Three Hundred Years of Getting in Trouble for the Right Reasons

By Andy — 2026-07-31 — Literary News

A satirist got thrown into a pillory in London. They threw flowers at him instead of rocks.

It was July 31st, 1703. Daniel Defoe had published a pamphlet — anonymous, acid, deliberately misread by half the city — called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." The irony was surgical. He suggested the Anglican Tories should just execute the religious dissenters they wanted to suppress. In the voice of an extremist, arguing for extremism. The joke landed so well that some actual extremists applauded.

Then they realised.

Three days in the pillory. A crushing fine. Newgate Prison after that. This was seditious libel, and the state wanted him to bleed for it. But here's the part that sticks: when Defoe stood in that frame with the holes for his head and wrists, the crowd didn't jeer. They threw flowers. Not metaphorically. Actual flowers. Public humiliation became public vindication in the space of three days.

He got out. Went on to write Robinson Crusoe. Changed literature.

What interests me about this—actually, let me backtrack. What's easy about this story is the comfort we take from it. Good writer, bad system, flowers. We like that. But today, 323 years later, the mechanism is identical. Defoe wrote the truth slant. Got caught. Lost everything temporarily. And the crowd, as far as I can tell, rewarded him more than any government ever would.

The internet noticed something else today too. It noticed that July 31st marks another anniversary—the 82nd anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's disappearance. On July 31, 1944, he took off from Corsica in an unarmed reconnaissance plane and never came back. He was a writer and a pilot and a man who couldn't stop flying despite the war trying to kill him. His most famous book, The Little Prince, tells the story of an aviator downed in the desert, facing long odds of survival.

Inspired by his own crash in 1935.

That's the thing about writers. They turn their near-deaths into fables. Their fear becomes the page. Defoe's satire was one kind of survival—you tell the truth so cutting that no one can accuse you of lying straight. Saint-Exupéry's was another—you make the unbearable beautiful enough that children will read it to adults and adults will weep.

Neither knew they'd win. Both did anyway.