Tracing the shadow of secrecy and government transparency in Eighteenth-Century France / Nicole Bauer.
Bauer, Nicole, author.
2023
DC133.4
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Title Tracing the shadow of secrecy and government transparency in Eighteenth-Century France / Nicole Bauer.
Author Bauer, Nicole, author.
ISBN 9783031122361 (electronic bk.)
3031122364 (electronic bk.)
9783031122354
3031122356
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1
Published Cham : Springer, 2023.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (233 pages)
Item Number 10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1 doi
Call Number DC133.4
Dewey Decimal Classification 944.034
Summary This book traces changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and explores the cultural origins of ideas surrounding government transparency. The idea of keeping secrets, both on the part of individuals and on the part of governments, came to be viewed with more suspicion as the century progressed. By the eve of the French Revolution, writers voicing concerns about corruption saw secrecy as part and parcel of despotism, and this shift went hand in hand with the rise of the idea of transparency. The author argues that the emphasis placed on government transparency, especially the mania for transparency that dominated the French Revolution, resulted from the surprising connections and confluence of changing attitudes towards honour, religious movements, rising nationalism, literature, and police practices. Exploring religious ideas that associated secrecy with darkness and wickedness, and proto-nationalist discourse that equated foreignness with secrecy, this book demonstrates how cultural shifts in eighteenth-century France influenced its politics. Covering the period of intense fear during the French Revolution and the paranoia of the Reign of Terror, the book highlights the complex interplay of culture and politics and provides insights into our attitudes towards secrecy today. Nicole Bauer is Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Tulsa in the USA. A cultural historian of early modern France, she is particularly interested in pulling threads from different directions to understand and uncover the cultural origins of political and social movements.
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Intro
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
Creatures of Infamy: Lettres de Cachet, Family Honor, and the Uses of Secrecy
The Governor's Son
The Widow Nolan
Mlle. de Nogent
Growing Resistance and Critiques
The Fate of Secrets in a Public Sphere: The Comte de Broglie and the Demise of the Secret du roi
The Perils of Secrecy
Transparency and a New Masculinity
Rejecting Secrecy and the Secret du roi
Those Who Know Your Secrets: Jesuit Secrecy and the Proto-nationalism of the Jansenists
The Jansenist Worldview and the Monita Secreta

The Problematic Jesuit Counter-Attack
Secrecy and the Foreign Other, Transparency and the Patriot-Citizen
"I Promise Never to Speak to Anyone": Police Practices and the Bastille
Inviolable Secrecy
Secrecy and Rumor
The Obstacles to Reform
Desire, Dread, and the Grateful Dead: The Bastille, Its Cadavers, and the Revolutionary Gothic Imaginary
Desire and Repression
The Bastille and Its Buried Secrets
The Marat of Versailles: Advocates of Transparency During and After the Terror
The Marat of Versailles
A Hundred Invisible Hands

Moderate Thermidoreans and Transparency
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

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