March 2013 Dinner Meeting

Speaker: Kathryn Gucer

“Come slingshooting with me: Pamphlets, Posts, and Popular Rebellion in 17th-Century France”

In January 1648 angry Parisian mobs threw stones at the windows of the most powerful man in France, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. The hooligans used slingshots, or frondes in French, to protest Mazarin’s imposition of steep taxes and his control over the ten-year-old king, Louis XIV. These protests escalated into a five-year rebellion through- out France that has come to be known as the Fronde. Mazarin’s oppo- nents, or frondeurs, quickly added the pen and the printing press to their arsenal of weapons, producing an unprecedented explosion of brief political pamphlets called mazarinades. As the rebellion spread from city to city in France, people outside of Paris began to write, read, republish, and re-disseminate these materials. Part literary criticism, part history of the book, and part political history, the talk will explore the Fronde by way of these media and mediators. It will also highlight little known collections at the Newberry Library and other libraries in the United States.

Union League, 65 W. Jackson, Chicago. Timing: spirits at 5:00, dinner at 6:00, program at 7:30.