Harvard University professor Robert Darnton's book “Poetry and the Police” combines the techniques of detective investigation, historical research and theoretical reflection. Its plot is connected with the secondary unraveling of the circumstances of one case, once already solved by the Parisian police. We are talking about the dissemination in the spring of 1749 of seditious poems directed against the royal court and personally Louis XV. Trying to find the author, the police sent fourteen representatives of the educated class - students, young priests and lawyers - to the Bastille. Reconstructing the cultural context behind these poems, Robert Darnton describes topical, grassroots, and courtly poetry as an important political medium that largely determined what would come to be called “public opinion.” Trying - following the French detectives of the 18th century - to unravel the chain of distribution of this kind of poetry, the American historian reveals the role of oral communications and social networks in an era when the Ancien Regime was already becoming obsolete and the Internet had not yet been invented.Texts and program notes