HIST 358: The Self before the Selfie (HC): Crime, Police and Censorship

Drawing on twenty-five years of research, Darnton reveals the illegal book trade in rich detail. He explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers: Therese Philosophe, an anti-clerical blend of sex and metaphysics; L'An 2440, an attack on the Old Regime in the form of a utopian fantasy set in a future Paris; and Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, a deliciously scathing work of political slander with the king as its target. Substantial excerpts from these works, gathered at the end of the book, make excellent reading today and shed light on elements of our own political culture.

The monarchy, two empires and five republics have faced the challenge of "emotions" and revolts, but also an expectation of civil peace and security. Four specialists offer a history of police, attentive to everyday events, to major affairs as well as to the crash of political and social crises.

Focusing on everyday legal experiences, from that of magistrates, novelists and political philosophers, to maidservants, pauper men and women, down-at-heel attorneys and middling-sort wives in their coverture, History and the Law reveals how people thought about, used, manipulated and resisted the law between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Supported by clear, engaging examples taken from the historical record, and from the writing of historians including Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and E. P. Thompson, who each had troubled love affairs with the law, Carolyn Steedman puts the emphasis on English poor laws, copyright law, and laws regarding women. Evocatively written and highly original, History and the Law accounts for historians' strange ambivalent love affair with the law and with legal records that appear to promise access to so many lives in the past.

Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735-1789 is the first of two volumes centred around the two great courts of Paris, the Chotelet and Parlement, and their criminal defendants in the eighteenth century. Richard Andrews seeks to refute the 'black legend' of revolutionary propaganda and its modern historical successors, which hold that the Old Regime courts were cruel and arbitrary. These courts are shown rather to be thoroughly rule-bound and consisting of strict judicial procedure derived from royal statutes. Rule of and by the law is shown to be the most substantial legacy of the Old Regime. This volume places the courts of Old Regime Paris in the context of French society and the state. The practices and doctrines of punishment are examined, along with the jurisprudence of moral and criminal behaviour.

A Poisoned Chalice tells the story of a long-forgotten criminal case: the poisoning of the communion wine in Zurich's main cathedral in 1776. In the wider world of German-speaking Europe, writes Jeffrey Freedman, the affair became a cause célèbre, the object of a lively public debate that focused on an issue much on the minds of intellectuals in the age of Enlightenment: the problem of evil. Contemporaries were unable to ascribe any rational motive to an attempt to poison hundreds of worshippers.

Documents from the French National Archives shed light on the birth of the modern police. During the 18th century, the police force took on new roles while being the subject of numerous debates initiated by philosophers.

Relations between theatre and state were seldom more fraught in France than in the latter part of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century. The unique attraction of the theatre, the sole source of mass entertainment over the period, accounts in part for this: successive governments could not ignore these large nightly gatherings, viewing them with distrust and attempting to control them by every kind of device, from censorship of plays to the licensing of playhouses.

In this study, author Steven G. Reinhardt utilizes a micro-level, descriptive approach to examine the intersection of honor and violence in prerevolutionary France, in particular in the Périgord region between 1770 and 1790. Based on a sampling of criminal court cases from a region marginally integrated into the emerging capitalist economy, Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Périgord presents a series of rich narratives illustrating their subjects' understanding of the imperatives of the honor code. Combining careful scholarship with popular history, the book will interest historians of early modern Europe, legal scholars, and anthropologists of law, as well as students and general readers interested in the history of violence.