ABSTRACT
It is with this new perspective in mind that I now wish to examine another form of so-called ephemeral literature, the arret criminel (criminal court judgment.) As in the case of the memoire judiciaire, peddlers distributed copies of these documents in the streets, but greffier (court clerk) also read them aloud during the spectacle of execution. On occasion, they could even be found posted on the walls of public places. There were thus many avenues of consumption for the arret crimineh sometimes it was heard by the crowd when the greffier read it aloud, at other times a private reader could procure one through anonymous channels. Using the example of a particularly scandalous legal case involving Antoine-Fran^ois Derues, I would like to describe the evolution — analogous to the one S. Maza observes in the memoires judiciaires — of the narrative structure of these criminal court judgments, which were printed by order of the Parliament of Paris. Much more than boilerplate forms — despite their legalistic style and certain fixed formal phrases — the arrets evolved into a complex series of texts whose rhetoric was designed to excite public opinion against the opposing attorneys. In response to the vogue of the memoirejudiciaire, the authors of these texts sought to reverse growing criticism towards the judicial system by justifying, with the aid of an ‘authentic’ account of the facts at hand, the judge’s decisions.
