Keeping you in the dark: the Bastille archives and police secrecy in eighteenth-century France

Abstract During the French Revolution, the Bastille prison had become synonymous with abuses of power and government secrecy. The Paris police had long exercised secrecy in its operations, but in the eighteenth century, they became a target of the revolutionaries as the most visible arm of a government that was seen as opaque but intrusive. Both the growing power of the modernising state and the rise of public opinion in this period contributed to changing attitudes towards government secrecy and to the valorisation of transparency in the political culture of the Revolution.