The political significance in pre-revolutionary France of slanderous gossip, seditious accounts of contemporary history and libellous biographies of people in power, circulating from mouth to mouth as well as in manuscript and print, is now well known. Darnton’s list of the top forbidden bestsellers in pre-revolutionary France includes several titles of the kind, many of them substantial works in several volumes.
1 R. Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers in Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996). They appealed to hungry readers because, as Darnton notes, they were very good reading, but also because they offered an insight into politics and current events that licit literature could not. Slander, immorality, politics and contemporary history were the main targets of censorship regulations, in France as well as in Denmark–Norway. Nevertheless, Darnton shows how pieces of information that often began as oral gossip in the circuit of communication could travel on ‘scraps of paper’ before they ended up in more or less coherent printed narratives that represented public affairs as the product of private lives. As such, they became central in practices of unmasking politics. ‘Anecdotes’, ‘chronique scandaleuse’, ‘vie privée’, ‘mémoires secrètes’ were part of an underground literature that nurtured suspicion about the motives and capabilities of those in power. In pre-revolutionary France, by lifting the veil of secrecy in particular ways, they contributed to creating a new public sphere, eroded authority under absolute monarchy and became absorbed in a republican political culture.
2 R. Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia, 2010), pp. 6–7. See also A. Farge, Subversive Words. Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century France (Philadelphia, 1995).Darnton is not alone in pointing out how this current of literature drew on a long history of scandal in print and on techniques developed by earlier authors, such as the late antique Byzantine historian Procopius. His
Anecdota presented the hitherto ‘unknown’ and ‘unofficial’ history of the reign of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora and claimed to expose the true, secret, private springs of their public actions. Behind their great public esteem was hidden immoral behaviour and scandalous relations. Over the last three decades scholars have demonstrated how the translations of Procopius’
Anecdota into French in 1660 and English in 1674 (as
Histoire secrète and
Secret history) sparked a stream of ‘secret histories’ and ‘anecdotes’ in the fast-growing market of print, adapting the procopian model to various past as well as present European contexts.
3 For instance, E. Tavor Bannet, ‘“Secret History”: Or, Talebearing inside and outside the Secretoire’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005), 375–96; R. Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure 1674–1725 (London, 2009), and P. Burke, ‘Publicizing the Private. The Rise of “Secret History”’, in C. J. Emden and D. Midgley (eds), Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York, 2012). Most of these adaptations promised to present the unofficial side of things, revealing the hidden, secret ‘truth’ about powerful institutions and people in Europe, past and present. They usually made the claim that the information they conveyed was authentic, based on insiders’ eyewitnesses and trustworthy sources, and they frequently reported occurrences of scandalous nature involving sex and abuse of power. In his
Cyclopædia (1728) Ephraim Chambers notes that ‘Anecdotes’ is a term used ‘by some authors, for the titles of Secret Histories; that is, of such as relate the secret affairs and transactions of princes; speaking with too much freedom, or too much sincerity, of the manner and conduct of persons in authority, to allow of being made public’. He traces the term to Procopius, who ‘seems to be the only person among the ancients, who has represented princes, such as they are in their domestic relations’.
4 E. Chambers, Cyclopædia (London, 1728), vol. 1, ‘Anecdotes’. Throughout the eighteenth century these kinds of representations proliferated across Europe, where they hid under a cover of anonymity and circulated more or less clandestinely, despite continuing danger of prosecution and persecution.
Darnton categorises the French anecdotes, private lives and secret histories as libels, and in the French context, they indeed were.
5 R. Darnton, The Devil, pp. 266–7. However, as they crossed borders as they increasingly did, whether in original language or in translation, in entire volumes or in bits and pieces, their categorisation and legal status changed. Denmark–Norway had its own local libels, however. Despite the laws that strictly prohibited libel and slander (called
smædeskrifter or
paskviller), which made them a main target for censorship restrictions, a rich platter of popular manuscript libels as well as erotic, scandalising literature circulated during the eighteenth century. Christina Holst Færch has shown how this ‘unpublishable’ literature became more radical after the introduction of absolutism in 1660. She sees the manuscript libels as a profoundly political weapon targeting the Dano-Norwegian elite and suggests that they resulted from the ‘information vacuum’ caused by the centralisation and secrecy of power. She also points to their importance for the growing political awareness in Denmark–Norway during the eighteenth century.
6 See C. Holst Færch, Smædeskrifter, sladder og erotiske vers i 1700-tallet. Hans Nordrups forfatterskab (Copenhagen, 2019), pp. 113, 141, 149.The political implications of the printed anecdotes, private lives and secret histories imported from abroad were less obvious, however. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, ‘anecdote’ had become a versatile label referring to all sorts of short, illustrative accounts. Alongside moral tales and other short prose fiction, newspapers and journals in Denmark–Norway carried historical anecdotes in large numbers, mainly centring on foreign rulers and courts.
7 On moral tales in periodicals, see A. Nøding’s chapter in this book. Claus Fasting’s weekly Provinzialblade (1778–81) offers a substantial number of historical anecdotes cut and translated from various continental sources alongside short fiction, essays and poems, see A. Nøding, Claus Fasting. Dikter, journalist og opplysningspioner (Oslo, 2018). Anecdotes of even the semi-scandalous and semi-fictitious kinds were commonly ascribed didactic as well as moral functions as historical ‘examples’. Intrigues and shady episodes from the private lives of the great past and present could go as moral illustrations, exemplary lessons or warnings from which readers could learn and be amused at the same time.
8 What R. Koselleck in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge MA, 1985) coined the historia magistra vitae paradigm characterises not only historical writing but saturates the entire printed public sphere in late eighteenth-century Denmark–Norway. For the historia magistra vitae-topos in the Dano-Norwegian context, see for instance A. Eriksen, Livets læremester. Historiske kunnskapstradisjoner i Norge 1650–1840 (Oslo, 2020) and also E. N. Johnsen, ‘I Klios forgård. Forfatterroller, offentlighet og politisk evaluering i Niels Ditlev Riegels’ (1755–1802) historieskriving’, PhD thesis (Oslo, 2019). In 1793 the local Jutland magazine
Ribe Stifts Ugeblad [The Diocese of Ribe’s Weekly] addressed the common use and abuse of historical anecdotes in a piece translated from German entitled ‘Om Anekdoter især vor Tids’ [On anecdotes especially in our time].
9 The piece was originally published in Niederelbischen Magazin, 1787. According to the author, the Hamburg mathematician and publicist J. G. Büsch, anecdotes convey historical information that is not ‘commonly known’ and they mainly serve as ‘bait’ and ‘spice’ for broader readerships who find conventional political history dry and tedious. The noblest kind of anecdotes, however, are those revealing the character or state of mind of historical agents and thereby give access to the hidden springs behind important historical events, Büsch notes. He explicitly connects anecdotes to the genre of ‘secret histories’ from Procopius.
10 Ribe Stifts Ugeblad, 19 juli (1793), p. 2. Hence, anecdotes and secret histories were more than didactic examples. According to the essay in the Danish weekly, the most important of them disclosed the deepest truths about history and politics.
As Brian Cowan has recently noted, there are two distinct approaches in scholarship devoted to the growth and significance in Europe of this current of literature focusing on the hidden, private lives of people in power.
11 B. Cowan, ‘The History of Secret Histories’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81/1 (Spring 2018), pp. 121–51. While literary scholars highlight the coherence and self-conscious use of the semi-historical and semi-literary genre of ‘secret history’, the historical approach has placed the publications in a wider history of writings involved in the ‘politics of disclosure’, which is seen as responding to the secrecy of politics during the Early Modern period.
12 The general obsession with secrets and secrecy inside as well as outside the state administration during the early modern period is well documented. See for instance J. Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001). Typically, Geheimeraad, Gehejmekonseil and Geheijmeexpeditionssekretær were titles for the king’s closest councilors in Denmark–Norway during the eighteenth century, the period that also saw the rise of Freemasonry and other kinds of secret societies. In the following I will draw on both these approaches when I trace the presence of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories in the two libraries in late eighteenth-century Denmark–Norway and the ways in which Biehl and Suhm demonstrate a self-conscious awareness of the genres in their unpublished writings.