Style on Trial, or ‘Veut-on charger MM. les avocats du roi de composer le Dictionnaire de l’Académie?’

The theme of literary hermeneutics and style is explored in relation to the press trials of 1818. The purpose is to show that contemporary press legislation and the nature and rhetoric of the arguments presented by the prosecution combined to make literary style a significant issue both in the trials themselves and in their subsequent discussion in the press. This connection between literary quality and the freedom of the press amounted to a struggle for control of language and meaning. Whereas the prosecution was forced to demonstrate that texts meant something other than their surface meaning, the defence resorted to literal interpretation and its supporters in the press to denunciations of the literary credentials of the prosecution.