Abstract
The " secret remedies " were at the heart of empiricists' and charlatans' activities in the 20th century XVIIIthcentury. We approach them today from two angles . On the one hand, the economy of privilege placed them at the heart of Ancien Régime society, rather than at its margins. Secondly, political and scientific authorities sought to regulate and control their trade. The first perspective allows us to reflect on the ambiguities of corporate privilege, by which the monarchy derogates from its own rules in favor of remedy merchants who escape common law.This is a situation we find on a European scale, notably in Italy and Germany, where the plurality of legal norms produces a blurring of regulations and competition between the corporatist system and merchant dynamics. Everywhere, current historiography is discovering the diversity of players and the porosity of borders. The category of " empirical " encompasses a huge variety of situations, from itinerant remedy merchants to innovative entrepreneurs, sometimes active on a European scale, who mobilize the language of the Enlightenment, produce scholarly attestations and develop branding strategies
In a second time, we look at the gradual establishment of monarchical control over secret remedies in France, with the secret remedy commissions (1728, 1772), then above all with the creation of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1778. Thanks to active collaboration with the lieutenancy general of police and the inspector in charge of controlling " empiriques ", the Society, under the impetus of Félix Vicq d'Azyr, controlled almost seven hundred recipes for medicines or cosmetics, and rejected almost 90 % of them. It applied three criteria - harmlessness, efficacy, novelty - and sometimes carried out analyses and experiments before granting its official authorizations or tacit permissions. Despite a great deal of police work and scientific expertise, control remained inadequate : many quacks were reluctant to submit their products, local authorities were uncooperative, and it seemed difficult to fight remedy sellers on the advertising front. In 1789, after a decade's work, the Royal Society of Medicine concluded that it had relatively failed : it did not have the means to prevent empiricists whose remedies had been rejected from continuing to sell and advertise them.
