Public Acoustics considers how sound and its metaphors enabled writers to imagine the force of public discourse in Old Regime France. French-speakers will know that the French word for noise ("bruit") can also mean talk, chatter, rumor, or news. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this term and other sound metaphors such as "brouhaha" and "fracas" became common ways for writers to describe public uproar or topics of public fascination. My book explores how these acoustic figures of speech shaped the way writers thought about public discussion and their own relationship to it.

Historians have shown that the idea of "the public" played an increasingly important role in French social and political life over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though France had a very centralized monarchal government in this era, its kings and their ministers largely understood that public support was crucial for the success of their actions. A more literate population, a flourishing print culture, a periodical press, and an ever more crowded urban center in Paris made the public a significant presence in the imagination of leaders and elites. In my book, I ask: What new dimensions of this history might be revealed by thinking about the language that writers in the period most often used to discuss public talk?

For my corpus, I concentrated on creative writers who were active in the arenas traditionally associated with the public sphere (salons, periodicals) or who developed a reputation for caring about the public and its opinions. Through acoustic language, these writers emphasized unexpected qualities of public discussion and its impact on social and political relationships. For example, the playwright Pierre Corneille depicted rulers' fear of the public in tragedies about kings or emperors who worried about the noise swirling outside their palace walls or who strained to listen to potentially seditious murmuring among their subjects. The author and salon host Madeleine de Scudéry, meanwhile, described how catchy new words or expressions spread through social chatter, seemingly at the speed of sound, crossing geographical and social borders. Pierre de Marivaux suggested that his stage comedies and his writing for periodical publications captured fragments of public speech and replayed them back to the public, in a positive version of a media "echo chamber." Different from traditional ideas of the public sphere, these writers' sonic approach to thinking about public talk is less invested in the rational content of that discourse than its mobility, volume, and tone. Acoustic language offers them a model for reconsidering the workings of informal communication networks, the ethical relationships between chattering masses and listening elites, and the psychological dynamics of these auditory social bonds.

Through these various case studies, Public Acoustics offers a parallel history to traditional narratives of the emergence of the public sphere, emphasizing how writers understood the importance of public discourse in terms of its sensuous, affective, confusing, and mobile qualities over its capacity to produce clear articulations of public opinion. My method is inspired by an approach called "metaphorology" developed by philosopher Hans Blumenberg. For Blumenberg, commonly used metaphors indicate ways of thinking that cannot be (or have not yet been) crystalized into abstract concepts. Histories of key metaphors can therefore provide an alternative to histories of ideas, an alternative that appreciates the creative imprecision of human thought and the richness of its relationship with context. For me, histories of metaphors can also point to ways in which creative writers participate actively in the evolution of key ideas in their cultures. This method showcases the value of literary ways of thinking for approaching larger social, cultural, and political issues.