Luke Giraudet’s Public Opinion and Political Contest in Late Medieval Paris is the product of the author’s 2019 doctoral dissertation at the University of York. It is an ambitious study that offers meaningful contributions to several overlapping historiographies, most notably the histories of late medieval French politics, medieval urban studies, premodern communication, and the history of public opinion alongside the “public sphere.” The book is framed around a close examination of the anonymous Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, a text that narrates five decades of political turmoil in Paris: the Armagnac-Burgundian civil war (1411-1435), the English occupation of Paris (1422-1436), and the Valois’s reclamation of the capital city (1436). However, the historical value of the Journal has largely been minimized due to its overt partiality toward the Burgundian faction from the text’s opening in 1405 to its end in 1449. In L’opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Âge (2002), eminent historian Bernard Guenée dismissed the Journal’s utility as a credible gauge of public opinion in Paris because of its author’s loyalty to the Burgundian party. Consequently, the source has only been applied to historical analyses of the period with significant hesitation, leading to its “awkward isolation in current histories of fifteenth-century Paris” (275). One of Giraudet’s main objectives is to challenge this deeply rooted, negative perception.
The greatest strength of Giraudet’s book is that he succeeds in this task, thereby making an important intervention in the historiography of fifteenth-century French and Parisian political history. He argues successfully that the Bourgeois’s membership within several overlapping Parisian communities made him a direct witness to the political actions and reactions, the conflicts, and the perspectives of Parisians. Furthermore, in addition to counterbalancing the more “neutral” Chronique du Religieux that Guenée relied on for his examination of public opinion, the Journal is a unique contemporary text that offers rare insights into the finer details of everyday Parisian life (18). Most importantly for Giraudet’s purpose, it reports on the “ongoing debates concerning the common good, taxation, warfare, and the city’s own place in the kingdom,” debates, he suggests, that occupied the attention of the bulk of Parisians during the fifteenth century (275). And, while he admits that the communities to which the Bourgeois belonged represent merely “a subsection of Parisian society,” Giraudet proposes that Journal is nonetheless “integral to envisioning the late medieval Parisian public sphere” (275).
The concept of the “public sphere” is a critical thread throughout the book, through which Giraudet directly challenges Jürgen Habermas’s model. According to Habermas, the emotionality of medieval people prevented them from engaging rationally in political discourse, and due to widespread illiteracy and the absence of “institutionalized public spaces such as urban coffeehouses and salons” (42), a medieval public sphere never emerged. Giraudet persuasively counters this derisive assessment by demonstrating the “permanence of political critique and discussion” in Paris. Building on an international historiography relating to medieval popular politics, Giraudet notes that what differentiated the medieval from the modern was that it was dynamic and untethered to formal institutionalized places. For example, in chapter 1 he demonstrates how important a heterogenous place like the Saints-Innocents church and graveyard in the Halles quartier was for social and political exchanges. Chapter 4 examines the communicative function of urban space, and specifically, the squares and streets as loci for political engagement for both men and women. As explained already in chapter 2, spaces like these were crucial to the publication of “official” information or expressions of authority (sermons, executions) because ruling authorities understood that it was there where they would have the greatest impact. The political reactions, including the collective emotions Parisians rationally expressed therein (which he argues for in the last third of this chapter), illustrate how important these unofficial, urban spaces were for shoring up people’s willingness to participate in political dialogue. Medieval political communication was not simply a top-down process as Habermas claimed; it was, rather, a continuous dialogue between authorities and the citizens in a variety of milieu.
Additionally, rumors-as-political-expression spread in these very locations (chapter 3), and, as examined in chapter 5, the civic ceremonies that unfolded in public places further acted as an “important interface” between official communication on the one hand, and popular opinion and rumor on the other. For Giraudet, these varied spaces simultaneously provided the framing for the former, and a material forum for Parisians’ “wider participation in political discourse” (227). Hence, although the physical spaces in which the public sphere emerged were not static, formalized sites as were the coffeehouses and salons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris, what becomes patently evident in this study is the profundity of engagement among [at least some] Parisians in the spaces that were, for them, important sites of political discussion, criticism, and political action. Political communication was not unidirectional as Habermas insisted, coming strictly from the kings or clerical elites; Parisians also “deployed political discourse to secure their stake in civic authority” (47).
Another significant achievement of this study is that it analyzes the Bourgeois’s authorial intentions as he shaped his narrative. His Journal was not simply a narrative designed to mirror the actions or perspectives of his “opinion communities”--a term Giraudet uses throughout his book to identify the communities to which Bourgeois belonged and with whom his political perspectives aligned. Indeed, as Guenée and other scholars have shown, the Journal is an intrinsically partisan text. Giraudet uses the Bourgeois’s partiality as an opportunity to explore the way in which he constructed his text for a very specific audience: the overlapping communities to which he belonged, and, most importantly, his Right Bank connections. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for this ongoing thread. Giraudet provides extraordinary detail of the social and spatial context for the Bourgeois author, who he identifies as Nicolas Confrant, canon of Notre Dame Chapter, former theologian at the University of Paris, and priest at Saints-Innocents. It has long been hypothesized that theJournal’s author was connected to the Right Bank, and that he had a stake in the Burgundian stronghold around the Halles quarter. Giraudet’s meticulous prosopographical analysis, which he couples with spatial analysis and network theory, provides necessary precision to this line of thinking. In addition to more firmly grounding the Bourgeois’s identity and his connections to both the Halles quarter and the University of Paris, chapter 1 provides a much more detailed outline of his pro-Burgundian, mainly artisanal audience base on the Right Bank.
By providing this comprehensive context to the Bourgeois author, Giraudet coincidentally establishes that the Journal codified “the institutional and collective memories” of that large, heterogenous, pro-Burgundian community on the Right Bank (52), and, that he “attempted to influence the political views, morals and social values of his audience while concurrently giving shape to this very community through his writing, demonstrating his function as an interpreter in the public sphere” (52). For these reasons, Giraudet construes the Journal as a “textual counterpart to the lived public sphere” (47), and, therefore, positions its author as its “interpreter” (52).
The drawback of the level of detail we see in all chapters is that they are lengthy and very dense, at times leading readers down pathways that are extraneous to the point at hand. The lengthy discussion on the public/private spatial divide in chapter 4, which subsequently led to a discussion about the gendering of space followed by an examination of the “female publicity” in theJournal, was a confusing digression, and one in which the arguments failed to convince this reviewer. At other points in the book, there are sections that could have been substantially compressed and then incorporated into other parts of the chapter. For example, chapter 2’s section on emotions and communication could be woven throughout the chapter, where some of these examples would more directly bolster Giraudet’s claims regarding the reactions to (and engagement with) the official forms of communication. Similarly, in chapter 3, the section on fama and male fama could have been integrated into the other subsections without the need for a one of its own.
In chapter 1, the author has incorrectly described the spatial footprint of the Saint-Martin quartier (53), leaving out the quartier Saint-Denis, which in fact forms a boundary between that of Saint-Martin and the Halles quartier. He has also overlooked in his description the Verrerie and Grève quartiers. Given that Giraudet rightly argues that quartiers were crucial for community-building, it is remiss to omit the boundary quarter of Saint-Denis, especially since Giraudet notes the importance of the Grande rue Saint-Denis in the Journal in passing (53). Unfortunately, he does not elaborate here or elsewhere, even though this boulevard was part of the Croisée, much wider than rue Saint-Martin, and the primary street for traffic inside and outside the city on the Right Bank. Furthermore, later in the chapter he introduces some festivities at the Church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Giles (62), which he argues provides further evidence of the Bourgeois’s connection to the two aforementioned districts (Halles and Saint-Martin). However, this church was located within the Saint-Denis quartier.
More clarification in some of the notes would have strengthened some of the claims. For example, Giraudet argues that local concerns may have been behind the Bourgeois’s attention to the conspiracy of 1416. The evidence was that several individuals owned houses “along the rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis” (64). However only two of the streets identified in the note (n. 66) are connected to rue Saint-Denis (rues des Lombards and Chanverie), and none are connected to Saint-Martin. Rue de la Mortellerie was east of Place de Grève in the Saint-Gervais quartier, far from the pro-Burgundian districts identified in the chapter.
It should be noted that the above-mentioned spatial errors will be inconsequential for the vast majority of readers of Public Opinion and Political Contest in Late Medieval France. Neither these minor inconsistencies nor the density of the chapters detract from the quality of this book and the significant contribution it will make to multiple historiographies.