TY - JOUR
AU - Brockliss,, Laurence
AB - The Sociéte Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), which traded between 1769 and 1794, was one of the few eighteenth-century publishing houses whose business papers have survived almost intact. Fortunately, for the historian, the STN was also in its day one of the most important printer-booksellers in Europe. Though based in a small Swiss-Prussian town located close to the French border, the enterprise at its height maintained twelve presses, stocked 1500 titles and sold its books all over the continent. Since the mid-1960s when the existence of its archives became widely known, the STN’s papers, held in the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, have been pored over by numerous historians intent on using its trading history as a way of bringing to life the burgeoning market for books in the Age of Enlightenment. One scholar in particular, the American historian Robert Darnton, who began studying the archive while a doctoral scholar at Oxford, has built his career on its contents. For Darnton, the STN has been a way into understanding above all the market for underground books in the France of Louis XVI and establishing a list of forbidden bestsellers which prepared the ground for the French Revolution. Although his initial ideas have been refined over the years by comparing the STN evidence with information about book seizures from the Paris archives, his basic thesis most fully developed in The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769–1789 and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France has remained unchanged from the early 1970s: the French gained their vision of an alternative world to the Ancien régime not just or even chiefly by reading the works of the leading philosophes, but also by digesting the pornographic novels, court libelles and utopian fantasies of second-rate writers like Louis-Sébastien Mercier, which were imported illegally into France from presses in Neuchâtel and other towns just over the eastern border. In the last ten years or so, however, Darnton’s extraordinary knowledge of the contents of the STN archives has come to be equalled, if not surpassed, by two English historians, Simon Burrows formerly of the University of Leeds and now of the Western Sydney University, and his lead research assistant, Mark Curran. Darnton, a lone scholar in the traditional mode, had spent many summers and one winter in Neuchâtel primarily reading and noting the 50,000 letters generated by the printing house. He had paid less attention to the STN’s trading ledgers. Burrows and Curran believed that the archive was too vast and complex to be successfully explored by a single historian and that it would be only possible to uncover its full riches once a team of scholars had been through the whole archive, transformed its content into machine-readable form and stored the material in a sophisticated, searchable database. Armed with a large grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, this they then proceeded to do, resulting in the publication of the much-praised French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE-1.0) database in June 2012, which provided researchers with both a cartographic and tabular account of the STN’s business. The studies discussed below represent the latest statements on the organization and character of the pre-Revolutionary French book trade drawn from these the two distinctive approaches. As the title suggests, Darnton’s book is built around a journey. In 1778, a twenty-nine-year-old employee of the STN called Favarger spent five months travelling around France at the company’s behest drumming up sales. Using Favarger’s diary of his travels and the correspondence between the STN and the provincial printer-booksellers he visited, Darnton builds up a composite picture of the STN’s business and the French book trade tout court. The reader is taken around France following in Favarger’s footsteps. Each chapter is devoted to a different town where we meet the booksellers, are introduced to their businesses, learn of their relations across time with the STN and hear about a different element of the French book trade. By the end of the book, we are fully informed about the trade’s organization: its dependence on imports, its financial fragility, the constant game of cat and mouse with censors and customs officials, and so on. And for those who want more information, the book is accompanied with a useful website (www.robertdarnton.org), which contains a transcription of Favarger’s diary, information about the individual printer-booksellers he sounded out and transcriptions of their correspondence with the STN. As with all of Darnton’s publications, the present book is a delight to read. Developed around a neat conceit and elegantly written, it holds the reader’s attention from beginning to end. Scholars familiar with Darnton’s earlier works may well feel that they have encountered much of the information it contains before, but they will discover when they reach the final chapter that his understanding of the role of the STN in the French book trade has subtly evolved. He continues to insist on the size and significance of the market for underground books in France on the eve of the Revolution. He continues to insist as well that this market was largely supplied by printing presses close to the eastern border and that the output of the STN can be taken as representative. His list of STN’s best sellers, however, contains some surprises. The old favourites are all there: Voltaire; Rousseau; Mercier’s An deux mille quatre cent quarante and Tableau de Paris; Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes; D’Holbach’s Système de la nature; and the infamous Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barri. But the works of Darnton’s High and Low Enlightenment share pride of place with works of Protestant piety. Among the books ordered by those Favarger encountered on his travels, the bestseller by far were the Psalms of David. As Protestant Bibles and catechisms could not be legally printed in France until the restrictions against Huguenots were lifted, such works were clearly part of the underground trade. But this is not the ‘under-the-counter’ world that Darnton has hitherto described. He also offers a more nuanced account of his Enlightenment bestsellers. Much is still made of the importance of the popularity of scandalous libels about the royal family which purportedly led to the désacralisation of the monarchy by 1789. But he is less willing to give materialism and atheism a starring role. The high ranking achieved by D’Holbach and Helvétius in the order book of the STN can be largely attributed to the bulk orders the house received from a single bookseller: Malherbe of Loudun, who went spectacularly bankrupt in 1781 owing the STN 3300 livres. Nor is pornography given central billing: Thérèse philosophe, of which much was made in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, has only a bit-part in the book. The Enlightenment being consumed by French readers on the eve of the Revolution is now seen to be an essentially Rousseauian one and the principal aspect of the Ancien régime state that they sought information about was the abuse of absolute power. The study of Curran and Burrows is on a much larger scale. Darnton’s work is based on the STN’s relations with some twenty provincial booksellers and pedlars who ordered between them 1215 titles. Curran and Burrows, on the other hand, draw on the complete digitized archive and describe a book trade that comprised 3987 separate editions and 2984 titles and involved the shipment of 445,000 books to 2895 clients (booksellers, business associates and individuals). Their study, moreover, despite its title, deals with the sales history of the STN, not just in France, but across the whole continent. Curran’s volume provides the first detailed, statistical account of the STN as a business. The partnership was floated, we learn, on the relatively small capital of 9000 livres. The partners then slowly built up the business across the 1770s into one of the largest printer-booksellers in Europe by concentrating on the Francophone market, developing a large list of French-language titles, keeping print-runs small and cutting profit-margins to the bone. From the late 1770s, however, the business got into difficulties as it became harder to sell books in France once the authorities made a serious effort to stop the import of illegal books and pirated editions. The STN responded by hiring out its presses to individuals like Brissot or printing huge runs of a handful of authors. But neither strategy worked, and in 1784, the STN went into receivership with an unserviceable debt of 75,000 livres. Burrows’ volume covers some of the same ground but is primarily interpretative. Like Darnton, he seeks to place the history of the STN in the history of the Enlightenment by establishing the geography of STN sales and the most popular works on its list. But his analysis is not based on a small sample of the STN’s client base but its business transactions across its entire twenty-five years of its existence. Burrow’s and Curran’s study both confirms and significantly challenges Darnton’s account. They confirm that the STN’s stock was a mix of their own publications and books they obtained from other publishers (the ratio was 2:1). They confirm too that the STN’s market was principally the south and east of France: it proved almost impossible to break into northern Europe; London for instance accounted for only 0.3 per cent of their sales. On the other hand, they throw serious doubt on Darnton’s belief that the STN can be taken as representative of the printer-booksellers on the eastern border that made a living exporting books legally or illegally to France. The STN exchanged books only with other Swiss publishing houses and their list should be seen as sui generis. Arguably the house was concentrating on titles where it glimpsed a hole in the market. It was not one of a number of frontier booksellers offering the same stock. There is also agreement with Darnton that the STN was in the business of selling Enlightenment. But their own analysis of the sales only partly agrees with his latest nuanced statement. They largely confirm Darnton’s list of bestselling livres philosophiques, but they raise doubts about using the list to define the mentalité of the enlightened Frenchman or women on the eve of Revolution. Mercier’s works may account for one out of nine of the STN’s sales, but this should not necessarily be taken as indicative of his wider significance. He was the partnership’s only in-house philosophe. The Parisian had approached the STN directly about publishing his works and the house had taken a gamble and bought his manuscripts. His works turned out to be a money-spinner but they were not the usual pirated editions the STN specialized in, and when trading conditions worsened, Mercier was one of the authors in whom they invested heavily hoping to restore their fortunes. Burrows and Curran also reject Darnton’s view of the commercial importance of the political libelle. This was not part of the STN’s normal business and the only one they sold in any numbers was the Anecdotes sur la comtesse du Barri. Burrows doubts as well whether this and the other infamous libelles had much lasting effect: they were aimed at Louis XV not Louis XVI. The pair, furthermore, go much further than Darnton in downplaying the commercial importance to the STN of the sales of clandestine works. Only 15 per cent of the 2984 titles sold could be classed as ‘under-the-counter’ books and only 29 per cent of the sales, a figure inflated solely by the huge number of copies of Mercier’s works and Raynal’s Histoire philosophique the house managed to shift. Even the religious side of the business can be exaggerated. The Psalms, the New Testament and the Bible are all on the bestseller list, and a list stripped of commission sales places Ostervald’s Abrégé de l’histoire sainte et du catéchisme at the top, but such works comprised only 8.8 per cent of the total. The large majority of books sold by the STN were ‘trashy’, sentimental novels, historical works and travelogues. They were just the sort of books that were being borrowed from lending libraries all over Europe but they were hardly works of Enlightenment. Indeed, the bestselling work of all—a book commissioned by Rilliet de Saussure, a member of the Genevan Council of 200—emphasizes that profit not Enlightenment or Protestant solidarity dominated the partnership’s business calculations. Rilliet’s Planta gagnant sa vie en honnête homme sold 16,787 copies, 2500 more than its nearest rival, Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. Most were shipped to Rilliet himself. It was a scandalous diatribe published as an ill-judged speculation at the behest of a member of the Genevan Council of 200 who was at odds with his wife. The work caused such concern to his own family that when its author died, his heir bought up the whole run and had it pulped. As a result, Burrows and Curran are keen not to oversell the STN as the or even a centre of Enlightenment publishing. Burrows suggests 2.9 million livres philosophiques entered circulation in France in the 1770s and 1780s. The STN traded in 414 of the 938 known ‘under-the-counter’ titles but was responsible for the importation of merely 123,244. This was small beer, and in terms of individual title sales possibly a poor reflection of the distribution of forbidden books in pre-Revolutionary France. But nor was the STN a representative centre of the French publishing trade in general. Only 5–6 per cent of the new books circulating in the 1770s and 1780s could be classed as ‘forbidden’ rather than simply illegal because they were pirated copies. The vast majority of new books, Burrows believes, legal and illegal, were Catholic religious works. They do not turn up in personal library catalogues because most of these works were ephemera and unrecorded. But if this were the case—and Burrows supports his claim with plausible evidence from the surviving inspection reports of the Besançon chambre syndicale in the late 1770s and early 1780—then the STN was completely unrepresentative of the French book trade. As a Protestant publisher it did not print Catholic devotional tracts and never sold a single copy of the much-reprinted L’Ange conducteur of which 50,000 copies were probably circulating in Franche-Comté alone between 1778 and 1789. The sheer weight of the statistical data on which Burrows and Curran’s account is based makes their argument convincing. Their work showcases the potential of the digital humanities as a tool for deepening our historical understanding. Yet if it seriously challenges the account that Darnton has painstakingly constructed over the last fifty years, it ultimately gets little nearer in answering the question that both they and Darnton as well as historians of France from Daniel Mornet onwards have been and are seeking to solve: the role of subversive books and books in general in shaping the outlook of the French on the eve of the French Revolution. For all their caveats about the specific role of the STN, Burrows and Curran acknowledge that France was swimming in anti-establishment or Enlightenment literature broadly defined in the 1770s and 1780s. What they, no more than Darnton, can say with any certainty is: who bought these works, why did they do so, and what did they make of them? Unless these questions can be satisfactorily addressed, linking the circulation of books with the outbreak and course of the French Revolution requires an unenlightened act of faith. We will know much more than at present about the ownership of books among the elite in the Netherlands, France, the British Isles and Italy once Alicia Montoya and her team at Radboud University have completed their digital study of 3000 extant printed catalogues of private libraries. We will know even more if they can extend their study to surviving manuscript catalogues as well. Understanding why people bought books, whether they read them, and what effect they had will be a much tougher nut to crack. The correspondence of members of the Republic of Letters can be very revealing about the purchase and use of learned works on antiquities, natural history and experimental philosophy. But tracking down information about the purchase and consumption of subversive works whatever the genre is very difficult. The sources uncovered by Mark Towsey in preparing his Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 are very rare. There is no way either that the answers to these questions can be second-guessed. As Antoine Lilti has demonstrated in his Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité, the leading lights of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and Rousseau, were more than their books: they were cult personalities. Owning one of their works in many cases would have meant no more than that the purchaser was part of the in-crowd. The radical message in many works of Enlightenment, high and low, moreover, was not immediately or easily accessible. Raynal’s bestselling Histoire philosophique is a case in point. As Burrows acknowledges, the attack on slavery attributed to Diderot is found deep inside the third edition. It may have passed readers by who had principally bought the book for the information it contained about the Americas. Many of the works that the philosophes penned, moreover, were deliberately elusive. We should not assume that an eighteenth-century audience, however literate, consumed texts with the subtlety of a post-modern literary critic. Voltaire’s play Mahomet is an attack on all forms of revealed religion, but contemporaries seem to have taken it at face value as a critique of the claims of Islam. In 1773, Mahomet was put on as the end-of-year school play at the Doctrinaire’s college at Avallon, while the students at the Parisian elite seminary of St Sulpice were known to perform it at their country retreat. This is not to devalue in any way the contribution Darnton and now Burrows and Curran have made to our understanding of the circulation of books in pre-Revolutionary France. As always, productive historical research throws up new questions and challenges. As Burrows makes clear in his Afterword, his digitization project does not end with the STN archives. Having established that the STN was sui generis, he is now moving on to investigate digitally other surviving printers’ archives, notably the businesses of the Veuve Desaint in Paris and Luchtmans in Leiden. He is also working on a new version of the STN database that will link with other history-of-the-book projects such as Montoya’s. In time then we may have a mega-database that allows researchers to interrogate every collected piece of data on the eighteenth-century book trade directly. As a result, of course, it could be the case that scholarly secondary studies like the ones under review will become redundant or the monograph be replaced by the brief interpretative article. The new age of digital humanities may only take us a little closer to understanding the cultural causes of the French Revolution. We will never find the Holy Grail. But it is set fair to change dramatically what we understand a work of history to be. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A Literary Tour de France. The World of Books on the Eve of the French RevolutionThe French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, I. Selling EnlightenmentThe French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, II. Enlightenment Bestsellers
JO - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/crz033
DA - 2019-06-18
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-literary-tour-de-france-the-world-of-books-on-the-eve-of-the-french-RuXSeSbXYk
SP - 110
VL - 33
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -