member to be put away secretly, quietly, usually under the cover of darkness. And some examples I found were just unbelievable wild stories, hours in the archives, poring over these police documents, because the police kept good records quite often and there was almost this voyeuristic quality to the way the police were observing these people. So, for example, it might be an aristocratic family and their son was engaging in what they called ‘debauchery’ and gambling a lot and was having multiple sexual partners, often of the same gender, which was extremely shameful and embarrassing to the father of this, to the patriarch of this noble family,. And this was in the city of Melun, which is a little bit outside Paris, and the father was actually the governor of Melun, aristocratic, important man in the community, and his son was off gallivanting with other young men, and so he requested the police to have his son arrested and sent to prison. And I followed this young man over several years and his father kept requesting him to be sentenced to prison because the police found him, arrested him, put him in prison for several months or a year, and then they would let him go in the hopes that he was quote unquote ‘corrected’ and then he would fall back into the same habits and then his father would request him arrested again, and it was. It's actually quite sad because honor and reputation are so important to these people. There is not the sense that we would think of today with families of total unconditional love. Not that families don't try to do things for their children. These days you have to earn a parent's love, you have to earn it by conforming to societal norms and behaving well. So, what happened was this father requested for his son to be put away until the end of his days, for all life, and we don't, I don't know exactly what happened to the son because of the paper trail fell away and instead the son kept trying to escape. Sometimes he escaped, he was caught and put back in prison, sometimes he was locked up in a monastery and then he escaped and then he'd be locked, sent somewhere else like the hospital general, which was maybe you know, a very kind of rough-and-tumble place to be where they put a lot of people they just considered fringe elements or riffraff. So, the Bastille prison was actually a little bit of a nicer place to be than the hospital general. But other examples might be…and this is where it's complicated. Wife could request a letter case against her husband if he was abusive, maybe coming home drunk every time and really creating havoc for her or the children. She could go to the police and say: can you please have him arrested? Because if I go through the normal channels of the law courts, it will take too long and this is really urgent. And so it was actually seen as a way to streamline, protect people. But it was definitely secretive. It was definitely not respecting any sense of a person's autonomy or human-rights a lot of parents using it against children. Husbands would use it against their wives. Like I said, employers could use it against their servants. Servants were not allowed to leave without permission. You weren't allowed to just quit, you needed permission and so if servants would run away, they could enlist the police to bring them back. One woman had the police find a maid who ran away when she was pregnant and said: oh, I'm actually trying to help her, she's pregnant and running around on her own, catch her and send her to the hospital and keep her there. And this is all against this young woman's will. Keep her there until she gives birth because it's my responsibility as her person to keep her safe. She doesn't even know what's good for her. So there's a lot of parochialism and there's a lot of this sense of these people are members of a patriarchal family, and so it's our job to look after them, even if they don't know any better, even if it's against their will. And the king is seen as sort of the larger head of a larger patriarchal family who intervenes to help maintain order within these families, but just to go a little further with this. This particularly expands as a practice in the late 17th century 18th century, because you have a shift, an interesting shift, of the government taking away some of the purview of the church. So it used to be. The church would intervene more in situations like this and try to mitigate immorality. There is a shift in language, in talking about subversive or, let's say, elements like this. In society, people who are sexually devious say there's a shift in talking about it, from sin to disorder, because in this 17th century and early enlightenment there's sort of this emphasis on bringing order and the state brings order, the patriarchal head of the family brings order, the king brings order to the kingdom, and so on top of this cultural emphasis on order, there's a growth in the bureaucratic arms of the government, and so the Paris police are growing and becoming more sophisticated. And there's the official head of police set up under Louis the 14th in the sixties, and it's considered the first modern police force. So it's interesting, it's kind of this old world, old Ancien Régime idea of collective honor, collective shame. And the patriarchal head of the family maintains order. But there's these newish trends in ideas of the state, where you have a more modern bureaucratized state intervening into your personal life more than it used to. And this also ties in with the rise of surveillance. The police are surveilling people more because what they would do when you request, let the cash, you request one for your cook who stole some stuff and ran away with the housemaid. The police would investigate. They wouldn't just take your word for it, they would talk to your neighbors discreetly. They would probably talk to the parish priest and say: is this right? Is this cook disreputable? Is this cook like a total reprobate? Should we? Is this person’s complaint legitimate? And then they would coordinate with the family to have this person arrested, usually at night, and they would grab them and send them to prison. And often they would not tell the person who is arrested why. So the victim would have no idea often why they've been arrested. No one would answer their questions. We have their letters written from prison and the police would write notes in the margins and say: do not reply. They would not send letters. Often for the people imprisoned, they would not answer their questions, they would not reply to their letters. It was almost like this in a modern sort of dictatorship. When people get disappeared, that's kind of what they do to you. You get disappeared and then say there are family members who didn't know about the arrest and want to know what happened to you, or they just want the police to confirm an arrest. Often they would not answer their questions. So there's this whole veil of secrecy around it that the police and the government use. That they believe maintains control, helps them keep a tight grip on things, but also that could enhance or create a sense of terror and fear and uncertainty. Because if you don't even know why you've been arrested or your family members and friends don't even know if you've been arrested, you just disappear. That uncertainty and fear, at least in theory for them, gives them an advantage and they can use that say to have the upper hand in interrogations or to scare people into cooperating. So most people who were arrested by lettre de cachet were family members or servants, spouses. Some, though you do, have a few cases high profile but secretive of spies say from foreign countries that they caught and they don't want anyone to know. They certainly don't want that other country maybe to know that they caught the spy and they would interrogate them. And then the other category might be very high ranking courtiers or aristocrats and the king, for whatever reason, is displeased with you and would send, or maybe you did badly in battle and actually that you were expected to present yourself. At present the king would send you a lettre de cachet and say, “I'm very displeased with your behavior. You know, go present yourself in prison tomorrow and you were expected to obey, and generally they did. Julian Swan has a fantastic book about dishonor. And among aristocrats under Louis the 14th and Louis the 15th, they generally would they would have. They would, they would be resigned, they would be angry, but they would obey and they would. They would present themselves with the lettre de cachet at the prison door and part of it was again the uncertainty. They wouldn't know how long the king planned to keep them there. It might just be a few days, but they don't know, so they have to go submit and present themselves there and just be aware that it could be two days, it could be a year. So those are the different categories and I can talk later about how attitude shifted. But basically, contrary to what revolutionaries said, this was a practice solicited by and approved of by most people in French society, at least in the first half of the 18th century. So I'll pause there.

Gary: You argue that religion played a major role in the turn against secrecy, particularly in the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1764. Can you explain who the Jesuits were, who the Jansenists were, why these two Catholic groups turned on each other, and how the Jansenists emerged victorious?

Bauer: Yes, yes, so this is a really really an interesting story and one that I feel like I was able to make an interesting contribution or maybe intervention into, because for people who are not familiar with this conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. The Jesuits were and still are in order in the Catholic Church that began during the Counter-Reformation when the church was dealing with. I'll make this brief. The church was dealing with the Protestant Reformation and so all these kind of new zealous types emerged to kind of revamp, help, give the church new life, and there was a lot of this new energy going into the church. In the 16th century, new orders like the Jesuits were founded that were both missionaries going abroad, spreading Christianity and educators in Europe. And so the Jesuits pretty quickly and to this day are known as very skilled humanists. They are humanists, so they're very much influenced by Renaissance, cultural shifts. Educators, and so they very quickly founded many, many cutting-edge high profile colleges…and college back then were kind of secondary schools for elites, but they also founded some schools for lower level education and they were often they often did not charge for an education. So it was generally considered that all young men from well off families would go, but sometimes there were men from more lower class, working class families who would go to these schools, and you were. You would be considered this the best kind of education you could get before going on to university if you were to do that back then. So, for example, someone like Descartes and Voltaire went to Jesuit colleges before the Jesuits were expelled in the 1760s. So this is the kind of reputation they had for teaching you the classics, but also often cutting-edge stuff like mathematics, sciences. They were known for being very curious and advanced in studying languages, the physical sciences, astronomy, mathematics, like I said, and they probably developed maybe the first time zone map because the Jesuits were basically an NGO, one of the first. They had a global network, they had missionaries all over the world and they communicated with each other, and so they probably arguably developed one of the first time zone maps because they were starting to experiment with that. So there's just a fascinating order that is really zealous but also really curious and tied into the Scientific Revolution and innovations in education. Also. We all owe it to the Jesuits because they probably invented the summer break. They, when they were setting up their schools, they decided: you know we're not going to have classes during summer because it's too hot. You know this is southern Italy and places like that. So anyway there's that. But they also developed this reputation for being very meddlesome, into intrigue, secretive, and this is because they had kind of this topdown method with influencing and spreading Christianity. Try to get in good with elites and then, if you can convert elites or have allies, be very pious and devout. This will trickle down to the rest of society. So they were very good at becoming confessors to prominent Queens, Kings, Duchesses, people at the Royal courts. They also used this method overseas. So when they were in places like China they would try to get in good with high ranking court officials, the emperor and others to hopefully convert people at the top, so to speak, to Christianity, and then it would trickle down. This did not happen in China, but the Chinese were very interested in the Jesuits’ science and they really took to advances in time-keeping which the Jesuits were also on board with. So they're just really interesting people into technical advances and advancements and philosophy and science. All this stuff. But they develop this reputation for being secretive and trying to pull the strings again behind the scenes, similar to women. A lot of the accusations you get during the enlightenment are similar to women at court. They're secretly pulling the strings. They're trying to control things. But added to that the Jesuits often were accused of a kind of global conspiratorial-ness to them. There's something about them and their global network which they did have because of their missionaries. Because of their connections. They are plotting to have a world-wide conspiracy and control of the government behind the scenes, similar to a lot of conspiracy theories today, and the fascinating thing is a scary thing is that they were often compared to Jewish people and the theories. The conspiracy theories about the Jesuits were very similar to those even now, antisemitic conspiracy theories that they have a worldwide network. “They are secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes and they are really foreign Even if they are in our country, they are not really of our country, they don't really belong, they're actually foreign.” So with Jewish people you know they would say, “oh yes, they're living in France, but they're really not French.” They use the same arguments with the Jesuits. They say, “well, maybe they're French. They grew up here, but they're loyal to Rome and they are ultra-montagne,” meaning loyal to the Pope above all and exclusively. They're not loyal to France right, they're not loyal to any local government and they're trying to infiltrate government, to control things for Rome and create this world-wide conspiracy to rule, rule the world. Basically, and never mind that the majority of the Jesuits were in the provinces running these small schools. Like I said, that is the bulk of their work in Europe, but they were famous and known for being at courts and being confessors and trying to control things behind the scenes. So that's the Jesuits. In a nutshell, the Jansenists are a group that develops out of some mystics and others in the 17th century, and there I mean without going too much into the theological debates around this. So Pascal, in the 17th century, was a very famous Jansenist and he had a few mystical experiences, got really on board with this idea. Jansenists are very much influenced by an Augustinian worldview. So their idea is that they're kind of like Calvinists, but they're still catholic and they believe in saints and miracles. Kind of so what that means? They kind of have a sense of human nature as being intrinsically wicked and you are prone to sin all the time and it's really only by grace that you could be saved and go to Heaven. It is not really much you can do, you pathetic human, because you're so sinful, you're so gross, it's really only god's grace. So pray to God. Hopefully you might be saved through your belief right. So there's more of a sense of grace or the wickedness of human nature and you can do very little, whereas Catholics traditionally emphasize good works and free will right. That's like the big catholic protestant divide and the reformation. So the Jesuits always were much more about freewill, good works. There are things you can do to get into Heaven. Jesuits are much more sanguine about human nature and our prospects for getting into Heaven and that kind of thing, and the Jansenists, because they're much more purist and they're austere and they believe in the power of grace really strongly. They didn't like how they thought the Jesuits were being too lax, especially with elites, and they were saying like oh yeah, you can still eat lots of meat and you know, go dancing, you know, just confess your sins before you die. You'll probably be okay, and they didn't like that. They like things, they liked things to be much more austere, strict and they believed that human nature is pretty corrupt. But what this leads to is they also have a very Manichean worldview they believe in. Things are pretty black and white for them there's good and evil and they use this interesting Biblical language of light and dark and that God's light will disperse the shadows and shine light into all the dark places. And this leads to a sort of suspicion of secrecy and darkness and things hidden. And the Jansenists, because of their views, seen as borderline, heretical, and in fact the pope, one of the Popes, issued a papal bull against them and they're still trying to maintain their beliefs and survive. In France, the French state started persecuting some of them and sending them to prison. So they were experiencing some persecution in the early 18th century. They blamed the Jesuits. They thought Jesuits at high ranking positions at court were working against them, convincing the king to persecute them. So that's part of the problem and maybe we don't know for sure. Maybe there were some Jesuits who were saying that the, their rivalry had begun in the 17th century when Pascal had written letters, these letters that were public letters attacking the Jesuits as two lax and two wishy-washy and tying themselves into knots to get people easy ways to get into Heaven kind of thing. So they're they are very suspicious of secrecy. They are kind of dealing with some persecution. They think the Jesuits are behind the persecution. They also think the Jesuits are secretive, plodding in the darkness. They start to align or connect Jesuit secrecy with foreignness. They're foreign because they're more loyal to Rome than they are to France. There's this concept of Gallicanism, which tries to promote the French church while still being catholic but independent from Rome. They are much more Gallican in that sense and the Jesuits less so. And then you get prominent Jansenists among some of them in the nobility and some of them in the parlement or the law courts, and they're more and more vocal about this new language of patriotism which really gets steam in the 1750s and 1760s. This is this new language that's very exciting to the French public and intellectuals, and so they start to latch on to that. They say we're all about patriotism, we're all about the French nation. We, we are actually representing the nation, almost in the sense that the British parliament does, even though this is not the same. This is not equivalent, but there they would say, oh the parliament are protecting the nation's rights and we should have a constitution, even though we don't but we should have one and we maybe represent the nation. So there's more of this language. And then meanwhile they're still hitting on the Jesuits, and so they start to connect secrecy with foreignness and actually a lot of their attacks on the Jesuits. They mentioned Jewish people. In the same attacks they say they're just like Jews. They will say this explicitly, they are secretive, they have these networks, they do not belong, they're sinful, they're wicked, they're doomed to wander. There is this. There's this old anti-semitic legend of the wandering Jew and they said that about Jesuits too. Oh, they're doomed to wander because they don't belong anywhere and they're actually corrupt. They're very corrupt, an they're hiding their international networks. So where I think I am intervening in this is. The Jansenists are often heralded as kind of early precursors of revolutionary or democratic or patriotic rhetoric or ideology, because they were talking about this idea of the nation and patriotism and they were kind of sometimes pushing back against government overreach, you could say. But their attacks and very successful attacks against the Jesuits are really there's some. There's some shady, shady aspects to this, where they're saying secrecy equals foreignness and they're developing this proto-nationalism. I would say this is the beginning of nationalism, where there's another nationalist always need another and they often have an internal or external other. This is just how we see this play out in the modern, in the modern world, again and again, and so they're developing this rhetoric which came out of religion, it came out of their interpretations of scripture, but it also has to do with their rivalry with the Jesuits. And so what happens is? They are also really good at marshalling public opinion, all kinds of, I mean we might call it a smear campaign, but all kinds of pamphlets, newspapers, some of them illegal, but they published them really successfully and abroad, talking about how corrupt and terrible the Jesuits are and some of it just really outlandish claims that the Jesuits are doing terrible things again, very similar to claims about Jewish people doing things to babies or hurting people or forcing people to convert or secretly controlling things at court. And then the Jesuits, on the other hand, were not very good at marshalling public opinion. Public opinion was such an important force and it was growing as, as something people were talking about, that was powerful and that was an alternative to state power in the enlightenment. And the Jesuits were still relying in traditional ways on patrons and powerful people at court, whereas the Jansenists, you could say, were much more enlightenment, save in using public opinion to get what they want, to reach out to the public, to convince people there. And so there were many influential figures in the parliament, magistrates and lawyers who were good at, you know, shifting public opinion away from the Jesuits, and they used a court case, a complicated court case having to do with some property. The Jesuits were shipping from areas in the Caribbean to basically argue that they were corrupt, contrary to French character and the French nation. They're using this proto nationalist discourse to say that they actually don't belong. They're not loyal, they're not patriotic and the Jesuits are basically expelled and a lot of their schools were closed down. This is kind of the. The unfortunate part especially is that a lot of their schools closed. They were providing education to a lot of people in the countryside. Some of those schools reopened under other religious orders, but there was some. There was a lot there, I think, and a lot of probably innocent people suffered too when they were forced to leave and they really don't come back until after Napoleon. So the Jesuits are fascinating. They. They were kind of considered counter revolutionary, though I think that's an exaggeration, during the Enlightenment. In the 19th century they tend to be pretty far to the right, supporting, you know, monarchical regimes. But you know in the 20th century they became very radical and very far to the left. It's very interesting. They now have a reputation for being very far on the left in the Catholic Church and of course the current pope is a Jesuit and he has angered a lot of conservatives because of his stuff about environmental or saying things about being tolerant towards gay people. So the Jesuits, I think, are just fascinating. I could talk about them all day, so yeah!

Gary: So on that note, so we've talked about this religious element. Now there is another very looming and exciting part of your book which I could not wait to discuss, which is the infamous fortress prison the Bastille. At the height of operations it was a particularly ominous and dreadful place. Can you detail how the Bastille became the Bastille of horror and legend?

Bauer: Yeah, so creepy, so dark. Right, and we love it, though I mean think of how many times it's been described in French literature and novels. This creepy, dark, mysterious place and every gothic novel you can think of often has place reminiscent of this. And yeah, I love it too. It's just so creepy and dark. I remember the first time I visited Paris when I was younger. Apparently I was a teenager. I was so disappointed to learn that it wasn't there any more. I wanted to go tour it, just like the people I talk about in my books, these book, these emotional tourists who would try to sneak in during demolition to experience the creepiness of the prison. And it's almost like ghost tourism today, which, by the way, is a booming industry. It's just fascinating where people will pay extra money to stay in supposedly haunted areas and haunted hotel rooms. They would do this during the revolution. People would sneak in, pay the workers to spend the night in, maybe a cell that doesn't even have a roof anymore, so they could get get the creepy vives and experience what it was like to be there. It's just a fascinating idea of itself. Why would someone pay money to get spooked? But people love it. So so, yeah, your question was about how it got this history right, how it got to be known.

Gary: How it became the Bastille of legends.

Bauer: Originally it was built, and I did want to say the 14th century, as a fortress, and it really becomes the Bastille legend, I would say under again under Richelieu, in the 17th century, when more and more he and Louis the 13th were using it to sort of mostly to put to incarcerate fisty aristocrats so they could cool their heels, because this was a time when aristocrats were still powerful. Right there's this narrative: rice: centralizing the monarchy, trying to tame powerful provincial centers, trying to bring more power to the monarchy, and if that meant imprisoning or attacking powerful aristocrats, he would do that right. Initially it was a place for that, and so you didn't have, as many say, peasants or people from the artisanal classes going there. If they were, they were sent somewhere. It's usually the hospital general, which was kind of a madhouse/hospital/place you just put people who are kind of fringe people, homeless people. They would force, they would collect them and put them there. So then you get the creation of the modern police force. In the 1660s and more and more Louis the 14th was also using it in that way to put away feisty aristocrats, but also spies and anyone else that the government may be thought was troublesome or new, new, dangerous secrets. This is the time period also of ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’ To this day nobody knows who he is and many great historians and much ink has been spilt spilled trying to figure out who he is. Paul Sonino wrote a really great book, and he's he might be right, because he's probably an expert on diplomatic history in the 17th century. But there were a few creepy, murky things that happened during the reign of Louis the 14th. One of them is ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’ There seems to be evidence that there was a masked prisoner first sent to prisons in the provinces far far-away like Pignerol and other places like this at the borders down in the south, and then he was sent to the vast prison and nobody knows who he was. But there seemed to be this prisoner that you no one was allowed to see, no one was allowed to talk to and that maybe was wearing a mask. So that was weird and creepy and people got really curious. Part of it also is there's the secrecy spurs curiosity. People are just dying to know what is it you're hiding? Why is he wearing a mask? Why can't anyone talk about him? Why can't any one see him? What's the deal right? So of course, when there's secrecy like this, it just spurs all these rumors and stories. Maybe he's a twin brother, maybe he's someone related to the royal family. So there's that story and those rumors start percolating in the reign of Louis the 14th and then they get picked up later by people like Voltaire and during the Enlightenment. And then there's also creepy, weird things, like the affair of the poisons which happened in the reign of Louis the 14th, and just really quick. This was a very crazy, bizarre scandal where it seems like a lot of high profile people at the court were involved in satanism, magic, the occult and all kinds of weird creepy stuff, like a black mass, which is a satanic ritual. That's kind of an inversion of a catholic mass, where you sacrifice an infant to the devil and hopefully we'll get riches and power in return. And supposedly a lot of people were involved with this, plus poisoning, plus talking to fortune tellers to get wealth and power in unsavory ways. And then it got out that maybe the king's mistress was involved. This was Madame de Montespan, probably the most powerful woman at the time that she was getting involved in satanic rituals and they started investigating it and found this wide network of fortune tellers, occultists, other magicians practicing all kinds of all kinds of weird, weird, creepy stuff: alchemy, this whole kind of underground network of magic and dealing in potions in Paris. And not only are these all these kinds of people doing this, there's a lot of their clients are aristocrats at the court and so they started to investigate. But then the more it got out that really high profile people, very prominent people, were involved, the more the king tried to, you know, sweep some of it under the rug. So basically his mistress did eventually lose her position. But nothing really bad happened to her, whereas other people who maybe knew things about her or other high ranking people were sent to prison and some of them were basically like thrown in dungeons. And this isn't even an exaggeration. The there were people who were kind of thrown in dungeons for the rest of their lives, in dark, dank places, chained to walls, enforced not to forbidden to speak about what they knew for the rest of their lives. And so a lot of this weird, creepy stuff happened. So it's not an exaggeration to say that people were thrown into dungeons, chained to walls and forced to be silent for the rest of their lives. So there's creepy, weird stuff like this happening. But what's also interesting is Louis the 14th was very active in persecuting protestants and Jansenists who we know about now, and a lot of them were sent to the Bastille or other prisons. And then when Louis the 14th revoked the edict of Note which made Protestantism again illegal in France, a lot of protestants fled to parts all over Europe and the Americas. Some were also forced to row in the galleys, which were these ships, you know, kind of like Ben Her style, where you had to row. A lot of them were sent to those horrible places and when they went abroad they published what is now known as the black legend or dark legend of the Bastille, this creepy horrible place where people are tortured or locked up forever. And it's just terrible and it's it's the worst thing that can ever happen to you. And they promoted this legend as a kind of anti-French anti-Louis the 14th propaganda, and it just spread and grew through the 18th century. Jansenists continue to be persecuted and, like we said, they're very good at promoting themselves in publicity and saying: look how terrible this is, look how persecuted we are. We're like martyrs for the faith and they would publish this in France secretly and they would publish it abroad and they would say how terrible the prison was because by exaggerating the horrors of the prison, that, of course, can help lend credit and sympathy to their plight and their cause by saying yes, see, see how much we've suffered in this horrible prison and there's all this torture going on and there's all these secret executions and it's terrible. Now there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that a lot of torture was happening in the 18th century. The police did, could and did torture people in interrogations, and they have this whole complicated system where they would show you the instruments first and then if you didn't talk, then they might do a little bit like the thumb screws or something. It could be very. It could get very bad, though, and they did use torture. Until you know, basically the revolution, the revolution abolished it, but it doesn't seem like there was a lot of torture going on. It doesn't seem like there was a lot of extra judicial killing. It doesn't seem like there were. There were even that many people imprisoned there after the reign of Louis the 15th, in the 1760s and ‘70s, but nevertheless because of this stuff, the real, actual, creepy stuff that happened under Louis the 14th, then the spread of the legend by people who are very savvy publicity types, sending abroad and spreading that around France as well. This legend spreads and grows. Then Voltaire picks up the story of the man in the Iron Mask and he was really emphatic about it. You know he said I'm a legit historian, I did my research, I talked to my source and I am convinced that ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ was the king's identical twin brother, and this is why so we don't have a lot of evidence for that. But Voltaire really thought that he had it right and published this and that kind of gave new life into this story. And it became mysterious and creepy again. And how could the king do this? The king would lock up an innocent family member to maintain power, which of course doesn't make the monarchy look good, and so there are. There are wider cultural changes happening where the monarchy is losing some of its sacredness, its legitimacy, and Roger Chartier wrote writes about this really well in his cultural origin of the French Revolution. Great book, and so there's that, but also 1760 and 1770. You get the rise of gothic literature, and I thought this was so cool. This was a connection I did not see right away, and some of this I owe to Colin Jones. You know the revolutionary historian who pointed this out for sure. He says: you know, I see these creepy dark legends around the Bastille prison that you're talking about. They really are reminiscent of gothic stories and I said, yes, you're totally right, and I also love gothic stories and I read a lot of them and I'm steeped in that whole stuff and the gothic genre was really exploding out of kind of sentimental literature at this time. Talking about this literature is more based on emotions and affect. It seems a little bit at odds with the enlightenment values of transparency, light, reason, order, and maybe that's why the gothic became so popular. Stories of ghosts, haunted houses, witches, ruins, creepy dark places, mysteries, secrets, and almost always the secrets are horrible and sinister and bad coming to light. But through the course of the novel these become really popular and become even more popular in the 1790s, the decade of the revolution. And I think that it's because, first off in the gothic, the bad guys are almost always aristocrats or clerics right, and these are coincidentally right, not really the bad guys in the French Revolution. You know, these are the people who are corrupt, who are after their own power, and the decaying castle or the ruins of a monastery are symbolic of their kind of corrupt decadence, an evil nature that is falling apart in the face of the light of revolution and new order and democracy. Right so there's that. But there's also underneath the surface this appeal and fascination with creepy dark secrets and what? What is hidden right? The mysteries are fascinating and attractive. Mysterious people are often attractive, like what is it? What is about them? Why? What are they hiding right? So there's this cultural trend of valuing transparency and light. I think the Jansenists has had a lot of influence in that. That translates into the political culture of the French Revolution. But underneath that I think there's also this sort of reaction to that or response to well, but isn't mystery still attractive? Isn't it still fascinating? And I think that's part of why people loved gothic literature at this time, and it's also part of what makes them so attracted to this, what I call best literature that is very creepy and dark, and the stories they would write about people in prisons and they were like in a dungeon surrounded by snakes and lizards and slimy, slimy snails and rats and things like this, and they're chained to the wall. And there's all these creepy, dark, elaborate torture machines and torture chambers and they thought they were, you know, Indiana Jones style. There were trap doors and booby traps so that the floor would give way and you would fall into spikes. There are really elaborate stories they are telling about the prison that are probably not true. So there's that. But then what happens in the revolution? They storm the Bastille prison right and they almost very immediately begin demolition. Louis the 16th was planning to demolish the prison anyway because it was literally falling apart. You know, one day the drawbridge fell off. So, but the revolutionaries took credit for demolishing it. They hated it, they saw it as a symbol of despotism and terror and secrecy. And then they, but they did find some human remains and when this happens they just go bark, they lose their minds because there's been this legend that has been building for the past 100 years of creepy, dark stuff happening behind the scenes, the government abusing power, torturing people, maybe, and then they find body parts, they find human remains and bones and they just they just go nuts. And the French press, which now is proliferating because they've lifted censorship with the French revolution, publishes all these stories about, “oh my gosh, we found bodyparts. Clearly these people were killed in infamy and secrecy and we're going to bring them to the light. They died in dishonor. We're going to bring them to honor; the king, or the government is so corrupt.” I mean it's the equivalent of when you know, if you know anything about serial killers. I mean I'm not an expert in serial killers. But when the looked under John Wayne Gacy's house and found all those bodies, this is what it's like for the French public. They're freaking out because it looks like, oh my gosh, we suspected the king was secretly killing people and then we found these bodies and so they staged a huge funeral for the bodies with 800 National Guard. And Bastille workers are marching with the remains and they made a little mock the Bastille prison and they gave speeches, and then they buried these people and they made a monument for these people. Now we don't know exactly who they were or why they died. Some people who were, who died in the prison were buried on-site if they were not Catholic, because you had to be Catholic or Christian to be buried in sacred ground, you know in a churchyard. So some people did die there and were buried in the garden. So that might have been who they found. Right. But it still looks bad. It looks bad that were demolished this prison that is a symbol of despotism and then found body parts. So that just amplifies even more and is also very useful to the revolutionaries, as assigned that the government was corrupt, evil, wicked, despotic and using secrecy to hide horrible abuses of power. And it's really crazy and fun too, because when I was reading about them discovering these human remains, that also revives again the story of The Man in the Iron Mask and they start speculating about that again and they loved to write about that. You have many people, ordinary people, writing letters to the editor of a magazine or a new newspaper and saying, oh, you know what, actually, I think he was this and I heard from so and so that he was actually this person back in the 17th century. So they're titillated, they're fascinated, they're horrified, but they're also, I think, not wanting to admit how attracted they are to mystery. So there's all these layers of the dark legend, and then there's the rise of gothic literature, and then there's the finding actual human remains in the prison after the storming of the bust in 1789. So that's kind of, I'll pause there, but that's kind of it in a nutshell, it's wild and crazy, though right.

Gary: Finally, I want to ask a question about the long-lasting impact of secrecy and the state. This is actually a sub-theme of the podcast; Dr. Joan DeJean did an episode on her book about how Paris police kidnapped innocent women and forced them into exile in Louisiana. I talked with Dr. Deborah Bauer about the development of domestic surveillance services in France between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. My dissertation is on the emergence of mass surveillance of citizens in France and Britain during World War I and how that set the stage for the all-seeing intelligence services we have today, like the NSA, GCHQ and the various French domestic intelligence agencies. This might be a big question and somewhat speculative, but what do you think were the long-term impacts of the French Revolution on the country’s use of secrecy?

Bauer: Yeah, that's a great question and we are still, I think, watching that play out in real-time maybe maybe like the French revolution itself. Are we still grappling with it? Figure out what it means right? Even though fur said the revolution is over, we are still figuring out how we feel about it, how we interpret it right. So with, yes, that's so that's so interesting, how it's kind of become a sub theme of the podcast. Yeah, and I think it has to do also with how we as a society have not close the books on this. The jury is still out. We. We don't know yet how we feel about this, and I think part of it is we don't even recognize some of our own contradictions around secrecy and transparency, for example, since the revolution, and you know the rise of civil society and you know the ideology behind democracy. Right is that the government should be transparent, accountable and we have to keep an eye on it. Right that what happens when we reverse the gaze? You know we need to keep an eye on the government. To what extent is the government allowed to keep an eye on you? This? We saw surveillance increase in the early-modern and modern period and even though revolutionaries were very angry about the police and the government using surveillance against the public, they very quickly use surveillance as well. I mean there are the famous for infamous surveillance committees during the French revolution, during the terror, when they promoted and really encourage citizens to denounce each other, to survey each other, to report neighbors to the surveillance committee and then they would be sent to the tribunal, the revolutionaries, while decrying the abuses of the police in the old regime. I think a lot of a lot of those same police just kind of shifted to the new revolutionary police and started working for the revolutionaries and using surveillance on anyone they suspected of counter-revolution right. And so you know that you know during the terror it's very scary time if you are not overtly pro revolution or even pro-Jacobin at that time. So we, I think, in many countries around the world and in France are still grappling with that history, because we want to keep an eye on the government. We want the government to keep us safe. But to what extent does the government get to intrude into your private life? What is the distinction between privacy and secrecy? Where do we draw the line if the government needs to keep an eye on people, to watch out for any threats to national security but at the same time does not want to violate your privacy right? So that's why there are a lot of laws in place that you know they can't search your house without permission or without a search warrant and things like this. And yet these debates are still raging right. It's not. It's not as if everyone's on the same page with this, and I think there's a lot of ways to go, a lot of directions to go. And here I think I'd like to mention, you know, Snowden and usage, and there was just this recent leak, this one. I think he was an airman right, he was in the air force and he just leaked government documents related to the war in Ukraine. Here in the United States. There was that. That just happened, and sometimes these people are hailed as heroes. They're kind of Robin hoods, if you will, of information they steal from the rich and give to the poor, they the governments, hoarding secrets from you and we're going to share it with you. But then others might say, oh, this is actually not so good, because there are some secrets that maybe save lives, or maybe we want to keep the secret so that rival countries don't find out what we're planning right. So there's there's that issue. There's that debate around how heroic is it really to steal secrets from the government and share it with the public? Are there some secrets that actually should remain hidden? Are we really meant to disclose everything? Is? Is everyone safer if we disclose everything, the problem or the? The issue today is that this is up for debate. I mean that's not necessarily a bad thing right. We are debating this in earlier centuries. It was just a given that the government kept secrets from you. You didn't even have a right to pry into them, but now this is an ongoing, lively debate. How much do we have a right to see into? Should everything really be disclosed? Maybe some secrets should be kept secret, at least for a while right. Maybe some lives will be saved. Maybe that's better for security or a war if we're in a war situation or something like this right, although governments have often used emergency situations as an excuse to kind of expand their powers right. So there's that issue there's the government should be transparent to us, because that's a pretty core value now in a democratic society. But how transparent should we be right? Do we have a right to privacy and where does that? Where do we draw that line? How many secrets do we get to keep at the same time with social media and the internet? Often people are willing to sacrifice a lot of their privacy for the sake of convenience, and you know all this stuff about your. Your information might be on the internet if you use your credit card to buy stuff and you know, and there's a lot of places where you're vulnerable to identity theft and we have often willingly given up some of that privacy or secrecy in exchange for convenience or fun. Or what have you right? A lot of people will say they love, they love to reference intended for the novel, but they will often say: you know, big brother didn't have to force a screen on you. You, you brought it in your home yourself. You know, maybe you have. What is it that echo? You know from Amazon, where I can talk to you and you tell it what to do and it can order new toilet paper for you if you are out of toilet paper, or it could also call your mother-in-law if you want to call your mother-in-law you just say: you know, sir, on your phone call. So and so. And there was that recent mishap where someone, someone's phone call, was accidentally recorded and sent to a bunch of other strangers because there was a malfunction with the, with the echo or whatever. It was. So part of it is that you know we are not 100% sure. We have not yet grappled with the contradictions in our own society between privacy versus transparency. And on top of that is all this new technology which seems to be threatening our privacy and rights to secrecy. And to what extent are we willing to sacrifice or give up some of that privacy for convenience? So I say that's one big issue, another one is, and this is just across. I think a lot of countries is conspiracy theories, and this is kind of one of my other bailiwicks are favorite, slash and not so favorite topic is. They're just so popular and have gained a lot of ground in recent years, throughout again, throughout many countries, not just the us, but they're very prominent in elsewhere and a lot of this is spreading on misinformation. But what I would say is the French revolution and the earlier decades in France can teach us a lot about the proliferation and really huge popularity and sway that conspiracy series, secrets, conspiracy theories, hold over people. And it is not. It is not that these people are out of touch with reality, I mean you might say they are. It's not that these people are just, you know, badly educated and not good at informing themselves. I mean they're usually reading stuff all over the internet, having different, listening to different new sources, listening to their podcasts right. Maybe. So you know such podcast. There's Joe Rogan says something on his podcast and everybody believes it. It's not that it's not that they're not listening and watching and reading. They are. It's just that during the French revolution like now, there was this explosion of suddenly different news outlets. For them it was newspapers. For us now we have all kinds of sources and suddenly it was much easier to get into an echo chamber and listen to someone that could kind of one and then promote and then reify your worldview, your assumptions and your prejudices against other groups of people. And so that kind of is happening now, where people can pick and choose their news outlet. It's not like everyone now, like in the seventies or eighties, watches the evening news. A lot of people have their own particular news outlet, sometimes extremist that caters to their will, view and then reifies it right and then creates an echo chamber. So that happened during the French revolution, where people started to read the newspaper that that catered to their specific target audience rather than a broad public and started to intensify or maybe radicalize their views. So that is happening now as well because we live, like then, in a very polarized political atmosphere. There are just periods in history where people get pretty politicized. It's almost like waves and crests and troughs. You know with waves the French revolution was a very polarizing, intensely politicized moment. Of course, maybe unprecedented politicization happening ever happened like that before the French revolution, at least in the West this 1960. We're a moment of intense politicization and then now I think it's also happening and it's very polarized. Not that we haven't had this kind of polarization before or that we haven't had this kind of intensity or level of crisis. I think we have. But there's this: multiple news outlets like they had during the French revolution and the other kind of probably key component to why conspiracy theories fears. Intense nationalism is rearing its head again. Is a lot of people have this Manikin worldview and it's like I said, tied to nationalism and seeing are needing another right, and often it's an external or internal other. But there has to be another in nationalism because it's predicated on dichotomies. It often needs another to define itself, and so we've got really rampant nationalism that's intensifying and this Manikin worldview is sort of added to this sense of echo chamber and going to your one news outlet that's relying your beliefs and then that often or it can lead to a dehumanizing or seeing this other as very one-dimensional and seeing things in black and white, good and evil right. So if you see this other in that way, you're much likely much more likely to denigrate them and see them as maybe not even human or the enemy and an enemy that needs to be annihilated rather than negotiated with or engaged in debate. And unfortunately I mean we see that now, and that's often the rhetoric you get in the French revolution. During the terror, they didn't have this sense of enemies. Let's like bring them to the table and have a debate about what to do with the war or what not. It was their enemies. They don't belong to the nation. They need to be, you know, cut out in some way, we're annihilated right there's you see this language a lot in Danton and Saint-Just and Robespierre and all this stuff, and I do think there's a lot to admire about those figures. It's just that that's kind of the Jacobin rhetoric and I think we see that. See that again. And it's really, and I just wish more people knew this history because it's so uncanny, it's so similar to how it was in the revolutionary period, how we are getting more polarized, how we have this Manikin worldview, how we have our echo chamber and we're less likely to listen to people who deviate from from that and to stereotype and have really intense prejudices against them. So those are two among many main ways that that this history really informs what's happening right now: the debate around government transparency and Wikileaks and publicizing government documents and the current debates and all the swirling and all the wondering and all the hand wringing about conspiracy theories and why they're gaining such attraction now. What is it about them and what is it about us? And conspiracy theories were a big deal and really central to the French Revolutionary political culture, and so I just think there's a lot there that can teach us about why we're so into those now and what's going on.

Gary: The book is Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France, 2023. Thank you for being on the show, Dr Bauer.

Bauer: Thank you. This was a pleasure.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going, so if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.