The Committee to Nuke Elysium

What’s happening now is reminiscent of the state of censorship in France in the decades leading up to the Revolution, the story of which is admirably told in historian Robert Darnton’s “>The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France. In the eighteenth century, publishers required a royal privilege to legally publish books in the kingdom of France. Morally outrageous works and works critical of the government were of course denied these privileges; the publishing sphere’s response was to set up presses beyond the borders of France. The French appetite for the secret, the sexy, and the outlaw was met by pirate publishers operating beyond the reach of Government critiques could never sell as well as naughty books, of course—but in many cases the two were combined, in stories that told salacious tales of the nobility and their ministers which contained coded criticisms of official policies. Bawdy literature served as a form of encryption by which pre-revolutionary authors could ensure their disruptive messages could survive.

Then as now, such works set off an official frenzy of denunciation. The public executioner actually whipped and burned outlaw books in front of the Parlement of France in Paris. Such absurdities were but a prelude to the bloodshed that followed—and when we hear of Sarah Palin calling for extreme measures to be taken against a “treasonous” Assange (who is not an American citizen), we have to wonder where all this will lead.