In a letter dated August 5, , French chief of police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie confesses his incapacity to prevent the publication of satirical pamphlets penned by then-imprisoned aristocrat Eustache Le Noble:. He has always found protectors and supporters who found it useful to grant this man the freedom to write on all sorts of subject matters.
One cannot say how many ways he has abused this freedom, and to what excess he has taken it, nor whether he will control himself in the future. Le Noble was an extremely prolific, well-known author in his time, who published works in a wide variety of literary genres until his death in La Pierre de touche politique — : Propaganda as a Double-edged Sword.
Written during the early years of the controversial War of the Grand Alliance — , the 29 pamphlets that compose La Pierre de touche politique shed light on the complexity of the publicity wars between Louis XIV and his foreign enemies. A later passage more closely evokes absolutist theory by ridiculing political structures based upon the primacy of the head of state over the body politic. Perhaps more significantly, this critique of the absolutist model redeploys the very terminology used to denounce Louis XIV in anti-monarchical pamphlets from the same period.
Le Cibisme 33, emphasis added. Here, the denunciation of papal authority masks the implicit criticism of all forms of absolute power, with the satirized object vacillating between the particular the organization of the Catholic church and the universal all absolutist political structures.
All of Europe now considers you the slave to a Tyrant who has put you in chains… but I am indeed mistaken if in a short time you do not see the fall of this Pygmy who has walked in Giant steps to the Usurpation of a Throne to which he has no right.
