Jacques Bon-Homme and National Politics: Ethos and Audience in 17th- Century Political Pamphlets

dc.contributor.authorSawyer, Jeffrey K.
dc.date.accessioned2017-10-20T18:47:25Z
dc.date.available2017-10-20T18:47:25Z
dc.date.issued1984
dc.description.abstractA number of fundamental problems remain in the way of providing a comprehensive analysis of pamphlets and pamphleteerng in Old Regime France. Our incomplete knowledge of the sizes of editions, the mechanisms of distribution, and author-patron relationships is one set of problems. Another stems from the complexity of the the texts themselves. Pamphlet authors often cultivated a baroque style of rhetoric, twisting their into elaborate figures of speech, sometimes beyond recognition. Many pamphlets, at least in the early part of the seventeenth century, were intentionally written in colloquial speech, and some even contain parodies of southern dialects. Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to interpretation is the rich undercurrent of allusions and citations to other pamphlets, to popular customs, to learned books, and "the whole cultural baggage of the epoch," to use Denis Richet's marvelous phrase. One of the main questions that arises from these difficulties is the question of the audience. This is a particularly troubling issue for those who are concerned about the concrete political functions of pamphleteering. The identity of the "public" is especially obscure in the seventeenth century. Millions of pieces of pamphlet propaganda were published, yet there is precious little evidence as to who read them and how these readers reacted. Occasionally, we can learn from diplomatic correspondence that this or that pamphlet caused a reaction among high-level politicians. But what about the larger audience for whom the pamphlets were presumably written? The evidence available about patterns of literacy suggests that the readers were predominantly urban, but this is hardly a very satisfying solution to the problem of establishing the audience for printed propaganda.en_US
dc.format.extent10 Pagesen_US
dc.genrejournal articlesen_US
dc.identifierdoi:10.13016/M29S1KM6R
dc.identifier.citationSawyer, J.K. (1984). Jacques Bon-Homme and National Politics: Ethos and Audience in Seventeenth-Century Pamphlets. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 12, 23-32.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11603/7359
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.publisherProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French Historyen_US
dc.relation.isAvailableAtUniversity of Baltimore
dc.subjectpamphletsen_US
dc.subjectOld Regime Franceen_US
dc.subjectliterary historyen_US
dc.subjectnational politicsen_US
dc.subjectaudienceen_US
dc.subjectpublicen_US
dc.subjectpropagandaen_US
dc.subjectdiplomatic correspondenceen_US
dc.subjectpoliticiansen_US
dc.titleJacques Bon-Homme and National Politics: Ethos and Audience in 17th- Century Political Pamphletsen_US
dc.typeTexten_US

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