4th Year Winner: Roussel/Capet/Walpole

HIST 4230, “Technologies of Communication: A History of Reading from the Codex to the Kindle.” CD: Margaret Schotte.

Abstract

The essay takes the reader on a fascinating journey employing an obscure, once-printed (in 1801) text as its starting point. Published anonymously, Règne de Richard III, ou Doutes Historiques sur les Crimes qui lui sont Imputés assembles a triad of historical figures whom the author characterizes as a “[a] literary English nobleman and his contentious bestseller, [a] French King and his private linguistic exercises and [a] Napoleonic era bureaucrat and his publishing side-job.” The essay accounts the bureaucrat’s discovery and publication of the doomed King Louis XVI’s translation of Horace Walpole’s notorious defense of the English King Richard III against the charges of multiple crimes—especially the murder of the “princes in the Tower”—made by such Tudor propagandists as William Shakespeare. It rather archly reviews the scholarly controversies concerning Louis’s decision to translate Walpole’s work but most productively it accounts the Napoleonic bureaucrat’s--a man of many names, including Jean-Pierre-Alexis Roussel d’Épinol—“side-hustle,” and his avid participation in profiting from France’s almost instant nostalgia for the time before the Revolution. Deftly researched and wittily written “Roussel/Capet/Walpole” ushers the reader both into a realm unexpected intertexts and into the demimonde of post-Revolutionary Parisian print culture. The author is clearly fascinated by that world, and that fascination is, in the best sense, infectious. This is very much history as it should be written.