:"Very often the eager theatergoer could pay for his place by signing on with one of the organzied claques, paid to cheer or jeer at actors and plays, depending on the commission. And because of the license expected in the parterre, it was here that the tone could be set on first night for the success or failure of the play." p. 137
"On March 6 the article[of the playwright Beaumarchais] was brought to the King's attention and, presumably still smarting from his wishes being thwarted, he took the reference to wild(rather than verminous) creatures as a personal attack. It was enough to put Beaumarchais in prison. And Louis, full of silly pique, decided that the most crushing reproof he could give to an ironist would be comic humiliation. That evening, while at the card table, he scribbled on the back of the seven of spades that Beaumarchais should be confined not in the Bastille(the usual detention for insubordinate writers) but in Saint-Lazare, the correction center for delinquent boys. In the short term, this facetious humiliation took the wind out of Beaumarchais' sails. Refusing to emerge from the prison, knowing he was the butt of jokes, he never quite regained the breezy confidence which had sustained him through many misfortunes. In the very last years of the old regime he himself became the whipping boy of radicals and reactionaries alike." p. 144
Incidentally, Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro in fact found an eager patron in Marie Antoinette, contra the Austrian Emperor's concern about Mozart's operatic adaptation depicted in Amadeus.
"Startling as it may seem, the court and the high nobility were prime customers for the works that did most to damage their own authority. The town of Versailles had a number of shops where the most professional hawkers(colporteurs unloaded their stock. Delorme, for example, who used Dunkirk as a port of entry for his books, had his own outlet at Versailles and he was by no means alone. The appetite of the court for daring literature--both political and erotic--may be gauged from the fact that similar outlets were located at towns to which the court seasonally moved... In an only slightly less direct manner, the immunity of the great aristocratic families from search and seizure meant that the colporteurs used them shamelessly to smuggle their goods. The coachman of the Duc de Praslin was a virtual colporteur in his own right and in 1767 six bales of clandestine books were discovered in a wagon bearing the arms of the Marechal de Noailles. Even the King's youngest brother, Artois(who as Charles X was to take a censorious line with seditious literature), was said to be protecting hawkers of libels.
These stories seem to vindicated de Tocqueville's view that th eold regime brought about its own undoing by irresponsibly flirting with ideas it only half understood, but which it found diverting: the literary equivalent of the Figaro syndrome." p. 175
"It could be argued, though, that the French Revolution was as much the interruption, as the catalyst, of modernity. Not in all respects, since in its most militant phase, the Revolution did indeed invent a new kind of politics, an institutional transference of Rousseau's sovereignty of the General Will that abolished private space and time, and created a form of patriotic militarism more all-embracing than anything that had yet been seen in Europe. For one year, it invented and practiced representative democracy; for two years, it imposed coercive egalitarianism(thoguh even this is a simplification). But for two decades its enduring product was a new kind of militarized state." p. 184
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