In 1781 Antoine Blanquet, a roads inspector in the Gévaudan region of southern France, took an unusual risk. He had seen evidence of financial irregularities in the records of the recently deceased syndic of his diocese. Having long mistrusted the syndic, and having observed the bishop of Mende's heavy-handed exploitation of his seigneurial rights as count of the Gévaudan, Blanquet decided to act. He informed Montpellier's intendant--the chief administrative officer for the province of Languedoc--of the secretive dealings of the bishop and of the diocesan administration he headed. The secrets included the collection of unauthorized taxes, the floating of unauthorized loans, and the self-interested manipulation of public works projects. Blanquet clandestinely shared this "tissue of horrors" for nearly two years. His indignant letters sparked an investigation, eventually reached Versailles, and effectively created what finance minister Jacques Necker would label the "Affair of the Gévaudan." His "secret" letters also endangered his lif.
My paper will use the experience of Blanquet to probe the processes of individual decision-making. Blanquet knew he risked reprisals, and he knew that power, custom, and inertia were stacked against him. But his "love of the public good" impelled him to unveil secrets, and to shine a light on what we today would call corruption. Why? What does Blanquet's lonely and isolating campaign tell us about the relationship between cultural expectations and individual action? Did he merely channel newly reformist sensibilities, or did he seek within himself unique resources with which to act on a moral conscience? Blanquet's story may help us pinpoint the conditions--social, cultural, structural, but also in the interior consciousness--for the emergence of the historical phenomenon of "whistleblowing."
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