Scholarly understanding of the notion of public opinion in France has suffered, and suffers still, from some serious misconceptions. Chief of these is the belief that its prominence in the decades prior to the Revolution and talk of a ‘tribunal’ that passed judgement on kings as on other men was part of the assault that eventually doomed the monarchy. The ‘tribunal’ metaphor was already familiar in the middle years of the seventeenth century and remained a relative commonplace, in no way host...