Concealment and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions explores deceit and the efforts to unmask it in three moments of French history: before, during, and after the Revolution. The principal players in these papers vary widely, but their strategies of concealment and transparency provide important historical understanding. Before the Revolution, clandestine playing card-makers who hoped to escape the stamp tax set up secretive workshops in unexpected places, including the Tuileries Palace and the royal mint in Bordeaux. During the Revolution, the imperative for transparency affected virtually all aspects of public life including the very means of record-keeping, as pedagogical techniques for stenographers emerged to insure accountability and promote trust. After the Revolution, the century’s most renowned impostor, the stage-character Robert Macaire, became a vehicle for radical social and political critique.

Jeffrey Ravel’s paper Face Up or Face Down: Clandestine Playing Card Workshops in Eighteenth-Century France follows the underground networks of card-makers determined to evade royal excise taxes. It uncovers a series of revealing details pertaining to the manufacture, design, distribution, and use of popular playing cards. The concealment exposed here touches royal authority, tax policy, popular gaming, and a flourishing underground economy. In Making Government Transparent? The Rise of Stenography During the French Revolution, Katlyn Carter narrates the revolutionary government’s effort to provide accurate accounts of legislative speeches and debates. The paper examines the ways revolutionaries’ large goals of transparency in emotion and opinion affected the everyday business of record-keeping. In addition to discussing particular techniques, the paper also assesses whether the ultimate aim was achieved. Did reforms in stenography truly render government transparent or was it merely the illusion of transparency? James H. Johnson’s paper The Fool’s Truth: When Imposture Points to Revolution explores the evolution of this initially comic character into a figure for scathing social and political critique. Daumier’s caricatures of Macaire disguised as pillars of the establishment captured the sense that the new elites were themselves frauds. The explosive book The Testament of Robert Macaire (1840) went further, denouncing the hypocrisy of monied elites and calling for revolution.