Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France.

By Sarah Maza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xii plus 354pp. $35.00).

A dispute over debts between a family of commoners and an aristocrat, a conflict between seigneur and villagers over the control of a local festival, a case of international insider trading on the stockmarket, an affair of fraud and deception over a necklace for a queen, an indictment for theft, a death sentence for a servant accused of poisoning an old man, a domestic dispute over abandonment by a husband, and a case of adultery by a wife: these disparate sources of litigation riveted the attention of the literate elite as causes celebres during the last two decades of the Old Regime in France. They achieved this elevated status because a group of young, Enlightenment-educated, ambitious lawyers undertook to write trial briefs (memoires judicidiaires) that they published and distributed by the thousands to a literate public frantic for this sort of sensational news.

Sara Maza argues that these memoires rivalled popular books (including the underground literature) and important newspapers as one of the most successful types of publication--with single editions running from 3,000 to over 10,000 printings--in prerevolutionary France. Maza exploits this rich source to discuss "the ways in which the writing and reading of sensational courtroom literature contributed to the birth of public opinion and a new public sphere." (p. 2-3)

The transformations of the memoire from a single handwritten brief intended for coutroom use in the seventeenth century to a new form in multiple printed copies destined for public consumption after the mid-eighteenth century served many purposes and had profound consequences. Lawyers argued that by rendering public the facts of a case they leveled the field between unequal parties, and thus mitigated the potential effect of influence and even bribes in judgments. The causes celebres thus fumed the court into a forum to which the public was called to pass judgment. As Maza points out, while the "appeal to `public opinion' was undoubtedly a rhetorical convention shaped by political struggles over the course of the century; increasingly, however, the convention overlapped with the growing social reality of the memoire readers." (129) Publishing memoires also provided an opportunity for ambitious barristers to bring together legal ability and literary skill, and Maza emphasizes that in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, lawyers came to displace "men of letters as leaders of the prerevolutionary ideological crusade." (215) Indeed, lawyers drew upon the symbols, language, and style of both Rousseauean sentimental autobiography (as well as his position on gender) and theater, especially its melodramatic elements, and did so "in terms that were both intensely personal and universally intelligible," thereby contributing to the emergence of a "protodemocratic public sphere" (67) that was gendered male. The memoire served as an increasingly effective vehicle for highlighting contemporary political concerns, and it is no accident, Maza asserts, that recourse to public trial briefs coincided with the important political crises of the period: Jansenism, the Maupeou crisis, and then the multiple concerns of the last years of the 1780s. Lawyers cut their political teeth during these crises, and their memoires wove the larger themes of debate--attacks on despotism, social inquity, and the social and political role of women--into their cases with increasing openness.

Drawing upon Jurgen Habermas' analysis of the emergence of the public sphere, Roger Chartier's insistence upon seeking the cultural, rather than ideological origins of the Revolution, and Keith Baker's exhortations to analyze nontraditional texts, Maza expertly establishes the memoires as crucial links between the High Enlightenment and the Revolution. She demonstrates how these briefs came to "translate political tensions into social imagery," a development with explosive potential. However, I am not convinced that she can deduce from her evidence how much "the consciousness of real social grievances was a by-product of the struggle to define and control a wider, and more open, political arena" (67), although this struggle surely helped to hone this consciousness. By deftly analyzing the most successful of these memoires and directly addressing the thorny question of determining readership, Maza does show convincingly that their writers contributed to the creation of public opinion and the the gendering of that public sphere. She contributes significantly to our understanding of the dynamic role barristers played in shaping the prerevolutionary period and of the ways in which the barristers adopted the Enlightenment for this role. She suggests that this role helped prepare them for their part in the Revolution itself.