Archives Parlementaires: lèse (more)

As I mentioned in my last in this thread, I was a bit surprised to see just how prevalent the construction lèse nation had become early in the Revolution. The following is a sorted KWIC of lEse in the AP, with the object type restricted to "cahiers", resulting in 38 occurrences. These are, of course, the complaints sent to the King, reflecting relatively early developments of Revolutionary discourse. Keeping in mind all of the caveats regarding this data, we can see some interesting and possibly contradictory uses:

CAHIER: (p.319)sent être, comme criminels de lèse-humanité au premier chef, et ils se joindront au
CAHIER GÉN...: (p.77)manière de juger, qui   lèse les droits les plus sacrés des citoyens, doit av
CAHIER: (p.697)r individus, cette concession lèse les et avoir eu d'autre mo dre une r {La partie d
CAHIER: (p.108)e, excepté dans les crimes de lèse-majesté au premier chef. Art. 33. Qu'aucun jugem
CAHIER: (p.791) si ce n'est pour le crime de lèse-majesté au premier chef, et réduite aux seuls c
CAHIER: (p.448)té seulement pour le crime de lèse-majesté au premier chef ou pour celui de haute t
CAHIER: (p.409)s choses saintes, et crime de lèse-majesté, dans tous les cas spécifiés par l'ord
CAHIER: (p.260)istériels, sauf pour crime de lêse-majesté, de haute trahison et autres cas, qui se
CAHIER: (p.42)e, à l'exception des crimes de lèse-majesté, de péculat et de concussion; mais, dan
CAHIER: (p.780), si ce n'était pour crime de lèse-majesté divine et humaine. Art. 9. Qu'ii soit as
CAHIER: (p.476)ée, si ce n'est pour crime de lèse-majesté divine et humaine. Art. 8. Qu'il soit as
CAHIER: (p.584)our le meurtre et le crime de lèse-majesté divine ou humaine, et que hors de ce cas
CAHIER: (p.378)ont seuls juges des crimes de lèse-majesté et de lèse-nation. Art. 8. Le compte de
CAHIER: (p.42)re précise ce qui est crime de lèse-majesté. Et que l'on établisse quels sont les c
CAHIER.: (p.117)déclaré coupable du crime de lèse-majesté etnation. et comme tel, puni des peines
CAHIER GÉN...: (p.671) excepté le crime de   lèse-majesté, le poison, l'incendie et assassinat sur
CAHIER: (p.660) les cas, excepté le crime de lèse majesté, le poison, l'incendie et assassinat sur
CAHIER: (p.532)hommes coupables elu crime de lèse-majesté nationale; l'exemple elu passé nous a m
CAHIER: (p.645)poursuivis comme criminels de lèse-majesté nationale; que visite soit faite dans le
CAHIER: (p.383)s par elle comme criminels de lèse-majesté, quand ils tromperont la confiance du so
CAHIER: (p.286)s crimes de lèse-nation ou de lèse-majesté seulement; et que, dans ce cas, l'accus
CAHIER GÉN...: (p.210)ni comme criminel de   lèse-majesté; 4° Cette loi protectrice de la libert
CAHIER: (p.35)rrémissibles comme le crime de lese-majesté. 13° 'Qu'en matière civile comme en mat
CAHIER: (p.378) crimes de lèse-majesté et de lèse-nation. Art. 8. Le compte des finances imprimé a
CAHIER: (p.359) crimes de lèsemajesté, et de lèse-nation, ce qui comprend les crimes d'Etat. 7° En
CAHIER: (p.301)ort infâme, comme coupable de lèse-nation, celui qui sera convaincu d'avoir violé c
CAHIER.: (p.536) et punis comme coupables de lèse nation. 17" De demander 1 aliénation irrévocabl
CAHIER: (p.82)x, sera déclarée criminelle de lèse-nation et poursuivie comme telle, soit par les Et
CAHIER: (p.402)tte règle seront coupables de lèse-nation et poursuivis comme tels dès qu'ils auron
CAHIER: (p.285) patrie, coupable du crime de lèse-nation, et puniecomme telle par le tribunal qu'é
CAHIER: (p.544) coupables de rébellion et de lèse-nation, favoriser la violation de la constitution
CAHIER: (p.42)lisse quels sont les crimes de lèse-nation. Le vœu des bailliages est que les ressor
CAHIER: (p.285)n user que pour {es crimes de lèse-nation ou de lèse-majesté seulement; et que, da
CAHIER: (p.402)s généraux, comme coupable de lèse-nation; que les impositions seront réparties dan
CAHIER: (p.320)e défendre, c'est un crime de lèse-nation. Qui pourrait nier que dans la génératio
CAHIER: (p.388)-mêmes; déclarant criminel de lèse-nation tous ceux qui pourraient entreprendre dire
CAHIER.: (p.249)sions. Ce serait vu crime de lèse-patrie de ne pas correspondre à sa confiance pat
CAHIER GÉN...: (p.221)i serait un crime de   lèse-patrie. 2° De demander l'abolition de la gabelle

These include "lèse-majesté nationale", "lèse-majesté et nation" (OCR error fixed), "crimes de lèse-majesté et de lèse-nation", and (my favorite) "crime de lèse-majesté divine et humaine". Kelly suggests that notions of royal authority had been trimmed over the 18th century and with this reduction came a restriction of just what would constitute lèse-majesté and to what kinds of crimes it would apply. He argues that it was only in 1787, with the Assembly of Notables, that the idea of the nation "begins to take shape in a public glare" and further suggested that the decrees of September 1789 to decree the punishments for lèse-nation (and subsequent events) show the "confused and arbitrary genesis of lèse-nation".

See also the 11 entries in our Dictionnaires d'autrefois for lese which stress lèse-majesté through the entire period with lèse-nation being left as an after-thought, such as in the DAF (8th edition): "Il se joint quelquefois, par analogie, à d'autres noms féminins. Crime de lèse-humanité, de lèse-nation, de lèse-patrie." One should not construe this as excessively conservative, however, since lèse-majesté is, by far, the most common construction in the 19th and 20th centuries (at least as represented in ARTFL-Frantext).

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Archives Parlementaires: lèse collocations

The collocation table function of PhiloLogic is a quick way to look at changes in word use. Lèse majesté, treason or injuries against the dignity of the sovereign or state, is a common expression. The collocation table below shows terms around "lese | leze | lèse | lèze | lése | léze" in ARTFL Frantext (550 documents, 1700-1787) with majesté being by far the most common.



It is interesting to note that the construction "lèse nation" does not appear once in this report. Searching for "lèse nation" before the Revolution in ARTFL-Frantext finds a single occurrence, in Mirabeau's [1780] Lettres écrits du donjon de Vincennes, where he complains that "toute invocation de lettre-de-cachet me paraît un crime de lèse-nation". The collocation table for lEse in the current sample of the Archives Parlementaires (there are no instances of the lEze in this dataset), shows the lèse nation construction to be far more frequent.

There have been discussions* of the transition from lèse majesté to lèse nation, which is clearly shown here. Now, a reasonable objection to this is that this report includes the entire (as much as we have at the moment) revolutionary period. But we see roughly the same rates and ranking for lèse in 1789.

It would appear -- I would not put too much credit in these numbers -- that the shift from majesty to nation, and all that this implies in terms of the way state is envisaged, was well under way by 1789. This either happened very quickly in the years leading up to the Revolution, since the construction just once in ARTFL-Frantext before, or was a development that took place in types of documents not found in the rather more literary/canonical sample in ARTFL-Frantext, such as journals, pamphlets, and other more ephemeral materials. I guess data entry projects will never end.

One other observation. I like the collocation cloud as a graphic. But if you examine the table, you may notice that the cloud does not really represent the frequency differences all that well. The second table -- all of the AP -- shows that nation occurs more than 6 times as frequently as majesté, but differences of that magnitude tend to be rather difficult to show in a cloud. So, the compromise of providing both is probably the best approach.

* G. A. Kelly, "From Lèse Majesté to Lèse nation: Treason in 18th century France", Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981): 269-286 (JStor).

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Archives Parlementaires (I)

A couple of weeks ago, some ARTFL folks discussed the notion of outlining some research and/or development projects that we will be, or would like to be, working on the coming months. We discussed a wide range of possibilities that could involve substantive work, using some of the systems we have already developed or are working on, or more purely technical work. Everyone came up with some pretty interesting projects and proposals, and we decided that it might be entertaining and useful for each of us to outline a specific project or two and write periodic entries here as things move forward. In the cold light of sobriety, this sounds like a pretty good idea. So, let me be the first to give this a whirl.

Our colleagues at the Stanford University Library have been digitizing the Archives Parlementaires using the DocWorks system. During a recent visit, Dan Edelstein was kind enough to deliver 43 volumes of OCRed text, which represents about half of the entire collection. Dan and I very hastily assembled an alpha text build of this sample under PhiloLogic. I converted the source data into a light TEI notation and attempted to identify probable sections in the data, such as "cahiers" , "séances", and other plausible divisions using an incredible simple approach. Dan built a table to identify volumes and years, which we used to load the dataset in (hopefully) coherent order. This is a very alpha test build. It is uncorrected OCR (much of which is surprising good) without links to pages images. The volumes are being scanned in no particular order, so we have volumes from a large swath of the collection. We are hoping to get the rest of volumes from Stanford in the relatively near future and will be working up or more coherent and user friendly site, with page images and the like. So, with these caveats, here is the PhiloLogic search form.

The Archives Parlementaires are the official, printed record of French legislative assemblies from beginning of the Revolution (1787) thru 1860. We are interested in the first part of the first series (82 volumes), out of copyright, ending in January 1794 which contain records pertaining to the Constituent Assembly, Legislative Assembly, and the Convention. The first seven volumes of the AP are the General Cahiers de doléances, which are organized by locality and estate (clergy, nobility, and third). The rest contain debates, speeches, draft legislation, reports, and many other kinds of materials typically organized by legislative session, often twice daily (morning and evening).

There will be some general house keeping required to start. Some of this will involve writing a better division recognizer, particularly for the Cahiers which are currently not including the place name and estate. I will also need to decide how to handle annexes, editorial materials, notes, etc. I suspect that it may also be worth some effort to try to correct some of the errors automatically, by simple replacement rules and identification impossible sequences. I am also thinking of using proximity measures to try to correct some proper names, such as Bobespierre, Kobespierre, etc. I would also want to concentrate some effort on terms that may reflect structural divisions. Dan has suggested identification of speakers, where possible, so one could search the speeches (full and in debates) of specific individuals like Robespierre, but this appears to be fairly problematic, since it is not clear how to identify just where these might stop.

Loading this data, particularly the complete (or at least out of copyright) dataset will probably be of general utility to Revolutionary historians, particularly when linked to page images and given some other enhancements. This will be done in conjunction with our colleagues at Stanford and other researchers.

I have several rather distinct research efforts in mind. There are a series of technical enhancements which I think fit the nature of the data fairly well:

• sequence alignment to identified borrowed passages from earlier works, such as Rousseau and Montesquieu,
• topic based text segmentation, to split individual sessions into parts, and,
• topic modeling or clustering to attempt to identify the topics of parts identified by topic based segmentation.

We have already run experiments using PhiloLine, the many to many sequence aligner which we are using for various other applications. As we have found, this works for uncorrected OCR relatively well. For example, Condorcet in the Séance du vendredi 3 septembre 1790 [note the OCR error below] borrows a passage from Voltaire's Épitres in his

Nouvelles réflexions sur le projet de payer la dette exigible en papier forcé, par M. GoNDORCET.

Un maudit Écossais, chassé de son pays, Vint changer tout en France et gâter nos esprits. L'espoir trompeur et vain, l'avarice au teint blême, Sous l'abbé Terrasson calculaient son système, Répandaient à grands flols les papiers imposteurs, Vidaient nos coffres-forts et corrompaient no s mœurs.

Un maudit écossais, chassé de son pays,
vint changer tout en France, et gâta nos esprits.
L'espoir trompeur et vain, l'avarice au teint blême,
sous l'abbé Terrasson calculant son système,
répandaient à grands flots leurs papiers imposteurs,
vidaient nos coffres-forts, et corrompaient nos
moeurs;

without specific reference to Voltaire (that I could find). This is generally pretty decent OCR. The alignments work for poorer quality and where there are significant insertions or deletions. For example:

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, [1758], Lettre à Mr. d'Alembert sur les spectacles:

autrui des accusations qu'elles croient fausses; tandis qu'en d'autres pays les femmes, également coupables par leur silence et par leurs discours, cachent, de peur de représailles, le mal qu'elles savent, et publient par vengeance celui qu'elles ont inventé. Combien de scandales publics ne retient pas la crainte de ces sévères observatrices? Elles font presque dans notre ville la fonction de censeurs. C'est ainsi que dans les beaux tems de Rome , les citoyens, surveillans les uns des autres, s'accusoient publiquement par zele pour la justice; mais quand Rome fut corrompue et qu'il ne resta plus rien à faire pour les bonnes moeurs que de cacher les mauvaises, la haine des vices qui les démasque en devint un. Aux citoyens zélés succéderent des délateurs infames; et au lieu qu'autrefois les bons accusoient les méchans, ils en furent accusés à leur tour . Grâce au ciel, nous sommes loin d'un terme si funeste. Nous ne sommes point réduits à nous cacher à nos propres yeux, de peur de nous faire horreur. Pour moi, je n'en aurai pas meilleure opinion des femmes, quand elles seront plus circonspectes: on se ménagera davantage, quand on

Séance publique du 30 avril 1793, l'an II de la:

son tribunal n'exerce pas, d'ailleurs, une autorité aussi 1 mu soire qu'on pourrait le croire ; il se fait J"_ tice d'une partie de la violation des lois «j ciales ; ses vengeances sont terribles p l'homme libre, puisque la censure o lst "°" la honte et le mépris : et combien cle st* § dales publics ne retient pas la crainte m. châtiments ? Dans les beaux temps cle n°*ji les citoyens, surveillants nés les uns a es» s'accusaient publiquement par zèle p % justice. Mais quand Rome fut corrompu^ citoyens zélés succédèrent des oeiai •„ t fâmes; au lieu qu'autrefois les bons accu- -^ les méchants, ils en furent accuses tour . -, rla méEn Egypte, la censure ssu_ v moire des morts ; la comédie eut o*" B^^ des un pouvoir plus étendu sur la rep vivants. „ •* i„ t-Ole niani^ 1 * L'esprit de l'homme est fait ae te ut rtr-c, encore plus du ridicule que d'un ,»ïl u

The Rousseau passage is found in a speech titled Nécessité d'établir une censure publique par J.-P. Picqué, which does not appear to mention the title and possibly not Rousseau at all (as far as I can tell). As you can see, this is fair messy OCR and is significantly truncated. We have a preliminary database running and will probably release this once we have the entire set and experiment further with alignment parameters.

Based on preliminary work that I have done on Topic based text segmentation, which Clovis followed up on in more detail (link), suggests that the individual séances may be a particularly good candidate for topic segmentation, since the topics can shift around radically. Running text tends not to do as well as clear shifts in topics. There are a number of newer approaches than the Hurst TextTiling implementation (which I will blog when I run them up) that may be more effective.

Finally, on the technical side, I want to experiment with LDA topic modeling. Again, Clovis' initial work on topic identification for the articles of Echo de la fabrique, indicate that, if one can get good topic segments, the modeling algorithm may be fairly effective. Oddly enough, I cannot recall anyone doing the "topic two-step", where one would apply topic modeling to parts of documents split up by a topic based segmentation algorithm. Or, I may have missed some important papers. The idea behind all of this is an attempt to build the ability to search for relatively coherent topics, either for browsing or searching.

So far, I have been talking about some more technical experimentation to see if certain algorithms, or general approaches, might be effective on a large and fairly complex document space. While I used the AP for significant work when I was doing Revolutionary studies, my initial systematic interest was in the General Cahiers de doléances. For my dissertation, and some later articles ("The Language of Enlightened Politics: The Société de 1789 in the French Revolution" in Computers and the Humanities 23 (1989): 357-64), I keyboarded a small sample of the Cahiers (don't ever, ever do that as a poor graduate student :-) to serve as a baseline corpus to look at changes in Revolutionary discourse over time, with specific reference to the materials published by the Société de 1789. I suspect that a statistical analysis of the language in the cahiers may bring to light interesting differences between the Estates, urban/rural, and north/south. For this set of tasks, I am planning to use the comparative functions of PhiloMine to examine the degree to which these divisions can be identified using machine learning approaches and, if so, what kinds of lexical differences can be identified. It would be equally interesting to compare a more linguistic analysis to the content analysis results found in Gilbert Shaprio et al, Revolutionary demands: a content analysis of the Cahiers de doléances of 1789.

I will, as promised (or threatened) above, try to blog good results and failures -- remember Edison is credited with saying while trying to invent the lightblub, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” -- of these efforts here so we can all consider them.

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