Book Description

From Rogue to Everyman chronicles the colourful career of archetypal rogue Charles de Julie, foundling, army deserter, pimp, police officer, underground journalist, poet, and prisoner in the dreaded Bastille. Laurence Bongie reveals both the richly woven tapestry of Ancien Regime social history and a ground-level perspective of everyday material life in eighteenth-century Paris, a city of wit and learning where wealth and luxury were juxtaposed with the most squalid and degrading varieties of human poverty, disease, and crime. Julie knew intimately the sights, sounds, and smells of the French capital, its Opera and playhouses, law courts, narrow dirty streets, hackney coaches, great houses, low taverns, and splendid public gardens. only too well the activities of the capital's rakes, thieves, loan sharks, pickpockets, confidence men, blackmailers, crooked gamblers, and rowdy bullying soldiers, not to mention its twenty or thirty thousand prostitutes - all closely watched by as many as three thousand government spies and the eighteenth-century world's most invasive police network. Julie established close contacts with a number of the capital's leading maquerelles as well as their distinguished clients, and his underground news sheets, lifted mainly from secret vice squad reports, provided a restricted circle of wealthy subscribers with racy accounts of the town's sexual dalliances. His story ends in the dreaded Bastille. Extensive quotations from Julie's writings trace the moral itinerary of a clever, manipulating rogue, spirited liar, thief, poetaster, and libertine.