| Canon law defines a scandal as an act that brings doubt to the faithful or that offers an occasion to sin. Yet modern political discourse demands that scandals should be exposed rather than concealed. This dissertation examines the emergence of the modern understanding of the cultural form of the scandal in the context of 18th-century French political and religious struggles. It consults religious as well as secular sources and seeks to document the rise of an ethic of disclosure, whereby the public, and/or agents acting on its behalf, asserts the right to know about secret and potentially harmful information, the better to extract justice from the wrongdoers, even despite any potential danger that they themselves might be drawn to temptation. The struggles over the civil status of actors, the Jansenist-Jesuit controversy, and the literary genre of the chroniques scandaleuses all receive detailed attention in these regards, as it is argued that these loci were crucial to the development of the modern notion of political scandal in the French context. The dissertation concludes with a treatment of the French Revolution in which it is argued that contemporaries understood many of the principal events of that Revolution as the revelations of a long-hidden scandals; these events included especially the storming of the Bastille, in which secret archives and police files played a key role, and the journalism of Jean-Paul Marat, who declared that his own journalistic method was to expose scandals whenever he could. |
