The Glory and the Sorrow; a Parisian and his World in the Age of the French Revolution

Abstract

This is a fascinating and tantalizing volume. The letters of Adrien-Joseph Colson in the Archives départementales of the Indre are not a new discovery—a selection was published in French in 1993—but Timothy Tackett has here placed them meticulously into the context of surviving evidence of Colson’s life, demonstrating that he was a far more curious figure than the ‘bourgeois de Paris’ he was dubbed by that previous text. Sixty-two in 1789, Colson had lived a life of intriguing liminality. Never married (Tackett skates gently over a few tiny hints of same-sex interest), Colson had made his way from a possible first vocation as a provincial priest into a long legal career, primarily as the agent for a noble family. Living for decades in a modest apartment on the central Parisian rue des Arcis, his life was a constant round of neighbourhood interactions with the respectable artisans of his building and neighbourhood, walks across the city to consult authorities and pursue proceedings, and mountains of correspondence about his employers’ tortured legal affairs. More than a thousand letters in which this business was mingled with reporting Parisian and national news to his friend and colleague Roch Lemaigre, resident in Berry, form the central corpus of this study.