From Rogue to Everyman: A Foundling's Journey to the Bastille

Leonard Adams is a professor of French Studies at the University of
Guelph.

Illegitimate, talented, witty, and determined to survive if fate would
only give him the tools and the opportunity, Charles de Julie arose from
the shadowy corners of 18th-century Paris full of ambition and unbridled
energy. Bongie’s book is the chronicle of Julie’s relatively short
life, filled with the stuff of low life, police work, spies and aspiring
hacks, loose women, and a host of indiscriminate seducers with which his
age was cursed. The episodes not only brim with the stuff of Julie’s
life but also open windows into the little-known events that touched the
lives of little known characters who created the vibrating drama on the
Parisian social landscape, particularly low life in the age of the
philosophes—Voltaire, Helvétius, Rousseau, and Diderot the
encyclopedist, to mention but a few.

A remarkable feature of the book is Bongie’s style: it is moving and
sprinkled with speculative asides which provide links that keep in
perspective Julie’s life and that of his collaborative partners, his
friends and, in the long run, spies in the police department unashamedly
planning his downfall. Julie the poet, Julie the shrewd orator who
desperately sought freedom and favour from his superiors after spending
what seemed like an eternity in the Bastille, refused to surrender his
pride to the harsh justice of the police chief. Finally released, he was
sick, with little time to live. He died at 30.

Bongie has done a thorough examination of France’s archives. His work
has removed—for the benefit of the curious researcher—a panel
concealing the lower layers of Parisian society. The resulting
revelations give readers a clearer understanding of the world of the
Ancien Régime—a society where aristocrats and underlings often
mingled to share in unsavoury acts. We become aware of all these events
through the eyes and sensibilities of Charles de Julie, a young Parisian
with an indomitable will to survive.