Les Pamphlets contre Necker: Medias et imaginaire politique au XVIIIe siecle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Léonard Burnand, writing in the tradition pioneered by Robert Darnton, traces Jacques Necker’s public career through the deforming lens of his enemies’ pamphlets, from the 1770s to his retirement in 1790, with an epilogue concerning the influence of those publications down to the present. A less talented author might have turned this into a tedious sequence of content-summaries, but Burnand skilfully weaves his analysis of the shifting opposition to the Genevan wizard into a critical survey of the anti-Necker literature, to produce a narrative that can be read with pleasure from end to end. When Necker launched a successful campaign to obtain the place of Controller-General Turgot (in office August 1774–May 1776), by questioning his laissez-faire policies in print, he became a target for the incumbent’s physiocrat friends Condorcet, Baudeau, Morellet and others. During his first term in office as Director of the Royal Treasury (1776–7) and then Director General of Finance (1777–81) Necker briefly wrested control over the royal financial system from men who owned most of its important offices, such as the powerful Treasurers-General and Receivers-General, or who, like the Company of the General Farm, leased the right to operate sections of the system. Burnand discusses the pamphlets this evoked from an outraged financial establishment and its spokesmen, notably the Farmer-General Augeard, financial operators like Radix de Sainte-Foy, Bourboulon and Panchaud, and the young and ambitious intendant Calonne. These men took aim, more successfully than Burnand admits, at Necker’s cleverly self-crafted reputation for competence and rectitude and scored several hits on Necker’s own past as an operator, his management of royal finances during the American War of Independence and the optimistic picture he painted of them in his famous Compte Rendu (1781).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".