The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800
The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800
Anderson, Wilda;Darnton, Robert;
1980-05-01 00:00:00
The Business of Enlightenment A publishing history of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800 Robert Darnton Copyright © 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Th e author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License. Attribute all licensed uses to Robert Darnton (author) and Harvard University Press (publisher). For complete license terms, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-23826 ISBN 0-674-08785 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-08786-X (paper) Creative Commons license negotiated with assistance from: Learn more at authorsalliance.org/reversion PREFACE TO THE CREATIVE COMMONS EDITION I am making the fi rst two books I published available online and free of charge through the Authors Alliance, because I hope in at least a small way to promote the diff usion of knowledge. Th ey are still in print, but they exhausted their commercial viability long ago. Th e fi rst, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, was published in 1968. I like to joke that the royalties from it provide me with enough revenue to take my wife to dinner once every three years—if she pays for her half of the bill. Th e second book, Th e Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800, published in 1979, still attracts quite a few readers, although not enough purchasers to sub- sidize many evenings in a restaurant. Most authors lose little revenue by making old or out-of-print books available for free on a Creative Commons license. And they gain a great deal: access to readers. More than anything else, I want to see my books reach new readers. I suspect most authors share this goal though, to be sure, writers who live from their keyboards need to balance their desire to reach readers with their need to make money. More power to them. But most of us, especially in the academic world, care primarily about the circulation of our ideas, and we do not want our books to die aft er their commercial lives have ended. How can you give your book new life? Make it avail- able with help from the Authors Alliance. Follow the directions in the Authors Alliance guide, Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available, and have it distributed from an open-access repository—even through the col- Preface To e C Th reative Commons Edition lections oer ff ed to the public by the Digital Public Library of America. In doing so, you are not doling out charity. You are ensuring that your work’s continuing impact and relevance are not limited by its commer- cial life. Of course, you probably will need to win the agreement of your publisher. I was fortunate in that the Harvard University Press gener- ously agreed to provide the rights needed to publicly release the books online. I feel grateful for this support. At the same time, the HUP may benet fi from its generosity, because exposure to the online editions can make some readers want to purchase print copies. A book that sits on a shelf, read by only a few persons with access to that library, will never circulate as widely as an Authors Alliance version of the same text. e Th ancient printed book may be rediscovered aer ft decades of neglect, but more likely it will be forgotten. Deposit it in an open-access repository, put it within the range of search engines, and sit back with the satisfac- tion that it will live again as part of the general endeavor to make all knowledge available to all humans. Cambridge, Massachusetts Robert Darnton June 2015 TTYTTTl'TTTTT ACKNOVVLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to two research centers that provided support and fellowship during the labor on this book-the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sci ences at Stanford, California, where I began writing the book in 1973, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study at Wassenaar, The Netherlands, where I finished in 1977, having laid it aside for other work in the interim. The research goes back to 1965, when I first began to explore the archives of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel and the Chambre syndicale and Anisson-Duperron collections of the Biblio theque nationale. Thanks to generous help from the Society of Fellows of Harvard University in 1965-1968 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1970-1971, these explorations have continued over many years and have led to other publications as well as this one. By spending a semester as a directeur d'etudes associe in the Vle Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (now the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales) in 1971, I learned a great deal from the French masters of histoire du livre. And I learned most of all from Jacques Rychner, now director of the Bibliotheque de la ville de Neuchatel, who explained the mysteries of analytical bib liography to me over countless cups of coffee in the shops around the library in Neuchatel. He permitted me to pursue the study of the Encyclopedie into the printing shop of the STN, territory that belongs to him and that will become known in all its richness when he publishes his doctoral thesis. My work in Neuchatel also benefited greatly from the encourage- vii .Acknowledgments ment of the late Charly Guyot, and I hope that this book may help to perpetuate the memory of his kindness. Another N euchatelois also helped me enormously, although I never met him. He was Jean J eanpretre, a retired chemist, who de voted the last years of his life to cataloguing the papers of the STN. His labor and the cheerful cooperation of the staff of the Bibliotheque de la ville made it a joy to work in the STN archives. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the help of several persons who aided in the preparation of this book. Caroline Hannaway provided information on five obscure contributors to the Encyclopedie methodique. Marie-Claude Lapeyre of the Laboratoire cartographique in the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales prepared the maps, and Charlotte Carlson drew the graphs. Giles Barber read Chapter V and Raymond Birn read the entire manuscript with great care. Elizabeth Suttell edited it. Susan Darnton prepared the index. Marianne Perlak designed the book. American-Stratford Graphic Serv ices, Inc., did the composition. And The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group did the printing and binding. viii TTTTTTTTTTTT CONTENTS I. Introduction: The Biography of a Book 1 II. The Genesis of a Speculation in Publishing 38 The Neuchatel Reprint Plan I 39 From the Reprint to the Revised Edition I 44 ,Joseph Duplain and His Quarto Encyclopedic I 57 Publishing, Politics, and Panckoucke I 66 From the Revised Edition to the Quarto / 76 The Paris Con- ference of 1777 I 82 The Basis of a Bonne Afjaire I 89 III. Juggling Editions 94 The '' Second Edition'' I 94 The Origins of the ''Third Edition" I 100 Imbroglios I 103 The Neuchatel Imprint I 111 Opening Gambits of the Final Negotiations / 116 Duel by Lettre Ostensible I 120 The Last Turn of the Screw I 124 The Contract I 127 IV. Piracy and Trade War 131 Pirate Raids I 131 The Octavo Publishers and Their Encyclopedic I 136 The Origins of the Quarto-Octavo War I 139 The Final Failure of Diplomacy I 147 Open War I 154 Pourparlers for Peace I 165 A Drole de Paix I 171 ix Contents V. Bookmaking 177 Strains on the Production System I 177 Procuring Paper / 185 Copy / 196 Recruiting Workers / 203 Setting Wages / 212 Printing: Technology Pacing Work and Managing Labor I 219 and the Human Element / 227 VI. Diffusion 246 Managerial Problems and Polemics / 246 Marketing / 254 Booksellers / 263 Prices and Consumers / 273 The Sales Pattern / 278 Subscribers, A Case Study / 287 Diffusion in France / 295 Diffusion Outside France I 299 Reading I 319 VII. Settling Accounts 324 The Hidden Schism of 1778 I 325 A Preliminary Reglement de Comptes / 331 The Feud Between Duplain and the STN / 336 Marketing Maneuvers I 343 The Perrin Affair I 349 The Anatomy of a Swindle / 360 The Final Confrontation in Lyons I 370 Denouement I 376 Epilogue I 381 VIII. The Ultimate Encyclopedie 395 The Origins of the Encyclopedic methodique I 395 The Climactic Moment in Enlightenment Publishing I 403 The Liegeois Settlement I 410 Panckoucke 's Conception of the Supreme Encyclopedic I 416 Panckoucke as an Editor I 423 The Authors of the Methodique /430 Two Generations of Encyclo- pedists I 437 From V oltairianism to Professionalism / 44 7 Launching the Biggest Book of the Century / 454 IX. Encyclopedism, Capitalism, and Revolution 460 Panckoucke 's Folly / 460 From Encyclopedism to Jacobin- ism I 481 An Enlightenment Publisher in a Cultural Revolu- tion I 496 The Last of the Encyclopedists / 510 x Contents X. Conclusion 520 The Production and Diffusion of Enlightenment I 520 Enlighten- ment Publishing and the Spirit of Capitalism / 531 The Encyclopedie and the State I 535 The Cultural Revolution I 539 Appendices 549 A. Contracts of the Encyclopedie Publishers, 1776-1780 I 549 B. Subscriptions to the Quarto Encyclopedie / 586 C. Incidence of Subscriptions in Major French Cities / 594 D. Contributors to the Encyclopedic Methodique I 597 Bibliographical Note 611 Index 619 Figures 1. The Distribution of Paper in the Neuchatel Quarto: Volume 24 194-195 2. Manpower and Productivity, June-NoYember 1778 226 3. Work-Flow in the Shop, April 19-24, 1779 240 4. The Production of Volume 6, July-December 1777 241 5. The Diffusion of the Quarto, France and the French Border- land 279 6. Subscribers to the Quarto in Besam;on 291 7. Comtois Subscribers Outside Besam;on 292 8. The Diffusion of the Quarto Outside France 301 9. The Subscription Swindle 362 10. Two Generations of Encyclopedists, Geographical Origins 442-443 11. Two Generations of Encyclopedists, Social Position 445 Contents Illustrations from the Encyclopedie Grinding rags into stuff in a paper mill. Making sheets of paper from a mold. Type, set in a composing stick and justified. Composing lines and imposing pages. 232 Beating the forme and pulling the bar of the press. 233 The common press. 234 Table The Flow of Encyclopedic Paper to Neuchatel 190-191 TTTTTTTTTTTT THE BUSINESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT A Note on Terminology and Spelling In the eighteenth century, the French did not have an equivalent of "publisher" in English or editeur in modern French. They normally spoke of Ubraires, libraires-imprimeurs, or simply entrepreneurs. Of course many libraires sold books without becoming involved in their production, so "publisher" and "publishing" have been used in their modern, English sense throughout this book. ''Edition'' is also an am biguous term. l\Iodern bibliographers distinguish between ''editions,'' "printings," "states," and other units in the production and repro duction of texts. But eighteenth-century libraires and imprimeurs talked loosely of editions, which were partial reruns of incomplete printings and sometimes did not exist at all, as will be seen in the discussion of the ''missing'' second editions of the quarto and octavo Encycwpedies. To avoid confusion, and at the cost of some biblio the term ''edition'' has been used in the casual, graphical impurity, eighteenth-century manner. In this way, it will be possible to follow the publishers' discussions of their work without becoming entangled in anachronistic terms or distracted by the excessive use of quotation marks. As this book is based almost entirely on manuscript material, which has a rich, original flavor, quotations have been given in French. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, except in a few cases, where the original is so primitive that it indicates a significantly poor mastery of the written word. Place names such as Lyons and Marseilles have been spelled according to English usage, except where they occur in French passages. xw I TTT'fT'fTTTTYY INTRODUCTION: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BOOK By recounting the life story of the Encyclopedie, this book is meant to dispel some of the obscurity surrounding the history of books in general. A book about a book: the subject seems arcane, and it could contract into the infinitely small, like a mirror reflected in a mirror. If done properly, however, it should enlarge the understanding of many aspects of early modern history, for l'histoire du livre, as it is known in France, opens onto the broadest questions of historical re search. How did great intellectual movements like the En lightenment spread through society1 How far did they reach, how deeply did they penetrate? ·what form did the thought of the philosophes acquire when it materialized into books, and what does this process reveal about the transmission of ideas 1 Did the material basis of literature and the technology of its production have much bearing on its substance and its diffusion 1 How did the literary market place function, and what were the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communica tion 1 How did publishing function as a business, and how did it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of pre revolutionary Europe 1 The questions could be multiplied endlessly because books touched on such a vast range of human activity-everything from picking rags to transmit ting the word of God. They were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. Yet this inviting subject, located at the crossroads of so 1 The Business of Enlightenment many avenues of research, hardly exists in the United States today. We do not have a word for it. Histoire du livre sounds awkward as ''history of the book,'' and the awkwardness betokens unfamiliarity with what has emerged as a distinct historical genre, with its own methods, its special journals, and its allotted place among sister disciplines, on the other side of the Atlantic. In the United States, book history has been relegated to library schools and rare book collections. Step into any rare book room and you will find aficionados savoring bindings, epigones contemplating watermarks, eru dits preparing editions of Jane Austen; but you will not run across any ordinary, meat-and-potatoes historian attempting to understand the book as a force in history. It is a pity, for the generalist could learn a great deal from the specialists in the treasure houses of books. They could teach him to sift through their riches and to tap the vein of information that runs through their periodicals: The Library, Studies in Bibliography, Papers of the Bibliographical So ciety of America, Revue Franqaise d'histoire du livre, Den gulden passer, the Gutenberg J ahrbuch, and mal,ly others. Admittedly, these publications seem to be written by bibli ographers for bibliographers, and it can be difficult to see issues of substance beneath the esoteric language and the antiquarianism. But bibliography need not be confined to problems such as how consistently compositor B misspelled the text of The Merchant of Venice or whether the patterns of skeleton formes reveal regularity in compositorial prac tices. Bibliography leads directly into the hurly-burly of working-class history: it provides one of the few means of analyzing the work habits of skilled artisans before the Indus trial Revolution. Curiously, however, it has not attracted much attention among the French, who have done the most to bring the his tory of books out of the realm of mere erudition and into the broad paths of histoire fatale. French research tends to be statistical and sociological. It usually takes the form of macro scopic surveys of book production or microscopic analyses of individual libraries, but it neglects the processes by which books were produced and distributed. Those processes have been studied best in Britain, where researchers have pursued their quarry into the account books of publishers and the ledgers of booksellers, not merely into state and notarial ar- 2 The Biography of a Book chives, as in France. By mixing British empiricism with the French concern for broad-gauged social history it might be possible to develop an original blend of the history of books in America. Of course it is easier to pronounce on how history ought to be written than to write it; and once the historian of books has equipped himself with prolegomena and method ologies and has ventured into the field, he is likely to stumble on the greatest difficulty of all: inadequate sources. He may work in a library overflowing with ancient volumes, but he cannot know where they circulated before they reached him and whether they really represent the reading habits of the past. State archives show how books appeared to the authori ties in charge of controlling them. Auction catalogues and inventaires apres deces give glimpses of private libraries. But the official sources do not reveal much about the lived experience of literature among ordinary readers. In fact the catalogues as well as the books had to pass the censorship in eighteenth-century France, so it does not seem surprising that the Enlightenment fails to appear in research based on catalogues and requests for privileges, a kind of royal copy right. The Enlightenment existed elsewhere, first in the spec ulations of philosophes, then in the speculations of publishers, who invested in the market place of ideas beyond the bound aries of French law. How these speculations came together in books and how the books acquired readers has remained a mystery because the papers of the publishers have almost entirely disappeared. But the records of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, one of the most important publishers of French books in the eighteenth century, have survived in the Swiss city of Neu chatel, and they contain information about every aspect of book history They show how authors were treated, paper manufactured, copy processed, type set, sheets printed, crates shipped, authorities courted, police circumvented, booksellers provisioned, and readers satisfied everywhere in Europe be tween 1769 and 1789. The information is vast enough to over whelm the researcher. A few letters from a bookseller can reveal more than a whole monograph about the book trade, yet the papers in Neuchatel contain 50,000 letters by all kinds 1. For examples of the different areas of research in this field and for further reading see the Bibliographical Note. 3 The Business of Enlightenment of persons who lived by the book trade in all kinds of ways. It would be impossible to do justice to the material and to reconstruct the world of eighteenth-century books in a single Therefore, after some reconnoitering in 1963, I de volume. cided to go through the entire collection in Neuchatel, to supplement it with research in other archives, and to write a series of studies about intellectuals, books, and public opinion in the age of the Enlightenment. The present volume constitutes the :first installment. It is intended to explore the ways of Enlightenment publishing by tracing the life cycle of a single book-not just any book, to be sure, but the supreme work of the Enlightenment, Di derot's Encyclopedie. Given the richness of the sources and the complexity of the subject, it seemed better to attempt an histoire totale of one publication than to treat the totality of publishing. By following a single theme wherever it leads, one can branch out in many directions and cut into unmapped territory. This approach has the advantage of specificity: better, at a preliminary stage of groping in the unknown, to :find out precisely how publishers drew up contracts, editors handled copy, printers recruited workers, and booksellers pitched sales talk while making and marketing one book than to withdraw into hazy statements about books in general. There is also the appeal of novelty: it has never before been possible to trace the production and diffusion of an eight eenth-century book. And :finally, the publishing history of the Encyclopedie deserves to be told because it is a good story. The story can be pieced together from the letters of the publishers-not very businesslike letters, most of them. They abound in denunciations of conspiracies and epithets like "pirate," "corsaire," and "brigand," which suggest the flavor of the book trade in the Old Regime. Driven by an un limited appetite for lucre, uninhibited by compunctions about stabbing partners in the back and tossing competitors to the sharks, the publishers of the Encyclopedie epitomized the phase of economic history known as "booty capitalism." Perhaps they had more in common with the merchant adven turers of the Renaissance than with modern executives, but then how much is known about the inside history of business in any period? What other enterprise can be studied as closely as the Encyclopedie, not only from its commercial corre spondence but also from account books, the secret memoranda 4 The Biography of a Book of the managers, the diaries of traveling salesmen, the com plaints of customers, and the reports of industrial spies-a whole series of industrial spies the publishers used against allies and enemies alike? The Encyclopedie gave rise to so many alliances and alignments that its contracts and codicils -traites, the publishers called them-need to be studied in the same way as diplomatic documents. And its publishers wrote so many letters that one can investigate their way of thinking as well as their behavior. To see how they reached decisions, how they calculated strategy, and what they cared about is to enter into the mental world of early entrepreneurs. The story of the Encyclopedie suggests the possibility of an intellectual history of businessmen as well as a diplomatic history of business. But it is difficult to tell a story and to ana lyze behavior patterns at the same time. This book will switch from the narrative to the analytical mode when it seems ap propriate, and the reader who prefers one to the other can jump around in the text, using chapter subheadings as sign posts. The story begins around the time that Diderot ended his connection with the Encyclopedie-that is, in 1772, when the last volume of plates came out. It may seem strange to em bark on a history of the Encyclopedie just after Diderot had steered it safely into port, but this procedure can be justified by two considerations. First, a huge literature on Diderot and the original Encyclopedie already exists. The text of the book has been analyzed and anthologized dozens of times : to recapitulate all the studies of its intellectual content would be redundant, even if it were important for the purposes of publishing history. Secondly, very little can be learned about the production and diffusion of the first edition. A few frag ments from the account books of the original publishers have been found, and some of the publishers' commercial activities can be deduced from material assembled by Luneau de Bois jermain, a cranky subscriber who unsuccessfully sued them for swindle. Although several scholars have combed through these documents with great care, they have failed to find out 2. This statement should not be construed to imply that publishing history can ignore the contents of books. On the contrary, this study is meant to show the im portance of understanding not only texts but also the meaning of texts for their audience at specific points in the past. For references to the literature on the Encyclopedie, especially studies of the early editions, see the Bibliographical Note. 5 The Business of Enlightenment how the first edition was manufactured, where it was sold, and who bought it. The history of the second edition remains al most equally obscure, despite some revealing material that George B. \Vatts and John Lough have excavated from ar chives in Geneva. And although Italian scholars have uncov ered some of the politics surrounding the editions of Lucca and Leghorn, they have not found out how much the Italian reprints cost and how many copies they contained. As far as the diffusion of the Encyclopedie is concerned, however, the first four editions were relatively unimportant. They were luxurious folio publications ordinary readers could not afford and, when taken together, accounted for only about 40 percent of the Encyclopedies in existence before 1789. The great mass of the Encyclopedies in prerevolutionary Europe came from the cut-rate quarto and octavo editions printed between 1777 and 1782. Between 50 and 65 percent of the copies in France were quartos, and all of them can be traced, thanks to the papers of the Societe typographique de Neu chatel (STN). The archives in Neuchatel also make it possible to explain the history of the octavo edition and the origins of the Encyclopedie methodique, the ultimate encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, whose fate can be followed through the Revolution from other sources. Furthermore, the Neuchatel papers reveal the connecting links between all the Encyclo pedie speculations, including some that never materialized, from 1750 to 1800. They show how the book changed in shape as the publishers adapted it to an ever-widening audience and how publishing consortia succeeded one another· as the specu lators scrambled to exploit the biggest best seller of the cen tury. From the viewpoint of book history, therefore, the story of the Encyclopedie took its most important turn in the 1770s. Only then did it move into a phase that represented the diffusion of Enlightenment on a massive scale. If the docu mentation will not permit much study of the book's previous incarnations, it is rich enough to show how Diderot's work the vast majority of his readers after he had finished reached with it. Before attempting to follow the later transmigrations of the text, it is important to take account of a basic fact that became apparent to the authorities in France as soon as the first volume of the first edition reached the subscribers : the 6 The Biography of a Book book was dangerous. It did not merely provide information about everything from A to Z; it recorded knowledge accord ing to philosophic principles expounded by d 'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse. Although he formally acknowledged the authority of the church, d 'Alembert made it clear that knowledge came from the senses and not from Rome or Reve lation. The great ordering agent was reason, which combined sense data, working with the sister faculties of memory and imagination. Thus everything man knew derived from the around him and the operations of his own mind. The world Encyclopedie made the point graphically, with an engraving of a tree of knowledge showing how all the arts and sciences grew out of the three mental faculties. Philosophy formed the trunk of the tree, while theology occupied a remote branch, next to black magic. Diderot and d 'Alembert had dethroned the ancient queen of the sciences. They had rearranged the and reoriented man within it, while elbow cognitive universe ing God outside. They knew that tampering with world views was a danger ous business, so they hid behind subterfuge, irony, and false protestations of orthodoxy. But they did not hide the epis temological basis of their attack on the old cosmology. On the contrary, the Preliminary Discourse made it explicit in a brief history of philosophy that established the intellectual pedigree of the philosophes and struck down orthodox Thom ism on one side and neo-orthodox Cartesianism on the other, leaving only Locke and Newton standing. Thus Diderot and d'Alembert presented their work as both a compilation of information and a manifesto of philosophie. They meant to merge those two aspects of the book, to make them seem like two sides of the same coin: Encyclopedism. This strategy served as a way of legitimizing the Enlightenment because the Encyclopedists identified their philosophy with knowl itself-that is, with valid knowledge, the kind derived edge from the senses and the f acuities of the mind as opposed to the kind dispensed by church and state. Traditional learning, they implied, amounted to nothing but prejudice and super stition. So beneath the bulk of the Encyclopedie 's twenty eight folio volumes and the enormous variety of its 71,818 articles and 2,885 plates lay an epistemological shift that transformed the topography of everything known to man. It was this break with the established notions of knowledge 7 The Business of Enlightenment and intellectual authority that made the Encyclopedie so heretical. Having made the break and having learned to look at the world of knowledge from the viewpoint of the Pre liminary Discourse, readers could see smaller heresies scat tered throughout the book. Finding them became a game. It would not do to look in obvious places, where the Encyclo pedists had to be most careful about the censorship, although they even smuggled some impiety into the article CHRISTIAN ISME. Better to search through out-of-the-way articles with absurd headings like ASCHARIOUNs and EPIDELIUs for remarks about the absurdities of Christianity. Of course the remarks had to be veiled. The Encyclopedists draped the pope in Japanese robes before mocking him in SIAKO; they diguised the Eucharist as an extravagant pagan ritual in YPAINI; they dressed up the Holy Spirit as a ridiculous bird in AIGLE; and they made the Incarnation look as silly as a superstition about a magic plant in AGNUS scYTmcus. At the same time, they produced a parade of high-minded, law-abiding Hindus, Con fucians, Hottentots, Stoics, Socinians, deists, and atheists, who usually seemed to get the better of the orthodox in argu ments, although orthodoxy always triumphed in the end, thanks to non sequiturs or the intervention of ecclesiastical authorities, as in UNITAIRES. In this way, the Encyclopedists stimulated their readers-to seek for meaning between the lines and to listen for double-entendre. Once a reader learned to exercise his reason in this manner, he would discover unreason in all spheres of life, including the social and political. The Encyclopedie treated the state with more respect than the church, and it did not contest the supremacy of the privileged orders. But mixed among its conventional and sometimes contradictory articles, the at tentive reader could find a good deal of irreverence for the masters of the secular world. Not only did Diderot seem to reduce the authority of the king to the consent of the people in AUTORITE POLITIQUE but also d 'Holbach advocated a bour geois-type constitutional monarchy in REPREsENTANTS; Rous seau anticipated the radical arguments of his Contrat social in :EcoNOMIE (Morale et Politique) ; and .Jaucourt popularized natural law theory in dozens of articles that implicitly chal the ideology of Bourbon absolutism. Several articles lenged pomp and pretensions of the aristocracy. Although mocked the the tax exemptions of the privileged orders were def ended in 8 The Biography of a Book some places (EXEMPTIONS and PRIVILEGE), they were attacked in others (vINGTIEME and IMPOT). And the dignity of ordinary persons was affirmed at many points, not only in articles about bourgeois (N:EaocE) but also in impassioned descriptions of the hard life of laborers (PEUPLE). It would be wrong to construe such remarks as a call for revolution. The Encyclopedie was a product of its time, of mid-century France, when writers could not discuss social and political questions openly, in contrast to the prerevolutionary era, when a tottering government permitted a good deal of frank discussion. The Encyclopedie did not even favor an advanced form of capitalism. Despite its emphasis on tech nology and physiocracy, it discouraged the concentration of men and machines in factories, and it presented an archaic picture of manufacturing rather than a preview of the in dustrial revolution in articles like INDUSTRIE and MANUFAC TURES. The radical element in the Encyclopedie did not come from any prophetic vision of the far-off French and industrial revolutions but from its attempt to map the world of knowl edge according to new boundaries, determined by reason and reason alone. As its title page proclaimed, it pretended to be a '' dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers'' -that is, to measure all human activity by rational standards and so to provide a basis for rethinking the wor Id. Contemporaries had no difficulty in detecting the purpose of the book, which its authors acknowledged openly in key articles like Diderot's ENCYCLOPEDIE and d 'Alembert's Aver tissement to volume 3. From the appearance of the first vol ume in 1751 until the great crisis of 1759, the Encyclopedie was denounced by def enders of the old orthodoxies and the Old Regime, by Jesuits, J ansenists, the General Assembly of the Clergy, the Parlement of Paris, the king's council, and the pope. The denunciations flew so thick and fast, in articles, pamphlets, and books as well as official edicts, that the Ency clopedie seemed doomed. But the publishers had invested a fortune in it, and they had powerful protectors, notably Chretien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the liberal Directeur de la librairie, who superintended the book trade during the crucial years between 1750 and 1763. Malesherbes saved the Encyclopedie several times, first in 1752, when it became implicated in the de Prades affair. One of Diderot's collaborators, the ab be Jean-Martin de Prades, 9 The Business of Enlightenment had submitted a thesis for a licentiate in theology at the Sor bonne that seemed to come straight out of the Preliminary Discourse, if not hell itself, as de Prades 's bishop observed. In the course of the subsequent scandal, de Prades fled to Ber lin, where Frederick II made him a reader ; the Encyclopedie was denounced to the king as evidence of creeping atheism; Diderot, who had spent four painful months in Vincennes only two years earlier for his Lettre sur les aveugles, seemed to be imprisoned once more; and rumors had it that the likely Jesuits would take over the Encyclopedie as a reward for their diligence in exposing the conspiracy to destroy religion. Thanks to Male sher bes, this crisis resulted only in an arret du Conseil, which condemned the first two volumes for "plu sieurs maximes tendantes a detruire l 'autorite royale, a etablir l 'esprit d 'independance et de revolte et, sous des termes obscurs et equivoques, a elever les fondements de l'er reur, de la corruption des moeurs, de l 'irreligion et de l 'incredulite. '' That sounded terrible enough, but it had little effect because the volumes had already been distributed to the subscribers, and the government permitted the work to continue, without revoking its privilege. The scandal continued to sizzle and spread for the next seven years, as volumes 3 through 7 appeared and as skillful polemicists like Charles Palissot and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau fanned the flames on the side of the priests. On the other side, Voltaire loaned his pen and his prestige to the cause; and Diderot and d 'Alembert found the ranks of their collaborators swelling with other illustrious writers, including most of the men who were beginning to be identified as philosophes : Du clos, Toussaint, Rousseau, Turgot, Saint-Lambert, d 'Holbach, Daubenton, l\farmontel, Boulanger, l\forellet, Quesnay, Dami laville, Naigeon, Jaucourt, and Grimm. They also claimed Mon tesquieu and Buffon, whose works they cited constantly, although it seems that neither wrote anything expressly for the Encyclopedie. (Montesquieu died in 1755, leaving a frag ment which was published posthumously in the article GOUT, and Buff on kept his distance from the Encyclopedists, per haps because he had enough difficulty defending the unortho- 3. Arret du Conseil of Feb. 7, 1752, quoted in John Lough, The "Encyclo pedie" (New York, 1971), p. 21. Lough's book provides a good survey of the early history of the Encyclopedie. It can be supplemented by the works of Watts, Proust, and Wilson, cited in the Bibliographical Note. 10 The Biography of a Book dox passages in his Histoire naturelle, which began to appear in 1749.) Nothing could have been better for business than the con tinued controversy and the volunteer corps of authors. The publishers, Andre-Frarn;ois Le Breton and his associates, Antoine-Claude Briasson, Michel-Antoine David, and Laurent Durand, had envisaged an edition of 1,625 copies, but the sub~ scriptions poured in so fast that they increased it three times, until it reached 4,255 copies in 1754. In their prospectus of 1751, they had promised to provide eight folio volumes of text and two of plates, at a total cost of 280 livres, by the end of 1754. The prospectus did envisage the possibility of an ad ditional volume, which would be sold at a 29 percent reduc tion, but it reassured the subscribers that the text and plates had been completed, even though Diderot was more than twenty years away from the end of his labors and he would produce almm:;t three times as many volumes as the pro spectus had promised. This stroke of false advertising set a standard that the Encyclopedie publishers were to maintain without flagging for the next fifty years. Indeed, if the public had known that the book would grow to seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates, that its price would inflate to 980 livres, and that its last volume would not appear until 1772, the enterprise would never have got off the ground. Although Luneau de Boisjermain did try, unsuccessfully, to bring it down by suing the publishers for swindle, the real threat came once again from the French authorities during a second crisis, from 1757 to 1759. That was a dark period in French history. It began with 's attempt to assassinate Louis XV. The country, al Damiens ready bleeding from the Seven Years' War, filled with rumors about atheists and regicides; and the crown stirred up fears of conspiracies by a Declaration of April 16, 1757, which threatened to put to death anyone who wrote or printed any thing against church or state-indeed, anything even tending to "emouvoir les esprits." At this point, the anti-Encyclo pedists opened fire with their heaviest barrage of propa ganda, not only denouncing the heresies in volumes 4 and 7 of the Encyclopedie but also associating them with bold-faced atheism, which, they charged, had broken out shamelessly in public, and with a censor's approval, when Helvetius pub De l'Esprit in July 1758. This book caused an even lished 11 The Business of Enlightenment greater scandal than the thesis of the abbe de Prades; and although Helvetius had not contributed to the Encyclopedie, most of the indignation he aroused fell on it. In January 1759, the procureur general of the Parlement of Paris warned that behind De l'Esprit lurked the Encyclopedie and behind the Encyclopedie hovered a conspiracy to destroy religion and undermine the state. The parlement promptly banned the sale of the Encyclopedie and appointed a commission to in vestigate it. But though it had hunted witches for centuries, the parlement had never gained control over the printed word in France. That authority belonged to the king, who exercised it through his chancellor, who delegated it to the Directeur de la librairie, who in this case happened to be Malesherbes. On March 8, 1759, the Conseil d'Etat reaffirmed the king's author ity by taking the destruction of the Encyclopedie into its own hands. It revoked the book's privilege and forbade the pub lishers to continue it, noting, by way of explanation, the strategy that its authors had pursued: "Ladite Encyclopedic, etant devenue un dictionnaire complet et un traite general de toutes les sciences, serait bien plus recherchee du public et bien plus souvent consultee, et que par la on repandrait encore davantage et on accrediterait en quelque sorte les perni cieuses maximes dont les volumes deja distribues sont rem plis. '' The Encyclopedie went onto the Index on March 5, 1759, accompanied by De l'Esprit, and on September 3 Pope Clement XII warned all Catholics who owned it to have it burned by a priest or to face excommunication. It was hardly possible for a book to be condemned more completely. The Encyclopedie had run afoul of the most important authorities of the Old Regime, yet it survived. Its survival marked a turning point in the Enlightenment and in the history of books in general. Sometime in the course of this crisis, Diderot, who had been writing away behind locked doors, learned from Male sherbes that his papers were about to be seized by the police -and that they could be saved by being deposited with Malesherbes himself, who had just issued the order for their confiscation. Malesherbes also seemed to be behind the com promise that finally saved the entire enterprise. On July 21, 4. Arret du Conseil of March 8, 1759, quoted ibid., p. 26. 12 The Biography of a Book 1759, an arret du Conseil required the publishers to refund 72 livres to each subscriber, ostensibly as a way of closing their accounts. In fact, however, the government permitted them to apply the money to a Recueil de mille planches . . . sur les Sciences, les Arts liberaux et les Arts mecaniques, which was nothing but the plates of the Encyclopedie under a new title. Having regained a legal hold on their speculation by a new privilege, issued for the Recueil de planches on September 8, 1759, the publishers proceeded to print the last ten volumes of text. In order to minimize scandal, the volumes appeared all at once in 1765, under the false imprint ''A NEUFCHASTEL,/ CHEZ SAMUEL FAULCHE & Compagnie, Libraires & Imprimeurs. '' And to make doubly sure, Le Breton purged the text in page proofs, while Diderot's back was turned. Al though he never forgave the publisher for this atrocite, Dide rot continued to labor on the plates, and the last two volumes appeared in 1772. But the joy had gone out of the work. Deserted by d 'Alembert, Voltaire, and most of the other writers who had rallied around him in the early 1750s, Dide rot threw the last volumes together haphazardly, leaning more and more on the faithful J aucourt, who copied and com piled tirelessly and saw the book through to the end. Diderot ended it in a state of disappointment and disillusion. Looking back at the result of twenty-five years of labor, he described the Encyclopedie as a monstrosity, which needed to be re written from beginning to end. His verdict touched off a series of projects to remodel the book that culminated in the even more monstrous Encyclopedie methodique, for Le Bre ton's successors, and booksellers everywhere in Europe, con sidered Diderot's work too faulty to be left untouched and too lucrative to be left alone. But whatever its faults, its completion counts as one of the great victories for the human spirit and the printed word. In permitting Diderot's text to appear in print, despite its formal illegality, the state gave the philosophes an oppor tunity to try their wares on the market place of ideas. But what resulted from this breakthrough in the traditional re- 5. Diderot produced his criticism for Charles Joseph Panckoucke, a publisher who was soliciting permission to produce a completely revised edition of the Encyclopedie in 1768. The original text of Diderot's memoir is missing, but part of it was published during the lawsuit of Luneau de Boisjermain and reprinted in Diderot's Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux (Paris, 1875-77), XX, 129-33. 13 The Business of Enlightenment straints on the press in France 1 By concentrating on the and the powers of the Old duel between the Encyclopedists historians have told only half the story. The other Regime, half concerns some basic questions in the history of eight First, is it possible to situate the work eenth-century books. in a social context? Where did the Encyclopedists come from, and where did the Encyclopedies go~ Second, how did the later editions emerge from the first, and what do they reveal about the operations of the publishing industry¥ Research on the social background of the Encyclopedists has turned on the question of whether they can be considered shaped the consciousness of their class and bourgeois who helped to establish industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century. To an older generation of Marxist scholars, the answer to that question was an unqualified-and an undocu mented-yes. 6 But a younger generation of social historians has found all sorts of complexities and contradictions within the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, while economic historians have failed to turn up much evidence of industrialization in France before the second half of the nineteenth century. Faced with so much ambiguity in the sister disciplines and with a general change in the intellectual climate, literary scholars have been challenged to adopt a revolution con ceptuelle in the study of the Encyclopedie. The call has come from Jacques Proust, the leading authority on the Encyclo pedie in France, who argues that the Encyclopedists must be understood as a peculiar group, a societe encyclopedique with an underlying formation structuree, although they also can be identified with the bourgeoisie. This analytical approach has led to some important research, but after wading into the 6. Albert Soboul, Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (Paris, 1952), pp. 7-24. Soboul goes so far as to treat Diderot's esthetics as a prophetic version of socialist realism in painting (p. 179), although he concedes that the philosophes failed to attain Stalin's concept of the nation (p. 149) and that Encyclopedism had to wait for Stalinism to reach full perfec tion: '' L 'esprit encyclopedique se realise librement et pleinement dans la seule societe affranchie du capitalisme et de l 'exploitation de l 'homme par l 'homme, la societe sans classes dont l 'Encyclopedie sovietique est le reflet" (p. 23). 7. Jacques Proust, "Questions sur l 'Encyclopedie," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, LXXII (Jan.-Feb. 1972), 45. Proust's "revolution" apparently would proceed from a social analysis of the Encyclopedists to a structuralist analysis of their texts. For research on the Encyclopedists as a group see the Bibliographical Note. 14 The Biography of a Book data, the researchers have generally found that ''structures'' and ''bourgeois'' disappear in the welter of information about individuals; and even so, their information is incomplete. The authors of almost two-fifths of the articles cannot be identified; and almost one-third of the identifiable authors wrote only one article, while workhorses like Diderot, the ab be Mallet, and Boucher d 'Argis produced the bulk of the book. The chevalier de J aucourt, a nobleman who could trace his lineage well back into the Middle Ages, wrote about one fourth of the entire text, but no one would argue that the Encyclopedie was a quarter aristocratic, especially as many of J aucourt 's contributions contain only a few lines and look trivial in comparison with a treatise like v1KGTIEME by Damil aville, who wrote only three articles. Given the unrepresentativeness of the articles whose au thors can be identified and the unevenness of the contributions of those authors, how can one find a meaningful standard of measurement in order to study the Encyclopedists sociologi cally? Even if one lumps them all together and sorts them into socio-occupational categories, they do not look very bourgeois, at least not in the modern, capitalist sense of the term. Only 4 percent were merchants or manufacturers. The same proportion came from the titled nobility, and both groups seem small in comparison with doctors and surgeons (15 percent), administrative officials (12 percent), and even clerics (8 percent). What identified the Encyclopedists as a group was not their social position but their commitment to a cause. To be sure, many of them retreated when the cause was most in danger, but they left their mark on the book, and the book came to epitomize the Enlightenment. Through scandal, persecution, and sheer survival, the Encyclopedie became recognized, by friends and enemies alike, as the summa of a great intellectual movement, and the men behind it became known not merely as collaborators but as Encyclo pedistes. Their work signaled the emergence of an "ism. " How Encyclopedism fared on the market place immedi ately after the Encyclopedists had finished their work is difficult to say because the papers of Le Breton and his as- 8. The above percentages have been calculated from the information on con tributors in Jacques Proust, Diderot et Z'"Encyclopedie" (Paris, 1967), chap. 1 and Annexe 1 and in John Lough, The Contributors to the '' Encyclopedie'' (Lon don, 1973). For further details see Chapters VIII and IX. 15 The Business of Enlightenment sociates have almost completely disappeared. Some evidence in the rather unreliable material produced during the lawsuit of Luneau de Boisjermain indicates that the first folio edition did not sell widely in France: only one-half or perhaps even one-quarter of the copies remained within the kingdom. But the publishers made a fortune from it. On an initial invest ment of about 70,000 livres, their profit may have reached as much as 2,500,000 livres. Net income came to approximately 4,000,000 livres and net costs to something in the range of 1,500,000 to 2,200,000 livres, of which about 80,000 went to Diderot. Those were spectacular sums for the eighteenth century, and the publishers were only able to deal in them by tapping capital from the subscribers. Thanks to this flow of cash, the Encyclopedie financed itself by 1751, although the paper and printing for the last ten volumes of text, which were issued simultaneously, must have required a heavy out lay of cash. The business seems to have been run like many speculations in publishing. On October 18, 1745, Le Breton and his three associates signed a traite de societe, establishing a capital fund of 20,000 livres and dividing shares among themselves according to the proportions of their contributions: Le Breton 9. The publishers claimed that three-quarters of the edition went to foreign subscribers, but they probably exaggerated the importance of foreign sales in order to indicate that in opposing Luneau they were contributing to the welfare of the entire nation by promoting a favorable balance of trade. See John Lough, "Luneau de Boisjermain v. the Publishers of the Encyclopedie," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Besterman, XXIII (1963), 132-133. 10. These estimates are based on fragments of the publishers' accounts and other material connected with the Luneau case, later published by Louis-Philippe May: '' Histoire et sources de 1 'Encyclopedie d 'a pres le registre de deliberations et de comptes des Miteurs et un memoire inMit," Revue de synthese, XV (1938), 7-110. In "The Encyclopedie as a Business Venture," From the Ancien Regime to the Popular Front: Essays in the History of Modern France in Honor of Shepard B. Clough, ed. Charles K. Warner (New York and London, 1969), pp. 19-20, Ralph H. Bowen argues that these documents confirm Diderot's contention that receipts totaled 4,000,000 livres, expenses 1,500,000 livres, and profits 2,500,000 livres. But Luneau manipulated the evidence to suggest that the pub lishers gouged the subscribers, and a closer reading of it by Lough ("Luneau de Boisjermain v. the Publishers of the Encyclopedie," p. 167) shows that the ex penses probably came to at least 2,205,839 livres. In fact, the Luneau material is too contentious to support firm conclusions, especially as difficulties concerning bill collecting cut badly into the profits of eighteenth-century publishers, who allowed for them in their financial statements under rubrics like recouvrement and mauvais debiteurs. 16 The Biography of a Book acquired an interest of three-sixths and the others one-sixth Supplementary articles allotted Le Breton a fixed sum apiece. per sheet for printing expenses, so the associates delegated the responsibility of production to him, and he did as well as he could within the terms fixed by the contract.11 Precisely how he managed this enormous task cannot be known, nor is it possible to learn much about how he supplied the cus tomers and who they were. The Luneau material contains the names of about seventy-five subscribers. Most of them were noblemen, including several eminent courtiers-the Vicomte de Noailles, the Marechal de l\fouchy, the Due de la Valliere and several magistrates of the parlements and bailliages. The rest came mainly from the law, the clergy, and the upper echelons of the royal administration. Only two were mer chants.12 Of course those few names, bandied about in the polemics of a lawsuit, hardly constitute a representative sample of all 4,000 subscribers. About all one can conclude from the publishing history of the first edition is that its text came from a disparate group of writers who were united by a common commitment to the task; that its luxurious folio volumes went to wealthy and well-born readers scattered across Europe; and that it was extremely lucrative. One of the first persons to draw that last conclusion was an aggressive publisher from Lille named Charles Joseph Panc koucke, who had set up business in Paris in 1762 after a brief apprenticeship with Le Breton. Panckoucke cultivated philo sophes, especially Buff on, Voltaire, and Rousseau; he also courted protectors in the government. By 1768 he had become the official bookseller of the Imprimerie Royale and the Academie roya1e des Sciences, and he was well on his way to becoming the dominant figure in the French press, thanks to an interlocking set of government-granted monopolies cover ing periodical literature. On December 16, 1768-four years before the final volumes of plates were published-Panc koucke and two associates, a bookseller named Jean Dessaint and a papermaker called Chauchat, bought the rights to fu- 11. For the texts of the contracts and additions see May, '' Histoire et sources de l 'Encyc'lopedie," pp. 15-17, 25. 12. Lough, ''Luneau de Boisjermain v. the Publishers of the Encyclopedie,'' pp. 133-140. 17 The Business of Enlightenment ture editions of the Encyclopedie and the copper plates for the illustrations from Le Breton and his partners. While the original publishers completed their printing of the plates, the new consortium lobbied for permission to pro duce a refonte or totally revised edition. Panckoucke recruited Diderot to help in this effort, and Diderot complied with an eloquent memoir that argued the case for a new Encyclo pedie by recounting the faults of the old one. The chancellor, Maupeou, refused this request, although the Due de Choiseul, a more liberal figure who was about to be ousted from the government, authorized a reprint of the original text. These difficulties scared off Dessaint and Chauchat, but Panckoucke bought back their shares, transformed them into shares in a speculation on the reprint, and on June 26, 1770, sold them again to a new set of partners. These partners eventually included Voltaire's publisher, Gabriel Cramer, and Samuel de Tournes in Geneva; Pierre Rousseau, the director of the Societe typographique de Bouillon; and two Parisians, a notary called Lambot and a bookseller called Brunet. Nine months later, on April 12, 1771, Panckoucke formed another separate association, this time for a set of Supplements, which would correct the erors and fill the gaps of the original text. This Societe was made up of the speculators on the reprint, except for Lambot, who probably had sold out to Panckoucke early in 1771, and the two Genevans, who had meant to join but finally dropped out; it also included Marc Michel Rey, Rousseau's publisher in Amsterdam, and Jean Baptiste Robinet, a man of letters who was to edit the Supplement. Thus what had begun as a modest partnership 13. Durand died in 1763 and the other partners divided his 1/6 share, so in 1768 Le Breton owned 10/18 of the speculation and David and Briasson each owned 4/18. Panckoucke and his two partners each acquired 1/3 of the new speculation. The following account of the publishing history of the Encyclopedie and the Supplement from 1768 to 1776 is derived mainly from the work of Watts, Lough, Clement, and Birn cited in the Bibliographical Note. 14. In their correspondence, the publishers usually referred to the Supplement in the singular, as it appeared on its title page, but they sometimes talked of Supplements in the plural. According to the original '' Acte de Bouillon'' of April 12, 1771, in dossier Marc-Michel Rey, Bibliotheek van de Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels of Amsterdam, the shares in the association for the Supplement were to be divided as follows: 6/24 to Cramer and de Tournes, 6/24 to Rousseau, 3/24 to Rey, 3/24 to Robinet, 4/24 to Panckoucke, and 2/24 to Brunet. After the Genevans withdrew from the enterprise, their shares were divided between Panckoucke and Brunet. It is impossible to follow 18 The Biography of a Book among three Parisian booksellers grew into two international consortia, built on a system of overlapping alliances among the most powerful publishers of the Enlightenment. The subsequent history of the Encyclopedie has a good deal in common with eighteenth-century diplomacy: baroque in trigue and sudden reversals mixed with warfare. The first publishers had been attacked by some pirates from England in 1751; and although they apparently put an end to the threat of an English E.ncyclopedie by paying ransom, they could not prevent two folio editions from being produced in Italy. The first began to appear in 1758 in the republic of Lucca, and the second followed suit from Leghorn, beginning in 1770. Although both became mired in delays and difficulties, they conquered some of the Encyclopedie market outside France, especially south of the Alps. The northern market then fell in large. part to a renegade Italian monk called, in the French version of his name, Fortune-Barthelemy de After setting up shop in the Swiss city of Yverdon Felice. near Neuchatel, Felice announced that he would produce the much-desired refonte of the Encyclopedie-that is, a com pletely rewritten version in quarto format, which would draw on contributions from savants all over Europe in order to correct errors, fill gaps, and, as it developed, substitute some sober Protestantism for the impieties of the original. Ency clopedie buyers therefore faced a choice : they could take Diderot's text with or without Robinet's Supplement, or they could order the purged and perfected version from Felice. of livres hung on those decisions, the publishers As millions in a trade war. Against Panckoucke's soon became embroiled dual alliance, which covered Geneva, Bouillon, and Amster of his own: the Societe typo dam, Felice mobilized two allies graphique de Berne, which had helped him to found his in Bernois territory), and a business (Yverdon was located in The Hague named Pierre Gosse, who powerful bookdealer traded extensively throughout northern Europe. Gosse and the Bernois bought up Felice's entire edition, leaving him to the selling and reselling of shares in the separate speculation on the reprint, but Panckoucke retained only a :fraction of a fraction of his original interest in it. By Oct. 26, 1770, Cramer and de Tournes owned 2/6 of it, Lambot apparently owned 2/6, Rousseau owned 1/6, and Brunet owned part of the remaining 1/6 with Panckoucke. 19 The Bitsiness of Enlightenment do the editing and printing while they handled the market ing.15 In prospectuses, circular letters, and journal advertise ments, they hammered away about the deficiencies of Diderot's work and the excellence of Felice's. Now that Diderot's repu tation has obliterated the memory of his rival, it is difficult to appreciate the effectiveness of this propaganda. But the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon had a good reception in the eight eenth century, and not only in pietistic corners of Germany and Holland. Voltaire, whose Questions sur l 'Encyclopedie resulted from a broken promise to contribute to the Supple ment, said he would take Felice's text over Diderot's if he were shopping for Encyclopedies. And Felice's backers promoted that attitude through journals like the Gazette de Berne and the Gazette de Leyde, where they could manipulate literary notices. In 1771, for example, Gosse rebuked the STN for printing an unfavorable review of Felice's first volume in its own periodical, the Journal helvetique, and the STN im mediately changed its tack, for the simple reason that Gosse was its biggest customer in the Low Countries. The Panckoucke group replied in kind through its journals, 15. In a letter to the STN of July 16, 1779, Felice said he was printing 1,600 copies. On Jan. 18, 1771, Gosse informed the STN that he had bought 3/ 4 of the edition and the Societe typographique de Berne had bought 1/ 4. And in a Jette1· of July 30, 1771, he noted that he had taken over the entire edition. His son, Pierre Gosse Junior, who succeeded him in 1774, told the STN in a letter of July 16, 1779, that he was still receiving all 1,600 copies, as Felice neared the end of his labor. These and all subsequent references to the STN come from the papers of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, Bibliotheque de la ville de Neuchatel, unless specified otherwise. 16. At first Voltaire showed nothing but scorn for Felice and his Encyclopedie. Voltaire to d'Alembert, June 4, 1769, Voltaire's Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva, 1962), LXXII, 60. But by 1771 he had decided that Felice had got the better of Panckoucke: "Ils [Felice's contributors] ont l 'avantage de corriger dans leur edition beaucoup de fautes grossieres, qui fourmillent dans l 'Encyclopedie de Paris et que Panckoucke et Dessaint ont eu l 'imprudence de i·eimprimer. Cette faute capitale Jes force a donner un supplement, qui rencherit le livre, et on aura l 'edition d 'Yverdon a une fois meilleur marche. Pour moi, je sais bien que j 'acheterai I 'edition d 'Yverdon et non l 'autre." Voltaire to Gabriel Cramer, [Dec. 1770], ibid., LXXVII, 163. In 1777 Voltaire proposed that his Questions sur l 'Encyclopedie, which he had originally undertaken for Panc koucke 's Supplement, be incorporated into Panckoucke 's quarto edition, but this project never came to anything. See Voltaire to Henri Rieu, Jan. 13, 1777, ibid., XCVI, 27. 17. Gosse to STN, Jan. 18, July 1, and July 30, 1771. For further information on Felice and his conflicts with the rival Encyclopedie publishers see E. Maccabez, F. B. de Felice (1723-1789) et son Encyclopedie (Yverdon, 1770-1780) (Basel, 1903) and J. P. Perret, Les Imprimeries d'Yverdon au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (Lausanne, 1945). 20 The Biography of a Book mainly Panckoucke 's Journal des savants and Rousseau's Journal encyclopedique. Cramer even sent Rousseau detailed instructions about how to ridicule Felice: instead of seeming to take the Protestant Encyclopedie seriously, the Journal encyclopedique should stress the absurdity of an obscure Italian, who could not even write decent French, attempting to correct a text produced by the finest philosophes in all of France. Felice answered that he merely expunged the ab surdities of Diderot's text and assembled articles supplied by authorities like Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet, who made Diderot's contributors look outmoded. He went on to offer his subscribers a supplement of their own that would incorporate anything worthwhile from Robinet's Supplement in a more up-to-date survey of the current arts and sciences. And in 1775 he went further: he announced that he would produce his supplement in a folio as well as a quarto edition and that he would fill the folio with the most important origi nal material from the main text of the Encyclopedie d'Yver don. This move struck at the heart of the rival publication because Robinet had aimed his Supplement at the owners of all the folio editions-the Encyclopedies of Lucca, Leghorn, and Paris as well as the Panckoucke-Cramer reprint. By ordering their supplements from Felice, the owners of the folios could combine the standard version of the Encyclopedie with the modern revisions of it, and the bottom would drop out of Robinet's market. Panckoucke then attempted to snare Felice's subscribers by announcing a quarto edition of Robinet's Supplement. This counterattack never got anywhere because an open sup plement war was certain to hurt Robinet far more than Felice, as the owners of folio Encyclopedies outnumbered the sub scribers of Felice's quarto by a factor of at least six to one. In the end, therefore, Panckoucke sued for peace. He agreed to withdraw his quarto if Felice would withdraw the folio, and both sides promised to exchange their printed sheets so that they could crib from one another with maximum effi ciency. Meanwhile, Panckoucke ran into greater difficulties with his more important enterprise, the reprint itself. In February 18. Cramer to Rousseau, July 23, 1771, quoted in John Lough, Essays on the '' Encyclopedie'' of Diderot and d 'Alembert (London, 1968), 88. 21 The Business of Enlightenment 1770, following a denunciation by the General Assembly of the French Clergy, the Parisian police seized 6,000 copies of the first three volumes and walled them up under a vault in the Bastille, where they remained for six years, despite every thing Panckoucke could do to get them released by pulling strings and greasing palms. After this catastrophe, the pub lishers of the reprint decided to move it from Paris to the printing shops of Cramer and de Tournes in Geneva. But no sooner had Cramer and de Tournes begun setting type than the Genevan Venerable Company of Pastors tried to force them to stop by denouncing them to the civil authorities. While Cramer argued his case before the city's Magnificent Council, Panckoucke secretly maneuvered to cut him out of the speculation and to transfer it to Bouillon and Amsterdam, where it could be reconstructed by Robinet, Rousseau, and Rey as a ref ante once again. But Rey refused to go along with such a spectacular and costly reversal of policy, and Cramer eventually won over the city fathers of Geneva, who appreci ated the importance of his operation for the local economy. Cramer placated the pastors with an offer to tone down d 'Alembert's controversial article GENEVE, which made them look like deists, and to let them purge anything that wounded their Calvinism in the text of the Supplement. This arrange ment did not settle all the problems of the reprint because the French authorities continued to keep the first three volumes in the Bastille and Panckoucke continued to flirt with other printers. But these difficulties did not lead to anything more than some sharp remarks in the correspondence between Geneva and Paris. In the end, the Genevans not only kept the lucrative printing job in their own hands but also redid volumes 1 through 3 and made an attempt to take over the Supplement. When he put together the complementary speculation on the Supplement in April 1771, Panckoucke had offered Cra mer and de Tournes a 6/24 share in it. They were also to get the printing commission, but before accepting, they demanded that they be given control over the subscription and finances and that Robinet move his editorial operation to Geneva. Hoping to keep Robinet in Bouillon and to get the printing tr an sf erred there, Rousseau vetoed this proposal, and Rey supported him. The Genevans responded in November 1771 22 The Biography of a Book by withdrawing from the Supplement altogether. Then, for almost a year, the remaining partners squabbled about how to divide the outstanding shares of 6/24 and where to locate the printing. Panckoucke and Brunet finally bought the shares and agreed to advance the capital for the printing operation. In return they forced Rousseau and Rey to let them negotiate with the French authorities for a Parisian printing or, failing that, to abandon the printing to Cramer, for they insisted that Geneva would serve as a better base for smuggling than Bouillon. Having buried this bone of contention, Panckoucke and Rousseau then became entangled in a dispute over their journals. Panckoucke wanted to reserve the French market for his newest acquisition, the Journal historique et politique de Geneve, while Rousseau fought to keep France open for the Journal de politique and the Journal encyclopedique, which he published in Bouillon. Thanks to the protection of the foreign minister, Panckoucke finally forced Rousseau to pay 5,000 livres a year for the right to distribute the Bouillon journals in France, and at the same time he won over Robinet, who dabbled in the intrigues against Rousseau's journals while putting together the copy for the Supplement in Bouil lon. By February 1776, the plots and subplots had become more than Rousseau could bear. He sold his 6/24 share in the Supplement to the Parisian printer Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe, who proceeded to print it in Paris, while Rey pro duced an edition in Amsterdam. The two editions, each con taining four volumes of text and one of plates, were completed in 1777. By this time Cramer had finished the reprint. Although he had filled his letters to Panckoucke with lamentations about the difficulties of the enterprise, it probably succeeded well enough because at several points he and de Tournes offered to buy out all the other partners. No one would part with his shares, however, and by June 13, 1775, Panckoucke and the Genevans felt ready to reach a settlement, even though the printing would continue for another year and Panckoucke would have to make a later settlement with the partners to whom he had sold portions of his original interest. In the Genevan agreement of June 13, 1775, Panckoucke terminated the partnership by paying the Genevans 200,000 livres against their one-third share in the profits, while they promised to 23 The Business of Enlightenment administer the final stage of production and sales in his in terest. At that point, the profits came to only 71,039 livres, but about 670 of the 2,000 copies remained to be sold. If they could be marketed at the subscription price of 840 livres apiece, they would fetch 562,800 livres. Of course much of that sum would be eaten away by delays, booksellers' discounts, defaults in the payments, and the loss of the 6,000 copies of volumes 1 to 3, which Panckoucke valued at 45,000 livres. But even if Panckoucke and his hidden partners cleared only 400,000 livres (the equivalent, consid()ring their two-thirds share, of the Genevans' 200,000 livres), they would have had a good return on their investment. As the Geneva folio had a relatively low pressrun and a high price, it did not represent much of an expansion of the Encyclopedie market. Nor did the Supplements, which filled some of the gaps in Diderot's text but without Diderot's verve. In the long run Felice's work probably did not have a great impact on the audience of the Encyclopedie. It never pene trated France because the authorities successfully prohibited it, and it even floundered elsewhere in Europe because Felice kept expanding its size, raising its price, and delaying its completion. By 1780, when he issued the last of his fifty-eight volumes, ten years after the first, he had lost a great many subscribers, and the publishers of the cheaper quarto and octavo editions of Diderot's Encyclopedie had cut into his market. It was through those editions that the original text, and also the Supplement, reached ordinary readers every where in Europe. Having put together and taken apart sev eral international consortia, having done battle against partners and competitors alike, and having learned to operate with the backing of the government rather than in defiance of 19. The full text of the complex contract signed by Panckoucke, Cramer, and de Tournes in Geneva on June 13, 1775, is printed in Lough, Essays, pp. 102-108. It is difficult to say why Panckoucke bought out the Genevans instead of settling the speculation by apportioning the profits according to shares after the distribu tion of the final volumes. He probably wanted to wind up the Genevan enterprise quickly and cleanly so that he could move on to other speculations. His payments actually come to 130,000 livres, spread out over three years because he deducted the current profits, evaluated at 70,000 livres, from the 200,000 he agreed to pay for the Genevan shares. He also took over uncollected credits with a paper value of 152,020 livres. The exact number of unsold Encyclopedies that he acquired can not be known because the original contract for the edition had set the pressrun at 2,000, with a surplus of 150 to cover spoiled sheets, and there is no way to find out the actual spoilage. 24 The Biography of a Book it, Panckoucke was ready to speculate on Encyclopedism for the grand public. Before taking up the story of how the Encyclopedie reached the general reading public, it is worth looking back over the early history of the book to see whether any connecting themes run through its twists and turns. From 17 49, when Le Breton and his associates petitioned the government to release Diderot from the prison in Vincennes, until 1776, when Panckoucke persuaded it to free the 6,000 volumes from the Bastille, two objectives stand out in the maneuvers of the publishers: they wanted to appease the state, and they wanted to make money. But the Encyclopedie sold for the same rea son that prompted the government to confiscate it: it chal lenged the traditional values and established authorities of the Old Regime. The publishers sought a way out of this dilemma by toning down the text. Not only did Le Breton emasculate the last ten volumes, but Panckoucke planned to restrain the philosophie of his refonte as well, when he lob bied for permission to print it in 1768~or so the backers of the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon claimed during the early battles of their commercial war. In a printed circular, Gosse warned the booksellers of Europe to beware of bowdlerization: C 'est sur des a vis rei;us de tres bonne part de Paris qu 'il a ete fait mention dans nos avis que Messieurs les libraires de Paris, en de mandant un nouveau privilege, s 'etaient engages de retrancher dans cette nouvelle edition tous les articles qui ont pu choquer le gouverne ment dans la premiere edition, tout comme nous tenons des avis de tres bonne part que ce nouveau privilege leur est refuse et que Monseigneur le Chancelier et le Parlement s 'opposent a la reimpres sion de l 'Encyclopedie en France. Tous ceux qui sont instruits des persecutions que les auteurs et les premiers editeurs ont essuyees en France comprendront facilement qu 'un pays de liberte convient seul pour la perfection de cet ouvrage. 20. On the day of Diderot's arrest, July 24, 17 49, the publishers appealed to the Comte d 'Argenson, the minister who had ordered it, by emphasizing its eco· nomic consequences: '' Cet ouvrage, qui nous coutera au moins deux cent cinquante mille livres, etait sur le point d'etre annonce au public. La ilfitention cle M. Diderot, le seul homme de lettres que nous connaissions capable d 'une aussi vaste entreprise et qui possede seul la clef de toute cette operation, peut entrainer notre ruine. '' Letter quoted in John Lough, The '' Encyclopedie'' (New York, 1971)' p. 18. 21. Circular from Pierre Gosse and Daniel Pinet of The Hagne, dated Aug. 2, 1769, and sent to the STN. In a letter to Marc-Michel Rey of Oct. 26, 1770, Panckoucke indicated that Gosse 's version of his activities was not far from the 25 The Business of Enlightenment Of course perfection for Felice also meant cutting philoso phie and, furthermore, substituting Protestantism for Cathol icism in the articles that had won the blessings of the French censors-a tactic that was designed to please the authorities in Bern but not those in Versailles. When he reviewed the idea of a ref onte in his unsuccessful proposal to transfer the printing operation from Geneva to Amsterdam and Bouillon in 1770, Panckoucke made it clear that he put commercial considerations above everything else: "Il ne faudra point se permettre aucune hardiesse impie qui puisse effrayer les magistrats. Au contraire il faudra que tout l'ouvrage soit ecrit avec beaucoup de sagesse, de moderation, qu 'il puisse meme meriter des encouragements de votre gouvernement ... C 'est ici une affaire d 'argent, de finance, ou tout le monde peut s 'interesser. '' Business was business, even if it involved Enlightenment. Similarly, the Supplement turned into a cautious venture, ideologically if not commercially. The agreement of April 12, 1771, envisaged a cast of savants rather than philosophes, and Robinet promised to direct them toward the natural sciences rather than philosophy. The contract bound him to '' ecrire les Supplements avec sagesse et a n 'y rien admettre contre la religion, les bonnes moeurs et le gouvernement, les Supplements ayant pour principal ob jet la perfeetion des sciences naturelles. " Given this em phasis, it hardly seems surprising that Panckoucke succeeded truth because he explained that he (Panckoucke), Dessaint, and Chauchat had lobbied for permission to do the refonte for six months, hoping '' que le gouverne ment permettrait la refonte de l 'ouvrage en supprimant les articles qui avaient pu deplaire. '' Letter quoted in Fernand Clement, ''Pierre Rousseau et I 'edition des Supplements de l 'Encyclopedie,'' Revue des sciences humaines, LXXXVI (April-June 1957), 140. 22. Panckoucke to Rey, Oct. 26, 1770, quoted ibid., p. 141. 23. Ibid., p. 136. The prospective contributors named in the agreement in cluded d 'Alembert for physics, Albrecht von Haller for anatomy, J.-J. de Lalande and Jean Bernouilli the younger for astronomy, Antoine Louis for surgery, Antoine Petit for medicine, L.-F.-G. de Keralio for tactics, Philibert Gueneau de Montbeliard for artillery, Nicolas de Beauzee for grammar, and J.-F. de La Harpe for literature. Nearly all these men were recruited by Panckoucke several years later to write for the Encyclopedie methodique, in some respects an exten sion of the Supplement. Robinet failed to recruit several of the writers mentioned in the agreement, and he recruited many more who were not mentioned-about fifty in all, including Condorcet and Marmontel as well as hacks like J.-L. Carra and J.-L. Castilhon, who each wrote about 400 articles. See Lough, The Con tributors to the '' Encyclopedie,'' pp. 54-69. 26 The Biography of a Book not only in transferring the printing to Paris but also in getting a privilege for it. While Panckoucke steered the Encyclopedie toward official orthodoxy, the officials moved closer to Encyclopedism. Dur ing the last years of Louis XV's reign, the government had actually increased the severity of its policy toward books, but the reign of Louis XVI began under the influence of an Encyclopedist, Tur got. Panckoucke 's confiscated Encyclo pedies were released from the Bastille, and his later specula tions thrived under a series of reforming ministers who not only relaxed the state's control of the book trade but also consulted him about how to do it. The Malesherbes tradition, which had lapsed after Malesherbes left the Direction de la librairie in 1763, revived in time to stimulate an Encyclopedie boom, which began in 1776 and continued until the Revolution. The legalization of the Encyclopedie also helps explain the connecting links in the series of speculations on the book between 17 45 and 1789. Legality in publishing derived from a privilege, the exclusive right to reproduce a text, granted by the grace of the king, administered through the Direction de la librairie, and registered with the Communaute des libraires et des imprimeurs of Paris. Although they had something in common with modern copyrights, book privileges, like privileges in general under the Old Regime, involved ancient notions and institutions-the authority of the king, a baroque bureaucracy, and a monopolistic guild. By granting a privi lege, the king did not merely allow a book to come into being: he put his stamp of approval on it; he recommended it to his subjects, speaking through one or more censors who expati ated on its importance and even its style in long-winded permissions and approbations that were usually printed in the book along with a formal lettre de privilege from the king. Privileges were also properties, which could be bought and sold, divided into shares, and willed from husband to wife and father to son. But they extended only as far as the king's authority. Outside the kingdom, other publishers could re print a French text as often as they pleased, unless their own 24. The privilege, conveying the exclusive right to print and reprint the work for twelve years, was entered in the Registre des privileges of the Communaute des libraires et des imprimeurs de Paris (referred to hereafter as the booksellers' guild) on Feb. 10, 1776. Bibliothilque nationale, ms. Fr. 21967, p. 94. 27 The Business of Enlightenment governments objected. The privileged publisher in France might cry out about piracy, but he could only ask the Direc teur de la librairie, the customs officials, the guild inspectors, and the police to close the borders to the rival edition and to confiscate any copies that might reach the domestic market. The whole system stimulated the production of French books outside France because the spread of the French lan guage had created a demand for cheap, pirated editions every where in Europe and because only books of unalloyed orthodoxy could be published legally within the kingdom. By its very nature, the organization of publishing in France forced the Enlightenment underground and into exile-into the printing shops of Amsterdam, Bouillon, Geneva, and Neuchatel; for how could the king sanction the printing of texts that challenged the basic values of the regime~ The rigidity of privilege kept a multimillion-livre industry beyond the pale of the law. Faced with this dilemma, administrators like Malesherbes encouraged the development of a grey area of quasi-legality in publishing. They granted permissions tacites, permissions simples, tolerances, and permissions de police-that is, authorizations for books to appear without the royal imprimatur, though also without formal and ex clusive property rights attached to them. If the clergy or parlements protested against an unorthodox book, the gov ernment would not seem to have sponsored it and could promise to have it confiscated, taking care, on some occasions, to warn its publishers in time for them to save their stock. The struggle to print and reprint the Encyclopedie took place at the center and all around the edges of this complex and contradictory system. The original publishers actually took out three privileges for the text, one in April 1745, one in January 1746, and one in April 1748. Each corresponded to a stage in the expansion of the original plan to publish a four-volume translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, 25. For a general discussion of the various degrees of legality in eighteenth century publishing see Robert Darnton, "Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature,'' Daedalus (winter, 1971), pp. 214-256. A great deal can be learned about the institutional aspects of publishing from the Almanach de l'auteur et du libraire (Paris, 1777) and the Almanach de la librairie (Paris, 1781) as well as from the royal decrees on the book trade in A. J. L. Jourdan, 0. 0. Decrusy, and F. A. Isambert, eds., Recueil general des anciennes lois fran<)aises (Paris, 1822-33), XVI, 217-251; XXV, 108-128. 28 The Biography of a Book or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, which had first appeared in England in 1728. On March 8, 1759, however, the government destroyed the rights to the final, full-blown Encyclopedie by revoking its privilege. True, the publishers continued production, but only under the cover of '' une tolerance tacite, inspiree par l 'interet national,'' as Diderot put it. How, then, was it possible for Panckoucke to claim he had bought the exclusive '' droits'' to the book from the Le Breton association 1 This claim served as the basis for most of the Encyclopedie speculations between 1768 and 1800, and Panc koucke asserted it in the most absolute manner, in all his letters and contracts. In writing to Marc-Michel Rey, for example, he stated, "Vous n 'ignorez pas que j 'ai acquis il y a environ 18 mois avec M. Dessaint et un papetier de Paris nomme M. Chauchat taus les droits et cuivres de l 'Encyclopedie. 'm In his contract with Cramer and de Tournes for the Genevan folio edition, he described himself as '' proprietaire des droits et cuivres de l 'ouvrage intitule Dictionnaire encyclopedique.' ' Far from questioning those proprietary rights, other pub lishers acknowledged them. Thus the Societe typographique de Neuchatel observed in 1779 that Panckoucke could market the Encyclopedie everywhere in France, owing to his "privi lege exclusif pour cet ouvrage. '' Eighteenth-century pub lishers did not use such language lightly. They knew that droits derived from privileges, yet they recognized Panc koucke 's right to a book whose privilege had been destroyed. The explanation of this paradox stands out in a contract that Panckoucke signed with the Societe typographique de Neuchatel on July 3, 1776 (see Appendix A.I). In it, Pan ckoucke identified himself, in his usual manner, as "proprie taire des droits et cuivres du Dictionnaire encyclopedique,'' and, as usual, he traced his ownership of the rights and the 26. Diderot, Au public et aux mag;strC'ts as ouoted in Lourrh, "Luneau de Boisjermain v. the Publishers of the Encyclopedie,'' p. 132. Strictly speaking, the arret du Conseil of March 8, 1759, revoked the second of the three privileges, and in his lawsuit, Luneau de Boisjermain argued that the contractual obligations of the publishers, which were based on the final privilege, therefore remained in tact. But his argument turned on a technicality or an oversight by the Conseil d 'Etat, and the court did not uphold it. 27. Panckoucke to Rey, Oct. 26, 1770, in Clement, ''Pierre Rousseau et l 'edi tion des Supplements de l 'Encyclopedie," p. 140. 28. See the text of the contract printed in Lough, Essays, p. 67. 29. STN to Marechal of Metz, Aug. 22, 1779. 29 The Business of Enlightenment plates to his contract of December 16, 1768, with Le Breton, David, and Briasson. He then noted that he had bought out his own partners, Dessaint and Chauchat, in 1769 and 1770 and that his exclusive rights to the book had been confirmed by a royal privilege dated May 20, 1776, "sous le titre de Recueil de Planches sur les Sciences, Arts et Metiers." The register of the Parisian booksellers' guild for 1776 contains a privi lege under Panckoucke 's name for a work with precisely this title, and a similar privilege appears in the first edition of the Encyclopedie-not in volumes 1-7 of the text, which carry the privilege that was revoked in 1759, but in volume 6 of the plates, which appeared in 1768, when Panckoucke bought the rights to the book from Le Breton and his associates. The privilege in the plates states that it had been registered in the booksellers' guild on September 8, 1759-that is, just at the time when the government saved the Encyclopedie, after ostensibly destroying it, by letting Le Breton apply the subscribers' money to the volumes of plates. Thus the rescue operation of 1759 was not merely an attempt to pre serve the publishers' capital while permitting them to con tinue the printing in a semiclandestine manner. It restored their claim to the ''rights'' of the book, property rights, which had enormous commercial value in the book trade. Consequently, when Panckoucke 's group bought out Le Bre ton's group on December 16, 1768, they paid 200,000 livres for "la totalite des droits dans les reimpressions futures et dans la totalite des planches en cuivre.'' This huge sum covered far more than the value of the copper plates, as the 30. Bibliotheque nationale, ms. Fr. 21967, p. 122, entry for March 29, 1776: "Notre aime le Sr. Panckoucke, libraire, Nous a fait exposer qu 'il desirerait faire imprimer et donner au public les ouvrages intitules Recueil des planches sur les sciences, arts et metiers in-folio, Histoire generale des voyages par M. l 'abbe Prevot [that is, Prevost], s 'il Nous plaisait lui accorder nos lettres de privilege pour ce necessaires. A ces causes, voulant favorablement traiter l 'exposant, Nous lui avons permis et permettons par ces presentes de faire imprimer lesdits ouvrages autant de fois que hon lui semblera et de les vendre et debiter partout Notre royaume pendant le temps de douze annees consecutives." No entry for any such work exists under the date of May 20, 1776, but Panckoucke 's reference to that date might have concerned his final acquisition of the privilege in the Chancellerie rather than its registry with the guild. 31. As their title pages proclaimed, the plates appeared '' avec approbation et privilege du roi' '; but their title, Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts liberaux, et les arts mecaniques, avec leur explication, did not indicate that they had any connection with the Encyclopedie, which had been banned three years before the appearance of their first volume. 30 The Biography of a Book contract made clear, though it resorted to .tortuous phrasing when it described the nature of the '' droits.' ' In Panckoucke 's next speculation, the partnership of June 26, 1770, which resulted in the Genevan folio reprint, he let his partners make use of his "droits" for one edition only, but he insisted that the rights remain his. Similarly, when he the association for the Supplement on April 12, 1771, formed required that the rights to the Supplement revert to him he after the completion of one edition. Then, in the spring of 1776, he confirmed his rights to the Recueil de planches by taking out a new privilege, thereby substantiating his claim to be '' seul proprietaire '' of the entire Encyclopedie, texts, and supplement. From this point on, he spoke of his plates, "privilege" as well as his "droi ts. " And finally, when he partnership with the Societe typographique de formed his Neuchatel, he was able to sell a half share in the "cuivres, droits, et privilege'' for 108,000 livres. Thus, after being out lawed, the Encyclopedie gradually regained a degree of le gality that had cash value in the eyes of publishers, even if it did not protect Panckoucke 's 6,000 volumes from confisca tion in 1770; and it served as the basis for a series of specu lations that stretched into the 1770s and beyond, as one consortium succeeded another and the publishers passed on the book's pedigree for ever-increasing sums. 32. According to the text printed in Lough, Essays, p. 59, Le Breton and his partners stated that "nous vendons pour toujours aux sieurs Dessaint, Pan· ckoucke et Chauchat tous nos droits dans les reimpressions a faire a l 'avenir dudit ouvrage de l 'Encyclopedie, nos dits droits tels qu 'ils se poursuivent et qu 'ils se comportent, que lesdits sieurs acquereurs ont dit bien conna1tre et dont ils sont contents; en consequence de quoi ledit ob jet est par nous vendu sans aucune garantie. '' It might be thought that ownership of the copper plates meant de facto control over future editions, as the text would be worthless without the illustrations. Cramer once developed this argument in a letter to Panckoucke (ibid., pp. 94-95), but it did not carry much weight. The quarto and octavo edi tions included only three of the eleven volumes of plates, and the publishers in Leghorn offered to sell the text without the plates if their customers preferred. What Panckoucke wanted was a legal claim to the book so that he could sell shares in it and use it to fight off competitors. His behavior seems puzzling only because modern concepts of legality and property do not suit eighteenth-century practices. 33. The contract of June 26, 1770, printed in Lough, Essays, pp. 67-73, specified that ''Messieurs Cramer et de Tournes n 'entendent s 'interesser que dans I 'edition actuelle de deux mille exemplaires, et ne pretendent aucun droit de propriete perpetuelle sur Jes droits et cuivres dudit ouvrage. '' 34. Article 22 of the contract in dossier Marc-Michel Rey, Bibliotheek van de ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels. Vereeniging 31 The Business of Enlightenment Of course the pedigree remained ambiguous, and the suc cession of contracts and partnerships seems bizarre and con fusing today: a legalized illegal book T A privilege for a text replaced by a privilege for some plates, even though the plates appeared under a different title and the title did not include such key words as Encyclopedie and Dictionnaire? ''Rights'' to this baroque hybrid, half illegitimate, half fictitious being divided into tiny fractions and hawked around publishing circles, not only in France, where privileges had some mean ing, but also in neighboring states, where publishers existed by infringing them T It took an eighteenth-century mind to devise such expedients, but they made sense in an eighteenth century context. The publishers needed to protect their in vestment, not merely to get on with their printing. They wanted to buy and sell the rights to books as well as the books themselves, to divide the rights into shares, and to deal the shares out in partnerships, which could be taken apart and put together again according to changes in circumstances. That was how the publishing game was played-by endless combinaisons, as Panckoucke put it. To speculate on combinaisons for such high stakes required something more than money: it called for protections, to use another of Panckoucke 's favorite expressions. Publishers needed protectors to make their rights stick, and rights with out protectors often proved to be worthless. The history of the Encyclopedie therefore involved a great deal of lobbying and influence peddling-successful in 1752 and 1759, when the government saved the first edition; unsuccessful in 1770, when it sacrificed the second edition to the clergy; and suc cessful again in 1776, when Panckoucke installed the Supple ment in Paris with a privilege. From then until the end of the century, Panckoucke and his allies fought to defend their "rights" by currying favor with the government. Their de fense-and the attacks on it from Yverdon, Lyons, Lausanne, Bern, and Liege-constitute a central theme in the following pages. It is worth noting that the Encyclopedie depended on combinaisons of money and power from the very beginning; that political and economic interests interwined throughout the earliest stages of its history; and that it worked its way into the social fabric of France because its backers knew how 35. On Panckoucke 's notion of combinaisons see Chapter IX. 32 The Biography of a Book to weave around the contradictions that characterized the culture of the Old Regime. To help the reader keep his bearings, it might he useful to list the editions of the Encyclopedie with some of the basic facts about them. (1) The Paris folio (1751-1772): it consisted of seventeen volumes of text issued from 1751 to 1765 (the last ten ap peared simultaneously under the false imprint of Neuchatel in 1765) and eleven volumes of plates issued from 1762 to 1772. The publishers-an association formed on October 18, 17 45, by Le Breton, David, Briasson, and Durand-set the pressrun at 4,225 copies; but the number of complete sets must have been smaller, owing to spoilage and attrition among the subscribers, who did not always claim the later volumes .. Although the subscription price was originally set at 280 livres, it eventually came to 980. In later years, the market price increased to as much as 1,400 livres, but that figure, quoted by the publishers of the cheaper editions, may have included the Supplement and Table and even the bind ing.36 The Supplement, in four folio volumes of text and one of plates, was published in Paris and Amsterdam in 1776 and 1777, followed by a two-volume Table analytique in 1780. The pressrun of the Supplement apparently came to 5,250 copies, its price to 160 livres. It had no formal connection with the original Encyclopedie and involved a new group of contribu tors and publishers. 36. The Gazette de Leyde of Jan. 3, 1777, carried an advertisement by the pub lishers of the quarto edition saying the Paris folio was then selling for 1,400 livres. The same figure occurs often in the correspondence of the STN. On June 8, 1777, for example, the STN told Considerant, a bookseller in Salins, that the first edition had become extremely rare and commonly sold for 1,100 to 1,500 livres. The prospectus for the Genevan reprint, dated Feb. 1771, said that the first edi tion "coute aujourd 'hui jusqu 'a soixante louis [that is, 1,440 livres], quand on peut la trouver, car Jes premiers volumes entr 'autres sont d 'une rarete extreme.'' Lough, Essays, p. 76. That price probably included binding but not the Supple ment and Table, which had not yet appeared. 37. The pressrun of the Supplement was set by the original contract of April 12, 1771, but it might have been modified later. See Clement, "Pierre Rousseau et l 'edition des Supplements de l 'Encyclopedie,'' p. 136 and Raymond F. Birn, Pierre Rousseau and the philosophes of Bouillon in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hesterman, XXIX (1964), 122. On the price and background of the Table see George B. Watts, "The Supplement and the Table analytique et raisonnee of the Encyclopedie,'' French Review, XXVIII (Oct.1954), 4-19. 33 The Business of Enlightenment (2) The Geneva folio (1771-1776): it was a reprint of the first edition, at a pressrun of 2,150 copies, including the chaperon or extra sheets to cover spoilage. The subscription price was 840 livres, but by 1777 competition from the quarto edition had driven the market price down to 700 livres and even less. (3) The Lucca folio (1758-1776): because it followed the original edition from an early date, this reprint became bogged down in delays. From what little can be learned about its history, it seems to have had a pressrun of 1,500 copies, at least during the printing of the first volumes, and a price of about 737 livres. Although no international copyright law existed in the eighteenth century, the French publishers probably considered it a pirated work and tried to keep it out of the kingdom. In the tiny republic of Lucca, however, it was an important and legitimate enterprise, directed by an ad venturous patrician named Ottaviano Diodati, with the finan cial backing of some wealthy notables and the political protection of Lucca 's senate, to which it was dedicated. (4) The Leghorn folio (1770-1778): this was the last of the folio reprints, followed by an edition of the Supplement (1778-1779). It included 1,500 copies and may have cost only 57 4 livres, without the Supplement. Its publisher was Giu- 38. On June 8, 1777, the STN noted in a letter to Droz of Besanc;on that the current price of the Geneva folio had fallen to 700 livres. It got this information from letters from booksellers like Pavie of La Rochelle, who offered to sell a Geneva folio for 700 livres on Feb. 8, 1777. By this time the subscription for the cheaper quarto Encyclopedie had opened, and Panckoucke, who had taken a half interest in the quarto, had sold 200 of his last Geneva folios to a Parisian specu lator in the book trade named Batilliot for 100,000 livres. Batilliot then offered them to retailers at the rock-bottom price of 600 livres each with three months credit for payment. See Batilliot to STN, Feb. 6, 1777, and Batilliot 's printed circular of Dec. 1, 1776, in the STN papers. The price was 620 livres, including the Supplement and Table, in 1786 when Thomas Jefferson went shopping for Encyclopedies in Paris (see Chapter VI). 39. On the Lucca Encyclopedie, see Salvatore Bongi, "L' Enciclopedia in Lucca," Archivo storico italiano, 3d ser., XVIII (1873), 64-90, which has little to say about the commercial aspects of the enterprise. Bongi does note, however, that in launching the subscription in Nov. 1756, Diodati set the price at 2 zecchini for each volume of text and 3 zecchini for each volume of plates. As the full set contained seventeen vol umes of text and eleven of plates, its price probably came to 67 zecchini. According to the conversion tables in Samuel Ricard, Traite general de commerce (The Hague and Amsterdam, 1781), II, 289, 293, the zecchini was worth 11 livres tournois at this time; so a set would have cost 737 livres, unbound, at the subscription price in Lucca. That figure seems low, but transport costs would have increased it appreciably north of the Alps. There is further information in H. K. Weinert, ed., Secondo centenario della edizione lucchese dell' Enciclopedia (Florence, 1959), where the pressrun is asserted (p. x) to have been 1,500. 34 The Biography of a Book seppe Aubert, a specialist in Enlightenment literature, who persuaded three wealthy bourgeois to put up the capital. More important, the enlightened archduke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold, accepted the dedication of the work, shielded it against the pope, and even provided loans and a building for the presses. (5) The Geneva and Neuchatel quartos (1777-1779): these really two editions with the Supplement blended into were original text. Each set contained thirty-six volumes of the text and three plates and cost 384 livres at the subscription price. Owing to competition from the octavo edition, the last sets sold on the open market for as little as 240 livres by 1781. The quartos were printed at a total pressrun of 8,525 copies, including chaperon. Because of extensive spoilage and mishaps, however, only 8,011 complete sets could be assembled and sold, according to Joseph Duplain, a Lyonnais bookseller who managed the enterprise for a consortium made up of Duplain, Panckoucke, the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, Clement Plomteux of Liege, Gabriel Regnault of Lyons, and some minor partners. (6) The Lausanne and Bern octavos (1778-1782): although these were advertised as two editions, they really were one expanded edition based on two subscription campaigns. Their 40. On Aubert and his relations with the archduke see Ettore Levi·Malvano, "Les editions toscanes de 1 'Encyclopedie," Revue de litterature comparee, III (April-June 1923), 213-256 and Adriana Lay, Un editore illuminista: Giuseppe Aubert nel carteggio con Beccaria e Verri (Turin, 1973). Neither work, however, provides information about the price and pressrun. According to a prospectus of 1769, Aubert promised to supply the subscribers with his edition for 36 zecchini, 10 zecchini less than the price of the Lucca edition. But at that time the original publishers had issued only six of the eleven volumes of plates, so Aubert's price must have been much higher ten years later when he finished the printing. As he originally set his price at 78 percent of the price charged in Lucca, 574 livres represents a fair estimate, perhaps a little on the low side, of its level in livres tournois. The information on the pressrun comes from a circular letter by Aubert, sent to the STN in a letter from Gentil and Orr, shipping agents in Leghorn, on March 6, 1775. 41. The drop in the price of the quarto affected only some leftover sets, which the publishers divided among themselves toward the end of the enterprise. On Nov. 19, 1780, the STN informed Batilliot of Paris that it had just sixty copies left and was selling them at 240 livres each for cash or 294 livres with a year or so of credit. Three months later it sold thirty of them to Batilliot at a special price of 200 livres each, but otherwise it maintained its price at 240 livres until it cleared its stock. Panckoucke, however, sold off his surplus at a lower price, so that by March 1780 the quarto could be bought in Paris for 200 livres, according to a report that two of the partners of the STN sent to Neuchatel from Paris on March 31, 1780. 95 The Business of Enlightenment combined pressrun came to 5,500 or 6,000 copies ; they cost 225 livres at the subscription price; and they contained thirty-six volumes of text and three of plates. The allied so cietes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern produced the octavos jointly by reprinting the text of the quarto edition in reduced format. They were therefore treated as pirates by Panckoucke and his partners, who owned the rights to the text and the Supplement. This enumeration of facts and figures suggests a surpris ing conclusion: there were far more Encyclopedies in pre revolutionary Europe than anyone-except eighteenth-century publishers-has ever suspected. And in addition to the six ver sions of Diderot's basic text, there were two quite different works that used it as a point of departure: Felice's Encyclo pedie d'Yverdon, printed between 1770 and 1780 at 1,600 copies, and Panckoucke 's Encyclopedie methodique, begun in 1782 at a pressrun of approximately 5,000 copies. Some pub lishers probably also put together small scrap editions from the leftover sheets of the chaperons. So the total number of Encyclopedies, excluding the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon and the Encyclopedie methodique, can be estimated as follows : 42. Although the octavo publishers originally announced that their subscrip tion would cost 195 livres, it eventually came to 225. See Gazette de Berne, April 8, 1780. During negotiations for a marketing agreement with the quarto publishers, they consistently said they would double their pressrun from 3,000 to 6,000. Societe typographique de Lausanne to STN, Oct. 16 and Nov. 11, 1779, and Berenger of Lausanne to STN, Nov. 23, 1779. But after the agreement was finally concluded early in 1780, one of the STN 's partners reported that the in crease had amounted to only 2,500 copies. Ostervald of the STN to Bosset of the STN, June 4, 1780: "J e sais de science certaine que les gens de Lausanne et de Berne, qui ne la tiraient d 'abord qu 'a 3,000, la tirent presentement a 5,500, depuis l 'entree en France obtenue. '' 43. These estimates involve much guesswork, especially when it comes to cal culating chaperons and the size of French versus non-French sales, as the question marks indieate on the table. But the guesses can be supported by a great deal of quantitative and qualitative evidence from the papers of the STN, which provide the key for calculating Encyclopedie diffusion in general (see Chapter VI). The size of the chaperons varied, although printers' manuals said it was customary to include one main de passe (25 sheets) for every two reams or every ream (1,000 or 500 sheets). S. Boulard, Le Manuel de l'imprimeur (Paris, 1791), p. 72 and A.-F. Momoro, Traite elementaire de l'imprimerie, OU le manuel de l'imprimeur (Paris, 1793), p. 91. Their total number seems impressive: 625 folios, 514 quartos, and 300 octavos, at a conservative estimate. (The references to the size of the Lucca, Leghorn, and Lausanne-Bern editions are in round figures, so the estimated chaperons have been placed within parentheses.) Most of these sheets were spoiled, but many of the unspoiled ones could have been combined to form complete sets, especially if a few of the gaps were filled by reprinting. As some publishers al most certainly put together scrap editions in this manner, and as the octavos may 96 The Biography of a Book Total In France Outside France Chaperon Paris folio 4,225 2,000( 1) 2,050 175 Geneva folio 2,150 1,000(?) 150 1,000 Lucca folio 1,500 250(?) 1,250 (150) (plus 100) Leghorn folio 1,500 O(T) (100) 1,500 (plus 100) Geneva-Neuchatel 8,525 7,257 754 514 quarto Lausanne-Bern 5,500 1,000(?) 4,500 (300) octavo (plus 300) 23,400 839 11,507 12,054 (plus 500) (plus 500) All the presses of the publishers turned out about 24,000 copies of the Encyclopedie before 1789. At least 11,500 of them reached readers in France, and 7,257 of the French copies were quartos. Thus the Encyclopedie became a best seller in the country where it originated and where it suffered most from persecution. Fortunately, the majority of the Encyclo pedies in prerevolutionary France (about 60 percent) came from the only editions whose sales can be traced in detail. Therefore, by studying the production and diffusion of the quartos, one should be able to understand how the Encyclo pedie penetrated the Old Regime. have been printed at 6,000 instead of 5,500 copies, 25,000 represents a conservative estimate of the total number of Encyclopedies in existence before the French Revolution. On the question of chaperon,q and scrap editions see Robert Darnton, ''True and False Editions of the Encyclopedie, a Bibliographical Imbroglio,'' forthcoming in the proceedings of the Colloque international sur l 'histoire de l 'imprimerie et du livre a Geneve. 37 I I YYYYYYYYYYYY THE GENESIS OF A SPECULATION IN PUBLISHING The directors of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel planned to produce an Encyclopedie as soon as they set up business. On July 25, 1769, before they had printed a single book and when they possessed only three secondhand presses and a few dilapidated fonts of type, they sent a memorandum to the most powerful publisher in France, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke : L 'Encyclopedic, traversee en France dans son origine, encore aujourd 'hui arretee par les memes obstacles, ne pourra peut-etre jamais etre publiee dans le royaume avec la liberte necessaire. Le public, avide de connaitre les sentiments des divers savants de l 'Eur ope, attend avec impatience que cet ouvrage destine a instruire les hommes soit imprime sans aucune gene ... Il reste un moyen in faillible d 'eviter les oppositions que l 'on a lieu de craindre dans le royaume et de procurer a l 'ouvrage toute la superiorite qu 'il peut avoir. La Societe Typographique nouvellement etablie a Neuchatel en Suisse et dirigee par un certain nombre de gens de lettres, offre de se charger de l 'impression pour le compte de Messieurs les libraires de Paris. Contente pour cette fois d 'un profit tres modique pour l 'im pression, la Societe, qui desire de donner quelque celebrite a son debut, s'engagera a abandonner toute l'edition et a n'en faire aucune offre, ni en Angleterre, ni en Hollande, ni en Allemagne, ni en Italie en un mot a n'en tirer que le nombre d'exemplaires convenu. On sait que le Comte de Neuchatel est un des pays les plus libres de la Suisse, en sorte qu 'il n 'y aurait aucun obstacle a redouter de la part du gouvernement et du magistrat.1 1. STN to Panckoucke, July 25, 1769, included as a memoir in a letter from the STN to Jean-Frederic Perregaux of July 25, 1769. 38 Genesis of a Speculation The Neuchatel Reprint Plan The Neuchatelois may have been obscure and inexperienced, but they had a case. Their town offered an ideal setting for the production of books that could not be printed safely in France. Though as Swiss in character as Lausanne or Geneva to the south, Neuchatel had been a Prussian principality since 1707. Its printers therefore owed allegiance to a philosopher king, Frederick II, who left them to the lax supervision of their own local authorities and shielded them against the giant across the Jura mountains. France was capable of raid ing print shops beyond its borders, but the Neuchatelois saw France more as a market than a menace. Swiss porteurs had backpacked forbidden books over the Juras to French readers since the sixteenth century. By 1769, censorship, the monop olistic practices of the Parisian booksellers' guild, and the state apparatus for controlling the book trade had forced the philosophes to publish their works in the dozens of societes typographiques that sprang up like mushrooms in a ring around the French borders. Having watched the publishing industry flourish throughout the Rhineland and Switzerland, the N euchatelois decided to found a publishing house of their own. As they announced in circular letters to booksellers every where in Europe, the Societe typographique de Neuchatel ( STN) would produce "good" books of all kinds; and their first ventures showed a willingness to speculate on works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and even d 'Holbach. To some extent, this willingness might have resulted from the tastes of the STN 's three founders, Frederic-Samuel Ostervald, Jean-Elie Bertrand, and Samuel Fauche. Oster vald was a civic leader-banneret or head of the local militia and a member of the governing Conseil de ville-and a man of letters, having published two learned works on geography. His son-in-law, Bertrand, was professor of belles-lettres at 2. On Dec. 11, 1764, a Parisian police inspector and a company of French troops raided three printing shops in the theoretically independent duchy of Bouillon. Raymond F. Birn, Pierre Rousseau and the '' Philosophes'' of Bouillon in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Besterman, XXIX (Geneva, 1964), 93. 3. A fourth founder, Jonas-Pierre Berthoud, withdrew within a year. For back ground on the firm and its founders see John Jeanpretre, "Histoire de la Societe typographique de Neuchiltel 1769-1798," Musee neuchdtelois (1949), pp. 1-22 and Jacques Rychner, "Les archives de la Societe typographique de Neuchatel," Musee neuchdtelois (1969), pp.1-24. 39 The Business of Enlightenment the College de Neuchatel and a pastor. Bertrand abandoned his ecclesiastical functions in 1769 in order to devote himself to the STN, where his encyclopedic knowledge proved fully especially useful in an encyclopedic project: an expanded, pirated edition of the multivolume Description des arts et metiers, which was being produced in Paris under the spon sorship of the Academy of Sciences. Fauche represented the commercial and technical aspects of the business. He had been publishing and selling books in Neuchatel for several years before joining forces with Ostervald and Bertrand, and he had developed a specialty in prohibited books-a branch of the trade where profits and risks were greatest. In 1772 Fauche attempted to market an obscene, anticourt libel be hind his partners' backs, and they retaliated by forcing him out of the company. But they had gone along with his efforts to produce an edition of d 'Holbach 's atheistic Systeme de la nature in 1771-a venture that proved both profitable and humiliating because it produced such a scandal that Oster vald and Bertrand were temporarily forced out of their positions in the Conseil de ville and the Compagnie des Pasteurs. Whether or not its directors felt partial to the ideas in the they published, the STN never specialized in the litera books ture of the Enlightenment. It printed and traded in all kinds of books-books about travel, romance, medicine, history, and law, books like the Voyage autour du monde by Bougain ville and Lettres de Sophie by Madame Riccoboni, which ap pealed to an educated but not especially highbrow readership. Essentially, the directors of the STN wanted to make money rather than to spread lumieres. But they knew that there were profits in Enlightenment. Pierre Rousseau, a third-rate actor and playwright had made a fortune by popularizing the work of the philosophes-and especially the Encyclopedie -from the Societe typographique de Bouillon. And just at the other end of the Lake of Neuchatel, Barthelemy de Felice had put together a publishing business that was doing very well by producing his expurgated, Protestant version of the Encyclopedie. Fauche himself had collected 834 livres merely for lending his name to the false imprint under which vol umes 8-17 of the original Encyclopedie appeared: "A Neuf chastel, chez Samuel Faulche & Compagnie, libraires & imprimeurs.'' Ostervald and Bertrand were men of substance 40 Genesis of a Speculation and influence who considered themselves several cuts above Rousseau, Felice, and Fauche. They were eager to speculate in Encyclopedisme, and their eagerness came from enlight ened self-interest as well as interest in the liJnlightenment when they offered to print the Encyclopedie for Panckoucke. Instead of approaching Panckoucke directly, they attempted to negotiate through Jean-Frederic Perregaux, a N euchatelois who was to be a founder of the Banque de France in 1800 and was beginning his career as a financier in Paris in 1769. They sent their memorandum to Perregaux with a covering letter, explaining that "nous savons que !'interdiction lancee contre la premiere edition de l 'Encyclopedie en France n 'a pu etre levee par les libraires qui viennent d 'en annoncer une seconde. Nous leur offrons nos presses dans le memoire que vous trouverez ici et que nous vous prions de vouloir bien com muniquer a M. Panckoucke. '' Not only could they do the printing safely, they added; they would also improve the quality of the text, for they were men of letters, not merely printers, and they could call upon other erudite Swiss to help them. After several weeks of soundings and pourparlers, Perre gaux finally learned that the STN had made its bid too late. "Voici le secret de l 'a:ffaire que je n 'ai decouvert que hier et avec toute la peine imaginable. N 'ayant pu obtenir la permis sion pour Paris, ils se sont accommodes de I 'edition d 'Hollande qu'on a commence a y imprimer, et tous les beaux arrange ments faits ici ne serviront que pour les supplements a celle de Paris . . . Malgre la permission que les libraires inte resses ont actuellement de faire venir les volumes d 'Hollande, jugez de toutes les revolutions auxquelles cet ouvrage est encore sujet d 'ici a deux ans, epoque pour laquelle il doit etre pret. " Perregaux judged correctly: the STN could be thankful that it never became involved with the folio reprint, which was produced in Geneva, not Amsterdam, in 1771- 1776. As explained above, this edition had a stormy history. It provoked quarrels between Panckoucke and his partners ; 6,000 copies of its first three volumes were confiscated by the French government and had to be reprinted; and the sub scription campaign floundered. In June 1775, when its backers 4. STN to Perregaux, July 25, 1769. 5. Perregaux to STN, Sept. 13, 1769. 41 The Business of Enlightenment met for a preliminary settling of accounts in Geneva, a third of its 2,000 sets had not been sold; and profits looked thin, although they seemed likely to grow in the next few years. Just when Panckoucke was liquidating the second folio en terprise in Geneva, Ostervald arrived in Paris with a pro posal to join him in a new speculation on the Encyclopedie. Upon learning that his man was in Switzerland, Ostervald wrote home suggesting that the STN lure Panckoucke to Neu chatel, where it could negotiate from a position of strength: "S'il se rend a votre invitation, faites-lui boire du meilleur, c 'est a dire de deux niches tout a fait a gauche du fond de ma cave.' ' Panckoucke was too entangled in Geneva to make the trip, but he wrote encouragingly that he would be "charme d'etre instruit de l 'affaire que vous avez en vue.' n He had repulsed an effort by the STN to do business with him in April 1770 and this new note of affability suggested new re spect for the STN, which had grown into a major publishing firm in the six years since it had first attempted to collaborate on his Encyclopedie speculations. Not only did the STN print a great many books of all kinds by 1775, it also did an enor mous wholesale trade with booksellers everywhere in Europe, from Moscow to Naples and Dublin to Pest. And it had in creased its capital, while expanding, by taking on Abram Bosset-DeLuze, one of Neuchatel's wealthiest businessmen, as a third partner. Panckoucke 's position also improved in the mid-1770s. His 6,000 Encyclopedies, which had been confis cated in 1770, were returned in February 1776-an indica tion of the new atmosphere in Versailles and of his influence within it. The accession of Louis XVI on May 10, 177 4, brought a new brand of reformist ministers into power. They favored a freer trade in books as well as in wheat, and they showered favors on Panckoucke, who helped them liberalize the publishing industry. With support from Versailles, he el bowed competitors aside, pushed his way to the center of jour nalism as well as the book trade, subsidized entire stables of authors, and made and unmade publishing consortia on a gi gantic scale. But he piled speculation on speculation so pre cariously that he strained his resources; and he needed a 6. Ostervald to STN, June 2, 1775. 7. Panckoucke to STN, from Geneva, June 12, 1775. 42 Genesis of a Speculation fresh infusion of capital in the summer of 1776 when he came to Neuchatel to talk Encyclopedies with the STN. This time, on its third attempt to speculate on the Encyclo pedie, circumstances favored the STN. Not only was the gov ernment developing a more liberal policy toward the book trade, it was also being pushed in this direction by Panc koucke, who owned the rights to the Encyclopedie. Having liquidated the second-folio association a year ago, Panc koucke thought the market was ripe for a new edition and needed backers to finance it. The STN could negotiate the deal from its own territory, where it could demonstate the size and solidity of its business and where Ostervald could at last make use of the secret corners of his wine cellar. Thus, on the day before the American colonies declared their inde pendence, these entrepreneurs of Enlightenment formed a partnership to produce a new Encyclopedie. The contract of July 3, 1776 (see Appendix A.I) created the first in a series of alliances and alignments that shaped the history of the Encyclopedie for the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century. It made Panckoucke and the STN equal partners in a reprint of a reprint. They planned to in corporate the 2,000 copies of Volumes 1-3, which Panckoucke had recently recovered from the Bastille, in a new version of the Geneva folio, so the terms of their agreement resembled those of Panckoucke's contract with the Geuevans of 1770. The STN was to print volumes 4-17 at the same pressrun (2,000 and 150 sheets as chaperon to cover spoilage) for a fixed price of 34 livres per sheet; it would use the same qual ity of paper (grand batard fin, at 10 livres per ream) and of type (all from the foundry of Fournier le jeune in Paris) ; and Panckoucke would have the illustrations printed from the same plates. The new edition would be cheaper (720 livres for subscribers instead of 840 livres), and it would be an STN affair: the N euchatelois would handle accounts, publicity, and sales. Their partnership cost them 108,000 livres, which they promised to pay to Panckoucke in sixteen notes of 6,750 livres each, payable at specified intervals over four years, beginning on April 1, 1777. In this way, Panckoucke acquired some badly needed capital, and the STN became co-owner of the most important book of the Enlightenment. 8. Cramer and de Tournes had paid 76,451 livres for only a third interest in the second folio edition, while the STN paid 108,000 livres for a half interest in 43 The Business of Enlightenment The association created in Neuchatel differed from Panc koucke 's earlier partnership in one crucial way: it gave the STN a permanent half interest in the Encyclopedie itself, not merely in one edition of it. The contract for the second folio edition, which Panckoucke had signed with Cramer and de Tournes in Geneva on June 26, 1770, specifically exempted the Genevans from anything more than a one-third interest in the edition that they were to print. The Neuchatelois, however, contracted not merely to print a third folio edition but to acquire half of Panckoucke 's holdings '' dans la totalite des cuivres, droits, et privileges du Dictionnaire encyclo pedique, tant pour le present que pour l 'avenir." The agree ment stipulated that the STN might reprint the Supplement, which Panckoucke was beginning to publish with another set of associates, and it held out the possibility that "dans quel ques annees '' Panckoucke and the STN would have equal in terests in a speculation on' 'une nouvelle edition corrigee dudit Dictionnaire encyclopedique dans laquelle on fondrait tous les supplements.'' Thus instead of merely becoming Panc koucke 's printer, as it had attempted to do in 1769, the STN became his ally. This alliance had momentous consequences, for although the plan for the third folio edition soon dis solved, Panckoucke and the STN remained united in a long term effort to wring a profit from their common property: the text and plates that had been put together so painfully by Diderot and his collaborators. From the Reprint to the Revised Edition Soon after he returned to Paris in mid-.J uly 1776, Panc koucke decided to scrap the Neuchatel plan for a new edition the proposed third edition and in the droits et cuivres as well. The STN probably got a better price because a great many sets of the earlier edition remained to be sold. Panckoucke, who owned them all, protected his future sales in the contract with the STN by emphasizing that the new edition had to remain le plus profond secret until Jan. 1, 1777, thereby giving himself enough time to dispose of the Genevan copies. The contract also committed the STN to pay Panckoucke 35,400 livres for half the value of the first three volumes of text and the first volume of plates, as well as the frontispiece and engraved portraits of d 'Alembert and Diderot, which Panckoucke had had printed in Paris. The Genevans had also paid for those volumes at virtually the same price, and Panckoucke had reimbursed them in the settling of accounts of June 13, 1775. He therefore did not swindle the STN by exacting payment for the same thing twice, as it might appear, but he did well to cover the cost of the confiscated volumes by incorporating them in a new edition. 44 Genesis of a Speculation of the old text and to create instead an Encyclopedie that would be so completely revised as to be virtually a new book. How and why he reached this decision cannot be known with absolute certainty because many of the documents from this period are missing, but enough of them remain for one to fol low the general lines of his rapidly changing course of action. After leaving Neuchatel in early July 1776, Panckoucke stopped in Geneva to see Samuel de Tournes, his former partner in the Geneva folio edition, who had agreed to ad minister the sales of the 670 sets that were Jeft over when the partnership was disbanded in June 1775. De Tournes re ported that about 300 sets were stiU sitting unsold in his warehouse. The slowness in the liquidation of the old reprint did not bode well for the sales of the new one; and as the new Encyclopedie would be 120 livres cheaper than its predecessor, Panckoucke seemed certain to ruin one speculation by rush ing into another. While his enthusiasm for the Neuchatel agreement cooled, Panckoucke began to favor a grander plan, which he tried out, after his arrival in Paris, on some of his philosophe friends, notably his brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Antoine Suard, a prominent member of the Academie fran <_;aise. Having ingratiated himself with influential philo sophes, won admission to salon society, and put together a handsome income from pensions and sinecures, Suard repre sented the Enlightenment at its most mature and most mun dane-the kind of Enlightenment that was championed by d 'Alembert and that found its spiritual home in the Academy. Panckoucke apparently suggested that Suard enlist a group of philosophes to rework Diderot's text for a revised edition. Suard seized eagerly on the proposal, and he persuaded France's two most important academicians, d 'Alembert and Condorcet, to direct the enterprise with him. The three phil osophes outlined their plan in a memorandum dated .July 27, 1776, which Panckoucke sent to the STN. Although this dorn ment has disappeared, its main points seem clear enough from Panckoucke's subsequent exchanges with Neuchatel: 9. Panckoucke 's discussions in Geneva can only be known from some notes Bosset wrote under the title ''Observations de M. Bosset sur la refonte,'' STN papers, ms. 1233. 10. On Suard and the integration of the High Enlightenment in the upper echelons of the Old Regime see Robert Darn ton, ''The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Prerevolutionary France,'' Past and Present, no. 51 (1971), 81-115. 45 The Business of Enlightenment 1. The new editors would blend into the text the five-volume Supplement, which was then being published by Panckoucke; 2. they would correct errors and omissions and would im prove the poor coordination between the text and the plates; 3. they would include a great many new articles; and 4. they would incorporate a '' Dictionnaire de la langue franc;aise,'' which Suard was then preparing for publication. In short, Suard, d 'Alembert, and Condorcet proposed to overhaul the original Encyclopedie from top to bottom. They planned to put together a whole team of philosophes to do the work. And they expected to be paid liberally by Panckoucke and his partners. The origins of this proposal went back far beyond the for mation of the Suard group to the beginning of Panckoucke 's plans to speculate on the Encyclopedie. Shortly before or after his purchase of the rights to the work on December 16, 1768, Panckoucke sought Diderot's help in persuading the French authorities to permit the publication of a completely revised edition. Diderot complied by writing an extraordinary memoir about the imperfections of the work on which he had labored so hard for the last twenty years The book had been marred, he explained, by the mediocrity of its contributors and he named them, along with the vast sections of the En cyclopedie that they had spoiled. Some of the contributors were incompetent. Others subcontracted their assignments to hack writers, who produced hack work. And these flawed articles made the good ones look incongruous. There was no consistency in the quality of the writing and little coordina tion in the allotment of the work. Thus important subjects were omitted because some contributors thought they were being treated by others, the cross-references were neglected, and the text was not carefully related to the plates. Diderot put it bluntly; the Encyclopedie was a mess: "L' Encyclo pedie fut un gouffre, ou ces especes de chiffoniers jeterent pele-mele une infinite de choses mal digerees, bonnes, mau vaises, detestables, vraies, fausses, incertaines, et toujours incoherentes et disparates.' m The new publishers could pro- 11. Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux (Paris, 1875- 77), XX, 130. For the context and reception of Diderot's memoir see L. P. de Bachaumont and others, Memoires secrets pour servir a Z'histoire de la Republique des Lettres en France de 1762 jusqu'a nos jours (London, 1777-89), entry for June 29, 1772; cited hereafter as Bachaumont. 46 Genesis of a Speculation duce a much better Encyclopedie, Diderot continued, if they confided it to a director who would plan the rewriting with great care, holding the contributors to a strict schedule, pay ing a copyist to produce legible copy, coordinating the plates and the text, and choosing only the best authors, who would be well paid. Writing with the frustrations of his own direc torship vividly in mind, Diderot showed how the Encyclo pedie could be transformed into a new and vastly superior work. The Diderot memorandum reveals the thinking that shaped Panckoucke 's Encyclopedie enterprises from the very begin ning, namely, a conviction that the original book was badly flawed and needed to be reworked into a revised edition~a refonte as Panckoucke called it in his correspondence. Unlike modern literary scholars, Panckoucke did not approach the Encyclopedie as if it were a sacred text or an untouchable classic. From the very beginning he meant to remold it into something better. Circumstances prevented him from realiz ing his original intention, but he held fast to his plan until the very end, when he was putting out the Encyclopedie meth odique, a work that was not completed until 1832, after it had run to 202 volumes and Panckoucke had been dead for thirty three years. If Diderot's memorandum belongs to a vision that haunted Panckoucke throughout his career, it also had an immediate and self-avowed purpose in 1768: it was intended to convince the French authorities that the original Encyclopedie was so riddled with faults that they should grant Panckoucke per mission to publish a revised edition. Panckoucke 's request was refused and Diderot's memorandum forgotten-until it was published for an entirely different purpose in 1772 and again in 1776 by Luneau de Boisjermain. Luneau was a can tankerous man of letters who had embroiled the original pub lishers of the Encyclopedie in a celebrated lawsuit. He wanted to convict them of defrauding the subscribers of the work be cause, he claimed, they had supplied a shoddy book at a much higher price than had been set by the subscription. Having somehow got his hands on Diderot's memorandum, he used it as evidence to support his case. Luneau lost his suit, but Panc koucke never gave up in his determination to produce a new Encyclopedie. When he revived his pet project in July 1776, he dredged up Diderot's memorandum once again, this time 47 The Business of Enlightenment to convince the STN to accept the change in plans. '' J e vous envoie le memoire de Diderot, qui n 'aurait jamais du etre publie. C 'est un a bus de confiance qui y a donne lieu. Luneau a supprime tout ce qui est a l'avantage de l'Encyclopedie, comme de raison, mais la lecture de ce memoire vous con vaincra de la necessite de la refonte. Nous y avions pense il y a 8 ans [that is, in 1768], mais Diderot est aussi une mau vaise tete qui nous demandait cent mille ecus et qui nous aurait desespere. ' This tantalizingly brief note-one of only two letters from Panckoucke that survive from this period-shows that the Diderot memorandum was continuously used as a weapon in the process of lobbying, quarreling, and intriguing that made publishing such a rough business in the eighteenth century. The original version of it has disappeared and Panckoucke noted that Luneau cut passages from it in order to damn the Encyclopedie more effectively. So Diderot did not have quite so critical an attitude toward his book as Luneau claimed, but he did criticize it-and very trenchantly, too-because he en tertained thoughts about editing the revised edition that Panc koucke originally wanted to publish. Panckoucke 's letter in dicates that he offered Diderot the editorship in 1768 and that Diderot demanded 300,000 livres for the job. Perhaps Diderot took the offer seriously enough to write the memorandum, which provided the principal argument in Panckoucke 's cam paign to get the government's permission for the new work. Thus, while ending his association with the original publish ers, Diderot apparently began planning a new Encyclopedie, one which would redeem all the mistakes that made him feel so bitter about his twenty-five years of labor for Le Breton. The labor for Panckoucke would be more rewarding, though Diderot may not have seriously expected to receive as much as 300,000 livres. More important, perhaps, Panckoucke would not mutilate the copy: he was a friend of the philo sophes and would leave Diderot free to realize the Encyclo pedie of his dreams. 12. Panckoueke to STN, Aug. 4, 1776. The purpose of the memoir stands out clearly in an introduction to it written by or for Panckoucke. Diderot, Oeuvres completes, XX, 129-130. 13. The version of the memoir in the Assezat-Tourneux edition of Diderot's Oeuvres completes was taken from a published factum or judicial brief by Luneau, which has several ellipsis dots where passages and person's names were cut. Un· fortunately, the copy sent by Panckoucke has not remained in the STN 's papers. 48 Genesis of a Speculation Panckoucke 's project gives one an intriguing glimpse of the great Encyclopedist in his old age, preparing to redo the work that had consumed his middle years; but it came to nothing because the authoritarian Maupeou ministry refused to permit such an ambitious undertaking, which might well have resulted in a more outspoken Encyclopedie than Le Bre ton's. A year later, Panckoucke came back with a plan to re print the original text and to correct its errors and omissions by producing some supplementary volumes-the plan that eventually led to the second or Genevan folio edition and the Supplement. He asked Diderot to direct the Supplement and received the famous reply: '' Allez vous faire f . . . , vous et votre ouvrage, je n 'y veux plus travailler. Yous me donneriez 20,000 louis et je pourrais expedier votre besoin en un clin d'oeil, que je n'en ferais rien. Ayez pour agreable de sortir d 'ici et de me laisser en repos. " N" o wonder that Panckoucke described Diderot as a mauvaise tete and that he did not turn to him seven years later when he revived the refonte project. The fact remains, however, that Diderot had helped to shape that project in the first place and should be considered as the father or grandfather of the Suard plan. The plan took final form in a contract signed by Panckoucke and Suard on August 14, 1776 (see Appendix A. II). Ac cording to this agreement, d 'Alembert and Condorcet would "preside" over the new folio Encyclopedie but Suard would be held responsible for its preparation. He would put to gether a team of distinguished writers to produce the text. The contract listed Saint Lambert, Thomas, Morellet, d 'Ar naud, Marmontel, La Harpe, Petit, and Louis as likely candi dates-men whose names have lost their luster today but who But in his covering letter, Panckoucke did not challenge the accuracy of the passages that Luneau printed, so the version in the Oeuvres completes is probably accurate, as far as it goes. Diderot scholars have correctly pointed out the polemi cal background of the memoir, but they have not seen its implications for Diderot's biography. Panckoucke 's letter suggests that Diderot seriously considered assuming the editorship of an entirely new version of the Encyclopedie, not just the Supplement, despite the disclaimers in the memoir itself, p. 131. 14. Diderot to Sophie Volland, Aug. 31 ( n in Diderot, Correspondance, ed. G. Roth (Paris, 1955--), IX, 123-124. Diderot's dislike of Panckoucke is also suggested by a remark that Ostervald reported to Bosset in a letter of June 4, 1780: "Harle [Ostervald's son-in-law, a merchant in Saint-Quentin] vous en aura peut-etre parle [that is, about Panckoucke] et vous aura dit comme a moi que Diderot l 'avait assure que c 'etait un homme de mauvaise foi, off rant d 'en fournir la preuve. '' 49 The Business of Enlightenment commanded the most prestigious positions in the Republic of Letters during the 1770s. They included so many academi cians that the ref onte would have appeared as a product of the Academie frangaise, which d 'Alembert and Voltaire had packed with philosophes of their own stripe. Suard and his colleagues were to rewrite the text, incor porating new material from the Supplement, from certain articles of Felice's Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, and from other sources such as Suard 's proposed Dictionnaire de la langue frangaise. They would take special care to correct the poor coordination of the plates and the text and the cross-refer ences, as Diderot had recommended in his memoir. And as Diderot had also suggested, they would be held to a rigid schedule, a copyist would produce a neat version of all their work, and they would be well paid. By giving Suard complete control over the rewriting, Panckoucke probably meant to correct the unevenness and incongruities that Diderot had found so objectionable. But Panckoucke required Suard to produce a steady stream of copy-at least three volumes a year-from May 1, 1777, when the first two volumes were to be in the printer's hands, until the end of 1781, when presum ably the last volume would be finished. Suard would have to pay 500 livres for every week that the printshop remained idle owing to a lack of copy. By maintaining this strict pro duction schedule, Suard would receive 5,000 livres for each volume and 20,000 livres when the work had been completed. The contract did not specify how many volumes were to make up a set in the revised edition, but Panckoucke evidently planned on about twenty volumes in text. If so, Suard would receive 120,000 livres, of which he was obligated to pay at least 40,000 to the writers working under him. To set a whole stable of philosophes to work for four and a half years, at a cost of 120,000 livres, was a major enter prise, and Panckoucke knew that he needed intellectual and political as well as financial backing for it. So he probably attached great importance to d'Alembert's support of the project. As the ruler of the Academie frarn;aise and as one of 15. All of the men named in the contract belonged to the Academie franc;aise except the two who would be least well known today: Antoine Petit was a famous doctor and member of the Academie des sciences, and Antoine Louis was the distinguished secretaire perpetuel of the Academie de chirurgie. Both had con tributed articles on medical science to the original Encyclopedie. 50 Genesis of a Speculation France's most prestigious philosophes, d 'Alembert would at tract the best talent and would make the new Encyclopedie appear as the legitimate successor of the old one, which he had originally edited with Diderot. Also, d 'Alembert's pat ronage could attract that of still greater figures. On Decem ber 8, 1776, d 'Alembert wrote the following letter to the STN: Messieurs, Quoique ma sante d 'une part et de l 'autre des occupations indispensables ne me permettent pas d 'avoir la meme part qu 'autre fois a l 'ouvrage important dont vous me parlez, vous pouvez etre persuades de tout l 'interet que j 'y prends et du desir que j 'ai d 'y concourir autant qu 'il sera en moi, tant a cause de l 'utilite de l 'ou vrage que par les liens d 'estime et d 'amitie qui m 'unissent depuis longtemps a M. Suard, mon digne confrere, qui conduira siirement cette entreprise a votre satisfaction et a celle du public. Je compte aller a Berlin au mois de mai prochain, et je ferai pour vous aupres du roi de Prusse tout ce qui dependra de mon faible credit et des bontes dont ce prince m 'honore. Vons pouvez faire et vous ferez sans doute de cet ouvrage, grace a la liberte honnete dont vous jouissez, un des plus beaux monuments de la litterature ancienne et moderne, et je n 'ai d 'autre regret que de ne pouvoir pas mettre a ce bel edifice autant de pierres que je desirerais. Mais je porterai du moins un peu de mortier aux architectes, et je voudrais seulement qu 'il flit meilleur et plus abondant. J 'ai l 'honneur d'etre avec respect, Messieurs, Votre tres humble et tres obeissant serviteur d 'Alembert D'Alembert never made this trip to Berlin, but he prom ised to lobby for Frederick II's support of the new Encyclo pedie. This point mattered a great deal to the STN because Frederick was sovereign of Neuchatel and could protect them against interference by local or French authorities. In their original contract with Panckoucke, the Swiss printers had stipulated that Frederick's protection was to be sought. And after d'Alembert canceled his trip, they sent him a memoran dum on their need for a formal statement ( rescrit) from Frederick that they could use to ward off any attempt to in terrupt the printing. It also stressed their hopes that Freder- 16. D 'Alembert was answering a letter from the STN, which is missing, as is most of its correspondence concerning the Encyclopedie during this period. 51 The Business of Enlightenment ick would accept the dedication of the work. Ostervald and Bosset discussed these plans with d 'Alembert in Paris in the spring of 1777. Their letters at that time and later remarks in their correspondence show that d 'Alembert had made a seri ous commitment to promote the project. He evidently shared some of Diderot's feelings about the need to improve the original work, and for his part he promised to help by writ ing a "Histoire de l 'Encyclopedie" for the revised edition.17 For Panckoucke, therefore, the revised Encyclopedie did not represent a casual side bet but a serious speculation on the kind of work that he hoped to produce in the first place, the kind that Diderot had recommended to him in 1768 and that looked more feasible in 1776, when the new reign of Louis XVI seemed to promise a more tolerant attitude to ward publishing, when Frederick II might extend protection from abroad, and when d 'Alembert, Condorcet, and Suard could be counted upon to recruit the most distinguished writers in Paris. It was for such an Encyclopedie that he opted in July 1776. Next he had to persuade the STN to go along with him. Panckoucke could expect his Swiss partners to resist such a drastic change in plans. The contract of July 3, 1776, did envisage an eventual joint speculation on a revised edition, but it committed the associates to start work right away on the folio reprint. Soon after Panckoucke 's departure, the 17. "Memoire envoye a Paris le le. juin 1777" in STN papers, dossier En cyclopedie: ''En rendant nos tres humbles actions de grace a Monsieur d 'Alem bert du soin qu 'il daigne prendre pour nos interets aupres de S. M. le Roi de Prusse, nous le supplions de nous favoriser de sa puissante recommandation, dans la vue d 'obtenir de S.M. qu 'il lui plaise adresser un rescrit au Conseil d 'Etat de sa Principaute de Neuchatel et Valangin, portant qu'informee qu'il s'est etabli dans la capitale une imprimerie considerable sous le nom de la Societe typo graphique, Elle la prend sous sa haute protection, pour qu 'elle puisse travailler avec tout le succes possible, lui accordant non seulement la permission d 'imprime1· librement la nouvelle edition de l 'Encyclopedie a laquelle on travaille, mais agreant de plus que ce grand ouvrage lui soit dedie. Il sera convenable que ce rescrit nous soit adresse et envoye directement, afin que nous puissions en faire usage au besoin et le produire seulement dans le cas ou l 'on voudrait nous gener pour ce travail.'' Ostervald and Bosset knew d 'Alembert and discussed their Encyclopedie projects with him during a trip to Paris in the spring of 1777. No record of those discussions survives, but the STN alluded to them in a letter to Panckoucke of Feb. 8, 1778: '' Rappelez-vous aussi que M. d 'Alembert nous avait fait esperer au printemps dernier de nous fournir une histoire de l 'Encyclopedie, morceau neuf et qui produit par une telle plume donnerait un merveilleux relief a notre affairef'' 52 Genesis of a Speculation STN had bought a house adjoining its workshop in order to have room to execute the enormous printing job. It began searching for new workers, presses, type, and paper supplies, for it expected at least to double its printing capacity in a few months. The prospectus accompanying its agreement with Panckoucke committed it to a tight production schedule, which it needed to maintain, in any case, in order to bring in enough capital to pay the first of its sixteen notes to Panc koucke as they became due. The papers of the STN do not reveal how Panckoucke presented his proposal, but they indi cate that he sent five items to support his case: Diderot's memorandum of 1768; some critical "Reflexions" on the Panckoucke-STN prospectus for the proposed third folio re print; the draft of a contract between Panckoucke and Suard for the preparation of the revised edition; a proposed amend ment to the Panckoucke-STN contract, which would commit the STN to the Suard plan; and a memorandum of July 27, 1776, by d'Alembert, Condorcet, and Suard, which argued the need for rewriting instead of reprinting the original text. None of these survives, but the Neuchatel papers contain a more revealing document: a memorandum Bos set sent to the other directors of the STN on the eve of a conference on Panc koucke 's proposal, which shows how eighteenth-century pub lishers confronted crucial decisions. Should the STN accept the Suard plan? Hundreds of thousands of livres and many years of labor would be determined by that decision, which the directors were to make the next day at two o'clock in the afternoon. Bosset considered the issue so important that he wrote down his thoughts as they occurred to him and sent his notes to Ostervald and Bertrand. Writing memos, scheduling conferences, going over the pros and cons of complex ques tions of finance and marketing-the directors of the STN operated like modern businessmen, although their business was Enlightenment. First, Bosset argued, the STN should face the fact that Panckoucke was acting out of self-interest: he needed to post pone the reprint in order to have more time to market his 300 unsold sets (a matter of 210,000 livres to him). But Pane- 18. Bosset 's memorandum, ''Observations de M. Bosset sur la refonte,'' goes over the material sent by Panckoucke closely enough for one to have a good idea of its contents, especially as Panckoucke 's draft contracts served as the basis for the contracts that do survive in the STN 's papers. 53 The Business of Enlightenment koucke 's motive was irrelevant to the real issue facing the STN. "\Vould the increased cost of the Suard project result in substantially larger profits? Bosset was inclined to think so because he found that the ''Reflexions'' sent by Panckoucke exposed a dangerous weakness of the reprint strategy: the market for the original edition might well be sated. It would be safe to assume that sufficient demand existed for a sub stantially new Encyclopedie-provided the price were right. But here Bosset detected a flaw in the Suard plan. It would price the revised edition out of the range of all but the wealthiest book buyers. Bosset believed that the greatest profit was to be made by tapping the demand for the En cyclopedie among ordinary readers : ''Ce ne peut done etre que par le bas prix auquel on etablira cette nouvelle edition qu 'on pourra en faciliter l 'ecoulement en le mettant plus a la portee de chacun. '' The subsequent history of the Encyclo pedie would prove that Bosset had perceived a profound truth about the literary market, but the low-price policy appealed to him for another reason. In satisfying the STN 's interest as a shareholder, it would do even more for the STN's interest as a printer. The Neuchatelois expected to print the entire revised edition and to be paid from the re ceipts according to their output. So they would make far more from a cheap edition of three or four thousand sets than from an expensive edition of two thousand. A large, inex pensive edition also would diminish the danger of pirating. And it even might be more advantageous to Panckoucke, Bos set believed. He argued that the eleven volumes of plates, which Panckoucke proposed to sell at 36 livres each, could be compressed into six somewhat larger volumes to be sold at 40 livres each for a total cost of 240 livres instead of 396 livres. He thought that the text could be kept to twenty vol umes (the seventeen original volumes and three volumes of text from the Supplement) because the addition of new ma terial would balance evenly with the deletion of errors and repetitions from the old. Each volume of text could sell for 24 livres, making 480 livres for the text, plus 240 livres for the plates or 720 livres for the entire set, the same price that Panckoucke and the STN origfoally had planned to charge for their folio reprint. At that price, they could sell twice as many sets as Panckoucke had projected. And three or four thousand sets of 720 livres would fetch more in profits than 54 Genesis of a Speculation 2,000 at 864 livres, the price Panckoucke had proposed for the revised edition. They could do best by aiming their edition at the grand public. Of course the profit margin would not increase if costs went up beyond a certain point. The STN would have to force Panc koucke to reduce the 100,000 to 120,000 livres that he pro posed to pay the philosophes. Bosset argued that the revising required merely ''de l 'ordre et du gout,'' not genius, and he particularly objected to the "pretentions excessives" of Suard. He said nothing about Suard 's being Panckoucke 's but he proposed that Suard be paid for every brother-in-law, sheet of new prose instead of for every volume-a policy that would prevent him from receiving payment for any ma terial that he took over without modification from Diderot's text. Bosset also suggested that at the end of the rewriting Suard receive 12,000 livres and twenty free sets instead of the 40,000 livres that Panckoucke had proposed. And finally, that the STN demand three modifications he recommended in Panckoucke 's suggested amendments to the contract of July 3, 1776. First, Panckoucke had wanted to broaden the financial base of the enterprise by selling an interest of one third in it to other book dealers. He therefore had proposed that he and the STN each sell one-third of their half interest for 25,000 livres. Bosset considered the idea good and the price bad, because a third of the price that the STN had paid to Panckoucke was 36,000 livres : Panckoucke therefore was asking the Swiss to take a 25 percent loss without compensa tion and should be opposed. Secondly, the STN had paid Panckoucke 35,400 livres to cover the production cost of the three volumes from the Genevan edition that he had recov ered from the Bastille and that he meant to use for the pro posed third folio reprint (that sum also covered one volume of plates, the frontispiece, and the portraits of Diderot and d 'Alembert). If he abandoned the plan for the reprint, the STN should not be expected to pay for half the loss of those vol umes. Thirdly, Panckoucke had required that the revised edi tion be kept secret until July 1, 1777, when it would be an nounced publicly and its first two volumes would appear. That would give him six additional months in which to sell his 300 surplus sets of the Genevan reprint because his con tract with the STN committed him to publish the prospectus for the Neuchatel reprint on January 1, 1777. Bos set consid- 55 The Business of Enlightenment ered speed extremely important. The STN had committed too much capital to sacrifice six months without receiving any return on its money. It had bought an entire house, at an in flated price, in order to expand its plant immediately, and Bosset felt it should fight the demand for the delay. Appar ently sitting at home toward the end of the day, Bosset brought his argument to a close : '' Voila, Messieurs, en gros mes reflexions sur cette affaire que je soumets absolument a votre decision et a VOS lumieres. J 'aurai l 'honneur de VOUS voir, Messieurs, demain contre les deux heures pour en con f erer ensemble ... J'ai l'honneur, Messieurs, de vous sou haiter le bon soir. '' There is no record of what happened at the two o'clock conference, but the next piece of the puzzle shows that the Neuchatelois accepted the revision proposal. On August 31, 1776, they signed an agreement to adapt their earlier contract with Panckoucke to the Suard plan (see Appendix A. III). In this ''Addition au traite avec M. Panckoucke,'' they con sented to delay the announcement of the new edition until July 1, 1777. At that time the first two volumes of text and the first volume of plates would appear, and the rest of the work would be published at the rate specified in the contract for the reprint. The STN had to accept the loss of its share in Panckoucke's old copies of volumes 1-3 of the Geneva edi tion, which were to be sold as scrap paper, except for some salvageable tables and art work. It apparently also gave in to Panckoucke 's position on pricing because the agreement made no provision for reducing the number of volumes in the set, and it priced each volume at the level favored by Panc koucke, that is, 24 livres for each volume of text and 36 livres for each volume of plates. (These were retail prices; book sellers were to buy the text at 20 livres per volume and the plates at 30 livres per volume.) The STN agreed to let Panc koucke sell one-sixth instead of one-third of its half interest, at a price specified in some missing letters. Panckoucke was to sell half of his own interest. The shares would be divided into twelfths, so that the ownership of the enterprise would be be apportioned as follows: STN, 5/12; Panckoucke, 3/12; other book dealers, 4/12. This arrangement would ease the strain on Panckoucke 's finances and would lessen the danger of pirat ing by recruiting powerful backers like Marc Michel Rey, whom Panckoucke planned to see in Amsterdam in the au- 56 Genesis of a Speculation tumn. Instead of entering into a contractual relationship with Suard, the STN merely authorized Panckoucke to negotiate with him according to guidelines that it specified in a memo randum, which is missing from the Neuchatel papers. Since Panckoucke had already fixed the terms of Suard 's operation by the contract of August 14, the STN failed in this attempt to trim the budget. Thus, as explained above, Suard was au thorized to put his philosophes to work rewriting Diderot's text at 5,000 livres per volume. After the completion of the work, he was to receive an additional 20,000 livres, instead of 40,000, as Panckoucke had originally proposed. Bertrand of the STN was also to receive 20,000 livres for copyreading and proofreading. And the STN was to print the entire work but only at a pressrun of 2,000. So Panckoucke conceded enough to mollify the N euchatelois; but he gave very little ground, and he forced his reluctant partners to accept the plan for an ambitious and expensive reworking of Diderot's text, which he had originally formulated with Diderot himself. Despite the cogency of Bosset 's arguments, the STN had lost the second round of its bargaining with the most power ful publisher in France. Joseph Duplain and His Quarto Encyclopedie In the autumn of 1776 Panckoucke made a business trip to Holland and England. Upon his return he reported to the STN that he had sold 200 sets of the Geneva edition, '' mais il m 'en reste encore et vous sentez que je ne puis pas m 'oc cuper serieusement de notre aff aire que ces exemplaires ne soient places. Mais cela doit etre fait incessament. '' He also had sold shares in the revised edition, and he named Marc Michel Rey of Amsterdam, C. Plomteux of Liege, and Ga briel Regnault of Lyons as the "autres associes." Each man evidently bought a single share of 1/12, because Panckoucke had had four 1/12 shares to sell, and he wrote that Rey had bought only 1/12 instead of 2/12 as he had hoped. Regnault 19. Although Suard had accepted the contract for the revised edition on Aug. 14, 1776, he did not accept the modifications of it imposed by the Panckoucke STN agreement until much later. On Nov. 4, 1776, Panckoucke wrote to the STN: "Je joins ici l'acte que M. Suard a enfin signe. II exigeait des changements. Je lui ai represente qu 'ils entraineraient des longueurs et que nous n 'avions deja perdu que trop de temps. J e Jui ai fait sentir la necessite de I 'article du chomage, la perte immense qu 'une suspension, ne filt-elle que d 'un mois, entrainerait etc.'' 57 The Business of Enlightenment had actually purchased his share in July 1776, when Panc koucke had stopped in Lyons after concluding the original contract with the STN in Neuchatel and after seeing de Tour nes in Geneva. And Panckoucke returned to the STN the re maining 1/12 share, '' que vous m 'avez retrocede avec tant de peine. '' Thus the enterprise had backers from important dealers in Lyons, Liege, and Amsterdam as well as in Neu chatel and Paris. It was proceeding smoothly, though at a slower pace than anticipated, Panckoucke reported. Suard, who had tried to haggle over details in his contract, could not complete the first two volumes before August 1777, but he promised to pro duce the rest on schedule. Panckoucke would try to hurry Fournier, who was to supply the STN's font of type but was overburdened with orders. The first three volumes of plates should be finished by the end of 1777: it was slow work be cause they had to be reduced in scale and re-engraved in order to fit the more compact format that had been planned. None of these delays bothered Panckoucke, who still had at least 100 of his old Encyclopedies to sell, but he presented them as a blessing in disguise: '' M. Rey est d' a vis de ne rien annoncer d 'ici a un an. Trop de precipitation pent gater la plus excellente affaire. Le public pourrait prendre une medi ocre confiance dans une entreprise ou l 'on met tant de diligence ... On verra que c 'est une entreprise de librairie mal con c;ue. On nous accusera d'avidite. En ne nous pressant pas trop au contraire, nous aurons l 'agrement du public, des connais seurs, et nous ne pourrons manquer de faire une belle et utile entreprise. '' Meanwhile, Panckoucke continued to feel the strain on his finances. The capital from the new associates had helped somewhat, but he had 80,000 livres outstanding in his payments for 1777, so he had to hold the STN to a strict schedule in the payments of the 108,000 livres it owed him. He had already begun to pay wages to Suard. Later letters revealed that Suard had received 1,000 livres a month from 20. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 4, 1776. Regnault was one of the most important bookdealers in Lyons. He apparently bought a 1/12 share in the reprint and agreed to convert it to the refonte, just as the STN did. See Regnault to STN, Aug. 27, 1776. Rey sold his 1/12 back to Panckoucke some time later. During its brief period as his partner, the STN tried to develop close ties with him, but he did not want to become aligned with a rival firm that sometimes pirated his own books. See STN to Rey, Jan. 25, 1777, dossier Marc-Michel Rey, Bibliotheek van de Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels. 58 Genesis of a Speculation September 1776, had rented an apartment at 300 livres a year to serve as a "bureau de travail," had hired a "commis in telligent" at 1,200 livres a year and a copyist at 800 livres, and had set to work diligently combing other encyclopedias and reference works, correcting errors in the original En cyclopedie, and collecting material for new articles. The en terprise was therefore well off the ground when a bookseller from Lyons called Joseph Duplain threatened to bring it crashing down. Duplain was one of the -scrappiest book dealers in one of the toughest towns of the book trade. Lyons served as the main conduit for the mauvais livres and livres philosophiques produced in Geneva and Lausanne and smuggled into France to satisfy the demand for illegal literature. Lyonnais book sellers thought nothing of ordering wagonloads of works like La N aissance du dauphin devoilee and Le Systeme de la nature and shepherding them through their guild hall, where their syndics were supposed to confiscate them and turn them over to the public hangman for laceration and burning. To be sure, some booksellers in Lyons-the houses of Bruysset and Perisse, for example-kept their hands clean and vouched for the purity of the trade in their city in long-winded memoran dums to Versailles, where governmental agents, who knew the Lyonnais very well, refuted them point by point. But more forbidden books probably passed through Lyon than through any other provincial city in France. The town had a penchant for the underground trade because not only was it a natural outlet for the Swiss and Avignonese printers, it also had led the French provincial publishers in a long, losing battle against the guild in Paris. The state had given the Parisians a stranglehold on the publishing industry in the late seventeenth century, and they never relaxed their grip in the eighteenth. Because the Parisians monopolized legal books-books with privileges-the provincials retaliated by trading in pirated books, which were cheaper in any case, thanks to the cut-rate, cutthroat capitalism of the pirates who operated in havens like Neuchatel. These operators found 21. Panckoucke described his financial situation in a letter to the STN of Nov. 4, 1776, and Suard discussed his owu operations in letters of April 18, 1777, and Jan.11, 1779. 22. See, for example, the collection of memorandums in the Archives de la Chambre syndicale des libraires et imprimeurs de Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, ms. Fr. 21833. 59 The Business of Enlightenment plenty of allies in Lyons, where book dealers sometimes com missioned pirated editions or wholesaled large portions of them or helped with the smuggling. The Lyonnais could be adversaries, too, because they sometimes printed illegal books secretly in their own shops. They also were tough customers. Traveling salesmen testi fied that it took courage and caution to beard a Lyonnais bookseller in his shop. Before confronting his clients, Jean Elie Bertrand of the STN filled a notebook with sketches of their characters and points to be covered in the negotiations. He warned himself about "J. M. Bruysset, homme froid et habile,'' for example, noting that it would be wisest to steer their discussion toward three themes, which he outlined in detail and probably rehearsed before taking the plunge into Bruysset 's back room. He seemed less intimidated by ''les freres Perisse, gens d 'esprit, se piquant de litterature," with whom he proposed to discuss six, carefully planned subjects. And he placed "J acquenod pere et fils" near the bottom of the hierarchy of booksellers in Lyons. They warranted only a quick chat: "une simple visite, traiter legerement avec eux; le fils vaut mieux. '' The Lyonnais left similar impressions on Emeric David, a printer from Aix-en-Provence, who recorded his reactions in a diary during a business trip in 1787: "Vu le celebre De Los Rios: triste mine . . . n 'est guere qu 'un bouquiniste ... est, dit-on, charlatan, menteur." "Cizeron: homme age et indolent." "Vu M. Regnault~ maitre homme: air assure, volonte ferme; parait avoir le coup d 'oeil juste et les idees nettes." "Dine au Chateau Perisse en table de 25 couverts. Politesse excessive et qui ne se relache jamais. Ton ceremoni eux, meme entre proche parents . . . Perisse Duluc passe avec raison pour homme d 'esprit." Despite such occasional sumptuosity, David concluded that a spirit of crassness and duplicity reigned in the book trade of Lyons : '' Douze im primeries-les trois quarts ne s 'occupent qu 'aux contre fa<lons . . . Point d 'imprimeur qui cherche a bien faire . . . amour de l 'argent . . . brigandage.' ' Other inside observers drew the same conclusions. One clan destine bookdealer, who wrote a full account of the under- 23. ''Carnet de voyage, 1773, J. E. Bertrand,'' STN papers, ms. 1058. 24. Emeric David, "Mon voyage de 1787," a diary in the Bibliotheque de I' Arsenal, Paris, ms. 5947. 60 Genesis of a Speculation ground trade for the police during a spell in the Bastille, characterized the Lyonnais as specialists in the "noble me tier de fripons "-that is, pirating: "Les Reguilliat, Reg nault ... de Lyon sont les pestes de la librairie de Paris, d 'autant plus dangereux qu 'ils sont proteges. '' A bill col lector for the STN found the Lyonnais booksellers so shifty that he could rarely get them to pay without threatening to drag them into court: ''Nous avons presque use une paire de souliers apres Cellier, lequel est un vrai etourdi, barbouillon et menteur.' ' And Panckoucke not only fulminated against individual Lyonnais dealers like J ean-1\farie Barret-"un homme d'une insigne mauvaise foi"-but he also pro nounced an anathema against them as a group: "Si j 'avais a faire choix d'un malhonnete homme, il faudrait le chercher dans la librairie de Lyon. II n 'y a ni foi ni pudeur. '' Joseph Duplain grew up and flourished in this milieu. His father, Benoit, and his cousin, Pierre-Joseph, were booksel lers ; and when he took over the family business, he was known among his friends as a particularly sharp operator. One of them, a smuggler, tried to recommend himself to the STN by stressing how much his character differed from Du plain 's: ''Nous ne ressemblons point aux Duplain et aux Le Roy, avec [sic] lesquels, quoiqu 'amis in times depuis l'en f ance, pour nous etre livres a eux de bonne foi et nous etre fies a leur parole, voudraient nous escroquer un objet de 4000 livres et plus qui nous sont dus.' ' By this time, the STN had got to know Duplain very well from its own dealings with him, which illustrate the symbiosis between provincial book sellers and foreign publishers. In the spring of 1773, Duplain and the STN agreed to ex change two illegal works. Duplain promised to send eighty four copies of a twelve-volume duodecimo edition of Rous- 25. '' Memoire sur la librairie de France fait par le sieur Guy pendant qu 'il etait a la Bastille," Feb. 8, 1767, Bibliotheque nationale, ms. Fr. 22123. 26. Jean Schaub to STN, Jan. 10, 1775. 27. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 6, 1779. 28. Pierre-Joseph Duplain dealt heavily in the illegal trade until a colleague denounced him in 1773 and a lcttre de cachet forced him to flee to Switzerland. In 1777 he turned up as a commissionnaire and clandestine dealer in Paris, where he fought off bankruptcy by handling the most lucrative and dangerous kinds of forbidden books and manuscripts. See the P.-J. Duplain dossier in the STN papers. 29. Revol to STN, June 24, 1780. Amable and Thomas Le Roy were also Lyon nais booksellers, who worked with Duplain on the quarto Encyclopedie. 61 The Business of Enlightenment seau 's works, which he had had printed, as a trade for the equivalent value in the STN 's edition of Voltaire's Questions sur l'Encyclopedie. Exchanges in kind were common among wholesalers in the book trade, and the STN sent its books off punctually. But it had to wait three months before receiving Duplain's books. The Neuchatelois interpreted the delay as an attempt by Duplain to keep them from competing with him in the market for Rousseau, while he competed with them in selling Voltaire. After they finally received the Rousseau, they asked Duplain to do them a favor, which would prove his good will and compensate them for his bad behavior. They needed to get a shipment of the prohibited Encyclopedie d'Yverdon to the fair at Beaucaire and requested Duplain to clear it through the guild in Lyons. He complied, thereby ac quiring a debt of his own to collect at a future date from the STN. In the autumn of 1773, the Neuchatelois learned that Duplain was producing a pirated edition of the Dictionnaire des arts et metiers (five volumes, octavo), which they also had begun to print. They suppressed their counterfeit edition in favor of his-and then came back at him with another re quest. They needed help in getting the release of three crates of forbidden books that had been seized in the Lyons guild. Duplain did so and forwarded them on to the STN 's cus tomer, Gaude of Nimes. A few months later he agreed to clear another shipment of the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon through the guild: "L'Encyclopedie ne passe plus ici. Notre Chambre syndicale a regu a cet egard des ordres tres precis, mais comme je n'ai point oublie le service que vous m'avez rendu, adressez-moi ceux que vous voulez faire passer et ils. pas seront. '' Next it was Duplain 's turn to request a service. He had printed a pirated edition of Les lois ecclesiastiques. The widow Dessaint, a powerful Parisian bookseller who owned the privilege for the book, had managed to get a shipment of Duplain's edition seized and was prosecuting him for piracy. In order to save himself from a heavy fine and perhaps dis barment, Duplain asked the STN to send a fake petition to the lieutenant general of police in Paris. It should state that the STN had bought the shipment from a publisher outside 30. Duplain to STN, Nov. 3, 1775. The other information in this paragraph has been culled from the eighty-four letters in Duplain 's dossier in the STN papers. 62 Genesis of a Speculation France and had sent it to Duplain, who had discovered that it lacked some sheets. The STN should explain that it had persuaded Duplain-after a great deal of pleading-to have the sheets printed locally, thereby saving the value of the book without becoming entangled in negotiations with the real pirate publisher. The widow Dessaint had learned of this small repair job and had accused Duplain of publishing the entire work-a calumny that could cause a disastrous miscar riage of justice. Therefore (the STN should say), the French authorities ought to have the shipment sent back to Neu chatel and ought to clear Duplain "d'une accusation et d'un proces ou il ne doit pas entrer." The STN had no desire to make a false confession to the Paris police, but it appreciated the value of an ally in the guild of Lyons, so it sent the peti tion to Duplain: '' V ous trouverez sous ce pli la requete que vous desirez. Nous souhaitons qu 'elle fasse l 'effet que vous en attendez, le tout sans notre prejudice, et serons charmes d 'avoir souvent occasion de vous prouver notre devoue ment. '' Such was the way relations evolved between Lyon nais dealers and Swiss publishers-a matter of accumulating obligations while driving hard bargains, of steering between extremes of competition and cooperation, and of holding mu tual mistrust well enough in check to inflict damage on com mon enemies in Paris. In December 1776 this man, who epitomized the Lyonnais style of book dealing at its toughest, issued a prospectus for a cheap reprint of the Encyclopedie in quarto format. Du plain had no right to do such a thing; the ''rights'' to the book were owned by Panckoucke and his associates, and even they did not dare to print it on French soil. So Duplain was taking a gamble. He was announcing the publication of an enormous, illegal work before he had any assurance that he could bring it into being or get it into France. But prospec tuses were cheap : Duplain merely announced his terms in a handbill, which he mailed to his clients and contacts. He evi dently wanted to see what the response would be before spending money on type and paper. Since he proposed the work by subscription, he could apply the subscribers' down payments to this expensive initial investment. And while sounding the market, he could keep himself hidden. For he 31. Duplain to STN, Nov. 3, 1775, and STN to Duplain, Nov. 9, 1775. 63 The Business of Enlightenment issued the prospectus under the name of Jean Leonard Pel let, a Genevan publisher, who agreed to serve as straw man for 3,000 livres. This process of sounding-or "taking the pulse of the pub lic,'' as it was known among eighteenth-century publishers also involved printing annonces and avis or advertising notices in certain journals. On January 3, 1777, the Gazette de Leyde ran an avis about Duplain's speculation that is the richest source of information about its original character. The notice showed that Duplain mean:t to follow the same strategy as Bosset had recommended, that is, to tap a wide market by producing a relatively cheap Encyclopedie. It lamented the fact that the supreme work of the century-a book that was a library in itself-had been priced beyond the range of the persons who could most profit from it. The nou veaux editeurs-whom it did not mention by name-therefore were offering it at a spectacular reduction: for 344 livres instead of 1,400 livres, its current selling price. They could slash the price so drastically, they explained, by producing only three volumes of plates-no great loss, because most of the plates in the original eleven folio volumes had little util ity. The new edition would contain re-engraved versions of the truly important plates, and any reader who wanted to collect illustrations of trades could buy the inexpensive Cahiers des arts et metiers sponsored by the Academie des sciences. The text of the new edition, however, would be far superior to the old. Printed (appropriately) in a type called philosophie and on handsome paper, it would incorporate the Supplement, would correct the numerous errors of the folio editions, and would contain some new material, which the notice described vaguely as "quelques morceaux que leur rarete ou leur idilite rendent precieux. '' Subscribers should make a down payment of 12 livres and should send 10 livres after receiving each volume of text and 18 livres after each volume of plates (the last volume of plates would cost only 6 livres). They would receive twenty-nine volumes of text and three volumes of plates at a rate of six to eight volumes a year. The publishers would limit their printing to the subscriptions they received; so it would be impossible to take advantage of this bargain after the subscription closed. Anyone interested should rush his down payment to a book dealer in Geneva 64 Genesis of a Speculation called Teron, who apparently was serving as a marketing agent for Duplain. To announce a cheap Encyclopedie while Panckoucke was producing an expensive one was like holding a pistol to his head, but Panckoucke was not the sort who would wait for the enemy to fire first. He counterattacked with another En cyclopedie project, which he and the STN formulated in a contract dated January 3, 1777 (see Appendix A. IV-V). First, they acknowledged that the announcement of Duplain 's pretendue nouvelle edition made it necessary for them to re duce the printing of their revised edition from 2,000 to 1,000 sets. But they would retaliate with a counterquarto, which would force Duplain's off the market because it would be a cheap version of the revised text printed at a large pressrun of 3,150. It would have only three or four volumes of plates and thirty-six to forty volumes of text, which would cost 12 livres apiece. It would therefore be somewhat larger and more expensive than Duplain 's edition, but not so expensive as to be in another price range. Potential buyers could be ex pected to shy away from Duplain 's edition if they knew that a distinguished group of philosophes were preparing a su perior work. And Panckoucke would make sure that the buy ers stayed away from the rival quarto by enforcing his droits et privileges. Privilege protection was a crucial element in Panckoucke 's strategy. He owned the exclusive right to reproduce the book-a right so valid, according to the standards of the day, that he could divide it into portions and sell it at a very high price throughout western Europe. It would be vain to trans late a legal fiction into a palpable asset, if legality could not be enforced. Therefore the state had to be made to hunt down Duplain 's quartos as rigorously as if they were contraband salt. A few exemplary confiscations, and even the publication of a fierce interdiction, would make many of Duplain 's sub scribers desert to the Panckoucke group. So Panckoucke got Le Camus de Neville, the Directeur de la librairie, to send a circular letter to the various booksellers' guilds and the in specteurs de la librairie, warning that Duplain 's quarto was an illegal, pirated edition and that all copies of it would be confiscated by the authorities. Thus Panckoucke and his asso ciates struck back in two ways: they tried to woo away Du- 65 The Business of Enlightenment plain 's subscribers and potential subscribers by offering their own, superior quarto Encyclopedie, and they tried to crush Duplain's quarto with the power of the French state. But this counteroffensive raises a question important enough to merit a digression: how was it that the French government, which had nearly destroyed the first two editions of this book, could serve as the main line of defense in an effort to save the third~ Publishing, Politics, and Panckoucke This paradox seems less puzzling if one considers the dif ferences between the government that locked Panckoucke's 6,000 Enyclopedies in the Bastille in 1770 and the government that released them in 1776. The political situation had become more and more oppressive during the last years of Louis XV's reign. From the costly and humiliating experience of the Seven Years' \Var and the dissolution of the .Jesuits in 1764 to the Brittany Affair and the parliamentary crisis of 1771-1774, the government had aroused increasing opposi tion, which it put down with increasing authoritarianism. It was especially severe in policing the book trade, as Panc koucke learned at considerable expense. But the accession of Louis XVI in May 177 4 brought an end to the tough '' tri umvirate" ministry of Maupeou, Terray, and d'Aiguillon. Turgot, a contributor to the Encyclopedie and a friend of the philosophes, set the tone of the new reign. Even after his fall in June 1776, the government remained intermittently re formist, and it was especially liberal in its policy on publish ing. On August 30, 1777, it issued several edicts that were intended to tighten measures against pirating and to loosen the monopoly on privileges held by the members of the Pari sian booksellers' guild ( Communaute des libraires et des im primeurs de Paris). The guild looked like a vestige of Louisquatorzean state craft in 1777. The state had used it in the second half of the seventeenth century to gain control of the printed word. Col bert had eliminated a great many provincial presses, had concentrated publishing in Paris under the authority of the guild, and had enlisted the guild's help in suppressing all nonprivileged books. With the censorship, the royal bureauc- 66 Genesis of a Speculation racy, and the police reinforcing their economic monopoly, the guild members had taken over most book privileges, forcing their provincial rivals into the arms of publishers like the STN, which specialized in pirated and prohibited works. By the accession of Louis XVI, this policy had proved to be counterproductive. It had produced a boom in the illegal book trade, while giving the Parisian patriciate a monopoly of orthodox literature. The reformers of Louis XVI wanted to liberalize the orthodo~y and to create a limited free trade in books. Their legislation ·provided that instead of conferring an unlimited and perpetual right to a work, a privilege should normally expire after ten years or the death of its author. Authors themselves and their heirs could hold privileges in definitely (the power of the guild had made it almost impos sible for them to possess the privileges for their own works), and provincial printers could produce any book that fell into the public domain-that is, the great bulk of the literature that had been reserved for the Parisians. The August edicts conceded that the Parisian monopoly had forced the provin cials into piracy, and so it allowed them to liquidate their cur rent stock of counterfeit books but set up a system of severe penalties and policing to prevent any further trade in pirated as well as prohibited books. Inspired as they were by a desire to instill a modern, entre preneurial spirit to an industry that had languished under an archaic, Colbertist organization, these edicts produced con sternation in the Parisian oligarchy. The guild responded with petitions, protests, pamphlets, lawsuits, and a kind of informal strike, which created chaos in the publishing indus try until the Revolution resolved the dispute by destroying privilege and corporatism altogether. Throughout the pro testing, the most powerful member of the Parisian guild was conspicuous by his absence. In December 1777, the Paris agent of the STN reported: "Les libraires d 'ici font feu et flamme contre les nouveaux reglements. 100 d 'entr 'eux s 'as sembleront ici a quelques jours a la chambre syndicale et don- 32. See the text of the edicts of Aug. 30, 1777, in .RecueiZ des anciennes lois fran<;aises, ed. F. A. Isambert, Decrusy, and A. H. Taillandier (Paris, 1822-33), XXV, 108-128 and, for a general discussion of guild versus entrepreneurial pub· lishing, Robert Darnton, "Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth·Cen· tury France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature," Daedalus (winter, 1971), pp. 214-256. 67 The Business of Enlightenment neront une requete au Garde des Sceaux. Si elle n 'a pas le succes desire, ils s 'adresseront au Roi. Il s 'agit principale ment de la conservation des privileges ... Panckoucke ... n 'etait point a l 'assemblee des libraires, qui l 'accusent d'etre l'auteur de tous ces reglements. " Panckoucke did not dis cuss his role in the reforms openly in his own letters, but he did not hide his bad relations with the other members of the guild and his support of the new legislation. "On parle beau coup d 'un nouveau reglement, mais j 'ignore encore quand il paraitra, '' he wrote on July 4, 1777. ''La librairie a besoin d 'une reforme. Les a bus ont produit les exces, qui a son tour ont fait tout le mal dont nous sommes temoins." On Novem ber 19, 1777, he wrote, ''Les arrets font ici beaucoup de sensa tion. II y a des representations de toutes parts. Les gens de lettres et les libraires paraissent avoir mis leur raison sous leurs pieds. II est impossible de plus mal voir et de plus mal raisonner. " In 1791, he tried to prove his civisme by emphasizing his opposition to ''les vautours de la librairie, les despotes des chambres syndicales'' before 1789. He claimed that he had fought against the guild's esprit de corps by campaigning for the reforms of 1777. He must have cam paigned discreetly, however, because all he could produce by way of evidence for his prerevolutionary progressivism was a memoir, apparently written for the Direction de la librairie, which argued the government's case against a memoir sub mitted by the guild. But Panckoucke could not be expected to break openly with the guild in 1777; and he may well have been a key figure in the reform of the book trade, as con temporaries believed, even if he remained behind the scenes advising and lobbying in the style that he preferred. One reason for Panckoucke 's alienation from the other 33. Perregaux to STN, Dec. 17, 1777. 34. Indicating his alignment with the provincial booksellers against the Pa risians, he added, "Les Rouennais ont fait des remerciements par deputations. II serait a desirer que Lyon et Jes autres grandes villes en fassent d 'autant. Quoiqu 'il en arrive, ces arrets ne font rien a notre affaire [that is, the Encyclo· pedie]." 35. Lettre de M. Panclcouclce a Messieurs le president et electeurs de 1791 (Paris, Sept. 9, 1791), pp. 23, 14. 36. Panckoucke described his role as a reformer and his memoir in some ''Ob servations de M. Panckoucke," which he published in the Mercure of Nov. 21, 1789. He printed the memoir itself, or at least part of it-a low-keyed, reason able argument for limiting book privileges-in the Encyclopedie methodique, Jurisprudence, VI, 813-817. 68 Genesis of a Speculation members of the guild was that he did not do business as they did. Except for a few adventurers, they tended to be con servative, to milk privileges for safe books-classics, legal treatises, religious works, and the like-which brought them a relatively secure, regular, and restricted income. He specu lated extravagantly on new books and enormous compila tions: the thirty-volume Grand vocabulaire fran<;ais, the twenty-three volume Abrege de l'histoire generale des voy ages, and the eighty-six-volume Repertoire universel et rai sonne de jurisprudence. In 1763 when he set himself up in business in Paris by acquiring the stock in trade of the book seller Michel Lambert, Panckoucke assumed responsibility for selling the massive works being turned out by the Imprimerie royale: Buff on 's Histoire natitrelle, which eventually ran to thirty-six volumes in quarto, the forty-one-volume Memoires de l 'Acadbnie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, and the Me rnoires de l 'Acadernie royale des sciences, which had been printed since 1699 and reached volume 188 in 1793. Panckoucke did not finance these elephantine enterprises single-handed. He set up consortia, sold shares, and spun to gether credits and debits in such complex combinations that it is impossible to form a clear idea of the extent of his wealth. He clearly made enough from his books to pay Anis son Duperron, the Directeur de l 'Imprimerie royale, 70,000 to 80,000 livres a year, and he speculated still more heavily in journalism. At various stages of his career, he invested in sixteen periodicals. He merged nine journals in the Mercure, and swallowed up others at such a rate that he can be con sidered the first press baron in French history. In the 1770s he followed a general policy of shifting from the book trade to journalism, as he explained to the STN: '' J e viens d 'avoir le brevet du Mercure pour 25 ans avec des advantages que n'avait pas mon predecesseur. J'y ai remis le Journal de politique et les souscriptions de cinq journaux que je sup prime. Cette operation me porte a realiser le plan que j 'ai toujours eu de vendre mon fonds, hors L'Histoire natu relle. " In 1776 he even considered establishing a residence in Neuchatel, so that he could speculate on books from a safe 37. Panckoucke to STN, July 7, 1778. In a letter to the STN of Nov. 4, 1776, Panckoucke explained, '' J e suis chaque annee avec M. Duperron, Directeur de l 'Imprimerie royale, pour 70 a 80 mille livres ... Je vous prie de faire attention que je serais en avance de plus de 80 mille livres a la fin de 1777. '' 69 The Business of Enlightenment base outside the kingdom during the summer months and manage his journalistic empire from Paris during the winter. Contemporaries saw this empire building as an attempt to monopolize the entire book trade. After Panckoucke bought the nation's oldest journal, La Gazette de France, in 1786, the Memoires secrets commented, "L'avidite du sieur Panckoucke est insatiable: a lui seul, s 'il pouvait, il envahir ait toute la librairie. " Ten years earlier the STN asked him if it were true as rumored that he had offered to pay the crown 8 million livres a year in order to completely take over the printing industry. Panckoucke attributed the rumor to resentment over his role in the reform of the book trade: '' L 'off re de 8 millions pour etre seul imprimeur n 'a pas le sens commun. Le bruit en a aussi couru [ici], et mille autres 38. Panckoucke outlined this plan, which would have involved d 'Alembert's intervention to get the blessing of Frederick II, in a draft of a letter to the STN dated Dec. 25, 1776, in the Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148: '' Mandez-moi, Messieurs, si un fran~ais catholique romain pent acheter chez vous, dans le Comte de Neuchatel et de Valangin, des terres, des biens-fonds. Faites-moi aussi savoir si le roi de Prusse pent lui donner des places, quelles Bont celles qui sont a sa nomination, quelles sont celles qui s 'achetent, celles qui se donnent, s'il ne faut point etre protestant pour les occuper, s'il y en a actuellement quelques unes de vacantes, celles qui exigent residence, s 'il ne suffirait pas d 'y etre quelques mois de l 'annee, etc. J e ne vous cache pas, Messieurs, que je serais assez d 'a vis d 'aller m 'etablir avec ma femme et une fille six mois de l 'annee aupres de vous, c 'est a dire la belle saison, et de revenir passer l 'hiver a Paris. Comme M. d 'Alembert compte faire un voyage en Prusse au mois de mai, nous profiterons de ce moment pour notre dedicace [that is, of the Encvclopedie], et j 'aurais envie d 'en profiter moi-meme pour me donner dans votre ville un etat qui pourrait donner plus de consistance a nos operations. J 'ai d 'ailleurs ici le projet de vendre tout mon fonds hors L'Histoire naturelle et mon journal. On fait meme actuellement mon inventaire, et cette vente pent etre faite dans un mois, de sorte que si elle avait lieu, je n 'hesiterais point a acheter la petite maison de M. Bosset De Luze, avec quelques dependances. Mais comme nous dependons dans le monde de I 'opinion et qu 'en vendant ici les trois quarts de mon fonds, je ne voudrais point avoir l 'air d 'aller etablir aupres de vous une librairie nouvelle, je voudrais une place honnete, qui motivat cet arrangement. Nous avons eu des libraires dans ce pays-ci qui ont forme des etablissements chez plusieurs souve rains, mais tons ont eu des places, qui ont autorise leurs demarches, et je voudrais etre dans le meme cas. '' Panckoucke excluded everything except the first two sentences of this part of the letter in the final draft sent to the STN on the next day, but later allusions in letters from the S'fN to him show that he had dis cussed the possibility of taking residence in Neuchatel with Ostervald and Bosset. 39. Bachaumont, entry for Dec. 2, 1786. And in its entry for July 6, 1778, the Memoires secrets remarked, "Le sieur Panckoucke, en vertu du brevet qui lui accorde l 'entreprise du Mercure, eleve les plus grandes pretentious. 11 ne se con tente pas d 'avoir deja englobe le Journal frani;ais, celui Des dames, celui De politique et de litterature; il voudrait que les autres devinssent encore au moins tributaires du sien a cause de sa primatie. '' 70 Genesis of a Speculation calomnies. Comme on croit que j 'ai bonne part a ces arrets, les libraires sont irrites contre moi. Cela se calmera. '' Panckoucke 's peculiar position as the ''Atlas de la librai rie " made him a natural ally of the government against the guild. Whether or not he collaborated on the edicts of 1777, he represented the entrepreneurial spirit that they attempted to instill in the book trade. Of course Duplain was also an entrepreneur, but he operated as a pirate, outside the law. Panckoucke, the bookseller of the Imprimerie royale, specu lated from the center of the system-a system whose en lightened reformism and liberal trade policy harmonized perfectly with his own interests and attitudes. But Panc koucke 's speculation on the Encyclopedie seemed to contra dict his general principles and policies. He favored reforms to restrict privileges and to open up the market while using his privilege for the Encyclopedie to close the market to Duplain. There was no contradiction in Panckoucke 's own interests, however, because the ten-year limit on privileges decreed by the reforms of 1777 did not threaten his stake in the Encyclopedie. The slack sales of the Geneva edition indi cated that there would be little future demand for the book in its original form, especially if the Neuchatel reprint were to be executed. But Panckoucke expected the revised edition to do very well, and the edicts of 1777 stipulated that any book whose text had been increased by at least one quarter should be exempted from the expiration of its privilege. Moreover, the new legislation provided stronger protection against pi rating, which was the greatest danger facing the revised edi tion. So the revised edition would fare better under the new laws than under the old. Panckoucke 's general plan to shift his investments from books to periodicals would protect him from the expiration of his other privileges, in case any of them were endangered, because the edicts of 1777 did not affect privileges for journals. And above all, his support of the government in its confrontation with the guild put him in a position to defend all of his interests by pulling strings in Versailles. This last consideration was probably the most important because publishing in the Old Regime had none of the gen- 40. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 18, 1777, and Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1777. 41. Bachaumont, entry for Dec. 5, 1781. 71 The Business of Enlightenment tlemanly veneer it later developed and Old Regime politics form of court intrigue, unrestrained by popular par took the ticipation. Administration involved the exploitation of office unencumbered by a civil service tradition. And officeholders expected a yield on their investment without any modern compunctions about graft and bribery. Conflicts of interest therefore were resolved by influence peddling or "protec tion" as it was known in the eighteenth century. Panckoucke 's protectors included the most powerful men in Versailles. His letters often alluded to his influence in the highest quarters, especially among men like Jean-Charles Pierre Lenoir, the lieutenant-general de police of Paris, who could confiscate counterfeit copies of Panckoucke 's books; Le Camus de Neville, the Directeur de la librairie, who could look after Panckoucke 's interests in the bureaucracy in charge of the book trade; and the comte de Vergennes, the foreign minister, who could open France's borders to books Panckoucke wanted to import and close them to his rivals. Panckoucke had such influence in the government that Lin guet accused him of tyranny and, to prove the point, pub lished a letter to him from Vergennes, which was "ecrite avec tant de cordialite, d 'affection, de politesse et de con sideration, qu 'elle sort absolument du protocole ordinaire,'' according to the Memoires secrets. So deeply did Panc koucke ingratiate himself in Versailles that contemporaries considHred him as a kind of ex officio minister of culture : ''Sa voiture le portait chez les ministres a Versailles, OU il etait reQU comme un fonctionnaire ayant portefeuille. '' Panckoucke naturally used his protections to defend his interests. When the most outspoken edition of Raynal 's His toire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du com merce des Europe ens dans les deux I ndes (Geneva, 1780) was prohibited in France, Panckoucke called on Vergennes and Maurepas: soon afterwards his agents were selling it in the 42. A study of politics and influence peddling in the court of Louis XV and Louis XVI remains to be written, but a great deal about this strangely neglected subject may be learned from Michel Antoine, Le conseil du roi sous le regne de Louis XV (Geneva, 1970) and J. F. Bosher, French Finances 1770-1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, Eng., 1970). 43. Bachaumont, entry for Sept. 17, 1776. The Memoires secrets found the letter so familiar as to be of dubious authenticity, but noted, ''On explique cela en disant que M. de Vergennes l 'a 6crite lui-meme, d 'abondance de coeur." 44. D.-J. Garat, Memoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur ses ecrits, et sur le XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1820), I, 274. 72 Genesis of a Speculation Palais royal while the police looked the other way. He alone succeeded in getting permission to market the quarto Ge nevan edition of Voltaire's works in 1776. The ministers of Louis XVI not only returned his confiscated volumes of the Genevan Encyclopedie but also gave him permission to im port huge shipments of it directly to his warehouses in Paris, by-passing the customs and the inspectors of the guild. His influence in Versailles was so notorious that booksellers trembled before him. J. M. Barret, one of the canniest dealers in Lyons, warned the STN not to attempt to smuggle a pi rated edition of Buff on 's Histoire naturelle into France be cause Panckoucke owned the privilege for it: "Vous n 'ig norez pas que M. Panckoucke, furieusement jaloux de cet article, obtiendra facilement des ministres, avec qui il est bien, les ordres les plus severes pour en arreter le cours; et le libraire de France qui serait Surpris, serait ecrase. '' Panckoucke deployed his protections to greatest effect in def ending his journalistic empire. The STN published a small literary journal and tried for years, using all manner of machinations and bribes, to get it permitted in France. Noth ing worked: Panckoucke would not allow the slightest incur sion into the market of his Mercure. In 1779, Panckoucke claimed that the Journal de litterature, des sciences et des 45. In his Lettre of Sept. 9, 1791, Panckoucke boasted about his success in circulating the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Raynal: "Je sus si bien manier Jes ministres du roi que je Jes ai fait librement circuler dans le royaume'' (p. 9; see also p. 16 on the sales of Raynal 's Histoire philosophique and the similar re marks in Bachaumont, entry for Feb. 16, 1776). Of course Panckoucke did not pull strings merely to spread Enlightenment. A document in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms. Fr. c.31, a contract between Panckoucke and Stoupe dated May 7, 1781, shows that he bought a controlling interest in a Genevan edition of the Histoire philosophique for about 250,000 livres. Panckoucke mentioned his special permission to import the Geneva Encyclopedie in a letter to the STN of Aug. 5, 46. Barret to STN, Oct. 24, 1779. Four years later the STN made the same proposition to Amable Le Roy of Lyons and received the same reply (Le Roy to STN, Dec. 17, 1783): "Je n'Msiterais pas de m'y interesser pour mon industrie, si elles [ vos speculations] n 'etaient pas dirigees contre M. Panckoucke, qui est le favori de tous les ministres. II a un privilege authentique sur cet ouvrage, et je crois qu 'ii ecraserait de son credit un libraire national qui tremperait dans votre pro jet.'' · 47. The STN's campaign occurred for the most part after it had finished its speculation on the Encyclopedie with Panckoucke. Several of its agents reported that he blocked every attempt to negotiate a permission. See Thiriot to STN, May 5, 1781 (" Panckoucke jette feu et fiammes, rien n 'avance chez le Garde des Sceaux' ') and similar remarks in Le Senne to STN, undated letter, evidently from May 1780. 73 The Business of Enlightenment arts had trespassed on his territory when it published some political news disguised as letters to the editor. The govern ment ruled that the journal had violated his privilege and would have to pay him a prohibitively expensive indemnity if it continued to discuss subjects that were reserved for the Mercure. The Journal de Paris became involved in a similar quarrel with the Mercure in 1786 and was likely to lose, the Memoires secrets commented, because Panckoucke ''a dis tribue environ mille louis dans les bureaux des Affaires etran geres, du Ministre de Paris et de la Police.' ' Panckoucke did force the Journal de Paris to discontinue printing for a while in 1777 and also got the Journal encyclopedique sus pended in 1773 for printing some remark that displeased a minister. The real reason for this severity, according to the Memoires secrets, was that the Journal encyclopedique con trolled a market that Panckoucke wanted to take over with his Journal historique et politique; the J ou,rnal encyclope dique had no legal status in France, because it was published in Bouillon. It only saved itself by paying a ransom of 51,500 livres to Panckoucke. Panckoucke himself had to make regu lar payments to various ministries in order to maintain his monopolies. In .January 1777 he found that he could not pro duce 22,000 livres that were due to the foreign ministry, and three months later he was 340,000 livres in the red. This time he used his protections to save himself from bankruptcy. Amelot, minister for the departement de Paris and the mai son du roi, permitted him to suspend payments temporarily, and soon afterwards Panckoucke reestablished his finances well enough to reassert his special relations with Versailles. Lobbying was therefore essential to publishing as Pane- 48. Bachaumont, entry for Aug. 31, 1786. On the other incidents mentioned here see Bachaumont, entries for Nov. 5, 1786; Nov. 13, 1786; July 2, 1773; and the additional remarks printed as an appendix in Bachaumont, vol. 27, pp. 278- 279 without an entry date. Bachaumont is more reliable for information about public opinion than events, but most historians of eighteenth-century journalism have had to rely on it for lack of a better source, except the journals themselves. For general background on the subject see Eugene Hatin, Histoire politique et litteraire de la presse en France, 8 vols. (Paris, 1859-61) and Hatin, Biblio graphie historique et critique de la presse periodique frani;aise (Paris, 1866), which have not been superseded by the more recent work of Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terron, Histoire generale de la presse frani;aise (Paris, 1969), vol. I. On Panckoucke 's financial crisis of 1777 see his Lettre of Sept. 9, 1791, pp. 11, 29. 74 Genesis of a Speculation koucke practiced it, and he was a notoriously tough practi tioner. He turned the apparatus of the state against his com petitors. But he did not call on the government lightly. He refused the STN 's constant requests for help in its own, com paratively insignificant attempts at lobbying by explaining that he hoarded his influence in order to use it in moments of supreme importance: '' J e ne puis pas encore vous rendre service aupres de M. de Neville, qui protegera notre grande affaire. J e ne dois pas I 'importuner d.e petites demandes ... J e vous servirai mieux dans les choses importantes quand je conserverai aupres des magistrats une bonne reputation que les criailleries de mes confreres ne pourront entamer. " ''Notre grande aff aire'' meant the Encyclopedie. Panc koucke planned to def end his privilege for the book by in voking his protections. The confrontation between the revised and the quarto En cyclopedie was therefore as complex as any conflict of inter est in the Old Regime. It can not be interpreted simply as a contest between privilege and enterprise because Panckoucke was a privileged entrepreneur who fought off rivals by enlist ing the government on his side but sided with the underpriv ileged in the government's attempt to open up the publishing industry. That the state should defend a book it had prohib ited eighteen years earlier may seem paradoxical, but no less paradoxical than the fact that it based its defense on a prin ciple-privilege-which it called into question by its reforms and which the Encyclopedie itself undermined. The Old Re gime was shot full of such contradictions, especially during its last years, when reformers attempted to remodel elements of the system without changing its structure. But one con sistent motive ran through all the twists and turns of Panc koucke 's Encyclopedie policy: self-interest. ·whatever his personal values and his friendships with the philosophes, he kept to an old-fashioned strategy of greasing palms and twisting arms. He was even ready to embrace his enemy if it would increase his profit margin. 49. Panckoucke to STN, May 5, 1777. The STN had asked Panckoucke's help in getting the release of some contlscated copies of its pirated edition of the Description des arts et metiers. Panckoucke refused on the grounds that '' ce serait me compromettre. On a permis l 'entree directe dans mes magasins de plusieurs balles Encyclopedie. Mes injustes confreres, sachant les liaisons que j 'ai avec votre maison, ont soup~onne qu 'elles pouvaient contenir de vos .tl.rts.'' 75 The Business of Enlightenment From the Revised Edition to the Quarto It was therefore perfectly natural for Panckoucke to get the Directeur de la librairie to strike down Duplain 's quarto Encyclopedie by decree. But soon after setting this counter attack in motion, Panckoucke began to consider a greater temptation: was there not more to be gained by joining Du plain than by beating him? This issue arose because of an other peculiarity of eighteenth-century publishing: indus trial espionage. On December 26, 1776, Panckoucke sent to the STN a secret report on Duplain 's enterprise, which he had received from Gabriel Regnault, their associate in Lyons : "C 'est par son canal que je suis instruit de toutes les demarches de Duplain, mais il ne faut pas qu 'il soit compromis. '' Regnault, who was one of the craftiest book dealers in Lyons, had received con fidential information about the success of the quarto sub scription, presumably from contacts inside Duplain 's shop. The information was so convincing and the success so spec tacular that Panckoucke suddenly decided to reverse his plans. Two-and-a-half weeks later he and Duplain met in Dijon and agreed to exploit the quarto in common instead of waging war on one another. Just how Panckoucke came to make this four th drastic change in his Encyclopedie policy cannot be determined be cause the documentation is too sparse. But his contract with Duplain of January 14, 1777, which they usually referred to later as the Traite de Dijon, provides an unusually rich ac count of how a publishing enterprise was organized in the eighteenth century. Since it determined the character of the Encyclopedie that finally emerged from all of Panckoucke's machinations, it deserves to be studied in detail (see Appen dix A. VI). The contract created a societe or association between Panckoucke and Duplain, allotting to each a half inter est in the quarto edition. Panckoucke received half the in come from the subscriptions that had already arrived and that would continue to accumulate in response to the pro- 50. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 26, 1776. Regnault's report and the other letters to and from Panckoucke at this time are missing from the STN 's papers, but the Dijon agreement and the subsequent correspondence of the STN make it clear that Panckoucke considered the quarto such a commercial success that he preferred to cash in on it rather than to destroy it. 76 Genesis of a Speculation spectuses already spread through '' toutes les provinces'' of France. In return, he bestowed upon the enterprise '' tous les droits qu 'il peut transmettre "-that is a legal status deriv ing from his ownership of the "droits [et] cuivres du Dic tionnaire encyclopedique et du privilege du recueil de planches sur les sciences, arts et metiers. '' He was to oversee the pro of the three volumes of plates and to handle ship duction for the Paris market-a delicate business in which his ments Duplain was to manage the pro protections could be crucial. duction and distribution of the twenty-nine volumes of text. Each partner would gather subscriptions and would report on their progress every month. After a semiannual tallying of accounts, profits would be divided equally. The subscrip tions had poured in so quickly that Duplain expected to ac cumulate enough capital from the down payments to cover the initial costs of production; but if those costs temporarily outstripped revenues, each partner would advance half the capital necessary to continue with the printing. To simplify the accounting, Duplain would receive a fixed amount for every sheet printed at the pressrun of 4,250, and Panc koucke would be compensated in the same way for the re touching and re-engraving of the plates. Since the produc tion of the text would be the most demanding phase of the operation, Duplain was to receive 2,000 livres a year for expenses. The new association also would pay 600 livres a year to a redacteur, who would blend the four-volume Sup plement into the text, "sans addition ni correction"-that is, he was not to tamper with the text but to act more as a copy ist than a copy editor. This was the only respect in which the contract deviated from the provisions of Duplain's original prospectus, which promised to include some new material in the new edition. Panckoucke probably insisted on maintain ing the original text in order to avoid spoiling the market for the revised edition. The contract specified the character of the type (philoso phie) and the paper (it was to weigh between eighteen and twenty pounds, poids de Lyon, and to cost 9 livres per ream) and set up a tough production schedule. Duplain was to put 51. Actually, Duplain would make the necessary payments and would be com· pensated for the use of his capital by receiving interest on it at 5 percent from Panckoucke, who also would provide him with a promissory note of 20,000 livres as security. 77 The Business of Enlightenment out four volumes every six months, beginning on July 1, 1777. The text would be distributed from a central warehouse in Geneva and would be sold under Pellet's name, but Duplain would have it printed as he pleased, contracting the work to printers in Geneva and other Swiss towns and perhaps even in Lyons. The retail price was set at the same level as in Du plain 's prospectuses: 10 livres for each of the twenty-nine volumes of text and 18 livres for each of the three volumes of plates, making 344 livres in all. But booksellers could sub scribe at a wholesale rate of 7 livres 10 sous per volume of text and 15 livres 10 sous per volume of plates or 264 livres in all, and they would receive a free set for every twelve that they bought. In short, Panckoucke bartered his monopoly on legality for a half interest in a sure success. In his later letters to the STN, he explained that the subscription rate proved that Duplain might well sell twice as many Encyclopedies as the 4,000 specified in the contract, and that it would be wiser to cash in on this coup than to try to destroy it. One can re construct his calculations: the total revenue of the enterprise would come to about a million livres, the total costs to about a half million, leaving a half million in profits-profits to be collected almost effortlessly over four years, with no risk and little outlay of capital. But wouldn't the quarto ruin the sales of the remaining sets of Panckoucke 's Geneva folio Encyclopedies? He had 52. This calculation is based on the terms of the contract and represents ·costs and income as projected in 1777 rather than the final figures, which turned out to be much greater. The only information that is missing concerns the cost of the plates, and this can be estimated from a "Resume des frais des planches" produced by Panckoucke in 1780 (STN papers, ms. 1233). If the 4,000 sets all sold at the wholesale price, they would fetch 968,088 livres, taking account of the maximum number of free thirteenth copies. If they all sold at the retail price, they would bring in 1,376,000 livres. Therefore Panckoucke could safely estimate that the gross revenue would be over a million livres. His estimate of the costs would have been more complicated, but skipping some of the details and mathe matics, it would have been roughly as follows: Engraving and retouching the plates 34,916 livres Printing the plates 16,414 Paper for the plates 17,737 Composition and printing of the text 180,090 Paper for the text 237,600 Duplain 's expenses for four years 8,000 Salary of the redacteur, four years 2,400 Total cost 497,157 livres 78 Genesis of a Speculation forced the STN to delay the announcement of the revised edi tion until July 1, 1777, in order to protect the market for the Genevan edition and had reiterated his determination to maintain that policy after returning from his sales trip in November 1776. But on December 1, a banker called Batil liot, who specialized in discounting notes of bookdealers, pub lished a circular announcing that he had bought up Panc koucke 's folio Encyclopedies and would sell them to book dealers at 600 livres apiece. That was 240 livres less than the subscription price; so Batilliot could expect to find buyers and also to make a killing, because it later turned out that Panckoucke had sold him 200 sets for 100,000 livres or 500 livres apiece. That bargain made it possible for him to clear 20,000 livres from the transaction; yet it also served Panc koucke 's interests because Panckoucke needed capital badly, and he knew from his sales trip that he could no longer market the leftover folios at the subscription price. The Batil liot deal seemed to be a rare case of profit sharing instead of profiteering in the book trade. But six weeks after con cluding it, Panckoucke joined forces with Duplain, knowing full well that the quarto could ruin the market for Batilliot 's folios. Had Batilliot learned about the Traite de Dijon, he would certainly have cried swindle. But Panckoucke kept his partnership with Duplain secret. A year later he saved Batilliot from bankruptcy, and Batilliot eventually did sell all his Encyclopedies. So it seems unlikely that Panckoucke meant to defraud his friend. Events moved fast. Panckoucke changed strategy rapidly in order to keep up with them rapidly and ruthlessly, but not dishonestly. Thus by Janu ary 1777 he had freed himself from the folio and was ready to capitalize on the quarto. He needed the capital desperately at that time. In April 1777 he found himself 340,000 livres behind in his payments and secured a royal decree authorizing him to legally suspend payments. In June he offered to let the STN buy the Table analytique of the Encyclopedie, the gigantic index-cum-digest to Diderot's text, which Pierre Mouchon, a pastor of Basel, just finished after five years of labor. Panckoucke's offer 53. This account is based on Batilliot 's rich dossier of 101 letters in the STN papers. On March 13, 1778, Batilliot informed the STN that he had sold all but one of the Geneva Encyclopedies, although his profit had been eroded by the need to clear their way into Paris by bribery. 79 The Business of Enlightenment illustrates the strain on his finances-and also the eighteenth century version of what is known as hard sell today. The Table was a sure money maker, he stressed. In fact many persons would buy it who did not own the Encyclopedie, and he was so sure of its success that he would refund the STN 's money if it failed. He described the manuscript in detail and expatiated on the best way to produce and market it. '' Soyez stirs que tout se placera et que vous ferez une bonne affaire et sure,'' he concluded. ''Mais il ne f aut pas perdre le temps a tergiverser.'' He had bought the manuscript for 30,000 livres and would sell it for 60,000-really a bargain price, con sidering its market value. But he needed the money fast and was only making this offer because of the pressure on his finances: ''Vo us savez, Messieurs, les malheurs que j 'ai eprouves depuis un an. J e me suis trouve pour pres de 300,000 livres de faillites. J e perdrai 100 mille livres avec [illegible name]. Boisserand de Roanne vient de manquer et je m 'y trouve pour une somme considerable. Cependant je n 'ai point suspendu mes paiements, mais j 'ai ete oblige de moderer mes entreprises, et c'est cette position qui m'oblige a vous faire l 'offre de cette table ... J e puis me vanter qu 'ayant fait les entreprises de librairie les plus grandes et les plus hard ies, aucune n 'a manque, et que toutes les personnes qui ont travaille avec moi ont beaucoup gagne. '' It is easy enough to understand Panckoucke 's eagerness to cut in on Duplain 's profits. But where did the new quarto association leave the old plan for producing a revised Ency clopedie? The Traite de Dijon mentioned the revised edition only once, in a clause that bound Panckoucke to delay the publication of its prospectus for two years so that it would not spoil the market for the quarto. The contract also gave Duplain the option of buying a three-twelfths interest in it but said nothing about the possibility of Panckoucke 's associ ates buying shares in the quarto. Panckoucke could hardly ex clude them from Duplain 's enterprise because in January 1777 he owned only three-twelfths of the droits et privilege, 54. Panckoucke to STN, June 16, 1777. In setting a price of 60,000 livres on the Table, Panckoucke was indulging in some typical fast talk: '' J 'en ai achete la copie aux associes de l'Encyclopedie 30 mille livres ... Je vous propose de vous vendre cette table, mais je veux doubler mon argent.'' He actually bought it from de Tournes for 22,000 Iivres. See the text of the contract in Lough, Essays, p.104. 80 Genesis of a Speculation which he exchanged for a half interest in it. So Regnault, Rey, Plomteux, and the STN could expect cuts in that half interest which would be proportionate to their holdings in the project for the revised edition. On February 3, Panckoucke wrote a retrocession into the Traite de Dijon which specified that the STN's half interest in the revised edition entitled it to a quarter interest in the quarto (see Appendix A. VI). Pre sumably he sent similar subcontracts to the other three as sociates. But would that concession satisfy them? Looked at from the STN's point of view, the Traite de Di jon was a disaster. It hurt them the greatest in the most im portant aspect of their business, their printing. In dropping the original reprint plan for the revised edition, Panckoucke had refused most of their demands, but he had mollified them with the prospect of a gigantic printing job. And that job had suddenly doubled in size on January 3, 1777, when Pane· koucke agreed to meet Duplain 's threat by producing a quarto as well as a folio edition of the revised Encyclopedie. The Traite de Dijon canceled that arrangement and post poned the revised edition for two years. What was the STN to do meanwhile with its vastly expanded plant? Panckoucke himself, in his dealings with Suard, had emphasized the im portance of keeping the STN's workshop occupied, and he later stressed this consideration in his offer to sell the Table analytique. The STN refused his proposition because it wanted to get a return on its investment, not to be drawn into further speculation. So it must have been appalled at article 4 of the Traite de Dijon, which specified that all the printing of the quarto would be done ''a la convenance de M. Du plain.'' Duplain had already hired two Genevans to begin the job and was planning to contract some of it to printers in Lyons. He had no reason to hire the STN; and even if he did, he could do so at a lower price than the 54 livres per sheet allotted him by the Traite. The previous agreement of January 3 had given the STN a similar set price for printing every volume in 1,000 folio sets and 3,150 quarto sets of the revised edition, no matter what its actual costs. The Traite de Dijon seemed to cut it out of the printing operation alto gether and even to deny it any role in the management of the enterprise, for the contract only concerned Panckoucke and 55. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 4, 1776, and June 16, 1777. 81 The Business of Enlightenment Duplain. As Duplain later made it clear, it created no obliga tion between him and the STN. This sudden reversal of policy therefore threatened to damage the N euchatelois as much as it would benefit Panckoucke, and they had reason to fear that the two fast-moving Frenchmen had outmaneuvered them while their backs were turned. The Paris Conf ere nee of 1777 Ostervald and Bosset considered the situation so serious that they traveled to Paris in mid-February to conduct their own investigation. They planned to arrive secretly and to gather as much information about Panckoucke as possible before confronting him-that is, they proposed to investigate him as he had investigated Duplain, with the help of spies. They explained their plan in a letter to Perregaux: "Faites nous l 'amitie de vouloir prendre quelques informations par ticulieres avant notre arrivee de M. Panckoucke, libraire, Hotel de Thou, rue des Poitevins, mais qui soient des gens qui puissent connaitre non seulement sa fortune mais encore ce qui peut regarder sa bonne foi, probite etc. Nous com prenons que cela n 'est pas absolument aise; mais comme ces informations nous importent essentiellement a notre arrivee a Paris, nous vous demandons instamment la grace de ne rien negliger pour cela, et surtout qu 'il ne soit point informe, di rectement ni indirectement de ces informations, ne souhaitant point qu 'il sache notre arrivee a Paris." A week later, Per regaux replied, '' J 'ai deux personnes aux informations pour l 'homme dont vous desirez connaitre les facultes, le coeur, etc.'' And soon after the arrival of the two Swiss, he re ported to the home office in Neuchatel that he had accom plished his mission: '' J 'ai communique a vos associes les informations que vous desiriez qu'ils prissent." Ostervald and Bosset never gave a full account of what they learned, but they wrote that it was favorable as to Panckoucke's wealth and connections, if not his ''heart'': '' D 'abord nous vous dirons que les informations les plus exactes prises sur la solvabilite de l'homme avec qui nous avons a traiter se sont reunies en sa faveur. Nous ne pouvons pas douter sur nos propres observations qu 'il ne soit tres entendu, tres actif, 82 Genesis of a Speculation bien vu de ses superieurs et jouissant de beaucoup de credit. " In order to travel from Neuchatel to Paris, Ostervald and Bosset had to cover an enormous cultural distance. They were sophisticated Swiss, who had already made several trips to the French capital. Bosset had business contacts throughout France and the Low Countries, and Ostervald, who was sixty-four in 1777, corresponded regularly with booksellers in every major European city; their mental horizon must have been vast. But their daily routine kept them confined within a small town where people had an Alpine air and spoke a slow, Germanic French. Neuchatel had nothing ap proaching a cafe society, though its inhabitants had learned to drink coffee-much to the regret of visitors from Paris, who came in search of rustic simplicity and Rousseauistic pastoralism. The principal cultural nourishment of the Neu chatelois still came' from Sunday sermons, delivered in the old Calvinist style from the pulpit of Guillaume Farel. From Farel 's Romanesque hilltop church they could easily see their entire town, enclosed within medieval walls between the Alps to the east and the south and the Juras to the west and the north. Ostervald and Bosset left this tiny world on Monday, Feb ruary 17, and after two days of rough riding arrived at Besangon, the main outpost of French culture on the rugged western slopes of the Juras. As the crow flies, the journey from Besangon to Paris was five times as long as the Neuchatel Besangon journey. But as coaches traveled, it required only twice the time, owing to a transformation of the facilities for travel in France, completed just a year earlier and already helping to change the kingdom from a heterogeneous mosaic of provinces into a unified nation. The vehicle of this "revolu tion'' was the diligence, a comfortable, light coach fitted with springs and carried at a gallop over a superb new road sys tem by horses that were changed at regular relais. Ostervald 56. Quotations from STN to Perregaux, Feb. 11, 1777; Perregaux to STN, Feb. 19 and 28, 1777; Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 7, 1777. The letters from France did not often mention persons by name because the French govern ment was notorious for opening mail. 57. Charly Guyot, De Rousseau a Mirabeau. Pelerins de Motiers et prophetes de 89 (Neuchatel, 1936), p. 103. Rousseau had lived in the area in the 1760s and had written eloquent descriptions of it. 83 The Business of Enlightenment and Basset stepped into their diligence at Besan~on on Feb ruary 20. Four days later, having dashed through Dole, Di jon, Chatillon, Troyes, and Provins, they stepped out in Paris. In racing across the country at unprecedented speed to re negotiate their speculation on the Encyclopedie, Ostervald and Basset seemed to be agents of modernity, of the forces epitomized by the diligence and the book. But they also trav eled in the style of gentlemen under the Old Regime-not aristocrats, that is, but men whose manners derived from an international code of gentility. In some respects, therefore, they had more in common with Panckoucke than with the peasants of their own estates. Before leaving Neuchatel, they requested Perregaux to provide them with a necessary prop for gentlemanly life in Paris, "un hon domestique, intelli gent, actif, et sur," and also asked him to reserve two adjoin ing rooms for them ''du prix d 'environ 30 sous, petites mais propres et chez gens su.rs.' ' Once settled in, they made the rounds of the capital and court. They went to cafes and the aters. They dined with worldly abbes and beautiful ladies. They had audiences with potentates in Versailles and learned whose secretary to cultivate, whose favorite to flatter, and whose valet to bribe. That was how one did business at the nerve center of the publishing industry. But for all their ex perience and sophistication, Ostervald and Basset felt like aliens in Paris-and indeed they were. Swiss by nationality, French provincial by culture, they sounded somewhat be. wildered in their letters home: "Nous irons aujourd 'hui a !'audience de M. de Neville et a celle de M. Boucherot et vous quittons pour nous habiller . . . C 'est une vie bien etrange que celle que nous menons.'' Ostervald cut one letter off short by explaining that he had just dined '' chez M. l 'abbe Fouchet et avec un autre abbe qui l'ont fait trop boire et que par ainsi il n 'a rien de mieux a faire qu 'a aller se coucher. " The wining and dining was incidental to the main business 58. Arrangements for the journey are clear from the STN 's correspondence with Pellier and Pochet, commissionnaires of Besarn;on, in Feb. 1777. On the "revolution" in travel see Guy Arbellot, "La grande mutation des routes de France au milieu du XVIIIe siecle," Annales. E.S.C., XXVIII (May-June 1973), 765-791. 59. STN to Perregaux, Feb. 11, 1777. 60. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 12 and March 20, 1777. See also the similar remarks in their letter of March 23. 84 Genesis of a Speculation of discovering whether Panckoucke had duped them and of attempting to get better terms from him for the Encyclopedie speculations. After they had received the favorable report on Panckoucke, Ostervald and Bosset began to negotiate with him. They wrote home about their sessions in such detail that it is easy to imagine the three men squirming in their seats as the arguments flew around the table: ''Notre homme [Panc koucke] prend di verses formes, pretend avoir fait un coup de maitre pour lui et nous a Dijon. Nous avons exige qu 'il ecrivit de la maniere la plus pressante a Duplain pour que nous imprimions la moitie de son affaire. La crainte que nous n 'allions Iacher une annonce est un epouvantail pour lui. Nous le lui presenterons au besoin et le menageons cependant, parce que cela est indispensable ... Panckoucke a pris [ses suretes] vis-a-vis de Duplain en se reservant d'expedier les planches gravees d 'ici. Mais nous devons en prendre contre l'un et l'autre, crainte de devenir leurs dupes ... Notre homme est un vrai pro tee. On a meilleure opinion de sa for tune-que du reste il faut le manier avec delicatesse et tenir souvent sa patience a deux mains. Nos conseils sont le fils aine du voisin et l 'abbe G. '' Ostervald and Bosset sounded so suspicious because they assumed that Panckoucke was attempting to cut them out of a promising market by colluding with Duplain. They knew how roughly "their man" had treated the unsuspecting Ba tilliot, and a report that they received from their home office upon their arrival in Paris made Duplain 's enterprise seem even more suspect. Charmet, a veteran bookdealer of Besan c_;on and an old ally of the STN, had stopped by Neuchatel while making a business trip around the circuit of Swiss pub lishers. He told Bertrand (the third partner of the STN, who had remained behind to mind the business) that Du plain never had any serious intention of producing the En cyclopedie but had only published his prospectus "pour ten ter le gout du public." Moreover, Charmet believed that the public had failed to respond. Contrary to the claims of Du plain and Panckoucke, he asserted that ''Capel, libraire a Dijon, n 'est pas plus en etat d 'y faire 150 souscriptions pour cet ouvrage que l 'on ne pourrait en faire dans le plus petit hameau." Bertrand concluded, "Il resulterait de ce fait sup- 61. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 28, 1777. The ''ab be G. '' was probably Grosier, a minor litterateur with whom the STN was in contact. 85 The Business of Enlightenment pose vrai que M. P. a ete trompe ou qu'il a voulu vous trom per, qu'il a en effet le dessin de vendre a deux acheteurs la meme chose.' ' The Neuchatelois found their suspicions confirmed and their position reinforced from an unexpected quarter: Suard and the philosophes. Despite their earlier opposition to his plans for the revision, Suard greeted Ostervald and Bos set warmly and offered them a ''diner academique. '' The academician-philosophes stood to lose almost as much as the STN by the Traite de Dijon because it postponed their work for two years. They therefore appealed over Panckoucke 's head to the government; and they succeeded well enough to frighten Duplain into sending his associate, Thomas Le Roy, on an emergency mission to Paris. Le Roy and Panckoucke de cided to pacify the opposion with bribes. On January 23, they signed an Addition to the Traite de Dijon, which au thorized Panckoucke to distribute 240 livres before the appearance of each volume in order to smooth its path into France. Whether Suard became seriously disaffected with 62. Bertrand to Ostervald and Bosset, Feb. 23, 1777. Bertrand's letter illus trates a factor that complicated negotiations among early-modern publishers: mistrust compounded by misperception. By 1777 Charmet was an old man who had lost his grip on his business. He was wrong about Capel, who eventually col lected 152 subscriptions in Dijon, and he grossly underestimated the demand for the Encyclopedie in his own territory, where a younger bookseller called Lepagnez eventually sold 338 subscriptions. At the same time, however, Charmet's report seemed to be confirmed by other reports that reached Ostervald and Bosset in Paris. On March 10, 1777, Panckoucke wrote to Duplain that "M. Boucher, libraire de Rouen qui est actuellement ici, ne croit point au succes de votre enter prise. TI l 'a dit ici a ces Messieurs, et ces rapports leur font croire que j 'ai trop legerement cru a vos souscriptions. Ils se persuadent toujours que s 'ils annon <;aient leur edition, tous vos souscripteurs deserteraient. '' Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 63. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 28, 1777. 64. The Addition expressed this arrangement, somewhat elliptically, as follows: '' Attendu Jes di:fficultes qu 'eprouve I 'execution dudit acte, le ministere le regard ant comme contraire aux interets des gens de lettres, M. Thomas Le Roy, associe aux Srs. Duplain et Cie., etant de retour a Paris pour lever les difficultes elevees au sujet dudit acte, a charge le Sr. Panckoucke de faire toutes les demarches con venables pour surmonter les obstacles qui se rencontrent en cette occasion: et a cet efl'et il l 'autorise a ofl'rir a qui il appartiendra une somme de cent pistoles par chaque volume de discours, a l 'efl'et d 'obtenir les facilites necessaires pour l 'entree de cette edition en France.'' A margin note in Panckoucke 's handwrit ing next to article 17 of the Traite de Dijon (the article mentioning the need to postpone the announcement of' the revised edition for two years) said, "C'est l 'ordre expres que m 'a donne le magistrat [that is, Neville]. Il a meme desire qu 'on allat plus vite.'' Panckoucke evidently meant that the Directeur de la Iibrairie had applied pressure on him to speed up the quarto so as to minimize the 86 Genesis of a Speculation his brother-in-law is doubtful, but he and his philosophes tended to support Ostervald and Bosset in their debates with Panckoucke : ''Nous avons vu deux fois M. Suard et verrons aujourd 'hui MM. d 'Alembert et de Condorcet,'' the Neu chatelois reported after a week of negotiations. '' M. Suard est assez dans nos idees, mais pense toujours que l 'annonce la refonte et redaction sera en tout temps favorablement de du public. Il a mauvaise opinion de l 'entreprise de accueillie Notre homme [Panckoucke] soutient toujours que Duplain. sont en tres grand nombre et que les souscriptions actuelles le hon marche f era ecouler tout de suite cette edition-la.' ' The sparring continued for almost four weeks. Panckoucke insisted on the importance of cashing in on a best seller while keeping the revised edition in reserve. Ostervald and Bosset objected that the Traite de Dijon deprived them of a lucra printing job, for which they had already sacrificed a tive great deal of capital in the expansion of their plant. And Suard argued against the dispersal of his editorial team. The debate put Panckoucke in an awkward position because the same half interest twice-once to he seemed to have sold the STN for the refonte and once to Duplain for the quarto and he could not reconcile the contradictory obligations of his contracts unless he persuaded the Neuchatelois to accept partnership in Duplain 's enterprise. They could a secondary original commitment and undercut the quarto hold him to his by publishing the prospectus for the refonte. And if he dumped them for Duplain, he expected them to produce a pirated quarto of their own. The only way to prevent the crossed speculations from ex ploding was to persuade Duplain to concede enough of the printing to mollify the STN. On February 28, Panckoucke ex plained the gravity of the situation in an urgent letter to Duplain. But Duplain failed to reply because while the at mosphere thickened in Paris, he was getting married in Ly- harm it would cause to Suard 's stable of writers. Contemporaries believed that Panckoucke and Duplain, like other publishers, resorted to bribery. An anonymous pamphlet, Lettre d'un Zibraire de Lyon a un Zibraire de Paris (March 1, 1779), reported as current gossip (p. 1), "Je vous ai mande dans le temps, et toute la librairie de Lyons en est informee, que Duplain a donnee 40,000 livres pour avoir la permission d 'imprimer l 'Encyclopedie.'' Bee also the similar remarks on Pane· koucke, p. 8. 65. Ostervald and Basset to STN, March 7, 1777. The original contains only the first letter in each of the proper names. 87 The Business of Enlightenment ons. Unable to withstand the pressure from Ostervald and Basset much longer, Panckoucke wrote again on March 10. After some quick congratulations and a perfunctory tribute to matrimony-"le veritable etat de bonheur quand on sait bien s 'y gouverner "-he sketched the terms of a "lettre os tensible,'' which Duplain was to write to him so that he could show it to the N euchatelois. Duplain should offer the STN as much of the printing job as possible; he should present the quarto as a get-rich-quick speculation, which would not cause much delay in the refonte; and he should provide plenty of convincing information about the abundance of the subscrip tions. "Il ne faut point les effaroucher. Donnez-leur a irn primer, et tout ira selon vos desirs ... Ne mettez pas un mot dans cette lettre qui puisse m'empecher de la leur mon trer. Ne regardez point encore une fois cette reponse comme indifferente. " Meanwhile the N euchatelois tried to soften up Panckoucke by working on the philosophes. On the same day as Panc koucke 's final appeal to Duplain, they reported to their home office that they were gaining ground with Suard, ''de qui nous esperons tirer meilleur parti que de son beau frere, homme avantageux, decisif, brusque rneme et impatient ... Le ton que prend notre homme ici est de nier et contredire tout ce qui n 'est pas selon ses idees et son plan. " Two days later, Suard had drifted toward the STN 's camp and Panckoucke was faltering: '' M. Suard blame hauternent son beau frere d'avoir souscrit a un si long renvoi et croit avec raison que le travail de la refonte en souffrira. 11 persiste cependant a desirer d 'avoir un interet dans l 'entreprise, et cela repon drait de son assiduite. Panckoucke nous parait embarrasse et pique de ce nous voyons clairement a quel point il s 'est laisse mene par Duplain.' ' On 1\Iarch 14, Ostervald and Bosset re ported that Panckoucke had '' l 'air pens if, un peu embar rasse" when they dined with him. They sensed that he was giving ground. He had agreed to let them appeal to Duplain themselves, and they sent a tough letter. It demanded that they print half the quarto and that the publication of the re- 66. Panckoucke to Duplain, March 10, 1777, Bibliotheque publique et uni versitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 67. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 10, 1777. 68. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 12, 1777. 88 Genesis of a Speculation vised edition begin by the end of 1777. They would never have consented to a delay in the revised edition, they told Duplain; and if he did not make concessions, they could always publish the prospectus for it, which would ruin the market for the quarto. The Basis of a Bonne Aff aire \Vhile waiting for Duplain to reply, Ostervald and Bosset made a quick trip to Rouen, where they talked business with seven of the town's thirty booksellers. The exposure to one of the most active centers of the provincial book trade changed their perspective because they learned that the Rouennais had subscribed to the quarto in droves and that the subscription boom seemed to extend throughout France. When they returned to Paris, they joined forces with Plom teux, their Encyclopedie associate from Liege, who had ar rived to protect his own stake in the negotiations with Panc koucke. ''Nous ne pouvons que remercier la Providence de nous avoir envoye d 'aussi bonnes troupes auxiliaires,'' they wrote home. '' Il parait que ce libraire, qui est homme de grand [sang froid]' fait un pen baisser le verbe a notre homme. '' But meanwhile, Panckoucke had received the two critical letters that he had solicited from Duplain. In the first, Duplain reported on the subscription rate. He could not provide an exact figure, but he assured Panckoucke that it was phenomenal: ''Tout ce dont nous pouvons vous assurer, c 'est que calculant d 'a pres toutes les lettres que nous recevons, nous en placerons plus de 4,000; et si vous nous promettiez de nous donner du temps, nous en placerions le double. Nous avons entre nos mains de quoi faire le plus beau coup du monde, mais le projet de la deuxieme edition [that is, the revised edition] et le temps trop borne que vous nous donnez nous empechent d'en profiter. Nos voyageurs [that is, traveling salesmen] r6coltent partout. Il n 'y a pas de village oil il ne trouve [sic] des souscripteurs, pas de pe tite ville qui ne presente jusques a 36 engages. Valence en Dauphine en a fait ce nombre, Grenoble davantage, Montpel lier plus de 60, Nimes autant, Dijon nous promet 200. En un 69. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 20, 1777. 89 The Business of Enlightenment mot, jamais projet n 'a ete accueilli de cette maniere, et cepen dant votre <liable lettre de defense avait fait une furieuse im pression, mais on revient. 'no This information confirmed what Ostervald and Bosset had learned in Rouen, and the second letter went further : '' J e ne saurais vous peindre l 'enthousiasme du public pour notre projet. Dans le moment que je vous ecris, je re11ois de Robi quet de Rennes 50 souscriptions, de Catry du Havre 32, d'Aber d'Autun 26 avec assurances d'un cent, d'un avocat d'Aurillac 13. II n'y a pas de courrier qui n'en reunisse des nombres. Je puis vous assurer que nous placerons nos quatre mille et que si nous avions du temps, je ne craindrais pas d 'en tirer six. Au nom de Dieu, mon ami, ne vous inquietez pas davantage et profitons d 'un evenement qui ne se representera jamais. D 'ailleurs vous sentez bien que si I 'Europe allait en core retentir de nouvelles annonces pour une autre edition, le clerge averti formerait des oppositions, le ministre retirerait sa protection, nous ferions la petite guerre, et enfin les uns par rapport aux autres nous echouerions. J e vous invite a faire entendre raison a Messieurs de Neuchatel. Ce sont des gens instruits, et la perspective d 'un benefice immense doit leur faire ouvrir les yeux et leur faire abandonner le projet d'imprimer, ce qui au bout du compte ne peut leur donner qu 'un benefice qui ne convient qu 'a des ouvriers par sa modi cite. Si au reste ils veulent absolument faire quelques vo lumes, s 'engager a executer comme moi, ils peuvent se pro curer une Philosophie neuve et je leur remettrai quand ils l 'auront trois volumes.' m Duplain 's letters are revealing in four ways. First, although they were written at the instigation of Panckoucke, they sug gest Duplain 's attitude toward his enterprise: he considered it the most spectacular speculation of his career and thought that the campaign to exploit it should take precedence over everything else. This attitude would prove to be crucial in the final crisis of the enterprise three years later. Secondly, Duplain 's remark about the government showed how he understood Panckoucke 's ''protection'' from their discus sions in Dijon: Panckoucke did indeed have strong backers in Versailles, but they would not act openly. As long as he 70. Duplain to Panckoucke, March 10, 1777, in Panckoucke's dossier in the STN papers. 71. Duplain to Panckoucke, March 16, 1777. 90 Genesis of a Speculation went about his business discreetly, they would pull strings for him behind the scenes. They might abandon him, however, if he aroused the well-entrenched enemies of the Enlighten ment. Thirdly, Duplain would only deal with the STN through Panckoucke, and in dealing with them he adopted Panckoucke 's line : they should recognize a good thing when they saw it; they should speculate imaginatively, instead of snatching at petty profits and thinking like small-town shop keepers. And fourthly Duplain made. a small concession: he would let the STN print three volumes. He could not do more, he explained, because he already had contracted the bulk of the job to four printers, who had had special fonts of Philoso phie made and would have thirty presses at work within a week. The STN would not be able to get the requisite type cast for six or eight months. It would be better to commis sion them to print some other work in order to keep their plant busy. But if they absolutely insisted, he would give them the three volumes. That was enough to bring around Ostervald and Bosset. On March 24, they wrote horue triumphantly, "Enfin nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer, Messieurs, que la grande affaire qui nous occupe desagreablement depuis si longtemps est terminee et, ce nous semble, avec autant d 'a vantage que possible. L 'affaire de Duplain reussit etonnamment.' n But the formal settlement, a contract that they signed with Panc koucke on March 28, did not really represent a triumph for the STN. (This Accession and related documents are reprinted in Appendix A. VII-VIII.) It merely bound the Neuchatelois to accept the Traite de Dijon in exchange for being allowed to print three volumes according to the specifications of the Traite. Duplain later ratified this agreement by an Engagement of May 28, which also reserved the entire printing job of the revised edition for the STN, as it had demanded. This pro viso made it easier for the Neuchatelois to renounce their earlier demand for half the printing of the quarto, especially as Panckoucke assured them that work on the revised edi tion would continue, though at a slower pace, and that it would eventually be produced in both folio and quarto for mat at a total pressrun of 3,500. The continuation of the revi sion also mollified Suard, who was further compensated by a 72. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 24, 1777. 91 The Business of Enlightenment gift of a one-twelfth share in the enterprise. The gift came from the STN's holdings of six one-twelfth shares, but Panc koucke paid for it as part of a general refunding of the STN 's debt to him for its original investment. The refunding was a complicated business because each reversal in Panckoucke's policy had entailed an adjustment in his financial arrangements. On July 3, 1776, the STN had acquired its half interest in Panckoucke 's original specula tion. (So later, when the shares were divided into twelfths, the STN owned six shares worth 18,000 livres apiece). It promised to pay this sum in sixteen notes, which matured every three months from April 1, 1777. By January 3, 1777, the new arrangements for the revised edition had made it necessary for Panckoucke to agree to a first refunding of this debt. The STN took back its sixteen old promissory notes and issued thirty-six new ones, which came to 110,400 livres in all and matured later: at monthly intervals for three years, beginning on January 1, 1778. On March 28, 1777, the STN's acceptance of the Traite de Dijon required a new fi nancial arrangement. Panckoucke now reduced its debt to 92,000 livres, which compensated it for ceding a one-twelfth share to Suard. The STN bound itself to pay that sum by forty-eight billets a ordre. These replaced its second set of notes and were to mature over a four-year period beginning on January 1, 1778. By making its payments smaller and spreading them out over a longer period, the STN eased the strain on its own finances and could feel somewhat reconciled to the loss of a large share in the printing operation. It could also find solace in contemplating the return on its 5/24 share in the quarto (after ceding one-twelfth of its half interest in Panckoucke 's half interest in the quarto, its share in Duplain 's enterprise came to 5/24, though it still had a 5/12 interest in the droits et privilege and the revised edition of the Encyclopedie). Now that "cette affaire est devenue la notre," as they put it, Ostervald and Bosset completely changed the tone of their remarks about the quarto. Its pressrun could easily be in- 73. See "Troisi~me addition a l'aete du 3e juillet 1776," Appendix A.VIII. The contract of July 3, 1776, also bound the STN to pay 35,400 livres in six in stallments between Aug. 1, 1777, and Nov. 1, 1778, to cover half the value of the three volumes of text from the Geneva edition, which Panckoucke had recovered from the Bastille. Although the subsequent agreements made those volumes al most worthless, they did not cancel that debt. 92 Genesis of a Speculation creased to 6,000, they exulted. "Il y aurait 100,000 livres de benefice [for their 5/24th] ... C 'est un profit certain. " And they fired off instructions about spreading prospectuses, gathering subscriptions, and procuring paper, type, and workers. Their enthusiasm waned for the revised edition as it waxed for the quarto-a process of affective adjustment, which may be a common aftereffect of decision-making. But the Neuchatelois could hardly deny that Panckoucke had de feated them once again. And this fourth round of negotiations proved to be the most important of all, because it determined the character of a consortium that produced most of the En cyclopedies in circulation under the Old Regime in France. 74. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 23 and March 24, 1777. See also the similar remarks in their letter to the STN of April 4, 1777. 93 I I I YYYYYYYY'fTYY JUGGLING EDITIONS After the settlement of the '' grande aff aire'' in Paris, the enterprise shifted from policymaking to manufacturing. But policy continued to be an important element in the efforts of the new quarto associates to guide their speculation to a successful conclusion. In fact the very success of the quarto created problems because it whipped up the profit motive throughout the publishing world, especially among the quarto's own publishers, who faced a crisis in self-govern ment each time the subscriptions broke through a new ceil ing, requiring a new agreement on terms for the expansion of production. The story of how the quarto associates fought their way from the first to the third edition shows exactly how the entrepreneurs of the Enlightenment conducted their business. The "Second Edition" Throughout 1777 the subscriptions continued to pour in. Traveling salesmen and bookdealers throughout the country reported spectacular sales, and Panckoucke grew more and more excited about the boom. By .Tune 1777, when Ostervald and Bosset had returned to Neuchatel, he was ready to drop everything in order to exploit this unprecedented success: "Tout ce que je sais tres certainement par le rapport de nombre de libraires de province, c 'est que I 'edition a un pro digieux succes et qu 'il faut nous y livrer tout entier, parce 94 Juggling Editions qu 'un benefice tout venu vaut mieux qu 'un benefice incertain. Il est certain que si cette edition est bien executee, qu 'on en peut vendre 10 mille." In early July, he learned that one of Duplain 's agents had sold 395 sets on a recent tour : ''Le succes de cet ouvrage m 'etonne de plus en plus.'' His aston kept growing because Duplain 's pressrun of 4,000 ishment copies represented a very ambitious goal for a work that eventually ran to thirty-six enormous quarto volumes in an era when printings of single-volume books normally came 1,000 or 1,500 copies. In mid-August Duplain reported to that the subscription for the 4,000 sets would soon be filled and that he planned to open another one. On August 27 he STN, which had begun work on the first of its three told the volumes, to increase its pressrun from 4,000 to 6,000. Duplain 's letter provides the solution to the mystery of the missing second quarto edition, which has baffled bibli ographers for some time. Encyclopedie scholars have been able to identify only a first edition of the quarto, whose title page proclaims it to be a "nouvelle edition ... a Geneve chez Pellet,'' and a later edition, described on its title page as '' troisieme edition ... a Geneve, chez Jean-Leonard Pel let, Imprimeur de la Republique, a N eufchatel chez la So Typographique. '' What became of the second edition ¥ ciete Duplain 's letters indicate that by the end of August thirty two presses, aside from those of the STN, were working on the quarto at a run of 4,000 and that all or part of the first five had been printed. On the last two or three days of volumes the month, each press increased its output to 6,000. But the had reached different stages of comple unfinished volumes there was no uniform cutting-off point. The STN tion, so had reached sheet T of volume 6 when it received Duplain 's order to increase the printing. It therefore reset and re printed the preceding sheets at a run of 2,000 and continued 1. Panckoucke to STN, June 26 and July 8, 1777. See also the similar remarks in Panckoucke 's letters to the STN of May 13 and June 16, 1777, and in Duplain to STN, Aug. 18, 1777. 2. In ''The Swiss Editions of the Encyclopedie,'' Harvard Library Bulletin IX (1955), 228, George B. Watts made a good guess as to the explanation of the ''second'' edition, although like other scholars he assumed that Pellet was behind the whole affair. Lough agrees with Watts's version of this complicated question (Essays, pp. 36-38). For a full discussion see Robert Darnton, "True and False Editions of the Encyclopedie, a Bibliographical Imbroglio,'' forthcoming in the proceedings of the Colloque international sur l 'histoire de l 'imprimerie et du livre a Geneve. 95 The Business of Enlightenment thenceforth at 6,000. The other printers did likewise. But they had reached different points in the production of the other volumes. At the moment that the STN changed gears in Neuchatel, Pellet in Geneva could have been near the end of volume 5, while J. F. Bassompierre, also in Geneva, could have been at the beginning of volume 4 and the Perisse broth ers of Lyons in the middle of volume 3. As there was no uni form order in which the sheets were assembled into volumes and the volumes into sets, there is no standard section in every set that can be identified with some second or inter mediary stage of the printing. Each set must be different from all the others, and no second edition ever existed. It does not make much sense, in any case, to speak of editions, because more than half the type of the Pellet quarto was not reset. Instead, the work went through three different ''states,'' corresponding roughly to the pressruns of 4,000, 2,000, and 6,000. But its publishers talked loosely about two editions. In order to avoid confusion, their usage will be fol lowed in this account, despite its inaccuracy according to the tenets of modern bibliography. Duplain 's instructions also provide more specific inf orma tion about the size of the printing. The Traite de Dijon called for an edition of 4,000 sets but stipulated that 4,250 copies of each sheet would be printed. The 250 extra sheets were in tended to be mostly or entirely chaperon, to replace those spoiled by the printer. But printers commonly calculated in reams, quires, and sheets (ram es, mains, and f euilles; in eighteenth-century France, 25 sheets made a quire, and 20 quires made a ream, which thus contained 500 sheets). Du plain actually directed the STN to use 3 reams, 10 quires more in the printing of every sheet's worth of text (that is, of every eight pages), making an output of 12 reams, 6 quires, or 6,150 copies. The increase therefore went as follows : 3. In his letter to the STN of Aug. 27, 1777, Duplain phrased his directions as follows: ''Nous nous sommes determines a tirer trois rames dix mains de plus. Vous voudrez bien en consequence, Messieurs, tirer sur chaque feuille que dorena vant vous mettrez sous presse en tout douze rames et six mains, et lorsque vous aurez fini votre volume, vous reimprimerez s.v.p. tout ce qui est fait et tirerez trois rames dix mains seulement. '' In a letter of Aug. 18, he said that the print ing of the eighth volume had just begun in Lyons and that the first ten volumes should be completed by September, but his letters do not provide enough informa tion for one to know exactly which proportion of the early volumes were reset and run off at 1,750 copies or who printed them. 96 Juggling Editions original pressrun 8 reams 16 quires or 4,400 copies increase 3reams10 quires or 1,750 copies total 12 reams 6 quires or 6,150 copies So many copies of so huge a work seemed staggering to Panckoucke: '' Il est certain que le succes de cette edition in quarto passe toute croyance. '' He agreed in principle to the increase in the pressrun, but he did not want to accept any proposals for enlarging the enterprise until he had made a personal inspection of Duplain 's operation in Lyons, for he had more faith in the success of the quarto than in Duplain 's management of it: '' J e veux par moi-meme m 'assurer de la verite, '' he wrote to the STN. ''Et comme je pars lundi pour Lyon, je verrai alors tout par moi-meme, et je ne ferai rien que pour le bien commun. J e pense, Messieurs, que vous vous en rapporterez dans tout ceci a l 'habitude que j 'ai de traiter les grandes affaires. '' The N euchatelois had learned to beware of Panckoucke 's grand style of doing business, but they were willing to turn it against Duplain. So the fifth round of negotiations began with the usual conspiratorial preparations, though it mainly concerned technical questions of adjusting the Traite de Dijon to the new dimensions of the quarto. A great deal of money hung on those technicalities. For example, the Traite de Dijon allotted Duplain nine livres for every ream of the requisite paper that he procured of the Encyclopedie. By increasing the printing by three reams, ten quires per sheet, the quarto associates committed them selves to purchasing approximately 11,165 additional reams of paper for 100,485 livres. Such enormous demand was cer tain to force up the price of paper. In fact, the price had al ready risen so markedly that in May Duplain had persuaded 4. Panekoucke to STN, Sept. 9, 1777. Panckoucke added that he really did be lieve Duplain 's reports: ''On doit esperer d 'en placer a Paris au moins 1,000. Le debit meme, s'il repond aux provinces, peut en etre le double. Duplain m 'a eerit pour une augmentation de tirage que nous n 'aurions pas le droit d 'empecher, quand bien meme nous n 'aurions pas Jes raisons de le vouloir. Ainsi que Jui, je suis bien sur que l 'on placera ces 6,000 exemplaires, et cette assurance doit vous eonvaincre, Messieurs, que je vous ai engage dans une excellente affaire, puisqu 'a ce nombre nous devons doubler nos fonds et au-deli.'' 97 The Business of Enlightenment Panckoucke to allow five additional sous per ream. How much more should Panckoucke allow in the contract for the second edition~ He knew that Duplain would jump at the possibility of raking off the difference between the real costs and the allotted sum. And that difference could be enormous -2,761 livres for an extra five sous in the price of the extra 11,165 reams. Duplain 's allotment for printing costs raised the same problems, although in this case Panckoucke might argue for a reduction. The Traite de Dijon permitted Duplain to contract the printing for whatever prices he could get and allowed him 30 livres for the composition and printing of each sheet at a pressrun of 1,000 and an increase of 8 livres for every additional 1,000. Since the Traite provided for an edition of 4,000 copies, it allotted Duplain 54 livres per sheet. Panckoucke evidently believed that the labor involved in printing an additional 2,000 copies would not cost another 16 livres per sheet. He therefore wanted to reduce Duplain 's printing allotment. The Traite de Dijon also provided 600 livres per volume for the work of a "redacteur," who was to incorporate the supplements into the text and probably also to do some copy editing. Duplain had hired a minor littera teur in Lyons called the abbe Laserre, and Laserre wanted more money. Finally, Panckoucke and Duplain would have to iron out some problems about marketing. Duplain wanted to strike a bargain with a Lyonnais dealer called Rosset, who prom ised to buy up to five or six hundred subscriptions if he were given special terms. The Traite de Dijon did not permit any deviation from the fixed wholesale price. But in the interest of increasing sales, Duplain had offered to give Rosset a secret rebate, provided that Panckoucke concurred. Panc koucke was suspicious of secret bargains and thought the demand for the book too great for them to be necessary. So he asked the STN to write a contrived letter ("lettre ostensi ble") to him, which he would show to Duplain and Rosset in order to strengthen his hand in the bargaining. He virtually dictated it, stressing all the arguments against modifying the price policy; and he warned that if the STN wanted to 5. The new price of 9 livres 5 sous per ream was set by an Addition to the Traite de Dijon dated May 15, 1777. This document is missing from the STN papers, but its contents are clearly indicated by the fourth paragraph of the Panckoucke-Duplain agreement of Sept. 30, 1777 (see Appendix A.XI). 98 Juggling Editions say anything confidential to him while he was in Lyons, they should confine it to a separate sheet, '' cachetee avec de la cire et sous double enveloppe,'' because he would be staying with Rosset. The Lyons conference of September 1777 added yet another contract to the structure of actes and traites that Panckoucke had built around the Encyclopedie. The agreement, which Panckoucke and Duplain signed on September 30 (see Ap pendix A. XI), regulated the terms for expanding the print ing by 1,750 copies. Panckoucke testified that an inspection of the subscription register had convinced him that 4,407 sub scriptions had been sold, making the increased pressrun de sirable. He consented to an increase of five sous in the set price for the paper, and he got a reduction of three livres per sheet in the printing price of the extra 1,750 copies (Du plain was to get 33 livres per sheet instead of 36 livres, as he might have expected, according to the rates set in Dijon). The abbe Laserre received an increase of 250 livres per vol ume. The additional salary would permit him to hire de nou veaux aides (presumably copyists) and to complete all the work on the copy by the end of 1779. Duplain evidently failed in his attempt to get a special concession for Rosset, but he was compensated by a side-speculation on the Table analy tique, which he and Panckoucke arranged by a contract dated September 29. After the STN had refused his offer to buy the Table, Panc koucke decided to go ahead with its printing, using the presses of his former Parisian associate, J. G. A. Stoupe. As he had explained to the STN, he expected many owners of the first two folio editions of the Encyclopedie to buy the Table, which would serve as an index and summary of Dide rot's text. The success of the quarto Encyclopedie meant there would be a parallel demand for a quarto edition of the Table. Panckoucke and Duplain agreed to produce one, splitting costs and profits. Panckoucke would supply Duplain with the sheets of the folio edition as they came off the press. Laserre would adapt them to the quarto format for a fee of 2,400 6. Panckoucke to STN, Sept. 9, 1777. 7. The text of this '' Copie de traite pour la Table analytique entre M. Duplain et M. Panckoucke" is in the STN papers, ms. 1233. A letter from the STN to Panckoucke of May 3, 1778, shows that the STN did not then know about the secret arrangements for the quarto Table and was prepared to make a similar deal with Panckoucke behind Duplain 's back. 99 The Business of Enlightenment livres. And Duplain would handle the printing and market The enterprise would begin after the quarto Encyclo ing. pedie had been printed, and it would be kept secret until then -even from the STN and the other quarto associates. So Panckoucke and Duplain ended the conference in Lyons on good terms with one another. Panckoucke had arrived ready to do battle and left feeling reconciled and even jubi lant about Duplain 's handling of the quarto. As he reported in sending a copy of the new contract to the STN: '' J 'ai eu beaucoup de peine a obtenir une remise de trois livres sur I 'impression. J e me suis assure que I 'augmentation sur le pa pier etait necessaire. IIs n 'emploient que de l 'Auvergne du poids de 20 a 22 livres. Ils n 'y gagnent pas, et je crains bien qu'ils ne se trouvent dans l'embarras cet hiver. L'abbe de La serre etait paye comme un croucheteur. II avait des titres pour obtenir sa demande ... J 'ai bien vu qu 'on m 'en avait impose a Dijon, mais tout cela n 'est plus un mal, puisque le succes passe nos esperances. J 'ai vu les presses Genevoises. Tout m 'a paru bien monte et en bon train. Le nombre de 4,407 est bien reel. Un seul relieur de Toulouse en a fait 200. Les souscriptions viennent tous les jours. J e suis temoin qu 'on en a fait 150 en 8 jours. II ne peut point y avoir de rentrees avant la fin de 1778, puisqu'on est oblige a des achats im menses de pa pier qu 'il faut payer d 'avance. Au reste, on donnera le compte tous les six mois. Duplain a a Lyon des associes intelligents qui ont mis plus de 400,000 livres dans son commerce et qui mettent le plus grand ordre dans cette affaire. Les registres sont bien tenus, et il est impossible d 'en imposer . . . Enfin, cette affaire, si le gouvernement ne la croise pas, offre les plus grandes esperances ... La faveur du public est sans exemple. '' The Origins of the ''Third Edition'' So great was the flood of subscriptions that Panckoucke and Duplain laid plans for a ''third edition'' while they settled the terms for the "second" (that is, for the increased press run). On the very day that he signed the Lyons contract, Duplain wrote to the STN that he expected to arrange a new printing of 2,000 but that it would have to be a separate and 8. Panekoueke to STN, from Lyons, Oct. 9, 1777. 100 Juggling Editions distinct edition in order to prevent delays in the production of the first 6,000 sets. Launching a new edition was no casual matter, however. Before they could agree on its terms, Panc koucke, Duplain, and the STN spent a year in bargaining and bickering. The unprecedented size of the quarto had al ready made it almost unmanageable. To increase it by a third strained the publishers' resources and their tempers to the breaking point. Every modification of the old arrangements shifted the budget of the book by thousands of livres, and every attempt to increase profits increased the danger of profiteering. Duplain sounded the market carefully before committing himself to such a major expansion of the enterprise. The sub scription rate continued to be strong-so strong, according to one of his agents, that a third subscription might soon be filled with the surplus from the second. But Duplain had only announced two subscriptions. By mid-January he thought it necessary to announce a third in order to see whether the demand would be sufficient for a new edition. This technique of "taking the pulse of the public" was a form of fraud, which gave subscriptions a bad name, but it helped minimize risk. So Duplain was following the rules of the game rather than breaking them when he asked the STN to place the fol lowing notice in various journals: Les deux premieres editions de l 'Encyclopedie in-quarto, annoncees chez Pellet a Geneve, se sont ecoulees avec une rapidite qui prouve que le public a goute le projet de cette impression et qu 'il est content de la maniere dont il est execute. Les editeurs, flattes d 'un accueil qui a surpasse leurs esperances, proposent une troisieme souscription aux memes conditions que les precedentes. Au moyen d 'un plus grand nombre de presses qu 'on fera monter, ceux qui voudront souscrire auront l 'ouvrage complet en meme temps que les premiers souscrip teurs ... La souscription est ouverte jusques au premier mars, et la premiere livraison se fera en mai 1778. On peut souscrire chez les principaux libraires de chaque ville.11 9. Duplain to STN, Sept. 30, 1777. 10. The agent, Merlino de Giverdy, told Panckoucke in November that there might be enough subscriptions for a third edition within three months. Panckoucke passed this news on to Neuchatel with a jubli!ant remark of the kind that now filled all his letters about the quarto: "C'est un succes incroyable'' (Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 8, 1777). 11. Duplain to STN, Jan. 16, 1778. The text is missing from Duplain 's letter and is quoted from the Gazette de Leyde of Feb. 6, 17'18, where the STN had it printed. 101 The Business of Enlightenment Duplain took this step without consulting his associates. Because he administered the subscriptions, he alone knew how feasible a new edition would be, and he dominated the administration of the quarto so completely that he often made such policy decisions by himself. This tendency worried the Neuchatelois, who had reason to hesitate before plunging into a new speculation on the quarto because they wanted to avoid further postponements of the revised edition, they knew Duplain too well to trust him, and they considered the third edition too important to be left completely in his control. They therefore filled their letters with anxious queries: Had Duplain informed Panckoucke of his decision to make a trial announcement? Was there any sign that the subscription rate had slackened? Did Panckoucke realize that Duplain was drawing them into a major recommitment of capital? They no longer doubted the success of the quarto-'' une chose fort extraordinaire' '-but they worried that success itself might overexcite Duplain 's appetite for gain at their own expense. ''Nous voyons clairement que plus l 'entreprise prospere et plus il est jaloux de la part que nous y avons, '' they confided to Panckoucke. Panckoucke remained unperturbably optimistic. He wanted to subordinate everything, including the revised edition, to the exploitation of the quarto's sensational selling power. The STN deferred to his judgment, '' connaissant combien vous etes expert en ces sortes d 'aff aires,'' but pressed him on two points: first, the preparations for the revised edition should continue unabated, so that they could issue a prospectus for it at the end of the year (to issue one earlier might spoil the sales of the third quarto edition); and second, they should make sure that the size of the third edition not exceed the number of subscriptions. The prospective size of the edition proved to be a sticky point because Duplain resisted the STN's attempts to know what it would be. This information mattered to the N euchatelois be cause they sought to increase their share of the printing. Not only did they want to get new volumes from the third edition to print, but they also hoped to increase the pressrun on the old ones. They could earn far more by producing 8,000 12. STN to Panckoucke, Jan. 25 and 29, 1778. 13. STN to Panckoucke, Feb. 22, 1778. 102 Juggling Editions copies of a volume for all three editions than 6,000 for two. But Duplain had committed himself only to giving the STN three volumes to print at the prescribed rate (see the contract of May 28, 1777, in Appendix A. IX). He could gain more by contracting the work at lower rates to other printers. These and other issues would have to be resolved by the contract for the third edition, if in fact the edition were to take place. Meanwhile, Duplain and the STN played a curious game of probing and parrying in their correspondence: the STN kept trying to pry information and commitments out of him and he replied with elliptical or evasive remarks. Imbroglios On March 4, 1778, three days after the deadline for the third subscription had expired, the STN wrote to ask whether the public's response had been sufficient to go ahead with the printing and remarked casually that it expected to produce the same volumes for the third edition as for the first two. Instead of giving a straight answer, Duplain wrote that some customers who had recently subscribed through the STN would have to wait for the third edition to be served. Indirect as it was, his reply indicated that he had decided to proceed with the third edition, but what was to be its sizef At the end of March, the STN reminded Duplain that it needed to know what its work load would be in order to make advance plans for its printing operations. It had heard a rumor, it added, that he was now having some volumes run off at 15 reams (7,500 copies). That was an oblique way of sounding Duplain on his strategy: Had he set the size of the third edition at 1,500 or 2,000 copies f And would he have the text recomposed for it or would he print the remaining volumes of all three editions together at a pressrun of 7,500 or 8,000f Duplain seemed to give a forthright answer on April 5: ''Nous mon tons douze presses qui seront uniquement employees a cette edition ... Nous avons pres de 500 souscripteurs sur 1500 que nous tirons. Nous ne ferons point augmenter le nombre de l 'autre edition. On recomposera jusqu 'a la fin.'' But the STN did not believe him because it had learned from secret informants that Duplain was printing entire volumes at 14. STN to Duplain, March 29, 1778. 103 The Business of Enlightenment 8,000 and because the letter that it had received from Duplain contradicted a letter that Panckoucke had received from him and had forwarded on to Neuchatel. The STN explained these inconsistencies to Panckoucke, concluding, '' Cette petite observation [a report from Lyons that Duplain was printing some volumes at 8,000] et d'autres que l'on pourrait [faire], nous vous le disons dans la confidence de l 'amitie, n 'inspirent pas une confiance entiere et exigent de votre part comme de la notre une attention bien entretenue.' '1 Was Duplain printing more copies than he would admit to his associates and raking off excessive profits from his man agement of the printing'? Those questions seemed particularly pressing in April 1778, when Duplain and Panckoucke made a first attempt to agree on a contract for the third edition. It is hard to know what happened in these negotiations, which were conducted by mail, because most of Panckoucke 's letters are missing from 1778. But Duplain evidently stressed the enormous increase and expense of his administrative tasks and asked to receive far more than the 8,000 livres in four annual installments provided by the Traite de Dijon. Panc koucke informed the STN that he was trying to hold Duplain to an increase of 16,000 livres, and the STN sent back a state ment of support: '' Vous avez sagemment repondu aux preten tious de Duplain. Votre offre nous parait equitable et son calcul enfte toujours a I 'extreme. II faut convenir qu 'il est charge d 'un rude detail, mais 16,000 livres font un dedom magement honnete pour quelqu 'un qui d 'ailleurs partage les benefices. Nous vous abandonnons confidemment la suite de cette negociation. " The STN also warned Panckoucke that Duplain might be cheating on the printing and took steps to investigate this matter itself. On April 8, it instructed Jacques Frarn;ois d'Arnal, a Lyonnais banker and son-in-law of Bos set, ''de vous informer sous main a combien d 'exemplaires Duplain et compagnie font tirer l 'Encyclopedie. '' The mis trust and intrigue had grown so thick that Duplains' partners actually spied on him in order to know how many copies he planned to print of the book that they were publishing to gether. On April 12, d 'Arnal reported, ''Nous avons su adroitement 15. STN to Panckoucke, April 9, 1778. 16. Ibid. 104 Juggling Editions par deux personnes differentes, qui sont bien instruites, que la nouvelle edition de l 'Encyclopedie in-quarto sera de 1500. '' Not very incriminating. But the Neuchatelois suspected that Duplain had set his pressrun at 2,000, perhaps with the inten tion of selling the extra copies on the sly. They therefore kept d 'Arnal 's report to themselves and tried to draw Du plain into exposing his true design by keeping up a friendly exchange of letters with him throughout the spring of 1778. In one particularly amicable letter, they said that they had just received some good news from Panckoucke : the third edition was to be printed at 2,000, and the subscription rate was strong enough to justify an even larger pressrun. They assumed, of course, that Duplain would favor the obvious, budget-cutting device of printing the remaining volumes at 8,000, while pretending that the third edition had been reset, as promised in their sales campaign.17 Duplain felt that such matters belonged strictly to his domain and would not be provoked into making any revela tions about them. The Traite de Dijon only required him to give account to Panckoucke. Their contractual relationship excluded the Neuchatelois, who were Panckoucke's associates, not Duplain 's. Duplain knew they were hungry for the com missions that he was providing to other printers, who lined his pockets by doing the work for far less than the rate set by the contracts for the first two editions. If he gave more printing to the Neuchatelois, he would have to pay them at the official rate. And as subassociates, they might pry into his manage ment of the enterprise. So he tried to keep them in the dark; and instead of giving them grounds for feeling hopeful about the prospects for the third edition, he sent them a terse and gloomy reply. Far from printing the third edition at 8,000, he wrote, he had not yet decided whether to print it at all. He had received only 500 subscriptions, mainly because of Panc koucke 's failure to tap the rich Parisian market. Duplain himself was making every possible effort to drum up sales. He had sent a circular letter to a great many bookdealers and would wait for their response before deciding on the fate of the third edition. This reply sounded suspicious to the N euchatelois. They hid 17. STN to Duplain, April 15, 1778. 18. Duplain to STN, April 21, 1778. 105 The Business of Enlightenment their doubts in their next letter to Duplain, while venting them to Panckoucke. A short time ago Duplain had claimed that the third subscription was a sure sellout, they observed to Panc koucke. Now he doubted that it would produce enough to warrant an increase in the printing. Why had he changed his tone so completely 1 The N euchatelois could guess at the an swer to that disturbing question, but they would conceal their suspicions from Duplain and would insist on a close inspec tion of his accounts. They now appreciated the importance of articles 13 and 14 of the Traite de Dijon, which bound Du plain to give a report on the subscriptions and bookkeeping; and they rejoiced at Panckoucke 's announcement that he would come to Lyons to examine Duplain 's accounts in per son. They agreed with Panckoucke's suggestion that they postpone the revised edition in order to concentrate exclu sively on the quarto. Once they had drained all the profits out of it and had closed their accounts with Duplain, they could proceed with other projects, which they could prepare behind Duplain 's back. The relations among the quarto associates had become so conspiratorial that only an external threat prevented an internal rift. They had to drop everything in May 1778 in or der to conduct emergency negotiations with other publishers who were attempting to cut into their market with other Encyclopedies. On June 22, Panckoucke aligned the quarto group with a consortium from Liege, which had begun to produce an Encyclopedie arranged by subject matter instead of by alphabet. This project ultimately developed into the Encyclopedie methodique and put an end to the plans for a revised edition. On June 24, Duplain bought out a Lyonnais group that had begun to produce a pirated quarto edition. And throughout the summer of 1778 the STN was attempting to settle a trade war with the societes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern, who were marketing an octavo Encyclo pedie. These crises made it necessary for the quarto publish ers to suspend their negotiations on a contract for the third edition. But they could not afford any delay in the printing of the third edition. On the contrary, they needed to get their quartos on the market before their competitors could spoil it. Sub- 19. STN to Panekoucke, May 3, 1778, and STN to Duplain, May 2, 1778. 106 Juggling Editions scribers were wary of putting money on books that did not yet exist. They might switch to a second, more attractive subscription, if their money had not been collected for the first. The quarto subscribers were to pay for each volume after they received it, and their payments were to finance the printing of the later volumes. Duplain therefore accelerated his production schedule to an almost unbearable speed. He set presses to work in Lyons, Grenoble, and Trevoux as well as Geneva and Neuchatel. He had the printed sheets assembled into volumes and stored in Lyons. He arranged for their transportation over thousands of miles of complicated routes. And he tried to keep track of the subscriptions and collec tions, while keeping the accounts in order, disentangling snarls, and undoing errors. The problems of administering such a complex operation strained Duplain 's temper and his relations with his partners to the breaking point. After receiving a badly printed volume from the STN in January, he exploded in a fit of uncontrol lable rage. Two weeks later he was still angry enough to tell his partners what he thought of them in the following terms : "Vous faites mal un volume et M. Panckoucke ecrit a tous nos souscripteurs qu 'il faut que nous accordions plus de terme. En un mot, nous travaillons jour et nuit pour la reus site de l 'affaire, et il semble, Messieurs, que vous f assiez tout ce que vous pouvez pour la detruire. Lorsque nous aurons amoncele par des credits des dettes en province, qui nous payera T La majeure partie n 'en vaut rien. Voila ou conduisent les discours de M. Panckoucke. Nous vous dirons en passant que nous avons plus de 50,000 ecus dehors et que cela a de quoi effrayer et faire de terribles reflexions. J oignez a cela un travail affreux et continue!, et voyez comment vous auriez envisage un <liable de volume qui en verite est affreux, quoique vous en disiez." The pressure on Duplain further complicated the situation in which the third edition came into being. While his as sociates secretly spied on him, he raged against them for making him bear almost the entire burden of the enterprise. Their unwillingness to ease the financial strain made him especially angry. He had delivered the books faster than the subscribers could pay for them. Most of the subscribers were 20. Duplain to STN, Feb. 9, 1778. 107 The Business of Enlightenment booksellers who had sold dozens of sets and needed time to collect the money from their customers. But Duplain had to advance enormous sums for the paper and printing. When his receipts did not even approach his expenses, he began to feel desperate: thus his '' terribles reflexions'' at the thought of 50,000 ecus outstanding and his fury at Panckoucke 's willingness to give the booksellers more time to make their payments. got some relief from the financial pressure by de Duplain laying the payment of his own bills, especially those he owed STN for its share of the printing. By mid-June the to the STN had printed volumes 6 and 15 of the first two editions and had begun work on volume 24. Each volume cost it thousands of livres to produce; and after it finished each one, it billed Duplain according to the rates fixed in the Traite de and the subsequent contracts. This billing took place Dijon usual manner of eighteenth-century commerce: the in the STN sent a statement of its charges to Duplain and then normally wrote bills of exchange on him made out to its own creditors or to d 'Arnal, who handled its financial affairs in D'Arnal was continually paying out large sums on Lyons. STN's behalf, mainly for paper. He therefore needed to the its notes on Duplain in order to keep its account out of cash the red. But when those notes became due, Duplain refused to pay them, arguing that his own debtors-the booksellers had subscribed for the quarto-had failed to pay him on who and he therefore should be able to delay his payments to time the STN. As associates in the enterprise, the Neuchatelois ought to carry their share of its financial difficulties, he main tained. They retorted that as printers they had to be paid. did the laws of commerce entitle them to their wages Not only hut also they could not be expected to advance their own capital for their own work without receiving some of the that must surely be flowing to Duplain from the sub money This quarrel broke out in June 1778, just when the scribers. quarto group's negotiations with the rival Encyclopedie publisher had reached their most critical phase, and it con intermittently throughout the rest of the year. tinued At the same time, Duplain and the STN sparred over the 21. This account of the STN 's disputes with Duplain is based on d 'Arnal 's thick dossier in the STN papers as well as on the correspondence between the STN and Duplain. 108 Juggling Editions printing of the third edition. Duplain knew that the Neu chatelois needed to print more volumes if they were to avoid firing workers and dismantling their huge shop. He therefore played on this need in order to postpone the payment of his debt. On June 2, he asked the STN to extend the maturation date of some bills of exchange which were then due by three months. And to show that he could be tractable on his end, he stopped evading its demands for information about the third edition: "La troisieme edition est commencee, et nous l 'avons donnee exclusivement a deux imprimeurs qui ont monte 18 presses, se sont engages a trois epreuves de chaque f euille, et nous voulons faire une belle edition afin que s 'il reste quelques exemplaires, ils ne soient pas a charge. On tire trois rames dix mains (that is, 1,750 copies)." So Duplain had begun to print a quite large edition, and he might well exclude the STN from it. Duplain let the N euchatelois make that last reflection them selves, expecting them to become more flexible about the pay ment of their bills. They reacted by firing off an urgent letter to Panckoucke. They had eleven presses to keep occupied, they lamented; yet Duplain was attempting to cut them out of the printing of the third edition, and in doing so he was violating his contractual obligation to give them three volumes. To be sure, they had received three volumes for the first two editions, but they were also entitled to three volumes of the third, as could be proved by a logical extension of the Traite de Dijon. They would settle, however, for a fourth volume to print, hopefully at 8,000. They urged Panckoucke to press this demand on Duplain and also to come to Lyons to check his accounts because '' il doit lui avoir passe de fortes sommes par les mains.'' They were worried about how Duplain had handled this money, and they also felt perplexed about a discrepancy between the last letters they had received from Duplain and Panckoucke. Panckoucke 's letter reported that he and Duplain had agreed to simplify the marketing of the third edition by taking 500 sets apiece and selling them in their own territories. That agreement seemed to imply that the edition would consist of 1,000 sets, but Duplain 's letter spoke of 1, 750 sets. Moreover, d 'Arnal 's report set the press run at 1,500. The Neuchatelois still did not know what to be lieve about the mysterious third edition. But it was now clear 109 The Business of Enlightenment that the disputes over its financing and its printing had become interlocked, stalling the settlement of the contract, even though Duplain 's men had begun setting type and print ing sheets at a pressrun somewhere between 1,000 and 1,750. While the STN tried to get Panckoucke to apply pressure on Duplain, Duplain continued to suffer from the strain on his finances. "Nous avons bien eu l 'honneur de vous observer que I 'argent est ici d 'une rarete affreuse, que nos libraires demandent du temps, et qu 'enfin nous ne pouvons pas en faire sortir des pierres," he wrote to the STN on June 9. "Le train que nous menons l 'ouvrage exige une mise dehors a laquelle nous ne comptions point.'' He simply could not meet his June payments to the STN. But he could retreat from his adamant stand on the printing-a stand that he had probably taken, in any case, in order to improve his bargaining position on the financial question. The STN showed its willingness to play this game with him by instructing d'Arnal to grant Du plain a delay on his payments in exchange for obtaining a fourth volume. The bargain worked perfectly, d'Arnal re ported, despite Duplain 's reluctance to sacrifice any of his profitable business as a middleman. In essence, therefore, Duplain bartered a loss in his rake-offs on the printing for impunity in failing to pay his bills on time. But he snapped up d'Arnal's proposal too quickly. The STN interpreted this alacrity as a sign of weakness and an swered d 'Arnal with instructions to raise its bid to three volumes of the third edition. It then wrote directly to Duplain, saying that it was glad to help him with his financial difficul ties and that it would soon send him some ''remonstrances'' that would explain its case for the printing of the third edi tion. Meanwhile it would like to do a fourth volume for the first two editions. It had plenty of paper and workers ready for the job. This tactic backfired. Duplain told d 'Arnal that after reconsidering the question, he thought the STN had enough work to keep it busy without anything from the third edition. And in his letters to the STN he merely continued to insist on the need to postpone the payment of his bills. The STN then had to fall back on a strategy of dunning. In late June it warned Duplain that he had accumulated 16,980 livres in debts, that it would insist on being paid, and that it 22. STN to Panckoucke, June 7, 1778. 110 Juggling Editions would charge interest for any delay. In early July, Duplain refused to honor two bills of exchange worth 2,019 livres. The STN then put him on notice that d'Arnal would present the bills once more and that it could no longer accept any postponement of their payment. The quarto associates had reached the brink of a schism, and they still had not settled on a contract for the third edition. The Neuchatel Imprint The STN considered the situation so serious that it sent its most trusted agent, J ean-Frarn;ois Favarger, on a special mis sion to Lyons. Actually, Favarger was to make a complete tour de France, selling Encyclopedies and other books and settling accounts with bookdealers throughout the country. But the most important purpose of his journey was to do some general reconnoitering in Lyons without letting Du plain realize it. By appearing as a traveling salesman, Fa varger might be able to discover Duplain 's true motives and intentions, for by now the STN's relations with Duplain had become so entangled in bidding and bluffing that the Neu chatelois no longer knew what his game was. They therefore planned Favarger 's interview with Duplain in minute detail and even wrote a scenario for it in Favarger 's diary. Fa varger consulted the instructions that Ostervald and Bosset wrote in his diary before meeting with the STN's customers along his route, and he recorded the results of each meeting afterward. Most of the entries consisted of a few phrases, but in Duplain 's case, the instructions ran on for two-and-a half pages and contained remarks such as the following: Voir M. Duplain et tacher de savoir, mais sans temoigner trop de curiosite, a quoi on en est pour l 'impression des volumes de l 'Encyclo pedic quarto, combien de presses y travaillent a Lyon OU ailleurs; si l 'on a commence la troisieme edition, a combien on la tire . . . Vous ecouterez attentivement tout ce que M. J. D. [Joseph Du plain] pourra vous dire touchant notre Encyclopedic, et vous eviterez de faire aucune ouverture . . . Vous parlerez a J.D. du desir que nous avons d'imprimer encore un volume a 6,000. Vous le prierez de nous en ecrire. Vous lui direz 23. The most important in this exchange of letters are d 'Arnal to STN, June 12; STN to d'Arnal, June 17; STN to Duplain, June 24; STN to Duplain, July 8; and STN to d 'Arnal. July 8, 1778. 111 The Business of Enlightenment qu 'il y a beaucoup d 'apparence qu 'aucun des volumes n 'est corrige avec plus de soin et par des gens plus instruits, qu 'on donne toute I 'attention possible a I 'execution, que notre imprimerie est mieux montee a tous egards qu 'aucune de celles qu 'on emploie a cette en treprise, que nous avons fort papiers superieurs en beaute a ceux de Lyon, que nous avons monte notre fabrique expres pour reimprimer l'in-folio que son edition in-quarto a retardee, qu 'il est done juste que nous soyons indemnises de quelque maniere. S 'il est impossible d 'obtenir de lui un volume a 6,000, dites que nous avons droit par le traite d 'imprimer trois volumes a 2,000 [that is, of the third edition] et que nous esperons que cet article ne souffrira aucune difficulte . . . NB Vous nous rendrez compte en detail de ce que vous aurez fait a cet egard. If he played his part skillfully, Favarger might win the STN 's case for an increase in its printing allotment. But he was also to snoop around Duplain 's shop, to collaborate with d'Arnal and the abbe La Serre, and to sound the other Lyon nais dealers in order to discover what Duplain 's general Encyclopedie policy really was. Favarger arrived in Lyons on July 13 or 14, just in time for some last-minute instructions from his home office. The STN warned him that Duplain had recently refused to honor its two bills of exchange and had def ended his conduct with spe cious arguments, which it refuted point by point so that Favarger could confound him in their discussions. It con with an exhortation: '' Relisez bien toutes vos notes cluded pour Lyon avant de faire aucune visite afin d 'avoir balle en bouche en traitant. '' One can imagine Favarger 's reaction, as he sat in his inn, rereading his instructions, rehearsing his and fortifying himself for the confrontation with Du lines, But when the great moment came, he found his man plain. surprisingly a ff able. Duplain talked business for hours with apparent openness and sincerity, though he did not reveal anything about the higher diplomacy of his operations. Fa varger held firmly to his appointed role throughout the flood of words, though it was not easy: '' je ... me suis conforme, Dieu merci, en tous points a vos instructions, ce qui n 'est pas aise avec lui quand l'on yest aussi longtemps." And he sent a happy report back to Neuchatel: Duplain was printing the 24. Favarger 's diary, labeled ''Instructions et renseignements pour J. F. Favarger,'' is in the STN papers, ms. 1059. 25. STN to Favarger, July 11, 1778. 112 Juggling Editions third edition at 4 reams 15 quires (2,375 copies); he would give the STN a fourth volume to print for the first two edi tions (that is, at 6,150) and three volumes for the third; and he would pay the next set of bills when they became due in August. Duplain stated frankly that he made 1,500 livres for every volume that he had printed in Lyons instead of in Neuchatel, but he had recovered from his fits of temper and wanted to maintain good relations with the STN. He justified his refusal to pay its bills for the printing of volume 15 in June by explaining that the STN's shipment of that volume had arrived late, making it impossible for him to collect from the subscribers in time to make his own payments. He ex pected the STN to come to his aid in difficult moments because it was a partner as well as a printer. Moreover, specie had been unusually scarce in Lyons, and he thought that as Bosset 's son-in-law, d 'Amal ought to agree to a three-month delay in the payment of the bills of exchange. All this sounded disconcertingly reasonable to Favarger. Duplain seemed to be charming and to have conceded the most contested points without a struggle. But what had caused this abrupt change of behavior on his part ? In his report, Favarger mentioned that Duplain "m'a dit vous avoir ecrit pour permettre que cette troisieme edition parut sous votre nom, que cela lui donnerait plus de relief." This letter arrived in Neuchatel just in time to take the pres sure off Favarger 's encounter with Duplain in Lyons because it was Duplain 's way of replying to the STN 's intransigent demand that he pay his bills: "Nous nous sommes determines a reimprimer la troisieme edition a 4 rames 15 mains,'' Duplain wrote ''Elle est sous presse, et nous esperons delivrer deux a trois volumes en aout. Comme nous voulons que cette edition ( entre nous soit dit) soit superieure a l 'autre pour !'execution, la correction etc. afin que s 'il en reste quelques exemplaires ils ne nous soient pas a charge, nous avons pense que pour qu 'elle se distinguat, elle parut sous un autre nom. Nous vous prions en consequence de nous permettre de nous servir du votre. Vons para!trez avoir achete de Pellet etc. Envoyez-nous a cet egard votre consentement s.v.p. " After 26. Favarger to STN, July 15, 1778. 27. Duplain to STN, July 10, 1778. This letter was a reply to a Jetter from the STN of July 8, which was virtually an ultimatum on the payment of Duplain 's bill. 113 The Business of Enlightenment waiting three days for this attractive offer to sink in, Duplain sent another plea for the STN to delay the collection of its two bills of exchange until August. This gambit succeeded. The STN replied that it would extend the debt and that it would gladly lend its name to the new edition, for which it expected to print "plusieurs volumes. " So when Favarger walked into Duplain 's shop girded for battle, the quarrel was being settled above his head. And soon after their anti climactic confrontation, Duplain handed him a freshly printed prospectus which announced that the STN was sponsoring the third edition. So it was that the third edition came to appear under the STN imprint. But Duplain was moved by more than a desire to make peace with one of his creditors. As his letters to the STN indicated, the first two editions had received a bad name, owing to sloppy printing and poor quality paper. By changing the typographical false front from ''a Geneve chez Pellet'' to ''a Neuchatel chez la Societe typographique,'' he could attract more subscriptions. He could also get relief from another of the typographical troubles that had plagued the quarto throughout the first year of its existence. When Duplain first offered the quarto for sale, he committed himself to provide the entire text of the original edition and the Supplement for a retail price of 344 livres-10 livres for each of the twenty-nine volumes of text and 18 livres for each of the three volumes of plates. The foreman of a printing shop had advised him that the twenty-nine folio volumes of the original text and the Supplement would come to twenty-nine volumes in quarto format. Soon after the printing had begun, however, this estimate proved to be far too low. The text of the quarto eventually ran to thirty-six unusually thick vol umes. Could Duplain expect his subscribers to pay 70 livres more than the contracted price in order to get the text that they had been promised~ Panckoucke thought not: ''Le public a souscrit pour 32 volumes [that is, twenty-nine volumes of text and three of plates]. Si l'ouvrage en avait un plus grand nombre, je ne sais trop comment on pourrait les lui faire payer. ' To make matters worse, Linguet had spotted this mistake and had proclaimed it to be a swindle in his widely 28. STN to Duplain, July 15, 1778. 29. Favarger to STN, July 23, 1778. 30. Panekoucke to STN, June 26, 1777. 114 Juggling Editions read Annales. So Duplain could expect to stir up a storm of protests and even lawsuits if he raised the price or cut the text. He eventually muddled through this dilemma by levying a charge on only four of the seven extra volumes. In this way he fraudently raised the retail price to 384 livres-just enough to pay for the additional printing without producing an up roar among his customers. This was a risky policy, which Duplain tried to foist on the public without being detected. Therefore, when he announced the second edition, he avoided mentioning the number of volumes and the total price, and he merely said that it would be sold on the same terms as the first. This crisis had passed by the time Duplain decided to launch the third edition. He therefore tried to protect himself by changing the terms of the subscription and by attributing it to the STN rather than to Pellet. The new subscribers would not be able to hold him to the promises that he had broken in dealing with the old ones, and the new quarto would appear as if it were the old one under new management. For these reasons, the prospectus that Duplain gave to Favarger announced '' une troisieme edition de l 'Encyclopedie, qui contiendra 36 volumes in-4 ° a deux colonnes, proposee par souscription chez la Societe Typo gra phique de Neuchatel." It did not explain how the STN had come to replace Pellet as the publisher of the quarto. Innocent readers might even conclude that the STN was pi rating him, for the prospectus gave no indication that Duplain was behind both enterprises, switching his straw men. Only an astute observer would notice the crucial difference between this quarto and the others: this one was explicitly offered as a thirty-six volume set (plus three volumes of plates) costing 384 livres. Duplain even promised that if the new edition should contain more than thirty-six volumes, they would be provided free of charge. Actually, he had freed himself from the obligation to fit the whole work into twenty-nine of them. The ''Neuchatel'' edition therefore represented a clever attempt to cover up a foolish mistake in marketing-an effort to obscure one fraud by perpetrating another, although ''fraud'' is too strong a term for the common eighteenth century practice of publishing books under false imprints. 31. Favarger included a manuscript text of the prospectus in a letter to the STN of July 23, 1778. 115 The Business of Enlightenment This strategy pleased the N euchatelois because it seemed to assure them of getting at least three new volumes to print. They told Duplain that they were delighted with his pro spectus, which they reprinted and circulated among their cor respondents. By this time Duplain and Panckoucke had also made peace with the publishers of the rival Encyclopedies. So at last the way seemed to be clear for a settlement of the quarto contract. Opening Gambits of the Final Negotiations The external and internal problems of the quarto had forced Panckoucke and Duplain to suspend their initial con tract negotiations in April. When they resumed their bargain ing in July, the situation had been transformed: the agree ment with the consortium from Liege had forced Panckoucke to scuttle the plan for the revised edition, and the STN 's quarrel with Duplain had raised suspicions about his handling of the third edition. He had actually produced a portion of that edition by July, so it was too late to prevent him from arranging the production so that he could siphon off thou sands of livres by exploiting his role as middleman and man ager. Panckoucke could only hope to hold him in check by insisting on a strict contract. The final round of negotiations therefore proved to be even tougher and more complicated than its predecessors. Originally, Panckoucke favored a conciliatory strategy. He phrased an early draft of the contract to make it seem as though he were rewarding Duplain for his successful stewardship by giving him a free half interest in the full "privilege, droits et totalite des cuivres" of the Encyclopedie. The Traite de Dijon had limited Duplain 's half interest to the speculation on the quarto. By extending their partnership to all other Encyclopedie projects, Panckoucke apparently hoped to win concessions from Duplain in the bargaining over the contract for the third edition. And to make the prospect tempting, his draft proposal specified that one future project would be a quarto edition of all the original illustrations-a clever idea, as Panckoucke was convinced that many of the quarto subscribers wanted the entire collection of plates, rather than three volumes of them, in order to make their sets of the Encyclopedie as complete as possible. Nothing would 116 Juggling Editions be easier than to satisfy this ready-made market, for Panc and the STN owned all the original plates, which koucke in some cases reduced in scale, and then could be retouched, of copies ordered-at an enor used to produce the number of effort. Panckoucke con mous profit, with a minimum sidered this gambit seriously enough to submit it to the STN for approval in late April. But it seems very unlikely that he tried it out on Duplain, for by May the success of the ever third edition had become clouded by Duplain 's quarrel with STN and the threat of the rival Encyclopedies. By July, the when those difficulties had subsided, it no longer seemed appropriate to reward Duplain for anything. Panckoucke had dropped his plan for a supplementary edition of the plates in order to pursue other quarry, and he was ready to do some hard bargaining on the third edition. The bargaining reopened with an exchange of letters between Duplain and Panckoucke. As the contracting parties of the Traite de Dijon, they handled the contract negotiations for the third edition, but they consulted their own associates, principally the STN in Panckoucke's case and Merlino de Giverdy in Duplain 's. Most of the surviving documents come from the Panckoucke-STN consultations, so one must follow the negotiations from the perspective of Neuchatel, which was biased but broad enough to afford an excellent view of the contest. On July 7, Panckoucke sent to the STN a draft contract he had received from Duplain and his own point-by-point com mentary on it. A week later, the STN replied in kind. These three documents therefore show how the issues appeared at all three points of the Lyon-Paris-Neuchatel triangle. First, Duplain set the edition at 3 reams 16 quires or 1,900 copies and asked to receive 38 livres for every sheet printed at that rate as well as 10 livres for every ream of paper used. Was he putting his costs too high in order to rake off the difference between the expenses allotted him and his actual expenditure? Panckoucke addressed the question squarely and answered it with a "no." Duplain was only ask ing for a slight increase over the rates set by the Traite de Di jon. He should be granted it; "il ne faut pas chicaner." Pane- 32. Panckoucke 's draft proposal, in his handwriting, is in the STN papers, ms. 1233, entitled ''Addition a I' Acte du quatorze janvier mil sept cent soixante et dix-sept." 117 The Business of Enlightenment koucke, who liked to do business in a grand manner without quibbling over small sums, was actually treating Duplain gen erously, for the increase, which seemed small enough when measured by the ream, came to about 8,190 livres in all-the equivalent of at least eleven years wages for a Swiss printer, though somewhat less than 1 percent of the anticipated reve nue of the third edition. The Neuchatelois agreed that Duplain deserved this in crease in the allotted costs, especially for paper, whose price had risen rapidly in response to the demand created by the quarto. They objected only to Duplain's phrasing of this clause because it gave him complete control over the choice of the printers without obligating him to give any volumes to the STN. They therefore asked Panckoucke to get Duplain to reserve at least three volumes for their presses. But they had no other criticism of Duplain 's proposals on pricing. Like Panckoucke, they assumed that he would commission the work at cheaper rates than he received from the quarto Association and that he would pocket the difference. They seemed to consider the money he would make in this manner as legitimate remuneration for his activities as middleman, provided it were kept within bounds by the rates set in the contract. Far from hiding this source of income, Duplain had told Favarger openly that it brought in 1,500 livres per vol- 33. In his ''Observations sur l 'Acte de M. Duplain,'' which he sent with Duplain's draft in his letter to the STN of July 7, 1778, Panckoucke explained his calculations as follows: ''Le prix de 38 livres pour 3 rames 16 mains est con forme a I' Acte de Dijon-30 livres le premier mil, 8 livres le deuxieme. II n 'y a que 4 mains de difference ... Dix livres le pa pier; ii est tres recherche, et ils ne gagnent pas cinq sols a ce prix. '' To follow his reasoning, one should remember that eighteenth-century publishers commonly thought in reams rather than num bers of copies. Duplain wanted to print each sheet 1,900 times for the equivalent of what it would have cost at a pressrun of 2,000, according to the rate set by the Traite de Dijon. The difference of 100 sheets or 4 quires in the printing of each sheet of the text came to 16 sous or 104 livres per volume (the volumes normally contained about 130 sheets) or 3,744 livres for the entire printing. The cost of increasing the paper allotment by 5 sous per ream can be calculated thus: since there were about 130 sheets per volume and each sheet was to be printed 1,900 times, each volume would contain 247,000 sheets or 494 reams, and the entire printing of all the thirty-six-volume sets would contain 17,784 reams. At an addi tional 5 sous per ream, the increase in the paper costs would therefore come to 4,446 livres. The costs were ultimately higher because Duplain later increased the printing by another ream per sheet. But these calculations illustrate the way eighteenth-century publishers reason~d, beginning always with standard costs per sheet of text or feuille d 'edition. 118 Juggling Editions ume for him. What would be condemned as rake-offs today passed as a normal business practice among eighteenth-cen tury entrepreneurs, who had to cope with manufacturing tech niques that belonged somewhere in the middle of the evolutionary scale between the putting out system and the factory. Panckoucke and the STN also went along with Duplain 's demand for a reviseur who would correct the copy for the third edition for 1,000 livres a year. But they balked at a long, complex clause of his draft, which seemed to give him unlimited opportunities to exaggerate his costs at their expense. The clause read: ''Et moi C. Panckoucke consens ... qu'ils [Joseph Duplain & Compagnie] en feront faire I 'impression a Geneve et dans les diff erentes villes de la Suisse a leur choix; et dans les cas OU ils imprimeraient quelques volumes en France, ils seront expedies a Geneve pour y etre mis dans un magasin commun; dans le cas ou ils s 'y refusassent, les risques en saisie du gouvernement seraient pour leur compte, comme dans nos conventions pre mieres, a la charge par nous d 'acquitter les frais; qu 'il leur sera rembourse les frais qu 'ils feront hors ceux compris dans les frais d 'impression, comme sechage et etendage seulement, les autres debourses, comme commis, magasin, ports de lettres et tous autres relatifs, leur seront rembourses.' ' Duplain 's phrasing implied that he could print, store, and distribute the volumes from Lyons, running the risk of con fiscation by the government and charging the Association for what it would have cost him to have the volumes transported from Lyons to Geneva and stored there before distribution. He also seemed to ask for a blank check to cover his operat ing expenses. Panckoucke countered this proposal with the suggestion that Duplain receive, for all of his expenses, the fixed sum of 16,000 livres, or twice the amount provided by the Traite de Dijon (2,000 livres a year for four years). This sum seemed sufficient to Panckoucke because the output of quartos 34. Favarger to STN, July 15, 1778: "Il me dit qu'il y avait environ 1500 livres a gagner pour lui de faire imprimer ici plutot que chez nous.'' For its printing, the STN was paid according to the contract price rather than the price Duplain paid his other printers. 35. '' Copie du pro jet d 'Acte propose par M. Duplain pour la troisieme im pression" dated July 1, 1778 and sent by Panckoucke to the STN in his letter of July 7, 1778. 119 The Business of Enlightenment had doubled since the signing of the Traite. He explained his in some confidential remarks to the STN: "Vous reasoning savez les pretentions excessives de Duplain sur ces frais de II faut bien prendre garde de nous laisser magasin, commis. entamer a ce sujet. Ecrivez moi de la maniere la plus f erme et j 'enverrai cette partie de votre lettre a Lyon.' ' la-dessus, Duel by Lettre Ostensible The STN complied with a letter that reproduced Panc koucke 's arguments exactly and also pushed its claim to print at least three volumes. Publishers frequently used such fake letters-lettres ostensibles they called them-as weapons in their bargaining with each other and with the French authorities. The STN had written one for Duplain in 1775, and Duplain now parried Panckoucke 's maneuver by using a variant of the same technique. On July 19 he wrote a letter to his own associate, Merlino de Giverdy, who submitted it to Panckoucke as evidence for Duplain 's argument on the ques tion of expenses. Merlino was then negotiating in Duplain 's name with Panckoucke in Paris ; and the letter certainly strengthened his hand, for it def ended Duplain 's position with extraordinary vehemence. Duplain made it seem as though his backers in Lyons were exerting pressure on him to resist Panckoucke 's terms and that he also had to fight off a far more intimidating pressure group, the local clergy. To be sure, he said, Panckoucke had received a permission to market the Encyclopedie, but the permission said nothing about printing it in France. Panc koucke knew full well that Duplain ran enormous risks by doing part of the printing in Lyons. Duplain had had to guarantee his Lyonnais printers against any loss that might be incurred if the authorities cracked down on them. He had set up secret warehouses to store the volumes and had hired agents to ship them out secretly by night. He had even had to take measures to appease the clergy, "ce corps redoutable qui commern;ait a gronder." All of those operations cost money, a great deal of it; yet the quarto Association was providing him only 2,000 livres a year for expenses. Very well, he had found a way to cut his expenses, by printing in 36. Panckoucke, "Observations" in his letter to the STN of July 7, 1778. 120 Juggling Editions Lyons instead of Geneva. But he expected compensation for running the risks that were necessary to make those savings. He wanted to be paid the amount it would have cost to have the volumes transported and stored in Geneva, even though they would really be distributed from Lyons. That sum would constitute a "droit d 'assurance," for Duplain was actually functioning as an insurer who assumed the risk of reimburs ing the injured parties should the merchandise be lost. Du plain was also a fighter, battling for the common good of the enterprise, while Panckoucke remained idle on the home front, complaining about costs. Panckoucke's attitude was infuriat ing, and Duplain was ready to do battle against him, too, if he did not agree to an equitable contract: '' Comme je ne suis pas . . . d 'humeur . . . a faire la guerre a mes depenses et que toutes ces lenteurs me font bouillir le sang, je te pre viens que si dans neuf jours je ne re~ois pas le traite signe, je me mets sur le champ en justice. Il est ridicule qu 'a pres les peines que je me donne, les succes merveilleux que je procure, on me conteste une chose juste et que certainement les tri bunaux ne me refuseront pas. " One can never be certain about Duplain 's motives, but his letter was probably a bluff. He tried to intimidate his associ ates several times with angry outbursts. His later letters suggest that he did not really fear the clergy, though he might claim to do so in order to extract concessions from Panc And he had no grounds for bringing his dispute with koucke. Panckoucke before a court. Panckoucke evidently read Du plain 's letter in this way and let the nine-day ultimatum expire without giving ground. He wrote to the STN that he stand by the Traite de Dijon-that is, he would set a would of 16,000 livres on Duplain 's expenses. The N euchatelois limit replied that they hoped he would settle with Duplain ''de maniere a nous garantir de toute tracasserie,'' and that he would insist on inspecting Duplain 's accounts "pour notre commune surete. '' Although they maintained a friendly tone in their letters to Duplain at this time, their distrust of him had grown so great that they now considered it crucial to force a tough contract on him in order to protect them from embezzlement. selves 37. Duplain to Merlino, July 19, 1778, from the copy kept by the STN in Duplain 's dossier. Duplain used the ''tu'' because Merlino was his cousin. 38. Panckoucke to STN, July 21, 1778, and STN to Panckoucke, July 28, 1778. 121 The Business of Enlightenment They had an opportunity to unbosom their worries in August, when Panckoucke made a quick trip to Switzerland. The ''Atlas of the book trade'' was carrying several specu lations besides the Encyclopedie in the summer of 1778. He acquired the Mercure, began selling off his stock of books, and laid plans to produce gigantic editions of the works of Rous seau and Voltaire, who had recently died within two months of each other, touching off terrific intrigues among the pub lishers specializing in Enlightenment. Panckoucke, who led in the intriguing, traveled to Switzerland in order to the field stake out a claim to the manuscripts of the two philosophes, and on his journey he stopped by Neuchatel to discuss the resulted Duplain negotiations with the STN. The discussions in an agreement on the terms to be demanded and in another lettre ostensible, in which the STN outlined those demands. On August 25 the N euchatelois sent the letter to Panc koucke, who had returned to Paris via Montbard, where he had discussed still more speculations with Buff on. They added a covering note that showed how closely they were coordinat ing their publishing policies : ''Nous vous envoyons par ce courrier, suivant nos conventions verbales, une lettre osten pour M. Duplain pour en faire usage suivant votre sible prudence ordinaire, et vous prions de nous informer du suivi, en meme temps que vous pourrez nous dire quelque positif sur les oeuvres de Voltaire, continuant toujours chose a nous occuper de celles de J. Jacques.'' By this time, Duplain had increased the size of the third edition by a ream, making it 4 reams 15 quires or 2,375 copies and raising once again the problem of how much to allot him for his printing costs. trivial matter, for Duplain was already skimming This was no 50,000 livres from the printing costs allocated for off about the first two editions, and he now was pressing Panckoucke and the STN to increase the rate that they had tentatively agreed upon for the third edition. At the same time, he clearly planned to print the new edition as cheaply as possible, for he was not only taking competing bids from the local printers but also had set up some presses of his own and was even asking the quarto Association to pay for them. In the lettre ostensible, the STN said it would go as high as 44 livres per sheet, though it thought 42 livres more reasonable. At the rate, Duplain would make 13,104 livres more than he higher would at the rate set by the Traite de Dijon. Since he was also 122 Juggling Editions to make another 4,446 livres from the increased allotment of 5 sous per ream on the paper, he would do very well by Panckoucke 's proposed contract, the STN wrote, phrasing its comments in order to make the desired effect on Duplain: "Nous devons rendre justice avec vous a l'habilete et a l'intelligence avec laquelle M. Duplain a traite cette affaire la des son commencement. Nous avons nous-memes ete temoins qu 'il s 'est donnees a Lyon pour les livrai de toutes les peines sons ; et s 'il a un benefice comme imprimeur qui ne laisse pas d'etre considerable sur la. quantite, il lui est bien acquis. Mais nous voyons, Monsieur, trop d'inconvenients a nous ecarter du Traite fait a Dijon pour les frais a allouer a M. Duplain; nous avons trop d 'envie en notre particulier de nous conserver son amitie et nos relations avec lui, pour ne pas devoir ecarter tout ce qui pourrait donner matiere a discussions tels que les frais de voyage, magasinage etc. '' Considering that the STN had virtually called Duplain a bandit in its confidential correspondence with Panckoucke, its lettre ostensible represented its true feelings about as ac curately as the diplomatic notes exchanged between sovereign states. It adopted a tone that would flatter Duplain without making any concessions to him. In fact, the STN was both more flattering and more intransigent than in its previous fake letter. It stated explicitly that it had no objection to Duplain 's making a profit from his role as middleman, but it would not give an inch in its refusal to let him set his own ceiling on his expenses. It dismissed his argument about run ning great risks with the comment that it would gladly set up twenty presses and print the whole work in Neuchatel if the danger from the authorities in Lyons were really so great. It also brought up the embarrassing issue of Duplain 's mis calculation on the number of volumes necessary to incorporate the entire folio text. A similar bevue had discredited Felice's Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, it complained, and it noted criti cally that Duplain had been forced by this mistake to pacify the subscribers and give away the fifteenth volume free. Yet he had not even informed his partners about this deviation from the policy agreed on by all of them in the Traite de Dijon. But the STN said it would not dwell on such unpleas ant matters, nor would it insist on "la somme considerable payee pour ces cuivres, privileges etc.'' que nous vous avons -a sum that had been spared Duplain. It merely wanted to 123 The Business of Enlightenment avoid future quarrels. So it would hold firm to its determina tion to have all Duplain 's expenses covered by explicit al lotments in the contract. In this way, harmony would continue to reign among the partners, and they could fully share in the glory of having produced "cette entreprise, qui est en effet la plus belle qui ait ete faite en librairie. '' The Last Turn of the Screw Whether or not he expected Duplain to be moved by such dulcet phrases, Panckoucke could produce them as evidence that his hands were tied: he could make no more concessions because his Neuchatel allies would.not stand for it. He and the STN evidently had agreed on this strategy in Neuchatel be cause on September 1 the STN wrote to him saying that it hoped he had arrived safely back in Paris, where he would find the lettre ostensible and its endorsement of a draft con tract with which he proposed to confront Duplain. They added that they would accept whatever arrangements Panc koucke should make and they had complete faith in his ability to overcome Duplain 's pretentions peu f ondees. Meanwhile, the STN kept up the amicable tone of the letters that it sent directly to Duplain. On August 26 it wrote dis ingenuously that it hoped he had settled his differences with Panckoucke, since it believed that Panckoucke, like the STN itself, wanted to make all possible concessions to his wishes; and it closed by expressing its own wish for the copy of the fourth volume Duplain had promised. A week earlier it had informed him that it was nearing the end of volume 24, its third; so its need for new work had become critical. At the same time, Duplain 's next set of payments were about to become due. On August 29, the STN notified him that his debt had mounted to 23,723 livres and that this time it expected its bills of exchange to be acquitted without any trouble. It was still waiting for its fourth volume, it added. Duplain replied that he only owed 2,957 livres and that he would not pay a penny more. He produced his own version of the STN 's printing account, which differed greatly from the version he had received from Neuchatel and seemed to provide pretexts for endless haggling. And he showed his determination to haggle rather than pay by arguing that the STN was com- 124 Juggling Editions mitted to finance all its purchases of paper and to go without reimbursement until it had delivered the last printed sheet of each volume to him in Lyons. To support this argument, Duplain cited an irrelevant passage from his agreement with the STN of May 28, 1777, and then said that the strain on his finances was so great that the STN should not expect to be paid in any case. The STN reacted with predictable fury. Duplain was re opening questions that they had settled in July, when the N euchatelois had agreed to extend his debt until the end of August and he had promised to let them print a fourth vol ume of the first two editions. Now he had produced another specious argument in order to hold back both the payment and the volume. The STN warned him that it could no longer make concessions on either issue, that failure to honor its bills of exchange would throw its finances into chaos, and that his conduct raised grave questions as to his motives. Duplain had made his motives clear enough in a letter of August 21: ''Nous sommes en difficulte avec M. Panckoucke pour nos frais. Des que cela sera termine, nous vous enverrons un volume." But the N euchatelois had ignored that remark, and so he repeated it in his answer to their protest. He would stick to his refusal, he wrote on September 15; and "quant au nouveau volume promis, nous attendons la reponse de M. Panckoucke sur un obj et qu 'il nous conteste, quoique promis, et duquel nous ne nous departerons point.'' Actually, the Neuchatelois had got the point long ago; and while Duplain intensified the pressure on them, they tried to get Panckoucke to relieve it. On September 15 they inquired anxiously about the negotiations, recounted their latest diffi culties with Duplain, and concluded, "En verite, Monsieur, procedes multiplies nous deviennent tres desagreables. de tels 'autant plus la necessite de regler compte Nous en sen tons d avec cet associe-la et aspirons a l 'epoque convenue entre nous pour travailler a cette importante operation.'' After another week had gone by without any word from Panckoucke about the negotiations, the Neuchatelois began to feel desperate and filled another letter to him with more urgent complaints about Duplain 's tactics, which they now described as extortion. He was holding back the money and the copy to force them to 39. Duplain to STN, Sept. 2, 1778. 40. STN to Duplain, Sept. 9, 1778. 125 The Business of Enlightenment grant better terms in the contract, they said. But vehement as they were in condemning his conduct, they virtually asked Panckoucke to give in to it. Someone had to bend, they ex plained, and the pressure on them was becoming unbearable: "Vo us concevez, Monsieur, dans quel embarras son opinia trete doit necessairement nous jeter ... Tout cela en verite est tres desagreable, et nous vous prions instamment d 'aviser au moyen d 'y mettre fin le plutot qu 'il sera possible." But if they were willing to weaken their position on the clause about Duplain 's expenses, they were more determined than ever to insist that all the quarto associates meet in Lyons to make a close inspection of his financial management: '' U ne conduite si deraisonnable demasque ses vues. Elles ne peuvent tendre qu 'a extorquer notre acquiescement a ses pretentions, et vous saurez comme nous apprecier ce plan-la . . . Tout cela nous porte a conclure qu 'il serait fort bien a souhaiter pour le bien de la chose que l 'assemblee des interesses a Lyon . . . put etre anticipee et avoir lieu le plutot possible.' ' The pressure hurt the N euchatelois most because the pas sage of each day brought them closer to the maturation date of their bills of exchange and to the end of the printing of volume 24, the last of the three volumes Duplain had given them. They had written seventeen different bills of exchange on Duplain, worth 19,380 livres in all, and if he refused to acquit them, their bearers would descend on d 'Arnal, demand ing immediate payment. Should d'Arnal fail to provide the money, the STN would face not merely lawsuits but also the collapse of its credit. Of course it could sue Duplain, but a long and bitter battle in the courts could fatally damage the whole enterprise. In any case Duplain had not given it time to make the threat of litigation effective because it had to produce 19,000 livres at once or suspend its payments-that is, suffer irreparable damage to an excellent commercial reputation, which it had built up by nine years of hard work. Duplain never backed down from his refusal to honor the bills of exchange, despite the entreaties of the STN and d 'Arnal. By emergency action on the Bourse, d 'Arnal came up with the 19,000 livres. But this heroic intervention strained his own capital resources badly, cost a great deal of money in brokerage fees and short-term loans, and only postponed the 41. STN to Panckoucke, Sept. 27, 1778. 126 Juggling Editions reckoning with Duplain until the next series of notes ma tured.42 In a letter of October 3, 1778, the Neuchatelois complained bitterly to Duplain about the financial crisis he had inflicted on them. They meant to collect their entire debt next time, they warned, and were ready to def end their case '' devant tons les tribunaux du monde. '' But they had to contain their anger, because they needed to persuade him somehow to send them the copy for the four th volume. By this time two volumes of the third edition had already been printed and distributed and the STN 's workers had come within a few days of finishing volume 24. ''Ce volume fini, nous aurons 20 ouvriers sur les bras qu'il faudra renvoyer ou occuper a d 'autres objets, toujours avec une grande perte pour nous, a mo ins que vous n 'ayez l 'honnetete de nous expedier' a lettre vue, un fragment assez fort de copie,'' the STN implored. And then it confessed its willingness to play his game against Panckoucke: ''Nous l 'avons sollicite a vous accommoder. Nous ne faisons aucun doute qu 'il ne s 'y prete et que vous ne consentiez de votre cote a prendre des arrangements propres a prevoir entre nous toute sorte de difficultes. Vons sentez comme nous que cet ecueil serait aussi funeste qu 'une contre f ac;on ou autre malencontre typographique. '' No contract, no copy, Duplain replied. There was nothing the Neuchatelois could do but suffer on the sidelines while their two powerful partners fought it out. The bluffing, grappling, and crushing must have been fierce; but no record of it has survived. All one can know is the result: on October 10 in Paris Panckoucke and Duplain 's agent Merlino de Giverdy signed the contract for the third edition of the quarto Encyclopedie. The Contract The contract represented a compromise, but Panckoucke carried most of the contested points (see Appendix A. XIV). 42. The STN 's financial difficulties with Duplain are explained in its corre spondence with d 'Arna!, notably in d 'Amal 's letter to the STN of Sept. 24, 1778. 43. Duplain to STN, Oct. 9, 1778: "Nous attendons que M. Panckoucke ait fini le traite nouveau a signer pour vous envoyer un nouveau volume, et ii attend, dit-il, votre ratification. Cela ne nous regarde pas. Tout ce que nous pouvons dire a M. Panckoucke, c 'est que nos frais sont immenses et que nous n 'aurions jamais pense qu 'ils fussent si considerables. Si tot done que nous saurons que M. Panc koucke a consenti, le nouveau volume partira.'' 127 The Business of Enlightenment As he desired, it set the printing rate at 44 livres per sheet and increased the price of paper by 6 sous to 10 livres per ream. Duplain could not have put up much of an argument against these rates because they would bring him 17,550 livres more than those set by the Traite de Dijon, which were already providing him with an enormous profit on the print ing. But the new contract kept strictly to the old allotment for Duplain 's general expenses, giving him 16,000 livres for managing the production and distribution of 8,000 Encyclo pedies in place of his previous allowance of 8,000 livres for 4,000 Encyclopedies. Duplain therefore had conceded def eat on the issue that had produced the fiercest fighting. He found in articles 3 and 5, which au some compensation, however, thorized him to set up a printing operation in France and to charge the quarto Association for the equivalent of what it would have cost to have those volumes transported to Geneva for storage and distribution. Far from mentioning any obli gation to give some of the printing to the STN, this contract for the "Neuchatel" edition indicated that the printing was take place "a Lyon et autres villes de France" and that to the Association would pay the Geneva-Lyons transport costs in case Duplain considered it '' convenable'' to have some of the work done in Switzerland. It even committed the Associa pay Duplain 's costs for buying his own presses and tion to for bringing workers to Lyons. So it signified a shift from Geneva to Lyons in the production as well as the distribution of the book. Duplain promised to reimburse his associates for any losses in case the French authorities cracked down on his operation, but he demanded payment for assuming this risk: thus the fictitious transport allotment. This "insurance" also compensated him for receiving only 16,000 livres ''pour ... un objet de depense annuelle infiniment plus consider able." By writing this phrase into the contract, Duplain indicated that he had not taken defeat gracefully in the con troversy over his expenses. Panckoucke tried to protect him self from further squabbling on this issue by two other provisions. First, the allocation for the nonexistent transport of the merchandise from Lyons to Geneva should not be effective if the STN opposed it. Second, should the associates disagree over this or any other aspect of the enterprise, they were to choose arbitrators and were to be bound by the contract to accept the arbitrators' verdict, without appealing 128 Juggling Editions to the courts. This provision showed the businessmen's dis trust of the expensive and inequitable judicial system in France, but it also indicated their distrust of Qne another. They had not been able to agree without doing battle, and their agreement established a truce, not peace. The bitterness and belligerency left over from the contract dispute had poisoned relations between Neuchatel and Lyons, but it had not prevented the STN 's shop from continuing work. As soon as it heard that the contract had been signed, the STN shot off a letter to Duplain, requesting its copy in a tone of somewhat strained bantering: ''Au cas que vous eussiez encore cette copie si ardemment postulee et si brave ment def endue [that is, in case he had not sent it already], veuillez le faire partir sans delai et par la route la plus courte . . . Au reste, nous sommes remplis de confiance dans vos habiletes. Un pilote aussi actif et aussi experimente doit infailliblement conduire la barque au port. " Unamused and unflattered, Duplain replied that he would not provide the copy until the N euchatelois had accepted the contract because clause 5 required their ratification. The STN received a copy of the contract on October 18 and immediately notified Du plain that they accepted it, despite some misgivings about clause five. They wished that it had set a fixed price for the fictitious transport allowance, but they would not refuse to endorse it because they yearned for an end to "la longue contestation." Now, at last, they hoped he would send the fourth volume and perhaps even would let them print it at a pressrun of 8,000-that is, for all three ''editions.'' On the same day, they sent a franker letter to Panckoucke. They worried that clause 5 might give Duplain a loophole for inflating his "insurance" expenses. But they congratulated Panckoucke for his victory on two key points: the limitation of Duplain 's general expenses to 16,000 livres and the pre vention of further disputes by the provision for arbitration. If they could only give Duplain's accounts a thorough going over, the Neuchatelois concluded, they might emerge un scathed from the whole affair. After one more exchange of letters, Duplain finally surrendered the copy. It was volume 35, and the STN was to print it at 6,000 for the first and sec ond editions. So it did not have to fire its work force. It had 44. STN to Duplain, Oet. 14, 1778. 129 The Business of Enlightenment won a fourth volume for the first two editions. But it had not yet received anything to print for ''its'' edition, which was still far from being what eighteenth-century publishers called une aff aire bouclee. The quarto associates had a contract, however. The last round of their long and painful negotiations had developed into a duel by lettre ostensible. The duel had ended in a draw, and Duplain had resorted to a more powerful weapon: ex tortion. He had inflicted wounds on the vulnerable, Neuchatel flank of his adversary, but he had not forced Panckoucke to sue for peace in Paris. Instead, Duplain himself had made the crucial concessions in the final compromise. And far from feeling pacified by the peace of October 10, he began to look for other ways to trim off fat from the overgrown profits of the quarto, while his partners hardened in their resolve to make a closer examination of his suspicious conduct. So in agreeing on terms for the expansion of his enterprise-"the most beautiful ever in the history of publishing,'' according to the STN-the quarto associates infused it with so much duplicity, hatred, and greed that it threatened to blow up in their faces. Its very success had increased its explosiveness. But before recounting the struggle that led to the final ex plosion, it is necessary to backtrack through 1777 and 1778 in order to pick up the story of the quarto's external battles. 130 IV TYYYYYTTYYYY PIRACY AND TRADE WAR While the quarto associates quarreled over their domestic affairs, they had to defend themselves from outside attack. Only a militant foreign policy could protect their market from raids by rival publisherH who wanted to profit from the extraordinary demand for relatively inexpensive Encyclo pedies. That demand had remained hidden until the success of the quarto stunned the publishing world, revealing a market for Encyclopedism throughout the length and breadth of the land. As the STN put it in a letter to Panckoucke about the need to coordinate their defense against Encyclopedies being produced in Lyons, Lausanne, and Liege, '' C 'est une chose admirable de voir a quel point et en combien de sens on s 'occupe de l 'Encyclopedie depuis notre quarto. Il semble que nous ayons electrifie tout le monde. 'n Pirate Raids Having originally floated his quarto as a pirated edition, Duplain had no way of burying his treasure after he turned legitimate. Other pirates got wind of it and raced to the attack. In August 1777 he heard that some Geneva publishers were planning to counterfeit the quarto and to undersell it by 100 livres a set. He rushed to Switzerland and confronted 1. STN to Panckoucke, June 7, 1778. Similarly, the STN wrote to Belin, a bookseller in Paris, on April 18, 1778: "On dirait, comme vous l 'observez, que le succes de 1 'Encyclopedie in-quarto a tellement electrise tout le monde que chacun vent avoir part a ce grand dictionnaire.'' 131 The Business of Enlightenment them with a counterthreat: he and his associates would not only defend their market with the full force of the French state but also ruin it for their competitors, for they could liquidate their quarto and produce their revised Encyclo pedic in time to destroy the demand for any other quartos. The project for the revised edition, Suard 's refonte, there fore served as a weapon in the defense of the quarto; and it proved to be effective because the Genevans abandoned their plan. Meanwhile, however, a group of booksellers from Toulouse plotted to print a counterfeit edition in the shop of Gaude pere et fils in Nimes. This project also foundered, probably because Panckoucke 's privilege could not be attacked openly within the kingdom. But as it sank from sight, rumors of another counterfeit quarto began to circulate, this time from Lausanne. Ostervald investigated them and reported that the Lausannois only intended to pirate a Brussels edition of the thirty-volume Encyclopedie de jurisprudence. But even false alarms were disquieting. The industry of pirate publishing was too aggressive and too well developed every where around France's borders for the quarto to be free from attack. Having skirmished with pirates for years, Panckoucke knew that they would try to capture the market for the Encyclo pedie. But he felt confident that he could ward them off by relying on his privilege and protections, the strategy that he had originally intended to use against Duplain. ·when in formed of the danger from Geneva, he replied that he already knew about it, and about raids being prepared from other quarters as well, but that he had erected a solid defense 2. Duplain explained his strategy to the STN in a letter of Aug. 18, 1777: '' L 'unique but de notre dernier voyage a Geneve a ete d 'empecher la contrefagon dont nous etions menaces. La seule man'ere de s 'en garantir c 'est d 'annoncer a ces enrages que d 'ici en fevrier 1779 nous aurons tout livre et que de suite a pres nous annoncions une edition augmentee par !es premiers editeurs. A peine auront ils fait quatre a cinq volumes dans l 'intervale qu 'ii y aura jusqu 'a notre entiere livraison. Qu 'en feront-ils ~ Comment leur edition entrera-t-elle en France~ Elle trouvera de grandes oppositions. Toutes ces raisons dites verbalement et non par lettre arreteront !es plus obstines. Faites-en part a la Societe de Lausanne s.v.p.'' 3. The only information on this project is a passing remark in a letter to the STN on April 6, 1778, from a binder and bookdealer in Toulouse named Gaston, who had collected a huge number of subscriptions for the quarto Encyclopedie and would have collected still more, he claimed, had his campaign not been un dercut by an edition '' que les libraires de Toulouse font imp rimer a Nimes chez M. Gaude.'' 4. STN to Duplain, Aug. 23, 1777. 132 Piracy and Trade War against them: ''On a voulu m 'inspirer des craintes sur une pareille entreprise a Avignon. Au reste, j 'ai ici tout dispose de maniere que dans aucun cas aucune de ces editions n 'entrerait en France, et sans la France, point de succes. '' Moreover, pirates bluffed as often as they attacked. So Panckoucke advised his partners to ride out the threats, trusting in his ability to defend the French market. At first this strategy worked well: the Encyclopedies of Geneva and Avignon proved to be attempts to frighten the quarto Associ ation into paying protection money. But this was a dangerous game. The next assailant might mean business, and the quarto publishers would not be able to tell whether he was faking until he had launched his attack. After the pirates from Geneva, Toulouse, and Avignon had disappeared over the horizon, Duplain was assaulted from within Lyons by two men of his own hreed, .Jean Marie Barret and Joseph Sulpice Grabit. Both dealers had built up a large wholesale trade, much of it in prohibited books, which they tmmggled in from Switzerland or occasionally had printed in Lyons. Barret, for example, secretly produced an edition of Rousseau's works in 1772, which illustrates the way he and his colleagues did business. Regnault, the future Lyonnais associate of the quarto Encyclopedie, learned of the printing and demanded to be given a chance to buy a half interest in it. Fearing that a refusal would result in a denunciation to the police, Barret reluctantly complied. Soon afterward, how ever, he discovered that Benoit Duplain, the father of Joseph, was trying to beat him to the market by producing a rival clandestine edition in two separate Rhops. Instead of inform ing Regnault, Barret let slip a remark that commercial diffi culties now made him willing to sell the other half of his Rousseau. Regnault eagerly bought him out, only to become trapped in a trade war with Duplain, which Barret took pleasure in watching from a safe diRtance. ''La mechancete de nieR confreres m 'est si bien connue que je crois ne pouvoir prendre trop de precautions,'' was the conclusion that he drew from the experience. Gr a bit lived by the same code. In 1773 he tried to force Saillant and Nyon of Paris to buy a thousand volumes 17-22 5. Panckoucke to STN, Sept. 9, 1777. See also the report on the piracy threats in STN to Panckoucke, Aug. 31, 1777. 6. Barret to STN, Dec. 28, 1772. 133 Thf' Business of Rnlightenment from a pirated edition of their own Histoire de France by Yelly. He threatened to counterfeit volumes 1-16 and to un dersell them unmercifully if they refused to collaborate in the undermining of their own privilege. And he :,;ent his threats anonymously through the STN, as if he were a Swiss pirate instead of a Frenchman, who might be expected to def end the law of his land against foreign interlopers. His plot failed, but it illustrates the character of the book trade in Lyons, where the only law that counted was the iron law of the marketplace: maximize profit:,;.' Barret and Grabit naturally jumped at the chance to cash in on the mo:,;t profitable enterprise that any bookdealer of their generation had ever seen in Lyons: Duplain 's quarto Encyclopedie. They decided to produce their own quarto-or at least to produce enough of it to convince Duplain that they would go ahead with the printing, presumably using presses in Switzerland, if he did not buy them off. ,\s veteran pirates, they knew that they would have to make a considerable investment for their threat to be credible. Perhaps they even meant to go through with it: it is as difficult to know whether they were bluffing today as it was two hundred years ago. In any case, they printed at least six sheets ( 48 pages) at a press run of four reams eight quires (2,200 copies) and then told Duplain that it would cost him 27,000 livres to get them to stop. That was an enormous ransom, the rough equivalent of a lifetime's wages for one of their printers. Would Du plain pay it 1 The STN favored the hard-line Panckoucke policy. "Nous n 'avorn.; pas ignore le pro jet de Barret,'' they wrote to Panckoucke. ''Mais il nous a paru que son but n 'etait que d 'obliger les entrepreneurs de I 'in-quarto a lui donner quelque part au gateau, et nous avons pense qu'il vous serait encore plus facile de faire valoir votre privilege contre un libraire du royaume que contre un etranger." But Panckoucke himself had doubts. He later confided that of all the threats to the quarto, ''Celle-la m 'inquietait veritablement. '' So he left the decision up to Duplain, who was best qualified to make it, thanks to his own experience as a buccaneer. Duplain decided to capitulate. In fact he surrendered formally, by contract. 7. This complicated plot may be followed from the correspondence between Grabit and the STN on the one hand and the STN and Saillant and Nyon on the other in late 1773 and early 177 4. 134 Piracy and Trade War and the treaty that he signed with Barret and Grabit is one of the most extraordinary in the string of documents attached to the quarto enterprise (see Appendix A. XIII). In weighty, legal language, it created a pirates' nonaggres sion pact. Barret and Grabit solemnly promised to abandon their edition and to refuse any connection with any other Encyclopedie. As an indication of their earnestness, they were to deliver 2,200 copies of their first six sheets to Duplain. And in return, Duplain paid them 3,000 livres immediately and promised to pay another 24,000 livres in a year. But he deposited his promissory note with a notary, who was not to release it unless a final condition had been fulfilled: the great bulk of Duplain 's quartos had to be sold. If he could produce 500 unsold sets in June 1779, he would not have to pay the 24,000 livres. In that case, however, Barret and Grabit would have the option of buying the 500 sets at half the wholesale price and then collecting the 24,000 livres. This complicated formula would permit them to buy the books for 49,500 livres instead of 147,000 livres, and it protected Duplain by cancel ing the ransom-or indemnite as the contract put it-in case his market collapsed, owing to some unforeseen calamity, like another pirate raid. This clause seemed reasonable enough, but Duplain may have had a secret motive for inserting it. In discussing the third edition with the STN, Panckoucke later explained that Duplain had decided to increase it by a ream "pour nous dedommager des arrangements qu 'on a ete oblige de prendre avec Barret.' ' One ream per printed sheet meant 500 extra copies, just the number that the Barret-Grabit contract set in the escape clause through which Duplain hoped to rescue his 24,000 livres. Perhaps he planned to print an extra 500 sets on the sly, to produce them as an excuse for refusing the ransom, and to dump them on Barret and Grabit for 48,700 livres. That reprisal would have made an appropriate ending to an unusually tricky episode. But Duplain never executed it. His accounts later showed that Barret and Grabit col lected all their money and so succeeded in one of the biggest and boldest raids known to have occurred in the history of pirate publishing. As Panckoucke later observed to Beau marchais during some negotiations over the Voltaire manu- 8. STN to Panekoueke, June 7, 1778, and Panekoueke to STN, July 7, 1778. 9. Panekoueke to STN, July 21, 1778. 135 The Business of Rnlightenment scripts, '' Quand on ne peut detruire les corsaires, la bonne politique veut qu'on compose avec eux. C'est la loi de la necessite. 'no The Octavo Publishers and Their Encyclopedie While Duplain pursued this policy in Lyons, the STN was sparring with a consortium from Lausanne and Bern, which planned to produce an even smaller, even cheaper Encyclo pedie than the quarto. It would be an exact copy of the quarto, reduced to the octavo format and marketed at little more than half the price ( 225 instead of 384 livres). This threat looked far more dangerous than any of the other attacks. But after fending off pirates from Geneva, Toulouse, and Avi gnon and surrendering 27,000 livres in ransom to the Lyonnais, Panckoucke and his partners decided it was time to stand and fight; they were soon engulfed in a full-scale commercial war. The publisher of the octavo, the societes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern, were formidable opponents because they had years of experience in the front ranks of the pirates who preyed on the French book trade. They operated like the STN, counterfeiting French books from the safety of Switzer land and underselling French publishers everywhere in Eu rope, including France. The Societe typographique de Berne had been supplying French readers with counterfeit books for twenty years when it announced the publication of the octavo Encyclopedie. True, it had only begun to print its own works; and the heaviest portion of its wholesale trade went to Northern Europe, especially Germany. It always sent wagon loads of French books to the fairs at Leipzig and Frankfurt. But it also commissioned other printers to produce books that it had smuggled into France. And it speculated increas ingly on the French market in the late 1770s, when it came under the influence of a shrewd young man called Pfaehler, who rose from clerk to codirector of the Society and who had a talent for piracy. Pfaehler seems to have been cut from the same cloth as Jean-Pierre Heubach, the director of the Societe typographique de Lausanne. Heubach had moved 10. Panckoucke to Beaumarchais, March 10, 1781, ms. Fr. d.31, Bodleian Li brary, Oxford. 136 Piracy and Trade War from Mainbernheim, Anspach, where he had worked as a binder and printer, to a partnership in Geneva with Jean Samuel Cailler, a publisher who specialized in the most ex treme kind of prohibited French books. Having acquired valuable experience in the underground trade, Heubach then set up his own publishing business in Lausanne. By 1771 he had three presses and a work force of fifteen men. He ex panded his shop and took on new partners in 1773 and again in 1774, when he reorganized his company and called it the Societe typographique de Lausanne. The business prospered. In 1785 Heubach had seven presses, a stock of books worth 27,388 livres, a town house, 15,000 livres' worth of land in the country, and total assets of 133,190 livres. He probably provided the original impetus for the octavo Encyclopedie, but Pfaehler enthusiastically backed him, and the combined support of their societes typographiques made it a serious threat to the quarto.11 The threat had not seemed grave at first. In March 1777 rumors of an Encyclopedie project reached the STN from Lausanne, but the N euchatelois dismissed them with a joke: ''On fait done cette annee des Encyclopedies comme des brochures.' n The rumors had linked the project with the Societe typographique de Lausanne by August, when Oster vald looked into them in Lausanne and was told that they had come from the Society's plan to counterfeit the Encyclo pedie de jurisprudence. But that report, which apparently came from the Society itself, could have been a false false alarm-an attempt to mislead Ostervald while completing the preparations for an attack on the quarto. The attack came two months later. On November 4, the Gazette de Berne, published by the Societe typographique de Berne, announced the opening of a subscription for an octavo Encyclopedie '' exactement Conforme a I 'edition quarto qui s 'imprime chez Pellet a Geneve. '' In its next issue, the Ga- 11. This information has been culled from the huge dossiers of the two pub lishing firms in the papers of the STN. Each soei6te typographique evolved in its own way, attracting many different partners and investors en route. When the Societe typographique de Berne was founded in 1758, it had some of the charac teristics of a. literary club. The Societ6 typographique de Lausanne was always more commercial and more 01·iented toward France. Its founding is described iu a circular letter issued on Feb. 22, 1774. 12. STN to Franl}ois Grasset of Lausanne, March 17, 1777. 137 The Business of l~'nli_qhtenrnent zette explained the terms of the subscription in a way that showed how it was meant to undercut the quarto: Les 39 [a slip for 29] volumes de discours de l 'Encyclopedie an noncee par la Societe typographique de Lausanne seront imprimes page pour page sur l'edition quarto de Geneve, et le 30eme sera un Supplement tres interessant dans lequel on trouvera les decouvertes et dans les arts pendant le cours de cette faites dans les sciences edition, avec un catalogue des meilleurs ouvrages sur ces sciences et ces arts publies chez toutes les nations avec un succes merite. Ces 30 volumes coftteront 150 livres de France, et les 3 volumes de planches, pour ceux qui les souhaiteront, coftteront 45 livres; en tout 195 livres de France. Somme tres modique pour un pareil ouvrage. The octavo might be smaller in size than the quarto, but it would be larger in scope; for it would contain a bonus Supple ment in addition to the old four-volume text of Supplements, which ''Pellet'' had blended into his edition. And most im portant, the octavo would be far cheaper-44 percent of the price of the quarto for those who took the option of doing without the three volumes of plates. It was a brilliant sales plan, which employed the strategy that Bosset of the STN had tried to get his partners to adopt in 1776: it offered the fullest possible text on the cheapest possible terms to the broadest possible audience. Of course the octavo would look puny next to the magnificent folio and the magisterial quartos. The quarto publishers editions later referred to it scornfully as a "miniature" and an En cyclopedie de poche, which would blind its readers by its small type. But the pirates had always prospered by purging their editions of luxe typo:qraphique, as they called it. In this way, they undersold their French competitors and kept their profits high. Duplain had adopted this policy in the first place by reducing the text to the quarto format and eliminating most of the original plates But the octavo publishers took it much further, and by pursuing their course as pirates, they unwittingly furthered a general cultural movement: the popu larization of the Enlightenment. 13. Gazette de Berne, Nov. 19, 1777. See also the similar notice in the Journal encyclapedique of Jan. 1778. The priee eventually came to 225 livres because the text of the quarto ran to thirty-six instead of twenty-nine volumes, and the octavo was compelled to do likewise. 14. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 18, 1777, and Feb. 22, 1778. 138 Piracy and Trade War The Origins of the Quarto-Octavo War Publishers frequently used subscription announcements as trial balloon:,;. If they failed to elicit much response, they would drop the project, having lost only a pittance for the publication of the pro:,.;pectus or having gained a ransom from some competitor who took them seriously. But the pub li:,.;hers of the octavo Encyclopedie meant what they said in their announcement, for in early November Duplain made a distressing discovery: ''Nous avons des a vis certains que la Societe typographique de Lausanne fait fondre une fonte petit texte gros oeil et se propose de faire notre Encyclopedie in octavo. Vous sentez que c 'est une entreprise ridicule mais qui neanmoins nous portera le plus grand coup par rapport aux annonces qu 'elle ne manquera pas de faire." Duplain shot this warning off to the STN with a request that it send an agent on an emergency mission to Lausanne. Although the order for the special font of type could mean that the Lausan nois had pa:,.;sed the point of no return, they might retreat if confronted with the arguments that Duplain had used to bring around the Genevans two months earlier. "Il faut s.v.p. a lettre vue depecher un ambassadeur pour parer le coup . . . Il n 'y a pas une minute a perdre pour vous rendre a Lausanne . . . Vons pouvez dire a Messieurs de Lausanne qu 'a compter du huitieme volume tous nos volumes auront 120 feuilles, qu'ils ne pourront pas entrer en France, et que sitOt notre edition finie, ce qui Sera a la fin de 1778, nous en publierons une augmentee par les d'Alembert et Diderot. Ne perdez pas un instant s.v.p. 'n Then, without informing his associates, Duplain prepared a counterattack of his own. He printed a prospectus announcing that the quarto group would produce a rival octavo edition at a still cheaper price. If threatened by him on one side and cajoled by the STN on the other, the Lausannois might capitulate or accept an unfavorable com promise. The N euchatelois could be expected to take a conciliatory line toward the Lausannois because they were friends. The two firms had cooperated closely for years and even had col laborated on pirated editions, sharing costs, profits, and trade 15. Duplain to STN, Nov. 11, 1777. 139 The Business of Enlightenment secrets. They were also united by personal ties, especially the friendship between Ostervald and Jean-Pierre Berenger, who handled the literary aspect of the Lausanne society's business. Berenger was an anomaly in the publishing world. A gentle person and a man of principle as well as a man of letters, he had been caught up in the agitated politics of Geneva in the 1760s. The oligarchic Petit Conseil drove him out of the town and burned four of his works, including his six-volume Histoire de Geneve, for championing the cause of the underprivileged Natifs. For a while he drifted from proj ect to project, fixing his hopes on a professorship in Germany, a tutoring job in Poland, and a pension near Lausanne. Finally, with 4,000 livres from the sale of his library, he acquired a one-tenth interest in the Societe typographique de Lausanne and accepted a position as its homme de lettres, for 50 louis a year, which was enough to keep his family alive. At each step he had turned for aid and comfort to his good friend Ostervald. So it was natural for Ostervald to turn to him after receiving Duplain 's SOS and rushing off to Lausanne. Ostervald presented Duplain's arguments to Berenger, Berenger put them to the directors of the Societe typogra phique de Lausanne, and the directors replied through Beren ger to Ostervald that they would not retreat an inch. They had planned to produce a quarto Encyclopedie even before Du plain launched his first subscription, they said. He had got his announcement out first; so they had postponed their project and had offered to buy an interest in his, but they had never even received an answer to their proposal. They therefore had decided to produce an octavo edition, and they meant to go through with it. If Panckoucke had influence in high places, they could rely on protectors of their own, and they could always fall back on smuggling. They dismissed all talk about the revised edition and the rival octavo as bluffing. They would not be intimidated, they assured Ostervald, and they would never abandon their octavo. But they wanted to main tain good relations with the STN, perhaps even to form "une 16. This information comes primarily from Berenger 's dossier in the STN papers and also from the article on him in the Dictionnaire historique et biogra phique de la Suisse (Neuchatel, 1924). 140 Piracy and Trade War espece de ligue'' among the three Swiss societes typogra phiques against the French. They would gladly help the STN market its quarter share in the quarto if it would do the same for them with the octavo, and they were ready to listen to any other propositions it wanted to make.17 The combination of intransigence and appeasement in this reply probably represented an attempt to drive a wedge be tween the STN and its French associates. The Lausannois could assume that some split had opened up between Lyons and Neuchatel because Ostervald had not heard of Duplain 's octavo prospectus when he arrived in Lausanne. F,ither the quarto group was unable to coordinate its defense or it was falling apart. And none of the principals had heard from Panckoucke. The STN had informed Panckoucke of the octavo threat on November 16, the day of Ostervald 's departure for Lau sanne. About seven days later, it received a vehement reply in which Panckoucke reviewed all his experiences with the Encyclopedie: Je ne suis point surpris de la concurrence que nous eprouvons. Il y a pres de 8 ans que cette affaire a ete pour moi une occasion de supplices. Dom Felice n 'est-il pas venu nous barrer par son in-quarto [that is, the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon] au moment de la publication de l'in-folio? N 'ai-je pas ete mis a la Bastille? 6,000 volumes in-folio n 'y sont-ils pas restes six ans? Les portes de la France n 'ont-elles pas ete fermees deux fois? L 'impot enfin de 60 livres n 'a-t-il pas mis le comble a tout ce que nous eprouvions? Notre constance est venue a bout de tous ces obstacles. L'affaire de Geneve a reussi. Il en sera de meme, Monsieur, de notre entreprise. Cette edition in-octavo peut donner quelques alarmes, mais elle ne nous nuira pas. J e doute meme qu'elle s'execute. On pourra faire 2 a 4 volumes, mais on en restera la. Vous verrez si je ne suis pas bon prophete. Il est fou d 'imprimer 17. Berenger to Ostervald, Nov. 21, 1777. After discussing the situation at length, Berenger summarized his associates' position as follows: '' Qu 'au reste, ils ne croyaient point a cette nouvelle edition de I 'Encyclopedie sur un meilleur plan, ni a Ia defense d 'entrer la leur en France; que si M. Panckoucke avait du credit, ii n 'etait pas le seul; qu 'ils avaient prevu cet inconvenient, qui lors meme qu 'ii existerait ne Jes arreterait pas, parce qu 'on fait entrer en France tons Jes jours un grand nombre de livres defend us; qu 'ils ne croyaient pas non plus a cette edition octavo qu 'on annonce a Geneve pour les intimider; qu 'enfin ils etaient resolus de poursuivre, d 'autant plus qu 'ii dependait d 'eux de se mettre en surete, puisque s 'ils voulaient, ils ne resteraient charges que d 'un sixieme de I 'entreprise.'' 141 The Business of Rnlightenment l 'Encyclopedie en petit texte. Au reste, nous serons ici defendus. J 'attends le retour du magistrat pour mettre tout sous ses yeux. J e vous promets bien que cette Encyclopedie n 'entrera point en France. Although he felt confident of his ability to defend France's borders, Panckoucke thought that something might be gained by luring the octavo publishers into negotiations. If they would drop the octavo for twenty-five free sets of the quarto, he would gladly buy them off. Perhaps they could be per suaded to postpone it for two years in return for a partner ship in some future association that might market the octavo and the revised edition together. But they might take willing ness to negotiate as a sign of weakness. It was crucial to prevent them from detecting any fear, though Panckoucke sounded apprehensive enough as he vacillated between a pol icy of negotiation and one of uncompromising hostility. In the end, he recommended that the STN take the toughest possible line and trust to his protections. A week later Panckoucke had regained his composure and rethought his strategy. It now seemed to him that the Lau sannois could not be stopped: their Encyclopedie was certain to succeed, and it could damage the market for the quarto. He therefore advised the STN to try to win them over by offering a compromise: they would have to suspend publica tion for two years, but in return they would be able to sell their books legally, under the cover of Panckoucke 's privilege. He and the STN would join them in a three-way partnership, which would wring every last sou out of the octavo market. To be sure, this arrangement excluded Duplain, but Duplain did not have to know about it, and it would take effect after the expiration of the Traite de Dijon, when he would no longer 18. Panckoucke to Bosset, Nov. 19, 1777. On Sept. 11, 1771, France put a duty of 60 livres per quintal on imports of French and Latin books. This tariff was a terrible blow for the marketing of the Geneva folio Encyclopedie. 19. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 19, 1777. Panckoucke's phrasing revealed his agitated state of mind as he confronted a major policy decision: '' Peut-etre pourriez-vous les bercer d 'une association dans quelques annees, dire que nous prendrions part a leurs entreprises, et qu 'en la [the octavo Encyclop,edie] sus pendant cette annee et les deux suivantes elle aura surement lieu ... Peut-etre ne faudrait-il pas la craindre. Vous leur inspirerez de la confiance en marquant de la rrainte. Nos six mille sont places: que pourrions-nous esperer de plus~ II n 'est pas probable que les souscripteurs se retirent. On preferera toujours donner 4 a 5 louis de plus et avoir une encyclopedie lisible et d 'un format convenable. Je vous assure que je vois plus de danger a tenter un accommodement qu 'a paraitre in differents. Au reste, j 'attends le magistrat pour Jui mettre le prospectus [of the octavo] sous les yeux et voir Jes arrangements qu 'il y aura a prendre." 142 Piracy and Trade War own a share in the Encyclopedie: "Vous sentez que si un pareil arrangement avait lieu, il faudrait que Duplain n 'en sut rien et qu 'on gardat le plus profond secret.' ' So the octavo attack did divide the quarto group. In pub lishing his own octavo prospectus, Duplain launched a coun terattack without support from his allies. And in proposing a secret truce, Panckoucke attempted to collaborate with the enemy behind Duplain 's back. Their contradictory courses of action showed how deeply they distrusted one another. Du plain may have forced the battle in order to prevent the very sort of underhand accommodation that Panckoucke was at tempting to arrange at his expense. And Panckoucke was ready to jump ship because he had been waylaid in the first place and would gladly pit one pirate against the other. This division left the STN in the middle, a position made even more difficult by its ties with Lausanne and Bern, which were closer than either of its partners suspected. At first, the N euchatelois tended to favor Duplain 's policy, perhaps because they thought that his antioctavo would pro vide them with the huge printing job they had been deprived of by the quarto. They took his octavo proposal seriously enough to make some discreet soundings about the likelihood of its success. And they did not warm to Panckoucke 's sug gestion that they make a secret deal with the octavo group, though they agreed to open negotiations if they could argue from a position of strength and could get the Lausannois to propose terms. '' Il ne parait pas que ce flit a nous a leur faire des propositions, tenant, comme vous nous en assurez les clefs du royaume. " In short, the N euchatelois adopted the position that Panckoucke had abandoned a week earlier, but they remained flexible enough to adjust to the outcome of the battle between Lausanne and Lyons. 20. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 27, 1777. 21. The STN followed the common practice of announcing a project as a fait accompli and waiting for the reaction from potential customers before embarking on it. Thus after Serini of Basel wrote that he would not order any quartos be cause his clients preferred the octavo, it answered, in a letter of Nov. 24, 1777, that it would produce an octavo of its own: "Nous voyons que vos commettants preferent l 'octavo. Nous en entreprenons aussi une en ce format dont le merite ne sera pas inferieur mais bien le prix. Nous travaillons aux arrangements, et le prospectus en paraitra avant la quinzaine. Nous comptons que cette seconde edition entreprise pour cet objet aura plus de succes entre vos mains que la premiere. Nous le desirous pour votre a vantage autant que pour le notre.'' See similar remarks in STN to Claudet of Lyons, Nov. 22, 1777. 22. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 7, 1777. 143 The Busi.ness of Rnliglltenrnent Duplain had stockpiled his octavo prospectusm; in Geneva, waiting to release them until he had heard the Lausannois 's reaction to his threat. In late November they replied with an ultimatum that outdid his. \i\Tithdraw your prospectuses, they demanded, or we will lower the price of our octavo to the level of yours, and we will undermine your quarto by producing a still cheaper quarto of our own. "Yous serez obliges de nous ceder ou de baisser votre prix vous-memes. C 'est ainsi qu 'on se coupe la gorge les uns les autres, mais vous nous en donnez l 'exemple et nous en imposez la necessite. Et ne croyez pas que nous vous faisiom:; une vaine menace. Les prospectus sont prets, et nous avons les memes caracteres, presses necessaires etc. a Yverdon a notre disposition. " The Lausannois, who directed the strategy of the octavo publishers, gave the quarto group fifteen days to reply to the ultimatum. Propositions then arrived in Ruch haste and con fusion from both Lyons and Neuchatel that they suspended the deadline and negotiated on both fronts throughout De cember 1777. They reserved their toughest language for Duplain, telling him flatly that he would have to withdraw his octavo prospectus or they would sink his quarto. They were more conciliatory to the STN, which had indicated its own desire to reach an amicable settlement by proposing a com promise on December 10. In a personal letter to Ostervald, Berenger replied that although his associates could not ac cept the proposal, they wanted to avoid a war. They were suspicious of the propositions they had received from Du plain, which they interpreted as an attempt to deceive them and to play for time. But they would like to off er Ostervald a counterproposal. They had to move carefully, however, be cause they owned only a third of. the octavo enterprise and needed to clear everything with their two partners, one of whom was the Societe typographique de Berne. Perhaps the quarto group would let its plates be used for the engraving of the octavo plates. If so, the octavo publishers would cede it half of their 3,000 Encyclopedies for only 100 livres a set. Ostervald answered that he, too, faced the problem of get- 23. The Societe typographique de Lausanne addressed this ultimatum to Pellet for forwarding to '' vos commettants,'' and it sent a copy, without comment, in a letter to the STN dated Nov. 20, 1777. 24. Berenger to Ostervald, Dec. 15, 1777. The Lausannois described their ne gotiations with Duplain in a letter to the STN of Dec. 23, 1777. 144 Piracy and Trade War ting his associates to agree. He would try to persuade them to accept a reasonable compromise and trusted Berenger to do the same. Above all, the octavo group should avoid doing any thing rash and should consider the two advantages that their rivals could provide: open entry into France and the use of the plates. If Berenger could get his group to agree on a seri ous proposal-and Ostervald indicated that he did not take the 100-livre sales off er seriously-they should be able to prevent a trade war. At the same time, Ostervald communi cated Berenger 's offer to Panckoucke, explaining that he thought it should not be taken a:,,; a basis for negotiation but as a signal that the octavo group was willing to compromise. ·what counterproposal should he make~ Although he felt noth ing but scorn for '' cette miniature,'' he feared that it would sell very well, "taut le bon marche a d'attrait pour le plus grand nombre, c 'est a dire pour les sots.'' He had heard that the subscription was filling rapidly. One bookseller reportedly had ordered 300 sets. But Panckoucke could get more reliable information on the octavo's sales from his contacts in south ern France, where Jacob-Frarn:ois Bornand, an agent for the Lausannois, was currently conducting a sales trip. Duplain had embroiled things by negotiating independently and by alienating the Lausannois with "propositions ... capti euses et contradictoires; '' but the quarto group ought to be able to bargain from a position of strength and to reach a favorable settlement. Panckoucke agreed that the octavo was certain to sell, ''a cause du bas prix et du gout constant du public pour cet ouvrage. '' But he would only authorize the STN to offer harsh terms: the octavo group would have to cede a half interest in its Encyclopedie and delay its publica tion for two years; in return, Panckoucke and his partners would open up the French market and provide their plates. If the octavo publishers felt unable to accept those terms, they should renounce the French market; for Panckoucke had com plete faith in his ability to close France's borders and to ex clude any offensive book from her domestic channels of trade. <1 Ostervald immediately relayed the message on to Beren ger-and also to Duplain, who had been operating as though 25. Ostervald to Berenger, Dec. 18, 1777. 26. Ostervald to Panckoucke, Dec. 18, 1777, and Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1777. 145 The Busin('ss of J;,'nlightenment he were a separate power. Duplain had not even kept his asso ciates informed of what terms he had offered to the octavo group. The STN had felt uncomfortable about knowing less than the Lausannois about his end of the negotiations and had asked him what propositions he had made. He would only say that he did not take the octavo threat too seriously: "Leur edition au reste parait deplaire partout. ":! He clearly wanted to keep the negotiations to himself and he reacted with pre dictable hostility when the STN informed him that Panc kouke had authorized it to try to reach a compromise in Lausanne. ''Nous ne prendrons absolument aucun interet ni direct ni indirect dans le projet de l 'edition octavo meprise et bafoue partout. Nous vous prions pour notre repos et le votre de ne pas commettre sur cet objet notre ami de Paris, qui est un visionnaire et qui change d 'opinion comme le temps de vents. Laissez-nous agir, conduire la barque, et soyez surs de votre pilote. Nous avons repondu a Lausanne que nous leur abandonnions ce terrain, que nous ne pretendions pas y la bourer, et tenons-nous-en la, de grace. Ne les inquietons point, et ils ne feront rien contre nos interets. '' Duplain would have used much Htronger language had he known about Panc koucke 's secret collaboration plot, but he did not need to be ap prehensive about the STN 's offer to collaborate openly be cause the Lausannois rejected it out of hand. Berenger wrote that his aRsociates considered Panckoucke'R proposal so unfair that there was no point in continuing the negotiations. They already had wasted enough time parrying propositions that came from different sources and that con tradicted one another. First, they complained, Duplain had asked them to suspend the octavo for eleven months, then he had t~ropped that demand, and now the STN wanted them to postpone their edition for two years. They would rather be outlawed from France than suffer any delay at all. They meant to proceed with publication; and they would go ahead with their counterquarto if Duplain did not withdraw the prospectus for his counteroctavo within ten days. It looked as though this new ultimatum would lead to war, 27. Duplain to STN, Dee. 22, 1777. On Dee. 23, the STN warned Duplain that the octavo really was a serious threat. Lausanne and Bern had already sent three or four salesmen to the field, and they reportedly had gathered a rich harvest of subscriptions. See also STN to Duplain, Dee. 28, 1777. 28. Duplain to STN, Jan. 3, 1778. 29. Berenger to Ostervald, Jan. 2, 1778. 146 Piracy and Trade War the STN wrote unhappily to Panckoucke. It was Duplain 's fault. First he had attacked the octavo group and then he had alienated them by duplicitous negotiating. "Il est facile de conclure que c'est Duplain qui a aigri ces gens-Ia en Iachant a l 'improviste son peu honorable prospectus octavo, et qui de plus les a rendus un peu fiers par les tentatives faites de sa part aupres d'eux. Et comme il a juge apropos de faire le tout a notre insu, nous sommes fondes a lui en porter plainte. '' All they could do now was tell the Lausannois that they disavowed Duplain 's maneuvers, exert pressure on him for the with drawal of his octavo prospectm:;, and print and market the quarto as fast as possible, while leaving the octavo to Lau sanne and Bern. A few days later, word came through that Duplain had re nounced his prospectus. The STN tried to construe his re treat as a victory for peace in announcing it to Lausanne, '' Chacun travaillera de son cote et fera de son mieux sans don ner au public une scene peu convenable au bien de la chose.' m Actually, Duplain 's decision only postponed the battle be tween the quarto and octavo until the time when they would clash on the market place. It also sent the antioctavo and anti quarto to the limbo of unpublished Encyclopedies, where they kept company with the Neuchatel folio and the Geneva, Tou louse, Avignon, and Lyons quartos-soon to be joined by the Suard refonte. The escalation of the projects for editions had even inspired the STN at one point to propose three ref antes: "C'est a dire qu'independamment de !'edition in-folio et in quarto comme le porte notre traite nous en contrefassions nous memes [in-octavo], et cela au prix a faire perdre l'envie de nous contrefaire.'' That project was even less substantial than the antieditions, but it illustrates the extremes to which publishers would go in their bluffing and bargaining. The Final Failure of Diplomacy The cancellation of the antieditions left time for one more round of negotiations before the first volumes of the octavo were shipped to the battlefield in France. This time Pane- 30. STN to Panckoucke, Jan. 4, 1778. 31. STN to Societe typographique de Lausanne, Jan. 8, 1778. The Lausannois replied in a similar vein on Jan. 13. 32. STN to Duplain, Dec. 28, 1777. 147 The Business of },'nlightenment koucke and the STN maintained control of the quarto Asso ciation's policy, and most of the bargaining went on between Neuchatel and Bern. But this last attempt to avert a trade war put the N euchatelois in an awkward position because they owed allegiance to two triple alliances. A penchant for one could look like treason to the other. So the STN tried to keep its diplomacy secret and relatively equitable, mediating be tween its rival sets of partners and playing them off against one another without betraying either side. The three Swiss societes typographiques did business in the same way and had everything to gain by cooperating in stead of competing. Nothing irked a pirate more than to arrive on the scene after some other buccaneer had run off with the booty, yet he had no way of knowing whether he could beat his competitors to the market. ·when the Societe typographique de Lausanne began setting type for a counter feit edition of Raynal's Histoire philosophique, the Societe typographique de Neuchatel might be pulling the last sheets of another counterfeit edition, and the Societe typographique de Berne might have reached Paris with shipments of yet an other. But if they divided the printing into thirds, they could do it faster than all the other pirates; and by sharing the costs, they would also minimize the risks. These advantages drew the Swiss into a natural alliance against the French, sometimes even against their best friends in France. In February 1778, for example, the Societe typo graphique de Lausanne proposed to the STN that they co operate in counterfeiting Robertson's History of America, which was being translated by Suard, published with a privi lege by Panckoucke, and marketed by Panckoucke and Reg nault. Although this project had something to off end almost all its Encyclopedie associates, the STN replied, "Nous nous ferons un vrai plaisir de la [L'Histoire de l'Amerique] par tager avec vous. '' On February 24, after detailed discussion about paper, type, and profit-sharing, the two firms signed a contract for a joint edition. Each printed half the text, fol lowing a common sample sheet and work schedule; and they finished the job at the end of March, just when the antagonism between the quarto and octavo Encyclopedies was at its hottest. 33. Quotation from STN to Societe typographique de Lausanne, Feb. 9, 1778. Because Suard was slow, the Swiss used another translation and so beat Pane- 148 Piracy and Trade War The conditions of the trade virtually forced the pirates into such pacts, especially after the edicts of August 30, 1777, in dicated a new determination on the part of the French govern ment to destroy the circulation of counterfeit books. Faced with this threat, the three Swiss societes typographiques de cided to move from occasional collaboration to a formal alli ance or ''Confederation helvetique, '' as they called it. In May 1778 they signed a compact, which committed them to pool some of their stock, to hire an agent in Paris, who would pro vide a steady supply of material for pirating, and to cooper ate in producing and marketing counterfeit editions on a large scale. Each firm continued an autonomous line of busi ness but reserved two of its presses for the work of the Confederation, which soon became an important force in French-language publishing. It took at least eight months of conferences and correspondence for the Swiss to reach this agreement, the principal difficulty having been their commit ment to rival Encyclopedies. In the end, they decided to let that rivalry take its course and to concentrate on the more impor tant business of cooperative piracy. The STN therefore be came entangled in two opposed alliances but was in a position to mediate between them. The mediation involved a certain amount of duplicity, al though it might be anachronistic to apply present standards to men who adopted the practices of their time and who had enough experience of their trade to expect some crossing of alignments and enmities. Thus on .January 21, 1778, the STN agreed to circulate eighty octavo prospectuses for its ally in Lausanne, and on January 25 it informed its ally in Paris of the points on the French border where customs agents would have most success in seizing octavo shipments. But the So cietes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern knew that the STN would try to keep their Encyclopedie out of France, and the STN made a genuine effort to prevent a trade war. On .T anuary 29 Ostervald informed Panckoucke that he had close contacts in Bren and would see whether negotiations could be opened there as well as in Lausanne. Panckoucke had thought that a lettre ostensible might koucke to the French market. In 1777 and 1779 the STN planned counterfeit editions of two of Panckoucke 's favorite works, Cook's Second 1•oyage dans la mer du sud and Buff on 's Histoire naturelle. It eventually dropped both projects, but not because of any loyalty to Panckoucke. 149 The Business of Enlightenment touch off another round of bargaining after the withdrawal of Duplain 's octavo prospectus, and the STN did present some propositions to the octavo group. But the Bernois preferred to deal directly with Panckoucke and dispatched Pfaehler to Paris in :F'ebruary. Those pourparlers did not lead anywhere, however. Panckoucke merely stressed that he had the determi nation and power to drive the octavo from the French market, while Pfaehler replied that he and his associates did not mind because they were concentrating on the market outside France. The STN warned Panckoucke that Pfaehler might be bluffing: he probably had come to Paris to arrange for the smuggling of his Encyclopedies. Another octavo agent, Jacob Franc;ois Bornand of Lausanne, was also touring France, selling Encyclopedies and perhaps setting up smuggling routes. If he showed up in Paris, Panckoucke should take a hard line with him, too. The important thing was to convince the octavo publishers that the quarto group could keep them out of France, thanks to Panckoucke 's privilege and pro tections. If they intimidated their opponents sufficiently, Panc koucke and the STN could wait for them to come forward with peace proposals. By May the waiting had become difficult. Pfaehler had re turned to Bern and Bornand to Lausanne; the STN knew that three presses were churning out Encyclopedies in Lausanne alone; and it had received word that a great many French booksellers had taken out octavo subscriptions. On the quarto side, Panckoucke got the French authorities to issue special orders for the confiscation of octavos, and the STN kept up la guerre a l'oeil. War seemed only weeks away. On May 5 the octavo associates held a council in Bern and decided to make a last attempt at a diplomatic settlement. Pfaehler announced their final off er in a letter to Panckoucke : they would cede a half interest in their French sales for 15,000 livres and free access to the French market. Panckoucke pre- 34. STN to Panckoucke, March 10, 1778. Panckoucke and the STN discussed the situation in a series of letters between Jan. and June 1778. 35. STN to Panckoucke, May 3, 1778. 36. In his letter to Panckoucke of May 5, 1778, Pfaehler made the offer seem as attractive and congenial as possible: ''II n 'est pas douteux que vous jouirez par la d 'un benefice tres considerable sans beaucoup de peine et de risque, tandis que nous veillons a I 'impression, a I 'expedition, a la correspondance, enfin a tout le mercantil. Vons retirerez au bout d 'un certain temps le benefice sans autres soins ni embarras que d 'avoir fait un fonds modique.'' Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 150 Piracy and Trade War ferred to let the STN handle the negotiations. He passed Pfaehler 's letter on to Neuchatel and informed Bern that the STN had received his pleins pouvoirs to arrange a settlement. This maneuver, however, made the Neuchatelois uncomfort able-not so much because they had compunctions about bar gaining with a secret ally as because they felt perplexed about what line to take and what objectives to seek. The offer of half the French octavos aroused their suspicion because they feared that Lausanne and Bern might lie about their sales and falsify their accounts. A cash payment would be prefer able. But how much should they demand~ Even if they forced a large sum on the octavo group, they would sacrifice an opportunity to own a proportionate share in a market that seemed capable of unlimited expansion. For there was no underestimating the demand of the French public, "entiche comme il est du Grand Dictionnaire et seduit par le bas prix. '' In the end the STN merely resolved to wait for proposals to arrive from Bern and to bargain hard. The Bernois produced a draft contract that they wanted to serve as a basis for the bargaining. It gave the STN a choice between a half interest in the French sales and a quarter in terest in the entire enterprise. In either case, the quarto group would have to pay 15,000 livres for its share and would have to guarantee the shipments against confiscation by the French authorities. If the quarto group wanted to collaborate on those terms, the octavo group would increase production from 3,000 to 5,000 copies. If not, it would fight. The Bernois said that they did not desire a battle, and especially wanted to avoid any harm to the Confederation. But they would not make any more concessions: ''Nous romprons plutot toute negociation que de souscrire a des conditions onereuses. " The Bernois seemed so determined to hold this position that the STN doubted that the two sides could be brought together. But it did not want to give ground either. It thought that the octavo group still failed to appreciate the likelihood of suffer ing severe casualties in any attempt to break through the quarto's defenses in France. So it sent an intransigent reply, and then each of the negotiators paused to consult his con stituents. The STN sent a full report to Panckoucke, with copies of the correspondence, and also dispatched a few lines 37. STN to Panckoucke, June 7, 1778. 38. Societe typographique de Berne to STN, June 14, 1778. 151 The Business of Enlightenment to Duplain-his first notification, apparently, that fresh ne gotiations had begun: ''Les gens de Berne travaillent et marchandent. Ils offrent le quart, et nous insistons sur la moitie.' ' At this point, Berenger tried to break the stalemate with a personal letter to Ostervald. The quarto Encyclopedie had been produced ''en France et pour la France,'' he argued. But the octavo was a non-French affair. Four-fifths of its subscribers lived outside the kingdom. So Lausanne and Bern had little to gain from Panckoucke 's privilege, even if they increased their pressrun to 6,000. It was not reasonable to ask them to sacrifice half of all the subscriptions they already had in hand for the mere possibility of increasing their relatively small number of French subscriptions. Two days later the Societe typographique de Berne wrote a letter indicating that there was some flexibility on the octavo side. Instead of giving the quarto publishers a percentage of the sales, the octavo group might consider a cash payment; but then it needed hard information about "la somme qu'il faudrait payer pour une et toute fois et quels seraient les suretes qu 'on pourrait nous donner pour nous mettre a l 'abri des evenements que nous pourrions encore courir, non obstant de l 'entree accordee '? La variabilite du gouvernement et tant d 'autres choses rendent cette precaution necessaire, puisque la mort ou la disgrace d 'une seule personne peuvent amener des changements inat tendus. '' If Panckoucke wanted protection money, he would have to provide some assurance of his protectors' effective ness. The publishers of Lausanne and Bern had had enough experience with the French system of government to know that influence could be bought and also that it could evaporate overnight. The STN's reply is missing, but it clearly did not satisfy the Bernois, for on July 1 they abandoned the negotiations. They did so rather tentatively, however, dangling the bait while reeling in their line for the last time. Although they 39. STN to Duplain, June 24, 1778. The STN also warned Duplain that he had underestimated the selling-power of the octavo: '' Cette edition menee avec l 'activite que vous avez deployee aurait un succes aussi brillant que I 'in-quarto.'' 40. Berenger to STN, June 23, 1778, and Societe typographique de Berne to STN, June 25, 1778. 152 Piracy and Trade War could rely entirely on the non-French market, they said, they still would give up half their French sales in exchange for free access to the kingdom. This offer, which was tantamount to a gift of at least 300 octavos worth 58,500 livres, must have tempted the STN; but it did not bite, probably because it did not want to flood the market with cheap Encyclopedies before it had sold the 2,000 sets of the third quarto edition. To the octavo group, however, the offer seemed generous. It demonstrated a genuine desire to keep the peace, and the rejection of it smacked of a kind of commercial tyranny, which Berenger unhesitatingly attributed to "l'Atlas de la librairie frarn;aise.'' In a last, bitter letter to Ostervald, he explained that the publishers of the octavo had gone as far as they could to prevent a conflict, but they could not possibly turn over half their Encyclopedies to the quarto group. If they increased their printing to 5,000, they would only get to keep 2,500; and they had already sold that many. Moreover, "ils auraient eu la peine de former et preparer I 'enterprise et de I 'executer. En l 'augmentant ils multiplieraient leurs frais, leurs presses, leurs embarras, et cela pourquoi 1 Pour avoir l 'honneur d 'en donner gratis a M. Panckoucke, qui les a regarde faire les bras croises. Oh non, cela ne se peut. Ils ne sont ni sots, ni insenses. Ils aiment mieux laisser libres leurs souscripteurs frarn;;ais. S 'ils veulent des Encyclopedies de ce format, ils viendront les prendre sur les frontieres. Et M. Panckoucke pourrait bien etre fache un jour d 'avoir pousse trop loin ses pretentious. Les deux societes me paraissent disposees a lui rendre le change, non pas de la meme maniere-elles ne le peuvent pas-mais par des moyens qui ne lui seront pas moins defavorables. '' Panckoucke and company wanted war; very well, war they would get. 41. Societe typographique de Berne to STN, July 1, 1778: '' Apres avoir con sulte Messieurs nos interesses a l 'Encyclopedie et apres avoir tout balance de cote et d 'autre, ils ont trouve qu 'ii faudra nous en tenir a notre edition, qui est presque toute placee hors la France, que nous abandonnons entierement. II y aurait peut-etre eu moyen de s 'arranger encore, si vous nous eussiez pu faire entrer quelque sfirete en cas de changement dans le ministere, ou si vous n 'auriez pas rejete notre proposition d 'association pour le quart du tout en faisant les fonds necessaires ou pour la moitie des exemplaires qui entreront en France ... Nous avisons aujonrd 'hui M. Panckoucke d 'avoir rompu la negociation pour l 'Encyclopedie.'' 42. Berenger to Ostervald, July 1, 1778. 153 The Business of Enlightenment Open War Trade wars among eighteenth-century publishers did not involve pitched battles and clear lines of conflict. Each side set out to capture the market, of course; but they campaigned surreptitiously and their strategies differed. A publisher might try to undersell the enemy, to malign the quality of his product, to cut his supply lines, to intimidate his dis tributors, to deter potential customers by impugning his honesty or his ability to satisfy them, or finally to get his books seized by customs agents, guild officials, and the police. All or most of these techniques were used in the war between the octavo and the quarto Encyclopedies, but essentially the conflict developed into a contest between a strategy of smug gling and a strategy of protection and privilege. Panckoucke's ability to defend his privilege by invoking his protections was more important than the ownership of the privilege in itself. He could crush an interloper by setting wheels in motion in Versailles. Duplain would not have sur rendered half his quarto and the Societes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern would not have offered half the French sales of their octavo if they had not recognized the strength of Panckoucke 's unique position in the book trade. He had com plete confidence in his power to carry out the threats that he directed at the octavo group through the STN : '' J e reponds bien qu'ils n'entreront pas en France. Le magistrat me l'a promis, et les nouveaux reglements offrent les moyens les plus faciles pour les en empecher quand il y a un tiers op posant. Yous sentez, Messieurs, qu 'etant munis d 'un privilege, vous ne devez point, ainsi que moi, vous relacher de vos droits. Duplain, en vertu de nos actes, de notre privilege, est venu composer avec nous. II faut que les Lausannois en fassent de menie. " Panckoucke 's capacity to fight his battles with the weapons state accounts for the severity of the terms he offered of the to Lausanne and Bern and also for their willingness to per severe with the negotiations, despite his intransigence. At first he refused even to reveal the full extent of his influence 43. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1777. 154 Piracy and Trade War in Versailles, and the STN did likewise in its early negotia tiorrn with Lausanne; but its letters indicate that Panc1rnucke had received a definite commitment of support from a power ful source: ''Nous n' avons pas dit un mot aux Lausannois ni de vive voix ni par ecrit de la protection que l 'on nous ac corde, et ils n 'avaient que faire de le savoir. Nous nous sommes bornes a leur parler du privilege pour les cuivres et de la refonte projetee. '' Because thousands of livres hung on the effectiveness of this support, the octavo group had asked for assurances-an unconditional guarantee that Panc koucke would remove all obstacles to the circulation of their Encyclopedie in France and also "quelque surete en cas de changement dans le ministere. '' The STN had advised Panckoucke to let their opponents know how powerful his protectors were in order to strengthen its hand in the bar gaining.46 He must have done so, considering the persistence with which Lausanne and Bern sought to place their Encyclo pedie under the cover of his protection. The whole character of the negotiations indicates the importance that each side attributed to Panckoucke 's influence among the French au thorities. So Panckoucke 's remarks about his conferences with Le Camus de Neville, the director of the book trade, should not be interpreted as name dropping. As the STN put it, he held "les clefs du royaume" : he meant to open the doors of France to the quarto and to close them to the octavo. It is difficult to know the details of Panckoucke 's tactics because he kept them secret, but he certainly got Neville to issue a special alert against the octavo, just as he had origi nally done in the case of the quarto .• Judging from allusions in the correspondence of Panckoucke and the STN, Neville ordered his subordinates, the inspecteurs de la librairie at tached to the booksellers' guilds throughout the kingdom, to 44. STN to Panckoucke, Jan. 25, 1778. 45. Societe typographique de Berne to STN, June 14 and July 1, 1778. 46. STN to Pauckoucke, Feb. 22, 1778: ''Nous croyons qu 'ii est tres a propos que vous fassiez connaitre, so it directement soit par personue tierce, mais d 'une maniere nette et claire, au Siem· Bornand, commis voyageur des Lausaunois, la resolution au vous etes d 'user de vos droits et Jes mesures deja prises pour rendre efficace votre opposition. C 'est un moyeu assure de l 'arreter tout court, s 'ii en est un. '' 47. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 7, 1777. 155 The Business of ~Enlightenment confiscate any octavos circulating in their territory. The ter ritory of La Tourette, the inspector in Lyons, covered most of the eastern border of France, including the main arteries of the trade from Geneva and Lausanne. Since the quarto shipments were to follow the Geneva-Lyons route and the octavo might do likewise, Panckoucke and Duplain made a special effort to enlist La Tourette on their side. They gave him a set of their Encyclopedie and provided free copies to de Flesselles, the intendant; Prost de Royer, the lieutenant de police; and the local academy. Panckoucke also gave quartos to his most important protectors in the capital: Neville, Vergennes, and probably also Miromesnil, the Garde des Sceaux, and Lenoir, the lieutenant-general de la police. Al together the Association distributed almost two dozen compli mentary quartos-gifts that were valuable enough to reinforce the proquarto, antioctavo bias on the local and national levels of the administration. Panckoucke could also draw on a legacy of bribes and grati fications; and once he had oiled the machinery of the state, he set its wheels in motion. He conferred with Neville, got au thorization to take special measures in Lyons, and then issued orders to La Tourette, writing as if he himself were a min ister: '' J 'ai eu l 'honneur de vous mander que je m 'etais arrange avec M. Duplain au sujet de la nouvelle edition in quarto du Dictionnaire des Arts. Il me mantle dans ce moment qu 'il attend de Geneve les deux premiers volumes. J e vous serai oblige de donner vos ordres pour que ces volumes pas sent sans difficulte et d 'accorder toute votre protection a cet ouvrage. Monsieur de Neville est prevenu de tout ce que j 'ai fait a ce sujet. " 48. Because most of Panckoucke 's letters are m1ssmg from this period, his activities are difficult to follow, but the letters to him from the STN sometimes allude to a promise from Neville that special orders would be issued against the octavo. On May 3, 1778, for example, the STN wrote, '' Il sera tres bien que les ordres soient adresses aux inspecteurs dans les differentes chambres syndicales, vu l 'autorite que les nouveaux reglements leur attribuent.'' 49. Under the rubric ''gratis,'' the subscription list (see Appendix B) in cluded twenty-five copies intended to smooth the quarto's way into France. At least ten of them went to Lyonnais, and four went to Panckoucke 's protectors in Paris and Versailles. 50. Panckoucke to La Tourette, July 18, 1777, from a copy made by Panc koucke, which is in the Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. Although Panckoucke may not have actually sent this letter, the fol lowing document, which accompanies it in the Genevan archives, leaves no doubt 156 Piracy and Trade War The protection given the quarto proved to be so effective that the shipments from Switzerland to Lyons served as a cover for a smuggling operation mounted by Re vol et Com pagnie, shipping agents in Lyons. The "company" actually consisted of nothing more than Jacques Revol and his wife, and Revol had nothing more than know-how. But he knew a great deal. He had a wide acquaintance among wagoners, warehousemen, innkeepers, and customs inspectors-the hu man material out of which a smuggling business could be built-and he understood the weak points in the system for controlling the importation of books. Crates full of books were supposed to enter France through border stations, where customs officials tied them with rope, sealed the rope with lead, and made out a customs permit called an acquit a caution. Accompanied by the acquit, the crates then journeyed to the nearest town with a booksellers' guild whose officials (syndic et adjoints) were authorized to make inspections and dis charge acquits. Swiss shipments almost always had to go through the chambre syndicale of the guild in Lyons. There, under the surveillance of the local inspecteur de la librairie, the officials broke the seals, made sure the crates contained nothing illegal, and discharged the acquit by signing it and returning it to the border station from which it had originated. The books then could be forwarded by a shipping agent to their ultimate destination within the kingdom. At this point they traveled as a domestic shipment and usually were left alone by the authorities, unless Neville issued a special alert or unless they were bound for certain cities, like Marseilles, Toulouse, and especially Paris, where additional inspection was common. This system minimized fraud by enlisting both administra tive officials and established bookdealers in the policing of the that Neville cooperated with the campaign to protect the quarto long before the octavo was a threat. Perrin (Neville's secretary) to Panckoucke, July 19, 1777: "M. de Neville me charge, Monsieur, de vous renvoyer la lettre ci-jointe que vous lui avez commuuiquee. Ce magistrat ne voit point d 'inconvenient a la faire partir, mais M. de La Tourette n 'est pas actuellement a Lyon. Il va arriver au premier jour a Paris, et M. de Neville ne croit pas qu 'il soit a propos d 'ecril'e aux officiers de la chambre syndicale. Si vous voulez venir demain matin ou mardi matin a dix heures, vous verrez avec M. de Neville a prendre un autre parti. J 'ai re"u ce soir Jes trois exemplaires [that is, the free copies of the first volumes of the quarto] de la chambre syndicale. J 'en ai fait partir un aussitot pour M. le Comte de Vergennes. ' ' 157 The Business of Enlightenment trade, but it could be circumvented by the techniques used by Revol and other marginal middlemen. Revol instructed the wagoners to meet him at inns on the outskirts of Lyons, no tably the establishment of M. Boutarry, a half-league outside the Faubourg Sainte Claire, where he kept a supply of legal books. He would open the crates, substitute the legal for the prohibited works, and close the crates up again, counterfeit ing the lead seal, which was easier than falsifying the dis charge of the acquit. He then would store the contraband goods in a secret warehouse until they could be forwarded safely as a domestic shipment, and he would process the in nocent merchandise through Lyons 's chambre syndicale. Of course Revol could cut corners and save expenses if he could persuade a guild official to make a fraudulent or even a negligent inspection while the inspector turned his back. Inspection was long, dull work, involving a good deal of red tape and pawing about in piles of loose sheets (books were normally shipped in sheets rather than stitched and bound). Many syndics and inspectors did a cursory job: they checked the top sheets in a crate and glanced at whatever could be seen from the side. The sheets of prohibited books might pass unnoticed if stuffed in the middle of a crate full of inoffensive sheets. This practice of ''larding,'' as it was called, involved more risks than the detour through inns and secret ware houses, but it was cheape1' and easier; and the risks could be reduced if the officials knew that the shipping agent was re ceiving large, regular shipments of legitimate books. The quarto Encyclopedie fit this requirement perfectly. The inspector, La Tourette, had received special orders to facilitate its passage through Lyons; huge crateloads of it came almost every week from Switzerland; and the agent whom Duplain had hired to clear the crates through the guild was a boyhood friend of his, Jacques Revol. Revol was ah;o the STN 's first-string smuggler in Lyons. So the Encyclo pedie provided him and the N euchatelois with a golden op portunity for cut-rate contraband, as he explained in a letter of July 5, 1778: "Nous vous prevenons qu 'avons des entre pots surs; et si vous voulez profiter de I 'occasion qu 'avez de l'Encyclopedie, vous pouvez d'une balle en faire passer quatre, en les masquant sur les bords et aux tetes. Nous vout-> les ferons passer avec facilite, sanR que personne s 'en ap per<:;oive, d 'autant plus que c 'est nous qui retirons toutes les 158 Piracy and Trade War balles de M. Duplain et qu 'elles sont entreposees dans nos lui les envoyons deballees par ballot. C 'est magasins. Nous fort rare quand on les visite a la Chambre; ou si on les visite, regarde jamais en dedans ou ne visite que les bords. on ne les Vo us devez juger qu 'il nous serait facile de mettre en surete tout ce que vous voudrez. '' The STN funneled its prohibited and pirated books through Lyons in this manner for a year and a half. Far from drawing the fire of the French authori ties, as it had done in the 1750s, the Encyclopedie circulated under their protection and circulated so openly that it served as camouflage for the diffusion of works that they really did want to suppress. Panckoucke and Duplain had no idea that Revol had grafted a small smuggling business onto their enterprise. They wanted to prevent smuggling, at least in the case of the octavo ; for after the failures of the negotiations with Lausanne and Bern, they knew that the octavo group would try to penetrate France by clandestine shipments. As Revol 's operations il lustrate, contraband was particularly vulnerable at two points: the border stations, where customs agents could in spect the crates instead of sending them on under acquit a caution, and the guild towns, where the crates normally under went inspection. Neville's orders spread the antioctavo alert throughout the network of guilds, while the STN helped put the border agents on their guard. Writing to Panckoucke in the expectation that he would pass the word on to the French officials, it revealed the locations on the border where the smugglers were most likely to pass. The Neuchatelois could speak with some authority on this subject because they had done business for almost a decade with the shipping agents and smugglers of the area, particu larly those who operated around the border station of Fram bourg, which dominated the route between Neuchatel and Pontarlier, France. They normally dealt with Jean-Franc;ois 51. This account is based on Revol 's dossier in the STN papers. The quotation comes from his letter to the STN of July 5, 1778. 52. STN to Panckoucke, Jan. 25, 1778: "II s 'agit de mettre en oeuvre tous les moyens que nous avons en main . . . L 'un des plus essentials est de veiller avec le plus grand soin a ce qu 'il ne s 'introduise en France aucun exemplaire de I 'octavo, car les Lausannois posent toujours en fait qu 'il en entrera en depit de bureaux de Frambourg, de Jougne, Moret et Coulonge sont les prinei nous. Les paux de ceux qui repondent a nos frontieres. Nous nous persuadons que vous saurez prendre les mesures les plus e:flicaces pour emplleher cette eontrebande-la.'' 159 The Business of Enlightenment Pion of Pontarlier, who commanded a large team of wagoners. But Pion was lazy and unreliable, and the STN tended to entrust more delicate shipments to the smaller but surer agency of Meuron et Philippin in Saint Sulpice, a village on the Swiss side of the border. Meuron et Philippin specialized in border crossings, both legitimate and clandestine. They wanted to prove their prowess in order to steal the STN 's business from Pion. And they were proficient in various tech niques, ranging from backpacking to bribery, which had evolved over the years in the Jura valleys, where smuggling was an important industry. It was particularly important to the Swiss societes typographiques, which spent a great deal of time and money on the maintenance of their clandes tine routes to the rich French market for prohibited books. So the STN knew that a vast effort of secret route building lay behind the willingness of Lausanne and Bern to break off negotiations concerning the Encyclopedie. ''Nous avons eu occasion de voir ici nos Encyclopedistes in-octavo,'' it in formed Panckoucke. "Ils ne nous ont fait aucune ouverture relative a cet obj et, et nous avons lieu de croire ou qu 'ils veulent traiter avec vous ou qu 'ils croient pouvoir s 'arranger sans cela. Ils tirent actuellement a 3,000 et ils ont dit dans la conversation qu 'ils s 'engagaient a rendre les exemplaires dans tout le royaume a leurs perils et risques. Nous croyons devoir vous rendre ce propos pour l 'expliquer par leur con duite. Si la correspondance de Pfaehler avec vous n 'a point de suite, il faut en cas conclure qu 'ils ont ou croient avoir une route sure.' ' But where did that route pass~ If it could be discovered, the quarto group could cut the octavo's supply lines, per haps with such devastating effect that Lausanne and Bern would abandon France. Favarger kept his eye out for such a dis covery when he left for his confrontation with Duplain and his sales trip through southern and central France. He also intended to inspect the STN 's own supply lines, and his first stop was Saint Sulpice, in the office of Meuron et Philippin. There the Meuron brothers, Theodore Abram and Pierre Frederic, dropped a remark about crossing the border with five 800-pound crates bound for Paris containing volume 1 of the octavo Encyclopedie. This was a capital revelation, 53. STN to Panekoueke, May 21, 1778. 160 Piracy and Trade War which the Meurons slipped into the conversation with more than a touch of professional pride, because they knew that it would help them in their competition with Pion. Favarger tried to draw them into further disclosures, but "leurs re ponses ont toujour ete, 'Quand nous avons de vrais amis, nous savons aussi dans le besoin leur donner un coup d 'epaule.' '' Favarger then hurried on to Pontarlier in order to con front Pion with this information. Pion had gone to Besanc;on on business, but his son, who was minding the shop, came up with a crucial piece of missing information: he had seen the acquits a caution for the shipment. They had been discharged by Capel, syndic of the guild in Dijon. The agents in the sta tion at Frambourg, who usually only delivered acquits for Lyons, had just begun to permit shipments for Paris to pass directly through Dijon. So Capel was collaborating with the octavo group by discharging its acquits and relaying its crates on to their destination instead of confiscating them. Favarger sent a triumphant letter to his home office about this discovery, and the Neuchatelois immediately reported it to Panckoucke, taking care, however, to avoid mentioning Capel and insisting that Panckoucke not mention them. They knew that he would get his protectors to confiscate the ship and they did not want to be associated, even as inform ment, ers, with a smuggling operation-or rather they did not want the French authorities to associate them with it. In the reply that they sent to Favarger in Lyons, they emphasized the im portance of concealing Capel's part in the affair, because ''nous esperons que pour de l 'argent il nous rendra le meme service." If Capel would discharge the STN's acquits as well as those of its neighbors, he might well replace Revol as its principal underground agent, and Dijon could become the main entrepot of its illegal books. The conditions of the import trade in France had forced the N euchatelois to route most of their shipments through Lyons, an enormous and expensive detour in the case of books bound for the rich markets of northern France. Capel 's collaboration would open up a north west passage to the capital, which they had been seeking in vain for years. Lyons would still be the gateway to the Midi, and the STN wanted to encourage Revol's enterprise, in case the northwestern route should collapse. So it also instructed 54. Favarger to STN from Pontarlier, July 8, 1778. 161 The Business of Enlightenment Favarger to reinforce its ties with Revol: '' Plm; aurons de cordes a notre arc et mieux la chose ira. '' Of course Duplain should be informed of the octavo breakthrough but should be kept in the dark about Revol 's activities. The ~TN wanted to play both sides of the smuggling game. Favarger succeeded in feeding the prescribed amount of information to Duplain, which was no small accomplishment, given the vivacity of Duplain 's conversation and the com plexity of the Encyclopedie intrigues: '' M. Duplain n 'a pas pen ete Surpris de l 'adresse des entrepreneurs de cette edition pour faire passer leurs balles . . . Il est enchante de cette decouverte et dit, 'Il faut tremousser, c'est ce que je ferai; ils ne seront pas pen capots quand ils en verront quelques magots d 'arretes.' J e me suis bien garde de compromettre Capel et me suis conforme, Dien merci, en tons points a VOS instruc tions, ce qui n 'est pas aise avec lui quand l 'on y est aussi long temps que j 'y ai ete." In its next letter, the STN told Favar ger that Capel had refused its overtures and so his name could be mentioned to Duplain. It produced quite an effect: "Ila ete etonne des demarches de Capel, d'autant plus qu'il a souscrit pour un grand nombre de I 'in-quarto,'' Favarger reported. In fact, Capel eventually ordered 131 quartos, an enormous number but not enough for him to resist the tempta tion to make some extra money by working with the octavo group. His unwillingness to discharge acquits for the STN" did not surprise Favarger, who reminded the N euchatelois that they had failed to persuade him to cheat at his job two years earlier. But they would get surer service from Revol, who had made splendid use of the quarto shipments (Favar ger 's investigations confirmed that "lorsqu'il s'agit de l'En cyclopedie quarto, on n'en ouvre qu'une on deux [balles] d'un envoi, et I 'acquit est decharge ") and now had perfected his measures for smuggling books without them. The octavo publishers therefore had got off to a good start in their smuggling, but the quarto group was on their track. The octavo crates went from Lausanne and Bern right past Neuchatel and up the Val de Travers to Saint Sulpice. Next, thanks to .11euron et Philippin, they made the border crossing to Pontarlier and, with Capel's help, traveled directly to Paris 55. STN to Favarger, July 11, 1778. 56. Favarger to STN, July 15 and 21, 1778. 162 Piracy and Trade War via Dijon. The STN believed that they were stored in a secret entrepot outside the city walls and then were smuggled in small bundles past the customs to retailers and subscribers in the capital. Provincial subscribers might have received their shipments from Dijon, too, but the octavo publishers also used other routes. Favarger learned that Robert et Gauthier, booksellers of Bourg en Bresse, had smuggled in 50 octavos for their own customers and that the octavo group had asked J aquenod, an influential colleague of Duplain 's, to undertake "!'operation perilleuse" for them in Lyo'ns but that he had refused. So the quarto publishers had uncovered a good deal of their enemy's distribution system. How effective were they in destroying it 1 After learning that the four tons of the octavo's first vol ume were bearing down on the gates of Paris, Panckoucke reassured the STN that he had prepared for their reception: ''Le magistrat a donne des ordres. '' Too few of his letters survive from this period for one to know whether his pro tectors captured this shipment or any of the cartloads of volumes 2-36 that were to follow it. But it seems unlikely that the octavo agents could keep such huge shipments hidden from officials who were primed to discover them and who knew the route they would take. One indication of the casualty rate among the octavos comes from the diary and letters written by Favarger during his tour de France. Word reached him in Nimes that the authori ties of Toulouse had seized an important shipment of octavos. In Marseilles he crossed paths with Duplain's main assistant, Amable Le Roy, who had been selling quartos throughout the south. Le Roy confirmed the reports of the Toulouse confisca tion and added that it was doubly disastrous for Lausanne and Bern because it had destroyed their customers' faith in their ability to deliver the merchandise: ''Les souscripteurs, deja lasses des entraves et desagrements qu 'a essuyes le premier volume, se degoutent et prennent de l'in-quarto, qui va son train. Il est certain qu'ici [Marseilles, which eventually took 228 quartos] ils n 'en ont pas place quatre exemplaires. " In subsequent discussions with bookdealers, Favarger continued 57. STN to Favarger, .July 11, 1778. 58. Favarger to STN, .July 15, 1778. 59. Panckoucke to STN, .July 21, 1778. 60. Favarger to STN, Aug. 23, 1778. 163 The Business of Enlightenment to hear of desertions among the octavo subscribers: Odezenes et fils of Morbillon had not received a single volume of the six octavos they had ordered and were about to convert to the quarto; Fuzier of Pezenas had persuaded his clients to switch to the quarto because of the uncertainty of receiving the oc tavo; and Herisson of Carcassone had done the same. Similar information arrived from several correspondents of the STN in France. Panckoucke reported the confiscation of a shipment in Caen. Champmorin of Saint Dizier wrote of another in Sedan. Chaurou of Toulouse said the authorities there would not release the octavos they had seized until the quarto had been sold out. And the Societe typographique de Bouillon was stopped dead in its attempts to smuggle octavos to cus tomers in northern France. It took time for the state to organize the extermination of the octavo; so some early ship ments reached their customers. In October 1778 Duplain com plained, '' L 'edition de Lausanne in-octavo se repand en foule partout. 11 faut done que M. de N. [Neville] envoie a chacun de ses inspecteurs un prospectus de cette edition in-octavo et def ende qu 'on en vende . . . 11 est bien singulier que Panc koucke fasse si fort sonner sa protection et qu 'elle nous soit si inutile. " But a year later, Duplain 's lieutenant, Amable Le Roy, reported that 1,400 copies of the octavo had been confiscated by the French authorities. Unable to sustain such losses any longer, the octavo publishers retreated from France in 1779. Panckoucke had won the war in the western sector. But Panckoucke 's interdiction did not extend to the rest of 61. Bosset, reporting a conversation with Panckoucke, to STN from Paris, May 22, 1780. 62. Champmorin to STN, Nov. 26, 1780. 63. Chaurou to STN, Jan. 15, 1779. 64. Jean-Pierre-Louis Trecourt to Pierre Rousseau, Feb. 23, 1780. Trecourt had taken over the daily management of the Societe typographique de Bouillon from Rousseau, who had withdrawn in semiretirement to Paris. In this letter, he re minded Rousseau that they had failed to provide their French subscribers with octavos and had abandoned the marketing of it. In a letter of Aug. 18, 1780, he mentioned the confiscation of a large shipment of octavos by the chambre syndicale of Nancy. Both letters are in the Archives Weissenbruch of the Bibliotheque du musee ducal in Bouillon, and they were kindly communicated by Dr. Fernand Clement of Bouillon. 65. Duplain to Merlino de Giverdy, Oct. 14, 1778, from a copy sent to the STN by Panckoucke. 66. Le Roy mentioned the confiscations in a conversation with Mallet Dupan. Mallet to STN, Oct. 1, 1779. 164 Piracy and Trade War Europe, where Lausanne and Bern had extensive contacts. In Germany, for example, the Societe typographique de Berne reputedly did business with every important bookseller, and Pfaehler traded regularly at the book fairs of Frankfurt and Leipzig. When the quarto group tried to penetrate Germany, it found the territory occupied everywhere by the octavo. The STN got Serini of Basel to distribute quarto prospectuses among his large German clientele and at the two great fairs, but he found the situation hopeless. The N euchatelois had a great many German correspondents of their own, who wrote "de tousles cotes" that the octavo had captured the market. Similar reports arrived from other parts of Europe, while the quarto associates concentrated on reaping their three harvests from the denser market in France. The STN estimated that at least seven-eighths of the quartos had been sold in France by mid-1780, and it noted that they had circulated openly everywhere, without the slightest difficulty from the French authorities. So the trade war developed into a stalemate: the quarto group had driven the octavos from France, and the octavo forces had prevented the quartos from penetrating extensively beyond the Rhine and the Rhone. Except for occasional sniping and border raids, each side stayed behind its lines. The great European market for Encyclopedies had been divided into two spheres of influence. Pourparlers for Peace The stalemate did not please any of the Swiss societes typo graphiques, who were used to selling books on both sides of the divide. In the spring of 1779 the STN wrote ruefully to Panckoucke and Duplain that the octavo's success in Germany proved that they should have made peace in 1778-and it en- 67. Serini to STN, March 27, 1779. 68. STN to Duplain, April 7, 1779. See also STN to Panckoucke, June 24, 1779: "En Allemagne, I 'edition octavo que vous avez si fort meprisee, nous y a fait le plus grand tort.'' 69. STN to Dufour et Roux of Maestricht, Aug. 14, 1780. In a letter to Champ morin of Saint Dizier dated Nov. 12, 1780, the STN emphasized that the quarto association had marketed its Encyclopedies '' dans toutes les villes de province ou it y a chambre syndicale et meme a Paris, sans aucune precaution, et jamais ii n' y a eu aucun empechement.'' This statement is borne out by the record of book confiscations kept by the Chambre syndicale of Paris. Bibliothilque nationale, ms. Fr. 21933-21934. 165 The Business of Enlightenment tered into secret negotiations with its octavo neighbors. At first they merely discussed a marketing agreement: the STN would sell octavos in its territory, while Lausanne and Bern sold quartos in theirs, and each side would supply the other with its Encyclopedies at a 25 percent discount. The octavo publishers even offered to provide the STN with a list of the subscribers whom they had not been able to reach in France, owing to the effectiveness of Panckoucke 's embargo. But this proposal probably would have involved the N eucha telois in a campaign to smuggle octavos past their own anti smuggling defenses; after serious consideration, they rejected it. They did cooperate informally with Bern in May and June 1779, but these attempts at mutual marketing came to nothing. After offering the octavo in its commercial correspondence and spreading around some prospectuses, the STN sold only one set. Pfaehler failed to sell any quartos at all, although he proposed them to his customers on a sales trip through Ger many.70 By this time, however, few quartos remained. Panckoucke's Association had sold almost all the sets of its three editions. The quarto group may therefore be considered the victor of the Encyclopedie war, especially as the octavo publishers were the first to sue for peace. They had most to gain from a cessa tion of hostilities because the more expensive quarto had never been a threat in their territory, while there was still a demand for the octavo in France, judging from the reports of their French correspondents. They sounded the STN on the pos sibility of a truce at a meeting of the Swiss Confederation in October 1779, and soon afterwards the Lausannois proposed terms: the STN would arrange for the octavo's free entry into France and then would join Lausanne and Bern in a new edition of it, a tripartite edition, like the other productions of the Confederation. With the rich French market open to them, they could sell 2,000 or 3,000 more sets, for they had once had 1,200 French subscribers ''et serons surs de placer un beau coup plus grand nombre en France des que cet ouvrage aura un cours libre en France, dont il sera aise de l'obtenir, puisque la moisson des Encyclopedistes in-quarto est faite. 'm 70. Societe typographique de Berne to STN, March 14, June 15, and Dec. 13, 1779; and STN to Societe typographique de Berne, June 12, 1779. 71. Societe typographique de Lausanne to STN, Oct. 9, 1779. 166 Piracy and Trade War Tempting as it was, this proposal might badly entangle the STN 's two alliances; so Ostervald wrote a lukewarm reply. The whole business stirred up painful memories about the abortive negotiations of .June 1778, he said. That had been the time to come forth with concessions. He could see what the octavo publishers were after now: the lifting of the French embargo. But that would be more difficult than they realized, and he would not even consider it unless he had a realistic idea of the profits to be expected from the deal. He needed information that they kept secret-about costs, subscriptions, and the like-then he would decide whether ''la chose vaudra la peine que nous y employons ce que nous avons d 'amis et de credit a Paris.' m The Lausannois replied that they did not want to rake up old troubles but rather to give the STN an opportunity to cash in on a new speculation, which would surely succeed if they could break through to the French market. They had made a success of their first edition without France. Only 100 of its 3,200 sets remained to be sold, and they had reached the twentieth volume in their printing. They had received word from Lyons that the quarto publishers had sold out almost all their Encyclopedies, too: "leur moisson est faite; ils par aissent inclines a nous permettre de glaner a pres eux." The time had come to expand across the Jura. They could reprint volumes 1 through 20 at 3,000 and continue with volumes 21 through 36 at 6,000. The increase in output would permit them to save about 20,000 livres in the costs of composition and correction for the second ''edition.'' They could use that sum to buy their way into France from the quarto group. And once in France, they could make a killing, for they were con vinced that the quarto had not exhausted the demand for inexpensive Encyclopedies among French readers: ''Le public a bien accueilli la premiere edition [octavo], et l'on nous fait de toutes parts des instances en France pour cet ouvrage, qui nous sont un hon garant de l 'ecoulement de la seconde. L 'un de nous pourra faire le voyage pour renouveller les anciennes souscriptions et en acquerir des nouvelles. '' They would give the STN at least fifteen volumes to print; and in order to satisfy Ostervald's demand for information about costs and 72. STN to Soeiete typographique de Lausanne, Oct. 11, 1779. 167 The Business of Enlightenment profits, they produced the following "Tableau de l 'entre prise'': Pour la reimpression de 3,000 exemplaires en 36 vol- umes de discours et 3 volumes de planches, les frais d 'impression, gravure, etc., total environ ......... . 280,000 livres Ajoutons pour faux frais ........................ . 20,000 300,000 Le produit des 3,000 exemplaires, deduction faite du 25% [for the booksellers' discount] et le 13eme gratis [for bakers' dozens] sera ....................... . 450,000 livres Par consequent on aura 150,000 livres de France de benefice. The STN could therefore expect- to make 50,000 livres from its one-third share in the enterprise, aside from its portion (pre sumably 4,167 livres) of the protection money to be paid the quarto group and its profits from printing the fifteen vol umes.73 It was a tempting prospect; to make it more so, Berenger reinforced the octavo argument in a personal letter to Oster vald. He was a literary man, not a merchant, he said, but he had been amazed at the rapid sales of the octavo, especially as it was '' bien inferieur '' from a literary point of view. Heubach had assured him that only a few sets remained and that they could easily sell another 3,000 copies, for they were already sure of 500 sales in Paris and 700 in other French cities. But Ostervald knew that he could not make a deal without the support of Panckoucke, who had ultimate control of the French border. So he sent a noncommittal reply: he would have to consult the quarto associates. Berenger sent back a more insistent letter. The octavo pub lishers had reached an important turning point. They would either continue their Encyclopedie as it was (and it was profitable enough in its present form), or they would double it. To delay the decision would be to increase their expenses, and they did not want to set type now for volumes that they would have to recompose if they were to print at 6,000 instead of 3,000. But Ostervald could not get a commitment out of Panckoucke, who was then absorbed in his negotiations with 73. Societe typographique de Lausanne to STN, Oct. 21, 1779. 74. Berenger to Ostervald, Oct. 15, 1779, and Ostervald to Berenger, Oct. 21, 75. Berenger to Ostervald, Nov. 5, 1779. 168 Piracy and Trade War the Liegeois, and left Berenger 's letter unanswered. The Lausannois then began to suspect that the quarto group was playing for time, while it prepared some new move-perhaps an octavo of its own. After all, the information supplied by Lausanne and Bern proved the profitability of their project, which the quarto group could simply appropriate. Panckoucke and his partners had enclosed the French market within an impenetrable trade barrier, and they could harvest their own octavo in it without sharing the yield. On November 11, the Lausannois demanded a categorical reply. They could wait no longer; the quarto group would have to commit itself. A week later the Neuchatelois answered that they could not answer because their partners had not yet decided. If the octavo group forced the issue, they would have to say no not that they found the proposal unappealing; they simply could not commit their associates. The quarto Association was to meet in Lyons in a month, and the STN would try to get a decision from it at that time, "notre delicatesse ne nous per mettant pas de prendre aucun parti a ce sujet avant cette epoque. " That reply sounded so evasive to the Lausannois that it confirmed their suspicions. The quarto group must surely be preparing a surprise raid on the octavo market that they believed belonged to them. vVorse, their own con federate, the STN, had lured them into revealing confiden tial information, which was the crucial element in the decision to attempt this stab in the back. Now that the quarto pub lishers knew that there were at least 1,200 potential customers for another octavo in France, and that the demand for it had continued to make itself felt in Lausanne and Bern, they would produce the book themselves, extracting one more victory from a war they had already won. This was the theme of a bitter letter which Berenger sent to Ostervald, a letter whose bitterness was especially acute because of the closeness between the two men. Only three months earlier, Ostervald had made a surprise visit to the Berenger household during a trip to Lausanne and had spent some delightful hours with Madame Berenger and her chil dren. Berenger had written later about how sorry he was to have been away at the time and about the warm feelings that Ostervald had left behind: ''Si je pouvais etre jaloux, je le 76. STN to Societe typographique de Lausanne, Nov.17, 1779. 169 The Business of Enlightenment serais de vous: il n'est pas jusqu'a nos petits enfants qui n'estropient un peu votre nom pour parler de vous, et le petit homme se vante d 'avoir gagne aux quilles le grand Monsieur qui etait tant bon. ' Now Berenger wrote in a different tone, virtually accusing Ostervald of stealing the octavo group's plans for a second edition. '' C 'est notre Societe qui vous y a fait penser; c 'est elle qui vous l 'a proposee; c 'est a elle que vous avez demande des details pour voir si l 'entreprise etait faisable. Elle se confie a vous comme a un allie; elle vous detaille son projet, le gain qu 'elle en espere, les frais qu 'il exige, etc.; et des que vous le savez, vous faites de sa confiance un piege. Ellene pense pas que vous en ayez agi avec franchise et comme un associe. '' This treachery hurt Berenger more than anyone else, not merely because of his friendship with Ostervald but also because the Societe typographique de Lau sanne had allotted him one-fourth of its one-third interest in the octavo. He had pinned his hopes on it. He had expected it to bring him 9,000 livres, perhaps even enough to retire on. ''Deja je voyais dans le lointain le moment ou j 'acheterais une cabane solitaire, un verger, un petit champ, ou j'irais m'y egayer avec ma famille. Puis vous souffiez sur ce reve de bonheur. Ah! ce n 'est pas vous qui deviez le faire evanouir ! '' The STN's apostasy would also damage the Confederation and would even undermine Berenger 's position within his own societe typographique. For he had always advocated closer relations with Neuchatel, and now the Neuchatelois had made that policy look foolish-unless Ostervald would change his mind: "Voyez, pesez, jugez, je ne dirai rien de plus; je voudrais oublier cette affaire desagreable. 'ns Ostervald never expected to receive such an indictment be cause, in fact, he had not abused the Lausannois' confidence and the quarto group had not planned to produce its own octavo, although Berenger 's misconception suggests that such foul play was not unthinkable. No holds were barred in the commercial warfare of the eighteenth century. In this case, however, Ostervald was able to reassure Berenger that the STN had not betrayed its Swiss allie·s and that it still would argue their case at the meeting of its French alliance. As 77. Berenger to Ostervald, Aug.1779 (no precise date given). 78. Berenger to Ostervald, Nov. 23, 1779. 170 Piracy and Trade War that meeting had been called for the final settling of the quarto's accounts, it would provide an appropriate occasion for a settlement with the octavo publishers. Berenger sent a retraction in reply: he had been misled by a false rumor about the STN 's Encyclopedie plans. In subsequent letters, the two friends tried to cover up the chasm that had opened between them. Ostervald explained the difficulty of being forced to play both '' l 'enclume et le marteau. '' And Berenger expressed some sympathy for "votre situation ... facheuse. " The Lausannois then went directly to Duplain, who proved ready and willing to sell them the entry into France for 24,000 livres, as he had almost liquidated the quarto. But he, not make any settlement without the agreement of too, could Panckoucke, whose main concern by the end of 1779 was the launching of the Encyclopedie methodique. Fearing damage market for his new Encyclopedie, Panckoucke vetoed to the the proposal, reinforced his def ens es, and reported to the STN that Neville had sounded the antioctavo alert once more: '' Soyez surs que I 'in-octavo ... n 'entrera pas en France. Le Magistrat me l 'a renouvelle de nouveau.' ' A Drole de Paix The attempt to bring the quarto and octavo groups together had almost split the Swiss Confederation. So much was at stake in so many different intrigues by 1780 that fissures had developed everywhere in the publishing alliances. The octavo publishers had tried to use the STN to divide their conquerors, or at least to extract easy terms from them; for 20,000 livres was not an excessive price for the liberation of France, espe- 79. Ostervald to Berenger, Nov. 29 and Dee. 20, 1779, and Jan. 3, 1780; Beren ger to Ostervald, Dee. 10 and Dee. 31, 1779, and Jan. 15, 1780. 80. Panekoueke to STN, Jan. 6, 1780. Panekoueke was referring to Neville's order directing the inspeeteurs de la librairie to seize all copies of the octavo. Panckoucke also indicated, in a letter to the STN of Dee. 2, 1779, that he felt great concern about Duplain 's negotiations with the Lausannois: ''Duplain vient de m 'ecrire qu 'il etait a la veille de traiter avee les Lausannois, qui lui offraient mille louis pour l 'entree en France. J e lui ai mande sur le champ de ne rien faire, puisque pour une somme modique ee serait nous enlever toutes les esperanees de l 'Encyclopedie methodique, a laquelle on travaille a force et dont la partie physique est ml\me sous presse. Comme M. Duplain est alle tres en avant avec ces Messieurs de Lausanne, que sa lettre semble ml\me annoncer un rendez-vous, je vous prie en grace, Messieurs, de veiller sur tout ce qui passera. ' ' 171 The Business of Enlightenment cially if compared with the 27,000 livres that the quarto group had paid to Barret and Grabit. But for reasons that will be come apparent later, the Neuchatelois could not afford the slightest falling out with Panckoucke at this time. Even if they wanted to, they could not make a separate peace. They owned half the privilege for the Encyclopedie, but Panckoucke controlled the protections. Duplain suffered from the same weakness, though he followed an independent line of secret diplomacy. Ultimately, therefore, the octavo publishers bowed to necessity and laid their peace proposals before the impos ing Atlas de la librairie. The pacification took place, along with all the other regle ments de compte, at the Lyons meeting of January 1780. Un fortunately, there are only fragmentary reports of that event, so one cannot follow the last maneuvers that finally brought the octavo-quarto war to a close. But the main result is clear : traite, which gave the octavo publishers the two sides signed a the right to market their Encyclopedie in France for 24,000 livres. Rather than confront Panckoucke directly, the Lausannois revived the preliminaries that they had agreed upon with Du plain in December. Duplain received their bills of exchange, out to him, for payment of 24,000 livres at some future made date, and then negotiated the final contract with Panckoucke. This proved to be a difficult task, however. In order to insure themselves against the disappearance or malfunctioning of Panckoucke 's much-vaunted protections, the octavo publish ers insisted that he guarantee to get 500 sets into the capi For his part, Panckoucke continued to worry that the tal. flood of octavos would damage the market for the Encyclo pedie methodique, and he also considered the sum insufficient. But it represented a badly needed asset at a moment when the quarto associates were haggling over their own debits and credits, and Panckoucke hit upon an idea for translating it into something of immediate value. He allowed Duplain to to him as part of Duplain 's general endorse the notes over financial settlement with the associates, and then he gave them back to the Lausannois in return for the equivalent value in octavo Encyclopedies, presumably 150 sets of the 500 he had guaranteed to get into France. This arrangement seemed to be mutually beneficial: Panckoucke acquired a valuable com- 172 Piracy and Trade War modity in place of a paper asset, and the octavo publishers compensated him from their stock without depleting their capital. They used the capital for the new edition they had planned to produce with the STN. Secure in the knowledge that Panc koucke had finally sanctioned their entry into France, they immediately doubled their output. They printed volumes 21 through 36 at approximately 6,000 and reset the earlier vol umes for a supplementary pressrun of approximately 3,000. Hence the answer to another bibliographical riddle, for li brarians and book collectors have searched in vain for a miss ing octavo edition like the missing quarto. In fact, the un findable second ''edition'' of the octavo was only an extension of the first. But there were two distinct octavo subscriptions. Lausanne and Bern opened the second one in April 1780 with high hopes for capitalizing at last on the French sales that had eluded them for two and a half years. But just when those hopes seemed certain to be fulfilled, Panckoucke obliterated them. He slashed the price of his octavos, dumped them on the market, and then compounded the damage by publicizing his plans to produce an Encyclopedie to end all Encyclo pedies-the Encyclopedie methodique. How extensive was the damage to the second octavo edi tion? How dastardly was the deed 1 And why did Panckoucke do it'? Irresistible but unanswerable questions, given the sparseness of the documentation after February 1780, when the quarto Association came to an end. One can approach them, however, by comparing the terms offered by the octavo publishers and Panckoucke in their advertising: Lausanne and Bern, announcing their new edition in the Gazette de Berne of April 8, 1780: L 'Encyclopedie in-octavo qu 'impriment les Societes typographiques de Berne et de Lausanne, page pour page apres l'edition in-quarto par Pellet a Geneve, ayant regu l 'accueil le plus favorable, elles ouvrent une nouvelle souscription, a raison de 5 livres de France le volume de discours (il y en aura 36) et de 15 livres chacun des 3 volumes de 81. The main provisions of the settlement are described in notes made by Ostervald and Bosset at the Lyons meeting (STN papers, ms. 1220) and in their letter to their home office from Lyons of Jan. 29, 1780. See also the complemen tary remarks in Panckoucke to STN, March 31, 1781. 82. See George B. Watts, "The Swiss Editions of the Encyclopedie," Harvard Library Bulletin IX (1955), 230-232 and Lough, Essays, pp. 40-41. 173 The Business of Enlightenment planches, [making 225 livres in all] comme on peut voir plus au long dans leurs Prospectus. Pour cette deuxieme edition, on delivrera les volumes de discours depuis 1 a 20 par 5 volumes a la fois, et depuis 21 a 36 par 2 volumes. On paye en souscrivant chez lesdites societes et les principaux libraires 6 livres de France et 25 livres en recevant les 5 premiers volumes, qui paraitront au plus tard au mois d'aout prochain, apres quoi la souscription sera fermee et chaque volume se vendra 6 livres de France. L 'ouvrage entier sera termine dans le courant de juin 1781. Panckoucke, in a printed circular to booksellers, dated Feb ruary 27, 1781: L 'ENCY CLO PED IE, in-octavo, edition de Lausanne, en trente de Discours et trois de Planches. Cette edition aussi com six volumes plete que celle connue sous le nom de Pellet, est pour vous, Monsieur, du prix de 168 livres 15 sols, et le treizieme exemplaire gratis, en feuilles. Le prix pour le particulier est de 225 livres, de sorte que votre remise est plus d 'un quart. 11 en parait actuellement 26 volumes de discours et un de planches. Toute cette edition sera finie au mois d 'avril prochain. Pour ce seul article, je tirerai en expediant a un an et quinze mois. Le prix de chaque volume de discours est de 3 livres 15 sols et le volume de planches 11 livres 15 sols. Je ne ferai que deux livraisons pour eviter l 'embarras ... 11 n 'y a jamais eu de livre donne a meilleur compte. Panckoucke was hardly exaggerating: an Encyclopedie for 168 livres, 15 sous, and an additional 8% percent discount for large orders, with a year's credit for the payments repre sented an incomparable bargain, one that would have driven any competitor to despair-and the despair must have been heavy in Lausanne and Bern. The octavo publishers may have dropped their price (their subscription notice apparently gave the prix de particulier or retail price, and Panckoucke 's circular the wholesale prix de libraire) but they could not cut it down to Panckoucke 's level. He got his octavos free, and they needed to clear some profit after covering publishing costs, which had gone up by 8 percent, owing to the now use- 83. The circular is in a letter from Panckoucke to the STN of March 31, 1781. Panckoucke issued these printed circular letters every year to advertise his wares among a large clientele of retailers. They show how he came to function as a wholesaler-impresario, for they differed from the catalogues printed and circulated by other wholesalers in that they offered only a few works of massive size, like Buff on 's Histoire naturelle and La Harpe 's Abrege general des voyages, instead of a general stock. By studying the series of lettres circulaires in Panckoucke 's dossier in Neuchatel, a biographer would be able to follow the evolution of his enterprises and his marketing strategy. 174 Piracy and Trade War less purchase of the right to sell their merchandise in France. Even by the standards of the time, Panckoucke seemed to have struck below the belt; and even his former partner, the STN, protested that he had committed a foul. But Panc koucke replied that his conscience was clear: "Vous vous plaignez de l 'in-octavo de Lausanne, mais vous avez partage les mille louis qu 'ils ont donne pour entrer en France. Vous ignorez done que dans l 'acte passe avec Duplain il est convenu que j 'en ferais entrer cinq cent a Paris; et puisqu 'il fallait remplir cet engagement, j 'ai cru devoir en prendre en paye ment et les servir. Si je ne l'eusse pas fait, un autre l'eut fait a ma place, et nous n 'y eussions rien gagne. '' He still viewed Lausanne and Bern as interlopers in his territory. True, he had opened it up to them, but he felt no moral obligation to honor their deal with Duplain. He executed his part of the bargain and then turned it against them-a coup de theatre, perhaps, but not a sale coup. If anyone were to skim the cream off the market, it should be he. And he could spoil it at the same time-that seems to have been his main motive. For the Lyons agreement committed him to allow 500 octavos into Paris, not to make sure that they got sold. He could prevent their sale, if he sold 150 of his own, at a drastic reduction. In that way, he would minimize the damage to the Encyclopedie methodique, which had become his supreme speculation by 1780: better to dump 150 octavos on the market than to swamp it with 500. It seems unlikely, however, that 150 cut-rate octavos could permanently destroy the demand for the 3,000 that Lausanne and Bern expected to sell. Panckoucke probably calculated on a short-term victory, one that would drive the bulk of the second octavo edition off the market until he could produce the first volumes of the Encyclopedie methodique, which would be so superb as to make the public forget the primitive, imperfect work of Diderot. In the long run, however, Lau sanne and Bern probably sold a great many of their books in France because Panckoucke 's ultimate Encyclopedie became mired in difficulties and delays. Thus the last phase in the dif fusion of Diderot's text and the first phase in the production of Panckoucke's overlapped and intertwined. In fact all the speculations on the Encyclopedie were connected, for all of 84. Panckoucke to STN, March 31, 1781. 175 The Business of Enlightenment them represented attempts to satisfy the seemingly insatiable appetite for Encyclopedism among the readers of the Old Regime. But before they can be traced to their denouement, it is important to take a closer look at the process by which the Encyclopedies reached the readers. 176 v BOOKMAKING The contract disputes, pirate raids, and trade wars all point to one central fact: the Encyclopedie had become a best seller-the biggest best seller anyone had ever heard of, a publisher's dream, "la plus belle [entreprise] qui ait ete faite en librairie. 'n Whether it really was the most lucrative spec ulation in the entire history of publishing before 1789 cannot be determined because almost nothing is known about the sales of other early-modern books. But the papers of the STK reveal almost everything about the production and diffusion of the quarto Encyclopedie. Each of those aspects of the book's biography deserves a chapter to itself, for each leads to unexplored areas in the past-areas where publishing his tory borders on the history of economics and technology, of work and the working class, of management and advertising, and of communications and idea diffusion. By following this best seller from producer to consumer, one can investigate the literary market place from a dozen different angles. In the end one should be able to chart the course of a phenomenon that has eluded earlier investigation, although it has shaped much of modern history: the spread of the Enlightenment. Strains on the Production System The extent of the quarto's success can be appreciated from the enormous effort that was necessary to manufacture the 1. STN to Panckoucke, Aug. 20, 1778. 177 The Business of Enlightenment book. After collecting more than 8,000 subscriptions, Duplain faced the problem of producing 306,900 huge quarto volumes.~ He was not a master printer himself, and in any case, the task exceeded the capacity of a single printing shop; so he contracted the work out to two dozen shops scattered about eastern France and western Switzerland. Jean-Leonard Pel let, under whose name the first two editions appeared, had only a peripheral connection with the enterprise. The quarto partners, who paid him 3,000 livres for the use of his name 011 the prospectuses and title pages, referred to him disparag ingly as their "prete-nom" and "commissionnaire" iu their confidential correspondence. Judging from colophons, Pellet printed only four volumes of "his" edition-no more than those done by the STN, which also printed four, though it produced only one of the volumes of its own ''Neuchatel'' edition. In order to make the most of his role as contractor, Duplain played the printing houses off against one another and bar gained them down as far as they could go. They had to com pete not only for commissions but also for supplies-type, ink, paper, and workers-and the competition got rougher as the enterprise increased in scale. The original nucleus of pro duction was in Geneva, in the shops of Pellet, Bassompierre, and Bonant. By March 1777, thirty Genevan presses were working on the quarto, and a year later the whole city wa' printing it, according to a Genevan bookseller. Meanwhile, Duplain had shifted the center of production to Lyons. Once he had covered himself with Panckoucke 's privi- 2. This figure is based on the total pressrun of 8,525, stipulated by the con tracts for the three editions. The number of complete sets must have been smaller, owing to spoilage. Panckoucke saw to the production of the three volumes of plates in Paris. 3. See STN to Ranson of La Rochelle, May 24, 1778: ''Pellet, qui n 'est qu 'un simple imprimeur, est un prete-nom pour nous''; and STN to Graffenried of Avrenches, March 6, 1780: "Celui-ci [Pellet] n 'etait que notre commissionnaire, charge de notre part d 'imprimer quelques volumes ... Pellet avait commission aussi de collecter des souscriptions, et c 'est la a quoi tout son interet a ete reduit.'' Pellet's fee for the use of his name on the title page appears in Bosset 's notes, entitled '' Depenses,'' on the expenses of the enterprise, in the STN papers, ms. 1220. And Pellet's colophon appears at the end of volumes 2, 7, 11, and 31 of the first edition of the quarto in the Bibliotheque de la ville de Neuchatel. The only other volumes with colophons in that set are volumes 3 and 8 (Bassompierre of Geneva) and 14 (Societe typographique de Geneve.) 4. Duplain to Panckoucke, March 16, 1777 (from a copy sent to the STN by Panckoucke) and Barthelemy Chirol of Geneva to STN, July 17, 1778. 178 Bookmaking lege, he was able to operate legally in France. The French au thorities permitted him-informally and without acknowledg ing it-to have the quarto printed in Lyons, and the contract of October 10, 1778, virtually made the third edition a Lyon nais product, despite the "Neuchatel" on its title page. When Favarger inspected Duplain's operation in July 1778, he found that the quarto was dominating the printing industry of the whole region: ''II y a environ 40 presses qui travaillent a cet ouvrage, tant ici [Lyons]qu'a Grenoble et Trevoux ... A la reserve de quelques usages, l 'on n 'imprime ici autre chose, et dans tou tes les irnprirneries, que l' Encyclopedie quarto ... Quiconque avait un certain argent a rnettre tous les mois ou tousles ans sur des livres, l'a place sur l'Encyclo pedie quarto.' ' Duplain himself listed fifty-three presses working on the third edition in January 1779. Considering that the first two editions were almost three times as big as the third, it seems likely that about one hundred presses in twenty different shops worked on the quarto between 1777 and 1780. At the same time, the societes typographiques of Lausanne and Bern were putting out the octavo Encyclopedie at a pressrun of 6,000, and Felice was printing 1,600 sets of his version of the Encyclopedie in Yverdon. Diderot's book was being produced on such a scale that it strained the capac ity of the printing industry throughout a vast stretch of France and Switzerland. The strain showed in every segment of the economy with any connection to the book trade. It is difficult to appreciate today, however, when books, as physical objects, do not have the same importance they possessed in the eighteenth cen tury. Before buying a book, the readers of the Old Regime inspected the merchandise carefully, rubbing the pages be tween their fingers, holding them up to the light, scrutinizing the shape of the characters, the clarity of the impression, the 5. At first Panckoucke had doubted that Duplain could persuade the authorities to let him print in France: ''II sollicite pour en obtenir la permission a Lyon, et je sais qu'il ne I'obtiendra pas." Panckoucke to STN, July 4, 1777. But on Aug. 5, 1777, Panckoucke reported to the STN, "A force de sollicitations on a obtenu d 'imprimer quelques volumes a Lyon.'' 6. Favarger to STN, July 21, 1778. 7. Duplain to STN, Jan. 21, 1779: "Voici !'enumeration des presses que nous avons sur la troisieme edition: 6 chez Belivre, 4 chez Labbe ( T), 4 chez Chavanne, 6 chez Vatan, 8 a Trevoux, 4 chez Goeri, 3 chez Degoutte, 6 chez Pellet sous 15 jours, 3 chez Cuty, 9 chez Cuchet." 179 The Business of Enlightenment width of the margins, and the overall elegance of the design. When they found faults, they protested loud and clear. "Vous aviez garanti, Messieurs, pour l 'impression du Dictionnaire un beau pa pier, un caractere neuf,'' an indig encyclopedique nant subscriber wrote to the STN. '' Cette promesse, permet tez-moi de vous le dire, n'a pas eu son entiere execution, car le papier est generalement defectueux et le caractere presqu' eteint, ce qui fatigue beaucoup les yeux du lecteur. Des ou vrages de ce genre, faits pour vivre eternellement, meritent qu'on y apporte un peu plus d'attention. La majeure partie des f euilles sont maculees ou dechirees. Vo us sentez, Mes sieurs, que ces negligences de la part de vos ouvriers ne peu vent etre que prejudiciables a VOS interets, en degoutant le public des nouvelles souscriptions a ouvrir. " As this reader pointed out, the quarto publishers had em phasized the physical qualities of the book throughout their advertising. In their main prospectus, they insisted that all the volumes would be printed on the best quality paper with handsome type, called appropriately philosophie (small pica). Individual retailers embroidered on this theme in their own sales campaigns. Thus Teron of Geneva assured the readers of the Gazette de Leyde that "tousles papiers sont tires d'Au vergne, et on n 'emploie que des caracteres de France, qui ser ont renouvelles a pres le tirage de chaque cinquieme volume. " These remarks would seem out of place in the advertising for a modern, machine-made book, but they were standard fare in an age when books were made by hand, when sheets of paper were manufactured individually through months of careful handling in remote mills, and when an army of ragpickers was required to gather the raw material for paper-cast-off lin ens, whose threads can still be seen in the fabric of the En cyclopedie. It took more than a million sheets to produce just one of the thirty-six quarto volumes, in all three editions. And it took five months of hard labor by five compositors and twenty pressmen for the STN to transform those sheets into one volume of printed pages. Although they represent only 8. Champmorin of Saint Dizier to STN, July 17, 1780. 9. Gazette de Leyde, Oct. 7, 1777. See also similar remarks in the notices of Jan. 3 and Feb. 11, 1777. 10. According to its account books, the STN used 1,762 reams for volume 24 of the first and second editions and 669 reams for volume 19 of the third edition. By concentrating exclusively on this job, a team of five compositors managed to set the type for volume 24 between June 6 and Nov. 7, 1778. The pressmen, whose 180 Bookmaking a small fraction of the entire printing process, the STN 's operations illustrate the complexity of producing a book on a mass scale before the advent of mass production. Plant expansion proved to be the least of the STN 's prob lems. It bought a new house for its printing shop and pur chased six fully equipped, secondhand presses, doubling its printing capacity. The presses came from the Lyonnais printer Aime de la Roche Valtar and cost only 250 livres apiece, the equivalent of four months' wages for an ordinary journeyman printer.11 Getting type was another matter. In an attempt to maintain some harmony in the physical appear ance of the volumes, Duplain directed all his printers to buy their fonts of philosophie from a Lyonnais founder named Louis Vernange, but Vernange was soon overwhelmed with work. On April 20, 1777, he signed a contract with the STN, promising to supply a font weighing 1,800 livres, half on June 1 and half on July 1, and to cut his price by 20 percent if he failed to make the deadline. On June 2, he asked the STN to give him another two weeks. It agreed reluctantly, because it had planned to put six presses on the Encyclopedie from the beginning of the month. Still without type on June 18, it warned him that it needed the shipment urgently. And on June 26, it threatened to apply the penalty clause because its presses and workers were standing idle. The first shipment finally arrived on July 8, the rest at the end of July and the end of August. Even then, the STN had to order another 500 livres and various assortiments, which did not arrive until the end of the year. The main font, weighing 1,471 livres, had taken twice as long as Vernange had promised and had cost 1,852 livres tournois. Vernange justified the delay by recount ing his difficulties: his workers had fallen ill and had gotten into trouble by their ''caprices'' (the Lyonnais authorities had number varied, printed it concurrently with four other large-scale projects and various small jobs, all of which were composed by the half dozen other compositors in the shop. 11. On the STN 's purchase of "la maison Brun" in order to expand its shop for the printing of the Encyclopedie, see STN to Pettavel, July 22, 1776; Mme. Bertrand of the STN to Bosset, May 21, 1780; and Bosset to Mme. Bertrand, May 29, 1780. On the purchase of the presses see the STN 's letters to la Roche Valtar of Sept_ 8, Sept. 24, Oct. 6, Oct_ 12, and Nov. 24, 1776, and Sept. 17, 1777. Fava.rger inspeeted the presses during a trip to Lyons in 1776. He found them to be better value than new presses, which would cost 300 livres, without copper platens, and would take a month each to be built by Tardy, the best press maker in town. Favarger to STN, Aug. 25, 1776. 181 The Business of Enlightenment exiled one of them for misbehavior) ; he had not been able to find a wagoner for the route through the Franche-Comte, owing to the harvest; and he simply could not cope with all his orders. Actually, the STN was fortunate to get its type with only two months' delay. Bonnant of Geneva had to sus pend operations in November 1777 because his type failed to arrive-not from Lyons, for Vernange could no longer sup ply all the quarto printers, but from Avignon, where another foundry was already swamped.12 Demand also smothered supply in the ink trade, which was monopolized by two Parisian firms, Langlois and Prevost. The Neuchatelois dealt with Langlois, who charged 22 sous per livre, 2 sous less than Prevost. But they nearly ran dry in October 1777; and when Langlois finally came to their rescue, after several urgent appeals, he was able to ship only one of the two 250-livre barrels that they needed. He took three months to supply the second barrel; and when it arrived in April 1778, it turned out to be faulty, forcing the STN to suspend its printing for a while. The STN extracted two bar rels out of Langlois in May, another in October, and two final barrels in February and August 1779. Meanwhile he had inched up his price-from 22 to 28 sous per livre. He blamed the suppliers of his own raw materials-walnut gatherers and resin merchants from the Midi, traders in turpentine and linseed oil in Paris, and even the American revolutionaries, who, he claimed, upset commerce so badly that he had to push his price up another 2 sous in 1782. It may be that walnuts and revolutionaries were bound up in a world economic sys tem, but Langlois probably was cashing in on the boom in En cyclopedies-and doing very well from it, too, for one of his barrels of ink cost more than a fully equipped printing press. 12. The transactions about type can be studied in detail in the dossier of Vernange, which contains twenty-one letters, and in the STN 's replies, particularly "its letters of June 26, July 8, and Sept. 4, 1777. See also STN to Duplain, April 26, 1777, and Bonnant to STN, Nov. 14, 1777. In general, the STN ordered its type both by weight and by sets or feuilles, and it paid about 25 sous per Lyonnais Zivre of 14 onces. It provided Vemange with two sample letter m's so that he would cast the type in conformity with its height to paper. 13. The most important letters in L:mglois 's dossier m·e Langlois to STN, Oet. 27, 1777; Jan. 22, Feb. 5, May 2, and Sept. 17, 1778. Duplain insisted that his printers use top-quality Parisian ink: "Employez-vons de l 'encre de Paris' II n'en faut -pas d'autre et vous adresser a Messieurs Prevost-Langlois, l'un et l 'autre marchand d 'encre a Paris, sans autre adresse." Duplain to STN, Feb. 9, 182 The millroom of a paper mill as represented in the original Encyclop edie ("PAPETTERIE," plate IV). The waterwheel (E) turns an axle or camshaft (B). As they rotate, the cams raise the ends of twelve mallets arranged in groups of fours (a, b, c) and then release them so that the heads of the mallets drop into three troughs, where rotted rags have been dumped. The pounding and rinsing transforms the rags into stuff. The vat room of a paper mill ("PAPETTERIE," plate X). The ouvreur (fig. 1) has just dipped a mold of woven wire into a vat full of heated stuff and is letting· the water drain out before tilting the mold in such a way as to "lock" the fibers of the stuff together and form a sheet. Meanwhile the coucheur (fig. 2) separates a newly formed sheet from its mold by flipping it onto a piece of felt. Then the leveur (fig. 3) presses the sheets in piles of 260 called parses and separates them from the felts so that they can be dried and sized. Bookmaking Procuring Paper The most costly element in book production was paper. Paper obsessed eighteenth-century printers and determined many of their calculations. When they discussed pressruns, they often talked in reams and quires rather than in thou sands and tokens. And when they made budgets for books, they figured in feuilles d'edition, that is, the cost of producing all the copies of one sheet, including composition, presswork, and paper. Those three elements varied with the size of the printing: on the one hand, the cost of setting the type re mained the same, while the cost of the presswork increased with the number of copies printed; on the other, the cost of paper went up at a faster rate than that of composition and presswork combined. The Encyclopedie contracts made room for the first variation by setting a flat rate of 30 livres per feuille d'edition for the composition and presswork of the first thousand copies and 8 livres for every additional thousand. So according to the first contract (the Traite de Dijon of January 14, 1777), Duplain would receive 54 livres to cover the labor costs of producing one sheet of the first edition at a pressrun of 4,000. According to the contract of September 30, 1777, he would receive 71 livres 4 sous for the labor on the first and second editions, which were printed together at a run of 6,150 (that is, 12 reams 6 quires). The presswork had gone up from 59 percent to 69 percent of the labor costs. But the cost of paper had increased by even more-from 72 livres per feuille d'edition, according to the first contract, to 110 livres 14 sous, according to the second. The contracts also recognized the critical importance of paper as a variable by special Clauses that set a fixed rate per ream for Duplain 's provisioning. After doing some arithmetic, therefore, one can compare the proportions in the "budgets" of a f euille d 'edition from the contract for the first edition and a feuille d'edition in the con tract for the combined first and second editions. First and second "editions" First edition (pressrun of 6,150) (pressrun of 4,000) Typesetting 22 livres 22 livres Presswork 4 sous 32 " 49 " Paper 14 sous 72 " 110 " 126 livres 181 livres 18 sous 185 The Business of Enlightenment The role of the paper in the calculations of the publishers had expanded from 57 percent of the first budget to 61 per cent of the second. Of course the actual printing costs differed considerably from the standard costs set by the contracts, but the differences only magnified the importance of paper. For example, the STN provided all the paper for volume 24, which it printed at a pressrun of 6,150. The typesetting and press work came to 4,828 livres and the paper to 13,897 livres, or three-quarters of the production costs, excluding overhead. Moreover, the quarto association reimbursed the STN for its paper expenses at the rates fixed in the contracts, which were higher than the rates it had paid; so the STN got back 15,875 livres-a profit of 1,978 livres on the paper for volume 24 alone. In general, the expense of paper and the cheapness of labor made the proportions in the budgets of eighteenth century printers look like the opposite of those in modern printing, for in the nineteenth century labor costs soared, and the price of paper-mass-produced paper made by machines from wood pulp-plummeted. With the spread of off set print ing and the devastation of forests, costs may now be shifting back toward the eighteenth-century pattern. Looking back ward from the 1970s, however, one can hardly overestimate the importance of paper for the publishing industry two hun dred years ago. Duplain had to produce 36 million sheets of paper for his printers. Just how he managed this feat of engineering is not clear, because one can see only the managerial aspects of the enterprise from the perspective of the archives in Neuchatel. But the rising pressure of demand can be followed from the quarto's contracts. On January 14, 1777, Duplain 's paper costs were fixed at 9 livres per ream, on May 15 at 9 livres 5 sous, on September 30 at 9 livres 10 sous, and on October 10, 1778, at 10 livres. After investigating the situation in Lyons in September 1777, Panckoucke reported that the increases could not be avoided: the papermakers were forcing up their prices, and they might not be able to supply enough to get Duplain 14. These remarks on paper are based on a close study of the dossiers of twenty-three papetiers and marchands papetiers in Neuchatel, but they are in tended only as a sketch of a subject that will be treated in full in the forthcoming thesis of Jacques Ryehner. For a good account of all aspects of book production and references to the literature in analytical bibliography see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York and Oxford, 1972). 186 Bookmaking through the winter at any price. Duplain himself finally told the STN to find its own paper: "Ne comtez point sur nous pour des pa piers. C 'est la chose impossible.' na Although the STN protested vehemently, arguing that the responsibility for provisioning lay with Duplain, there was little he could do. The paper market of Lyons, and the mills of the Massif Cen tral which fed it, had run dry. Reports from Lyonnais paper merchants confirmed Duplain 's account of the crisis, and so did the STN's banker, Jacques-Frarn:;ois d'Arnal, who scoured the city for paper in December 1777: 'Nous avons ete visiter tous nos marchands de papier ... mais nous n'avons pas trouve une seule rame de papier de la qualite que vous demandez. M. Duplain enleve tout.' m Finally, the STN gave up on Duplain and the great paper mills of Auvergne and the Lyonnais, and it tried to piece to gether its own supply system. It had bought paper from the millers of its region for years, but few of them could make the heavy, white carre fin required for the Encyclopedie. Du plain insisted that every sheet conform to the samples he sent to his suppliers and to the STN, and that every ream weigh at least 20 livres (in Lyonnais livres of 14 onces), as stipu lated in the contract. He had to enforce strict standards be cause each volume required at least 1,000 reams; the paper came from many different mills; and if the millers' ship ments did not conform well enough to be "married" or blended by the printers, the book would take on a piebald appearance and customers would cancel subscriptions. The provisioning problems were compounded by the delicate and rather primitive character of papermaking as a craft. De spite the introduction of some modern machinery (cylindrical pulpers called Hollanders), it remained tied to the rhythms of an agrarian economy. Ragpickers took to the road after work ing the autumn harvests. Millers stocked rags and prepared stuff (a watery paste from which sheets were made) in the winter and manufactured most of the paper in the spring and 15. Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 9, 1777. 16. Duplain to STN, Jan. 3, 1778. 17. D'Arnal to STN, Dec. 21, 1777. The STN tried to get paper from six of Lyons 's thirteen marchands papetiers without success. In a typical reply, one of them, Dumond, wrote on Dec. 16, 1777: '' Ces papiers sont tres rares actuellement et augmentes par la recherche que M. Duplain en fait faire dans toutes Jes fab riques. Yous vous y prenez trop tard, n 'etant pas dans la saison.'' 187 The Business of Enlightenment summer, when the weather turned warm enough for sizing (applying a delicate finish, which easily spoiled while dry ing). They often operated by campagnes or large batches, which they sold in advance after hard bargaining during the off season. Having contracted for a campagne, they would blend their stuff from different grades of rags according to the quality desired. So they could not switch to Encyclopedie paper in the late summer and winter of 1777, when the printer:; needed it most. Duplain had not allowed for the inflexibility of this system when he increased production, and therefore the STN nearly had to fire its workers and to close its shop in the winter of 1777-1778 for lack of supplies. The STN got through the winter by combing a vast area of France and Switzerland for every last ream of 20-livre carre. It wrote dozens of letters, even to millers in the southernmost stretches of Duplain 's raked-over territory southwest of Ly ons. It haggled with merchants in far-off corners of Switzer land and Alsace. It sent Favarger by horse on a paper hunt through the remotest valleys of the outer Jura. And in the end, it built up a network of suppliers who kept it going until March 8, 1779, when it finished its final volume. The paper, 5,828 reams in addition to some earlier shipments from Du plain, came from thirteen millers and merchants, scattered around an axis that ran for 450 kilometers from Strasbourg to Ambert. Thanks to the STN 's account books, one can follow almost every ream in this flood of paper as it passed from the mills, through the presses, and into actual copies of the quarto sit ting on the shelves of libraries today. The table illustrates the evolution of the shipments. At first the STN depended entirely on Duplain and the Ly onnais merchants who worked for him. Favarger 's paper scout ing opened up some new sources in mid-1777, but the millers he enlisted, Gurdat of Bassecourt and Morel of Meslieres, could not produce much Encylopedie paper until the next spring. So when Duplain's provisions gave out in December, just when the STN began printing volume 15, the N euchatelois had to patch together enough supplies from the market in Ly ons to avoid suspending production in the winter. Relief came with the first big shipment from Morel in March 1778. By May the paper was flowing from Alsace, Switzerland, and the Franche-Comte. And by the end of 1778, the STN had ac- 188 Bookmaking cumulated enough stock to print almost all of its last two volumes. Drawing supplies from such scattered sources raised the problem of "marrying" the sheets so that their different col ors and consistencies would not offend the eye of the cus tomer . To see how the marriages were arranged, one can compare the entries in the STN's accounts with the pattern of watermarks in a copy of the quarto. According to an entry dated November 6, 1778, in the account book called Brouillard B, the STN constructed volume 24 out of paper from five sup pliers in the following amounts: 149 reams 10 quires Schertz (Strasbourg) 431 reams 1 quire 3 sheets Vimal (Ambert) 90 reams Gurdat (Bassecourt) 930 reams 9 quires Morel (Meslieres) 44 reams 11 quires Fontaine (Fribourg) 1645 reams 11 quires 3 sheets This information indicates the proportions of different sup pliers' paper used in the entire printing of 6,150 copies of volume 24. By converting it into feuilles d'edition, one can con struct a model volume 24, which can then be compared with an actual copy-in this case the copy in the Bibliotheque de la Ville de Neuchatel. Volume 24 of the Neuchatel quarto contains three sorts of paper that are fairly easy to identify: thirty sheets (or gatherings) of Vimal, which have nearly complete watermarks and countermarks; twelve sheets of Schertz, which lack marks but contain a "DV" mentioned in 18. The expression "marrying" comes from the rich slang of eighteenth century papermakers. For example, in a letter to the STN of Sept. 7, 1778, Jean Georges Schertz, a paper merchant from Strasbourg, promised to maintain the same degree of whiteness in the paper from all the mills that worked for him: '' S 'il y manquait un brin, la difference sera si peu de chose qu 'on ne s 'en ap percevra pas. J e sais qu 'ii faut pouvoir les marier. '' 19. The conversion can be done by dividing the amount of paper needed for one feuille d'edition into the total amount provided by each supplier. As each sheet was printed 6,150 times, one feuille d 'edition required 12.3 reams of paper. When divided by 12.3, Schertz's 149.5 reams come out as 12.1 feuilles d'edition. An archetypical or model copy of volume 24 would therefore contain 12.1 sheets of Schertz, although actual copies might have considerably more or less, depending on how the paper was doled out to the pressmen. The long and difficult task of inspecting the Neuchatel quarto was done with the help of Jacques Rychner, whose expertise in reading watermarks proved to be crucial for its success. 189 The Flow of Encycloz>edie Paper to Neuchatel (in reams) Supplier Girard Tavernier Duplain Gurdat Morel Claudet merchant, merchant, merchant, miller, miller, merchant, Date Lyons Lyons Lyons Bassecourt Meslieres Lyons 1777 April 160 May 10 June 48 July 226 70 Aug. July 19- 100 10 Sept. Dec. 13 Oct. printing Nov. 42 volume 6 100 Dec. 214 1778 Jan. 54 100 Feb. 168 Dec. 13- March June 13 April printing volume 15 May 100 95 234 June June 6- {July Nov. 7 Aug. 310 printing Sept. 90 volume 24 Oct. 102 Nov. 7- Nov. 70 Feb. 27 { Deo. 1779 Jan. printing Feb. volume 35{March Feb. 27- April May 8 May printing volume 19 345 780 Totals 260 491 1,304 100 Total By reading this table diagonally from upper left to lower right, one can trace the shipments of Encyclopedie paper from thirteen suppliers, both millers and merchants ( marchands pape tiers) to the STN. Each number represents a shipment. Thus Tavernier sent the STN three shipments in February 1778, one for 168 reams, one for 27 reams, and one for 86 reams. The information comes from two of the STN's account books, Brouillards B and C, which cover the period from January 1778 to December 1789. A missing account book, Brouillard Supplier Joannin Fontaine Vimal Petitpierre Planche Schertz Desgrange merchant, miller, miller, miller, miller, merchant, miller, Lyons Fribourg Ambert La Motte Vuillafans Strasbourg Luxeuil 96 40 52 304 120 150 54 120 55~ 487 457 58 343~ 613 120 470 5,8281 reams A, contained all the credits for paper shipments in 1777, when the STN printed its first Ency clopedie volume (volume G). Most of the missing information can be compiled from the cor respondence of the suppliers, whose lettres d'avis and f actures for the latter period correspond precisely with the entries in Brouillards B and C. But a few paper transactions were settled verbally and some commercial correspondence is missing from the STN's papers. The Business of Enlightenment Schertz's correspondence as countermarks; and four sheets of Fontaine, which have grapes as marks and "MF" for Maurice Fontaine as countermarks. The rest of the paper con sists of eighty sheets with no mark or countermark and seven sheets with a tiny cross. The former must have come from Morel, who told the STN that he would keep all identifying signs off the molds of his batard, which did not conform to the quality standards of the French authorities ; and the latter must have come from Gurdat, who provided seven sheets, according to the model. Thus the actual copy and the model correspond quite closely: The Neuchatel The model quarto Schertz 12.1 12 Vim al 35.0 30 Gurdat 7.3 Morel 75.6 80 Fontaine 3.6 4 133.6 133 This correspondence can be seen only on an abstract level, not in the physical examination of a particular copy-that was the point of the marrying. As Figure 1 shows, the STN shuffled the sheets in an irregular pattern throughout the volume instead of exhausting one lot of paper and then mov ing on to the next. In June 1778 when it began to print volume 24, the STN had plenty of paper from all five suppliers in stock and probably also had a fair amount from two others, Girard and Petitpierre. Neglecting the latter, it concentrated on the Morel, which was flowing into Neuchatel at the greatest rate; it also drew heavily on the Vimal, which ranked second in the stockroom, judging from its printing and paper ac counts. These two sorts accounted for 83 percent of the paper used in volume 24. Rather than using them en bloc, the STN scattered them throughout the volume in runs that usually varied between two and twelve sheets, except for the two large runs of Morel toward the end. The Gurdat served as a filler, 20. Using an overworn paper-miller's joke, Morel informed the STN in a letter of May 2, 1778, ''Les papiers que je ferai pour vous n 'auront point de marque. Ils seront batards de nom et de fait. '' 192 Bookmaking in single-sheet units that would not be noticed. The Schertz came first, probably because it was the most beautiful. Then the STN zigzagged between the Morel and the Gurdat, the and the Vimal, the Morel and the Gurdat again; finally Morel it ended with the Fontaine. The pattern could have been more complex and the mixing more complete, but the STN did not want to undertake the back-breaking job of blending hundreds of reams sheet by sheet. It only needed to produce a mixture that would pass muster with a paper-conscious public. That task required enormous effort, not because marrying was difficult but because buying paper demanded a great deal of time, energy, and craftiness. Each purchase had to be ar ranged through elaborate bargaining, and each supplier did business in his own way. The famous firms of J ohannot and Montgolfier in Annonay barely condescended to sell their medium-quality ( moyen) paper and quoted prices on a take it-or-leave-it basis. The little millers of the Franche-Comte, like Planche of Vuillafans and Sette of Chardon, had to scramble hard to sell any of their fin, and they often hauled their wares to Neuchatel themselves so that they could barter in person (many of them found it difficult to write even primi tive letters) over a bottle of wine, giving full rein to their Comtois palaver. Merchants like Girard of Lyons and Schertz of Strasbourg filled their commercial correspondence with sophisticated talk about bills of exchange and interest rates, while ordinary millers like Morel of Meslieres and Des granges of Luxeuil hustled for quick cash. When specie was scarce, Morel asked for payment in barrels of wine-he needed vintage Neuchatel, he explained, as medication for an ailing son-and he mixed his sales talk with garbled quota tions from Saint Paul and proposals to cut prices behind Duplain 's back by cheating on the weight of the reams and by adding quicklime to the stuff. The trade was built on such tricks, for the millers rarely had enough good rags to satisfy all their customers and therefore slipped inferior sheets into their fin or stuffed extra sheets into substandard reams in order to meet weight re quirements. The Encyclopedie touched off battles for rags, especially the well-washed linens that came out of Burgundy. Thus Jean-Baptiste Gurdat, a miller from the mountain ham- 21. Morel to STN, Nov. 30, 1777, and May 2, May 16, and July 1, 1778. 193 Fontaine Shertz Morel Gurdat Vimal A-M (12) -- ~-0 (2) ................ ........ _ p (1) -:.:. Q-X (6 ,,....,./ --- y (1) 2S-2T (2 ) --- ae--- ------- 2V-3C (7) -- 3D (1) -- __. ""_.. --- -- 0::::::- - ----- 3E-3N (9) -----~ 30-4F (16J_ ------- -=:- ......... --......-.....4G (1) 4H-4I J_9, }.-- _..... -· -........_ 4K (1) _ ....... 4L-5M~ ...... __._ -......._ 5N (1) 50 -6N~31 - -.::.. -- -- ------ 60 (1) -- -.:::::::. --- 6P (1) --- ~--- ---- ---- 6Q-6S (2) -- - .. 12 sheets 80 sheets 7 sheets 30 sheets 4 sheets Bookmaking Figure 1. The Distribution of Paper in the N euchfttel Quarto : Volume 24 This tigure, based on thr inspection of watermarks in the copy of the quarto in the Bibliotheque de la Ville de Neuchatel, shows how the STN distributed sheets while printing volume 24. The letters correspond to the signatures at the bottom of pages, the numbers in parentheses to the number of sheets in a run of paper from a single source. Thus the printer began with twelve sheets of Schertz, switched to Morel when he reached sheet N, moved on to Gurdat at P, went back to Morel for sheets Q through X, and so on. The notations correspond to standard bibliographical descriptions. Thus 2B stands for the sheet signed Bb, 7r stands for the preliminary leaves, and the calculations fit the 23-letter alphabet used by the printers, which eliminated I or J, U or V, and W. The formula for describing this volume 2 4 would be as follows: carre au raisin 4': 7r A-6R 6S2; 532 leaves, pp. [4], 1 2-1060. (For details about this system of bibliographical description see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography [Oxford, 1972], especially 2 2 pp. 328-332.) 68 and 71" were half sheets, which were cut from the same sheet to make the "prelims" at the beginning of the book and to avoid waste at the end. This interpretation is confirmed by the pay book (Banque des ouvriers) of the foreman in the STN's shop, which shows that 68 was paid for as a whole sheet and that there was no special payment for the composi tion of the title page and half-title, as oc<'urred in cases where the prelims were composed separately. let of Bassecourt near Porrentruy, demanded quick payment for his Encyclopedie paper because he wanted to exploit a coup against the papermakers of Basel: '' je conte de me transporte ches vous en viron le 3 ou 4 avris prochain pour a voir mon argen en samble car je en ay de grand besoin pour le present car jay oppetenus de notre prince un ordonance quil desfant de lesser passer des guenill'e pour bale et il men vien baucout de la bourgogne presentement.' ' Gurdat may not have had a perfect mastery of written French, but he knew how to wring specie out of his customers, to lobby with his protectors, and to divert the rag traffic from his competitors. For its part, the STN used all the devices in its power to manipulate the millers. It demanded a reduction on almost every ream that it received for the Encyclopedie, even when paper was acceptable. By finding fault, it often knocked a few sous off the price or got better treatment in the next shipment or forced a miller to accept inferior bills of exchange, which usually bounced and then spent months being passed from bill collector to bailiff to attorney until at last the original sig- 22. Gurdat to STN, March 2, 1778. 195 The Business of Enlightenment natory agreed to a settlement, normally at a reduced rate, or fled town, leaving his creditors to argue over the remains of a bankrupt business. The millers fought back by playing their customers off against one another. This strategy worked beautifuly in 1777, when demand outstripped supply and prices soared. But in 1778 the ragpickers decided that it was time for them, too, to take a cut in the Encyclopedie bonanza. Desgranges claimed that the cost of top-quality rags shot up by 25 percent in a little more than a year . Meanwhile, more mills switched to Encyclopedie paper and more printers built up their stock; so the pressure shifted back to the producers of paper. By the spring of 1779, the price of 20-livre carre had leveled off, and the supply system had adjusted to the Encyclopedie. But the adjustment had been slow and painful because the system responded poorly to short-term fluctua tions. It moved at a pace that was set by an ancient style of market-place bargaining and by the more fundamental sea sonality of nature. It worked well enough, however, to supply the raw material for 8,000 thirty-six-volume sets of Diderot's great work. Copy Diderot and his collaborators had done their share of the work many years ago, but that was only the beginning of a long process which culminated around 1780 with the re production and distribution of their copy on a mass scale throughout Europe. The text that reached the general reading public, if not the masses, differed somewhat from theirs, however, because it, too, suffered from the strains of the pro duction process. In his prospectus, Duplain had promised not only to reprint the original text in its entirety but also to im prove it in three ways: to correct its numerous typographical and factual errors; to add a great deal of new material; and to blend the four folio volumes of the Supplement into it. He never intended to produce a literal copy of the first folio edi tion but rather to create a superior version of it-or at least to persuade the public that he had done so. The correcting, augmenting, and blending would require a great deal of edi torial work, so the contracts between Duplain and Panckoucke provided for a redacteur, who was to receive 600 livres per 23. Desgranges to STN, Jan. 9, U79. 196 Bookmaking volume, later increased to 850 livres with an additional 3,000 livres for further work on the third "edition." Duplain gave this job to the ab be Jean-Antoine de Laserre, an Oratorian and a minor literary figure in Lyons. Laserre therefore be came the successor of Diderot and the intermediary through which Diderot's text reached most of its readers in the eight eenth century. Laserre 's main qualification for improving on the work of Diderot seems to have been friendship with Duplain. He did not worry about tampering with the text or adapting his changes to Diderot's style because he had other things to worry about-promoting his own career, for example, and courting his superiors in the church. He replaced the original article APOLOGUE by the abbe Edme Mallet with a selection from his own Poetique elementaire; he added an excerpt from his Discours de reception in the Academy of Lyons to the article NATUREL (Belles-Lettres) in volume 22; and at TESTA MENT in volume 33 he included an edifying extract from a pastorale by his archbishop, which began, ''Tout l 'Ancien Testament n 'est, dans le dessein de Dieu, qu 'un grand et mag nifique tableau, ou sa main a trace d 'avance tout ce qui devait arriver au liberateur promis. '' For the most part, however, le saint homme, as the Neu chatelois sardonically called him, left the text alone-not be cause he respected it but because he did not have time to make changes. He worked at a furious pace, cutting out references to the eight volumes of plates that were not to be included in the quatro, attaching snippets from the Supplements to the main body of the book by bits of his own prose, and reading over the final amalgam of printed and manuscript copy that was to be mailed out to the printers. As a half dozen printing shops were working on different volumes at the same time, he could hardly keep up with their demand for copy. He supplied the STN in small batches, and it kept urging him to work faster and to send larger quantities, so that it could maintain its rhythm of production: '' Copie et pa piers, c 'est toujours notre refrain. " It also objected to his tendency to slip his own writing into the text and to overlook errors. "La copie 24. STN to Laserre, Oct. 19, 1777. See also STN to Duplain, Sept. 20, 1777: ''Sur l 'artiele de la copie, qui va nous manquer, si nous n 'en recevons entre ce et 8 jours, nous vous demandons la grace d 'y pourvoir et de faire en sorte que nous en ayons toujours une certaine provision.'' 197 The Business of Enlightenment que vous nous avez envoyee va etre epuisee dans quelques jours," it wrote to Duplain in July 1777. "Faites-nous en passer de la nouvelle s.v.p .... Vous ferez bien de prier l 'abbe de Laserre de lire avec so in la co pie avant de l 'envoyer, ayant trouve de fautes cont.re le sens que nous avons re dressees et qui ont donne lieu a tout le sarcasme des Encyclo pediques. '' These criticisms stung the abbe, who replied that he could not do an adequate job of cleaning up the text while turning out six volumes in three months. He counted on the printers to make editorial as well as typographical corrections and not to snipe at him behind his back. True, he had not kept up with the polemics surrounding the Encyclopedie, so he could not dis arm its enemies by correcting the text in places where they had concentrated their attacks, but the book was big enough to withstand criticism and to contain contradictions. Comme la critique de Freron ne m'est parvenue que depuis l'envoi des premieres feuilles du 6eme volume, j 'ai laisse subsiste quelques unes des fautes que le journaliste y avait trouvees. Celle qui pourrait le plus choquer est a l'article Canathous, OU le mot de divinite sub stitue a celui de virginite forme une absurdite. Peut-etre regardez-vous aussi comme une faute d 'attention d 'avoir accepte des articles qui semblent se contredire. Mais les gens de lettres que j 'ai consultes m 'ont confirme dans l 'idee que l 'Encyclopedie etant un repertoire des dif ferentes opinions et non un ouvrage systematique, il fallait y inserer le pour et le contre ... c 'est du choc des opinions que sort la lumiere, et notre dictionnaire doit avoir l 'avantage des academies de recueillir tous les systemes sans les adopter. It may seem odd that a contemporary editor of the Encyclo pedie should have been so badly inf or med about the contempo rary criticism of it, but Laserre and his fell ow ''gens de let tres," that is, his colleagues in the academy of Lyons, had watched the Encyclopedie controversies from a distance in stead of engaging in the thick of them. Consequently, the quarto took on a certain provincial flavor. It was a Lyonnais product, edited, printed, and managed for the most part from Duplain's circle of acquaintances. Diderot and Panckoucke 25. STN to Duplain, July 30, 1777. 26. Laserre to STN, Aug. 4, 1777. In a letter to the STN of Oct. 1, 1777, Laserre again complained about being criticized behind his back and asserted that he would provide better copy in the future, for he had hired additional aides (evidently copyists and copyreaders) and would make sure that the entire text was read three times before it went to the printers. 198 Bookmaking might know what was necessary to satisfy Parisians, but La serre and Duplain knew what the provincials wanted, or at least what they would buy. For its part, the STN wanted to avoid damaging the market anywhere. It saw Laserre more as a liability than an asset, and when possible did some fairly extensive copy-editing of its own, explaining to Panckoucke: ''Nous nous attachons aussi a la correction, non seulement pour les fautes typographiques, mais encore pour les fautes de sens, qui se trouvent dans la copie meme qu'on nous envoie. 11 faut prier M. l'abbe de Laserre notre redacteur d 'y faire attention.'' '' L 'ecrivain de la presente [Bertrand] se joint a M. Ostervald pour YOUS recommander de ne pas permettre [que] M. l'abbe de Laserre mette de sa prose dans l'Encyclopedie, mais qu'il y joigne seulement les Supplements. " Panckoucke intervened, but rather gently. "Les auteurs sont un peu plus vains que les autres hommes," he explained to the STN. The Neuchatelois -who had dealt with Rousseau and Voltaire as well as a great many pretentious, second-rate authors-agreed, writing as one publisher to another : ''Sans doute que les auteurs sont vains ; la science reelle ou pretendue enfie, et l 'abbe encyclo pediste n'est pas le seul qui ne sache pas recevoir un bon con seil."29 But when they wrote to Laserre, they took a different tack. Abandoning their earlier demands that he respect the in tegrity of the text, they tried to make the most of his willing ness to manipulate it. They indicated that they could produce some propaganda for his books in their literary review, the Journal helvetique, if he could promote their edition of the Description des arts et metiers in the cross references of the quarto. This formula restored peace between editor and printer. From volume 15 onward, Laserre directed the quar to's readers to seek further information on the arts in the STN 's book, and the STN reviewed Laserre 's works as so many "livres classiques" in its journal. Unfortunately, Duplain had to deal with editorial problems that could not be solved simply by tampering with the text and 27. STN to Panckoucke, July 27, 1777, and May 1, 1777. 28. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 8, 1777. 29. STN to Panckoucke, Nov. 16, 1777. 30. STN to Laserre, Oct. 19, 1777; Laserre to STN, Jan. 28, April 6, June 10, and Oct. 24, 1778; and Nouveau journal helvetique, July 1778, pp. 38-42. Judg ing from the STN 's papers, trumped-up book reviews were as common in the eighteenth century as Balzac said they were in the nineteenth. 199 The Business of Enlightenment tickling the ego of his editor. As explained in Chapter III, he had based his subscription campaign on a disastrous miscalcu lation about the size of his Encyclopedie: it would have to con tain thirty-six volumes instead of the twenty-nine for which the subscribers had contracted if it were to include the whole text. (The subscribers paid by the volume, but Duplain had promised to keep the overall retail price down to 344 livres.) He hoped to skirt this difficulty by announcing ostentatiously that he would give away three extra volumes free, while quietly billing the subscribers for the other four. He also made some subtle changes in the terms for the second sub scription and marketed the third as if it were a new enterprise -in thirty-six volumes-by the STN. Even then, he had to in crease the thickness of the volumes in order to restrict their number. And in order to keep this obesity within bounds, he instructed Laserre to do some discreet abridging. By drop ping sections from the main text and condensing articles from the Supplement, Laserre kept the first eight volumes down to 800 pages each. But this maneuver did not escape the sharp eyes of some rival Swiss publishers. In April 1778 at the height of the quarto-octavo conflict, H. A. Gosse of Geneva sent the following letter to the Socjete typographique de Lausanne: Nous venons d'apprendre une nouvelle trop importante pour vous, Messieurs, concernant l 'Encyclopedie pour ne pas vous en donner avis. M. Cramer, libraire, vient de sortir de chez nous, nous a assure qu'ayant confronte !'edition in-quarto qui se fait ici avec la sienne in-folio, il a trouve qu 'outre les retranchements qu 'occasionnent naturellement !'omission des figures il y en a beaucoup d'autres, que cela venait sftrement de ce que les libraires avaient promis ! 'edition in-quarto en 33 volumes et que chassant davantage qu 'ils n 'avaient cru d 'abord ils se sont crus obliges de faire plus de volumes ou d 'y remedier en tronquant leur edition. Ils ont choisi le dernier parti. Vous ferez, Messieurs, le cas que vous jugerez a propos de cet avis. Nous l 'avons crude trop de consequence pour ne pas vous le marquer. What the Lausannois did with this explosive bit of informa tion is not clear. They may have used it in their attempt to ex- 31. H. A. Gosse to Societe typographique de Lausanne, April 11, 1778, in Geneva, Archives d 'Etat, Commerce F 62. By thirty-three volumes, Gosse evi dently meant the original twenty-nine and the four extra volumes for which Duplain planned to charge the subscribers, or he may have made a slip for thirty two-the twenty-nine volumes of text and the three volumes of plates that Du plain had originally announced. 200 Bookmaking tort favorable terms from the quarto publishers, although both sides stood to gain by suppressing information about the deficiencies of their common text. In any case, word soon spread around publishers' circles that Duplain was cheating on the length of his Encyclopedie, and Duplain had to order Laserre to stop. The volumes grew to 1,000 pages from volume 9 onward. Volume 11 contained an ''A vis des editeurs,'' which indignantly denied that any cuts had taken place. The editors had merely rearranged some material, it explained. For ex ample, PSEUDO-ACACIA would appear under P instead of A. The last volume would contain a generous section of additions and corrections; and if any subscriber discovered any genuine cuts in the text, the editors would publish them in a free supple ment. Laserre restored the material he had amputated be tween ABATARDIR and HORN as some ''Additions,'' appended rather awkwardly to the end of volume 16, and he remained faithful to the original text throughout the second half of the quarto, although he confessed in private to the STN that the whole business disgusted him: On nous force de gater l 'ouvrage. Depuis le 20eme volume a I 'article du Dictionnaire, nous y joignons celui des Supplements, qui disent souvent la meme chose. Mais "chat echaude craint l 'eau froide." 11 est essentiel selon M. Duplain et ses associes qu 'on ne trouve aucune suppression. A vec ce systeme nous nous serions evite bien des peines. On ne voulait d 'abord que 32 volumes de 100 feuilles. 11 fallait done supprimer. L 'on m 'a fait un crime de n 'avoir point tente I 'impossible. Aujourd 'hui que I 'on donnera de 39 a 40 volumes, il faut autant qu 'il sera possible tout conserver ... Je sens comme vous combien cette marche est vicieuse, mais nous sommes forces de la suivre. Although the N euchatelois replied sympathetically to the ab be, they berated him behind his back in their letters to Panc koucke. They had cause to complain, for Laserre had com pounded his previous errors instead of correcting them when 32. Laserre to STN, Aug. 4, 1778. Laserre acknowledged his suppressions in similar terms in a letter to the STN of June 10, 1778. And in his letter of Aug. 4, he revealed some of the details of his copyediting operation: '' J e vous proteste que depuis le 9eme volume, il n 'en est aucun qui n 'ait ete prelu par quatre per sonnes differentes, dont une est entierement occupee a verifier les citations, presque toujours defectueuses. II echappe des fautes malgre ces precautions. Mais c 'est une suite necessaire de la precipitation avec !aquelle on est oblige de travailler . . . J 'ai renvoye a la Description [des arts] de M. Bertrand dans presque tous Jes articles d 'arts et metiers, et c 'est encore une des choses qui nous a ete re proche par Jes censeurs que l 'env:e a armes rontre nous.'' 201 The Business of Enlightenment he reworked the copy for the third edition. This final episode of editorial bungling became clear to the STN after it received the copy for volume 19 of the third edition and compared it with volume 19 in the previous editions. To make matters worse, Duplain refused to let the STN print more than one volume of the ''Neuchatel'' quarto, even though he issued all thirty-six volumes under its imprint. Thus, as the STN ex plained to Panckoucke, it was being made to bear the onus of the slipshod work turned out in its name by rival printers whom Duplain favored. A mesure que notre 19eme volume 3eme edition avance, nous y re marquons un si grand nombre de fautes et de fautes si lourdes qu'il ne nous est pas possible de les digerer de [sang] froid. D 'abord ce volume ne renferme aucune correction nouvelle de ce qui se .trouvait de fautif dans les precedentes editions, en sorte que les 1,000 ecus alloues en supplement de salaire a notre abbe sont a pure perte; mais ce qui est pire encore, nous voyons des fautes nouvelles que nous ne pouvons retablir qu'a l'aide de la premiere edition folio. Voila de quoi faire epanouir la rate aux journalistes anti-Encyclopedistes. Cependant ce bel ouvrage porte en titre le nom de notre Societe. On ne manquera pas de nous en faire des reproches. 11 faudra nous justifier aux depens de qui il appartiendra. It is impossible to acquire more precise information about Laserre's operations-how he organized his copyists, how he processed the copy, and so on. But the above account should make it clear that neither he nor the publishers considered the text of the Encyclopedie as sacred. On the contrary, they stuffed it with extraneous material, squeezed it out of shape, cut it apart, and reassembled it as they liked, without the slightest consideratiort for the promises of their prospectus or the intentions of Diderot. Of course, Diderot himself, having suffered through more than his share of editorial diffi culties, had described the Encyclopedie as a monstrosity that needed to be completely redone. This casual and critical at titude toward the text runs through all the projects for re producing it, from the initial proposal for a ref onte to the Encyclopedie methodique. The publishers also treated other books in the same manner. They worked capriciously with texts, for it never occurred to them that they ought to feel 33. STN to Panekoucke, March 14, 1779. 202 Bookmaking religious respect for the written word. The age of ''scientific'' editing had not yet dawned. Recruiting Workers Having sent for copy, presses, type, ink, paper, ink-ball leathers, candles, quills, imposing stones, galleys, chases, and a hundred other articles, the STN needed men to put the matter in motion. It ordered the workers pretty much as it ordered the equipment and ran into the same problems of supply and demand. But it also had to cope with the peculi arities of printers as human beings. They had no notion of joining a firm. Instead, they worked by the job, coming and going according to the availability of tasks and their own inclination. Although some stayed several years in one shop and a few settled down and raised families, most printers seem to have lived from job to job and to have spent much of their lives on the road. For printing was a tramping trade. Men went where they could find work, even if they had to hike hundreds of miles. When work abounded, they sometimes changed jobs in order to collect travel money or simply by ''caprice,'' as they put it. They came and went at a furious pace during the Encyclopedie boom, which sent repercussions throughout the migratory circuits of France, Switzerland, and parts of Germany, producing as much competition for workers as for paper. The masters of the Swiss printing houses could not draw on a large supply of local labor, so they secretly tapped each other's shops and tried to siphon off printers from the larger labor pools of France. The STN used a colorful cast of re- 34. The following account is meant only to describe the main aspects of book making at the STN, not to serve as a substitute for the thorough analysis that will appear in the thesis of Jacques Rychner. On the two other early-modern pub lishers whose papers are comparable in richness to those of the STN see D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press, 1696-1712 (Cambridge, Eng., 1966), 2 vols. and Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses (Amsterdam, 1969-72), 2 vols., an account of the Plantinian press in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Antwerp. 35. Offray, a compositor working for Felice in Yverdon, to his friend Ducret, a compositor with the STN, Dec. 20, 1770, quoted in Jacques Rychner, ''A l 'ombre des Lumieres: coup d 'oeil sur la main-d'oeuvre de quelques imprimeries du XVIIIeme siecle," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLV (1976), 203 The Business of Enlightenment cruiting agents : a pub-crawling bookseller in Basel, a book magistrate in Strasbourg, a sometime smuggler from loving the booksellers' guild in Dijon, a marginal bookdealer in Paris, a shipper and a type founder in Lyons, a down-and-out watchmaker in Geneva, and a Genevan pressman with the al luring address, "chez la veuve Joly, rue des belles filles." These agents dispatched printers and discussed them with the STN in a stream of letters, which reveal a great deal about attitudes toward work and workers at the level of the ''bour geois," as the men called the masters. The STN ordered printers in batches, like paper. "Il serait bon qu'ils fussent assortis, c'est-a-dire tant de compositeurs, tant de pressiers,' ' it instructed an agent in Lyons. But it worried that the assortiments might get out of hand. Thus the safety provisions in its instructions to Perregaux, who was to send a servant around the printing shops of Paris in search of recruits : Nous cherchons des ouvriers par mer et parterre. Si M. Boniface, qui va furetant partout, pouvait nous procurer, enrOler et expedier dili gemment 3 compositeurs et 3 pressiers, aussi jolis gar<}ons que possible, nous lui en serions vraiment fort obliges, fussent-ils meme au nombre de 4 de chaque espece. Il pourrait leur promettre a chacun 1 louis pour le voyage. Nous avons accoutume [sic] de ne le payer qu'apres un mois de residence, mais il n 'est pas necessaire de leur dire cette particularite-la. Il peut encore les assurer que s 'ils travaillent ici de suite pendant un an, et mieux encore jusqu'a la fin de l'impression de notre Encyclopedie, qui doit aller a 2 or 3 ans, nous leur allouerons tres certainement une recompense dont ils auront lieu d'etre con tents.37 Evidently the STN did not expect the workers to remain in Neuchatel for as much as a year and would not trust them with as little as a louis. It hoped to keep them in the shop by means of bonuses, but the bonuses had strings attached, which it would not reveal until the men had arrived, 500 kilometers later. Thus it tempted them with le voyage-a sum of money roughly equivalent to the amount they would have made during the time it took to walk to Neuchatel but refused to pay it until they had worked at least a month. Sometimes the STN kept the men's belongings (hardes), 36. STN to Claudet, May 8, 1777. 37. STN to Perregaux, June 24, 1777. 204 Bookmaking which the recruiters sent separately, as a kind of security deposit; for it feared that they might take another job en route or disappear, after collecting voyages from several masters. On their end, the recruiters put the STN on guard against drunkenness and sloth. A Oenevan agent gave a qualified endorsement to a compositor but warned that he should be kept on piece rates: "Il est diligent et habile, a ce qu 'on dit; mais ce qu'il ya de sur, c'est qu'il est faineant et ivrogne." And a Parisian recruiter hedged a recommendation of a press man with similar reservations: "Et par rapport a ce dernier, qu'on m'a assure etre hon ouvrier, je vous prie de ne lui donner jamais rien d'avance. Son pere m'a <lit qu'il etait un peu faineant. '' All the letters about the workers struck a note of basic mistrust. At best a printer would knock off for ir regular bouts of debauche; at worst he would sell sheets to pirate publishers or spy for the police. The employers and their agents wrote about working men as if they were children (garqons) or things ( assortiments) or an alien species. At one point, the STN complained to Duplain that a recruiter had sent off some men without inspecting them: "Il nous en a adresse une couple en si mauvais etat que nous avons ete obliges de les renvoyer. " And at another, it begged to be given an additional volume to print so that it would not have to break up its shop-not that it objected to firing the men; it wanted to avoid the necessity of rebuilding its labor force for a later job. Duplain replied, "Qu'y a-t-il de plus simple que de choisir 6 hons pressiers sur votre nombre et renvoyer les 38. The STN discussed these stratagems with its recruiting agents, notably the Parisian bookseller Pyre. See Pyre to STN, June 16, 1777, and STN to Pyre, July 1, 1777. 39. Marcinhes to STN, July 11, 1777. 40. Pyre to STN, June 16, 1777. 41. While on a business trip in France, Ostervald warned the STN that one of their apprentices might be an agent for the Societe typographique de Berne. Ostervald to STN, April 25, 1780. He also tried to ingratiate himself with Beau marchais by informing him that the workers in Beaumarchais's printing house at Kehl were likely to accept bribes from publishers who wanted advance copies of the Kehl Voltaire so they could pirate it. Ostervald to Bosset, May 3, 1780. At the same time, the STN received warnings that its own shop had been infiltrated by the Parisian police. See J.-P. Brissot to STN, April 23, 1781; July 26, 1781; and Jan. 12, 1782, and the discussion of this correspondence in Robert Darnton, "The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Police Spy," Journal of Modern History, XL (1968), 322-324. 42. STN to Pyre, July 1, 1777, and STN to Bosset, Aug. 30, 1779. 43. STN to Duplain, July 2, 1777. 205 The Business of Enlightenment autres, qui refluant ailleurs nous procureront plus de pouvoir sur une race effrenee et indisciplinable dont nous ne pouvons jouir '? '' The workers exchanged letters of recommendation about bosses, just as the bosses corresponded about them. The few worker-to-worker letters that survive-some of them so crudely written and misspelled that they have to be read aloud to be understood-show the same set of concerns. The men wanted to find out where the supply of work was plentiful, the pay good, the company congenial, and the fore man a soft touch. This information also traveled by word of mouth, when printers crossed paths on the road or in taverns frequented by their trade. The printers' taverns in Paris, notably Le Panier Fleury, rue de la Huchette, became im portant clearinghouses for reports about jobs and wages. They even served as centers for collective action, as can be appreciated from the following account in an unpublished autobiography of a Parisian foreman: Ces Messieurs choisissent un cabaret qui leur sert de tripot. 11 y a dans ce tripot toujours compagnie, on y debite toutes les nouvelles de l 'imprimerie. On sait l 'et at des prix, on prend des mesures pour ne les point laisser tomber, on parle du gain excessif des maitres, et l 'on peut juger comme on les habille. 11 y a de quoi faire de bonnes copies. Aussi ne les menage-t-on pas beaucoup. On y apprend les places vacantes. 11 y a, dit-on, un ouvrage qui va commencer; il faut taut de compositeurs. On endoctrine les nouveaux venus sur l 'etat des prix, et on leur recommande surtout d'etre fideles a la societe et de defendre les prix. Quelques uns en ont un etat ecrit. En voici copie fidele. Whenever possible, the masters tried to manipulate the workers' grapevine. In the summer of 1777, for example, the STN had its printers write to friends in other shops, urging 44. Duplain to STN, Dec. 10, 1778. 45. The archives of the STN contain a half dozen of these letters, which may be the only specimen of worker-to-worker correspondence from the early modern period. They will be published in the thesis of Jacques Rychner. 46. Nicolas Con tat ( dit Le Brun), Anecdotes typographiques d 'un gari;on imprimeur, ed. Giles Barber (forthcoming, Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1979), part II, chap. 2. This passage goes on to quote the written report on wages, which circulated in the Panier Fleury and which provided the workers with de tailed information on payments per sheet for composition. For example: ''Pre mierement le gros Romain in 4°, in 8° et in 12 se paie ... 3 llivres] 10 [sous]. Le meme avec des notes et des additions ... 4 [livres] 10 [sous]." 206 Bookmaking them to come to Neuchatel. In this way an STN pressman called Meyer persuaded his brother in a printing house in Strasbourg to emigrate with five comrades at the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8), when the Germans traditionally changed jobs. Before then, however, the Strasbourg printers heard a bad account of the STN from a journeyman who was passing through town, and they canceled their trip. Evidently they had more faith in an oral report from a fellow worker than in a letter from a relative, which might be inspired by a bourgeois, as indeed it was. Thus the recruiting business was swept by cross currents and conflict. One side dangled propositions, the other played with the bait. Employers might dock wages, hold back be longings, or fire the unruly; but they could not reel in men at will. And if the workers sometimes played one bourgeois off against another, extracting voyages and bonuses, they lost their room for maneuver as soon as demand declined. The tactics on each side can be seen most clearly in the case of some recruits from Lyons and Paris, who did most of the work on the Encyclopedie for the STN in the summer of 1777. Duplain had warned the STN not to go fishing in his labor pool: ''Les ouvriers sont ici d 'une rarete extreme. Tachez de vous en procurer de vos cotes.' ' But it secretly arranged for shipments of workers with Claudet, its shipping agent, and Vernange, its type founder. Claudet entered into ne gotiations with several printers, but he found that they asked sophisticated questions, which he could not answer satisfac torily: What for mats did the STN favor 1 Did it pay by time as well as by the piece 1 How long would the jobs under way in its shop last 1 And above all could it guarantee them some marginal advantage by its wages 1 '' C 'est precisement sur cet appointement qu 'ils insistent, parce qu 'ils ne veulent pas 47. STN to Turkheim of Strasbourg, Sept. 4, 1777. The importance of main· taining a good reputation among the workers is also clear from the entry for May 27, 1777, in the diary of J.-F. Favarger, the STN 's traveling agent. Favarger had just visited the Societe typographique de Berne, hoping to secretly recruit some workers, when he ran into workers that the Bernois had recruited secretly from the STN. "Vu Pfaeler le cadet qui m 'a accompagne dans leur imprimerie, ou j 'ai trouve Christ et Brose de ceux qui nous ont quitte avec lui. II ne s 'est pu empecher de divulguer [notre] imprimerie par devant moi. Je l'ai fait taire, mais ii n 'en faut pas davantage pour engager Jes autres a ne point y venir.'' Favarger, Carnet de voyage, STN papers, ms. 1150. 48. Duplain to STN, May 28, 1777. 207 The Business of Enlightenment quitter un endroit ou ils sont bien, si ce n 'est pour trouver mieux.'' The STN refused to be drawn into such elaborate com mitments and fell back on Vernange, who came up with two compositors and two pressmen. They needed travel money, however, and the STN refused to advance it; so they re mained in Lyons. After another month of prowling about taverns, Vernange finally found three men who were willing to tramp to Neuchatel without a prepaid voyage. But when they arrived, the STN rejected two of them: '' Deux de ceux que vous nous avez addresses nous sont arrives mais malades au point d'infecter, en sorte que nous n'avons pules occuper. Personne n 'a voulu les loger. Ils sont repartis et ont pris la route de Besan<;on pour se rendre a l 'hopital et y chercher du soulagement.' ' Vernange admitted that he had reached the bottom of the barrel, but he could not come up with any thing better unless he paid an advance, and even then he would have difficulty because good workers were getting scarcer and scarcer. At last the STN authorized him to pay his recruits 18 livres and to promise that they would get 6 livres more upon their arrival. Two of them, "un nomme La France et son compagnon dont on a ete tres content en cette ville,' ' arrived in time to begin the printing of the Encyclopedie in July, but they did not hurry. They took two and a half weeks to walk the 300 kilo meters and stopped off in Geneva, where they borrowed 12 li vres in the STN 's name. Two others never arrived at all. One had left without insisting on his voyage and probably got snapped up by a rival printing house en route. The other, a certain ''Jean Maron,'' pocketed 12 livres and disappeared. ''Nous craignons qu 'il ne se serve de cet argent pour aller ailleurs, ou il exigera peut-etre encore des frais de voyage,' ' the STN concluded. In printers' slang "marron" meant a for bidden book, "marronner" and "marronage" involvement in the illegal trade. Evidently ''Jean Maron'' had learned some tricks in the shadier side of the book business. But whatever the etymology of his nickname, he taught the STN to revert to 49. Claudet to STN, June 18, 1777. See also Claudet's letters of June 6 and July 30, 1777. 50. STN to Vernange, June 26, 1777. 51. Vernange to STN, June 3, 1777. STN to Vernange, July 8, 1777. 208 Bookmaking the safer practice of paying the men after their arrival-and from then on it failed to dredge any more workers out of Ly ons. The STN had more success in the larger labor market of Paris, thanks to a bookseller called Pyre, who, as a friend of the STN 's foreman and an enemy of the Parisian guild, was well placed and willing to help. On June 16, 1777, six of Pyre's recruits set out for Neuchatel, bearing a letter from him which attested to the terms of their employment: 24 livres in voyage upon their arrival and a 24 livres bonus if they re mained until the end of the year. In another letter, sent directly to the STN, Pyre explained that he had not told the men about the requirement of a month's labor for the payment of the voyage because he feared that the proviso would prevent them from leaving. He also thought it best to hold back their hardes until he had learned of their arrival. They arrived on July 1, having walked the 500 kilometers across France in two weeks at an average of 36 kilometers a day. Their 24 livres in travel money was good pay for such a summer hike because it equaled what they would have earned from two weeks of hard labor in the STN's shop. ·when they reached Neuchatel, however, they learned that they could not collect it for at least a month. They had no choice but to set to work on the Encyclopedie and the other items being printed by the STN. Their progress through the shop can be followed, week by week and job by job, from the wage book kept by the foreman, Barthelemy Spineux. Three compositors, Maltete, Poire, and Chaix, set type for lottery tickets, the STN 's catalogue, and other small jobs for two Weeks. Then in the week of July 14- 19, Spineux gave them regular assignments. Poire and Chaix worked together on a tract of the Enlightenment, Instruction donnee par Catherine II, lmperatrice de toutes les Russies, a la Commission etablie par cette souveraine, pour travailler a la redaction d'un nouveau. code de loix, and Maltete com- 53. In a letter to the STN of Sept. 17, 1777, Pyre described himself as an "ennemi jure du corps de la librairie." He was a small and somewhat marginal bookseller, who suffered from the oligarchy of the great merchants in the guild. 'fhe most important of the letters about his activity as a recruiter are STN to Pyre, June 1, 1777; Pyre to STN, June 15, June 16, and July 1, 1777; and STN to Pyre, July 1, 1777. 54. The wage books, called Banque des ouvriers, in the STN papers, ms. 1051 provide information on the composition and printing of every sheet produced by the STN from 1770 to 1782. They are the principal source for the following dis cussion of work and workers. 209 The Business of Enlightenment posed the first formes of the STN's first volume of the Encyclo pedie. The three men continued to labor on their assignments until August 23, when Poire and Chaix disappeared. They had worked eight weeks, long enough to collect their voyage and their hardes, and had moved on-presumably to places in an other shop, which they had reserved through the workers' grapevine. Maltete left two weeks later. This time, Spineux refused to pay the travel money. "J e ne donne point le voyage a M. Maltete, et comme je n 'ai rien paye, je ne payerai rien,'' he scribbled in an angry note at the bottom of his entry in the wage book for September 6, which was the last to mention the Parisian threesome but not the last that was heard of them. Two months later Duplain reported that the men who had quarreled with the STN were blackening its name in the shops of Geneva, where they were still working on the Encyclo pedie. 55 Pyre's other recruits scattered in other directions. A press man called Jean left for Felice's shop in Yverdon after eight weeks with the STN. He returned fifteen weeks later, but his second stint lasted only three weeks; so Spineux never let him have his voyage. Another pressman, Gaillard, remained in the shop from July 5 to December 20-a fairly common stint and a satisfactory one, as far as one can tell from the wage book. But in July 1778, a Parisian tradesman, who supplied the STN with ink-ball leathers, wrote that Gaillard was back in Paris and ready to set out for Neuchatel again-for the third time. "Il fait [sic] tout plein d'eloge de vous et s 'attribue a lui-meme toutes les fautes qu 'il a faites.' ' Evidently Gail lard had quit after some kind of dispute. His experience and that of his fellow travelers confirms a theme that runs through all of the STN 's correspondence about workers: employment in the printing trade of the Old Regime tended to be stormy and short. How often the storms burst is imposible to say, but the wage book shows a very rapid rate of turnover in the STN's work 55. Duplain to STN, Oet. 31, 1777. The payments of voyage did not always take plaee one month after a reeruit's arrival. In a letter to Vernange of May 24, 1777, the STN said it would pay for the travel after three months of work in its shop. 56. In a note following the entry of Sept. 13, 1777, in the wage book, Spineux wrote, "J'ai paye a M. Erb [probably the "Bergue" whom Pyre had mentioned as Jean's traveling eompanion in a letter of July 2) pour voyage 42 batz. Je les avais retires de M. Jean, venu de Paris et parti pour Yverdon." 57. Thomas to STN, July 19, 1778. 210 Bookmaking force. Few workers remained in Neuchatel as long as a year, although a half dozen veterans, who stayed for two- or three year hitches, maintained some continuity in the shop. Judging from letters about the "caprice," "curiosite," and quarrel someness of the workers, they often left of their own accord. But there must have been much more firing than quitting after the Encyclopedie boom subsided. Once they had finished printing the quarto, Ostervald and Bosset decided to reduce their shop from twelve to two presses. Mme. Bertrand, who was handling the firm's correspondence while they were away on a business trip, wrote to them about a problem with this policy: you could not close down presses without dismissing pressmen. "On ne saurait mettre sur la rue du jour au lende main des gens qui ont femme et enfants. " This objection ap parently had not occurred to the directors. They brushed it aside with a lecture about profitability, and soon afterward the STN was operating at two presses. There is no way of knowing what became of the workers after the STN turned them out. They must have found it diffi cult to get jobs elsewhere because other printing houses also seemed to be cutting back and the book business in general went into a slump during the 1780s. Some of the men and their families-for the garr;ons were not necessarily youths en joying their Wanderjahre-probably disappeared into the "floating population" of the poor, which surged through the roads and flooded the poorhouses (hOpitaux) of western Eu- 58. Although the letters about recruitment indicate that the workers changed jobs to get better pay, they sometimes allude to more flighty motivation. In a letter to Vernange of May 24, 1777, the STN indicated that the men might come in order to taste the local wine, and in a letter to Pyre of Oct. 14, 1777, it said they might leave Paris because they were "curieux" to see Switzerland. The compositor Offray said that he and his comrades changed jobs by "caprice" in the letter cited above, note 35. And caprice was not limited to printers. On Aug. 17, 1777, Vernange wrote to the STN, "Yous connaissez aussi bien que moi ce que c 'est que d'etre expose aux caprices des ouvriers. J 'en ai un qui est tom be malade et un autre qui, par son inconduite, a ete oblige de s 'exiler de la ville." Similar remarks appear in some of the letters of the paper millers. 59. Mme. Bertrand to Ostervald and Bosset in Paris, Feb. 12, 1780. 60. The slump shows up clearly in the letters and orders that the STN re ceived from booksellers all over France in the 1780s. For example, on March 31, 1780, Pierre Machuel of Rouen wrote, ''La vente ... est totalement morte et de nouveaux correspondants-car la majeure partie [of the old ones] a fait banqueroute--ne payent rien, et les bons ne demandent plus rien ... Les maga sins sont plus que remplis, et l 'on meurt de faim aupres ... Les seuls heureux sont ceux qui se seront trouves !es editeurs de 1 'Encyclopedie. Mais le temps en est passe actuellement pour Jes autres. '' 211 The Business of Enlightenment rope on the eve of the Revolution. The jobless had often drifted through the STN 's shop, begging for pennies, which Spineux doled out from time to time and noted in the wage book: '' 7 batz d 'aumone au relieur ''; '' aumone 3 batz 2 creu zer"; "pour aumone a un ouvrier allemand 7 batz" "a un pauvre Allemand imprimeur 7 batz. '' Printers could easily sink into indigence because they rarely accumulated savings. According to Pyre, few of the potential recruits in Paris had saved enough to support themselves for two weeks on the road while tramping to Neuchatel. "La difficulte ne laisse pas que d'etre assez grande, parce que la plupart n 'ont point d 'argent, meme ceux qui sont assez ranges. Il s 'en est presente plus de vingt, qui tons n 'avaient pas un sou pour partir. '' Although they received relatively good wages when they found work, printers had no protection against unemploy ment, disease, and old age. Illness had tr an sf ormed Ver nange 's two substandard recruits from skilled artisans into beggars; and if they ever made it across the Jura Mountains to the pestilential hopital of Besarn,;on after the ST~ rejected them, they may well have spent their last dayR with other workers whom they had known in the Swiss printing shops men like the compositor from the Societe typographique de Berne who had come close to his final tour when he was recom mended to the STN: "C'est un bon ouvrier, qui a travaille du temps de M. Droz assez longtemps a Neuchatel, mais il vous faut dire que la vue et l'ouie commence a lui manquer et que par sa viellesse il n'a plus la vitesse en composant qu'un jeune homme robuste. Mais comme vous ne lui payez que ce qu 'il gagne [that is, piece rates], je vous supplie de le garder aussi longtemps, etant reduit par la grande misere ... a un etat pitoyable.' ' Setting Wages Cruel as it was, the labor market favored the workers for a few years at the height of the Encyclopedie fever. They re acted by attempting to force up wages, but the attempt pro voked a counteroffensive by the masters, who closed ranks 61. The references, in the order of their appearance, come from the wage book, entries for Feb. 14 and July 25, 1778 and Jan. 16 and Feb. 20, 1779. 62. Pyre to STN, June 16, 1777. 63. Pfaehler of the Soeilite typographique de Berne to STN, March 3, 1772. 212 Bookmaking after a great deal of sniping at one another. As this episode provides some rare insight into labor relations during the pre industrial era, it deserves to be analyzed and documented in detail. None of the twenty or so Swiss and French houses which printing the quarto on contract for Duplain knew pre were cisely what all the others received from him or what they paid their workers in wages. This information could influence the bidding for commissions and the competition for labor, so the master printers kept their cards close to their chests-and instructed their agents to look over their competitors' shoul ders. 'Yhen Favarger toured around printing shops for the STN, he was sometimes received as a spy-and rightly so. After vi8iting the shop of Cuchet in Grenoble, he sent the following report to Neuchatel: Cuchet imprime l'Encyclopedie. Le pauvre gar<;on a fait des frais immenses pour s 'assortir. Il a fait faire 5 presses neuves, qui lui re viennent a 480 livres, dit-il, une fonte neuve. Il a deja fait le 7eme volume. Il fait a present le 19eme et a chez lui la copie pour le 27eme. Il croit qu 'a pres il sera encore a temps pour en faire un 4eme, ce que je doute, quoique je ne lui aie pas dit. Il a 9 presses dessus. J e n 'ai pu savoir combien il paie les ouvriers, mais ce qu 'il m 'a dit, c 'est qu 'ayant fait des prix si bas avec M. Duplain, s 'il n 'a pas un 4eme volume a faire au bout de ses trois, il se trouvera avec beaucoup de presses qu 'il ne pourra pas occuper, une fonte usee et point de benefice que la gloire d 'avoir fait l 'Encyclopedie in-quarto. J e ne sais pas quels sont ses prix. Ci-joint un echantillon de son impression, qui en general n'est pas absolument mal, mais vous remarquerez qu'il y a un cote mieux fait que l'autre. Au reste, c'est pris d'une feuille a l'aventure, sans qu 'il s 'en soit apper<;u. J 'ai ete fort bien garde chez lui. J 'y ai reconnu quelques ouvriers qui ont travaille chez nous, auxquels je n 'ai pas pu parler. Ses pa piers me paraissent assez beaux et bien tires. Mais il ne peut rien gagner dessus. Louis Marcinbes, the STN 's man in C eneva, sent similar information about the shops of Pellet and Bassompierre, which the STN had requested ''pour ne pas etre dupes de ces gens-Ia." Marcinhes also infiltrated the Genevan shops in order to procure workers for the STN: 64. Favarger to STN, July 26, 1778. 65. STN to Marcinhes, July 7, 1777. The STN continued, "II nous importe fort de savoir ce que l 'on paie pour le 1000 de tirage et composition de chaque feuille de l 'Encyclopedie ehez Nouffer et Pellet. Veuillez nous l 'n.pprendre. 11 nous conviendrait de savoir en quel nombre on la tire.'' 213 The Business of Enlightenment J 'ai revu quelques ouvriers, mais je ne sais qui les a si fort prevenus contre votre typographie. Vous avez sans doute des concurrents en nemis et jaloux; et il est, j 'en conviens, fort disgracieux d 'avoir a traiter avec une canaille depourvue de tout sentiment d'honneur. Cette semaine pourtant il part un compositeur entendant fort bien cette partie et le grec. Il est long [that is, lent] mais assidu, travaillant avec beaucoup de soin, ne rassemblant point aux barbouillons, qui m 'avaient tous promis et qui se dedisent sans donner d 'autres raisons que la mediocrite des prix. Pellet et Bassompierre, qui ont sous de fortes promesses seduit plusieurs de ces ouvriers et degarni les im primeries des environs, ne veulent pourtant leur donner que quinze florins neuf sols de notre monnaie par feuille, le florin de 12 creuzer. Aussi une bonne partie veulent quitter, parce qu 'ils demandent 17 florins la feuille. Celui qui part cette semaine en est un. Il se nomme Caisle. Il doit aussi partir deux pressiers, qui ont promis de venir me parler mais que je n 'ai pas encore VU. On paie ici 4 florins le 1000 a la presse . . . J e ne perdrai pas de vue les occasions de vous adresser les mecontents de Messieurs Pellet et Bassompierre et Nouffer. As the Genevan,.; also had drained off workers from ~ eu chatel, the reciprocal raiding threatened to develop into au open war. But before things got out of hand, Duplain's agent in Geneva, Amable Le Roy, intervened by sending the follow ing directive to the STN : Vos ouvriers ont repandu plusieurs lettres dans les imprimeries de Geneve tendantes a engager les notres a se tourner de VOS cotes; et pour mieux y reussir, ils leur ont donner l'espoir d'un voyage paye et de six sols par 1000 de plus qu 'ils n 'ont ici. Nous avons arrete toutes les presses des principales imprimeries de Geneve, et meme elles rouleraient toutes des a present, si le besoin d 'ouvriers ne nous avait pas reduit a 12. Si vous mettez une augmenta dans les prix, elle contribuera a les rendre plus rares dans un tion pays oii il est tres interessant qu 'ils soient abondants pour la plus grande celerite des choses; parce que c 'est la OU il est le plus possible d 'avoir un aussi grand nombre de presses qu 'on le desire. Votre augmentation de prix d 'ailleurs pourrait les porter a cabaler pour l 'obtenir ici. Vous jugez, Messieurs, combien une telle cabale nuirait a la celerite de l 'ouvrage et a sa bonne fabrication; car si l 'on ne 66. Marcinhes to STN, July 11, 1777. Caisle, or "Quelle" as he appeared in the STN 's wage book, arrived in Neuchatel soon afterward-followed, a week later, by a letter from Pellet saying he had left town without paying a debt of 22 florins. Marcinhes got the wages of the Genevan compositors slightly wrong for his figure did not include imposition. He also provided information on the Gene vans' pressrun, because the STN suspected some fraud: ''Pellet tire pour sa part 4000 et 14 mains, Nouffer et Bassompierre autant. Voila ce que Bassompierre m 'a assure et ce que m 'ont confirme tous les ouvriers a qui j 'en ai par le." 214 Bookmaking SOUSCrivait pas a leur demande, les places chez YOUS etant remplies, ils aimeraient mieux courir a Bale et Yverdon que de revenir ici, et nous aurions beaucoup de peine a en trouver autant qu 'il nous en faudrait, la France meme etant depourvue. 11 conviendrait beaucoup que votre imprimerie fut fermee a tous ouvriers venant de Geneve pour ne l 'ouvrir qu 'aux Allemands qui sont a votre proximite. As the danger of losing Duplain 's patronage outweighed the difficulty of procuring workers, the STN decided to retreat. It sent a full report on its wages to N ouff er and Pellet and asked them to do likewise, so that the masters could present a united front to the men. The Genevans replied with detailed accounts of their wage scale and expressions of solidarity: 11 est certainement tres essentiel que nous nous conformions pour les prix de cet ouvrage, vu que les ouvriers nous mettent les pieds sur la gorge (wrote Pellet). Votre prote ayant ecrit que YOUS payez 15 batz le mil et une gratification a la fin, voici, Messieurs ce que je paie, de meme que dans les autres imprimeries, savoir 15 florins en paquet et corrige [sic] premiere et seconde. Le prote corrige la troisieme. Le prote met en page, ayant trouve qu'il me revenait mieux a compte, vu que l 'on demandait 4 florins de mise en page et meme 5 florins. A la presse je paie 4 florins le mille, soit 12 batz, et a chaque feuille finie je leur donne 5 cruches, de sorte que la feuille entiere vient 97 batz et demi, le florin toujours a 3 batz. To make sense of this situation, it is important to take ac count of some techniques of bookmaking. Early-modern print ing shops were divided into two halves, la casse, where the compositors set type, and la, presse, where the pressmen printed sheets. As the pressmen operated downstream to the compositors in the flow of work, they generally ran off what ever formes were ready. In Neuchatel they printed the Ency clopedic along with four or five other books, which the STN also had in production at various times between 1777and1780. Instead of receiving special wages for the presswork on each of the books, they were paid a standard rate of 15 batz (a little more than 2 livres tournois) for every thousand impressions they produced, no matter what they worked on. Pellet's let- 67. Amable Le Roy to STN, July 22, 1777. 68. Pellet to STN, July 23, 1777. 69. The only exceptions to this rule concerned unusually large or small press runs, in which the preparatory labor ("make ready") took up an unusually small or large amount of work in proportion to the printing. So when the STN increased the pressrun of the Encyclopedie from 4,000 to 6,000, it increased the pay of the pressmen from 60 to 86 batz instead of 90 batz for the printing of 215 The Business of Enlightenment ter showed that his standard rate was a good deal less than the STN's: only 4 Geneva florins or about 12 Neuchatel batz per thousand. The STN could not easily lower its rate to his level, however, because it could hardly pay its pressmen less for working on the Encyclopedie than on their other jobs, nor could it expect them to accept a reduction in wages across the board. But it could tinker with the wages of its compositors, which it set in the opposition fashion-that is, ad hoc, accord ing to the size of the type and the difficulty of each job. Several elements could be adjusted in the composition of the Encyclopedie because the compositors worked by the compan ionship or "paquet" system. In the case of the quarto, a paquet was a page of type ; four pages made a forme ; two formes were necessary to print both sides of a sheet; and 100 to 120 sheets went into each of the thirty-six volumes of text. The sheets were identified by their ''signatures,'' letters at the bottom of certain pages. By aligning the sheets according to the alphabetical order of their signatures and by folding them correctly, a binder could transform a loose stack of printed paper into a volume, ready to be read, page by page, after stitching, cropping, and binding. rrhus the sheet was the key unit of production. Compositors were paid by the sheet. But in the paquet system, four or five men composed nothing but paquets, working as a team under a head paquetier or compositeur en chef. Although he, too, made paquets, he spent most of his time on the more skilled labor of imposition. He arranged the paquets in the proper manner on the composing stone, added final touches such as headlines and signatures, laid an iron frame or chassis (chase in English) around the assemblage and packed it tightly with wood quoins and wedges (garniture in French, "furniture" in English), so that the newly constructed '' f orme'' would hold together and give an even impression when inked, covered with paper, and pressed beneath the platen of the printing press. each fonne. Similarly, when it did small jobs, it paid the printers 2 batz for 100 impressions, a higher rate than the standard 15 batz per thousand. Thus the entry in the wage book for April 24, 1779: " { Deux affiches 300 en tout ... 6 [batz] Pour le gouvernement Conges militaires 100 ... 2 [batz]" 70. For contemporary accounts of the paquet system see the article PAQUET in the Encyclopedie; A.-F. Momoro, Traite elementaire de l 'imprimerie, OU le manuel de l 'imprim.eur (Paris, 1793), pp. 24 7-248; and S. Boulard, Le manuel de l'imprimeur (Paris, 1791), pp. 96-97. 216 Bookmaking By dividing labor in this fashion, a group of compositors could move through a text at great speed. They were also paid as a group, once a week, at the Saturday evening "banque." The foreman would record the number of sheets they had com posed and the amount they had earned in his wage book ("ban que des ouvriers"). Thus the entry for August 30, 1777, "Mal tete Encyclopedie, tome VI T.V.X.Y .... 236," meant that Maltete had received 236 batz for the composition of four sheets, T through Y, during the week of August 25-30. He then divided that sum among the members of his team according to the amount of work each had done-so much per paquet and so much for his own imposition. Having adopted this system for the composition of the En cyclopedie, the STN had to decide how much it would pay per sheet and how it would apportion the piece rates between paquet work and imposition. It experimented with different combinations for a month and then set its wages as close as possible to those reported by Pellet and Nouffer. According to Pellet's report, compositors in Geneva would not accept anything less than four florins per sheet for imposition. He considered that too expensive, so he left the imposing to his foreman, who received an annual salary, probably something comparable to the 1200 livres tournois that the STN paid Spineux. But the STN had too many other jobs under way to let Spineux concentrate exclusively on the Encyclopedie. It did not even free its time-hand compositor, Ruhr, for the im positions of the Encyclopedie. Instead, it followed the prac tice of Nouffer, who had colluded with the attempt to freeze wages by sending the following report to Neuchatel: Pour satisfaire a VOS desirs ... et dans l'esperance que VOUS YOUS conformiez exactement a nos prix, nous Yous les donnons ci-bas ... Pour la composition d'une feuille en paquet ff.15 Pour la mise en page [that is, imposition] 4 Pour le tirage a 4 [mille] 14 mains 32-6 Ensemble ff.51-6 Nous donnons le louis d'or neuf a ff. 51 et par consequent l'ecu neuf a ff.12-9. 71. Ruhr received a weekly salary of 105 batz, or 15 livres tournois, for special assignments, such as unusual corrections (remaniements) on the Encyclopedie. The wage book for Oct. 4, 1777, for example, shows that his work that week had included '' remaniement . . . sur six paquets de l 'Encyclopedie. '' 72. Nouffer to STN, July 23, 1777. Although Nouffer expressed himself differ ently, his figures on presswork tally with those in Pellet's letter of July 23, 217 The Business of Enlightenment N ouffer 's letter provided just the information, including a precise exchange rate, that the STN needed. The Neuchatelois finally decided to pay their compositors 59 batz per sheet: 50 batz for the 8 paquets and 9 batz for imposition. This ad justment brought the STN 's wages within close range of those in Geneva, as can be seen from the following table: Genevan STN wages wages Eqwivalent in florins in batz in batz Composition 8 paquets 15 49-:Y2 imposition 4 13-14 total 19 62-% 107 120 Presswork 32-~ 170 179 Total cost of labor 51-~ per f euille d 'edition In the end, the feuille d'edition cost 9 batz more in Neu chatel than in Geneva, but the difference did not amount to much-a matter of 171 livres for all the labor on volume 6, which was trivial in comparison with the 11,545 livres that the STN charged Duplain for producing that volume. The quoted above. The pressrun of 4,000 required 8,000 impressions for each feuille d'edition, which, at four florins per thousand (Pellet's rate) came to 32 florins. The final six sous (half a common Genevan florin) correspond to the six cruches mentioned by Pellet and c.overed the remaining sheets. Thus Nou:ffer's price of 321h florins was the same as Pellet's, as is confirmed by Pellet's remark that his presswork came to 971h batz of Neuchatel (3 times 321h). 73. The STN 's attempt to adjust the components of its wage scale is evident from a note in the wage book for July 26, 1777, written just after the arrival of N ou:ffer 's letter: Composition de Gen~ve ... 49-2 Mettage en page ... 8-2 ajoute au prix de Gen~ve ... 1- batz 59 In deciding how to rearrange these proportions, the STN did not use the crude exchange rate of 3 batz to the Genevan florin mentioned by Pellet. Like Nou:ffer, it reckoned according to the standard French Jonis d 'or, which was worth 24 livres tournois, 51 Genevan florins, and 168 Neuchatel batz. See Samuel Ricard, Traite general du commerce (Amsterdam, 1781), I, 105-111 and 121-123. Thus the florin was really worth 3.294 batz, and the Genevan wages of 15 florins for paquet work on a sheet came to 49 batz 2 creuzer, almost exactly what the STN paid; but the Genevans paid 4 batz 1 creuzer more than the STN did for imposition. Printers normally calculated that imposition should come to one sixth of the costs of com· position. See Boulard, Le manueZ de Z 'imprimeur, p. 61. 218 Bookmaking STN paid a little more than the Genevans did for presswork, but it paid a little less for imposition, while matching the Ge nevan rate for paquets. In this way it moved as close to the Genevan rates as it could, without upsetting the wage scale of its pressmen and without penalizing any of its compositors, except Maltete, who received 50 percent less than his counter parts in Geneva for making up pages and imposing formes. Perhaps that was why he quit the STN early in September, before he could collect his voyage. By that time, however, the STN had built up a large enough work force to maintain a high level of production, despite temporary ups and downs. It re placed Maltete with a veteran compositor called Bertho, who led the Encyclopedie team satisfacL:rily for the next two years. The masters stopped raiding one another's shops, and the complaints about competition for labor disappeared from their correspondence. They had out-caballed the workers. Pacing Work and Managing Labor Even though the masters held the line on wages, the men received comparatively good pay. Comparisons are hard to make because so little is known about wages and output among early-modern workers, but the Swiss printers clearly belonged to the so-called "labor aristocracy. " The STN 's employees usually made 10-15 livres (70-105 batz) a week, or about 2 livres ( 40 sous) a day, depending on their productiv ity. They did not earn as much as their counterparts in Paris, where composition of an ordinary sheet in pica normally fetched about 8 livres as opposed to 5 livres (35 batz) in Neu- 7 4. For information on wages during the last years of the Old Regime in Franee see C.-E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVII le Biecle (Paris, 1932), pp. 447-456. The figures in George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), pp. 21-22 and 251 also are helpful, although they do not apply to the period before 1789. Using these and other data, Pierre Leon distinguished three strata of workers in the Old Regime: the poor, who made under 20 sous and often less than 10 sous a day; a middle group, who made 20-30 sous; and the elite, who made more than 30 sous. See Leon's eontribution in C.-E. Labrousse and others, Histoire economique et sociale de la France (Paris, 1970), II, 670. Although French historians have produeed estimates of typieal daily wages, they have failed to provide statistical series on earnings over long periods of time. So the labor history of the Old Regime re mains too underdeveloped to provide comparisons with the rich material in Neuchatel. McKenzie and Voet also use the notion of "labor aristocracy" in dis cussing the wages of the printers in Cambridge and Antwerp. See McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press, I, 83 and Voet, The Golden Compasses, II, 341. 219 The Business of Enlightenment chatel, and presswork brought in about 2 livres 10 sous per thousand impressions as opposed to 2 livres 3 sous ( 15 batz). But the cost of living must have been much higher in Paris, and the printers in Switzerland earned more than al most all the other categories of French workers. According to the estimates of C.-E. Labrousse, common laborers made about a livre a day ( 19-21 sous) in rural France and a little more in towns (23-24 sous). Skilled workmen such as car penters and masons made about 30 sous, and highly skilled artisans, like locksmiths, made 30-50 sous. Those estimates are not very revealing, however, because many workers received some form of piece rates, and almost nothing is known about variations in their output. So a great deal can be learned from the STN 's wage book, if one shifts the question away from the consideration of rates to a more fundamental issue: given their wage scale, how much did the printers work1 A close study of the wage book from June to November 1778 shows an extraordinary variety in the men's productivity. Income and output rose and fell so erratically from week to week that one cannot talk of averages but only of fluctations ranging for the most part between 70 and 120 batz with peaks of 130 batz or more and low points of about 45 batz. The stead iest compositor in the shop was Maley, who set the type for Cook's Voyage au pole austral, one of the four books, along with a journal and various odd jobs, that the STN was pro ducing at this time. For six weeks in a row, from August 15 to September 26, Maley composed two sheets and received 70 batz, although he could compose three sheets for 105 batz, as he did in the week of October 3. Nicholas and Quelle, who 75. In a letter to the STN of April 15, 1780, Pyre set the typical costs for producing a sheet in pica (cicero) at a pressrun of 1,000, presumably in octavo, as follows: composition . . . 8 livres presswork, at 2 livres 10 sous per thousand . . . 5 total ... 13 "etoffes" (overhead) ... 6-10 profit ... 5- 5 total cost ... 23-15 The printer Emeric David of Aix made almost exactly the same calculations in a diary that he kept during a trip through France in 1787: "Mon voyage de 1787," Bibliotheque de l 'Arsenal, ms. 5947, fol. 50. According to Contat, .Anecdotes ty pographiques, ed. Barber, part I, chap. 9, time hands in Paris 1·eceived 50 sous a day, which was the same as the 17 batz 2 creuzer paid for ''conscience'' work by the STN. Evidently the more skilled compositors could command relatively higher wages than the piece workers in Switzerland. 220 Bookmaking worked together on the STN 's edition of the Bible, went to the other extreme. They received 60 batz for composing one sheet in the week of October 10, 150 batz for two and a half sheets in the following week, and 120 batz for two sheets in the week after that. Erb worked slowly and erratically. He often set only a sheet of Millot 's Elemens d 'histoire univer selle and came home with 46 batz for his week's work, but he could double his output, as in the weeks of July 4 and August 15, when he composed two sheets and collected 92 batz. Champy, who normally set the Journal helvetique, worked fast. He frequently set three sheets of the journal and made 108 batz, although his output declined to half that amount in the weeks of June 27 and August 1, when he earned only 54 batz. The composition of the Encyclopedie proceeded just as unevenly. Bertho normally worked with a team of four paque tiers, and their output in September and October varied as follows: Sept. Oct. 5 12 19 26 3 10 17 24 31 Sheets composed 7 31/2 51/2 10 6 7 8 51/2 71/2 Wages (in batz) 413 2061;2 3241/2 590 354 3241/2 413 4421/2 472 The press crews worked at even more irregular rates. Dur ing three weeks in June, the output of Chambrault and his companion plummeted from 18,000 to 12,000 to 7,000 impres sions and their income from 258 to 172 to 101 batz. During three weeks in October, the output of Yonicle and his compan ion soared from 12,525 to 18,000 to 24,000 impressions and their income from 182 to 258 to 344 batz. It is impossible to find any consistent pattern in the fluctuations. They were rela tively moderate for Roat's crew, enormous for the crews of Georget and Lyet, erratic at a high level of productivity for Foraz 's crew, and erratic at a low level for Bentzler 's. The weekly output of veterans like Albert and his companion rose and fell continuously between 12,000 and 19,000 impressions. Meyer and his companion, also veterans, usually made more than 200 batz a week and once earned 303 (for 21,000 impres sions), but their income sometimes dropped to 165 batz (for 11,200 impressions). Kroemelpen and his companion usually 221 The Business of Enlightenment made about 172 batz (for 12,000 impressions), but they were capable of making 280 (for 19,500 impressions). The heaviest week put in by any press crew occurred between February 16 and 21, 1778, when Chambrault and his companion made 379 batz (about 27 livres each) for 26,250 impressions : 4 formes of the Encyclopedie at 6,000, 1 forme of Millot 's Elemens d'histoire at 2,000, and 250 impressions of the local Feuille d'avis. All these data point to the same conclusion: the men set their own pace. No matter how much one allows for outside factors -holidays, shifting assignments, occasional work at half press, advances from one week to the next-it seems certain that the variations were voluntary. If the men labored less, it was because they wanted to; the drop in their output did not result from irregularities in the supply of work. Com positors almost always worked exclusively on one job, so they could set as much copy as they desired each week. Press men ran off formes as the compositors finished them, no mat ter what the job, so they rarely ran out of material to print and if they did, they were entitled to compensation, called temps perdu .. Only once during the two years of work on the Encyclopedie does the wage book mention any such payment: "Gaillard . . . une demie journee perdue ... 8 [batz] 3 creuzer. ' Holidays do not account for the variations, because one man's output often increased while another's declined and there was no general drop in production even during the weeks of Good Friday, Easter, Christmas, and New Year's. Although Neuchatel was Protestant territory, many of the workers were Catholic. They did not enjoy the rich diet of feast days, which may (or may not) have reduced the work year to 250 or 300 days in Catholic Europe. But they gave themselves holidays. 76. The highest output of a press crew at Cambridge in the early eighteenth century came to only 20,700 impressions, but in general the productivity of the compositors and pressmen in Cambridge fluctuated as wildly as that of the men in Neuchatel. See McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press, I, chap. 4. 77. Wage book for Nov. 29, 1778. That sum was the same as the payment for a half day's work en conscience. 78. In discussing real or "effective" income, historians have assumed that French laborers did not work during an enormous number of unpaid feast days- 111 per year, according to G. M. Jaffe and George Rude. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, p. 251. But it seems unlikely that many of those holidays were observed. In his Art de faire le papier (Paris, 1761), p. 84, J. J. Lefran!)ois 222 Bookmaking Although the wage book does not provide a day-by-day atten dance record, it indicates the rate of absenteeism among time hands or "conscience" workers, who lost 8 batz 3 creuzer for every half day that they missed. Their record is particularly revealing during the summer of 1778, when several pressmen worked for short stretches ''en conscience.'' : Days worked among time hands June July Aug. Sept. 13 4 11 18 25 1 8 15 19 6 20 27 22 29 5 12 Kroemelpen 4 Pataud 5 5 6 6 3 Odier 4 6 Meyer 6 6 6 6 4 5 6 6 4 6 6 4% Leduc 4% 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 Aury 6 6 If the six-day week prevailed, it was broken almost as often as it was observed. And "conscience" workers, as their name indicates, were considered the most reliable in the shop. The piece workers probably labored more erratically. Indeed, the whole process looks so erratic that one wonders whether the six-day work week and the 300-day work year ever existed, and whether one day was ever the same as another. The irregularity in the pace of the work compounded the irregularity in the stints of employment and left the STN with enormous problems of labor management. With men mov ing unexpectedly in and out of the shop and working at idio syncratic rhythms, Spineux could not possibly turn out the de Lalande noted, "On suppose 300 jours ouvrables dans l 'annee, puisqu 'on ne chome dans ces sortes de manufactures que les dimanches et fetes principales. '' The wage book of the STN does not provide information on daily output, but the STN 's Gopie de lettres shows that its clerical staff and directors did not slacken their work on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. The only indications of official festivity in the STN papers are a few unimpressive entries in the account book entitled Petite Caisse, ms. 1048. Thus Dec. 27, 1777: "une bouteille aux ouvriers ... 6 [sous]." 79. As the time rates remained constant, the number of days worked by a time hand can be determined by his weekly pay. Furthermore, Spineux usually noted cases when time hands did not work a full week-for example, in the entry for June 13, 1778: "Pataud 5 jours ... 87 [batz] 2 [creuzer]." He also re corded their output according to piece rates and then subtracted it as ouvrage from the gross total of the week's banque, thereby indicating that the men re ceived only their time wages and did not finish incomplete weeks by working at piece rates. 223 The Business of Enlightenment Encyclopedie and the other books at an even rate. But he could minimize the chaos by certain practices. He attached composi tors to specific jobs called labeurs or ouvrages, using his time-hand compositor for specialized work-unusual correc tions ( remaniements) and small commissions like lottery tick ets and posters. The piece-work compositors could proceed at their own pace as long as their copy held out. If they reached the end of their labeur without quitting the STN and if the STN did not replace it with a new assignment, they would be fired. Thus Erb set nothing but Millot 's Elemens d'histoire for 32 weeks from January 10, 1778, until August 22, when he quit. Then Tef, a paquetier on the Encyclopedie took over; when he completed the Millot six weeks later, he was fired. The STN had hired a new man to replace Tef on the Encyclo pedie and it did not want to start a new book for several weeks, so it let him go. Tef was joined by another compositor, Comte, who had been working parallel to him on the Description des arts et metiers and had come within two and a half sheets of the end of that job. The STN was liquidating two of six long term labeurs without renewing them, so Tef and Comte could not be absorbed back into the ranks of the compositors, and they took to the road together. Spineux might have made room for them by dismissing men with less seniority, but he adhered to another principle: consistency in assignments. He almost never shifted men back and forth between labeurs. Thus if job security did not exist, at least a man could count on keeping his labeur as long as the copy held out. Although regularity in assignments simplified the allotment of work, it did nothing to mitigate the irregularity in output. On the contrary, the differences in the compositors' productiv ity meant that the formes of one job would become ready for printing at different intervals from the formes of another. Moreover, the number of characters per forme and the size of the pressruns also differed, so it was impossible for certain compositors to feed certain pressmen with any consistency. Instead, after running off one forme, a press crew would take the next forme that was ready, no matter who had composed it. Every pressman took part in the printing of every book. In this 80. The article LABEUR in the Encyclopedie suggests the job-oriented nature of this work: '' Terme en usage parmi les compagnons-imprimeurs; ils appellent ainsi un manuscrit ou une copie imprimee formant une suite d 'ouvrage consider able et capable de les entretenir longtemps dans une meme imprimerie.'' 224 Bookmaking way the extreme variety of the tasks in presswork compen sated for the regularity of the assignments in composition, and total output at the presse balanced that of the casse. It was up to the foreman to maintain the equilibrium between the two halves of the shop. He had to be careful, above all, to prevent the compositors from falling behind the pressmen, to '' ne pas laisser manquer les presses,'' according to one of the most emphatic themes in the contemporary literature on print ing. If a foreman kept a press crew idle for lack of a forme to print, he was expected to compensate it with temps perdu. But he could also fire it. Hiring and firing were the most important ways of maintain ing balance in the shop. For example, on October 3, 1778 when Tef and Comte left the STN, they were joined by a third compositor, Mayer, causing the casse to shrink from thirteen to ten compositors. Spineux had eighteen pressmen to keep busy, so he fired six of them. Almost overnight the work force had declined by a third, but it had retained its equilibrium. Three weeks later the STN began to increase production again and hired new men off the road. Labor man agement was a balancing act, performed at a heavy cost, both economic and human. How frequently and drastically the balance shifted can be appreciated from Figure 2. Except for three weeks in July, the composition of the work force was never the same from one week to another. Men came and went pell-mell; their out put rose and fell in terrific fits and starts; and the productiv ity of the shop as a whole fluctuated as wildly as the behavior of the individuals. Even during the period from June to Sep tember, when the turnover of labor was least severe, total out put per week zigzagged by factors of 15 percent or more; in September and October it often doubled or halved. For the masters, this irregularity betokened an inefficient use of resources and some loss in profits. What it meant for 81. See the article PROTE by Brulle, the foreman of Le Breton 's shop, in the Enoyolopedie and the more detailed discussion of the foreman's functions in Contat, Anecdotes typographiques, ed. Barber, part I, chap. 4 and part II, chap. 82. It was in order to maintain balance that the STN asked its recruiters to send matching numbers of compositors and pressmen. The need of pressmen out stripped that of compositors in times of high pressruns, so during the printing of the Encyclopedie the STN deviated from the conventional formula of two com positors for two pressmen. On July 8, 1777, it instructed Vernange, "II nous faut 2 pressiers pour 1 compositeur.'' 225 The Business of Enlightenment 1778 June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Labor Force 6 13 20 27 4 11 18 25 I 8 15 22 29 5 12 19 26 3 10 17 24 31 Compositors Output (inbotz) IOOO Number of workers Pressmen 19 18 19 17 15 15 15 15 16 17 16 17 15 14 13 18 18 18 12 12 15 16 Devils I 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 COmpoaitors 13 13 13 12 13 13 13 13 13 13 12 11 9 12 12 12 13 13 10 10 10 10 Production (in botz) Composition 1100 931 972 867 1061 941 981 1021 970 864 882 851 586 897 577 826 1107 908 547 764 799 871 Presswork 2038 1883 2056 1662 1544 13741711 1387 1732 1551 1675 1736 1368 1330 801 2217 1898 2123 924 1479 1699 1972 Total* 3244 2820 3047 2533 2775 2316 2605 2416 2795 2752 2564 2617 1984 2252 1403 3076 3027 3066 1499 2275 2519 2885 *Including other items Figure 2. Manpower and Productivity, June-November 1778 the workers is difficult to say, but some speculation may be per missible. After studying the wage book for many weeks, one develops a sense of the rhythms at which work progressed and the units into which it was divided. Press crews, for example, often made 172 or 258 batz a week because those sums repre sented a full run of two and three formes, respectively, of the Encyclopedie. A crew might print two formes (one perfected sheet or 12,000 impressions) and then knock off for the week 226 Bookmaking -or it might decide to stretch its pay 30 batz by printing a orme of Millot 's Elemens d 'histoire (another 2,000 impres or perhaps a forme of the Description des arts et me sions) tier s ( 1,000 impressions), if they were available. That is why figures like 12,000, 14,000, and 13,000 recur often in calcula tions of press-crew output. Despite its irregularity, work in volved combinations of various tasks, each of which required a fixed amount of effort. Within limits, the men could com bine the tasks as they pleased, taking on more or fewer f ormes and paquets. The units of work shaped their output, and work in general remained task-oriented-that is, men labored to compose so many sheets or to print so many thousands, not to make a standard amount of money or to fill the hours of a standard work week. Psychologically, nonstandardized work must have differed considerably from the kind of work that was then being im posed on the laboring classes in England. The pace of work in the factories was set by clocks and bells, by the opening and closing of gates, by fines and beatings, and ultimately by the production process itself; for later, in assembly-line produc tion, the men were reduced to ''hands,'' and work streamed past them in an endless, undifferentiated flow. The composi tors and pressmen of the STN worked at their own pace. They exerted some control over their production. And when they laid claim to their banque at the end of their long, erratic weeks, they may even have looked back on the sheets they had composed and the thousands they had printed with a sense of satisfaction. Printing: Technology and the Human Element Lest this interpretation seem romanticized, it should be added that some mastery over the production process did not 83. As examples of the historical literature on this subject see E. P. Thomp son, ''Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,'' Past and Present, no. 38 (1967), 56-97; Sidney Pollard, "Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolu tion," Economic History .Review, 2d ser., XVI (1963), 254-271; and Neil Mc Kendrick, "Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline, " Historical Journal, IV (1961), 30-55. And for examples of studies in the sociology of work see Sigmund Nosow and William H. Form, eds., Man, Work, and Society. A .Reader in the Sociology of Occupations (New York, 1962) and Eugene L. Cass and Frederick G. Zimmer, eds., Man and Work in Society (New York, 1975). 227 The Business of Enlightenment mean that the workers developed any special affection for the real masters of it. The bourgeois retained most of the power and manipulated it brutally, by hiring and firing, while the workers responded with the few devices at their disposal. They quit; they cheated on their voyage; they collected small advances on the next week's work (sale) and then disap peared ; and sometimes they spied for rival publishers or the police. Although they may have felt some pride in their craft, they took shortcuts and compromised on quality when it made labor easier. The results can be seen in any copy of the En cyclopedie today-clear, crisp typography for the most part, but margins askew here, pages misnumbered there, uneven register, unsightly spacing, typographical errors, and smudges -all of them testimony to the activity of anonymous artisans two centuries ago. Sometimes one can break the anonymity. For example, page 635 in volume 15 of the quarto in the Bibliotheque de la Ville de Neuchatel contains a viYid thumbprint, which was almost certainly made by one of the STN's printers. The wage book shows that the printer of that page (sheet 4L) was a certain" Bonnemain "-evidently a nickname and a singularly inappropriate one in comparison with Maltete and Maron. A letter from a master printer in Dole called Tonnet reveals how Bonnemain reached the STN 's shop. He was a dark haired Norman, who had had a checkered career in the printing houses of Paris and then tramped to Lyons, where he fell in with the Kindelem family-father, mother, and son, who drifted from shop to shop along the typographical tours de France. After committing quelq1tes coquineries in Lyons, the Kindelems and Bonnemain took to the road together and eventually showed up in the little shop in Dole, where Tonnet printed saints' lives for the peddlars of the Franche Comte. 84. For example, the pressman Huche quit the STN after collecting his banque on June 6, 1778, for printing one forme of the Encyclopedie and two formes of the Bible. But he had not completed five marques (1,250 impressions) of the last forme of the Bible, which the STN was printing at 3,000. So that work had to be done in the following week by Pataux, and Spineux noted in the wage book for June 13 : '' Pataux-Sale fait pour Huche, cinq marques . . . 18 [batz] 3 [creuzer].'' 85. There is no doubt that this and similar fingerprints came from the printers rather than from subsequent readers of the Encycloped·ie. The fingerprints are in ink and they often disappear into the binding-that is, they were made while the pages were being produced as sheets. Also some subscribers complained about receiving copies with printers' fingerprints on them. 228 Bookmaking Tonnet put Kindelem pere and Bonnemain to work at one of three presses, while Kindelem fils set type. This arrange his ment did not last long, however, because Tonnet detected some kind of complot odieitx involving his shop girl, who had a weak ness for young Kindelem. He planned to fire the whole group as soon as they had finished printing a Vie de Sainte Anne. But they struck first. After collecting a week's pay and an ad vance on the next week's work, they dumped 1,000 half-printed sheets under Bonnemain 's press and fled town by different routes. Young Kindelem ran off with the girl, and his parents took 200 copies of a devotional tract, which they sold along the road-or so Tonnet claimed. He wrote to warn the STN about the group, which reportedly had reunited in its shop, and he came down hard on the theme of solidarity among employers: '' J 'entre dans le malheur d 'un bourgeois qui ne peut tout faire lui-meme . . . Nous devons entre nous maitres imprim eurs nous prevenir de quelques coquins, qui sont parmi nos ouvriers. '' The STN may not have taken Tonnet 's version of the inci dent at face value because he was something of a shady char acter himself. He cheated on the bills for the books he bought, and the books were often obscene and seditious works, which he peddled under the cover of his trade in popular religious literature. But his warning did not matter very much in any case because it arrived in Neuchatel after the Kindelems had left. The wage book indicates that the father worked for seven weeks during the summer of 1777 as ''Rodolphe,'' an alias he had used earlier in Lyons. The son worked for only three weeks, and he must have left under a cloud because the last entry next to his name, dated September 6, 1777, shows that Spineux had docked him a week's wages. Having got into some kind of trouble, he probably had gone off in search of work in the other Swiss shops and then arranged for his par ents to join him. Perhaps Tonnet's shop girl did, too, at least for a few stops along the well-worn route from Neuchatel to Yverdon, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons. But Bonnemain did not. He remained at his press from August 1777 until March 1779, one of the longest stints put in by any of the men who 86. Tonnet to STN, Nov. 12, 1777. Judging from Tonnet's dossier in the STN papers, his printing and bookselling business did not amount to much. But in the Gazette de Berne of Dec. 23, 1780, he said that it included three presses and a stock of 40,000 volumes and that he would sell the whole thing for 10,000 livres. 229 The Business of Enlightenment printed the Encyclopedie. Evidently he liked Neuchatel well enough to break with his fell ow travelers, and the STN liked him well enough to keep him, although it had assured Tonnet that it would purge its shop of such mauvaise compagnie. To see into the life behind a fingerprint in the Encyclo pedie is to get some sense of how men moved through the ob scure channels of working-class history, but Bonnemain's thumbmark also can be studied for its typographical signifi cance. It illustrates a point that is difficult to appreciate in an age of automation: the printers of the Old Regime left their mark on their books-literally, in Bonnemain's case, and fig uratively in all the others. For each workman stamped each page with something of his individuality, and the quality of his craftsmanship affected the success of the product. Bonnemain 's fingerprint really resulted from a typographi cal trick. By smearing the forme excessively with ink, he and his companion did not have to pull so hard at the bar of the press to get an impression. But the extra ink came off on their fingers and smudged the sheets during handling. This maneu ver escaped the attention of Spineux but not Duplain, who sent some blistering criticism to the STN. 11 y a plusieurs jours que nous avons avis de Geneve que votre volume mal fait. Nous attribuions cela a la jalousie des ouvriers, qui de est chez vous ont passe a Geneve. Mais nous avons ete bien etonnes a la reception de VOS feuilles de voir que malgre qu 'elles ont ete choisies, elles ont ete tirees par des ouvriers qui ne sont bons qu'a tirer de l'eau du puits et non le barreau. Nous voyons des bras enerves OU parasseux, qui distribuent sur leurs formes beaucoup d 'encre pour avoir moins de peine a tirer. En un mot, ce que nous pouvons vous dire, Messieurs, c 'est que si tout est comme cela notre entreprise en souffrira beaucoup. Votre prote, qui a du gout pour la composition, n 'a done jamais les yeux sur les presses. Nous ne vous dissimulerons pas que cela nous donne de grands regrets et qu 'absolument nous ne donnerons aucrm autre volume si la fin n 'est pas mieux. Having learned to expect such outbursts from Duplain, the STN turned this attack aside by replying in kind. Not only had it done a creditable job on volume 6, it answered, but also the other printing houses had botched volumes 1 through 4. 87. STN to Tonnet, Nov. 16, 1777. Spineux's entry in the wage book for Sept. 6, 177 7, reads : "Retenir a M. Kindelem toute sa banque. " 88. Duplain to STN, Oct. 31, 1777. 230 Type ("IMPRIMERIE," plate I), including various spaces, which are in serted in the composing stick (fig. 5) so that the lines are justified-that is, end evenly, as in fig. 6. The letters appear backwards, as though reflected in a mirror, so that the printed text will read correctly-and the text could hardly be more correct if read ideologically: "GLOIRE a DIEU. Honneur au ROI. Salut aux ARMES." 231 The composing room of a printing shop ( "IMPRIMERIE," plate I). The first compositor (fig. 1) transfers type from the case to the composing stick, while keeping his eye on the copy, clipped onto a visorium. The second compositor (fig. 2) moves a newly composed line to a galley, where it will form part of a page. The third compositor (fig. 3) has imposed two folio pages inside an iron chase packed with furniture and is planing them with a mallet and wooden block so that the completed forme will present an even surface to the platen of the press. Newly printed sheets-in the folio, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo formats-are drying on cords above the men's heads. The press room ("IMPRIMERIE," plate XIV). The first pressman (fig. 1) lays a sheet on the tym pan of the press below the frisket, while his companion (fig. 2) spreads ink over the type of the forme in the coffin. Next the first pressman will fold the frisket over the tympan and the tympan over the forme. Then, turning a rounce with his left hand, he will winch the forme under the platen and print the sheet by pulling on the bar of the press, as in fig. 3. While he does so, the companion will dis tribute ink over the surface of his ink balls and inspect the previously printed sheet, as in fig. 4. r .. , .. ,., ,, .I ,..!'' .r .r .r .r .. The common press ( "IMPRIMERIE," plate XV). This side view shows how the pressman folded the frisket (X V S T) over the tympan (S T R Q) and the tympan over the forme in the coffin (R Q P 0) on the horizontal carriage of the press. He ran the coffin under the platen ( z) in the vertical part of the press by means of a windlass or rounce, shown in detail in fig. 1. Then by pulling· on the bar, he turned a spindle in the head of the press (x, detail in fig. 2), which worked like a screw in a nut, forc ing the platen down onto the forme. He printed only half the forme at a time, so it required two hefty coups at the bar, using the footstep (m) for purchase, to print one side of each sheet. Bookmaking Ainsi que nous l 'avions prevu, Monsieur, l 'examen attentif et detaille que nous venous de faire des quatre premiers volumes de l'Encyclopedie imprimes sous votre direction nous a mis a meme d'y decouvrir tant de defautes de tant de sortes que nous en sommes pro fondement affiiges et admirons toujours plus le style de votre dernier, en le comparant avec de tels chefs-d'oeuvre. Pages de beaucoup trop noires, d 'autres et grand nombre blanches au point de n 'etre presque pas lisibles, moines multiplies, pates, manque de registre, a la premiere page lettre grise dont on ne se sert plus, titres et reglets differents, au tome 3 pagination fausse, double signature, les lettrines prises de plusieurs corps, l 'algebre tres mal traite, toutes les lignes ou il y a du grec imprimees de travers etc. etc. Meanwhile the STN confided to Panckoucke and to d 'Arnal that its presswork did need improving, though it would not ad mit any imperfection to Duplain. With him, it explained, the best defense was a good offense. The typographical debate continued to rage through the mail for several weeks. Duplain wrote that the STN 's volume was so "abominable" that it would ruin his sales campaign, and he threatened to rejeet it. 89. STN to Duplain, Feb. 7, 1778. The STN then continued its criticism as follows: ''Mais ce qui nous a singulierement frappe, c 'est que les caracteres ne sont point des memes que ceux dont nous nous sommes servis pour I 'impression du 6eme volume, desquels nous etions convenus. Fideles a nos engagements sur ee point, nous avons priifere de differer notre travail de plusieurs mois plutOt que d 'y manquer en employant une fonte Philosophie toute neuve et tres ample dont nous etions pourvus. Cet article capital merite la plus grande attention de votre part, Monsieur; et s 'il en resulte quelque dommage pour l 'entreprise, bien plus que de nos pretendues feuilles trop noires, vous vous rapellerez, s 'ii vous plait, que nous vous en faisons aujourd 'hui la remarque. ''Quant aux defets, en voici une ample note, prociidant principalement des feuilles deehirees pour avoir ete l 'emballement mal fait, d 'autres dont le pa pier est devenu jaune, qui n 'ont pas ete remplacees convenablement. Tout cela presente matiere a bien des reflections, mais en attendant nous ne recevons toujours point la copie promise et necessaire, et ne pouvons que vous representer encore qu 'il est tres fort de vos interets de ne pas laisser chomer nos 11 presses, qui ne vous de plaise travaillent pour le moins aus3i bien que beaueoup d 'autres, et nous sommes d 'ailleurs pourvus de fort beaux pa piers . . . P.S. Les vignettes sont affreuses et mal tirees.' ' 90. STN to Panckoucke, Feb. 8, 1778, and STN to d'Arnal, Feb. 8, 1778. 91. Duplain to STN, Jan. 21, 1778: "Il faut en verite, Messieurs, que vous soyez aveugles pour qu 'un ouvrage fait sous vos yeux sorte de vos mains avec autant d 'imperfections. Votre tome 6 est abominable, et il l'est d 'une maniere a ruiner la societe entiere si nous le donnons. Mais comme nous ne voulons pas qu 'elle [that is, the quarto association] souffre de votre negligence et du peu de connaissance qu 'ont les pe1·somies a qui vous eonfiez la direction de votrn imprime rie, nous vous prevenons qu 'ii est ici pour votre compte et qu 'a aucun prix nous ne le p1·endrons. Quand votre carnctere aurnit se1Ti dix ans, il ne sortirait pas aussi plein et aussi charbonne. Les ouvriers que vous avez employes n 'ont cherche qu 'a faire des feuilles, et pour aller plus vite et s 'epargner la peine de tirer, ils 235 The Business of Enlightenment The STN retorted that it had done a better job than his other printers and that he was inventing a pretext to avoid paying his bill. Ultimately he did pay, and the quarrel blew over. But it was a significant episode because it showed how much im portance publishers attributed to the physical character of their books. Their concern was economic, not esthetic. rrhey assumed that a badly made book would not sell-and they were right. Not only did customers complain but also potential subscrib ers refused to buy the quarto, merely because of the way it was printed. The work habits of Bonnemain and his com panions had a direct effect on the literary market place, as the STN learned from letters like the following, from a sub scriber in Saint-Dizier: "Je connais plusieurs personnes qui se proposaient de souscrire pour l 'Encyclopedie et qui ont ete arretees a la VUe des negligences multipliees de VOS pres siers, dont les doigts sont imprimes sur presque toutes les f euilles. '' Thus in the era of the handmade book there existed a typo graphical consciousness that disappeared sometime after the advent of automatic typesetting and printing. To anyone still interested in typography, the imperfections that outraged producers and consumers in the eighteenth century constitute some of the charm of old books today. Every page, every line has its individuality. Each character bears the imprint of a gesture made by someone like Bonnemain. It would be mis leading, however, to represent bookmaking under the Old Regime as idiosyncrasy run wild because the printers operated within a system of technological constraints, and the technol- chargent leur forme d 'encre de maniere que sans effort la lettre sort-mais com mentf-comme un pate, sans regularite, sans traits ... Nous vous prions de surseoir absolument tout ce que vous faites, de nous renvoyer la copie, et nous continuerons. II ne fal!ait pas vous charger d 'une operation que vous n 'etiez pas en etat de faire et nous exposer a une ruine inevitable.'' 92. For further details on the dispute and its resolution see Duplain to STN, Feb. 9, 1778; d'Arnal to STN, Feb. 4, 1778; and STN to d'Arnal, Feb. 8, 1778. '' Puisque l 'afl'aire est en regle, nous oublierons volontiers ce que sa vivacite a pu Jui faire ecrire de trop peu menage dans l 'esperance qu 'il n 'oubliera plus a l 'avenir Jes egards que Jes honnetes gens se doivent entr 'eux. Nous lui avons ecrit consecutivement deux lettres qui lui feront comprendre que nous savons aussi bien que Jui juger le travail des imprimeries. '' 93. Champmorin to STN, Nov. 26, 1780. 94. Thus a typical remark on the commercial importance of good typography iu a letter to the STN of July 22, 1780, from Gaspard Storti, a bookseller in Venice: '' C 'est le pressier qui peut donner beaucoup d 'aide au bon succes.'' 236 Bookmaking ogy of bookmaking remained fixed in essentials between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. Like their forerunners of the Renaissance, the compositors of the STN made lines by transferring type from cases to composing sticks; they made pages by moving lines from the composing sticks to galleys; and they made formes by im posing the pages in a chase. Their work on the Encyclopedie probably differed from that of the compositors in sixteenth century Antwerp-and perhaps even fifteenth-century Mainz -in only one way: it was organized according to the paquet system. But paquet production involved the division of labor rather than technology. It increased the speed with which a text could be set, because the paquetiers worked simultane ously, composing separate segments of cast-off copy. As the directors of the STN wanted to print as many vol umes of the Encyclopedie as possible, speed was very im portant to them. They even pulled compositors off other jobs in order to form several teams of paquetiers in the spring of 1779, when the printing houses were racing to win Duplain 's last commissions. In the week ending April 24, for example, the STN had three teams and one lone compositor, Albert, working on volume 19 of the third edition, and they composed fourteen and a half sheets, an extraordinary output for the era of hand production (see Figure 3). Different versions of this system, called companionships, prevailed in the larger printing house;,; of the nineteenth century. Compositorial prac tices could not go further in the direction of speed and effi ciency until the introduction of mechanization, in the form of cold-metal machines during the 1820R, Linotype in the 1880s, and electronic composition today. Pre.:;swork, too, did not advance by any great leaps forward in technology before the adoption of the cylinder press from 1814 and steam power in the 1830s. The Encyclopedie was printed ou the venerable common press, in essentially the same way that books had been printed for the previous two or three hundred years. The two-man press crews worked from heaps of wet paper, which they had soaked and stacked on the pre ceding day. After a good deal of preparatory labor-working up ink, stuffing the ink balls, and make-ready at the press the crews began ''pulling'' and ''beating.'' The beater or ''sec- 95. For a good summary of the bibliographical literature on which the follow ing account is based see Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography. 237 The Business of Enlightenment ond'' would distribute ink over the surface of the ink balls by rubbing them together. Then he would ink or "beat" the forme, which had been locked in a movable box or ''coffin'' on the horizontal carriage of the open press. Meanwhile, the puller or "premier" would position a sheet on a parchment covered frame, the '' tympan, '' suspended over the forme by a hinge. He would close the press by lowering another frame called the ''frisk et'' over the sheet and by folding frisket, sheet, and tympan together onto the forme. Then he would winch half the forme under the platen, a fiat block suspended from a spindle in the vertical part of the press. By pulling the bar of the press, he would turn the spindle like a bolt in a nut, forcing the platen down on the back of the tympan and making an impression on the paper between the tympan and the type. After winching the other half of the forme under the platen, he would print it; winch the forme out again; unfold the tympan and frisket and remove the freshly printed sheet onto a new pile. After so many tokens or marques ( 250 sheets), the men would switch roles. And after one side of a sheet had been printed, the other would be run off from the second forme, usually by another crew. Printing was hard work. To winch the forme forward and backward with one hand while pulling at the bar with the other required strength and endurance-hence the nickname for pressmen, ours, as opposed to the nimble-fingered compositors, singes. The presswork on the quarto Encyclopedie must have been especially grueling because the run was so long-6,000, plus 150 chaperon to cover spoilage, in the case of the com bined first and second editions. Faced with so much hoisting and heaving, the pressmen sometimes ran off only one or two formes a week. But they never followed any consistent pattern because they worked at an irregular pace and took formes as the compositors finished them, turning out the Encyclopedie 96. According to the printers' lore, the term ''ours'' was c~ined by one of the original Encyclopedists, a certain Richelet, during the printing of Diderot's first edition. While Richelet was examining some newly printed sheets on a heap near a press, one of the pressmen let go of the bar, which sprang back toward its resting position and knocked Richelet off his feet. He retorted with the epithet ''ours,'' and the pressmen then devised "singe" as a corresponding term for compositor. See Momoro, Tmite elementaire de l 'imprimerie, pp. 308-309 !Wd Honore de Balzac, Illusions perdues (Paris, Editions Garnier, 1961), p. 4. Richelet's name does not appear in any list of Diderot's contributors, but the lists are far from complete. 238 Bookrnaking along with the Bible and several other jobs. Therefore the flow of work between the two halves of the shop could become extremely complex, especially when several teams of paque tier s were composing the Encyclopedie, as in the week of April 24, 1779 (Figure 3). By organizing work in this way-paquet production at the casse and fluid assignments at the presse the STN stretched the production of the Encyclopedie to the outermost limits of a technology that had remained unchanged in essentials for perhaps three centuries. In contrast to Figure 3, which illustrates the work-flow 011 the Encyclopedie for one week, Figure 4 shows how the pro duction of an entire volume evolved over five months. This was the STN 's first volume, the one whose pressrun it in creased according to Duplain 's directions for a second '' edi tion.'' So the figure also shows how one edition was blended into another in mid-production. The STN switched from 4,000 to 6,000 copies in the first week of September, as soon as it received Duplain 's order of August 27. At that point, Mal tete 's team of pa,quetiers had reached the end of the first al phabet, a11d the pressmen, working a few sheets behind them, had reached the end of sheet Y. The compositors continued as usual, i,;etti11g sheets Z through 2D. But the pressmen printed sheets T a11d V once again (there was no U or W in the printer's twenty-three letter alphabet), this time at 2,000, and then continued with sheet X at the increased run of 6,000. They could not do R and S from the formes they had printed the previous week because the type from those formes had been distributed before the arrival of Duplain 's letter. Thus one can see the precise point at which one edition shaded off into another. From that point onward, the compoi,;ition and presswork co11tinued at its usual erratic pace, the shop as a whole produc ing between 4 an<l 8 sheets a week, u11til December 13, when the last sheet, 51, was pulled. But during the last six weeks the compositors had to reset sheets A through S, which had bee11 97. The output of three crews in the week of April 24-29, 1778, provides a final example of variations in work at the presse. Georget and his second printed only one forme of the Encyclopedie (6,000 impressions) that week, while Albert and his. second pulled three formes of it (18,000 impressions) in addition to 525 impressions of the Journal helvetique. Gaspard and his second completed a more varied set of jobs: one forme of the Encyclopedie ( 6,000 impressions), one of Cook's Voyage (1,500 impressions), one of Millot's Elemens d'histoire (2,000 impressions), and a sheet of the local Feuille d'avis (250 impressions). 239 4S 4Y 4Y 5A 5A 5E 5E 5F 5F 5L 5L 4V 4V 4X 4X 5C 5C 50 50 5H 5H 4Z 4Z 5B 5B 5G 5G 4T 4T 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 121212 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 I I I I I I I I I i I i I i I I I I ~~j~j~tl~JjjJjjm~i~jj~~~!j~:jjjjjjjjjjjjjjl~:I!:jjj:j:j:j!j:j:j:j:j! ~=~=~=~=~*i~=~*~i=~=~:;:~:~:;:;t~:;:;:i:;:;:~:~:;:;:;:;:~:~:;:~:;:~~:;:;:~~~~=~~=~: :;§:;:;:~:;:;$;;;:;:;:~~;=~~:i:~:~:~r:~:;:~:~~ :;:~:~:~:;:;:j BERTHO & PAOUETIERS SCHRATZ & PAOUETIERS CHAMPY & PAOUETIERS ALBERT :~~:~:I:~~~:;:~~:~:;:~:~:;:i:~:;:i~:~:~:3i:;:;:;:~~~:~:~:;~:~:~;:~~~:~:~:~:~:~:;§:~:;:;~:;:;: tj;j;j~~@l: ~;:~:~:~~:~:~ j!j!j~r:::I~ l___L.U_ '* :;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:~:~:;:;:;:;:;:~:! l :;~~=~:;:~~~:~:~:~~i:i:;:~~;:r:~;:~:~i:l~~i:;:;: ~1:;:1:~1:r:r:r:r:;:r:;~r:;:r.~:~:r:1:1:;:;:i:: :~:~:~:~;:~1=f:~=f:~:~: MEYER ol~j~GE YON IC LE ALBERT FORAS GASPARD DESMARNES ~~~=~i~:i~i:~:;:~~:i:~i:~:;:~~~~: j1j:j:j:j:j:r:j;j;j:1:j;j;j,j;j@j1 ijtM,. ljj!j!j!jlmr!:lr=j:j:! 1j:j=j=r=j=ji r:jj!r!j!j1:=~t r=j=i LJE LI I 5B 4T 1 1 1 50 4T 1 1 4S4Y1 1 5B5G 5A 5E 1 5C 5H 1 5F 1 4V 1 4X 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 Figure 3. Work-Flow in the Shop, April 19-24, 1779 This figure shows the flow of work between the compositors, at the top, and the pressmen, at the bottom, during the week of April 19 to April 24, 1779, when the STN was nearing the end of volume 19. The notations correspond to the signatures on the sheets: thus 48 over 2 refers to the second forme of sheet Ssss, and 4Y over 1 refers to the first forme of sheet Y yyy (one quarto forme contained four pages or paquets, and it took two formes to print one sheet). As the press crews usually kept a little behind the compositors, some of the sheets were not run off until the week of May 1. Two of them, the second formes of sheets 5L and 4Z, which are marked by asterisks, were not printed until the week of May 8. It is impossible to know which press crews ran them off because at that time the subforeman had temporarily taken charge of the shop and he did not record the names of the pressmen next to the sheets they pulled. At the same time, the press crews also worked on three other books that the STN was producing concurrently with the Encyclopedie, which were being composed by six other compositors. Thus the work pattern was even more complicated than it appears here. But the figure does demonstrate how complex the flow of work on one book could become. It also indicates that the compositors worked from cast-off copy, moving from one eight-page unit to another without following the sequence of the text. And it shows that they fed their formes to whatever press crew was available, instead of working regularly with one crew or another. To operate on such a scale required careful management as well as a huge font of type. Given the complexity and the speed of the job, it does not seem surprising- that the final produet aroused so much criticism among the subscribers. 1777 July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. 12 19 26 2 9 16 23 30 6 13 20 27 4 11 18 25 1 8 15 22 29 6 13 z FIRST A-B I sfo I E-H I I-L IL -o lo -s I T-Y I z-2ol2E-21j2K-2Rj2S-2vj2z-3Ej3F-3Lj3M-3Ql3R-3Vl3X-4F 14F 4M 14Mf4Ti4V-4Yj4Z-5Bj5c-51 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 ~ COMPOSITION en a.. ::E SECOND u COMPOSITION AT 4,000 A I B-C I D-F I G-1 J l{M IN-QI R-V a:: T-V 3: AT 2, 000 K L-N H I A-G (/) (/) IJJ a:: a.. AT 6, 000 Figure 4. The Production of Volume 6, July-December 1777 The horizontal bars represent the number of sheets composed and printed each week, according to the entries in the foreman's wage book. The notations correspond to the signatures of the sheets, as explained in the caption to Figure 3. The Business of Enlightenment printed at only 4,000. Spineux detached a few paquetiers from the main group, which was then working under Bertho, to do the supplementary composition. For some reason, they attacked the copy in the middle, at sheet K, and then rejoined Bertho 's team in the last week, ending at the beginning, at sheets A through E. The pressmen followed wherever the com positors led, usually at a distance of a sheet or two. So the Encyclopedie did not emerge from the shop in a straightfor ward manner, and the pattern of its production does not cor respond to the structure of volumes that can be consulted in libraries today, where signatures run from A to Z and a set seems to belong to an ''edition.'' In this laborious fashion, line by line and sheet by sheet, the STN turned out five volumes of the Encyclopedie in two years. At the same time twenty other shops working in the same manner and occasionally with the same men produced the other sixty-seven volumes of the three quarto "editions." The human reality of this vast process cannot be appreciated from work-flow diagrams or even from the plates of the Encyclo pedie itself, where the printers look like wind-up dolls: ex pressionless and identical, they turn cranks and pull bars as if they inhabited an immaculate, mechanical utopia. Real print ing shops were dirty, loud, and unruly-and so were real printers. The presses creaked and groaned. The ink balls, filled with wool soaked in urine, gave off a fierce stench. And the men waded about in filthy paper, swilling wine, banging their 98. Roland Barthes interprets the plates in the opposite manner-as intensely human scenes, a '' sorte de legende doree de l 'artisanat,'' in which men dominate machines-but he provides no evidence for his argument. Roland Barthes, Robert Mauzi, and Jean-Pierre Seguin, L'Univers de l'Encyclopedie (Paris, 1964), p. 11. Of course, Diderot himself came from a family of skilled artisans, and the main article on printing in the Encyclopedie, IMPRIMERIE, was written by Brulle, the foreman of Le Breton's shop. But the text of the article, and the other articles on crafts, fails to say much about the craftsmen as human beings and does not mention anything about their ceremonies, humor, and lore. There is much to be said for the common opinion that the Encyclopedie rehabilitated the dignity of crafts, but there is no reason to link that tendency with an incipient populism or revolutionary egalitarianism, as in C. C. Gillispie, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclo pedia of Trades and Industry: Manufacturing and the Technical Arts in Plates Selected from l'Encyclopedie (New York, 1959), 2 vols. and Gillispie, "The Encyclopedie and the Jaco bin Philosophy of Science'' in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison, 1959), pp. 255-289. On the contrary, in stripping artisanal work down to its technological base-or re casting it as it ought to exist according to a more rational technology-the Encyclopedie eliminated a fundamental aspect of it: its culture. 242 Bookmaking composing sticks against the type cases for the sheer joy of making noise, bellowing and brawling as opportunities arose, and tormenting the apprentices with practical jokes. (If a printer's devil took a turn at the press, one could coat the bar with glue or ink, or one could produce bald spots on his sheets by surreptitiously touching the inked surface of his forme with one's fingertips; and a new boy at the casse could always be asked to clean the ink out of the eye of a capital P, which was really an eyeless paragraph sign or pied de mouche.) It is difficult to estimate the extent of the disorder because the masters did not discuss such things in their correspon dence. But sources like printers' manuals contain so many im peratives about what workers should not do-above all, eat ing, drinking, and fighting in the shop-that one can construct a negative picture of their actual behavior. That picture con forms to a few first-hand accounts, particularly those in the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Restif de la Bre tonne and Balzac's Illus,ions perdues. And the literary descrip tions correspond to the impressions given by printers' slang, which can be compiled from eighteenth-century glossaries and which stressed themes such as noisiness ( donner la huee), horseplay (faire une copie), pub-crawling (faire la deroute), drunkenness (prendre la bar be), brawls (prendre la chevre), indebtedness (fa-ire des loups), absenteeism (promener sa chape), and unemployment ( emporter son Saint Jean) . However unruly they may or may not have been, the men who made the Encyclopedie certainly did not resemble the automatons of its plates. They could have figured in the Come die hurnaine. Spineux, for example, worried that his brother in-law was cheating him out of an inheritance in Liege and that his wife was betraying him in Paris, while he oversaw the workers in Xeuchatel. Xo wonder that he failed to notice the tricks played by the pressmen, for his family problems nearly drove him mad. "Spineux m'a ecrit ce matin un billet qui po rte sa confession generale et an nonce que la tete lui tourne,'' Bertrand wrote to Ostervald in Paris. '' J e crains 99. A great deal of information about the atmosphere of eighteenth-century printing shops can be gathered from the contemporary sources cited throughout this chapter, especially Momoro 's Traite etementaire de l 'imprimerie and the ''Anecdotes typographiques,'' which contain full discussions of printers' slang. See also the glossary in the Encyclopeaie methodique, Arts et metiers mecanique.1 (Paris, 1784), III, 475-636, and the first chapter in Illusions perdues. 243 The Business of Enlightenment que nous ne perdions ce pauvre gar<;on. Spineux finally made it to the end of the Encyclopedie, but he had to be helped by a subforeman called Colas, who had problems of his own. Hav ing left his wife behind in Geneva, Colas migrated around the French and Swiss printing houses with a son, who worked as a pressman and a compositor, and an impressive wardrobe, which included twenty-three shirts, eleven pairs of silk stock ings, three complete suits, four pairs of breeches, and sixteen handkerchiefs. He must have been the best-dressed man in the shop, but he never seemed to have any money. Although he re ceived 18 livres a week from the STN, he remained in Neu chatel only three months; and he had to borrow from his land lady, leaving a gold watch behind as security, in order to pay his way to his next job, in the printing shop of Cellot, rue Dauphine, Paris. He had grown weary of living out of board ing houses, he complained : '' J e voudrais trouver un endroit stable, pour ne plus etre a meme d 'aller et venir." And he also suffered from" chagrins cuisants "-the result, apparently, of bad relations with the other workers. ''Mon amour pour le travail, le grand emploi du temps, mon attention a ce qu 'aucun ouvrier ne perde son temps et ne fasse mal, n 'ont pas toujours trouve des approbateurs parmi mes confreres de la pro terie,' noi he had explained in applying for the job with the STN. Superiority of this sort did not go down well with the work ers, who could respond with the varieties of indiscipline cele brated in their slang: joberie, copies, romestuques, bais, and grattes. Work might be disrupted, too, by a bout in the tavern, a funeral procession, a wandering beggar, a cockfight, a hang ing, or some dramatic event. In July 1781, one of the STN's former pressmen, Jean Thomas, who had worked on the En- 100. Bertrand to Ostervald, Feb. 23, 1777. On the suspieious eonduet of Mme. Spineux, who had remained in Paris after Spineux joined the STN, see Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 28, 1777. However, three years earlier Mme. Spineux had seemed to be full of wifely devotion, when she wrote to the STN about her husband's failure to arrive on schedule for a visit with her in Paris: "vous ob bligeres une mere de famille aflliger et sil vous saves ou est mon mari je vous prist de vouloire bien me le marque.'' Undated letter, received by the STN in Oct. 177 4. Spineux 's dossier reveals a great deal about his family affairs and his character, which seems to have been exacting, upright, and generous. 101. Colas to STN, Aug. 15, 1777; Feb. 27, 1779; and Aug. 25, 1779. Colas may well have been the foreman "Colas" described in Contat, Anecdotes typo graphiques, ed. Barber, part I, chap. 9: '' C 'est un original d 'ouvrier qui tranche du grand personnage. '' 244 Bookmaking cyclopedie three years earlier, arrived on the run from Geneva with a new bride and the bride's guardian in hot pursuit. The guardian had tried to prevent the marriage on the grounds that Thomas was a Catholic and the girl a Calvinist; and after their elopement, he asked the STN to flush the girl out of her hiding place, while he chased after Thomas with an arrest warrant. The STN's papers do not reveal what happened next, but the incident must have kept tongues wagging in the shop for weeks. Although such episodes stand ·out in the STN 's correspon dence, the routine letters can be more revealing, for they some times mention the workers' ties to friends and family, the ordi nary stuff of which ordinary lives were made. In July 1779, for example, the STN received an appeal for news about one of its young compositors, Orres (OresteT) Champy. Five months ear lier, he had informed both his uncle, who lived across the border in Arbois, and h1s father, who lived somewhere farther away in France, that he was spitting up blood. The uncle had urged him to "se bien menager" until Easter, when he could come to Arbois for some rest and home cooking. But Orres had not replied; so the uncle wrote to the STN, having re ceived a worried letter himself from the boy's father, "ou il me dit etre fort inquiet et tres en peine de ce jeune homme. Si vous vouliez bien, Messieurs, m 'honorer d 'un mot de reponse et me marquer ce que vous pensez de cet enfant, s 'il est malade ou non, ce qu 'il fait ou ce qu 'il est devenu, vous obligerez in finiment le pere et l 'oncle.' noa These people had families. They came from somewhere with passions, problems, hopes, and fears. Although most of them have vanished irretrievably into the past, they did not compose some faceless proletariat while they lived. They brought their own cultural world to their work-a world that hardly touched the Enlightenment, except through the com posing stick and the bar of the press-and they worked in their )Wn way, imprinting the physical substance of the Encyclo oedie with some of their individuality, just as Diderot had oreathed his spirit into its text. 102. Rocca of Geneva to STN, July 17, 1781, and an undated letter from Rocca received by the STN on July 26, 1781. 103. Champy of Arbois to STN, July 10, 1779. Although the STN 's reply to this letter is missing, young Champy probably had not been seriously ill because the wage book shows that he continued to work without interruption. 245 VI TTTTTTTTTTTT DIFFUSION The printed sheets had a long way to go before they reached the shelves of the subscribers. Not only did they have to be assembled, folded, stitched, trimmed, and bound before they took on the appearance of a book, but they had to do a great deal of traveling-from the print shops to Duplain 's store houses in Lyons, from Lyons to the shops of retail booksellers everywhere in Europe, and from the bookshops to the libraries of individual subscribers, with stops along the way in entre pots, custom offices, guildhalls, and tariff bureaus. The com mercial circuit was not completed until the individual sub scribers paid the booksellers, the booksellers paid Duplain, and Duplain divided the profits with his partners at a final settling of accounts. All these printed sheets rumbling about the highways of Europe, accompanied by bills of lading, in voices, customs declarations, and tariff forms and crossing paths with bills of exchange, letters of protest, and court summonses-these waves of paper surging across Europe threatened at times to overwhelm the entrepreneurs, who tried to contain them in the channels of commerce and ulti mately produced the spread of Enlightenment. Managerial Problems and Polemics Most of the paper passed through Duplain 's headquarters in Lyons, which soon became flooded. In December 1778 after berating the STN for several months about the slowness of its shipments, Duplain suddenly told it to stop them. He had run 246 Diffusion out of storage space: ''Nous ne pouvons pas absolument en loger ni recevoir aucune feuille, a moins de nous chasser de chez nous et en meubler nos appartements. " At the same time, he worried that the financial basis of the enterprise might give way, for he had to advance enormous sums in cash to the paper millers and printers while the subscribers and booksellers took their time in paying him. Once caught in this squeeze, he found it impossible to pay several of his bills to the STN: ''Nous avons bien eu l 'honneur de vous observer que l 'argent est ici d 'une rarete affreuse, que nos libraires demandent du temps, et qu 'enfin nous ne pouvons pas en faire sortir des pierres. Le train que nous menons l 'ouvrage exige une mise dehors a laquelle nous ne comptions point.' ' Constant bungling in Du plain 's warehouse and shipping operations compounded this problem because customers who received faulty shipments re fused to pay their bills. Their refusals touched off exchanges of nasty letters-Duplain was not the gentlest of correspon dents-and even lawsuits, which added further to Duplain's burden. The load had become more than he could bear by March 1778, when one of his clerks complained to the STN about the '' embarras dont nous sommes surcharges . . . la multiplicite des envois qui nous excedent. Il y a bientot six mois que Mon sieur Duplain n 'a pu mettre le pied a la rue.' ' A week later Duplain informed the STN that he had turned over all the quarto's bookkeeping to a firm of merchants, Veuve d 'Antoine Merlino et fils, which had also bought into his share of the enterprise: ''Nous nous debarrassons du detail de banque, et malgre cela nous sommes excedes, malgre 15 personnes que nous avons au moins. ''4 Actually, Duplain 's staff never amounted to much and could not cope with the work. ·when Favarger reached Marseille during his sales trip of 1778, he reported to the STN, "Quelques libraires que j 'ai vus m 'ont dit avoir regu a bien des reprises des volumes pour des autres et avec cela quantite de feuilles tres mal propres avec beau coup de defectuosite. Il me parait qu'il [Duplain] a trop peu de monde, car il n 'a de commis que les deux freres Le Roy, un teneur de livres, et Le Roy l'aine est presque toujours envoy- 1. Duplain to STN, Dee. 20, 1778. 2. Duplain to STN, June 9, 1778. 3. Duplain et Compagnie to STN, March 17, 1778. 4. Duplain to STN, March 24, 1778. 247 The Business of Enlightenment age. En mag as in il a deux assembleurs, trois femmes pour col lationner et son domestique pour mettre de cote etc.' ' "\Vhen he reached Bordeaux six weeks later, Favarger discovered that the local booksellers had banded together and were with holding their payments as a group until Duplain corrected the defects and disorder of his shipments. Duplain responded to these protests with threats of lawsuits; and instead of enlarg ing and reorganizing his staff, he drove it harder. After the STN objected to the way his warehouse workers assembled and inspected shipments, he replied, '' ~ ous vous dirons qu 'il faut faire collationner avant d'envoyer, que notre monde acheve les tomes 21, 22, 23 [that is, of the first two editions], vient de finir 3 et 4 [of the third edition], qui sont partis, va se mettre sur 24, 25, 26 et apres sur 5, 6, 7, 8. Vous rendez bien peu de justice a notre travail immense, et vous calculez bien peu son etendue. Ignorez-vous qu'il faut collationner pres de 1800 rames sur chaque volume?' n All the letters about Du plain give the impression of an obsessed man who saw in the Encyclopedie the chance of a lifetime and who drove himself to the breaking point in order to exploit it for everything it was worth. The lack of documentation makes it difficult to say much more about Duplain's role as a manager, except insofar as it concerned public relations. This aspect of his functions in volved not only marketing but coping with a basic problem that threatened to spoil the market: how to persuade the sub scribers to pay for thirty-six volumes of text after promising to supply them with twenty-nine. As already explained, Du plain tried to maneuver around this difficulty by surreptitious 5. Favarger to STN, Aug. 15, 1778. 6. Favarger to STN, Oct. 1, 1778: "Les libraires de cette ville qui ont pris de cette 3eme edition se recrient tres fortement de ce que M. Duplain veut leur expedier indifferemment des volumes pris du milieu du crops de l'ouvrage. Ils ne les payeront pas a 90 jours de date, parce qu 'ii arrivera que le souscripteur qui aura rec;u les deux premiers volumes ne se souciera pas [ d 'avoir] a present le 12eme ou 14eme sans avoir les entredeux, et le laissera sans le payer chez le libraire, qui ne sera pas moins oblige de le payer, ce qui mettra ledit libraire dans le cas de faire de fortes avances, auxquelles la moitie d 'entre eux ne pourront pas suffire. Ils ont deja mille peines de retirer ou faire retirer ceux qui leur viennent par ordre, car je suis persuade d 'a pres ce que j 'ai vu que la moitie de ce qui a paru jusqu 'a present est encore a retirer du particulier. Le libraire ne 1 'a pas moins paye. Ils concluent de la que M. Duplain a envie dans cette marche d 'aller plus vite. Or ils trouvent qu 'il va deja trop vite, qu 'il ferait beaucoup mieux de se presser moins et avoir plus de gout dans le choix de ses imprimeurs, car le public est tres malcontent d 'une partie des volumes qu 'il a deja livres.'' 7. Duplain to STN, Dec. 20, 1778. 248 Diffusion cuts in the text and changes in the terms of the subscription. But he had not got far when his entire position was exposed in perhaps the most widely read French-language periodical then in existence, the Annales politiques, civiles, et litteraires du dix-huitieme siecle of Nicolas-Simon-Henri Linguet. Under the headline ''Brigandage typographique d 'une nouvelle es pece," Linguet warned the world that the quarto editors could not possibly fit the full text into twenty-nine volumes. They would either have to cut it by half or double the size of their edition, drawing vast sums in additional payments from the subscribers. Linguet did not think that Diderot's rapsodie En cyclopedique-a slipshod compilation of bad philosophy and plagiarized treatises-deserved another edition in the first place. If the public insisted on buying one, it should spend its money on the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, a good, cheap work from which the poison of Diderot and d 'Alembert had been removed. But at all costs-and the costs would be enormous it should avoid the quarto. For the quarto was a fraud, and the fraud could be explained in one word: Panckoucke. '' Cette manoeuvre n'etonnera pas, quand on saura que c'est le libraire Panckoucke qui se cache sous le masque de l 'imprimeur Pellet; il n 'y a jamais eu de partisan, en guerre ou en finance, aussi f econd en ruses de cette espece que le libraire Panckoucke.' ' As in most of the polemics in eighteenth-century journalism, there was more to this than met the eye. Linguet 's hatred of the philosophes went back a long way and had exploded a year earlier in an attack on La Harpe and the rest of the secte in the Journal de politique et de litternture. Panckoucke was then publishing the journal and Linguet editing it-but not for long, because a cabal of philosophes and academicians per suaded Panckoucke to fire him and replace him with none other than La Harpe. This incident led to the founding of the An nales, which Linguet published from London and filled with declamations against Panckoucke and his philosophic friends. The quarrel also had a commercial aspect because Linguet 's new journal became a spectacular success and cut into the market for the J oitrnal de politique et de litterature, which Panckoucke merged with the Mercure in June 1778. Moreover Linguet 's main distributor on the Continent was the firm of Pierre Gosse Junior of The Hague, which had also taken over 8. Annales politiques, civiles, et Zitteraires du dia;-huitieme siecle, no. 15, II (1777), 465. 249 The Business of Enlightenment the marketing of the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon. Gosse must have rejoiced in Linguet 's attack on the quarto, if he did not actually instigate it, because the quarto was damaging his attempts to sell the last sets of the Encyclopedie d 'Y verdon, just as, back in 1769, Panckoucke 's folio edition had undercut his campaign to sell the first sets. By combining so many combustible elements-personal, ideological, and commercial-Linguet 's outburst sent reper cussions throughout the book trade. The STN received several letters from subscribers whose confidence in the quarto had been shaken, and it dealt with them as best it could. Thus it re assured a customer in La Rochelle, who worried about having to pay for extra volumes, that the whole affair could be dis missed as a personal vendetta: '' Auriez-vous adopte le calcul de ce fou de Linguet, qui aveugle par la haine implacable qu 'il porte au pauvre Panckoucke et croyant que cette entreprise lui appartenait uniquement, s 'est permis contre lui des propos les plus extravagants, dont les gens du metier se sont moques et ont bien su le lui dire?' no And it tried to rally a bookseller in Naples, who was tormented with second thoughts about a speculation on fifteen subscriptions, with some bandwagon sales talk. Outre que cornrne chacun le sait le caractere de cet hornrne farneux est de dire du mal de tout le rnonde, nous lui opposons en confiance un fait de notoriete publique. C 'est que nous avons actuellernent 6,000 exern plaires places et somrnes obliges d 'ouvrir un 3erne souscription pour satisfaire a de nouvelles dernandes. Il serait bien etrange que parmi un si grand nombre d'arnateurs aucun d'eux n'eut eu assez de bon sens pour prevoir !'objection qu'a imagine cet Aristarque moderne.11 These arguments, as the STN realized, did not constitute much of a defense, so it tried to cut off further attacks by go- 9. There is a good deal of information about these polemics in the dossiers of Pierre Gosse Junior et Pinet and of Mallet du Pan in the STN papers and in the Memoires secrets of Bachaumont, entries of Aug. 8, Sept. 6, and Sept. 17, 1777, and Oct. 6, 1778. 10. STN to Ranson of La Rochelle, May 24, 1778. 11. STN to Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli, Jan. 26, 1778. The STN went on to explain that it would keep down the number of volumes by increasing their size. The effect of Linguet 's denunciation on the Neapolitans is clear from the worried tone of their letter to the STN, dated Jan. 6, 1778: "M. Linguet nei suoi Annali no. 15 avverte ii pubblico contro l 'edizione dell' Enciclopedia in 4 ° di Ginevra e fa toccar con mano che in 29 vol. non conterra che la meta. Questa e una cosa che merita ogni seria considerazione, sopratutto perche non si sono gli editori avvaluti delle correzioni d 'Yverdon, che sono buone. '' 250 Diffusion ing to their source. It did not appeal directly to Linguet but to his main collaborator, Jacques Mallet du Pan, who oversaw a Swiss edition of the Annales being printed by the STN's other rival Encyclopedie publisher, the Societe typographique de Lausane. Because of his personal friendship with Oster vald, Mallet felt more allegiance to the N euchatelois than to the Lausannois, and he eventually succeeded in ending Lin guet 's campaign against the quarto. Meanwhile, however, Linguet had badly damaged the quar to's market, and Duplain had to devise some way of repairing it. Panckoucke had suggested a round of soft-peddled public ity. '' J 'ai mantle a Duplain ce qu 'il fallait qu 'il repondit,' '13 he informed the STN". "II faut que sa response soit generale, sans nommer ni Linguet, ni les Annales." Accordingly an "Avis" appeared in volume 11 that replied to Linguet 'r,; charges, without naming them or their author, by presenting the quarto's case positively: ''Nous avons pris avec nos sou scripteurs un engagement solonnel et sacre de leur livrer gratis tous les tomes qui excederaient le nombre de 36. '' In other words, what Linguet had denounced as a swindle should be understood as a bonus, especially as the individual volumes would each contain 200 more pages than anticipated. But who was to pay for the seven extra volumes between volumes 20 and 36, a matter of 70 livres per set and more than a half mil lion livres for all three editions'? Duplain tried to construe this difficulty as an advantage for the subscribers by announcing 12. In a letter of March 14, 1778, the STN assured Duplain "qu 'il n 'y a aucun danger a courir de la part de Linguet et qu 'il s 'en tiendra aux sarcasmes qu 'il a laches dans son journal ... Le sieur Mallet, avec qui nous sommes lies particu lierement, est parti dernierement pour aller joindre Linguet a Londres, avec lequel il s 'est associe pour son journal; et il nous a donne sa parole qu 'ii ne paraitrait plus rien contre notre entreprise, et nous sommes tres portes a croire que s 'il avait su que nous y fussions interesses, il n 'aurait point fait cette in cartade." A close reading of the Annales for 1777 and 1778 shows that Linguet did indeed cease his attack on the quarto. Although Mallet's letters from this period are missing, his dossier shows that he was a close friend of Ostervald. He attempted to negotiate a peace in the quarto-octavo war in Jan. 1778. And in June, when he had returned from London to oversee the Lausanne edition of the Annales, he tried to get Linguet to plug the STN 's edition of the Description des arts et metiers. The Neuchatelois then sent a sycophantic appeal to Linguet him· self, while indicating to one of their closest customers that they expected to make some important ''arrangements'' with Linguet and at the same time assuring Pauckouckc that they were ''hi en resolus de ne former aucune liaison avec un tel homme." See STN to Linguet, May 30, 1778; STN to Charmet of Besan~on, May 3, 1778; and Mallet to STN, June 6, 1778. 13. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 27, 1777. 251 The Business of Enlightenment another ''engagement solonnel'' in a circular letter and an Avis in the eighteenth volume: the subscribers would have to pay for only thirty-three volumes and would receive the rest as an additional bonus. By this stroke of generosity he actu ally increased the retail price of the quarto from 344 to 384 livres. He could not expect the increase to go unnoticed, so he went over to the offensive by attacking all the quarto's enemies in a broadside Mernoire: "C 'est en vain que des personnes mal intentionnees ont voulu tenter de decrier cette edition; on reconnaitra aisement qu 'un motif d 'animosite et une basse jalousie ont guide leurs honteuses demarches, qui ne peuvent que faire avorter leurs iniques projets. 'n Duplain 's tone and tactics had clearly changed: now he de nounced Linguet by name, raked over the quarrel with Panc koucke, and refuted the typographical argument in detail (Linguet had got the size of the quarto's type wrong and had underestimated the thickness of its volumes). He returned to the attack in an Avis to the nineteenth volume of the quarto that repeated the same themes while attempting to cover his exposed flank by a new maneuver. Writing as "Pellet," Du plain announced a tr an sf er in the ownership of the third edi tion: ''Dans le desir de repondre a l 'empressement de mes anciens souscripteun;, j 'ai traite avec la Societe typogra phique de Neuchatel. En me remplagant pour cette troiseme edition, ils me laissent le temps et les soins que je me fais un devoir sacre de donner aux deux premieres.'' The STN con firmed that it had boug·ht out Pellet in a printed circular dated July 24, 1778. Another circular and a prospectus followed on November 10, while Duplain sent out similar announcements from Lyons. All this propaganda stressed that the STN 's quarto would be even better edited, if possible, than Pellet's; that both editions would contain everything in the original text and a good deal more besides (" augmentations" as well as the uncut Supplernent) ; and that the subscribers would have to pay for only thirty-two volumes. This stratagem had two purposes: it would promote sales by disassociating the third ''edition'' from the typographical and editorial faults of the first two, and it would shift the conditions of the sub- 14. Undated two-page "Memoire pour !es editeurs de I 'Encyclopedie de Geneve en 32 vol. format in-4°.'' 252 Diffusion scription so that no customer could claim that he had only bargained for twenty-nine volumes. The STN supported Duplain 's fraud enthusiastically be cause it expected to get three more volumes to print by lending its name to the third edition. As already mentioned, however, it printed only one; and despite the claims of its advertising, the new quarto outdid its predecessors in the profusion of typographical errors. Then, while the STN was gnashing its teeth over the deformities of the third edition, Duplain went on to announce a fourth. Still using Pellet's name as a cover, he explained that he would publish one more edition in order to satisfy those who had failed to get their money in on time to buy the first three. He (Pellet) had received almost 400 more orders than he could supply. But he could not produce an edi tion of 400 sets economically, so he would have to charge his last subscribers 10 livres for each of the three volumes that he was giving away free to the first subscribers, bringing the price of the final quarto up to 414 livres instead of 384. Du plain sent the text of this announcement to the STN with instructions to publish it in Dutch and Swiss journals. He merely meant it as a ruse ''pour enferrer de plus en plus les souscripteurs,'' he explained. The sales campaign for the third edition had really become stalled some 300 subscriptions short of its goal, and he needed to convince the subscribers of the first two editions that they were getting a bargain by receiving three extra volumes free instead of getting swindled by being forced to pay for four.17 Duplain 's announcement probably had a still more devious purpose: to convince his partners that he was doing all he 15. The Avis quoted above all appear on unnumbered pages at the beginning of the quarto volumes. The circular letters come from the STN papers, ms. 1233, and a copy of the STN 's prospectus for the third edition can also be found in Case Wing Z 45.18, Newberry Library, ser. 7, Chicago. The underlying reasons for the shifts in Duplain 's strategy are clear from the following letters: Duplain to STN, July 10, 1778; STN to Duplain, July 15, 1778; and Favarger to STN, July 21 and July 23, 1778. Favarger wrote the last letter on a copy of Duplain 's prospectus for the ''Neuchatel'' edition, which the STN reprinted and circulated among its own correspondents. 16. Duplain published this announcement in the Gazette de Leyde of April 20, 17. Duplain to STN, March 31, 1779. Duplain timed the announcement to coincide with the period when the subscribers had finished paying for the twenty nine volumes stipulated in the sales agreements and were about to pay for the extra volumes. See Duplain to STN, April 17, 1779. 253 The Business of Enlightenment could to market the unsellable rump of the third edition. The STN read it that way-as a laudable attempt to stave off law suits while stampeding customers into buying the last of the subscriptions. Panckoucke, however, disapproved of it, not because he objected to lying to the public but because he thought it would not work:'' La notice de Pellet est une charla tanerie dont je ne crois pas que personne soit la dupe.' '19 The success of this maneuver cannot be calculated, but it brought the selling of the quarto to an end in appropriate style, by a final round of false advertising. Marketing All this feinting and sparring with journal notices raises two further issues: how did publishers market books in the eight eenth century, and what do their sales campaigns reveal about the literary market place~ Admittedly, one must surround those questions with a caveat: the Encyclopedie was not a typi cal book, and its subscription campaign cannot be taken to typify book salesmanship. By 1777, the Encyclopedie had come to be seen as the embodiment of the Enlightenment. It had aroused so much controversy that the publishers of the later editions did not have to worry about making its name known. In fact, its name was used as a selling service device by other publishers, who wanted to capitalize on its success by presenting their own books as Encyclopedies. The register of applications for privileges kept by the booksellers guild of Paris shows a surge of requests to publish encyclopedic works around 1770, including an Encyclopedie economique, an En clopedie medicale, an Encyclopedie mathematique, an En cyclopedie domestique, economique, rurale et marchande, an Encyclopedie militaire, an Encyclopedie litteraire, an Ency clopedie des dieux et des heros, and an Encyclopedie des dames. But far from coasting on this wave of notoriety and 18. STN to Panckoucke, April 5, 1779: '' Apres avoir lu et examine cet avis, il nous a paru ~tre un moyen assez adroit d 'engager les curieux a souscrire pour la 3eme edition de l 'Encyclopedie dans la crainte de payer plus cher s 'ils atten daient l 'apparition de celle qu 'on annonce.'' 19. Panckoucke to STN, April 25, 1779. 20. Registre des privileges et permissions simples, Bibliotheque nationale, ms. Fr. 22001, pp. 141, 146, 150, 164, 183, 225, and 266. Of course Encyclopedie had ap peared in titles before the publication of Diderot's work, but the incidence of its use in the guild's registers shows that Diderot's Encyclopedie created a vogue for the term. 254 Diffusion letting the book sell itself, the quarto publishers worked furiously to market as many copies as they could. Their sales campaign has some general significance for understanding eighteenth-century publishing, because they used the standard techniques of their trade. They distributed prospectuses and circulars, placed advertisements in journals, slipped sales talk into their commercial correspondence, and sent traveling salesmen far and wide in search of subscriptions. The publishers adopted these techniques as a matter of course, without coordinating them or calculating their effect. They evidently did not feel a need to work out any special sales strategy but assumed that the whole association would benefit if each partner hit the public with all the propaganda he could muster, firing away in whatever manner suited him. "II faut repandre avis sur avis et ne pas vous decourager, " Panckoucke exhorted the STN in December 1778, when the demand seemed to be declining. Duplain stressed the same point : ''II ne vient plus de souscriptions, et si malgre 200 let tres que nous venons de faire partir, nous ne trouvons un de bouche, nous serons necessites a une mise en magasin. Ayez s.v.p. la bonte de reiterer des annonces, de faire de nouveaux efforts, de parler dans vos gazettes. " The flow of subscrip tions provided a rough indication of demand and helped to orient policy. Thus Duplain did not decide to go ahead with the third edition until he received a sufficient response from a circular letter, which announced that Pellet had already begun to print it. But the demand for the quarto had taken the pub lishers by surprise, and they never had a clear idea of its extent. In fact each of them had only the vaguest notion of what the others were doing to promote sales. They all pro duced their own prospectuses and placed their own advertise ments. Duplain did not consult his partners before announcing his fake fourth edition. The STN printed a long circular letter about the third edition, which it addressed to itself and signed ''Pellet,'' without informing Duplain or Panckoucke, not to mention Pellet himself, who was used to having others put words in his mouth. Panckoucke sent out similar circulars from Paris and then delegated the selling on his end to a Pa- 21. Panekoucke to STN, Dee. 22, 1778. 22. Duplain to STN, Dee. 22, 1778. 23. Duplain to STN, April 21, 1778. 24. Journal helvetique, Mareh 1778. 255 The Business of Enlightenment risian bookdealer called Laporte, leaving it two removes away from Duplain 's central operation in Lyons. All three of the principal partners dispatched traveling salesmen to the French provinces, but without coordinating their routes, so that the salesmen sometimes got in each other's hair. Favarger sold only a few subscriptions during his tour of southern and central France in 1778 because he unknowingly retraced the steps of Duplain 's agent, Amable Le Roy, who had already harvested most of the sales. Le Roy then complained that Favarger spoiled the harvest by telling the subscribers that they could delay payments. And Panckoucke 's man came home almost empty-handed from a tour of the north because he became caught in the rivalry between provincial and Parisian dealers : Mon cornmis voyageur n 'a rien fait du tout. Il sera ici dans quelques jours. Il a vu la N ormandie, la Bretagne, rn 'a depense environ six cents livres et rn 'a donne des memoires pour quinze cents en totalite. On le regardait presque partout cornrne un espion. Les libraires de province n 'airnent point ces cornrnis voyageurs des libraires de Paris. Les Lyon nais, les Rouennais ont eu soin d 'etablir des preventions de toutes especes. Of course the partners did not always work at cross pur poses. Panckoucke applauded the success of one of Duplain's earlier traveling salesmen, who sold 395 subscriptions on one tour, and he also approved of Duplain's decision to bait sub scriptions with an offer of free engravings of Diderot and d 'Alembert: '' C 'est une depense bien vue et qui peut produire un bon eff et.' n By processing all the subscriptions in Lyons, Duplain maintained control over the whole enterprise. And by observing the same terms in their sales, which went almost entirely to retailers rather than to private individuals, the partners worked as collaborators instead of as competitors. The proceeds of the sales did not get dispersed in commis sions but went to Duplain, who used some of them for oper ating expenses and kept the rest to be distributed among the partners, in proportion to each man's share in the association, at the final settling of accounts. The associates also tended to aim their sales campaign at different areas, even though 25. Panckoucke to STN, June 26, 1777. On Favarger's difficulties see Favarger to STN, Aug. 23, 1778, and Duplain to STN, Nov. 10, 1778. 26. Panckoucke to STN, July 8, 1777. 256 Diffusion they got their salesmen tangled. Panckoucke concentrated on Paris, Duplain on the provinces and southern Europe, and the STN on northern Europe. Thus when Duplain wanted to make a general announcement, he sent its text to Neuchatel with a request for the STN to publish it in whatever journals it thought would be effective in "le nord," a term that he applied vaguely to all the territory between England and Russia. This propaganda cost very little-another indication of the relatively primitive character of eighteenth-century market ing. Favarger wore out a horse during his sales trip in France, but the STN easily wrote the beast off as a loss of 96 livres. Actually the total cost of the five-month journey came to quite a lot-1,289 livres and 240 livres for Favarger 's sal ary-but only a fraction of it can be attributed to the Encyclo pedie; for Favarger also collected bills, set up smuggling routes, established relations with new booksellers, and sold all the other works in the STN 's stock. The STN charged the quarto association only 18 livres for producing 1,500 copies of a four-page "Grand Prospectus" for the third edition in November 1778. Duplain printed his own version of it in l-1yons, and the STN went on to reprint 2,060 more copies on various occasions between November 1778 and January 1780. It also produced a one-page petit pro spectus to be distributed with the Gazette de Berne and 300 lettres circulaires, which it sent around its network of book sellers.30 As Duplain 's other printers also turned out pro spectuses, it seems likely that they produced enough to supply every bookseller in Europe with a dozen or more and to flood 27. On May 11, 1777, for example, Duplain wrote to the STN, "Nous vous envoyons ci-inclus le prospectus que vous ferez imprimer tel quel au meme nombre que la Gazette de Berne, en vous entendant avec le gazetier pour les frais de poste . . . Le meme prospectus . . . vous servira pour le nord, l 'Allemagne, l 'Angleterre, la Hollande et tous les autres pays ou vous voulez en envoyer. Faites-en tirer le nombre qu 'il vous en faut. '' 28. STN papers, Brouillard B, entry for Dec. 1, 1778, and Favarger 's "Carnet de voyage,'' ms. 1059. 29. Brouillard B, entry for Nov. 28, 1778. A copy of this prospectus can be found in Case Wing Z 45.18, ser. 7, Newberry Library, and a copy from Duplain's edition of it, which Favarger sent to the STN from Lyons with his letter of July 23, 1778, is in Favarger's dossier of the STN papers. 30. The information on pressruns is derived from the STN 's ''Banque des ouvriers," entries for Oct. 31, 1778; Aug. 1, 1778; Nov. 28, 1778; June 5, 1779; July 10, 1779; and Jan. 22, 1780. 257 The Business of Enlightenment the channels of the book trade. With a ream of paper and a day's work by a compositor and a press crew, the STN could easily run off a thousand prospectuses for 12 livres. Notices in journals were just as cheap. The STN placed a full-page annonce in the Gazette de Berne-thirty-six lines in small pica-for only 7 livres 10 sous. Similar notices in the journals of Basel and Schaffhausen cost 6 or 7 livres apiece, and almost eight pages of sales talk in the STN 's own Journal helvetique cost the association only 6 livres. These prices are difficult to evaluate, owing to the scanty state of research on French-language periodicals in the eighteenth century. But by modern standards the circulation of the journals was certainly small. In 1778 pressruns ranged from 7,000 in the case of the Mer cure to 250 in the case of the Journal helvetique. The Ga zette de Leyde probably had as much influence as any journal in le nord, judging from the frequent references to it in the STN 's correspondence. In 1779 it charged only 26 livres for a half-page notice consisting of twenty-five lines in small type. The STN also paid about a livre a line for three other adver tisements for the quarto, which it placed in the Gazette de Leyde in 1777 and 1778. But it had to pay almost twice as much ( 38 shillings) for two half-page notices in the widely read Morning-Herald of London (only two lines of them were devoted to the quarto, the rest concerned the Description des arts et metiers). Booksellers who speculated on the quarto also took out their own advertisements. Teron of Geneva, for ex ample, published five notices in the Gazette de Leyde and four in the Gazette de Berne between 1777 and 1779. Therefore the total cost of advertising for the quarto cannot he established, but it did not amount to much. For its part, the STN placed ten notices in five journals for about 120 livres-less than a third of the price of one Encyclopedie. The sum looks insig nificant, if seen from the perspective of Madison Avenue, but it produced a heavy dose of publicity by eighteenth-century standards. Twentieth-century notions of advertising do not fit the prac- 31. The STN mentioned these expenses in a letter to Duplain of June 26, 1779. The text of the half-page notice appeared in the Gazette de Leyde of April 20, 1779. And the pressrun of the Journal helvetique has been calculated from the STN 's ''Banque des ouvriers. '' On the Mercure subscriptions, which may have doubled by 1789, see Panckoucke to STN, July 21, 1778, where Panckoucke said they had reached 6,500, and the Memoires secrets of Oct. 6, 1778, where they are estimated at 7,000. 258 Diffusion tices of the Old Regime, and it would be anachronistic to comb through the papers of the quarto publishers in the expectation of finding an advertising budget or reports on market re search. The publishers could have afforded many more journal notices, but it never occurred to them that they could saturate the ''media'' with a ''campaign.'' They contented themselves with a few annonces-that is, literally, with announcing, in single issues of a half-dozen journals, that their product could be obtained at a certain price and in a certain manner. They did not, however, compose these announcements casu ally. Duplain wrote his own copy and passed it on to Neu chatel with strict orders that it be printed without changes: "Nous vous remettons ci-inclus un a vis a joindre tel quel dans les gazettes de Berne ou autres, si vous en connaissez, sans y rien changer. " In this case, the text announced the fake fourth edition with the covering explanation that'' Pellet'' had received nearly 400 more orders than he could supply, whereas in fact the real entrepreneur behind the quarto, Duplain, had just informed his partners, who also remained hidden, that the sales for the third ''edition,'' which was really the second, had fallen short by 300 subscriptions-and even that informa tion was false. Having woven together such a complex pat tern of lies, Duplain could not afford to have a single word 32. The costs of the STN 's advertising can be reconstructed from Brouillard B, entries for Feb. 8, May 3, June 13, and Nov. 28, 1778, and from the STN's "Compte courant" on all of its Encyclopedie work for Duplain in m.s. 1220. The entry for Feb. 8, 1778, in the Brouillard provides an example of different costs and account keeping: Encyclopedie 4 ° doit aux suivants, prospectus et avis inseres dans les pa piers pub lics concernant la 3eme souscription: a Banque [des ouvriers], composition et tirage d 'a vis et de prospectus 4-10 a Journal helvetique 1778, insertion de l'avis 6- a Profits et Pertes: Papier de poste pour dit 3- Port et affranchissage d 'a vis en Hollande, a Bale, Schaffhausen et Berne 4-10 Droits aux 3 gazetiers de Suisse . . . 21 28-10 ... 28--10 39 (livres) Jean-Baptiste d'Arnal, a Swiss merchant in London, informed the STN on April 19, 1782, that he had placed its notice in two issues of "le Morning Herald, qui est le papier le plus a la mode; cela m 'a coute 38 schellings.'' He also included a copy of the printed text. The text of the other notices has been established by a study of the Gazette de Leyde, the Gazette de Berne, and the Journal helvetique for the period 1777-1780. 33. Duplain to STN, March 31, 1779. 259 The Business of Enlightenment disrupted. With seeming artlessness, he began the advertise ment as follows: Jean-Leonard Pellet, imprimeur a Geneve et editeur de l'Ency clopedie in-quarto, annonce qu l 'ouvrage des redacteurs est entierement fini et que son edition contiendra en tout 36 volumes de discours et 3 de planches. 11 se fait un devoir sacre de tenir les promesses qu'il a consignees a la tete des tomes XI, XIII, et XVII. En consequence, MM. les souscripteurs recevront gratis trois volumes de discours. Duplain did not develop his main point-the announcement of the new edition, which was meant as a foil to make the terms of the old editions look good-until well down in the body of the text. This indirectness suited the casual, epistolary style of eighteenth-century journalism. Pellet spoke directly to ''MM. les souscripteurs,'' using the polite form of the third person, as if he were merely imparting information. His voice sounded like that of the journalists themselves, for journals were conceived as open letters. They presented their news in an offhand manner, without headlines or special make-up, as so much letter-writing between ordinary correspondants and the gazetier. Advertisements, called simply annonces or avis, could hardly be distinguished from news, although they usu ally came at the end in French periodicals. Everything about them gave off an air of casualness and confidentiality, just the thing for systematic falsehood. The slant of the publishers' sales pitch suggests the way they expected the Encyclopedie to appeal to the reading pub lic. They could have presented it as a superb reference work or as a manifesto of the Enlightenment. Either approach would have indicated the importance of ideology in their per ception of the public. In fact they combined themes in a way that is still more significant, as can be appreciated from the opening sentences of their main prospectus, which they re printed in most of their annonces and avis, including the '' Avertissement des nouveaux editeurs'' at the head of volume 1 in the quarto. Les deux ecrivains qui COll(;urent le projet de l'Encyclopedie en firent la bibliotheque de l 'homme de gout, du philosophe, et du savant. Ce livre nous dispense de lire presque tous les autres. Ses editeurs, en eclairant l 'esprit humain, l 'etonnent souvent par l 'immense variete de leurs connaissances, et plus souvent encore par la nouveaute, la pro- 34. Gazette de Leyde, April 20, 1779. 260 Diffusion fondeur, et l 'ordre systematique de leurs idees. Personne n 'a mieux connu qu'eux l'art de monter des consequences aux principes, de degager la verite de l'alliage des erreurs, de prevenir contre l'abus des mots, qui en est la principale source, d'epargner des efforts a la memoire qui recueille les idees, a la raison qui les combine, a I 'imagi nation qui les embellit. Cette marche vraiment philosophique a du accelerer les progres de la raison; et depuis quelques annees l'on court a pas de geant dans une route qu 'ils ont applanie et dont ils ont sou vent change les epines en fleurs. A quarto on the shelf would demonstrate its owner's ex cellence in three capacities: as a man of taste, as a man of learning, and as a philosophe. Far from being incompatible, these roles complemented one another; and best of all, they were easy to play. Diderot and d 'Alembert had laid out such pleasant paths through the arid expanses of knowledge that one could merely follow their lead, stopping now and then to enjoy the flowers along the way, and still have the satisfaction of belonging to the intellectual vanguard. One did not even have to read very many other books, for the Encyclopedie was a library unto itself. The editors did not list the works that it rendered obsolete, but anyone who consulted its Discours pre liminaire would have no difficulty in distinguishing between the heavy tomes of traditional learning and the streamlined, mod ern model. Modern learning meant Enlightenment; the pro spectus made that point clear, not only by invoking reason and the progressive march of philosophy but also by attributing knowledge to the operation of the three faculties, memory, reason, and imagination, exactly as d'Alembert had done in the Discours preliminaire. It made these points gently, how ever, without any flag-waving about Bacon and Locke or any rhetoric about trampling superstition underfoot. Instead of emphasizing the Encycloped,ie 's challenge to accepted values, it stressed the ease with which the subscribers could become learned and progressive at the same time. Di derot and d 'Alembert had made those qualities seem insepa rable-a neat trick, like turning thorns into flowers, which the publishers adapted to their propaganda. They wanted to sell Encyclopedies, not to make them seem difficult, and the book's authors had provided its main selling point: it was both a compendium of knowledge and a vehicle of Enlightenment. To ask whether it appealed to eighteenth-century readers as the one thing or the other is to miss the point, for it was intended 261 The Business of Enlightenment to appeal to them in both respects, by the men who wrote it and the men who sold it. Thus in a vulgar and simplified way, the advertisements amplified the message of the book; they did not distort it. And in doing so, they testified to the spread of a certain cultural tone. The publishers calculated that many people would buy the quarto merely in order to appear intel lectually fashionable. Not only did the prospectus suggest that anyone who owned an Encyclopedie could call himself a philo sophe, but Ostervald made the strategy of exploiting intellec tual snobbism explicit in a letter to Panckoucke: '' Il faut commencer par distinguer et ranger sous deux classes tous ceux qui se sont pourvus chez nous: les uns sont gens de lettres ou curieux de s 'instruire a l 'aide de cette compilation; les autres n 'ont ete guides que par une sorte de vanite, se faisant gloire de posseder un ouvrage si renomme. '' Intellectual snobbism seems to have been a new phenomenon at this time, perhaps because intellectuals had just begun to get a hearing in the general public. In any case, it seems sig nificant that the snobs sided with the Encyclopedie, while the book remained officially illegal. It could not be advertised in journals printed in France, although foreign periodicals like the Gazette de Leyde, which circulated widely in the king dom, carried notices about it. Duplain had to keep his operation hidden behind the Swiss title pages, and even the prospectuses had to seem Swiss. '' Il a fallu des courses, des sollicitations, des demarches pour obtenir la circulation moderee et comme venant de Neuchatel de ce prospectus,' ' Panckoucke in formed the STN. The STN received several letters from book dealers who were afraid to sell the quarto, and its replies, though reassuring, indicated the limits to the book's legiti macy: '' Quoiqu 'il y ait eu une defense de la part du magistrat pour cet ouvrage, nous sommes tres assures que l 'effet en est suspendu et qu 'il n 'y a absolument rien a craindre pour les collecteurs, surtout en mettant, quant a la capitale, quelque prudence dans leur marche. '' The government could not openly renounce its persecution of the Encyclopedie without seeming to endorse the ideology of the book. So the publishers had the best of both worlds: they could capitalize on the allure 35. Ostervald to Panckoucke, May 9, 1779. 36. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1778. Of course the limited toleration granted to their publicity meant that the publishers had to restrain the ideological element in their prospectuses and notices, but they did not eliminate it entirely. 37. STN to Pyre, May 1, 1777. 262 Diffusion of illegal literature while exploiting the unacknowledged pro tection of the authorities. But the most important point about their marketing concerns the way the Encyclopedie was pre sented and perceived during the late eighteenth century. It had originally made a splash by arousing controversy; it had spread throughout Europe on the waves of its succes de scan dale; and its enemies kept stirring up the scandal by renewing their attacks. Far from evolving into a neutral reference work, it remained official anathema until the Revolution. Its illegality continued to be so good for business that the STN prayed for more edicts against it. Booksellers The publicity and polemics show how the Encyclopedie was seen by its contemporaries, when it appeared on the market in a relatively inexpensive form. But the marketing itself in volved a great deal more than the production of propaganda. It occurred in two stages: the publishers sold subscriptions to booksellers, and the booksellers sold them to individual cus tomers. This two-step sales process required two systems of communication. The publishers and booksellers broadcast general messages to the public, and they exchanged com mercial information through their own network, a trade grape vine that operated through exchanges of letters, personal vis its, and traveling agents. This process put the middleman in a strategic position. Far from maintaining sales organizations that could operate on a national scale, the publishers had only comptoirs, tiny home offices composed of a bookkeeper and one or two clerks. But after years of doing business, they had built up extensive contacts everywhere in the retail trade. They therefore aimed most of their sales campaign at the retailers, who handled the selling on the local level. ''On pent souscrire chez les princi paux libraires de chaque ville" was the formula that closed most of the annonces for the quarto and for most other books as well. In order to persuade the booksellers to act energeti- 38. STN to Bosset, Aug. 28, 1779. For further discussion of this point see Chapter IX. 39. In this instance the formula comes from an annonce in the Gazette de Leyde of Feb. 6, 1778. Sometimes the notices said that the public could subscribe with Pellet or the STN, but they usually directed subscribers to retailers. 263 The Business of Enlightenment cally as Encyclopedie salesmen, the publishers allotted them a large share in the profits. The dealers bought their quartos for 294 livres and sold them for 384, and they received a free copy for every twelve that they ordered. If they sold a baker's dozen, they would make 1,464 livres, the equivalent of two years' wages for a journeyman printer and a profit of 41 percent on an investment of 3,528 livres. The importance of the trade discount emerges clearly in their letters. Gaston of Toulouse, for example, told the STN that he had made a great effort to sell subscriptions, because '' si la remise est honnete, on ne craint point la depense pour se mettre en campagne pour tacher de se procurer de bien loin des souscripteurs.' ' The quarto-octavo war became in large part a struggle over book sellers, and Panckoucke expected to win it because of the profits he shared with them: "Vons sentez, Monsieur, que le tres gros benefice des libraires les empechera de favoriser cette entreprise [the octavo],'' he explained to Ostervald.41 ''Et il n 'y a qu 'eux qui puissent faire le succes d 'un ouvrage de cette nature. Cette seule raison suffirait pour ne pas vous faire craindre cette concurrence.'' The STN also attributed the quarto's success to the support of the booksellers and ascribed their support to the money they made from it. In its commercial correspondence, the STN kept pushing them to sell the book harder. Again and again it returned to the same point: by buying the quarto volumes for 7 livres and 10 sous apiece and selling them for 10 livres, they could make a killing. ''Nous avons pour maxime general de faire gagner gros a tons les libraires avec qui nous travail lons, " it explained to Abert of Avallon, adding suggestively that Abert's colleagues in nearby Dijon had sold 100 subscrip tions in a few months. Meanwhile it urged the Dijonnais to emulate the booksellers of Besanc;on, who had sold still more, and it goaded one Bisontin for lagging behind the others: "Personne ne vous demande-t-il de l 'Encyclopedie quarto~ Nous croyons que vous etes le seul libraire en France et meme ailleurs qui n 'y ait specule. Leur bfinefice est assure.' ' It was by letters of this sort, dozens of letters every week, that the publishers handled most of their end of the marketing. 40. Gaston to STN, April 6, 1778. 41. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 19, 1777. 42. STN to Cardinal Valenti of Rome, July 12, 1779. 43. STN to Abert, May 1, 1777. 44. STN to Charmet, June 19, 1777. 264 Diffusion The booksellers produced still more propaganda on the other end. They took out advertisements in local periodicals, spread around prospectuses supplied by the publishers, and talked up the quarto when customers wandered into their shops. Tonn et of Dole favored posters: "Vo us ne f eriez pas mal d 'y ajouter un placard en grosses lettres pour afficher devant ma boutique, ainsi que devaient faire tous vos cor respondants. '' Charle of Meaux relied on the Affiches de la Brie and on the heavy use of prospectuses: "En les repandant dans nos environs avec soin, je pourrai bien vous faire 24 souscriptions au lieu de 12. '' And some dealers even produced prospectuses of their own. The Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli circulated an elegant, two-page prospectus in Italian, which invited subscriptions for both the quarto and the octavo editions.47 The publicity for the quarto therefore mushroomed all over Europe, and most of the selling was done by local bookdealers, who used whatever devices they could command. But what did the quarto look like from their perspective, and how did they understand their role in the diffusion process f Those questions can be pursued in two ways, by consulting the booksellers' letters and by following Favarger 's reports on retailing during his sales trip of 1778. The letters make somewhat disappointing reading because the booksellers did not expatiate on their notions of literature and their relations with their customers. They maintained a tight-lipped, busi nesslike tone and kept to the subjects that concerned them and their suppliers: shipping arrangements, payment problems, and the quality of the merchandise. But this emphasis shows how the Encyclopedie appeared from their point of view. They saw it primarily as an opportunity to keep their heads above water in a trade where men were constantly going under. This hard-bitten and strictly economic view of the book pre vailed especially among the smaller dealers, as is clear from a few examples chosen from the area around Nancy. Fournier of Saint-Dizier, a town of 5,600 souls in western 45. Tonnet to STN, Nov. 8, 1769. In this case Tonnet was referring to another work, but his remark applies to the Encyclopedie. Bookdealers also circulated sample title pages, though they did not mention this common sales technique in their correspondence about the quarto. 46. Charle to STN, Dec. 8, 1777. As his remark indicates, the booksellers strained to get the free thirteenth copy, so the baker's dozen provision stimulated their salesmanship. 47. Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli to STN, Feb. 17, 1778. This letter includes a copy of the prospectus and a long discussion of it. 265 The Business of Enlightenment Lorraine, counted himself lucky: he had a small nest egg. His wife wanted him to invest it in land, but he thought he might do better in Encyclopedies-provided he could get special terms. If he could have a discount of 94 livres a set in addition to the free thirteenths, he told the STN, he would pay cash on the barrel head. It was a tempting offer, for cash payments were rare in a trade that suffered from lack of specie, and Fournier thought he could sell two dozen subscriptions. The STN could not accept it, however, because once one of the quarto associates deviated from the fixed wholesale price, they would be deluged with requests foi· discounts. So in the end, Fournier 's wife had her way, and he sold only three quartos, at the standard price. Meanwhile in J oinville, a nearby town of 3,000, the local bookseller, a certain de Gaulle, was filling his letters with lamentations about the cost of transport. ''Comment voudriez vous que je puisse souscrire pour un exemplaire de l'Encyclo pedie?" he asked. "Les ports et les droits m'emporteraient le profit.'' Although he finally sold one subscription, he con sidered J oinville a poor market for books. People preferred to spend their money on tapestries, he explained: '' J 'ai le malheur d'etre dans une ville ou il n 'y a pas beaucoup de curieux. ''4 A little to the north, in Verdun, a small city of 10,300, a bookseller called Mondon worked hard to sell a dozen sub scriptions, in order to profit from the free thirteenth copy. The prospectus produced a promising response among his cus tomers, particularly the officers of two regiments stationed in the town, he reported. ·within four months, he had sold eight Encyclopedies; and after the announcement of the third edition, he sold four more. But then difficulties set in. Du plain 's first shipments did not contain enough copies of the first volumes, so that Mondon had to supply some of his cus tomers before others. "J e suis dans l 'embarras," he wrote to the STN. "Lequel de mes souscripteurs prefererai-je? Ce sont tous des personnes de la premiere classe. '' Next, Duplain lost Mondon 's order for the third edition. When he finally found it, he sent twice as many copies as "Mondon had requested. And when Mondon inspected the shipment, he discovered that the whole thing was worthless because at least 200 sheets had 48. Fournier to STN, Oct. 5, 1777; May 30, 1780; and June 20, 1780. 49. De Gaulle to STN, May 3 and Aug. 13, 1777. 266 Diffusion been spoiled by dampness and mishandling. As Duplain failed to replace the defective sheets and barely condescended to answer his letters, Mondon tried to get the STN to intervene. Duplain had ceased to care about the small booksellers and had failed to keep control of the quarto, once it had become a gigantic enterprise, he complained. And worst of all, Duplain had refused to give him his free thirteenth copy, on the grounds that four of his twelve quartos came from the third edition, which was a separate affair. "Vous devez bien imagi ner que dans une petite ville comme celle-ci il etait difficile sans so in et sans se deplacer de faire un nombre de souscrip tions. J e vous avouerai que c 'etait dans l 'esperance de jouir du 13eme." All these difficulties created problems with Mondon 's customers, who refused to pay until they received complete and correct volumes. And finally, the slump in the book trade and the departure of a great many troops for the American war left Mondon near the edge of bankruptcy. '' J e ne regarde pas comme mortification de vous faire l 'aveu de mon peu de fortune. Comme pere de famille, je dois prendre garde a mes engagements et les respecter . . . Le commerce ici est totale ment tombe. Nul etat ne peut fixer son debit sans troupes, et c 'est ce dont nous sommes degarnis depuis la miserable guerre qui nous ote toutes ressources . . . J e suis hors d'etat de payer: six enfants, peu de commerce ne me laissent entrevoir que beaucoup de peine. '' Such were the tribulations of small-town booksellers. The large dealers did not agonize over payments, but they, too, treated the Encyclopedie exclusively as an opportunity to make money. Machuel of Rouen appraised the demand for the quarto as "lucrative. " Mathieu of Nancy said that he ex pected to sell a great many subscriptions and then did so, without going into further detail. Bergeret of Bordeaux, Chevrier of Poitiers, Letourmy of Orleans, Rigaud of Mont pellier, and Buchet of Nimes discussed the quarto in similar fashion. They always treated it as a best seller, but never ana lyzed the reasons for its success. Instead, they maneuvered for favorable treatment-secret discounts or priority in the dispatching of shipments-and filled their letters with com plaints about Duplain. Rigaud, for example, tried to play 50. Mondon to STN, March 20, 1778; Sept. 26, 1778; and April 9, 1780. 51. Machuel to STN, April 11, 1779. Mathieu to STN, March 30, 1779. 267 The Business of Enlightenment the STN off against Duplain in order to get an extra free copy as a reward for collecting over a hundred subscriptions. The STN turned his request aside with a remark about what his success had meant for him: ''Nous devons aussi vous f eliciter de votre speculation a raison du benefice qu 'il y a a faire pour vous. '' And he replied with some fulminating criti cism of the first two ''editions'' : On trouve le papier gris et inegal, le caractere use, les corrections mal faites, car l 'ouvrage fourmille de fautes d 'impression. Enfin, le dis cours preliminaire du premier volume est execute d 'une maniere infame, c 'est-a-dire de caracteres uses sur de tres mauvais papier etc. Si on continue de meme, cela attirera infailliblement des discussions et vraisemblablement des proces avec les souscripteurs, qui ne cessent de se plaindre et qui enfin feront eclat. Finally, the booksellers' letters illustrate the functioning of their trade grapevine. Faced with the dangers of being caught in the crossfire between warring consortia of publishers or of getting lost in the blizzard of false advertising, the retailers needed to know what was really going on among the pub An obscure, marginal dealer like Lair of Blois found lishers. it extremely difficult to get a clear view of events. In December 1773, Lair heard (wrongly) that the work on the Supplement was floundering, owing to the desertion of Diderot (who had no connection with it) ; so he decided to order Felice's Ency clopedie d'Yverdon. By March 1777, the news of the quarto's existence had reached him, though he believed (wrongly) that it was being published in Bouillon and was a cheap counter feit of Felice's work. He favored the quarto until he read Linguet's attack on it in the Annales, which convinced him that Pellet and Panckoucke meant to swindle their subscribers and that he should remain faithful to Felice after all. But his faith was shaken when he heard rumors about the plan to publish a version of the Encyclopedie Methodique in Liege. Favarger finally clarified the situation when he came through Blois on his sales trip of 1778; but in revealing the true nature of the quarto, he disguised that of the Methodique, because he did not want the new Encyclopedie to ruin the market for the old one. He therefore convinced Lair that the project for the Methodique was a pipe dream, even though Panckoucke had 53. STN to Rigaud, Nov. 23, 1777, and Rigaud to STN, March 9, 1778. 268 Diffusion already taken it over and was about to execute it in Paris. Important booksellers locat·ed at nodal points along the grapevine succeeded much better in keeping themselves in formed. Jean Mossy, a powerful and canny dealer in Mar seilles, knew all about the connections between Neuchatel and Lyons six weeks after the STN had accepted the Traite de Dijon, but he hesitated to collect subscriptions for the quarto because he wanted to be certain about which of the competing editions the government would favor. "Quant a votre nouvelle edition de l 'Encyclopedie in-quarto, je n~ sais encore que vous dire," he wrote to the STN in May 1777. "Nous avions re<_;iu des ordres du gouvernment de ne point nous meler ni de la vente, ni de la souscription de cet ouvrage. Outre cela, on parle d'une autre que le gouvernement veut favoriser, qui sera aussi in-quarto. Il s 'agit d 'avoir patience pour voir ce que tout cela deviendra." A month later, Mossy realized that the govern ment had thrown its support behind 'Duplain 's quarto; and three months later he had penetrated the motive behind Du plain: '' ,J 'entrevois que cette entreprise est combinee par un fran<_;lais et qu 'il a envie d 'abandonner le commerce a pres cette operation.' rn Above all, the booksellers relied on their information net work to avoid being stuck with old editions when new ones threatened to capture the market. As soon as Sens of Toulouse heard about the quarto, he cancelled an order for the second folio edition ; and as soon as Carez of Toul heard about the Methodique, he cancelled an order for the quarto. The book sellers also exchanged information about other subjects, such as the solvency of their competitors and the direction of government policy. For example, Chaurou informed the STN that the authorities in Toulouse did not intend to release the shipment of octavos that they had seized: "L'Encyclopedie 54. The sequence of the misinformation that reached Lair can be reconstructed from his letters to the STN of Dec. 14, 1773; Sept. 21, 1774; March 23, 1777; May 15, 1777; Feb. 18, 1778; and Nov. 11, 1778. 55. Mossy to STN, May 16 and Aug. 4, 1777. The "ordres" to which Mossy referred probably concerned the Encyclopedic d'Yverdon, which was strictly for bidden in France and was also published in the quarto format. - 56. Carez to STN, Dec. 17, 1781, and Sens to STN, March 5, 1777: "Quant ~ I 'Encyclopedie, Ia personne pour laquelle nous voulions Ia [a copy of the folio edition] faire venir, sur Jes bruits qui courent que I 'Encyclopedie de Geneve en format in-quarto aura lieu et que le Iibmire Panckoucke de Paris s 'est arrange avec celui qui en a projete I 'edition, nous a dit qu 'il donnerait volontiers la preference a I 'edition in-quarto, ce qui est cause egalement que nous vous prierons de ne pas nous l 'envoyer.'' 269 The Business of Enlightenment in-octavo n'a pas ete rendue, et l'on assure meme qu'elle ne le sera pas. J e pense que l 'on n 'obtiendra le privilege tacite de cet ouvrage qu'apres que celle in-quarto sera consommee. " This was an important piece of news, which meant in effect that the quarto group had won the trade war; for the more it traveled the more it provoked the octavo subscribers to desert to the quarto, and the STN took care to keep it circulating through the grapevine. Not surprisingly, the booksellers appear only as business men when seen through business letters, but they were also cultural agents who operated at the meeting point between literary supply and demand. ·when a publisher's representa tive came through town, they often discussed public tastes in literature, and their discussions often influenced the pub lisher's decision about what works to reprint and what genres to emphasize. Favarger took soundings on literary demand wherever he went, traveling from book shop to book shop during his tour de France in 1778. His diary and letters con stitute a virtual survey of the Encyclopedie market, which one can follow as he progressed around the map of France. In Lyons, for example, the booksellers talked about nothing but the success of the quarto, although they were careful about how much they revealed in their talk. After a discussion in the powerful firm of Perisse freres, Favarger reported to the STN, '' J e n 'ai pu savoir leurs pensees sur l 'Encyclopedie quarto. Ils sont tres reserves, ces Messieurs. Mais ils s 'ac cordent a dire qu 'il n 'y a rien sous presse dans tout Lyon que quelques miseres et l 'Encyclopedie quarto." In Vienne Veuve Vedeilhe was all enthusiasm: ''Elle a place 48 exemplaires de l'Encyclopedie quarto, et la meme chose est a Vienne qu'a Lyon: l 'on n 'achete plus de livre que celui-Ia. '' Similarly in Grenoble Veuve Giroud said that she had sold twenty-six sub scriptions and could sell another two dozen, if Felice could be persuaded to take back some incomplete sets of the Encyclo pedie d'Yverdon. After receiving the first fourteen volumes of it, her clients had canceled their subscriptions, and they now wanted to give up Felice's Encyclopedie for the STN's. Push ing farther south, Favarger entered some arid territory. Dans Valence c'est Aurel qui fait le plus, mais il est charge de famille et ne gagne guere . . . Il n 'y a point de libraire a Viviers. Un 57. Chauron to STN, Dee. 22, 1778. 270 Diffusion ambulant du Vivarais dont je n 'ai pu savoir le nom ni la demeure y apporte, comme a Montelimar, 3 OU 4 fois pendant l 'annee des livres a vendre. Orange n 'a qu 'un nomme Tou'it, perruquier de profession, mais qui vend des usages et rien d'autre. Calame!, qui est note sur l'almanach des libraires, est un marchand d'etoffes, qui autrefois a vendu des livres mais qui n 'en tient plus. Carpentras did not contain a single bookseller, but like other small cities in the area it drew its supplies from the pirate publishers in the papal territory of Avignon. The Avignonese treated Favarger as an enemy and a spy, and the going got rougher on the route to Toulon because unemployed silk workers had turned to highway robbery. Favarger made it safely, but he found only three booksellers in Toulon, who told him that their trade had slumped so badly that they could only sell books on navigation. Business was booming, however, in Marseilles, Nimes, and Montpellier. Herisson of Carcassone had canceled his subscriptions to the octavo in order to get the quarto. And Fuzier of Pezenas and Odezenes et fils of Morbil lon also seemed inclined to desert to the quarto, mainly be cause the smuggling operation of the octavo publishers had collapsed in the southwest. The quarto had swept everything before it in Toulouse, though Favarger found the city to be a ''centre de la bigoterie'' and its booksellers a collection of scoundrels, who tried to eliminate one another by mutual de nunciation to the police. A bookbinder called Gaston had gath ered eighty to eighty-five subscriptions for the quarto by offer ing free binding as a bonus, but the booksellers' guild had forced him to give them all up on the grounds that a non-guild member had no right to sell books. The quarto also sold well in Bordeaux, despite a slump in the local book trade, which the dealers attributed to the American war. After going north through La Rochelle, where he did not do much business, and Poi tiers, "une bien pauvre ville pour tout commerce," Favar ger returned home through the Loire Valley, which was also a disappointment. His diary contains a series of entries like "Saumur, rien" and "Chinon, encore moins." The three L 'Etourmy brothers dominated the trade of the valley from their strongholds in Tours, Blois, and Orleans; but Favarger did not succeed in capturing their business, and he did not want the business of most of the lesser dealers, who speculated in prohibited books but failed to pay their bills, according to information that he picked up from the local merchants. After 271 The Business of Enlightenment inspecting two of the biggest markets for the quarto, Dijon and Besarn;on, Favarger finally made it back to Neuchatel, five months and hundreds of hours of shop talk after his departure. Although one cannot recapture the talk of those shops, one can catch something of its flavor from Favarger 's letters. He found the big Lyonnais dealers to be difficult and aloof : ' 'Ils n'ont jamais le temps de vous ecouter. Il semble qu'ils ont des empires a gouverner.'' The booksellers of Toulouse adopted a more casual, southern style of business : Lorsque vous avez fait vos offres, l 'on vous repond que l 'on examinera le catalogue etc., vous priant de repasser. Vous repassez done 3 ou 4 fois, et il arrive que le patron ne s 'y trouve pas. Si vous le trouvez, il n' a pas eu le temps d' examiner vos propositions. 11 faut done y retourner, pourquoi~ Pour rien la plupart du temps. Tous sont sur ce ton. Il faut qu 'un etranger coure constamment depuis l 'un des bouts de la ville a l 'autre et cela dans I 'avant midi, car apres diner il est rare de trouver quelqu 'un de ces Messieurs chez lui. When he finally collared his clients, Favarger not only made some sales but got some valuable information out of them. For example, he found a strong demand for Rousseau every where: "Chacun me demande les memoires [that is, Confes sions] de J.-J. Rousseau. On croit fermement qu'ils existent, non a Paris mais peut-etre en Hollande. Ce serait un livre a faire a 3,000 si on l 'avait dans la primeur . . . On est impa tient partout de savoir des nouvelles de cet auteur. Peut-etre, et cela est sur, qu 'une nouvelle edition augmentee de ses oeuvres se vendrait bien. '' This enthusiasm was purely com mercial. Personal taste and values seem to have had no in fluence on the booksellers' assessment of books. As Andre of Versailles put it, "J e ne neglige pas non plus le debit des livres que je ne saurais lire jamais, et c 'est uniquement parce qu'il faut vivre avec la multitude et parce que le meilleur livre pour un marchand de livres est celui qui se vend.' ' Only once did Favarger run into a bookseller who took an ideological ap proach to his business:" Aries. Gaudion vaut de l'or, mais c'est un singulier personnage ... Quand je lui ai parle de la Bible et de l'Encyclopedie, il m'a repondu qu'il etait trop bon Catho- 58. Quotations from Favarger's letters to the STN of July 21, July 26, Aug. 2, Sept.13, and Oet. 28, 1778. 59. Favarger to STN, July 23, Sept. 13, and Aug. 15, 1778. 60. Andre to STN, Aug. 22, 1784. 272 Diffusion lique pour chercher a repandre deux livres aussi impies, que toutes les encyclopedies lui ont bien ete offertes, mais qu'il se gardera bien d 'en placer. " Everywhere else, Favarger found that booksellers had greeted the Encyclopedie boom with gusto. The demand varied: it seemed to be weakest in remote inland areas-the mountains of the Midi, Berry, Poi tou, and parts of the Vendee-and strongest around a huge semicircle, which ran down the Rhone Valley and back up along the Garonne. In general, then, Favarger 's soundings confirmed all the other information that reached the publish ers : the Encyclopedie had taken the trade by storm. Prices ·and Consumers The booksellers liked the Encyclopedie because their cus tomers bought it. But who were those customers, and how far did the book penetrate into the world beyond the trading posts visited by Favarger 1 Those questions, like so many problems in the sociology of literature, are difficult to resolve. But one can measure the outside boundaries of the Encyclopedie 's reader ship, even if one cannot get inside the minds of the readers. First it is necessary to calculate the economic limits of the consumption pattern; then it should be possible to chart the geographical and social distribution of the quarto editions. The Encyclopedie became smaller in size and cheaper in price as it progressed from edition to edition. While the for mat shrank from folio to quarto and octavo, the subscription price fell from 980 to 840, 384, and 225 livres. At the same time, the size of the pressruns increased-from 4,225 and 2,200, in the case of the two folio editions, to more than 8,000 quartos and 6,000 octavos. Having satisfied the "quality market,'' the publishers tried to reach a broader public by producing in quantity. They made this strategy explicit in their commercial correspondence: ''Le format in-folio sera pour les grands seigneurs et les bibliotheques, tandis que l 'in quarto sera a la portee des gens de lettres et des amateurs dont la fortune est moins considerable.' ' They also empha sized it in their advertising. Throughout their work they had 61. Favarger to STN, Aug. 15, 1778. Gaudion considered Favarger 's Bible impious because it was a Protestant edition. 62. For the sources of this information see Chapter I. 63. STN to Rudiger of Moscow, May 31, 1777. 273 The Business of Enlightenment been guided by "vues economiques," they explained in the prospectuses. They wanted to bring the Encyclopedie within the reach of ordinary readers, who could profit most from it and who had been repelled at the luxe of the folio editions. The elimination of typographical luxury was a theme that would appeal to the values as well as the purses of a middle class public, and it became possible as a policy by the elimina tion of most of the plates-plates which looked pretty but had no usefulness, the prospectus explained, because they never could be complex enough to improve any artisan's technical skills, and they were often so simple-as to be unnecessary. Who needed engravings of everyday objects like hammers and bellows~ If compared physically with the folio editions, the quarto stands out by its simplicity and sobriety, its flimsy paper, modest margins, and undistinguished type. Duplain did not go to the magnificent mills of the .J ohannot and Mont golfier firms for paper but to second-rank supplies scattered throughout France and Switzerland. He did not order type from Fournier le jeune of Paris, the most elegant founder in Europe, but from Louis Vernange, a capable but pedestrian provincial. Even the printing of the quarto looks sloppy in comparison with that of its predecessors. A close examination of any set will reveal a profusion of workers' finger prints, overinked pages, misfolded sheets, badly made register, and typographical errors. The quarto was a rushed job, done on the cheap; and the octavo was even worse. If stood next to its sister editions, it looks like a poor stepchild, ragged, blotchy, and unkempt. Not only did the publishers cut frills as they cut costs, they tailored their book to fit the plainest provincial library. The Encyclopedie had gone from one ex treme to another. Its typographical metamorphoses suggest that after having been originally aimed at an audience of seigneurs and sophisticates, it had penetrated into the re motest sectors of the reading public. The'' democratization'' of the Encyclopedie had limits, how ever, because even the cheapest edition would have seemed ex pensive to the common people. One can see how far beyond their reach it remained by translating its price into bread, 64. These phrases, which recurred in all the prospectuses and notices, are quoted from the first "Grand prospectus," published by the STN in the Journal helvetique of May 1777, pp. 76, 78. 65. These remarks are based on the examination of several sets in libraries in Switzerland, Franee, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. 274 Diffusion the basic element of their diet. A first folio was worth 2,450 loaves of bread, a quarto 960 loaves, and an octavo 563 loaves, the standards of measurement being the subscription prices of the book and the ''normal'' price of 8 sous for a four pound loaf of ordinary bread in prerevolutionary Paris. An unskilled laborer with a wife and three children would have had to buy at least 12 loaves a week to keep his family alive and would have earned about a livre a day, when he could find work. Even in good times and even when the wife or children had jobs, half the family's income would have gone for bread. A "cheap" octavo represented almost a year of this precari ous food budget, a quarto a year and a half, a folio four years. It would have been about as likely for a laborer to buy an Encyclopedie-even if he could read it-as for him to pur chase a palace. Skilled artisans-locksmiths, carpenters, and compositors-made 15 livres in a good week. Judging from signatures on marriage certificates and from inventaires apres deces, they often managed not only to read books but also to buy them. But they could not have bought any Encyclopedies, for a first folio represented sixty-five weeks of labor, a quarto twenty-six weeks, and an octavo seventeen weeks. Diderot's work remained beyond the purchasing power of the "labor aristocracy," including the men who printed it. But the men who wrote it, the ''Gens de Lettres '' invoked on its title page, could have purchased the cheaper editions. Diderot himself made an average of 2,600 livres a year for his thirty years of labor on the Encyclopedie. A quarto would have cost him seven and a half weeks of his wages and an octavo four and a half-not an extravagant sum, considering that he had other sources of income. Many lesser writers en joyed greater wealth than Diderot, thanks to patrons and pensions. B. J. Saurin, a typical figure from the upper ranks 66. The above information on artisans' ''budgets'' and bread prices comes from the work of C.-E. Labrousse, Pierre Leon, Albert Soboul, and George Rude. See particularly, Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1932), pp. 447-463, 582-606 and the forthcom ing treatise on bread and bakers by Steven L. Kaplan, who gave me a generous preview of it. For estimates on literacy, which are even trickier than those on bread consumption, see Michel Fleury and Pierre Valmary, "Les progres de I 'instruction elementaire de Louis XIV a Napoleon III d 'apres l 'enquete de Louis Maggiolo (1877-1879)," Population, XII (Jan.-March 1957), 71-92 and Fran~ois Furet and W. Sachs, "La croissance de I 'alphabetisation en France XVIIIe-XIXe siecle," Annales. E.S.C., XXIX (May-June 1974), 714-737. 67. Jacques Proust, Diderot et l'Encyclopedie (Paris, 1967), pp. 59, 81-116. 275 The Business of Enlightenment of the Republic of Letters, now deservedly for gotten, made 8,600 livres a year in pensions and gratifications. He could have treated himself to a quarto, the equivalent of two and a third weeks' income. The octavo was for hack writers like Durey de Morsan, a literary adventurer who lived off the crumbs from Voltaire's table and wrote as '' un des souscrip teurs zeles '' of Lausanne and Bern: ''Le nombre des littera teurs pauvres surpasse de beaucoup celui des lecteurs opu lents. Je suis charme, en mon particulier, que cet ouvrage, ci devant tr op cher, n 'excede pas les facultes des demi-indulgents tels que moi. J e voudrais que la porte des sciences, des arts, des verites utiles flit ouverte jour et nuit a tous les humains qui savent lire.' ' It is impossible to produce typical figures for the wide vari ety of incomes among the middling classes of the provinces, but the following calculations should give some idea of what the purchase of an Encyclopedie would have represented for persons located well below the great noblemen and financiers and well above the common people. Although cures received only 500 livres as their portion congrue after 1768, their an nual income often amounted to 1,000-2,000 livres. The pur chase of a folio Encyclopedie would have absorbed twenty-five weeks of a prosperous cure's revenue, a quarto ten weeks. Magistrates of the bailliage courts stood at the top of the legal profession among provincial bourgeois and often earned 2,000-3,000 livres a year : a folio was worth seventeen weeks of their income, a quarto seven weeks. To live noblement a bourgeois had to count on at least 3,000-4,000 livres a year in rentes: a folio represented thirteen weeks of his income, a quarto five weeks. In each case, the difference between the cost of the folio and the quarto corresponded to the difference be tween an extravagance and a manageable luxury. Duplain had pitched his price at just the right level for the Encyclo pedie to penetrate beyond the restricted circles of the wealthy avant-garde in which it had originally been confined and to 68. Robert Darnton, ''The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Prerevolutionary France," Past and Present, no. 51 (1971), 87. 69. Durey de Morsan to Ostervald, April 17, 1778. 70. The calculations are based on information in Marcel Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France aua; XV II e et XV I II e siecles (Paris, 1923), p. 446 ; Henri See, La France economique et sociale au XV Ille siecle (Paris, 1933), pp. 64-66, 162; and Philip Dawson, Provincial Magistrates and Revolutionary Politics in France, 1789-1795 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), chap. 3. 276 Diffusion reach a general public of professional people and small-town notables. The accuracy of that calculation became clear from the re sponse to the subscriptions. As already explained, the orders poured in at such a rate that Duplain was overwhelmed and Panckoucke could hardly believe it: '' C 'est un succes incroy able. 'm The STN proclaimed the quarto to be the greatest coup in the history of publishing. And reports from book sellers confirmed that view. In Rouen Machuel found the quarto to be "repandu partout"; Rigaud corn!idered it "bien repandu'' in Montpellier; from Maestricht DuFour reported, '' Il n 'est pas d 'ouvrage si universellement repandu''; Res plandy described it in Toulouse as a work "dont nos rues sont pavees''; and d 'Arnal echoed in Lyons, ''Notre ville en est pavee. 'm The octavo sold even better, at least until the con fiscations of its shipments discouraged the subscribers. Lair of Blois reported that a traveling salesman for Lausanne and Bern had gathered 3,000 subscriptions in a quick tour of a few provinces and that the octavo's price had made it a dangerous competitor of the quarto. Similarly, Gaston of Toulouse wrote that he could have sold twice as many octavos as quartos if the publishers' intrigues had not undercut his efforts: J 'en plagai 182 exemplaires [of the quarto] dans trois semaines de temps. J e me trouve souscripteur de 104 exemplaires de cette meme Encyclopedic qui s'imprime a Lausanne en format in-octavo; et si on n 'en avait annonce deux autres in-octavo et une in-folio--savoir une que les libraires de Toulouse font imprimer a Nimes chez M. Gaude et les deux autres s 'imprimant a Liege sous le titre d 'Amsterdam-il est tres assure que j 'en aurais place au moins 400 de celle de Lausanne. Reports such as these convinced the quarto publishers that they had been wrong to dismiss the octavo as an absurd ''En cyclopedie de poche.'' They had failed to foresee that the 71. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 8, 1777. 72. STN to Panckoucke, Aug. 20, 1778. 73. Machuel to STN, March 31, 1780; Rigaud to STN, Nov. 22, 1779; Dufour to STN, Aug. 2, 1780; Resplandy to STN, Jan. 2, 1778; and d'Arnal to STN, Nov. 12, 1779. 74. Lair to STN, Nov. 11, 1778: "M. Witel, gendre de M. Fauche leur associe, m 'a dit qu 'il en avait vendu plus de 3,000 dans le pen de provinces de la France qu 'il n 'a fait que traverser, sans ceux qu 'il esperait de placer a Paris, ou il s 'est rendu en sortant d 'ici 14 septembre.'' 75. Gaston to STN, April 6, 1778. Although none of these annonces ever came to anything, they illustrate the extent of the demand for cheap Encyclopedies and the scrambling among the booksellers to exploit it. 277 The Business of Enlightenment public would put up with its small type in order to take ad vantage of its reduced price, they confessed to one another. ''Si nous en croyons quelques amis, l 'entreprise, quoique ridi cule, ne laissera pas que de reussir, tant le bon marche a d'at trait pour le plus grand nombre, c 'est-a-dire pour les sots, qui le forment toujours,'' the STN warned Panckoucke early in the quarto-octavo war. And Panckoucke replied that the octavo would indeed succeed, ''a cause du bas prix et du gout constant du public pour cet ouvrage. 'n Pricing therefore proved to be crucial in the process by which the Encyclopedie came within the range of ordinary readers. Duplain had sus pected that somewhere in the grand public a sizeable demand for the book lay latent. He had tried to tap it by offering the quarto at 39 percent of the price of the folio. And he found to his surprise that he had struck a vein of gold, one that ran even deeper and farther than he had suspected, for the octavo publishers outdid him in exploiting it by selling their Encyclo pedie at 59 percent of the price of his. But where exactly was this public located, and how was it composed~ The Sales Pattern Grand public is one of those phrases that the French use to indicate that they have subjected unexplored territory to the suzerainty of rational discourse. In fact, very little is known about the extent, composition, and tastes of the audience for books in the early modern era, when mass literacy and market research did not exist. Duplain was shooting in the dark when he sent out his prospectuses and traveling salesmen; but every time he made contact with the demand for Encyclopedies, he kept a record of it. His subscription list covers virtually all the quartos (8,010 sets) and about 60 percent of all the En cyclopedies that existed in France before 1789. So by trans posing the list onto a map (see Appendix Band Figure 5), one can get a clear view of the Encyclopedie market in eighteenth century France. The picture is not completely accurate, however, owing to four factors. First, it does not do justice to the Parisian market. Panckoucke and Duplain expected to sell a great many quartos in the capital, and when they failed to do so, each 76. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 18, 1777, and Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1777. 278 Perigueux. · Tunn Bergerac ••••• Bordeaux '--.Marmande · ... ·· .. · Auch eAire • 9arb11 . ··· .. ··\ .. ·\ ... ~ . 500 . 200 100 . 0 0 Q O ~ subscn~.oons I 100 Km Figure 5. The Diffusion of the Quarto, France and the French Borderland The Business of Enlightenment blamed the other : Duplain accused Panckoucke of slack sales manship, and Panckoucke claimed that Duplain's sloppy man agement had alienated the Parisians, who would not buy badly printed books. Although there was some validity to each of those arguments, Panckoucke probably put his finger on the main explanation when he observed that '' PariR regorge des precedentes editions.' m The first two folio editions appealed primarily to the luxury market of the court and capital, whereas the quarto suited more modest provincial purses: thus the failure of the quarto in Versailles, a large city of 30,000, which absorbed only 5 subscriptions, in contrast to its success in Lyons, which had about a fifth of the population of Paris and accounted for almost twice as many subscriptions. The spectacular sales in Lyons may also be attributed to a second factor, which may distort the map: the uneven effec tiveness of the bookdealers as Encyclopedie salesmen. Duplain and his agents outdid themselves as retailers in their home ter ritory, and so did two other dealers, Lepagnez of Besangon and Gaston of Toulouse, who operated in cities with an unusually high density of subscriptions. Thirdly, the density of booksellers themselves varied. For example, the Sartine survey of 1764 and the Almanach de la of 1780 show that a heavy population of booksellers librairie existed throughout Flanders and Artois in comparison with the Franche-Comte. A northerner might subscribe through a dealer in any one of several towns, including the important centers of the book trade across the border, but a Comtois would not be likely to place his order anywhere except in Besangon or Dole. Actually, however, very few Frenchmen ordered their quartos from outside the country. Plomteux of Liege reported mediocre sales, and the STN did not sell many quartos from its own stock in eastern France. The French bookdealers confined their sales to their local or regional mar- 77. Panckoucke to STN, April 25, 1779. Duplain complained about his partners' selling in a letter to the STN of Jan. 21, 1779: "Si vous et M. Panckoucke vous donniez autant de mouvements que nous, vous reconnaitriez aisement que ce livre est encore le meilleur des livres et se vendra jusqu 'au dernier . . . Mais M. Pane· koucke ne se donne pas de mouvements.'' Panckoucke expressed his complaints in a letter to Duplain of Dec. 22, 1778, in the Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148: "Yotre edition est deja si decriee que je doute tt·es fort que je parvienne a placer les 500 exemplaires. II parait que c 'est un cri gen eral ... J e presume bien que j 'en pourrai placer ici quelques cents, mais ] 'edi tion n 'est pas estimee, et on aime ici la grande correction.'' See similar remarks in Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 24, 1778, and March 18, 1779. 280 Diffusion ket and did not pass their Encyclopedies on to other retailers, because the quarto partners kept the wholesaling in their own hands. But the hinterlands served by the retailers varied in size, and those variations should put one on guard against a fourth factor: the map underrepresents rural subscriptions because Duplain entered only the names of booksellers, not their clients, on his subscription list, and the booksellers almost al ways lived in cities. The circles on the map therefore repre sent zones of regional diffusion, not precise points of demand. Besan~on (338 subscriptions) did not really dwarf Lille (28 subscriptions) by as much as it seems because about a third of the Bisontin subscribers came from outlying towns and vil lages. Even so, the disparity between the two cities looks enor mous, especially if one considers their population-about 28, 700 in the ca~e of Besan~on and 61,400 in the case of Lille. Why did the book sell so much better in some places than in others? · Any attempt to explain the sales pattern involves some treacherous steps: the argument may collapse where the sta tistical base is too thin, or it may slide off course in pursuit of spurious correlations. But research on the Old Regime has reached such an advanced state that one can draw on a kind of cultural geography in order to propose some tentative interpretation. In general, it seems clear that the quarto reached every corne·r of the country, including the remote areas of the Pays Basque and the Massif Central. Its diffusion corresponded fairly well to the density of the population on a national scale, despite important discrepancies from city to city. Sales were concentrated in the great provincial capitals and scattered about smaller cities in secondary zones of dif- 78. The quantitative and geographical study of eighteenth-eentury French culture goes back to Daniel Mornet, F. de Dainville, and the Maggiolo survey of literacy cited above in note 66. Its more recent variations include research on the book trade (see espeeia.Ily Fran~ois Furet and others, Livre et societe dans la France du XVIIle siecle [Paris and The Hague, 1965-70], 2 vols.), on educa tion (see Roger Chartier, Dominque Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compere, L'edu cation en France du XVle au XVllle siecle [Paris, 1976]), and on the intellec tual elite of the provinces (see the series of articles by Daniel Roche culminating in his magisterial thesis, Le siecle des lumieres en pr011ince . .A.cademies et acade miciens pro11i11ciaua:, 1680-1789 [Paris and The Hague, 1978]). The following account makes use of all this work. For population statistics, the census of 1806, despite its late date, remains the most reliable overall indicator of population around 1780. See Rent~ Le Mee, ''Population agglom6r6e, population 6parse au d6but du XIXe sieele,'' .A.nnales de demographie historique (1971), pp. 455-510. 281 The Business of Enlightenment fusion, but they do not demonstrate the existence of a ''Mag giolo line" of literacy, dividing a semiliterate south-southwest from a progressive north-northeast. Instead, the map shows a fertile crescent of Encyclopedies, curving through the Midi from Lyons to Nimes, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, just where Favarger found the market to be richest. Actu ally, one would not expect much correlation between minimal literacy-the mere ability to sign a marriage certificate, as measured in the Maggiolo survey-and the sophisticated mas tery of reading necessary to make use of the Encyclopedie. So it may not be significant that the quarto had only a mild suc cess in northeastern France, where Maggiolo found literacy to be most advanced. But Maggiolo 's findings have been con firmed, with some modification, in recent studies of education in the eighteenth century; and those studies show that primary and secondary schools were scarcest in the area where the quarto's sales were weakest-that is, in the southwestern circle formed by the Loire and the Garonne, with Limoges at its center and tangential stretches of cultural desert running through Brittany and the Landes. It is difficult to correlate sales with cities because urban centers had so many different characteristics under the Old Regime, and it would be arbitrary to attribute the quarto's success to one element in the population rather than another. Bordeaux, for example, was the site of a parlement, an in tendancy, an archbishopric, an academy, and a port. As it ranked fourth in population and four th in sales of the quarto, the incidence of the sales hardly seems surprising; but it can not be explained by labeling Bordeaux as a legal, administra tive, religious, cultural, or C'ommercial center, for it was all of those at once. Certain characteristics predominated m some of the smaller cities, however. In many cases the size of their population does not correspond to the sales of the quarto, even after one makes allowances for the distorting factors mentioned above. If the discrepancies point in the same direction, it might be possible to formulate some hy potheses about the nature of the market for the Encyclopedie. In Appendix C the thirty-seven largest cities have been ranked 79. See Chartier, Julia, and Compere, L 'education en France, chaps. 2 and 3 and especially the map of schools run by the Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes on p. 79, which corresponds fairly well with the map of the diffusion of the quarto Encyclopedie. 282 Diffusion according to both the number of their subscriptions and the size of their population, and data about the existence of parle- ments, intendancies, and academies have been compiled. Cases in which sales were disproportionate to population stand out in the fallowing table, which illustrates contrasts between pairs of cities. Capital Popu- Sub- Parle- A cad- of Gene- lation scriptions ment emy ralite Bordeaux 92,966 356 x x x Nantes 77,226 38 x Lille 61,647 28 x Toulouse 51,689 451 x x x Ami ens 39,853 59 x x Nancy 30,532 121 x x x Clermont- Ferrand 30,982 13 Renn es 29,225 218 x x Besarn;on 28,721 338 x x x Toulon 28,170 22 Brest 22,130 20 Grenoble 22,129 80 x x x Dijon 22,026 152 x x x Limoges 21,757 3 x Despite the arbitrariness involved in any set of compari sons, the table suggests two general tendencies: cities in which sales were high in relation to population tended to be pri marily administrative and cultural centers, and cities where sales were low in relation to population tended to be pri marily commercial and industrial centers. If one goes over the subscription list with that formula in mind, it seems clear that the quarto sold best in cities with parlements and academies. The only cases that ran counter to this trend are Metz and Aix-en-Provence, parliamentary cities that had an exceptionally thin density of subscriptions; but this aberration may be explained by the unusual character of their book trade. The powerful booksellers' guild of Nancy, 283 The Business of Enlightenment led by Mathieu and Babin, had almost destroyed the dealers of Metz; and the Marseillais, led by an aggressive bookseller called Mossy, dominated the trade in Aix. The quarto also sold well in seats of intendancies and other important adminis trative bodies such as the estates of Languedoc, which met in Montpellier; but there are too many counter examples, like Lille and Limoges, for one to make much of this tendency. And to a certain extent, subscriptions flourished in Protestant cities: Nimes, Montepellier, Montauban, and La Rochelle. In the case of Montauban, which ranked fifteenth in subscriptions and twenty-fifth in population, the connection between Protes tantism and Encyclopedism seems to have been particularly strong: 78 of the 105 quartos sold there were subscribed through Crosilhes, a dealer who catered to a Huguenot clientele and who often ordered the works of Voltaire and Rousseau along with Protestant editions of the Bible and Psalms. Buchet and Gaude, who collected all but 3 of the 212 subscriptions in Nimes, also dealt heavily in Protestant and Enlightenment literature; so their subscribers probably included a large pro portion of Huguenots. And one Huguenot subscriber, a mer chant in Sedan called Bechet de Balan, indicated an affinity between his religious beliefs and his interest in the Encyclo pedie by the way he placed his order: J e vous prie ... de me faire passer . . . ce Dictionnaire encyclopedique dont vous m'avez parle et relie proprement en veau; y joindre s.v.p. quel ques sermons des meilleurs pour lire dans nos heures de de votion le dimanche en famille.' ' Of course the special appeal 80. The quarto also sold badly in Colmar, which had a Conseil Superieur, and in Strasbourg, the nucleus of the book trade in Alsace. But the Alsatian trade was oriented more toward Germany than France, despite the Frenchification of the elite of the province. It may be, too, that the Encyclopedie d 'Yverdon, which was strictly prohibited from central France, outsold the quarto in Alsace. 81. The peculiar mixture of Protestant and Enlightenment books in the orders of Buchet, Gaude, and Crosilhes is clear from dozens of their letters to the STN. On Sept. 5, 1776, for example, Buchet ordered twenty-six copies of a Protestant Bible and thirteen copies of Le Christianisme devoile. On March 30, 1779, he complained about the severity of the inspections in the local guild, ''qui ne laisse rien entrer dans nos magasins de ce qui est susceptible d'etre arrete. Comme cette Bible (n'est) pas toleree par le fanatique [sic], qui compose cette nouvelle in quisition, on ne manquera pas ile faire un proces verbal et de m 'interdire pour toujours, si je n 'avais la sage precaution de l 'eviter.'' Nime 's population of 41,195 made it the eleventh largest city in France, and it came ninth in the ranks of the Encyclopedie subscriptions-a good showing in comparison with Orleans, which was a little larger in population but took only half as many Encyclopedies. 82. Bechet de Balan to STN, March 9, 1777. 284 Diffusion of the Encyclopedie for Huguenots does not mean that it lacked attraction for Catholics. On the contrary, it sold especi ally well in some intensely Catholic cities, which had large en dowments of ecclesiastical institutions, notably Angers, Char tres, and Auch. The population of Angers, an administrative center where the clergy was exceptionally influential, came to only a third of that in Nantes, a great commercial city only a short distance down the Loire. Yet the Angevins bought nearly three times as many quartos as the N antais. The relative failure of the subscription campaign in Nantes -Nantes ranked sixth in population and thirty-eighth in sales of the quarto-seems extraordinary, except that it failed just as badly in other port cities. The quarto sold poorly in Le Havre, Brest, Sete, and Toulon, and did not sell at all in Lorient, Saint-Malo, Cherbourg, Dieppe, Calais, and Dun kerque. It did fairly well in Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Rouen, but not if one considers their population. Marseilles ranked third in population and sixth in subscriptions, far behind Toulouse and Besanc;on, which were much smaller cities. And Bordeaux and Rouen were seats of parlements and academies, in which an old-fashioned patriciate set the tone of intellectual life, often to the exclusion of the merchants. Manufacturing cities gave the Encyclopedie a still worse reception. With the exception of Cambrai, the quarto sold very badly in all the great textile centers of the North. Population Subscriptions Lille 61,467 28 Ami ens 39,853 59 Reims 31,779 24 Saint-Omer 20,362 5 Valenciennes 19,016 Abbeville 17,660 Cambrai 15,608 57 13,183 8 Beauvais Sedan 10,838 2 Saint-Quentin 10,535 16 83. On the predominance of the church !n the life of Angers see John Mc· Manners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the .tfncien Regime • ..4 Study of .tfngera in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, Eng., 1960). 285 The Business of Enlightenment Heavy industry had not developed much in France by 1780, so it may not seem surprising that few Encyclopedies were sold in the industrial cities of the future: 13 copies in Cler mont-Ferrand and Saint-Etienne and none at all in Roubaix, Tourcoing, and Mulhouse. There was some manufacturing in a few cities with high Encyclopedie sales-metallurgy in Gre noble and textiles in Tours, Nimes, and Montpellier. But the only clear case of a manufacturing and commercial center in which the sales of the quarto rose disproportionately above the size of the population was Lyons. Lyons, however, was a special case, not only because it served as the headquarters of the quarto enterprise but also, as will be seen, because Duplain tampered with the subscriptions in his home territory. It is tempting, therefore, to advance a general hypothesis: the Encyclopedie did not especially appeal to merchants and manufacturers but rather to a heterogeneous public of noble men, clerics, and a group sometimes identified as the bourgeoi sie d' Ancien Regime-that is, notables, rentiers, officials, and professional persons, as distinct from the modern industrial bourgeoisie. Thus BesanQon and Lille may indeed represent opposite extremes in the literary market place: on the one hand, an old-fashioned city, encrusted with institutions of the state and church; on the other, a city ready for the leap into tne nineteenth century, unencumbered by tradition. It seems odd that the Encyclopedie sold so much better in the former than the latter-unless one sees the book as a representative product of the Old Regime rather than a prophetic work about the new. Still, speculative map-reading and slippery correla tions between sales and cities do not provide material for sound conclusions. One can only use them to formulate a hypothesis-the Encyclopedie appealed primarily to a tradi tional mixed elite, rather than to the commercial and indus trial bourgeoisie-which can be tested against two remaining sources of evidence: the subscription record of the Franche Comte, where the social distribution of the quarto can be studied in detail, and the letters of the booksellers, where one can catch a few glimpses of the quarto's readers. 84. See Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Regime (Paris, 1969), I, chap. 10. 85. That the two cities may be taken to epitomize the two extremes is clear from recent work in urban history, notably Claude Fohlen, Histoire de Besangon (Paris, 1965) and Louis Trenard, Histoire d'une metropole. Lille. Roubaix. Tourcoing (Toulouse, 1977). 286 Diffusion Subscribers, A Case Study During the century after its incorporation in the kingdom (1674), Besangon acquired a set of institutions that made it look like a perfect specimen of the provincial capitals of the Old Regime-a military gouvernernent, a parlement, a bureau des finances, an academy, a university, and a host of judicial and fiscal offices. It acquired so many of them, in fact, that it seemed to be all superstructure. Aside from a textile manu factory, which employed twenty-eight artisans, it had no in dustry of any importance, and its commerce existed largely to supply the needs of the soldiers, parlementaires, lawyers, and royal officials who poured into the city in the wake of Louis XIV, doubling its population and transforming its appearance. Elegant town houses, in the style of Louis XV and Louis XVI, grew up along the four main streets, which ran parallel through the center of the town between the im posing, neoclassical intendancy to the south and the vast new Caserne Saint-Paul to the north. Religious edifices prolifer ated to such an extent that perhaps one-fourth of the land within the city walls belonged to the church-that is, to the archbishopric and the cathedral chapter, the seven richly endowed parishes (the church of Saint-Pierre had. forty-one priests and sixty-eight chapels attached to it), and a dozen or so monasteries and convents. It was hardly possible to cross a street in Besangon without seeing someone wearing a robe or a sword. About one out of every forty persons be longed to the regular or secular clergy, and one in every seven served in the army. (The population had reached 32,000 by 1789, of whom about 800 were religious and 4,500 were soldiers.) The local almanach gives the impression that the town contained nothing but monks, priests, soldiers, magis trates, lawyers, and officeholders. It lists 73 councilors and 18 other officials in the parlement, 157 lawyers and attorneys, 37 members of the bailliage court, 17 receveurs des finances, 22 members of the Bureau des finances including 10 tresoriers de France, 16 top officials in the intendancy, 19 municipal coun cilors and aldermen, 15 administrators in the Direction des Fermes, and so on, through a maze of offices in the Eaux et Forets, the Domaines et Bois du Roi, the Regie Generale, the Poudres et Ralpetres, the Monnaie, the J uridiction consulaire, and many more. These were the men who sat in Besangon's academy, patronized its theater, joined its three masonic 287 The Business of Enlightenment lodges, and sent their sons to its flourishing, ex-Jesuit College and its university. But who read its books'? By 1780, the vast majority of the Bisontins-95 percent of the men and 60 percent of the women -could read; and the town had a public library and a cabinet litteraire as well as four booksellers. Although little is known about the cultural life of the artisans, shopkeepers, and other petites gens who made up the bulk of the population, they probably remained intensely Catholic; for local historians stress that the Counter Reformation continued as a powerful force throughout the province and its capital until the end of the century, unchecked by Jansenism or the Enlighten ment. In short, prerevolutionary Besangon seems to have been a closed and conservative little world-an outpost of Bourbon bureaucracy in a remote and backward province, the last place in which one would expect to find much of a market for the Encyclopedie. The market did not look promising to the town's leading booksellers, Charmet and Lepagnez cadet-at least not at first. ''Ce livre avait beaucoup de succes en bien des pays, mais il ne me parait pas qu'il prenne ici," Charmet observed. He did not even try to sell any subscriptions, and Lepagnez doubted that he could sell more than two dozen. After a few weeks of sounding his customers, however, Lepagnez began to realize that he had under-estimated the demand. He asked the STN to rush as many prospectuses as possible to him in early June 1777, and for the next six months his letters serve as a measure for the spread of the Encyclopedie fever throughout Besangon and its hinterland. By June 10, he had sold his two dozen subscriptions and thought he might sell four. By June 20, he had made 48 sales and by June 30, 72, even though he had not dared to use the STN 's prospectuses, owing to their poor paper. Attractive prospectuses on good paper were essential to his sales campaign, he explained; so he had 86. The above account is based on the Almanaoh historique de Besan<;on et de la Franohe-Comte pour l'annee 1784 (Besani;on, 1784) and from Fohlen, His toire de Besan<;on. Fohlen characterizes Besan~on as '' une ville . . . ou les idees philosophiques avaient relativement peu penetre, l 'attachement aux traditions etait fortement enracine" (p. 260). 87. Charmet to STN, May 12, 1777, and Lepagnez to STN, May 13, 1777: '' 27 exemplaires sont bien suffisant pour Besani;on, meme en me donnant tout le mouvement possible.'' 288 Diffusion printed his own, hoping to collect still more subscriptions. By August 22, he had sold 154; a week later he expected to pass the 200 mark, and at the end of September he had reached 260 and was still going strong. Having sold 338 by November 19, he reported that he would not handle subscriptions for any other book until "le feu de l'Encyclopedie sera passe." He became stalled at that point for another year-not be cause the demand had been satiated, he claimed, but because of Laserre 's surreptitous cutting: '' Il est vrai que si l 'on eut ete assez adroit pour ne faire aucune suppression a la pre miere edition, j'en aurais place 600, et je n'aurais supporte aucuns reproches, au lieu que je n 'en ai place que 300 dont je rec;ois des reproches continuels. C 'est un fait vrai. '' · Evi dently many customers paid close attention to the text as well as the paper on which it was printed, and the attacks on the quarto had scared them off. Eventually Lepagnez and an allied bookseller from Dole called Chaboz collected 52 more subscrip tions, making 390 in all and finally exhausting the market. '' Ayant farci ma petite province de 390 exemplaires de votre Encyclopedie in-quarto . . . il n 'est plus possible de trouver place a aucune. Vous devez etre bien content, " Lepagnez . concluded in December 1779. Meanwhile, he had collected 100 subscriptions for an edition of Rousseau's works published by the Societe typographique de Geneve ; and he expected to sell 100 more, although he com plained that the book trade had gone into a severe slump. His competitor, Charmet, had left the Encyclopedie field to him but had dealt heavily in the works of d'Holbach, Hel vetius, and La Mettrie, thanks to the protection of the inten dant, Bourgeois de Boynes, who had agreed to burn fake copies of confiscated books in return for des civilites palpables specially bound editions of the philosophes, which he kept for 88. The paper of the prospectuses served as a model for that of the book, and Lepagnez emphasized that his customers paid a great deal of attention to the quality of the paper when they made purchases. Lepagnez to STN, June 30 and Aug. 28, 1777. 89. Lepagnez to STN, Feb. 28, 1779. 90. Lepagnez to STN, Dee. 14, 1779. 91. Lepagnez to STN, Aug. 30, 1780: "Ne eroyez pas, je vous prie, que je fais iei une grande eonsommation de livres. Je vous jure qu 'apr&! 1 'Hiatoire universel!e, l 'Histoire ecclesiastique, eelle de l 'Eglise gallieane, la Bible de Vance, l 'EMYclopedie et le Rousseau, le reste me laisse dans une vaeanee depuis deux ans.'' 289 The Business of Enlightenment his own library. Instead of being shut out of this tradition bound city, the Enlightenment had poured into it and had even penetrated its most powerful and prestigious sectors. The extent of the penetration can be measured from a sub scription list Lepagnez published in 1777 when he had accumu lated 253 subscriptions. As Duplain 's records show that Lepagnez 's final total of 390 subscriptions-which included 52 collected by Chaboz-were the only ones sold in the Franche-Comte, Lepagnez 's list covers 65 percent of the quartos in his province. It is particularly valuable because it identifies almost all the subscribers by qualite or occupa tion.93 Of the 253 subscribers listed by Lepagnez, 137 came from Besangon, the rest from smaller towns, mainly Dole, Pontarlier, Poligny, Vesoul, Arbois, Lons-le-Saunier, Gray, and Auxonne. Figures 6 and 7 illustrate their social position, according to estate and occupation. About half of the quarto customers in Besangon and two fifths of the others in the Franche-Comte belonged to the priv ileged orders. The graphs may overrepresent them slightly because a few of the military officers and councilors of the parlement may have been wrongly classified as noblemen. But the margin of error is too small to affect the proportions, and the importance of the privilegies seems even greater if one con siders their minority position within the population as a whole. By way of contrast, the artisans, shopkeepers, day laborers, and servants who made up about three-quarters of 92. Charmet to STN, Oct. 18, 1775. 93. The list was printed and bound into volume I of the copy of the quarto in the Bibliothilque nationale, Z.2658. It has been republished by John Lough in Essays on the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d 'Alembert (London, 1968), pp. 466- 94. Judging from their high rank and, in most cases, their aristocratic titles, the military subscribers did not contain any commoners, but some of the parle mentaires, who were mostly councilors in the traditionalist if not reactionary parlement of Besan<;on, could have belonged to families that had not yet attained hereditary nobility. See Jean Egret, "La revolution aristocratique en Franche· Comte et son echec (1788-1789)," Revue d 'histoire moderne et contemporaine, I (1954), 245-271. In his Histoire de Besant;on, p. 210, Claude Fohlen concludes, "Cette noblesse de robe tient le 'haut du pave,' en I 'absence d 'une noblesse d 'epee numeriquement peu importante et d 'une bourgeoisie presque inexistante"; but he does not cite any source for that statement. By compiling information from Besan<;on 's almanacs and other sources, Daniel Roche estimated the population of adult males as follows: clergy, 9.9 percent; nobility, 2.4 percent; liberal prof es· sions, nonnoble officeholders, and administrators, 4.5 percent; bourgeois rentiers, 3. 7 percent; merchants and manufacturers, 2.9 percent; and artisans, laborers, and servants, 76.1 percent. Les lumieres en province, '' Troisieme partie: Annexes et illustrations. '' 290 25 ,....._,, 15 1--1 Others Others Abbes 1--1 10 f----1 H Monks ,..----, Medicine 5 1--1 1-- 1--1 H Merchants Canons Other l 1 Cl Titled MTt Administration, Parle- Lo Administration, . . Other . 1 1 ~' nobility ory v Noblemen mentolres wyers Commoners Protessionsv Business employment Undetermm~ FIRST SECOND THIRD ESTATE ESTATE ESTATE (15) (53) (69) Figure 6. Subscribers to the Quarto in Besam;on 25 Others Abbh 15 I- Monks Canons 1-- 5 Cur•s I- I- 1-- I- 1-- Medicine Other 1 r Clergy Tit.led Military Administration, Parl~- Lawyers Administration, Professions Business Other Undetermined \.....-...y--J' nobility v Noblemen menta1res " Commoners v employment FIRST SECOND THIRD ESTATE ESTATE ESTATE (22) (26) (68) Figure 7. Comtois Subscribers Outside Besan~on Diffusion Besan<1on 's population do not appear at all among the quarto's subscribers; nor do the peasants and shopkeepers who formed the bulk of the population in the rest of the province. The petites gens simply could not afford the book. If it interested them, they might have consulted it in the cabinet litteraire or reading club organized by Lepagnez; and some of them may remain hidden in the ''undetermined'' category of the graphs. But the Encyclopedie appealed primarily to the traditional elite-the men connected with the ecclesiastical, military, and judicial institutions of Besan<1on. And, incidentally, the sub scribers were men; women accounted for only 3 of the 253 subscriptions on Lepagnez 's list. As a garrison town, Besan<1on might seem likely to provide a good many subscribers from the upper ranks of the army, but one would not expect to find so many of its clergymen among the subscribers for a book that remained on the Index. There they are, however, both regular and secular, not only seven chanoines de la Metropole but also nine curates from the outlying towns and villages. Perhaps they were sophisti cated men who could overlook the anticlericalism of the En cyclopedie in order to enjoy its intellectual riches, or perhaps they turned some of its sharpest remarks against their own superiors, for ideological ferment was spreading throughout the lower clergy on the eve of the Revolution, and the quarto did not attract any customers among the prelates of the Franche-Comte. Nonetheless, as the Counter Reformation had swept through the province with unusual force, it seems sur prising that 19 percent of the non-Bisontin subscribers should have been clerics. One wonders what went through the heads of Blanchot, cure de Bourguignon-la-Charite, and Porcherot, cure de J oux, when they turned over the pages of their quartos. The parlements had condemned the Encyclopedie as vocifer ously as the church, but twenty-two of Besan<1on 's subscribers were connected with its parlement, including thirteen council ors and three presidents. The book had a great appeal for men of the law, not only in Besan<1on, where 14 percent of the local lawyers bought it but also in the smaller towns, where lawyers formed the largest group of subscribers. Four of Besan<1on 's eighteen doctors subscribed, followed by various other professional persons-military engineers and archi tectes, a notary, an apothecary, and the principal of Besan- 293 The Business of Enlightenment <_;on 's important college. Royal officials subscribed almost as heavily as clergymen and lawyers, so the quarto reached some important figures in the province's power structure, including two lieutenants-criminels, three of the twelve subdelegues, and two of the four secretaires a l'intendance, if not the intendant himself. It did not sell well among businessmen outside Besan <_;on (they accounted for only 3 of the 116 subscribers), but the Bisontin subscribers included a dozen merchants, a direc teur general des Fermes, and the only manufacturer of the city, a certain Detrey, who ran a small textile business. Two of those businessmen, Detrey and Chazerand, served in the municipal government of 1793, and a subscriber called Rambour, who was controleur des entrees de la ville, led the rather mild Bison tin version of the Jacobin movement. Two subscribers who were canons of the Metropole also played leading parts in the Revolution, which produced a schism be tween the upper and the lower clergy of the province. The abbe Millot was elected as a deputy to the Estates General but re signed and then helped form the municipal government of 1790. And the abbe Seguin became constitutional bishop, a deputy to the Convention, and president of the depart mental directory. The fourteen deputies to the Estates General from the Third Estate of the Franche-Comte in cluded three subscribers (Bidault, lieutenant-criminel in the bailliage court of Poligny, and Blanc and Grenot, both lawyers in Besan<_;on); and its composition suggests the importance of the legal profession in the Comtois revoluti6n, for it in cluded six bailliage magistrates, seven lawyers, and one no tary. Of course, other subscribers, particularly those from Besan<_;on 's reactionary parlement, probably became counter revolutionaries and emigres. It would be absurd to conclude that because a few future revolutionaires can be identified from the subscription list, subscribers in general favored the Revolution-just as it would be misleading to make too much of the fact that Besan<_;on 's subscribers came primarily from its notables. Where else would they have come from? But it seems significant that such a heavy proportion of the ruling elite in such a remote province should have wanted to buy the Encyclopedie and should have wanted to buy it so badly. The f eu de l 'Encyclopedie, as Lepagnez called it, burned brightest among the traditional leaders of provincial society. 294 Diffusion Diffusion in France Does the case of the Franche-Comte bear out the hypothesis that the EncyclopMie had little appeal for the commercial bourgeoisie·~ Not entirely, for even though almost all of the quartos in Besan~on were bought by privilegies and bourgeois d'Ancien Regime, a small proportion went to the city's small merchant class. To be sure, one cannot support a general inter pretation with such slight statistics, and one cannot take Besan~on to typify France. Particularism went so deep under the Old Regime that no two provinces shared the same culture, and ''France'' itself was a geographical expression, often applied to the Parisian Basin or Ile de France. But the En cyclopedic market transcended regional boundaries, and something of its general character can be seen from the correspondence of the men who did the marketing. Although bookseller:;; rarely discussed their customers, merchants who dabbled in the book trade often included some observations about the reading public in their letters. Curiously, their worst customers came from their own kind-that is, from other merchants, as the following examples indicate. Barre, a merchant in Nantes: "Les negociants ne pensent guere a la litterature. '' Gosselin, a merchant in Lille: '' J e ne doute point, Monsieur, que vous ne trouviez dans le reste de la France de quoi vous dedommager ample ment du peu de gout qui regne dans notre ville pour la litterature. Nous commem;ons seulement a sortir de cette Iethargie qui a enchaine l'Europe pendant plusieurs siecles. Notre climat ou plutot notre sol n 'est point fecond en gens studieux ;. et il y a cinquante ans on n 'aurait pas trouve une seule bibliotheque passable dans tout Lille." Bechet de Balan, a merchant in Sedan:· "Notre ville n 'offre point d 'amateurs de litterature. Les libraires n 'y font rien . . . et je dirai a la honte de nos citoyens que l'esprit de vendre des draps et d'amasser est le seul qui les decore. Vous ne croiriez pas, Monsieur, qu'on dedaigne meme les talents et que l'on neglige d'en donner dans !'edu cation des enfants. Les arts agreables leur semblent une chose inutile." Volland, "ancien officier de la Reine" in Bar-le-Due: "J e ne prevois pas que vous puissiez les [the quartos] vendre ici, les ayant proposes a tout le monde ici, et personne jusqu 'ici n 'en est venu chercher un exemplaire. Ils sont plus avides de commerce que de lectures, et !'edu cation y est absolument negligee ... Vous ne trouverez pas le debit de VOS livres ici. MM. les nobles ne sont pas riches, et les negociants 295 The Business of Enlightenment aiment mieux apprendre a leurs enfants que 5 et 4 font 9 otez 2 reste 7 que de leur apprendre a faire le bel esprit.' ' These remarks might represent nothing more than social prejudice, but they were made by merchants about merchants. The letter writers did not seem to be trying to impress the directors of the STN, who were merchants also, and no other letters in the vast correspondence of the STN ref er to a pe culiar lack of demand for literature among any other social group. Moreover, the letters that deplored the cultural back wardness of merchants all came from towns where the sales of the quarto were disproportionately low. The STN never heard anything bad about the book-buying habits of the mer chants in Lyons and Marseilles. In fact, a bookseller in Mar seilles called Caldesaigues mentioned the occupation of his :first thirteen subscribers to the quarto, and nine of them were merchants. The other references to individual subscribers in the STN 's correspondence all concern notables and noblemen, but they are too rare and scattered to have much significance, except 95. Barre to STN, Sept. 15, 1781; Gosselin to STN, July 7, 1775; Bechet de Balan to STN, March 9, 1777; and Volland to STN, July 23, 1780. After em phasizing the lack of interest in literature among his fellow merchants in his letter of Sept. 15, 1781, Barre added, '' Cependant j 'ai de mes amis qui ne de daignent pas les lettres. '' He eventually sold sixteen sets of the quarto. His customers may have included some merchants because he remarked in a letter of Aug. 7, 1781, "J'en ai pourvu tous mes amis." However, Vallet fils aine, a book seller in Nantes, complained to the STN in a letter of Aug. 19, 1779, that he had great difficulty in selling the Encyclopedie; and Pelloutier, a N antais merchant, warned the STN in a letter of Feb. 2, 1785, not to expect any orders for books from the merchants of the Caribbean, '' contre oil on s 'occupe trop a gagner de l 'argent pour chercher a acquerir de l 'csprit.'' 96. For example, the STN received the following reports of sales: on July 9, 1777, from Harle of Saint-Quentin, a report of a sale to the comte de la Tour Du Pin Chambli; on Nov. 27, 1781, from Volland of Bar-le-Due, a sale to a "gentil homme" in Bar and to the chevalier de Jobart, capitaine reforme in Nancy; on Aug. 12, 1777, from Robert of Bar-le-Due, sales to the chevalier de Longeau, lieutenant des marechaux de France in Bar, to the Baron de Bouret, chevalier de Malte in Bar, to M. de Trouville, chanoine de la Madeleine in Verdun, and to Baudot, procureur du roi in Bar; on Feb. 7, 1781, from Entretien of Luneville, a sale to an unnamed lawyer; and on March 20, 1778, from Mondon of Verdun, sales to eight persons, '' tous de la premiere classe, '' including an '' officier du regiment de Bresse." On Oct. 1, 1778, Favarger reported a sale to Baillas de Lambrede, commis des guerres at Marmande near Toulouse; in an entry dated June 9, 1780, in Brouillard B, the STN noted a sale to a lawyer from Nancy called Le Gros, and in his subscription list Duplain identified six individual sub scribers: "le cure de Cherier," "Dusers, chevalier de Saint-Louis," "Guiget abbe de la Croix Rousse a Lyon,'' ''le comte d 'Orsey a Paris,'' '' lti comte de N euilly a Versailles," and "Giraud cure a Vichy." 296 Diffusion in two cases, which show how the Encyclopedie spread through particular milieux, thanks to the intercession of well-placed individuals. The first of these intermediaries was an artillery captain in Saint-Dizier called Champmorin de Varannes. He arranged to sell four quartos to other officers and offered to set himself up as a distributor of the STN 's books in military circles, where, he noted, there was great interest in the works of Rousseau. Although his proposal never came to anything, it illustrates the strong demand for Enlightenment literature among army officers, which also shows up in the letters of booksellers in garrison towns like Besan<;on, Metz, Verdun, and Montpellier. The second informal Encyclopedie salesman for the STN was a friend of Ostervald 's and a councilor in the Parlement of Paris called Boisgibault, who bought a quarto himself and sold three others to colleagues in the parle ment. Unlike Champmorin, he did not seek a commission but arranged the sales ''par le desir ardent que je vous connais aussi pour contribuer a la propagation des sciences et pour repandre un livre qui en est le depot.'' Boisgibault wrote as an admirer of Turgot and Malesherbes and also of Switzerland, where he hoped to travel in order to enjoy "le spectacle deli cieux de la liberte et de cette fierte noble qu 'elle inspire a tous les hommes, qu 'elle egalise.'' His role in the distribution of the Encyclopedie expressed an ideological commitment that may have been mainly rhetorical but seems to have spread rather widely among the younger pa,rlementaires, whose oppo sition to the government in 1787 and 1788 proved to be crucial in precipitating the Revolution. If it seems certain that the Encyclopedie appealed to some elements at the top of French society, it is impossible to know exactly where the downward penetration of the book stopped. Only once did a correspondent of the STN mention price as an obstaele to its diffusion. A Protestant schoolteacher in Caen, who kept body and soul together by a small, clandestine book business-though he described himself merely as '' un simple particulier qui tient un nombre de jeunes gens Protes tants en pension dont je desirerais de faire des citoyens utiles et vertueux' rns_informed the STN that he was too poor to buy 97. Boisgibault to STN, July 11, 1781, and April 4, 1781. On the parlement's role in the prerevolution see Jean Egret, La pre-revolution franQaise (1787- 1788) (Paris, 1962). 98. Chaudepied de Boiviers to STN, June 21, 1777. 297 The Business of Enlightenment the quarto. Most literate Frenchmen must have been excluded from the subscription list for the same reason, but thousands of them belonged to cabinets litteraires, where they could read as much as they wanted for as little as one and a half livres a month. Booksellers frequently set up these reading clubs sim ply by subscribing to a few periodicals, using their stock as a library, and arranging quarters behind their shop as a read ing room. Although it is difficult to know what went on inside them or who their members were, it seems probable that the cabinets litternires became important centers of idea diffusion in the late eighteenth century. In 1777 Nicolas Gerlache, a small bookseller in Metz, derived almost half his income from his cabinet. It had 379 members, and its library included the quarto Encycloped·ie as well as a good deal of illegal litera ture.99 Choppin of Bar-le-Due told the STN that he ordered the quarto specifically for his ca.binet litteraire. It kept com pany in his shop with the works of Rousseau, the Systeme de la nature, Le Compere Matthieu, Vie privee de Louis XV, and other prohibited books, which Choppin also bought from the STN, for he explained that "ce sont ces sortes d 'ouvrages dont j 'ai le plus de debit.' noo Buchet of Nimes, Lair of Blois, and Charmet of Besangon ordered the same material for their cabinets litteraires; several other booksellers who handled the quarto subscriptions probably did likewise; and their customers probably included many readers of modest means. As Mercier put it in his Tableau de Paris, "N'avez-vous point de bibliotheque? Pour quatre sols vous vous enfoncez dans un cabinet litteraire, et la, pendant une apres-dinee entiere vous lisez depuis la massive Encyclopedie jusqu 'aux feuilles vo lantes. ' What then can one conclude about the readership of the quarto in France? The subscriptions sold well among men of the robe and of the sword-parlementaires and army officers in particular. They sold even better among professional men lawyers above all and also administrative officials and clergy- 99. Gerlache described his cabinet in several letters to the STN, notably an undated letter received in May 1777. 100. Choppin to STN, April 25 and July 28, 1780. 101. L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1783-89), IV, 3. The profusion of cabinets litteraires deserves further study. For some additional references see Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Revolution fran ~aise (1715-1787), 5th ed. (Paris, 1954), pp. 310-312. 298 Diffusion men. But they sold badly among men who lived by trade and manufacturing, at least in the north and northeast and in most port cities, if not in Lyons and Marseilles. The example of Besarn;on, where merchants comprised a small but significant minority of the subscribers, should make one wary of equating trade with disinterest in literature. But that equation seemed valid to several of the STN 's correspondents, and several others mentioned only notables when they identified their sub scribers. Despite the inconclusive character of the evidence, therefore, it seems likely that the Encyclopedie had a far greater appeal for the bourgeoisie d' Ancien Regime than for the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. The evidence thins out when it comes to the circulation of the Encyclopedie among the common people. Shopkeepers and artisans might have had access to it in cabinets litteraires or by borrowing, and some of them might have been able to afford the octavo after it finally penetrated the French market, but they are never men tioned in any of the sources. Although one cannot exclude the possibility that the Encyclopedie reached a great many readers in the lower middle classes, its main appeal was to the tradi tional elite-the men who dominated the administrative and cultural life of the provincial capitals and small towns. Diffusion Outside France The quarto may have represented provincial Enlightenment in France, but it expressed enlightened cosmopolitanism everywhere else. Its sales pattern looks like an itinerary from a Grand Tour: London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Naples, Venice-and beyond, to Munich, Prague, Pest, vVarsaw, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Copenhagen, and Hamburg. It reached most of the great capitals of Europe, but it did not flood them, as it did when it arrived in the provincial capitals of France. The quarto spread itself too thinly to penetrate much of the non-French public. Yet its non French diffusion is worth studying because it shows how far the Encyclopedie vogue reached and whom it touched. The quarto publishers sold 7,257 copies of their book in France and 691 in the rest of Europe-that is, they provided more than half the Encyclopedies that existed in France be fore 1789 but less than 10 percent of the rest in Europe. The 299 The Business of Enlightenment continental market was supplied primarily by the first two folio editions and the octavo. The editions of Lucca and Leg horn, which together amounted to only 4,500 sets, seem to have sold mainly in Italy. And the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, though it was a very different book, creamed off much of the Encyclopedie market in the Low Countries. As these other editions accounted for the great majority of Encyclopedie sales outside France, the sales record of the quarto cannot be taken as a measure of Encyclopedie diffusion on a continental scale. When studied in company with the dossiers of the Euro pean booksellers, however, it provides a complete picture of the quarto's distribution. And that picture covers almost every corner of the European book trade, as Figure 8 illus trates. As might be expected, the density of quartos was thinnest in eastern Europe, and the letters from the booksellers of the east convey a sense of cultural as well as geographical remote ness. Weigand and Kopf of Pest, for example, wrote that they could not order many Encyclopedies. They had taken a few sets of the octavo and an Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, but not many of their customers could read languages other than Latin and Hungarian. The country had only begun to revive after centuries of Turkish oppression, and Enlightenment was spreading slowly. Notre etablissement n'est presque fonde que sur de livres d'assorti ment, le caractere universe! de la nation et d'un pays qui a ete envahi pendant des siecles entiers par des guerres cruelles et sanglantes, n 'etant pas encore assez pres du dernier degre de culture pour pro duire des auteurs qui puissent garantir les libraires des frais d 'impres sion . . . L 'Encyclopedie de laquelle vous nous faites une exacte de scription n 'est pas celle-ci dont la Societe de Berne nous a fourni quel ques tomes, et nous ne pouvons pas encore donner commissions de cet ouvrage. Cependant, nous en esperons donner dans peu de temps, l'ouvrage n 'etant encore que peu connu chez nous, surtout quand la liberte de penser et d'ecrire qui a ete rendue a notre heureux royaume par notre auguste souverain, se sera repandue dans les individus. In the end, Weigand and Kopf ordered only one quarto, and they were sorry they did. When it finally reached them after four months in entrepots and barges along the Lech and the Danube it took two years to sell. And after they turned it over to their customer, '' un des premiers seigneurs de notre pays," he discovered that it was missing six sheets. Although 300 • St Petersburg Moscow• ewersaw oMadrid 5 3 1 500 km .4 ·~· subscriptions Figure 8. The Diffusion of the Quarto Outside France This map is based on Duplain's subscription list and the STN's record of the sales that it made from its own stock-the 208 quartos that it received as its share of Panckoucke's 500 (for an explanation of that transaction see Chapter VII). Some of those sales took place after the dissolution of the quarto association in February 1780, when the agreement on maintaining a common wholesale price came to an end. At that time the STN and Panckoucke cut their prices and sold their surplus to other dealers, who in turn were able to act as wholesalers. The map does not, therefore, represent the final destination of all the quartos outside France, and it especially exaggerates the importance of four cities that mainly served as entrepots; Neuchatel, Geneva, Brussels, and Liege. In most other cases, however, it gives a fairly accurate indication of the quarto's diffusion throughout the Continent. The numbers represent areas where the subscriptions were too dense to be shown city by city : 1. The Netherlands: Amsterdam, The Hague, Haarlem, Leiden, Utrecht, Maastricht. 2. The Austrian Netherlands : Brussels, Ypres. 3. The Rhineland: Frankfurt, Homburg, Mannheim, Worms. 4. Switzerland: Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel, Nyons, Soleure. 901 The Business of Enlightenment the STN finally furnished replacements, they feared that the faulty merchandise had made them lose one of their most im portant clients. Christian Rudiger of Moscow had an equally difficult time with five folio Rncyclopedi.es, which he ordered from the STN on March 13, 1777. The STN shipped them on May 31, but they did not arrive until August 1778, owing to the onset of an early winter. They, too, were full of defets, which had to be replaced from Paris and did not arrive until late in 1779. But the Parisian supplier (probably Panckoucke) sent the wrong sheets. By the time the STN had straightened out this second snafu, it was well into 1781, and Rudiger had lost two of his customers. The STN tried to console him by offering the quarto, but he took only four sets. Instead of weighty litera ture, his customers favored '' nouveautes de la derniere frai cheur, surtout aussi dans le genre libre et gaillard, a figures indecentes. 'noa He even sent specially to Leipzig in order to have this frothy stuff hauled to him overland by sleigh during winter. Normally, he received his orders by ship, via Frank furt, Lubeck, and Saint Petersburg. 'Vith luck, he could get a letter to X euchatel in a month, and it could get its shipment back to him four months later. He paid in bills of exchange on Amsterdam, but his trade suffered badly from a decline in the Russian currency: the value of the ruble dropped from 40 to 36 Dutch fi.orins and the value of the French livre tour nois increased from 22 to 30 copecks during the 1780s. Despite all these difficulties, he imported huge quantities of French books. Evidently Diderot and Therese philosophe helped his customers get through the Moscow winters. The evenings of Saint Petersburg must have been nearly as long, and many of them were spent in reading, for J.-J. 'Veitbrecht, the most important bookseller of the city, ex plained to the STN, ''Nous ne vendons guere qu 'en hiver, pour lequel nous nous preparons seulement l 'ete. 'no Weit brecht served a court clientele that seemed to be eager for fashionable French literature, although it bought only five quartos. Charles Guillaume (or Karl -Wilhelm) Muller, an other bookseller of Saint Petersburg, dealt primarily in 102. Quotations from Weingand and Kopf to STN, Sept. 17, 1781, and March 6, 1784. 103. Riidiger to STN, July 12, 1787. 104. Weitbrecht to STN, Nov. 16, 1778. 302 Diffusion Russian books, but he ordered a great many Enlightenment works from the STN, including three quartos and some heavy doses of Voltaire and Rousseau. Muller claimed to do business with "tous les lecteurs de ce pays-ci." Although it is im possible to know who they were, they probably included a good many westernized courtiers and foreigners. They needed their books before November, when the ice closed around Saint Petersburg. And they were willing to pay dearly in order to have some contact, through the written word, with the world of the philosophes, for the books' price increased enormously in the course of their long trip. In fact it cost twice as much to send a letter from Neuchatel to Saint Peters burg ( 4 livres 10 sous) as to buy an ordinary book in the STN's home office (about 2 livres). The STN found it almost equally difficult to reach Warsaw, which was closer in space but not in time because shipments normally took three months, going by land via Strasbourg, Ulm, Krems, and Cracow. In Poland, as in Russia, the audi ence for French books seems to have been aristocratic. Only three booksellers in Warsaw carried French books; two of them, Michel Groll and Joseph Lex, timed their orders to coincide with the sessions of the Polish Diet, because as Lex explained, ''Elle attirera les seigneurs polonais.'' A Stras bourgeois who had come to \Yarsaw in search of his fortune in 1771, Lex had learned to profit from the spread of French culture in the east. He had become '' connu et bien vu de tout ce qu 'il y a de mieux dans cette ville'' by selling books to noblemen, while his sister sold dresses to their ladies. Thanks to a cabinet litteraire, which he had established with a subsidy from the king, he expected to find several customers for the quarto in this milieu: J'ouvre le premier du mois prochain un cabinet litteraire pour lequel la plupart des seigneurs de cette ville se sont abonnes. Je profiterai des occasions de leurs visites pour trouver des souscripteurs pour votre Encyclopedic dont le prospectus promet de tres grands avantages. Mais pour y reussir d 'autant mieux, il faudrait que vous eussiez la complaisance de m 'en faire passer au moins 3 exemplaires a mesure que l 'ouvrage sortira de presse. J 'en garderai un pour mon cabinet 105. Muller to STN, Aug. 17, 1778. Although the above statements about Muller's book orders sound vague, they and all similar remarks on literary de mand are based on a careful reading of voluminous dossiers, and could be sup ported by stl1tistics drawn up from the STN 's account books. 303 The Business of Enlightenment litteraire et trouverai aisement a placer les 2 autres. Par ce moyen j 'en vendrai a coup sftr beaucoup, attendu que lorsqu 'un seigneur a quel que ouvrage nouveau, les autres veulent aussitot l 'avoir aussi. Mais comme celui-ci est un peu couteux, je ne vous en demanderai, Messieurs, qu'a mesure que j 'en recevrai la commission; et je vous previens que je ne trouverai a en placer beaucoup que lorsqu 'une fois j 'en aurai un exemplaire sur les lieux. By pursuing this strategy, Lex soon sold thirteen quartos all of them, it seems, to Frenchified aristocrats. One copy went to the Russian ambassador, who required a special binding on which he stamped his coat of arms. For his part, Groll sold eighteen copies, despite some initial pessimism: ''II n 'y a rien a faire avec des grands ouvrages dans ce pays-ci. '' Thus both booksellers did rather well with the quarto, although they agreed that their clients preferred light literature: '' que des choses amusantes et interessantes, surtout pour les dames, et tout au plus 4 ou 6 exemplaires, peu d 'ouvrages profonds et serieux, '' according to Lex 's f ormula. Wolfgang Gerle of Prague also notified the STN that his customers did not care for anything too deep or too long: "Les grands seigneurs qui entendent le frarn;ais ne se soucient guere de ces sortes d 'ouvrages. '' He ordered five quartos in addition to at least two octavos and a dozen copies of the second folio. But these Encyclopedies represented only a tiny proportion of the books that he provided for French readers throughout the Habsburg empire. Unlike the dealers farther to the east, he seemed well informed about the western book trade. He frequented the Leipzig book fair and cultivated several Swiss suppliers, haggling knowledgeably over terms. But his shipments from Neuchatel often took two months to reach him, traveling via Basel, Schaffhausen, Ulm, and Niirn berg. The War of the Bavarian Succession brought his affairs to a standstill for a while in 1779 and deprived him of two quarto subscribers who were army officers. And he also had difficulties with subscribers, who did not want to pay for the four extra volumes, and with censors, who took their time about letting the quarto through customs. He seemed to op erate in the middle range of the international trade, half way between suppliers in the Low Countries and Switzerland, on 106. Quotations from Lex to STN, May 13, 1780; March 31, 1779; and Jan. 19, 1778; Groll to STN, June 16, 1781; and Lex to STN, March 31, 1779. 304 Diffusion the one hand, and consumers in outposts like Moscow and \Varsaw, on the other. The other German dealers also occupied this area, and they traded heavily in Encyclopedies, but not in the quarto. The quarto-octavo war had produced two distinct zones of in fluence in the international market: Panckoucke 's consortium concentrated on France, and the societes typographiques of Bern and Lausanne worked primarily in l'Allemagne, a term that they applied to everything east and north of the Rhine up to the Slavic countries. The Bernois had marketed most of their books in this territory for years. Their director, Pfaeh ler, had contacts in all the major German cities, including Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, where he regularly attended the book fairs, and Heidelberg, where his brother ran a book shop. Indeed, the N euchatelois thought that the octavo pub lishers had such a strong hold on the German market that they virtually gave up on it. But when the French market began to run dry, they attempted to cross the Rhine, using Swiss agents such as Serini of Basel, Petitpierre of Basel, and Steiner of Winterthur. These dealers peddled quartos on sales trips, which usually carried them through Frankfurt and Leip zig, but they only managed to pass out prospectuses and to confuse their customers, who could not keep the editions straight. Serini himself got the fake and real versions of the quarto mixed up and offered both of them to his clients along with the octavo, which he apparently favored. The octavo al ways won. In fact, Serini never thought the quarto would have much of a chance in Germany. He would spread the word in Leipzig and Frankfurt, he wrote to the STN in 1779, ''Mais je doute que je puisse placer de l'Encyclopedie quarto. L'edi tion octavo a ete annoncee dans tous les coins en Alle magne. ' 107. Gerle to STN, March 7, 1778. Gerle recounted his difficulties with the extra volumes in a letter of Aug. 26, 1780: "Les altercations que j 'ai eues avec mes abonnes pour votre edition de 1 'Encyclopeilie et leur mecontentement de devoir payer 4 volumes de plus que dans I 'edition de Pellet [ Gerle was confused on this point] sont alles si loin qu'on a voulu me rendre I'ouvrage entier ou me forcer de perdre ees 4 volumes moi-meme.'' Ger le complained about the censors in letters of July 28 and Nov. 20, 1779, but by April 21, 1781, he was expecting his trade to improve greatly, owing to the reforms of Joseph II. 108. STN to Duplain, April 7, 1779, and STN to Panckoucke, June 24, 1779. 109. Serini to STN, March 27, 1779. See also the discouraging remarks in Serini 's letters to the STN of Nov. 22 and 29, 1777: "Cette entreprise [the 305 The Business of Enlightenment When the STN attempted a direct assault pn the German market, it failed completely. In the summer of 1779 Bosset spread prospectuses and sales talk everywhere on a tour that took him through Basel, Strasbourg, Rastadt, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Mainz, Karlsruhe, Hanau, Kleve, Ko blenz, Cologne, Bonn, and Diisseldorf. Although several book sellers promised to urge the quarto on their clients, none of them ever placed any orders, evidently because the octavo and the Encyclopedie d 'Y verdon had satisfied the demand. For example, Mainz, an active and prosperous town, absorbed twenty octavos and not a single quartoY The STN's attempts to woo German booksellers through its correspondence also brought discouraging replies .. Joseph Wolff of Augsburg said that he had two unsold sets of the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon on his hands and he did not want to waste his money on any more editions ''a pres qu 'il ya deja tant milles des exemplaires dans le monde. '' Dealers in Frankfurt and Cologne found only two customers for the quarto, although they promoted it in the local press. The quarto's biggest success came in Mann heim, where Fontaine sold twenty-seven sets, despite reports of a decline in the demand for French books by one of his colleagues, who could not sell anything in French at the Leip zig fair and who warned the STN, "L'on a peine de croire comme depuis I 'absence de la cour la lecture fran<;)aise a f ait place a I 'allemande.' ' Bruere of Homburg in Hesse disputed this view. The Ger man public wanted to read French literature, he claimed, but German booksellers did not want to provide it: Les libraires allemands ne voient qu 'avec un oeil jaloux la preference que les gens du bon ton donnent a la litterature fran~aise sur la lit- quarto] ::mrait ete excellente, mais elle scra gatce par deux differentes editions. La librairie en Suisse vient [sic] un vrai brigandage." On the STN's dealings with its other agents see STN to Gerle, Dec. 13, 1779; STN to Petitpierre, March 13, 1779; and STN to Steiner, April 24, 1779. 110. Bosset to STN, July 24, 1779. Although the social and cultural history of Mainz has been thoroughly studied, little is known about the rnading habits of its citizens during the eighteenth century. See F. G. Dreyfus, Societes et mentalites a Mayence dans la seconde rnoitie du XV Ille siecle (Paris, 1968), pp. 49;)-497. 111. Wolff to STN, Sept. 27, 1779. Like Wolff, German booksellers usually wrote in legible but ungrammatical French rather than in German. 112. La Nouvelle librairie de la cour et de l'Academie of Mannheim to STN, July 4, 1787. See also Deinet of Frankfurt am Main to STN, June 30, 1779; Hollweg & Laue of Frankfmt to STN, Sept. 23, 1780; and Societe typographique de Cologne to STN, Aug. 22, 1782. 306 Diffusion terature allemande. De la ils envisagent les ouvrages fran~ais comme une branche de commerce etranger, qui nuit au debit de leurs produc tions nationales. Cela est si vrai que lorsque'ils voient un ouvrage fran~ais un peu avantageusement annonce, ils se hatent de le faire traduire en allemand, pour affaiblir le debit de l 'original. Bruere even argued that the German dealers would not pub licize the quarto because they wanted to favor a German trans lation of it. A translation did get under way in Frankfurt am Main, but it soon floundered, as Bosset learned during his sales trip of 1779: J'ai vu ... M. Warrentrap et Venner, qui ont fait l'entreprise de l 'Encyclopedie en allemand dont j 'ai vu le premier volume sur du papier triis mince et un tas de manuscrits pour la suite, a laquelle travaillent, dit-il, une trentaine de savants. Je crois que ce sera un meilleur ouvrage que l'Encyclopedie fran~aise. Les Allemands sont plus profonds. Mais ce sera les Callendes Grecques, et elle ne fera pas de tort a la notre. Plusieurs libraires m 'ont assure qu 'elle ne se con tinue pas. Although Bruere's remarks about booksellers sounded some what too conspiratorial to be believed, they did indicate the character of the potential market for the Encyclopedie in Germany. By "les gens du bon ton" he meant the German princelings and the members of their courts. He himself sold a quarto to the Landgrave of Hesse Homburg and to the Prince of Anhall Schaumburg, and he peddled his other books in the '' cours du no rd.' m J.-G. Virchaux of Hamburg served a similar clientele in northern Germany and Scandinavia. When he referred to his customers, he mentioned only ''princes souverains ''and ''seig neurs suedois. '' He even warned the STN about the effect of its plebeian paper on such personages: "J'aimerais bien que VOUS prissiez de plus beau papier pour VOS editions . . . C'est en partie ce qui fait vendre; car comme je ne fournis 113. Bruere to STN, Aug. 12, 1779. Although he developed a small book busi ness of his own, Bruere was not a bookseller but a man of letters and a protege of the Landgrave of Hesse Homburg. 114. Bosset to STN, July 24, 1779. In a letter to Bruere of Aug. 19, 1779, the STN said that it considered the German edition to be economically unfeasible, owing to the high cost of paper in Germany as well al! the cost of the translation. 115. Bruere to STN, Feb. 12, 1781. Bruere also took out at least a dozen sub scriptions to the octavo Encyclopedie, and in a letter of Oct. 19, 1780, he said that he bought books for the libraries of the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Count of Biickburg, and the Prince of Phillipsthal. 307 The Business of Enlightenment absolument que les souverains du nord et les plus grands seig neurs chalands . . . vous sentez bien, Messieurs, qu 'il ne m 'est pas a propos d 'avoir des editions peu riantes. Ne pour riez-vous pas tirer du papier de Perigord ?" Although these remarks may have been calculated to impress a supplier in order to get shipments on credit, Virchaux had nothing flatter ing to say about his customers' tastes when it came to the contents as opposed to the appearance of books. They liked superficial literature, he explained, and especially pornogra phy-above all, if it had illustrations. Books on politics, natural history, and a few other scientific subjects did fairly well, but not those on theology and law. He therefore had little hope for the Encyclopedie in his territory: ''Les grands et volumineux ouvrages etant du debit le plus ingrat dans les pays du nord, nous ne pouvons pas, Messieurs, nous charger de l 'Encyclopedie in-quarto . . . Nous avons deux exem plaires de celle d 'Yverdon, qui nous sont fort a charge." In the end, he sold only two copies-one went to a '' tres grand seigneur tres riche "-and he attributed his lack of success to the American war as well as the frivolity of his public: ''Nous f erons tout notre possible pour faire connaitre votre Encyclopedie: mais tant que la guerre et les aff aires politiques fixeront les esprits, il n'y a guere d'apparence qu'on en vende beaucoup; et en general les ouvrages d 'aussi longue haleine sont peu recherches a present.' m Claude Philibert of Copenhagen indicated the Encyclopedie was equally unsuited for his clientele, although he sold several octavos and a dozen copies of the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon. He reprinted the STN 's prospectus, but it brought in only two sales: '' J usques ici je n 'ai que des esperances, car on aime tres peu souscrire ici et tres peu ou point donner des avances, pas meme un sol. Le jeu et les plaisirs vont avant tout. " The STN also sold a copy in Copenhagen through Johann Hein rich Schlegel, who had interceded in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the king and queen of Denmark to accept the 116. Quotations from Virchaux's letters to the STN of Jan. 9, 1779; Nov. 25, 1780; Dec. 19, 1778; Sept. 4, 1779; Aug. 2, 1780; and May 26, 1780. 117. Philibert to STN, June 24, 1777. Two years later, in a letter of June 29, 1779, Philibert reported, "Ce n 'est pas ma faute si je n 'ai pas eu des souscrip tions pour votre edition de 1 'Encyclopedie. C 'est assez annoncee, mais ici tout va lentement et l 'on veut voir avant que de se resoudre a acheter. Aussi il est inutile de proposer des souscriptions. Je comptais pourtant bien d'en avoir quelques-unes, mais !'edition in-octavo est venue la traverser." 308 Diffusion dedication of the quarto and had helped the publishers of the Leghorn edition to sell thirty subscriptions. After taking soundings, however, Schlegel wrote that he could do no more: the Danish market for the Encyclopedie was exhausted. Reports about the demand for Encyclopedies in London sounded like those from other parts of northern Europe. After making the rounds of the book shops and placing notices in the Morning Herald, Jean-Baptiste d'Arnal warned the STN not to expect many sales in England: '' J e vous reitere au reste, Messieurs, que le zele pour la litterature se refroidit tous les jours, que les esprits anglais se degenerent, et que nos seig neurs aiment mieux acheter 20 billets d'opera a un Vestris, a un N overre, a une Allegrante que de depenser 20 guinees en livres. 'm But D. H. Durand, a Swiss pastor in London, sold thirteen quartos, despite competition from the distributors of the Leghorn edition ; and more quartos probably reached England through Panckoucke, who had far better contacts with the London booksellers than did the STN. So the English market probably was not as bad as it appeared to be in d 'Arnal 's letters. Getting the books across the Channel did not prove to be an insurmountable problem, despite the war (France was joined by Spain in June 1779 and by The Nether lands in December 1780 in the coalition against Great Britain). The STN sent its Encyclopedies to London via Frederick Romberg Co. of Ostend, which used ships with double pass ports.121 It also sent a dozen quartos from Ostend to Ireland, and they arrived without mishap, although they took eight months to get there, as Romberg had trouble finding a safe neutral ship. They went to the book store of Luke White in Dublin along with works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Bu:ffon and La vie privee de Louis XV. When the STN offered him Raynal's Histoire philosophique, White refused, explaining that he preferred an Irish edition. The French Enlightenment clearly had spread across the British Isles. Most of it did not come from France, however, but from The Netherlands, where philosophic literature was printed and 118. Sehlegel to STN, May 30 and July 12, 1777. 119. D'Arnal to STN, Feb. 5, 1782. 120. In a letter of Dee. 4, 1777, Durand said the Leghorn edition was pre ferred, even though it eost 30 guineas, beeause it contained a full set of plates. 121. Bosset, from Amsterdam, to STN, Sept. 3, 1779: "Ils [Romberg freres] ont obtenu un passeport des deux nations, et il n 'y a pas de risque de tout.'' Pre sumably Bosset was referring to the Habsburg and British authorities. 309 The Business of Enlightenment reprinted in even greater quantities than in Switzerland. For precisely that reason, the Dutch market did not absorb many quartos. Bosset tried to crack it during his trip of 1779, but the Dutch treated him as a competitor and an enemy, and in any case they had already bought too many other Encyclo pedies to have any interest in his. Rousseau's publisher in Amsterdam, Marc Michel Rey, was willing to dine with Bosset but not to do business with him. Rey accused the STN of pirating his editions of Rousseau (it was secretly preparing a new edition at that very moment), and he said that he still had not ;,;old twenty-five sets of the second folio Encyclopedie, half the number for which he had subscribed almost ten years earlier. Harreveld, another of the great Amsterdam dealers, claimed that he had sold fifty sets of the other editions, mainly the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon, and could sell no more. Pierre Gosse Junior of The Hague, who had bought up all of Felice's Encyclopedie, had marketed it so aggressively in the Low Countries that the smaller booksellers would not buy the rival editions, for fear of antagonizing him-or so they told Bosset. He did not know what to believe in such hostile territory and moved on to the Austrian Netherlands, having sold only a few quartos among the highly literate and highly competitive Dutch. South of the Rhine, he found another world. The best bookseller in Antwerp, which had dominated the publishing industry in northern Europe during the late sixteenth century, was a certain" Mme. Moredon, qui roule carosse en ne vendant que breviaires.' The book trade hardly existed in Louvain, despite the presence of 3,000 university students. It flourished in Liege and Maestricht, important centers of pirate publish ing, but they could not absorb any more quartos because Plomteux of Liege, the STN 's partner in the quarto enter prise, had satiated the whole region. The letters that the STN received from its correspondents in the Low Countries generally confirmed Bosset 's reports. Gosse warned that he would defend the Encyclopedie d'Yver don until he had sold the laRt set, and that moment seemed 122. Bosset reported his dealings with the Dutch booksellers in letters of Aug. 30, Sept. 3, and Sept. 7, 1779. 123. Bosset to STN, Sept. 13, 1779. 124. Although Felice's Encycloprtlie was foundering on the Dutch ma1·ket, Pierre Gosse Junior wrote bravely to the STN on Sept. 5, 1777, "Quant a votrc Enayclopedie abregee [a backhanded reference to Laserre 's cuts] in-quarto, vous 310 Diffusion far away because several booksellers reported that its over abundance had destroyed the market for the other Encyclo pedies and that it was selling at two-thirds and even half its subscription price. Murray freres of The Hague did not want to hear about the quarto because they were "embarrasses de l 'edition d 'Yverdon, de l'in-folio, et meme de l 'in-octavo. Changuion of Amsterdam reported that advertisements for the quarto in the local press had produced no response and that "le public se lasse enfin de toutes ces duperies. " Luzac of Leyden said he would continue to run notices in the Gazette de Leyde if the STN wanted, but he doubted that they would do any good, "vu que le public est inonde d 'autres editions et que ce livre se vend aujourd 'hui a moitie prix. ' And Aubertin of Rotterdam warned that the quarto would not sell in his town: 'J 'ai trouve que les amateurs avaient ou l 'edition de Paris ou celle d'Yverdon et que dans une ville de commerce ces ouvrages ne sont pas d'un gout general et ainsi d'un debit fort borne.' Aubertin 's comments echoed the reports of disinterest in literature among merchants in France. But the main problem in the Dutch market was excess supply not lack of demand. "Les provinces sont tellement farcies d 'Encyclo pedies que les libraires non plus que les particuliers ne veulent en entendre parler, Aubertin wrote. "A chaque vente de livres ou il s 'en trouvent, les prix declinent. La Societe typo graphique de Berne m 'a encore envoye des prospectus de sa seconde edition. J e les ai repandus sans le moindre succes. '' n 'ignorez point que je suis interesse a 1 'Encyclopedie in-quarto d 'Yverdon, et comme elle est toujours tres accueillie, que je la crois preferable a toute autre, je ne me chargerai d 'aucune avant que le peu d 'exemplaires qui en restent, dont mon cher pere est seul possesseur, soient places et que je n 'en pourrai plus acquerir." 125. Murray freres to STN, Dec. 8, 1780. 126. Changuion to STN, Dec. 24, 1781. 127. Elias Luzac & van Damme to STN, June 2, 1780. 128. Aubertin to STN, Nov. 12, 1779. 129. Aubertin to STN, Sept. 22, 1780. A few years earlier, however, the Low Countries had st.ill looked like good tefritory for Erwyclopedies. Cha.telain et fils of Amsterdam, who had sold over 60 sets of the first edition, informed Dessaint of Paris on June 21l, l 76H, that the Dutch market was ripe fo1· another one: Archives de Paris 5AZ 2009. And in the first circular letter about the Encyclopedie meth odique (Jan. 1778), Deveria of Liege claimed that the demand continued to be strong in cities such as Ghent, where the bookseller Gimblet had sold more than 250 sets of the earlier editions. Amsterdam, Bibliotheek van de vereeniging ter bevordering van de belangen des boekhandels, Dossier Marc Michel Rey. 311 The Business of Enlightenment In the diffusion of the Encyclopedie, Holland became a sort of burned-over district, the very opposite of Hungary, Poland, and Russia. The Low Countries also served as an entrepot of Encyclo pedies for Portugal and Spain, although the STN used other routes as well-mainly the Trans-Alpine roads to Turin and Genoa and the river route from Lyons to Marseilles. Veuve Bertrand et fils of Lisbon found that one crate sent via Genoa took eleven months, one via Amsterdam took six months, and one via Os tend never arrived at all. Jacques Mallet of Valencia recommended that the STN use small boa:ts out of Marseilles that could hug the coast and dart into port whenever English frigates appeared. He distrusted the neutral ships from Genoa, ''car les Anglais ne respectent aucun pavillon et pren nent tout.' nao Duplain and the STN insured their shipments, but the costs and delays damaged their business badly until the end of the American war. Antonio de Sancha of Madrid reported that a load of books sent via Amsterdam and Cadiz took a half year and that its handling costs came to more than its wholesale value. Other shipments took longer and cost more: their outcome could never be predicted, because the long-distance trade remained unstable until the peace settle ment of 1783. Even after normal traffic resumed on the routes to Spain and Portugal, the publishers still had to grapple with a greater problem: the Inquisition. Bertrand and another foreign book seller in Lisbon, .Jean-Baptiste Reycends, smuggled a few quartos and octavos into their shops, along with some livres philosophiques that were also taboo in F'rance. But they never dealt extensively in the illegal trade, at least not with the STN, although they believed that the demand for foreign books was growing in Portugal. The Spanish booksellers always spoke of the Inquisition with fear and trembling, even when they managed to negotiate successfully with it. Sancha of Madrid told the STN that he could not resist making a small order 130. Mallet to STN, Oct. 4, 1777. 131. On Feb. 8, 1780, Reycends wrote to the STN in an awkward French typical of foreign bookdealers, '' Comme ici depuis la reforme de l 'Universite de Coi:mbre ainsi que l 'ouverture d 'nne Academie des sciences et des arts en cette ville les Portugais commencent d 'avoir un peu plus de gout pour la lecture des bons livres, tant Latins que franc;ais et autres langues, c 'est ce qui nous engage de procurer d 'etablir des correspondances dans toutes Jes villes principales de I 'Europe, par cet moyen pour etre mieux assortis. ' ' 312 Diffusion after receiving its prospectus for the quarto, but ''~a est une affaire si delicate dans ce pays-ci que 'de parler d'Encyclo pedie par rapport a notre Inquisition qu 'il m 'a fallu une per mission dudit tribunal pour pouvoir me souscrire a 3 exemplaires. '' vVhen the STN tried to take advantage of this small opening by offering all the other books in its stock, Sancha replied that he could not take anything except a dozen copies of Robertson's Histoire de l'Amerique (a best seller everywhere, owing to the American war). The other bookF; were not "convenables pour un pays si delicat comme le notre. '' ''Dans ce pays il faut avoir de grands soins sur les livres etrangers par rapport a notre Inquisition.'' In the end, he could not even steer the Robertson past the authorities: "L'on a donne dernierement un ordre a tousles ports de mer de ne pas les laisser entrer. Voyez si nous sommes dans un pays bien delicat." Sancha, who dealt with suppliers from all over western Europe and had fifteen presses of his own, was probably the most important bookseller of Spain. Lesser houses, like Paul et Bertrand Caris of Cadiz and.Jacques Mal let of "Valencia, did not dare to take the slightest risk. Mallet thought he might be able to get the Inquisition to allow him to import a few quartos, but he never did. ~ And Caris con sidered the Spanish market hopeless: "Quant aux ouvrageR qui seraient du gout de ce pays, ils doivent etre si epures que la moindre proposition Un peu equivoque OU philosophique serait arretee par le Saint Office. Voifa OU en est reduit la litterature de ce pays. " Despite the influence of the Catholic church, the Encyclo pedie trade in Italy resembled the Dutch rather than the Spanish variety. Only once in the hundreds of letters that the STN received from the Italian states did it hear that the Encyclopedie had encountered difficulties with the authorities, and on that occasion the alert came from territory that was 132. Sancha to STN, Feb. 26, 1778; April 2, 1778; Jan. 14, 1779; and July 12, 133. MnJlet to STN, Oct. 4, 1777: "Comme I 'Inquisition en a prohibe partie, au sont tous les articles qui coneernent la religion, nous ne pouvons les vendre sans permission, et dans ce cas, je vous la demanderai.'' The permission neve1· came through. 134. Caris to STN, Jan. 14, 1774. A few years later, one of the Caris, who had retired to Avignon, tried unsuccessfully to ship some Voltaire and an Encyclo pedie d'Yverdon to the shop in Cadiz. They were all sent back, he informed the STN in a letter of Aug. 18, 1780, "ne pouvant etre mis en usage par l 'arret fulminant de I 'Inquisition, aussi bete que mechant.'' 313 The Business of Enlightenment eventually to be French-namely Savoy. The Neuchatelois even corresponded about the quarto with a liberal cardinal in Rome. Of course Rome had condemned the book in no un certain terms in 1759, but by 1777 it had also condemned the .Jesuits, who had been the greatest enemy of the Encyclopedie, and it had not taken effective action against the two Italian editions. When the pubfo;hers of the Leghorn edition sent a traveling salesman around Italy, they chose a priest and gave him a 10 percent commission on every sale. And when the Italian booksellers discussed their misgivings about the text, they never mentioned its impieties but only its inaccurate account of Italian geography and natural history. In the Italian prospectus for the quarto and the octavo, the Societa letter aria e tipografica di Napoli invited all Italians to send in corrections, which it would forward to the publishers, so that their part of the world would get a decent treatment in the new editions. The Neapolitans also informed the STN that they had two men working hard on certain key articles, such as NAPLES and vEsuvE, which needed to be rewritten in order to avoid alienating their customers. None of these editorial projects ever came to anything, but they illustrate the attitude toward the Encyclopedie that existed everywhere among eight eenth-century booksellers: Diderot had made a good begin ning, but his work needed a complete overhaul before its full market value could be realized. Operating from this premise the publishers of the Lucca and Leghorn editions had not hesitated to adapt Diderot's text to their own needs. The Lucchese had needed above all to appease the pope and therefore had presented their work as a 135. J. Lullin of Chambery to STN, May 8, 1777: "Par ce qui est de la nouvelle Encyalopedie ... nos censeurs ne veulent pas m 'en permettre I 'intro duction; ils me font di:fficulte sur tout.'' 136. STN to Cardinal Valenti, July 12, 1779. 137. Gentil et Orr of Leghorn to STN, March 6, 1775. 138. Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli to STN, Feb. 17, 1778, including a copy of the prospectus. 139. Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli to STN, Feb. 17, 1778: "Nell' Enciclopedia franeesc d sono moltissime eose inette, inutile e ma! digerite che si vorrebbero sopprimere o riformare. '' The Neapolitans also recommended the im provements in the Leghorn edition to the publishers of the quarto: "Nell 'edizione di Livorno ci sono molte cose che meritano di essere adattate, fra l 'altro un bell'artirolo di Caserta ehc fu fatto in Napoli." The Lausannois wooed the Neapolitans by promising to incorporate all their revisions in the octavo. In the end, however, the articles on Italy in the octavo merely reproduced the text of the quarto. 314 Diffusion refutation as well as a reprint of Diderot's: they would con found the French heresies with a running commentary, to be written in the form of notes by a learned priest, Giovanni Domenico Mansi. The notes, however, became thinner as the edition progressed because Clement XIII failed to execute his threats against the Lucca Encyclopedie and because Clement XIV became more absorbed in the dissolution of the Jesuits than in the campaign against their bete noire. By 1771 the publishers finished printing the seventeen folio volumes of the text and, it seems, they had sold out all or most of the edition, mainly in Italy.14° The Leghorn edition appeared later and under more favorable circumstances, for Lucca was a tiny, frail republic, while Leghorn served as the main port of the powerful archduchy of Tuscany, and the Archduke Leopold, one of the few genuinely enlightened autocrats of the Conti nent, accepted the dedication of the book and protected the enterprise. The publishers claimed to have 600 subscribers in November 1769, when they were about to begin printing with a new font of Caslow type and six presses, which could turn out ninety sheets a month. They said that they had sold out all 1,500 copies by September 1775, when they finished the text. But in July 1777, Giuseppe Aubert, the publisher of the Milanese philosophes and the main figure behind the Leghorn 140. Salvatore Bongi, "L'Enciclopeilia in Lucca," Archivio storico italiano, 3d ser., XVIII (1873), 64-90. This article provides valuable information about Ottaviano Diodati, the main entrepreneur of the Lucca edition, and his relations with the Senate in Lucca as well as the papacy, but it has little to say about the diffusion of the Lucchese edition. In "L 'Encyclopeilie et son rayonnement en Italie,'' Cahiers ile l 'Association internationale iles etuiles fran9aises, no. 5 (July 1953), 16, Franeo Venturi ·asserts that the edition sold out quickly and that it went especially into Italian libraries. John Lough, however, claims that the enterprise did not flourish, owing to difficulties in production and slow sales. See Lough, Essays on the "Encyclopeilie" of Diderot anil il 'Alembert (London. New York, and Toronto, 1968), pp. 22-23. In fact, little is known about the Italian editions. Some information about the Leghorn edition can be gleaned from the correspondence of its principal entrepreneur, Giuseppe Aubert, which has been published by Adriana Lay: Un eilitore illumista: Giuseppe Aubert nel carteggio con Beccaria e Verri (Turin, 1973). Aubert's correspondence is the main source for Ettore Levi-Malvano, "Les editions toseanes de l 'Encyclopeilie," Revue ile litterature comparee, III (April-June 1923), 213-256. Levi-Malvano argues that both Italian editions were commercial successes, and he produces some information about the subscriptions to the Leghorn edition. They came to 600 by December 1770, of which at least 8 were in Rome, 20 in Parma, many more in Florence and Milan, and 20 in France. He also mentions four projects to trans late the Encyclopedie into Italian and shows how the Grand Duke of Tuscany favored the Leghorn publishers. 141. Mare Coltellini of Leghorn to STN, Nov. 18, 1769. 315 The Business of Enlightenment edition, refused to handle the quarto on the grounds that he still needed to dispose of sixty unsold sets of his own Encyclo pedie.142 The quarto publishers expected to undersell the Leg horn Encyclopedie in Italy itself,1 and they were undersold by the octavo group. So the entrepreneurs of Leghorn may have had some difficulties in their home market, despite their head start in the race to supply it. Actually, Italy seems to have contained several different markets, just as it was composed of several different states, for the reports from the Italian booksellers varied enor mously. After distributing fifty copies of the prospectus, Yves Gravier of Genoa expected to reap a rich harvest of quarto subscriptions; he did order thirty-two copies, although he eventually quarreled with Duplain and aligned himself with the octavo publishers. The quarto did quite well in Pied mont. Reycends freres of Turin (cousins of Jean-Baptiste Reycends of Lisbon) sold thirty-nine sets and had not ex hausted the demand by 1782, when they switched to the octavo.14 Other booksellers in Turin ordered fourteen more sets, although they, too, pref erred the octavo, as its lower price attracted more customers.14 Giuseppe Rondi could not sell any quartos in Bergamo, and Lorenzo Manini only sold four in Cremona, but Lombardy proved to be good Encyclopedie territory. Not for the quarto, however; Ami Bonnet spread its prospectuses around Milan without success, and Giuseppe Galeazzi warned the Neuchatelois that they had arrived too late on the Milanese market: he had already ordered thirty nine octavos, and the region was full of Encyclopedies. Tuscany seemed to be fuller. Despite a good deal of prodding 142. Aubert to STN, July 21, 1777. The reference to the 1,500 copies and the details on the type and presses come from a circular letter sent to the STN on March 6, 1775, by Gentil et Orr of Leghorn. The circular was an appeal for print ing commissions, but as it also said that the publishers would welcome offers to buy their entire shop, it suggested that their business was not flourishing. 143. STN to Vincenzo of Bergamo, Sept. 30, 1779. 144. Gravier to STN, June 6, 1777; Aug. 2, 1777; March 6, 1779; and July 15, 1780. Gravier was an important wholesaler and retailer who continued to glean orders for the Encyclopedie until 1785. He supplied one copy to a customer in Corsica and slipped another into Spain. 145. Reycends freres to STN, Jan. 9, 1777. 146. Giraud et Giovine to STN, Jan. 31, 1778. 147. Galeazzi to STN, Sept. 25, 1779: "Non mi conviene assolutamente cari carmi ne meno d 'una copia dell' Enciclopedia in-quarto, poiche il paese nostro e gia pieno, oltre di che quella di Losanna essendo di minore spesa molti si sono appigliati a quella." See also Galeazzi to STN, April 17, 1779. 316 Diffusion from the publisher, .Joseph Bouchard of Florence failed to sell a single quarto. "Ce pays-ci est rempli d 'Encyclopedies des reimpressions de Lucques et de Livourne; les gens s 'en tiennent la,' n s he informed the STN. The booksellers of Venice, who had once planned to produce their own reprint of the Encyclopedie, did not give the quarto a good reception, either, perhaps for the same reason. However, Gaspard Storti, a Venetian bookseller who sent some frank appraisals of the local market to the STN, explained that "ceux qui lisent en frarn;ais dans ce pays sont fort rares, et ils n 'aiment ou ne peuvent faire de la depense. ''1 The STN did not have ex tensive contacts in Rome, nor did the other quarto publishers, apparently, for they failed to sell a single Encyclopedie there. Naples promised to be an abundant market for the quarto, according to the Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli. But after subscribing for sixteen quartos, the Societa quarreled with Duplain and went over to the octavo publish ers, from whom it eventually bought fifty sets, while stocking up on the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. Apparently the land of Giannone, Vico, and Filangieri was as rich in enlight ened readers as the north, where Beccaria and the Verri brothers had flourished. In general, and despite the unevenness of its cultural and political geography, Italy seems to have been a great market for the literature of the Enlightenment not a priest-ridden backwater but a complex and cultivated 148. Bouchard to STN, June 26, 1781. Bouchard had assessed the market in the same way four years earlier, in a letter of May 27, 1777: "Pour ce qui est du manifeste de l 'Encyclopedie, M. Duplain de Lyon me l 'a participe [sic] il y a plus de deux mois. lei on l 'a a tout prix, vu l 'Mition de Lucques et la reimpression de Livourne, ce qui a rempli l 'ltalie." He made the same observation in letters of March 11, 1778; December 15, 1778; and March 2, 1779. Giuseppe Pagani e figlio of F'lorence responded enthusiastically to the prospectus, but they, too, failed to sell any quartos. 149. Storti to STN, Aug. 19, 1780. 150. Francesco Poggiali, a Roman bookseller, informed the STN that he was trying hard_ to sell the quarto, but his customers had been put off by a rumor that an Italian translation was being produced in Siena. Poggiali to STN, Dec. 29, 1779: "Vi devo per allora avvertire che nella citta di Siena e stata posta sotto i torchi la traduzione italiana dell' Enciclopedia e questa fara un poco d 'incaglio alla vostra.'' In fact, the Italian translation, like the German one, never came to anything. 151. As in many other cases, Duplain got the Neapolitans' orders wrong, failed to answer their letters, and finally responded with threats and insults when they protested at the treatment they received. '' Il procedere di MM. Duplain et Comp. ci ha disgustati all 'ultimo grado, '' the Societa letteraria e tipografica di Napoli complained to the STN in a letter of Oct. 12, 1778. 317 The Business of "Enlightenment land, which is only beginning to get its due in scholarship on the eighteenth century.15~ The demand for Encyclopedies certainly extended beyond :FJurope, although it is impossible to estimate the number of sets that reached other continents. Genevan dealer Etienne Pestre informed the STN that he had bought two quartos for customers in Africa, and J\feuron of Saint-Sulpice ordered one for the Cape of Good Hope. The STN even consulted Benjamin Franklin about establishing an entrepot in America. That project never came to anything, nor did a similar plan that Thomas .Jefferson proposed for marketing the Encyclo pedic rnet hodique. But Jefferson did a good deal to promote the diffusion of the Encyclopedie in the new republic. After reading an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette during a critical moment of the American Revolution, he bought a set of the Lucca edition for 15,068 pounds of tobacco. He intended it to be "for the use of the Public" and issued special orders for its protection against Cornwallis's army. At the same time, he tried to find a copy for himself: ''I am exceedingly anxious to get a copy of Le grande Encyclopedie, but am really frightened from attempting it thro' the mercantile channel, dear as it is originally and loaded as it would come with the enormous advance which they lay on under pretext of insur ance out and in.' n He apparently did not buy one until he succeeded Franklin as American minister to France. His residence in Paris became a clearing-house for French litera ture bound for America, and his correspondence between 1784 and 1789 provides some revealing glimpses of the French book trade. In 1786, for example, he informed Madison about the state of the Encyclopedie market: "I have purchased little 152. For a full account of Italy's intellectual life in the eighteenth century see Franco Venturi, Illuministi italian'i. (Milan, 1958--). 153. Pestre to STN, Dec. 20, 1777, and Meuron to STN, Jan. 2, 1783. 154. Ostm·vald and Bosset alluded to their negotiations with Franklin in a letter to the STN from Paris of April 14, 1780. Later, in 1783, they consulted Franklin about establishing an outlet for their books in America, but these dis cussions, conducted for the STN in Paris by the abb!i Morellet, did not lead to anything. See Morellet to STN, March 25 and May 31, 1783, and a note from Morellet dated only" 2fi "-evidently Feb. 2.5, 1783. 1.55. Jefferson to John Fitzgerald, Feb. 27, 1781; Jefferson to James Hunter, May 28, 1781; and Amable and Alexander Lory to Jefferson, Dec. 16, 1780, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, 1950--), V, Hi, 311-12; VI, 2'1; IV, 211. 156. Jefferson to Charles-Fran~ois d'Anmours, Nov. 30, 1780, ibid., IV, 168. 318 Diffusion for you in the book way since I sent the catalogue of my for mer purchases . . . I can get for you the original Paris edition in folio of the li~ncyclopedie for 620 livres, 35 vols: a good edition in 39 vols. 4to, for 380 [livres] and a good one in 39 vols. 8vo for 280 [livres]. The new one [the Methodique] will be superior in far the greater number of articles: but not in all. And the possession of the ancient one has more over the advantage of supplying present use. I have bought one for myself, but wait your orders as to you.' m Madison chose to subscribe to the M ethodique. Jefferson did, too, but he also bought :a set of the octavo edition and studied both texts whenever his curiosity compelled him down some new path in the arts and sciences. Reading The booksellers' letters make it clear that the Encyclopedie reached every corner of the Continent and even crossed the ocean. It sold better in some places and in some editions than in others, but it sold everywhere, on the Russian tundra and the Turkish frontier as well as in all the major cities of the west. Unfortunately, however, the letters do not reveal much about the last stage in the life cycle of the book. Between the selling and reading of the Encyclopedie there exists a gap that cannot be bridged by publishing history, for it is im possible to know what went on in the minds of the readers. Some sets may never have been read at all, although most of them probably had many readers-members of cabinets lit teraires, friends of the subscribers, and even domestic ser vants. Books seem to have been borrowed more extensively in 157. Jefferson to Madison, Feb. 8, 1786, ibid., IX, 265. Madison replied on May 12, 1786 (IX, 518): "A copy of the Old edition of the Encyclopedie is desireable for the reasons you mention, but as I should gratify my desire in this particular at the expence of something else which I can less dispense with, I must content myself with the new Edition for the present.'' 158. Jefferson bought three sets of the octavo for 528 livres, a bargain price. He apparently purchased two of them for friends. Jefferson to William Short, April 27, 1790, and Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Jan. 20, 1791, ibid., XVI, 388; XVIII, 579. As an example of Jefferson's comparative reading of the texts see Jefferson to David Rittenhouse, June 30, 1790, ibid., XVI, 587. And on Jefferson's library see E. Millicent Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 1952-59), 5 vols., which shows that Jefferson owned Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia as well as an octavo edition of Diderot's En cyclopedie and a nearly complete set of the Encyclopedie methodique. 319 The Business of Enlightenment the eighteenth century than today, and reading may have been a different experience-less hurried, more reflective, altogether an absorbing activity in an age when men of property were men of leisure and other media did not compete with the book. Of course one can only speculate on the nature of reading in the Old Regime. Its inner workings still seem mysterious, despite the attempts of psychologists, efficiency experts, and profes sors of reading to decode it, speed it up, and expound it in lecture courses. Nonetheless, there is some testimony from the eighteenth century about how. people read books. For example, a German visitor in Paris observed: ''Tout le monde lit a Paris ... On lit en voiture a la promenade, au theatre dans les entractes, au caf e, au bain. Dans les boutiques, femmes, enfants, ouvriers, apprentis lisent; le dimanche, les gens qui s 'associent a la porte de leur maison lisent, les laquais lisent derriere les voitures, les cochers lisent sur leurs sieges, les soldats 1isent au poste et les commissaires a leur station. " Of course it does not follow that the Encyclopedie was read in this onmiverous manner. Its size and alphabetical organiza tion precluded cover-to-cover reading, and it probably was consulted in different ways and for different purposes-for information on a specific topic, for amusement, for systematic study, and for the thrill of discovering audacious asides that should have been caught by the censor. From the viewpoint of intellectual history, the main problem could be formulated once again as follows: did the readers of the Encyclopedie use it as a reference work, or did they turn to it for philoso phie It must be admitted at the outset that they may not have turned to it at all. Samuel Girardet, a bookseller in the small 159. As an example of the psychological and sociological literature on reading see Douglas Waples, What Reading Does to People (Chicago, 1940). More recent work, including research in communication theory, does not seem to have advanced the subject very far, at least not to an outsider. But literary scholars have pro duced some suggestive hypotheses. See Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972); Walter Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," PMLA, XC (1975), 9-21; and Ronald C. Rosbottom, "A Matter of Competence: The Relationship Between Reading and Novel-Making in Eighteenth-Century France," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, VI (1977), 245-263. 160. Heinrich Friedrich von Storch, quoted in Jean Paul Belin, Le mouvement philosophique de 1748 ti 178.9 (Paris, 1913), p. 370. These remarks, which have been handed on from historian to historian, should not be taken literally. 320 Diffusion Swiss city of Le Locle, did not have a high opinion of his customers' interest in the quarto: Je prevois que l'Encyclopedie de Geneve sera un livre bien ennuyeux, vu que voici deja pres de cinq mois suivant la promesse que m 'avez faite de son apparition, temps depuis lequel il ennuie deja son acquereur, qui n'en a encore vu aucune feuille. Que ne l'ennuiera-t-il pas quand il possedera tout ce fatras de livre, qui apparamment rencherira par la sagacite de son contenu sur le bel ouvrage d'Yverdon, que nos montagnards reverent au point de le laisser tranquille et en repos sur le tabelar [sic], ou ils l 'ont pose des son apparition. Panckoucke maintained that "l 'Encyclopedie sera toujours le premier livre de toute bibliotheque ou cabinet,' but it could have been a book to display rather than read. In fact, Panc koucke heard that some subscribers in Lyons were illiterate. If they only used their quartos to impress visitors, however, their behavior suggests the importance rather than the in effectiveness of the book, for it seems significant that an En cyclopedie on the shelf could convey prestige, like a fake coat of arms or an artificial particule. Perhaps by 1780 prestige had shifted to the Enlightenment, and a new phenomenon, in tellectual snobbery, had been born. In any case, the well-displayed Encyclopedie must have proclaimed its owner's progressive opinions as well as his learning, because no one in the eighteenth century could have ignored the notoriously ideological character of the book. All contemporary writing about it-from the Discours prelimi naire to the attacks against it and the publicity in favor of it stressed its identification with the Enlightenment. And insofar as there is any evidence about the response of the readers, it indicates that they looked for philosophie as well as informa tion in the text. In an ''Avis'' at the beginning of volume 13, the quarto publishers printed an excerpt from a letter sent to them by a French doctor, who objected to some cuts in the article ACEMELLA: '' J e n 'y ai pas trouve les reflexions sur les proprietes des plantes qui terminent le dernier paragraphe du Dictionnaire. Cependant ce::; reflexions sont philosophiques et interessantes." The editors replied that the "observations 161. Girardet to STN, Jan. 27, 1778. 162. Panckoucke to STN, Aug. 4, 1776. 163. Panckoucke to STN from Lyons, Oct. 9, 1777: "La faveur du public est sans exemple. Des gens qui ne savent pas lire ont ici souscrit. '' 321 The Business of Enlightenment philosophiques" would come later, in the article PLANTES. They clearly could not afford to leave out any philosophie. A book dealer in Loudun also wrote to them that his subscribers had complained about ''divers articles de theologie traites trop dans le gout Sorbonnique, sans doute pour favoriser d'autant mieux sa circulation en France, mais ces entraves a la liberte de penser ne plaisent pas a tous les lecteurs. '' The attraction of the book's philosophie for eighteenth century readers also seems clear from a project of some French expatriates in London, who announced that they would compile all the 1norceaux philosophiques that Felice had cut out of Diderot's text and would publish them as a supplement to the Encyclopedie d 'Y verdon. In this way, they argued, Felice's subscribers could recuperate the most valuable part of the Encyclopedie without having to purchase an entire new set from the other Swiss publishers. Actually, this plan seems to have been a maneuver by Pierre Gosse ,Junior of The Hague to save his unsellable surplus of Yverdon Encyclopedies; and like so many publishers' projects, it never was executed. But it suggests why Felice's Encyclopedie floundered, while Dide rot's went through edition after edition: "L'editeur ne s'est pas conformc aux di verses fa<;ons de penser des lecteurs,' n the announcement explained-that is, the readers wanted phi losophie, and Felice had merely given them information. It is difficult to believe that eighteenth-century readers did not seek information in the Encyclopedie, but it would be anachronistic to assume that they used it in the same way that modern readers use modern encyclopedias. Diderot and d 'Alembert meant to inform and to enlighten at the same time. Their basic strategy was to argue that knowledge had to be philosophic in order to be legitimate; by seeming merely to purvey knowledge, they struck against superstition. To dis tinguish between the informative and the philosophic aspects of the Encyclopedie is to separate what the authors meant to be inseparable and misconstrue the meaning of the book for their readers. Although it is impossible to penetrate the minds 164. Malherbe of Loudun to STN, Sept. 14, 1778. 165. The quotations come from the announcement in the Gazette de Leyde of Aug. 10, 1779, published in the name of a '' Societe typographique de Londres.'' Gosse 's connection with this group is apparent from subsequent notices in the Gazette de Leyde of Aug. 24, 1779, and May 16, 1780. On his trip through the Low Countries, Bosset learned that the '' Societe typographique de Londres'' was a front for Gosse. Bosset to STN, from Brussels, Sept. 13, 1779. 322 Diffusion of those readers, one can enter into their libraries and oc casionally catch glimpses of them, bending over the pages of the Encyclopedie. Here, for example, is a scene from the auto biography of Stendhal: Mon pere et mon grand-pere avaient l 'Encyclopedie in-folio de Diderot et d 'Alembert, c 'est ou plutot c 'etait un ouvrage de sept a huit cents francs. Il faut une terrible influence pour engager un provincial a mettre un tel capital en livres, d 'oil je conclus, aujourd 'hui, qu 'il fallait qu'avant ma naissance mon.pere et mon' grand-pere eussent ete tout-a-fait du parti philosophique. Mon pere ne me voyait feuilleter l'Encyclopedie qu'avec chagrin. J 'avais la plus entiere confiance en ce livre a cause de l 'eloignement de mon pere et de la haine decidee qu 'il inspirait aux p [ retres] qui fre quentaient a la maison. Le grand vicaire et chanoine Rey, grande figure de pa pier mache, haut de cinq p [ieds] dix pouces, faisait une singuliere grimace en pronorn;ant de travers les noms de Diderot et de d 'Alem bert. Cette grimace me donnait une jouissance intime et profonde. Such were the sensations of a young Encyclopedie reader in a wealthy bourgeois family of Grenoble during the 1790s. Other readers in other settings probably had different experi ences, which can never be captured and catalogued. But what ever they felt, they must have known that in their hands they were holding one of the most challenging books of their time, a book that promised to reorder the cognitive universe and that would therefore produce some gnashing of the teeth among the local priests-unless the priests themselves were subscribers. 166. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris, 1949), I, 379. This reference was kindly supplied by Mr. Joseph Gies. 167. Priests in many pr-0vinces may have bought the Encyclopedie as fre quently as they did in the Franche-Comte. According to Louis Madelin, a list of forty Encyclopedie subscribers in Perigord contained the names of twenty-four cures. Madelin, La Revolution (Paris, 1913), p. 18. And the clergy accounted for six of the forty-two Encyclopedie owners whom Daniel Mornet identified i-n his study of private libraries. Mornet, "Les enseignements des bibloth0ques privees (1750-1780)," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, XVII (1910), 465, 469. The correspondence of the STN occasionally contains casual references to priests such as the following, in a letter from Antoine Barth0s de Marmorieres of Oct. 12, 1784: "Un bon pretre m 'avait prie de vous demander au dernier rabais pos sible votre Encyclopedie de Geneve.'' 323 VI I TTYYTYTTYTTY SETTLING ACCOUNTS In January 1780, the quarto partners met in Lyons to settle their affairs. As they had conducted their business by con spiracy from the beginning, they brought it to an end in a dramatic denouement, which is worth following in detail, not only for what it reveals about the spirit of early modern capitalism but also as an episode in the pre-Balzacian comedie humaine-or a drame bourgeois, as Diderot might have put it. The last act in the speculation on the quarto began in October 1778. By then Panckoucke and his partners had fought off rival Encyclopedies, some fake, some real, from Geneva, Avignon, Toulouse, Lyons, Lausanne, Bern, and Liege. Their own Encyclopedie had· evolved from project to project and edition to edition, becoming more profitable and more difficult to manage at each stage. For a while in the summer of 1778 it had almost spun out of control. But the settlement of the contract dispute on October 10, 1778, made it seem possible for the quarto publishers to bring ''la plus belle [ entreprise] qui ait ete faite en librairie' n to a happy ending: the Lyonnais had been bought off; the octavo group was retreating from France ; the Liegeois had made peace ; and Duplain had ac cepted Panckoucke 's terms for the third quarto edition. Noth ing remained to be done, apparently, except the production and distribution of the final volumes, the collection of the last payments, and the division of the profits. The Traite de Dijon prescribed procedures for winding up the affair. It even re quired the associates to meet every six months in order to 1. STN to Panckoucke, Aug. 20, 1778. 324 Settling Accounts make sure the accounts were in order, although in fact they met only twice-in February 1779, when Duplain gave an interim report on the state of the speculation, and in February 1780, when the associates liquidated it. But the quarto did not end in the prescribed manner, and its ending did not fit neatly into the twelve-month period between the two meetings. As soon as the publishers signed the contract for the third edi tion, their plots began to thicken again. They failed to resolve their conflicts in February 1779. And their final reglement de comptes produced an explosion. The Hidden Schism of 1778 In June 1778 Duplain, who often came up with bright ideas about how to sell Encyclopedies, suggested that he and Panc koucke each market 500 sets of the third edition on their own. The proposal had the advantage of simplifying his operation in Lyons because it would permit him to dispose of hundreds of quartos en bloc instead of dealing with dozens of booksellers and individual subscribers. And it appealed to Panckoucke because Duplain promised to reserve the rich Parisian market for him. Not only would Panckoucke monopolize the wholesale business in the capital, he would also be free from any diffi culty in getting rid of his 500 sets because he would allot 208 of them to the STN for its 5/12 interest in his portion and 41 each to Plomteux and Regnault for their 1/12 interests. Sales were booming at this time. There seemed to be no danger that the associates would become competitors rather than collabo rators, and so Panckoucke accepted Duplain 's proposal in July. In early November, Duplain sent the following letter to Batilliot, the Parisian banker who specialized in publishing speculations: Je vais vous faire une belle affaire, mon cher ami, mais c'est a con dition que personne n 'en saura rien, pas meme Panckoucke, notre ami commun. Cherchez un ou deux colporteurs qui ayent la confiance du public, et chargez-les de recevoir des souscriptions de l 'Encyclopedie de Pellet dont je vous envoie le prospectus. Partagez avec eux le bene fice. Vous voyez qu 'en pla<;;ant 13, vous gagneriez plus de 1400 livres. V ous annoncerez, ou pour mieux dire vos gens annonceront, que les 4 2. STN to Panekoueke, June 7, 1778, and Panekoueke to STN, July 21, 1778. 325 The Business of Enlightenment premiers volumes sont en vente a Geneve. Vous ne parlerez du tout point de moi ... J e me charge de l 'entree a Paris. BrUlez ma lettre. Instead of burning the letter, Batilliot turned it over to Panc koucke, and Panckoucke sent a copy to Neuchatel, restricting his commentary to one acid remark: the letter revealed ''la vilaine ame de Duplain.'' It also demorn;trated that the strug gle for the Encyclopedic market had produced a secret war among the quarto associates as well as an open war between them and their rival publishers. Secrecy was the first line of defense that Panckoucke urged upon the STN. Duplain must not know that they knew. ·while he raided their territory, they must mount a counter sales campaign, and they must store all the incriminating evidence they could find until the moment when they could use it most effectively against him. An open split now could bring down the whole speculation. But why had Duplain attempted this stab-in-the-back, and why had Batilliot revealed it to Panckoucke 1 Batilliot 's role can be explained easily: Panckoucke had just saved him from bankruptcy. '' Il ne perira pas,' l4 Panc koucke told the STN. "Mais il m 'en a I 'obligation." Duplain seems to have acted from the opposite kind of motivation: revenge, compounded by a desire to enrich himself at his associates' expense. He resented his def eat in the bargaining over the contract for the third edition, and he felt entitled to a larger portion of the profits. Had he not mounted the 3. Panckoucke sent the copy to the STN in a letter of Nov. 6, 1778, with the following explanation: "Vous pouvez, Messieurs, juger de la vilaine ame de Duplain par Ia lettre ci-jointe. 11 etait bien convenu qu 'en nous chargeant de ces 500 il ne ferait plus aucune negociation a Paris. Vous voyez comme il tient parole ... 11 faut de votre cote ecrire partout pour en placer en province. Nous n'avons pas de temps a perdre ... Ne parlez point a Duplain de la lettre ci-dessus. Tout cela servira dans I 'occasion. Une brouillerie actuelle ne servirait qu 'a nous nuire. '' 4. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1778. Panckoucke indicated that the rescue operation was a big affair: "Vous ne sauriez croire encore combien les affaires de Batilliot m 'ont tourmente." He first mentioned it in his letter of Nov. 6, 1778: "Batilliot vient d 'eprouver une faillite enorme, mais il s 'en tirera. Nous nous mettons 5 a 6, et nous le cautionnons. C 'est un brave homme qu 'ii nous importe de conserver." Bookdealers were often trapped in bankruptcies, many of them fraudulent, during the eighteenth century, so. they warned their allies when they thought a bankruptcy might be imminent. Thus on Nov. 22, 1778, only a few weeks after plotting with Batilliot against Panckoucke, Duplain warned the STN to beware of both men: ''Nous vous dirons sous le plus grand secret et par attachement pour vous que les sieurs Milon de la Fosse, banquiers a Paris, manquent, que Batilliot y est pour une somme enorme. Nous craignons bien le contrecoup pour notre ami Pauckoucke, et comme nous savons que vous negociez avec Batilliot, nous vous en disons deux mots.'' 326 Settling Accounts whole operation by himself? Had he not collected the subscrip tions, organized the printing, sent out the shipments, dunned the customers for payment, and in general driven himself to the point of exhaustion, while Panckoucke dreamed up proj ects in Paris and the STN complained about its cut in the printing? He had engineered the greatest publishing specula tion of the century, singlehanded. His associates had been more of a hindrance than anything else. Yet the contracts awarded them half the profits. Very well, he would help him self to his rightful share, even if he had to use some dubious methods. Of course, Duplain never put this decision in writing. But his actions spoke for themselves, and his attitude some times showed through letters that he wrote in a rage, par ticularly during his quarrel with the STN over its printing of volume 6: Comment, Messieurs, vous nous exposerez a perdre dans un instant et notre fortune et une riche speculation en imprimant un volume execrablement mal, et il ne nous sera pas permis de nous plaindre? Si nous l 'avons fait en termes trop amers, c 'est que reellement nous etions greves, et qu 'il faut a un coeur surcharge un epanchement. Nous travaillons jour et nuit pour la reussite de l'affaire, et il seinble, Messieurs, que vous fassiez tout ce que vous pouvez pour la detruire. The associates therefore approached their first sharehold ers' meeting as if they were preparing for a civil war. From November onward, Panckoucke and the N euchatelois adopted a conspiratorial tone in their letters about Duplain while re maining amiable and businesslike in their letters to him. ''Nous devons prendre nos precautions par rapport a Duplain de maniere qu'il ne puisse pas meme soup~onner qu'on se defie de lui," the STN wrote to Panckoucke. "Il faut cacher jusqu 'a nos soup~ons,'' Panckoucke echoed in reply. A new note also came into Duplain 's letters at this time. Instead of marveling at the inexhaustible selling power of the quarto, he suddenly warned his partners that the demand for it had disappeared. The flow of subscriptions had driPd up, he in formed the STN on November 10, 1778. J1~ach associate should make a supreme effort to spread circular letters, publish notices, and push the book in his commercial correspondence. Duplain himself had just sent out 200 circulars; if they did 5. Duplain to STN, Feb. 9, 1778. 6. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 15, 1778, and Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 3, 1779. 327 The Business of Enlightenment not bring in fresh subscriptions, the associates would have quartos rotting in their warehouses for years and years. Duplain 's letters also stressed his difficulties in getting the subscribers to pay, while he emptied his own coffers in order to meet his printing and paper bills. On December 1, he told the STN that he was 150,000 livres in arrears. The closer he came to the meeting in which he was to submit his accounts to the associates, the worse the speculation sounded. Panckoucke did not get upset at Duplain 's lamentations. He knew that one had to allow for a good deal of "honest graft" in the book trade, and he felt confident that Duplain would not go as far as outright swindling: ''Duplain fera usage de toute l 'activite de son ame pour augmenter les frais, mail il ne divertira pas les fonds. " The STN, however, suspected that Duplain was secretly printing extra sets of the third edition in order to sell them on the sly. Regnault, who did some secret surveillance for Panckoucke in Lyons, reported that the press run of the third edition was larger than the contract stipu lated. Panckoucke then began to feel alarmed: ''Nous avons affaire a un homme tres fin et tres avide, qui ne mandera [sic] pas mieux de nous surprendre." Panckoucke 's own ef forts to sell the quarto in Paris had got off to a bad start, and he still feared that Duplain might have skimmed the cream off the market by a clandestine sales campaign. So he demanded that Duplain reduce the third edition by 500 copies or at least cancel the agreement to divide the 1,000 sets. '' Il faut l 'y contraindre, l 'y forcer," he wrote anxiously to the STN. But Duplain would not budge. He insisted that they maintain both the agreement and the pressrun, even though the market had been sated. At first Panckoucke tried to protect himself by keeping back 7. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1778. 8. STN to Panckoucke, Dec. 15, 1778. At that time, Duplain had just asked Panckoucke to provide some extra copies of the plates and was refusing to let the STN print anything in the third edition-two indications to the Neuchil.telois that the printing was larger than he claimed. 9. Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 3, 1779. Regnault's report on the pressrun, which later proved to be inaccurate, was mentioned in this letter. Panckoncke expressed his demands to Duplain in letters of Dec. 22 and 26, 1778, Bibliotbeque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. Duplain explained his refusal to the STN in a letter of Jan. 21, 1779. He noted that the printing of the third edition was so advanced-it had then reached volume 16-that the association would lose a great deal by reducing it. 328 Settling Acco11tnts the plates. But as the STN objected, that tactic would not deter Duplain if he were seriously trying to swindle them; it would merely make him suspect their suspicions. In fact, it made him furious. He blamed Panckoucke 's failure to deliver the plates for the refusal of many subscribers to make their payments; and he told the STN that he would never again do business with Panckoucke. So there was little that Duplain 's partners could do, except look long and hard at his accounts in Lyons while trying to prevent him from seeing through their own disguise. "Je crois qu'il sera bien important de ne rien laisser ap percevoir a Lyon,'' Panckoucke advised the N euchatelois. ''II faut voir le compte, I 'examiner de sang froid, et faire ensuite nos observations. J e voudrais que ce flit le plus calme d 'entre vous qui vint a Lyon, OU bien il faudrait que vous y vinssiez deux. '' He proposed that they lodge together at the Palais Royal-'' une grande auberge sur le quai de la Saone ou l'on est fort bien"-so that they could coordinate their maneuvers in private. The N euchatelois should bring all their contracts and correspondence, in case they became locked in a debate with Duplain and needed evidence to support their arguments. The Swiss publishers promised to follow Panc koucke 's instructions, though their unhappiness with the whole business was increasing every day. They had become em broiled in a new quarrel over their printing with Duplain, and they grumbled that Panckoucke had become so absorbed in his Parisian speculations that he had neglected the sales of the quarto as well as their anti-Duplain defenses. They did not even like his choice of hotel : the Palais Royal was too far from Duplain 's shop. But they agreed to send Bertrand there on January 25. Sensing a need to draw closer to his ally in the face of the adversary, Panckoucke offered to change his reser vations to the Hotel d 'Angleterre: ''Si vous arrivez avant moi a Lyon, je vous prie, Messieurs, de ne rien entamer que de 10. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1778: "On ne peut pas nous imposer sur la vente. Les planches sont notre sii.rete. '' 11. Duplain to STN, Dec. 20, 1778: '' Enfin, nous vous avouerons que c 'est la derniere affaire que nous aurons avec lui. '' Duplain must have sent some angry letters to Panckoucke, considering Panckoucke 's letter to him of Dec. 22, 1778: "Entendons-nous, concilions-nous, et ne nous detruisons pas." Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 12. Panckoucke to STN, Dec. 22, 1778. 829 The Business of Enlightenment concert. Nous avons a forte partie, et soyez surs qu 'on cher chera de toutes les manieres a nous surprendre.' na In early January, the STN asked to postpone the meeting for a few weeks, because Bertrand had developed a serious illness. His condition deteriorated, so in early February Ostervald and Bosset went to Lyons in his place. Soon after their departure, he sent them a reassuring letter: he could now write without suffering too badly from headaches. But soon after their return, on the morning of February 24, he died in his bed. He was forty years old and left three children and a widow, Ostervald's younger daughter, Elisabeth. Bertrand had worked hard to make a success of the STN. He had been a man of great learning and advanced ideas. Had he lived to complete his labor on the STN's augmented edition of the Description des arts et metiers and some of his other literary projects, he might have won a place as a minor philosophe. Instead, he left a void in the Ostervald family and in the STN, which was only partly filled when his widow took over some of the commercial correspondence. In one of the rare, non commercial remarks in that daily marathon of letter-writing, Ostervald mentioned his loss to Panckoucke: ''Nous venons de perdre le prof esseur Bertrand, notre gendre et associe, decede hier matin des suites d 'une fievre bilieuse dont tous les secours de l 'art n 'ont pule delivrer. II vous sera facile de vous peindre l 'amertume de notre situation dans ce moment. Daig nez la partager et nous continuer votre amitie. '' Panckoucke replied, "II est affreux d'etre moissonne si jeune. J e sais tout ce qu'une telle perte doit vous causer d'embarras, d'amer tumes. " It was a brief moment when the businessmen spoke to each other only as human beings. Immediately afterward they resumed their commercial discourse, for the Encyclo pedie was moving too fast, as a speculation, for them to pause and contemplate the constants of the human condition. It had been necessary for them to take stock of their affair in Lyons while Bertrand was dying in Neuchatel. 13. Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 7, 1778 (a slip for 1779) in reply to the STN's letter of Dec. 29, 1778. 14. Ostervald to Panckoucke, Feb. 25, 1779. Ostervald then continued: "Quel que facheux que soit toujours un evenement de ce genre dans nos circonstances, nous ne laisserons que de suivre nos affaires selon le plan qui nous a diriges jusqu 'ici.'' 15. Panckoucke to Ostervald, March 7, 1779. 330 Settling Accounts A Preliminary Reglement de Comptes Duplain, however, had tried to persuade the associates that they did not need to hold the meeting. At the end of December, he suggested that Panckoucke cancel it because there were no dividends to distribute. He had reinvested the income from the first two editions in the preparation of the third. There would be profits enough to divide once the third edition had been distributed. And until theR, Panckoucke need not worry about the financial management of the enterprise, which Du plain had left to his partner in Lyons, ''Messieurs V euve d 'Antoine Merlino et fils, seigneurs suzerains d 'un million d'ecus romains, et je suis encore leur caution vis-a-vis de vous avec trois immeubles considerables que la vente de mon fonds m 'a mis dans le cas d 'acquerir. Ainsi dormez bien sur les deux oreilles. '' Panckoucke rejected this request, but not because he doubted Duplain 's solvability. '' J e n 'ai point d 'in quietude pour les fonds,'' he explained to the STN. ''Mais je crois necessaire, indispensable, quoiqu 'en dise Duplain, de nous rendre a Lyon pour avoir un compte. 11 ne faut pas se tier a toutes ses belles promesses.'' The STN agreed com pletely : the crucial thing was to get Duplain to open up his books and produce a '' compte . . . tout dresse ... pour l 'examen et la verification. " Exactly what examination and verification entailed is diffi cult to say. Panckoucke said the process would take five or six days and clearly expected Duplain to give a detailed ac count of all income and expenditure, with supporting evidence from letters and ledgers, in case any associate challenged it. The point of the exercise, as the STN put it, was to "voir clair '' and then to pass an acte certifying Duplain 's accounts. This formal agreement would join the other contracts in the Encyclopedie dossier maintained by each associate. It could be used as a weapon in the final reglement de comptes because it committed Duplain to a certain version of the affair-the number of subscriptions received, volumes printed, livres ex pended and collected by a certain date-which he could not modify in the future. In short, it would help Panckoucke and the STN to protect themselves from fraud. Given the vituperation and the conspiring that had pre- 16. Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 11, 1779, with a copy of Duplain 's letter, dated Dec. 31, 1778, and STN to Panckoucke, Jan. 17, 1779. 331 The Business of Enlightenment vailed among the associates before the meeting, the acte that they signed at the end of it makes strange reading: it suggests that nothing but harmony had reigned in the association (see Appendix A. XV). The associates all agreed that the first two subscriptions had been filled. Duplain therefore had to account for the difference between the revenue of 6,150 quartos and the cost of their production, which had been fixed by his contracts with Panckoucke. The acte then took note of his claim to have applied that profit to the expenses of the third edition. It certified that the third edition was being printed at a pressrun of 2,375 ( 4 reams, 15 quires instead of the 4 reams, 16 quires prescribed by the contract of October 10, 1778) and that those copies would be sold "en societe," except for the 1,000 sets that Panckoucke and Duplain had agreed to split. Not a very revealing document. \:Vhat had really happened at the meeting¥ The examination of Duplain 's accounts provided an oc casion for a good deal of horse trading. Each of the associates had his own projects and priorities. Duplain wanted to sub ordinate everything to the speedy liquidation of the quarto, a goal that was unobjectionable in itself but that entailed the division of the 1,000 sets and some painful friction with the STN. By investing all the association's income in an attempt to produce the third edition as quickly as possible, Duplain had failed to pay the STN 's bills. He also had refused to give it a share in the printing because his second objective was to profit from his role as a printing contractor. The STN wanted to be paid, to receive a volume from the third edition to print, and to get the big printing job that had eluded it ever since it had formed its original partnership with Panckoucke. Panckoucke 's interest had shifted from the quarto to the Encyclopedie methodique, much to the dismay of his associ ates. When he arrived in Lyons, he produced a contract for this new Encyclopedie which he had drawn up with some spec ulators from Liege and now wanted the quarto associates to ratify. In earlier negotiations with the Liegeois, Panckoucke had agreed to sell them the plates and entry to the French mar ket for 205,000 livres. But then he decided to cancel the sale in order to take over the Methodique himself, keeping his quarto associates as partners in the new enterprise. The associates, however, did not want to sacrifice their share of the 205,000 livres or to become entangled in a new speculation before un- 332 Settling Accounts snarling the old one. They already resented Panckoucke's neglect of their sales campaign for the third edition. And Duplain was insensed about his slowness in producing the plates, while the STN objected to his laxness in supervising Duplain. In short, the association seemed to be fissuring in many different directions, some of which cut across the basic cleavage between Duplain and the Panckoucke group. But none of these rifts appeared openly, and the associates patched up the most frayed areas of their enterprise by making con cessions to one another.17 Panckoucke had most to concede, and the Swiss had most to complain about. Feeling the need to reinforce his alliance with the STN, Panckoucke concluded a separate treaty with Ostervald and Bosset on February 13. The STN acknowledged its commitment to accept the 208 quartos that fell to it from its 5/12 share in Panckoucke's 500, and it reaffirmed its com mitment to pay the 92,000 livres that it owed for its original portion of Panckoucke 's plates and privilege. Panckoucke, "desirant obliger Messieurs de la Societe typographique," then gave them a free 5/24 share in the quarto edition of the Table analytique, which he was about to produce with Du plain. He and Duplain had secretly hatched this plan in their contract of September 29, 1777. The only Table that Panc koucke had mentioned in his letters to the N euchatelois was the folio edition, which he had unsuccessfully tried to sell to them in June 1777. At that time, he had explained that he had bought the original Mouchon manuscript for 30,000 livres; he would sell it for 60,000 livres; and he would guarantee that it would fetch 128,000 livres in profits. Since then, times had changed. Panckoucke had shifted his allegiance decisively to the STN, and he did not want the Neuchatelois to feel cut out of a speculation that he had planned behind their back. But the speculation itself looked alluring as ever. The Table pro vided a useful summary and index to Diderot's vast text. And it seemed certain to sell well in the quarto format be cause it could be marketed in the wake of the quarto Encyclo pedie, which had been far more successful than the folios. Panckoucke was convinced that it would be bought by most of 17. The negotiations concerning the Encyclopedie methodique are discussed in detail in Chapter VIII. Although the quarto associates did not keep a record of their meeting in Lyons, their transactions can be pieced together from references scattered throughout the STN papers. 333 The Business of Enlightenment the quarto subscribers and even by persons who did not own Encyclopedies. His gift of 5/24 share in the enterprise there fore had considerable value. And he ingratiated himself still further with the Neuchatelois by promising to intervene with Duplain so that they would get to print the quarto Table, a matter of six quarto volumes. Duplain, who was to manage the quarto Table as he had managed the quarto Encyclopedie, encouraged the Neuchate lois to expect they would get the printing job. He also mollified them by paying several of their bills of exchange, shortly before the meeting began. And he gave them a volume from the third edition to print. This last concession not only kept their presses going, it also quieted their doubts about the size of the pressrun; for they would know from their own printing that the third edition really contained no more than 2,375 copies, as Duplain had testified in the acte passed at the meeting. Duplain and the Neuchatelois even laid plans to collaborate in pirating the Genevan edition of the works of Rousseau. If the Neuchatelois did not dismiss all their suspicions about "notre homme de Lyon,'' they certainly returned home feeling much better about him. The issue that had upset Panckoucke's relations with Du plain concerned the printing of the plates, the division of the 1,000 sets, and the proposal to reduce the printing of the third edition. Panckoucke gave way on all of them. He went further: he granted Duplain a permanent 12/24 share in the plates and privilege of the Encyclopedie as· a replacement for the temporary share that had been allocated for the quarto. This grant was probably worth as much as the gift to the STN of a share in the Tahle because it gave Duplain a claim on all of Panckoucke 's ancillary speculations, including the Ency clopedic m.ethodique. \\Thy had Panckoucke been so accommo dating? The STX had already convinced him about the need supply Duplain with the plates, and Duplain had shown that to it would be unreasonable to reduce the pressrmi of the third edition because he had almost printed half of it. Perhaps it was also too late to rescind the agreement on the 1,000 sets, since each associate had been selling his portion privately 18. Panckoucke made his original offer to the STN in a letter of June 16, 1777. He finally published the folio edition of the Table himself, in two volumes, printed by Stoupe in 1779. See Panckoucke's circular of July 31, 1779, and his letter to the STN of July 21, 1778. 334 Settling Accounts for half a year. But Panckoucke had criticized Duplain's stewardship so vehemently that it is difficult to see why he should have rewarded Duplain for it-unless one takes ac count of the Encyclopedie methodique. More than anything else, Panckoucke wanted to get his associates to accept his new contract with the Liegeois. By granting Duplain a perma nent share in the plates and privilege, he would not only win Duplain 's support for the new enterprise but also give him a stake in it. Still, Panckoucke and the STN had secretly expressed grave doubts about Duplain's integrity. Had he defended his management so effectively as to win them over? There is no record of the exchanges across the conference table, but those who had negotiated with Duplain-shrewd men like Favarger and d'Arnal-agreed that he could be extremely persuasive. He may indeed have persuaded the associates that they were threatened by a severe drop in demand. They knew from their own sales campaigns that the subscription flow had virtually stopped. So they probably saw nothing suspicious in his gloomy report about the prospects for the third edition. Since he quieted their suspicions about the size of its pressrun and bound himself to produce the profits from all 6,150 sets of the first two editions, he seemed to have little room for peculation. And finally, they discovered a secret weapon for their defense. Somehow, when Duplain 's back was turned, they got access to his subscription register and secretly copied it. There was nothing suspicious about the list itself, which accounted for 7,373 subscriptions, but it could protect the associates against fraud, in case Duplain falsified the subscription report in the accounts that he would present after the completion of the third edition, when they would meet again to divide profits and liquidate the entire enterprise.19 The Lyons meeting of 1779 was not, therefore, the straight forward, amiable affair that it appeared to be in the acte passed by the associates before they dispersed. Each man ar- 19. Ostervald and Bosset alluded to the secret copying of the subscription list in a letter to Mme. Bertrand of Feb. 13, 1780, which referred to the "registre ... que nous relevames furtivement et sans qu 'il s 'en doutat il y a un an." The copy itself is in the STN papers, along with related documents about the Lyons meetings of 1779 and 1780 discussed at the end of this chapter. One of the docu ments, a memoir by Plomteux from Feb. 1780 (see Appendix A. XIX), makes clear that Duplain painted a very black picture of the third edition during the meeting of Feb. 1779. 335 The Business of Enlightenment rived nursing his own grudges and desires, and each session was charged with cross-currents and suspicions. Instead of exploding, however, the tension was dissipated by a process of shuffiing projects and trading off concessions. But the associates did nothing in February 1779 to purge the distrust that had alienated the Panckoucke group from Duplain and that remained repressed until the final reckoning of February The Feud Between Duplain and the STN As soon as the associates Feturned from the summit con ference at Lyons, the atmosphere clouded over again. Their commercial correspondence showed that it had become harder than ever to sell quartos, and their expansive, conciliatory mood passed as the market shrank. To be sure, they had al ready sold an unprecedented number of Encyclopedies. But after February 1779, their final balance sheet began to look less sensational than they had originally expected. Minor credits and debits took on major importance. The STN and Duplain, in particular, spent the next twelve months hassling and haggling. Although the inventory of their quarrels makes sad reading, it reveals a great deal about the relationships be tween printer and publisher, associate and manager, during the final stages of the enterprise. Some of the disputes concerned trivial issues. For example, Duplain refused to pay 90 livres 15 sous of the STN 's printing bill because he had to have the frontispiece of volume 35 re done in Lyons. The STN had printed it as '' troisieme edition, a Geneve'' which contradicted his attempt to pass off the third edition as a new, Neuchatel product. The Neuchatelois claimed that they had merely remained faithful to the copy he had sent to them. So every time one house sent a statement ( compte courant) to the other, there was a fresh dispute over an entry for 90 livres 15 sous. But usually Duplain and the STN argued over more important sums. In billing Duplain for its expenditure on paper, the STN included a charge for the chaperon or extra quire for every ream it had purchased. Early modern printers used the chaperon for pulling proofs and replacing defective sheets or sheets spoilt in the printing. ·without it, they could not produce 500 acceptable sheets from every ream of paper they bought. The STN therefore felt 336 Settling Accounts entitled to reimbursement for its chaperon payments, but Du plain refused to be debited for anything more than 500 sheets per ream, making a discrepancy of 1,066 livres for 111 reams of chaperon in the accounts. Even more important and acrimonious was the dispute over 31 misplaced quartos. On March 14, 1778, the STN ordered 52 sets of the third edition, which were to be charged to its account as a wholesaler and which it intended to distribute among its own customers, that is, to individuals who had sub scribed through the STN instead of going directly to Duplain. It heard nothing about the order until October 13, when Du plain wrote that he was sending 20 copies of volumes 1 and 2. The STN replied that it would be glad to receive those 20 but that it needed 32 more to complete its order of 52. Du plain 's shipper had actually sent all 52 volumes 1-2 on October 1, but he had not informed the STN that they were en route. The subsequent shipment of 20 volumes was meant for sub.scribers of the first two editions who had to be supplied from the third, owing to difficulties in coordinating the ship ping operation. Duplain had asked the STN to take those 20 subscriptions on its account because they concerned old STN customers in Northern Europe who lay outside the range of his own commerce. So he read the STN 's request for 32 more quartos as a new order, while the STN understood his ship ment of the 20 copies as a partial fulfillment of the old one. He therefore sent off 32 additional volumes 1 and 2 to Neu chatel, bringing the total to 104 instead of 52. As soon as they received notification of this last shipment, the Neucha telois realized what had happened and explained the double misunderstanding to Duplain. He trebled the confusion, how ever, by interpreting the explanation as an attempt to escape 20. As this issue is of some importance in printing history and analytical bibliography, it seems worthwhile to cite the following passage of the '' Memoire contre Monsieur Duplain'' that the STN submitted to the arbitrators who finally settled their dispute in Feb. 1780: "Chacun sait que toutes les fois qu 'on travaille dans une imprimerie, il se trouve toujours plusieurs feuilles de papier ou defec tueuses ou que les ouviers salissent, gatent, et dechirent, sans parler de celles qui servent pour !es epreuves. C 'est la raison pour laquelle celui qui fournit le papier en ajoute toujours un certain nombre en sus de ce qu 'il faut, et ce surplus se nomme chapelet ou chaperon. lei la Societe invoque en toute confiance l 'usage generalement re~u dans tous !es lieux oil. l 'on fait rouler des presses et supplie Messieurs les arbitres de faire declarer sur le cas tel libraire de cette ville qu 'ils jugeront a propos d 'appeler. II n 'y a de difference que dans le nombre de feuilles ainsi ajoutees pour chaperon. Quelquefois ii va a une main par rame; le moins est ·une main pour deux rames. ' ' 337 The Business of Enlightenment from an obligation to pay for 104 sets. The drop in demand compounded the problem because neither associate wanted to be stuck with surplus Encyclopedies. The STN agreed to take the first 20 of the extra sets because they had been subscribed by its own clients; and it found a subscriber for one of the other 32. But it refused to accept the final 31, which had a wholesale value of 8,526 livres. Duplain would not budge. As each new volume came off the press, he sent 31 unwanted copies to Neuchatel, and the STN sent them back again. Each associate debited the other for their wholesale price and their transport. And each shipment touched off a new flurry of letters full of recriminations. The STN offered to submit the dispute to arbitration, but Duplain refused. He was so obdu rate, in fact, that he seemed to act in bad faith, for a close reading of the correspondence shows that he was mainly to blame for letting a misunderstanding mushroom into a feud that poisoned relations between him and the N euchatelois until the very end of the enterprise, when it was settled in the STN's favor by a panel of arbitrators. Duplain and the STN also kept up a running battle about two minor items in their accounts for 1778. The STN had printed volume 15 of the first two editions and had shipped it to Lyons in sixty-four crates via Pion of Pontarlier on June 20. But Duplain had not received the crates by July 1, when he planned to send off volumes 15, 16, and 17, as well as a volume of plates, to the subscribers. With the passing of each day after the July 1 deadline, Duplain grew increasingly anxious about the STN 's volume. The delay sent repercussions throughout the enterprise: it held up his own shipments; the lag in the shipments caused a postponement in the payments due from subscribers upon the receipt of the books; and the postponement of the payments cut badly into the income needed to produce the later volumes. By July 24, Duplain had sent three letters to Pion without receiving any reply or any indication of what had happened to the shipment from Neu chatel. Unable to wait any longer, he sent his clerk to search for it along the route between Pontarlier and Lyons. The clerk ran into the crates at Beaufort: Pion had simply taken 21. This a.ffair was discussed in dozens of letters and memoranda for almost two years. The crucial letters for interpreting the original misunderstanding are: STN to Duplain, March 16, 1778; Duplain to STN, Oct. 13, 1778; STN to Du plain, Oct. 17, 1778; Duplain to STN, Oct. 20, 1778; and Duplain to STN, Feb. 18, 1779. 338 Settling Accounts his time about forwarding them and had neglected to notify Duplain by the customary lettre d 'avis. His wagoner had also done a bad job of covering the crates. So when they :finally arrived at the end of the month, ten sheets had been ruined by rain. In a fury, Duplain had the sheets reprinted in Lyons and charged the STN 275 livres for them as well as 124 livres for the clerk's journey. He even demanded compensation for the loss of a month's revenue, owing to th~ delay of the July 1 shipment-a matter of 200,000 livres at 1h percent interest per month, or 1,000 livres. And he raged at the N euchatelois for leaving him with his storerooms stuffed with Encyclo pedies, which might have been seized at any moment if the local clergy had turned against him: ''Nous sommes ici ac cables de livres, sans cesse dans la crainte de quelque delation au clerge et dans l 'huile bouillanfa>. 'T ous seuls, Messieurs, causez nos peines. '' The N euchatelois replied that the fault was Pion's, not theirs. Although they had not been obligated to meet any deadline, they had sent the volume off on time. According to commercial law, the shipping agents and wagoners were re sponsible for delays that occurred en route. And there were established procedures for dealing with damaged merchan dise. Duplain should have had a proces-verbal drawn up as soon as the shipment arrived, so that he could hold the wag oner liable. To foist the liability onto the STN was absurd, for the STN had ceased to be responsible for the shipment as soon as it left Neuchatel. By the time of the Lyons meeting in February 1779, Duplain 's temper had cooled, and he tacitly conceded the case to the STN by accepting an account state ment it had :mbmitted on January 6 that excluded all refer ence to the compensation he had demanded. But the punitory debits reappeared in the accounts that he sent to the STN later in 1779. The STN refused to accept them, and they provided material for a great many bitter remarks in the commercial correspondence between the two houses until the time of the liquidation of the quarto, when the arbitrators decided the issue in favor of the STN. 22. Duplain to STN, July 28, 1778. 23. The most important of the many letters and aceounts exchanged on this subject are: STN to Duplain, July 15, 1778; Duplain to STN, July 24, 1778; Duplain to STN, July 28, 1778; STN to Duplain, July 28, 1778; Duplain to STN, Aug. 7, 1778; STN to Duplain, Aug. 26, 1778; and Duplain to STN, Sept. 2, 339 The Business of Enlightenment Ostervald and Basset returned from the conference of Feb ruary 1779 with the first part of the copy for volume 19 of the third edition in their baggage. When they began to print it, they noticed that it contained the same textual errors as volume 19 of the first two editions. Yet Duplain was trying to sell the third edition, under the STN 's imprint, as '' su perieure a l 'autre pour I 'execution, la correction etc.,' ' and the contract for it allotted the abbe Laserre 3,000 livres for improving the text of the earlier editions. The STN con cluded that "notre bon abbe" had collected his wages without doing any work at all. It felt distressed at having loaned its name to an Encyclopedie that '' fourmille de fautes innom brables et tres grossieres que l 'on reprochait avec tant de raison a I 'in-folio et qu 'un homme doue de bon sens n 'aurait jamais laisse passer s 'il avait lu avec attention.'' And it com plained that Duplain did not care about the quality of the work: he had gouged his partners for the salary of "son bon ami l 'homme de l 'Eglise'' and then had failed to supervise him-a neglect that bordered on mismanagement and that could damage the quarto's sales as well as the STN 's repu tation.25 But as explained in the previous chapter, the STN had far more serious complaints about Duplain 's management. It blamed him for the ''faux calcul par un animal de prate,' ' which had committed the quarto publishers to provide the public with the full text of the original seventeen folio vol umes and the four volumes of the Supplement in twenty-nine volumes in-quarto. That was a typographical impossibility, which Linguet had exposed with his usual verve in perhaps the most widely read journal in Europe. Duplain had had to ex tend the quarto to thirty-six volumes and to give away three of them free. But how could he constrain the subscribers to pay for the extra foud As they entered into "la crise des volumes excedant le nombre 29,' ' the quarto associates trem bled; they knew that they would face a great many contested bills, cancelled subscriptions, and law suits-all because of Duplain. In fact, Duplain only managed to fit the text into thirty-six volumes by giving each volume '' une grosseur mon- 24. Duplain to STN, July 10, 1778. 25. STN to Plomteux, May 1, 1779. For further information on Laserre's editing see Chapter V. 26. Ibid. 27. Duplain to STN, April 17, 1779. 340 Settling Accounts strueuse"-120-130 sheets (about 1,000 pages) instead of the 80-90 sheets (about 700 pages) that his associates considered appropriate for a quarto. As the subscribers paid by the volume and the printers were paid by the sheet, this tactic narrowed the association's profit margin. But it fattened Duplain 's profits because he received a set amount from the association for every sheet he had printed-and he had them printed at a far lower price than he was paid, except for the volumes done by the STN. He cited this exception as a reason for expecting the STN to grant a delay in the payment of its printing bills. The STN replied tartly by citing his rake-offs as grounds for expecting him to pay his bills on time. And then it made a more damaging discovery about his manipula tion of his expenses. In July 1779, the STN hired the assistant foreman (second prate) from Pellet's shop to help with its printing, which had then reached volume 19 of the third edi tion. The new employee, Colas, had supervised the printing of the first two editions of the same volume for Pellet. He was therefore able to explain why it contained so many more sheets in the first editions-12 sheets, or 96 pages, to be exact than in the third, even though the text was exactly the same. Pellet had had his compositors widen the spaces between words and stretch out paragraphs until they ended on new lines ("printer's widows"), so as to use up as many sheets as possible. This tactic cost the association 744 livres, which the STN suspected Pellet of sharing with Duplain. Instead of raising all these matters with Duplain, the as sociates kept the most serious of them secret, in order to confound him with incriminating evidence at the final settling of accounts. But they could not contain all their discontent. New issues kept arising, especially from subscribers who complained about the disorder in Duplain 's shipments and billing. For example, in mid-April 1779, Duplain and the STN exchanged account statements. Each statement contained one company's version of the debits and credits that the other had 28. STN to Plomteux, May 1, 1779. 29. Duplain to STN, Dec. 1, 1778, and STN to Duplain, Dec. 5, 1778: "D'ail leurs nous ne sommes point d'humeur de faire des avances, ayant besoin [de] nos fonds; et quant a ce que vous nous marquez sur le benefice que nous pouvons avoir sur I 'impression, vous en avez vous, Messieurs, un bien plus considerable sur la quantite de volumes que nous savons que vous avez fait imprimer au dessous du prix stipule.'' 30. STN to Panckoucke, Feb. 25, 1779, and March 23, 1779. 341 The Business of Enlightenment accumulated over the last few months. The accounts were widely different. In a tightly argued letter that went on for seven pages, the STN disputed twelve items from Duplain 's account. There were the first four volumes of the set of the third edition for the marquis de Boissac, which should have been sent to Heidegger of Zurich instead of being debited to the STN: 40 livres. There was the shipment of thirty-one copie~ of volumes 7 and 8 of the first edition, which Duplain had sent to Neuchatel via Geneva instead of following its in structions to use the cheaper route through Pontarlier: a dif ference of 5 livres 10 sous. There was the misfiled down payment of Buchet of Nimes, who had subscribed for his twenty-six sets through Duplain, not through the STN: a debit of 288 livres to be erased. There was the delay in Du plain 's shipment to the STN of its subscribers' copies of volumes 5-8 of the third edition, which arrived long after Duplain 's bill for them: 1440 livres, which should be carried over from this compte courant to the next. There was Du plain 's supplementary payment for one of the 8TN 's ship ments-a bill that the STN had settled with Pion, that Pion's wagoner had collected a second time in Lyons, and that Du plain had inserted in the STN 's account: another debit of 360 livres to be struck out. And so it went-a series of im broglios, which were not terribly important individually but, when taken together, represented 9,151 livres and several months of accumulated bad feeling. Duplain would not give an inch on any of them. In some cases he was right. Buchet 's 288 livre down payment actually had been made to the STN, which had misfiled it and which acknowledged its error as soon as Duplain produced con vincing evidence of the mistake. But most of the disputes resulted from the disorder of Duplain 's operations in Lyons. The associates received a great many complaints from sub scribers whose Encyclopedies had arrived late, or with miss ing or damaged sheets that Duplain refused to replace, or with too many copies of one volume and too few of another. In his haste to collect payments, Duplain sometimes wrote bills of exchange on booksellers who had not yet received their shipments. When they complained, he threatened to sue. They retaliated with countersuits or took their complaints to his associates, who then became embroiled in dozens of quarrels between Duplain and the subscribers. Each quarrel hurt the 342 Settling Accounts association, either by sapping its profits or by eroding the associates' confidence in Duplain 's management. "Les plain tes sont tres multipliees," Panckoucke lamented to the STN. '' J 'ai une peur horrible que tout cela ne finisse par des proces. '' The STN found it especially difficult to cope with Duplain because it dealt with him in three capacities: as an associate, as an Encyclopedie wholesaler, and as a printer. It could not keep those roles distinct. Duplain took sums that were due to the STN from its subscribers and subtracted them from its printing bills. Then he refused to pay those bills on the grounds that he had not settled his multiple quarrels with the STN over subscriptions and shipments. He refused to honor the bills of exchange that it wrote on him, forcing it to make emergency loans, at a high interest rate, to cover its own engagements. He did pay some of its bills but never in full, for he always found fault with some item. In January 1779, he paid most of what he owed for the first three volumes it had printed, but in April he refused to pay for the last two and revived disputes over items that had been settled in the Jan uary account. He never settled the April account at all-until forced to do so by arbitration after the liquidation of the quarto. The STN complained bitterly: "Generalement vous agissez a notre egard avec une rigueur etonnante. Selon VOS pretentious le fruit de tout notre travail serait reduit a rien ... Nous vous supplions de nous traiter comme les derniers de vos imprimeurs.' ' But the last year of the STN 's rela tions with Duplain produced nothing but refusals on bills of exchange, arguments over accounts, and a growing conviction on its part that Duplain had gone from mismanagement to peculation. Marketing Maneuvers Duplain 's quarrels with the STN symptomized a change in the character of the enterprise. The associates had always distrusted one another, but as they approached the moment when the final balance sheet would be drawn up, they con spired and maneuvered with greater intensity, hoping to make 31. Panckoucke to STN, June 1, 1779. 32. STN to Duplain, April 24, 1779. 343 The Business of Enlightenment the most from a market in its last stages of contraction. That the demand had dropped drastically had become clear in No vember 1778, when the STN expressed the fear that "toutes les ressources soient epuisees en France.' ' Favarger sold only three subscriptions on his tour of southern and central France in late 1778, and Panckoucke had sold only twelve in Paris by April 1779. The Parisian situation was unusual, however, because other editions had glutted the market and because Panckoucke had neglected his sales campaign. As Duplain and the STN complained, he had shifted his allegiance from the quarto to the Encyclopedie methodique. Although he honored his commitment to delay the publication of the pro spectus of the Methodique, he let word leak out that his super Encyclopedie was well under way; the STN then objected that the leaks amounted to "!'equivalent d'un prospectus." Panc koucke's negligence probably hurt the sales of the quarto, but it was far less damaging than another form of insubordi nation among the associates: secret price-cutting. Panckoucke and the STN had committed themselves in. their contract of February 13, 1779, to maintain the subscription price of the quarto. But the division of the 1,000 sets and the decline in demand inevitably produced competition instead of cooperation among the associates. Soon after the meeting of February 1779, a rumor spread that Plomteux had offered special terms for his portion of Panckoucke 's 500 copies. Du plain warned that any deviation from the terms stipulated in the prospectus would ruin the sales of the rest of the edition. Two months later Duplain heard that Regnault was selling his portion with an off er of free transport and a year's credit -an enticement that amounted to a reduction in the sales price and would undermine Duplain's attempts to collect cash from the association's subscribers. This deviant sales manship may have contributed to the deterioration of Reg nault 's relations with Panckoucke, for in 1777 and 1778 Regnault had served as Panckoucke 's secret agent in Lyons (his principal activity apparently was to spy on Duplain), and by June 1779 their friendship had been destroyed by a quarrel that threatened to end up in court. Panckoucke him- 33. STN to Duplain, Nov. 22, 1778. On Nov. 29, 1778, the STN warned Panc koucke that ''la province est rassassiee, ce que nous avons appris par un de nos commis, qui est de retour d 'un voyage qu 'il a fait dans les provinces meridionales de France, ou il n 'en a place qu 'une couple.'' 34. STN to Duplain, April 10, 1779. 344 Settling Accounts self eventually deviated from the prescribed terms of the subscription, although he did not actually lower the price of his quartos. And later in 1779, the STN began to tempt its customers with various selling devices: six months' credit; three free copies for every twenty-four orders instead of one for every twelve; free stitching (the STN evaluated brochage, which involved folding and sewing the sheets, at 4 percent of the wholesale price) ; and free transport as far as Lyons. By the end of the year, Plomteux reportedly had traded some of his quartos for books that he expected to market more easily, and a few quartos had sold in Lyons for 240 livres-54 livres off the original whole~mle price. Although it would be an ex aggeration to say that the bottom had dropped out of the market, the demand fell off seriously enough in 1779 to in crease the pressure that was building up among the associ ates. And while the pressure rose, Duplain attempted to dispose of the rump of the third edition by some adroit ma neuvering. 35 First, he offered to trade his share in the quarto Table and in the Encyclopedie methodique for the 208 sets that the STN had acquired as its portion of Panckoucke 's 500. The diffi culties of the market made the STN feel inclined to accept. But Panckoucke secretly advised it to refuse, basing his argu ment on Duplain 's avarice: "C'est un homme avide que ce M. Duplain et qui aime l'argent avec fureur." It followed that 208 quartos were worth more than a half interest in the Table, which would produce 4,000 sales according to Panc koucke 's estimate, and the more remote prospects of the Methodique. But Panckoucke was also concerned about the need to prevent Duplain from cutting himself loose from their speculations: ''De quelque maniere que vous traitiez, il faut 3;). The quarrels over pricing stand out in Duplain to STN, Feb. 18, 1779; Duplain to STN, April 17, 1779; and STN to Panckoucke, May 2, 1779. Reg nault 's role in the enterprise remains obscure, but a letter to him by the STN of June 6, 1779, shows that he and Panckoucke were expecting to take their quarrel to court. The STN 's remarks on stitching came in letters to Bosset of Aug. 7, 1779, and to Noel Gilles of Aug. 15, 1779. Panckoucke offered credit in return for a slight increase in the price of the quarto in a circular dated July 31, 1779. And the price-slashing in Lyons was reported in letters from the STN to Bosset, Sept. 16, 1779, and from d'Arnal to the STN, Nov. 12, 1779. By this time, how ever, only a few volumes of the quarto remained to be sold, and it seems unlikely that many of them were marketed at such a low price, especially outside the Lyons area, where sales were heaviest. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Jefferson found that the quarto sold for 380 livres-that is, virtually the same amount as the original subscription price-in Paris in 1786. 345 The Business of Enlightenment que Duplain reste interesse pour une part et I 'obliger surtout a agir personnellement pour placer !'edition. Duplain brule de se retirer, et son activite nous est necessaire. ,J e vous prie de ne pas me compromettre. Duplain ne me pardonnerait de la vie de vous avoir donne un a vis qui croise ses interets. '' This line of reasoning convinced the N euchatelois. The fact that Duplain had made the offer was reason enough to refuse it, they replied to Panckoucke. And it did indeed seem odd that Duplain should want to acquire more quartos at the very moment when they seemed to be least in demand. Duplain did not give up, however. In fact he tried to coerce the STN into accepting his offer. He sent the first eight vol umes of the STN 's 208 copies to Paris instead of Neuchatel a move that not only held up the STN 's attempts to market them but also decreased their value by overloading them with 1,466 livres in transport costs. The N euchatelois had expected to sell most of their 208 sets in northern Europe. Faced with the expense of the unnecessary Lyons-Paris-Neuchatel jour ney and the threat that the next twenty-eight volumes would follow the same route, they might be expected to take the easy way out and trade the books to Duplain. Duplain did not make this threat openly. He presented the Paris shipment as a retaliatory measure. The STN had offered to sell its copies with six months' credit, he explained to Panckoucke, and that derogation from the terms of the subscription would ruin his own sales. Beside.-;, he had contracted with Panc koucke to supply 500 quartos to the Parisian market. To Paris they would go, regardless of Panckoucke 's subsequent agree ments with his own associates. The N euchatelois replied that Duplain 's argument was '' fautif a tous egards. '' Not only had they honored their commitment to keep up the price (they did not begin price cutting until August 1779), but also the agreement to divide the 1,000 sets dicl not require Panckoucke to receive his share in Paris. Any such provision would have been absurd and would have heen rejected by Panckoucke and the STN to gether. The N euchatelois could only interpret Duplain 's ac- 36. Panckoucke to STN, March 7, 1779, and STN to Panckoucke, March 14, 37. Duplain to Panckoucke, March 12, 1779, from a copy in Panckoucke 's letter to the STN of March 18, 1779. 346 Settling Accounts tion as an attempt to force them into complying with whatever secret strategy he had devised to wind up the affair with the greatest possible profit for himself, no matter what the cost to his associates. 'rhey therefore resolved to resist, and to keep their suspicions hidden : '' V ous nous avez conseille tres sagement de dissimuler jusqu 'au bout avec lui et de ne pas marquer notre jmite mecontentement. En verite la chose de vient de jour en jour plus difficile,'' they told Panckoucke. They stuck to their decision to refuse Duplain 's request for the 208 copies, and the 1,466 livres in unnecessary transport costs became one more item in the long list of what they re ferred to as their ''griefs contre Duplain.' ' Meanwhile Duplain tried to persuade Panckoucke to divide up the rest of the third edition as they had done with the first 1,000 copies. About 450 or 500 sets remained to be sold, he said. He would apportion them among the associates, and this time he would ship them wherever they pleased so that each man could dispose of his copies as he liked. There was one thing to be said for this proposal: it would prevent further deterioration in the relations among the associates by aban doning the agreement against price-cutting and by leaving them free to sell the last quartos on the best terms they could find. Panckoucke felt tempted to accept it, although he had no illusions about Duplain 's '' avidite sans bornes,'' as he ex plained to the STN. True, Duplain had sent the 208 copies to Paris in order to keep the STN out of the provincial market, and he had refused to give Regnault his copies in Lyons for the same reason. But Duplain could find even more ways to sabotage their sales; for he controlled the machinery of the enterprise in Lyons, and there was little the associates could do, at a distance of 150 leagues, to keep him in check. It was too late to recoup their losses from the rake-offs on the print ing, although Panckoucke would try to protect them from any major embezzlement by holding back the last volume of plates until the accounts had been settled. But they might prevent further fraud by dividing up the last copies and selling them on their own. In that way they could put an end to the quarrels over the last marketing and bill-collecting operations and could hold the association together until the final reckoning 38. STN to Panckoucke, March 23, 1779, and March 14, 1779. See also STN to Duplain, April 24, 1779. 347 The Business of Enlightenment of the accounts-assuming that they could continue to hide their distrust of Duplain. "Au nom de l'amitie, ne me com promettez jamais,'' Panckoucke concluded. ''Nous avons, mal gre les plaintes que nous pourrions faire, a nous concilier jusqu 'ace que tousles comptes soient rendus. '' The STN saw two objections to Duplain 's proposal: it believed that he exaggerated the number of unsold sets, which it estimated at 400 instead of 450-500; and it thought that he would have an unfair advantage in marketing them, for he could pick off the last of the subscriptions that had been flowing into the association's central office, while they would have to sell their portion on the open market where the demand was weakest. A few days later, Duplain put his proposal formally to the associates in a circular letter : '' I1 reste de la troisieme edition un nombre de 480 exemplaires, et nous voyons avec peine qu 'il ne s 'en vend plus. Nous croy ons pour l 'avantage de tous les interesses qu 'il convient de se partager ce nombre, parce que chacun ayant ses moyens, il sera plutOt epuise. '' The STN rejected this proposition adroitly, by telling Duplain that he had done such a good job of marketing seven or eight thousand Encyclopedies for the association that it was sure he could sell a mere "queue" of 480. Panckoucke then came around to the STN's opinion. He did not trust Duplain 's version of the subscriptions, he confided to the N euchatelois. So he would reject the proposal and refuse to ship the third volume of the plates to Lyons. Panckoucke 's delaying tactics infuriated Duplain, who asked the STN to intervene for the release of the plates. The Neuchatelois agreed to do so, but at the same time they in sisted that Duplain surrender the remaining volumes of their 208 sets in Lyons, where d 'Arnal had rented a warehouse to receive them. This bargaining worked. Duplain delivered the books to d' Arnal in Lyons rather than to Panckoucke in Paris, and the STN persuaded Panckoucke to send off the last vol ume of plates, arguing that further stalling on the plates 39. Panckoucke to STN, March 18, 1779, which ineluded a copy of Duplain's proposal from a letter by Duplain to Panckoueke dated Mareh 12, 1779. 40. STN to Panekoucke, Mareh 23, 1779. The STN also supported Pane· koucke 's resolution to hold back the third volume of plates ''a titre d 'epouvan· tail" and reassured him that it would keep their secrets: "Nous sommes de votre avis de garder des menagements jusqu 'a la c!Oture, et nous ne vous compro· mettrons jamais." 41. ''Lettre commune a Messieurs les interesses, '' April 1, 1779. 42. STN to Duplain, April 7, 1779, and Panckoucke to STN, April 25, 1779. 348 Settling Accounts would alert Duplain to their suspicions. The associates there fore backed away from a confrontation once again in the spring of 1779. But their positions had hardened, their mis trust deepened. Duplain had only strengthened the secret collaboration between Panckoucke and the STN by maneuver ing to get most of the copies of the third edition into his own hands, while paradoxically--or so it seemed-the demand had continued to decline, increasing the pressure on the associates to find some way to market the last of their Encyclopedies. Then, just when the pressure was becoming hardest to bear, Duplain came up with another proposal. The Perrin Affair In July 1779, Duplain traveled to Paris and warned Panc koucke that the future of the third edition looked even blacker than it had seemed in February. The flow of subscriptions had completely dried up. It seemed certain that the associates would be stuck with 400 quartos when they met at the end of the year to liquidate the enterprise. They would have to divide up the surplus sets and market them individually. But by then they might find it impossible to sell the quarto on any terms, except as scrap paper, because the market was already sated, and it would be ruined irredeemably by the publication of the Encyclopedie methodique in 1780. Fortunately, how ever, Duplain had found an "entrepreneur" who had caught the Encyclopedie fever. He had fired the imagination of this man, whom he did not mention by name, with the prospect of a speculation on the last copies of the quarto. So the associates could dump their unwanted sets on him. To be sure, the entrepreneur demanded extraordinary terms-156 livres per set, 53 percent of the normal wholesale price-but they would be lucky to get rid of their last Encyclopedies at any price. And he would take a huge number-all their leftovers, which amounted to 422 sets. 43. On this brief cooling-off period in the relations among the associates see Duplain to STN, April 17, 1779; STN to Duplain, April 24, 1779; STN to Panc koucke, May 2, 1779; and Panckoucke to STN, June 1, 1779. In the last letter, Panckoucke agreed to send the plates because of the supreme importance of keeping their suspicions hidden and avoiding an open break with Duplain. 44. On the terms of this deal see the contracts of Aug. 3 and Aug. 13, 1779, in Appendix A. XVII; and on the negotiations see Panckoucke to STN, Aug. 3, 1779, and Duplain to STN, Aug. 3, 1779. 349 The Business of Enlightenment Panckoucke found this offer very attractive. He had not been able to sell more than two dozen sets of the 200 or so sets that he had retained after splitting the 1,000 with Duplain a year ago. He wanted to wind up the quarto quickly in order to devote all his attention to the Encyclopedie methodique. And he felt hungry for the impeccable bills of exchange, which Duplain's entrepreneur promised to provide and which would mature in only six months. The entrepreneur seemed delightfully oblivious to the dangers of the book trade, because he merely asked that the prospectus for the Encyclopedie methodique be held back until August 1780, whereas all the insiders of the business already knew that the great work would soon burst upon the market. And Duplain pushed the proposal hard, using his carrot-and-stick methods of per suasion. He said that his man would also purchase all of Panckoucke 's portion of the 1,000 sets they had divided; if Panckoucke refused, Duplain would sell his own portion at half price to the entrepreneur, who would then be able to undersell the other associates. Panckoucke knew that Duplain was a tricky operator, but he wanted to turn this trickiness outward, so that the associates should not be victims of it. Duplain had someone else on his hook. Better to let him land the catch before it got away. They would never have such an opportunity again. Such was the advice that Panckoucke sent to :'.'J euchatel on August 3, 1779. In a confidential postscript, he also recom mended that the STN attach a condition to its acceptance of Duplain 's offer: it should insist on receiving the printing job for the quarto edition of the Table analytique, with an allot ment of 1,000 livres for the editorial work to be done on each of the four volumes. Duplain sent a letter on the same day, stressing the same themes, with a confidential new twist of his own. If the N euchatelois wanted to refuse his proposal, they should tell him so; but they should inform Panckoucke that they had accepted it. Duplain would then supply them with their 5/24 share of the leftover quartos, which they could sell their own terms behind Panckoucke 's back. But he urged on them to agree to his proposal so that they could all liquidate the quarto quickly and move on to speculations on the Ency clopedie methodique and the Table. The STN chose to maneuver against Duplain as Panckoucke 45. Panckoucke to STN, Aug. 3 and Aug. 13, 1779. 350 Settling Accounts had recommended rather than to mislead Panckoucke as Du plain had suggested. It sent its consent to the proposal, with the proviso that Duplain let it print the Table. Duplain agreed, noting that the decision to sell the surplus 400 now looked wiser than ever because the demand had completely evapo rated.46 Two contracts consummated the sale (see Appendix A-XVII). The first, August 3, 1779, concerned only Panc koucke and Duplain. Panckoucke committed himself to accept the transaction that Duplain was to arrange with the entre preneur-who was referred to only as "on "-and Duplain was to come up with the bills of exchange that "on" would supply for all the remaining quartos, Panckoucke 's as well as those of the association, at 156 livres a set. The second con tract, dated August 13, revealed that "on" was a "M. Perrin, commissionnaire a Lyon.'' Duplain certified that he had re ceived 65,832 livres in Perrin 's notes for 422 sheets of the quarto and that Perrin would produce another 24,060 livres for the 160 sets that Panckoucke was holding at his disposition in Paris. Instead of saving the associates from internecine strife, as Panckoucke had hoped, the Perrin deal brought them to the brink of civil war. It embroiled the STN and Duplain in a quarrel about the printing of the Table analytique, and it ultimately confirmed Panckoucke and the STN in their sus picions that Duplain was swindling them. The printing job mattered a great deal to the Neuchatelois because they needed to keep their shop busy after completing their last volume of the Encyclopedie in May. By August they had had to fire half their work force, but they retained an "assortiment de bons ouvriers '' in the hopes of finding a big enough commission to relieve "nos presses oisives. " They had been expecting since February that relief would come in the form of the Table analytique. They had made elaborate preparations for the work, discussing typeface, costs, pressrun, prospectuses, and other details in a series of letters with Panckoucke. And Panc koucke had led them to believe that Duplain would give them 46. Duplain to STN, Sept. 2, 1779. 47. Duplain kept the original version of the contract of Aug. 13 and sent copies to the associates. As the contract did not provide for any free thirteenth sets, it might be said to have given Perrin his quartos for about 60 percent of the normal wholesale price. 48. STN to Bosset, Aug. 30, 1779, and STN to the Societe typographique de Lausanne, June 1, 1779. 351 The Business of Enlightenment the job. Duplain, however, planned to produce the Table as he had produced the text; that is, he wanted to profit from his role as middleman by contracting the printing to the firms that did cut-rate work for him in Lyons. He therefore felt re luctant about accepting the STN 's condition for its agreement to the Perrin sale, and as soon as he had received the agree ment, he began to back away from his commitment on the printing. He told the STN that it would have to do the work as cheaply as the cheapest of his Lyonnais printers. He ex plained quite frankly that he felt entitled to a cut in the printing payments as a reward for -his success as an entre preneur. He had already gathered 1,500 subscriptions for the Table, he said, and he expected to. take in still more as soon as he published its prospectus. The N euchatelois immediately protested that this new demand violated the Perrin agreement. But Duplain would not budge. If they refused to accept his terms, he said, they could drop out of the Perrin deal and take their 5/24 share in Perrin 's 422 quartos. Perrin would be delighted to return them because he was beginning to realize that they were unsellable. For the same reason, as Duplain knew very well, the N euchatelois could not afford to add more quartos to their own stock. Nor could they continue much longer to maintain a large shop without a large printing job. So they gave in and agreed to work on his terms. They never got the commission, however, because he kept postponing the printing; and when they complained, he stopped answering their letters. So the Table provided material for another dos sier to be argued over at the liquidation in Lyons. While the STN grappled with Duplain over the Table, Panckoucke tried to come to grips with the elusive Perrin. Perrin proved to be difficult to deal with because, according to Duplain, he demanded that Panckoucke pay for the trans port of his 160 quartos from Paris to Lyons. Panckoucke 49. The story of the preparations for the quarto Table has considerable in terest, especially for typographical history, but it would require too long a de tour to be recounted here. The most important of the many letters concerning it, all from 1779, are: STN to Panckoucke, Feb. 25; Panckoucke to STN, March 7; STN to Panckoucke, March 14; Panckoucke to STN, March 18; STN to Panc koucke, March 23; STN to Panekoueke, May 9; Panckoucke to STN, June 1; Panckoucke to STN, Aug. 3; STN to Bosset, Aug. 7; Duplain to STN, Sept. 2; Duplain to STN, Sept. 9; STN to Panckoucke, Sept. 19; Duplain to STN, Sept. 20; STN to Panckoucke, Sept. 30; STN to Panckoucke, Oct. 15; and Duplain to STN, Nov. 9. 352 Settling Accounts refused, on the grounds that the contract of August 13 only obligated him to hold Perrin 's quartos "a sa disposition" in Paris. But according to Duplain, Perrin would back out of the sale if Panckoucke did not assume the transport costs, which were certain to be very expensive. In fact, Duplain warned that Perrin was looking for an excuse to cancel the deal. But Panckoucke stood his ground, even though Perrin threatened to take him to court-according to Duplain. ''According to Duplain'' seemed to be the only form through which Perrin could express himself. Panckoucke never dealt directly with Duplain 's entrepreneur and did not even learn his name until Duplain described him in a letter as '' un nomme :M. Perrin, commissionnaire de Strasbourg, qui a une maison a Lyon, une je crois a Paris, et enfin un homme exces sivemen t riche dont je vous reponds. " That sounded sus piciously vague to Panckoucke, who by now had learned to suspect everything emanating from Lyons. '' J e vous serai oblige," he wrote to the STN, de vous en faire informer par M. d 'Arnal, sous main, si ce M. Perrin n 'existe pas, si meme ce n 'est qu 'un prete-nom. C 'est une friponnerie de Duplain que nous ne devons pas souffrir, parce que nous n 'avons consenti a la vente de ces exemplaires que parce qu 'il nous a assure qu 'on n 'en vendait plus du tout et que meme il nous a menace si nous ne voulions pas consentir a cette vente qu'il etait determine a vendre ace prix ses exemplaires. Priez M. d'Arnal de prendre les informations les plus secretes. Nous ne devons pas souffrir d'etre la dupe du tres avide Duplain. In a postscript, Panckoucke reminded the STN to keep to their strategy of hiding all suspicions: ''Si les informations de M. d' Arnal sont conformes a mes soup<:ons, il faut les tenir tres secretes, laisser aller M. Duplain en avant, etc." Industrial espionage is no invention of the twentieth cen- 50. Panckoucke to STN, Sept. 10, 1779, citing a letter he had recently received from Duplain. 51. Panckoucke to STN, Sept. 10, 1779. The emphasis is Panckoucke 's. For some reason, perhaps because he was upset, Panckoucke wrote two letters to the STN on the same day about his suspicions. The second version read: '' J 'ai de mande ii. Duplain le nom de l 'acquereur de l 'Encyclopedie. II m 'a nomme un certain Perrin. J e crains bien encore que ce soit un tour qu 'ii nous joue et qu 'il ne soit lui-meme l 'acquereur sous le nom de ce Perrin. Quoiqu 'il puisse en etre, ii faut user jusqu 'au bout de tons les mena;gements possibles. II faudra bien que ce Perrin se fasse connaitre, sa demeure, sa qualite. J e desire que mes soupi;ons ne soient pas fondes. ' ' 353 The Business of Enlightenment tury, and it was not new to the speculation on the Encyclo pedie. The quarto associates had spied on one another from the beginning. During its first negotiations with Panckoucke, the STN had conducted a secret investigation of him, using his neighbors as informants and Perregaux as an agent. It commissioned an underground bookdealer called Quandet de Lachenal to do another investigation in 1781. Panckoucke had received confidential reports about Duplain 's operations from Regnault, and Louis Marcinhes kept the STN informed about the activities inside the Genevan printing houses. Spying seems to have existed everywhere in the eighteenth-century book trade. The word espion occurs frequently in the cor respondence of the booksellers, just as it appears in the titles of some of their most popular books: L'Espion turc, L'Espion anglois, L'Espion devalise. It covered a wide range of ac tivities, some of them rather innocent. Like many traveling salesmen, Favarger was spying when he interviewed workers, peeked at sales registers, and filched newly printed sheets. More serious was the practice of bribing workers to provide sheets for pirated editions. The STN warned Beaumarchais that the printers in Kehl were certain to supply sheets of his Voltaire to pirates who wanted to beat him to the market. And it also put its customers on guard against double agents in the underground book trade-men like Desauges of Paris, Poirn;ot of Versailles, and Mallet of Troyes, who ordered il legal books and then turned the suppliers over to the police. The French police even had agents in the STN 's own shop, according to reports from Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who prob ably was a police spy himself. Spying had become such a com mon activity that it seemed natural for the STN to plant a man in Duplain 's shop. In fact, it had received secret reports on the shop from d 'Arnal for two years before Panckoucke asked it to investigate Perrin, and so it requested d'Arnal to undertake the investigation. The STN shared all of Panckoucke 's suspicions about Perrin: ''Plus nous examinons l 'affaire de la vente ... et plus nous y decouvrons d'obscurites, de contradictions meme, 52. On the STN 's warning to Beaumarchais see Ostervald to Bosset, May 3, 1780; on its relations with Brissot see Robert Darnton, "The Grub-Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Police Spy," Journal of Modern History, XL (1968)' 301-327. 354 Settling Accounts et de procedes suspects.' ' After receiving his instructions from the STN, d'Arnal replied that he would undertake the mission, although it would not be easy: V ous nous chargez, Messieurs, d 'une commission bien difficile a executer. Comment sans se compromettre pouyoir questioner, inter roger, surtout etant connus pour ayoir des relations aYec yous? Vous sentez, Messieurs, que nous sommes par cela meme tres suspects a ceux qui pourraient nous donner quelques eclaircissements. Cependant, nous ayons engage un ami, qui est fort lie ayec M. Perrin, a nous preter son ministere pour sonder ledit sieur. 11 usera de toute l 'adresse possible pour tacher d 'arracher audit sieur son secret, et s 'il n 'y reussit pas, personne ne pourra se flatter de reussir. Mais ledit Perrin etant chargeur de M. D xxx, est par cette raison tres interesse a le menager. 11 est fort a craindre qu 'il ne se determine pas aisement a le trahir ... Des que notre espion aura fait quelque decouYerte, nous nous haterons de yous en instruire.11 D'Arnal added that Perrin ran a shipping firm, Carmaignac et Perrin, which was believed to be wealthy and which did indeed have a branch in Strasbourg. It struck him as most unlikely that a shipper would speculate in publishing, so he agreed with the hypothesis that Duplain was using his ship ping agent as a straw man. But he would have to proceed with extreme caution if he wanted to acquire enough evidence to prove the case against Duplain, for Duplain knew that d 'Arnal was intimately connected with the STN, and Duplain's con nections with Perrin might be just as close. D'Arnal there fore kept in the background. He counseled his spy to move carefully and to wait for a casual encounter with Perrin, as a special visit might arouse suspicions. They had not made contact by October 10, the last date on which "P xxx" was mentioned in the letters from d 'Arnal that have survived in the papers of the STN. At that point, d 'Arnal 's man dis appears from the documents. He may well have produced some important information for Ostervald and Bosset four months later, when they arrived in Lyons for the final settling of accounts. D 'Arnal himself fought at their side throughout that last encounter with Duplain. But there is no record of his activities. So one can only say that the final phase of the 53. STN to Panckoucke, Sept. 19, 1779, in BibliotMque publique et universi taire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 54. D'Arnal to STN, Sept. 24, 1779. 55. D'Arnal to STN, Sept. 28, 1779. 355 The Business of Enlightenment quarto's history involved an espionage ope}'ation directed against the manager of the enterprise by two of the as sociates. While d'Arnal pursued his investigation in Lyons, Panc and the STN continued on their own to accumulate koucke incriminating evidence against Duplain. The STN learned from a French bookseller that Duplain had claimed, before the Perrin sale, that the third edition was virtually sold out-an innocent remark, perhaps, but one that made the STN wonder where Perrin's 422 quartos came from. Panckoucke dis covered a printed flyer, which had been circulating among French booksellers and which offered the quarto at a discount in Pellet's name. He concluded that it represented an under hand sales campaign by Duplain similar to the Batilliot plot of November 1778 : '' J e suis persuade que Pellet n 'est que le prete-nom de Duplain, et que ce Perrin n 'est qu 'un horn.me de paille ou un prete-nom comme Pellet. Enfin, ne <lites rien, et laissez-le agir. Si cette vente [that is, the Perrin sale] n 'est pas reelle, il faudra bien qu 'il nous tienne compte.' ' Why should Duplain continue his efforts to acquire and sell quartos, if the demand had been exhausted and the supply turned over to Perrin, the associates wondered. Duplain 's surreptitious marketing seemed especially insupportable to Panckoucke be cause in October Panckoucke received a copy of the prospectus for the Table analytique, which Duplain had written and pub lished without consulting the associates. It promoted Du plain 's quarto Table by denigrating the folio Table that Panckoucke had just finished printing-an unnecessary swipe at one of Panckoucke 's side speculations, which threw him into a rage. Just when the associates were finding it most difficult to contain their suspicions and their anger, Duplain sent them a proposal for selling still more quartos to Perrin with a highly suspect "Apergu" about the present state of the sales: 56. D 'Arnal probably included the reports on his investigation in the private correspondence he maintained with Bosset, his father-in-law, which has not been preserved. 57. STN to Panckoucke, Sept. 19, 1779, Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve, ms. suppl. 148. 58. Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 2, 1779. 59. Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 11, 1779, and STN to Panckoucke, Oct. 15, 356 Settling Accounts 6589 places a divers 500 remis a M. Panckoucke 500 a moi [Duplain] 422 vendus suivant la derniere convention a 156 livres [to Perrin] 8011 turned out to be an important number for the quarto enterprise. It was Duplain 's figure for the output of market able Encyclopedies-the number of complete sets that he had put together from the sheets sent in by his printers, the num ber that he had marketed and for which he agreed to be held accountable. The contracts for the three editions had set pressruns totaling 8,550, and later documents indicate that 8,525 copies were actually printed. Why was there such a disparity between the number of quartos produced and the number that Duplain claimed to have sold'? Duplain avoided discussion of production figures, but he indicated that his printers had supplied him with material for far more than 8,011 sets, because he emphasized the number of def ets he had accumulated. Defets were sheets that had been spoiled in printing, transport, or warehouse work. Since a spoilt sheet could ruin a volume and a ruined volume could ruin a set, Duplain had his workers put aside all the spoilt sheets they found in the shipments that poured into his warehouses from the twenty or so shops that printed the thirty-six volumes of the three editions. To unpack, check, assemble, store, and ship out all those Encyclopedies was a complex operation. Du plain 's employees worked in confusion and haste, spoiling still more sets as they proceeded. In the end, he said, they filled two warehouses with def ets. But 100 to 130 sets, perhaps even more, could be salvaged from the defets by printing a few missing sheets. Duplain therefore proposed that the as sociates authorize him to put together a scrap edition and to sell the new quartos at 156 livres a set. He thought Perrin might be interested in buying them. 60. Duplain to STN, Oet. 11, 1779. 61. Duplain to STN, Oet. 11, 1779: "Je eraignais bien que les gachis enormes qu 'on a faits dans mes magasins, dans les envois, neeessites par la promptitude de l 'operation, qui a oblige d 'employer de toutes sortes de personnes, ne nous eussent prive de bien d 'exemplaires, et ne nous eussent pas mis dans le eas de faire une nouvelle reeolte que voiei. Comme le tome 36 va finir, je vais faire ranger 357 The Business of Enlightenment Duplain did not explain why the associates should spend more money to produce more Encyclopedies at a time when the demand seemed to have hit bottom. Nor did he account for Perrin 's willingness to buy another hundred quartos so soon after discovering-according to Duplain-that there was no market for those he had acquired by his previous purchase. Strangest of all was Duplain's claim that only 6,589 of the 8,011 copies had been sold to subscribers; for the secret sub scription list that the N euchatelois had copied from his books in February 1779 accounted for 7,373 subscription sales. Even the figure of 8,011 complete sets seemed questionable, because Duplain had insisted that Panckoucke print the plates at the much higher pressrun of 8,600. '' J 'ai rec;u le calcul en gros des exemplaires envoyes par M. Duplain,'' Panckoucke wrote to the STN after receiving the "Aperc;u." "Les planches sont le thermometre de la vente. On les tire a 8,600. En supposant ex act le calcul que nous avons fait a Lyon de 8,309 et en y joig nant 130 ou 150 provenant des def ets, nous nous rapprocherions beaucoup du nombre exact, mais nous serions bien eloignes du calcul de l\L D. Tout cela ne pent se verifier que sur les lieux.'' Only one explanation seemed to make sense of all those puzzles and paradoxes: Duplain had turned the enterprise into a gi gantic confidence game. Panckoucke and the STN had pretty well adopted that view by the autumn of 1779. But they continued to deal with Du plain as if they suspected nothing. They refused his proposal for the scrap edition but maintained a polite, businesslike tone !es defets, et ce qui va vous surprendre, c 'est que j 'ai deux magasins remplis. II est done question de savoir si la compagnie veut suivre mon avis, qui est de refaire !es feuilles qui completeront !es exemplaires; et je crois qu 'avec une tres modique depensc nous ferons 100, peut-etre 130, peut-etre plus encore d 'exemplaires ... Quant a moi, Messieurs, mon a vis est qu 'on travaille sur le champ aux defets, qu'on refasse !es feuilles qui produiront avee un gros avantage des exemplaires complets, et qu 'on vende 156 livrcs !es exemplaires revenants nets de I 'operation, si M. Perrin, qui a achete !es autres, le veut.'' The term defets was used loosely to cover both spoilt sheets and leftover sheets from sets that had been spoiled. Ex tensive spoilage c1·eated a large surplus of leftover sheets and therefore a possibil ity of constructing a scrap edition. 62. Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 25, 1779. Panckoucke stressed this point again in a letter to the STN of Oct. 31, 1779: "On tire !es planches de l 'Encyclopedie a 8,600. II faut done qu 'il y ait 8,600 de discours. '' As mentioned, the STN had believed earlier that Duplain might be cheating on the size of the editions, but his willingness to let them print a volume from the third edition had quieted their suspicions. He could have had extra copies of that volume printed, however, or he could have ordered an unusually large printing of it in the first two editions. 358 Settling Accounts in their correspondence with him, while venting their anger in their letters to one another. That was a difficult role to play, especially for the N euchatelois, who complained to Panc koucke, "Nous observons qu'en general nous sommes con stamment sur la defense et uniquement occupes a parer les bottes qu'il plaira de nous porter. Cette position n'est rien moins que la ph'ts avantageuse. N"'aurons-nous point en main de quoi agir un peu offensivement contre lui "? '' Their desire to strike back had grown almost ungovernable in June, when they went through a final round of their financial quarrels with Duplain. Having completed the printing of their last volume, they had notified him that his debt had mounted to 35,000 livres. Duplain replied that he owed 6,000 livres, and refused to honor 29,000 livres in the STN 's bills of exchange. The STN tried to collect its bills through d 'Arnal, protesting that ''on ne peut rien de plus cruel que leurs procedes a notre egard." But d'Arnal replied that Duplain claimed "qu'enfin il n'avait rien a demeler avec vous, Messieurs, et que c'etait par pure complaisance qu 'il repondait aux lettres que vous lui ecrivez. '' Soon afterward Duplain stopped answering most of the STN 's letters in addition to rejecting most of its bills. There was little that the STN could do but wait to retaliate at the final accounting, while fuming secretly to Panckoucke, who replied in kind. PANCKOUCKE: Je suis bien persuade que ce Perrin n'est qu'un homme imaginaire ou tout au moins un prete-nom. D. est avide et ne se pique d'aucune delicatesse. II faut bien se laisser vendre les exemplaires, et puis nous lui demanderons compte, la vente a Perrin n 'ayant pas eu lieu ... Faites en sorte que Duplain ne soupgonne rien. STN: Tout concourt a appuyer VOS conjectures quant a notre associe touchant le veritable acquereur des exemplaires vend us en dernier lieu, et nous avons lieu d 'esperer que nos amis de Lyon decouvriront encore quelque chose ace sujet. Mais quoiqu'il en soit, nous ne pourrons man quer d 'en savoir le vrai lors de la reddition [sic] des comptes ... Nous ne sonnerons mot jusqu'a l'epoque fatale, qui heureusement n'est pas eloignee. PANCKOUCKE: Je pense toujours que ce Perrin est un homme de paille. Duplain nous joue. Jene serai point dupe de sa cupidite. 63. STN to Panckoucke, May 9, 1779. 64. STN to d 'Amal, June 23, 1779. "Leur" referred to "Duplain et com pagnie. '' Companies normally used the plural form in their commercial corres pondence. 65. D'Arnal to STN, June 27, 1779. 359 The Business of Enlightenment And so the dialogue continued, as suspicion piled on suspicion, intrigue compounded intrigue, and the plots and subplots gathered together until everything culminated at the same point: the reglement de comptes at Lyons in February 1780. The Anatomy of a Swindle Duplain and his associates argued over the accounts for sixteen days-until February 12, when they agreed on a gen eral settlement. The STN and Duplain then continued to argue over their particular accounts, which were finally re solved by arbitration on February 21. Almost a month of complicated and impassioned wrangling; and to reconstruct it, only the flotsam and jetsam that it left in its wake and that Ostervald and Bosset swept up and took home in their bag gage. In one of the letters that he wrote while the storm was raging, Bosset complained about having to recreate the ac counts from '' les chiffons de Duplain.' ' The historian must work from Bosset's own scrap paper, the chiffons of chiffons: notes taken during debates, sums scrawled in the course of strategy sessions, and memos dashed off at critical moments. In the absence of coherent documentation and in the interest of clarity, it seems best to begin with a summary of all the swindles that Duplain 's partners discovered, even though the discoveries came at different stages of a long, confused struggle. The most incriminating evidence that Duplain's associates brought to Lyons was the subscription list they had secretly copied from his books a year earlier. They kept this weapon in reserve and forced Duplain to come up with a list of his own in order to justify his version of the financial situation. Then they retired to their inn, compared the two lists, and discovered a monumental swindle. Thanks to Bosset 's margin notes on his copy of the secret list, one can follow the fraud, subscription by subscription, as Duplain 's associates unrav eled it. Every time Bosset found an entry on the first list (the secret one of 1779) that was not on the second (the falsified 66. Panckoucke to STN, Sept. 27, 1779; STN to Panckoucke, Oct. 3, 1779; and Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 15, 1779. 67. Bosset to Mme. Bertrand, Feb. 13, 1780. 68. Most of the notes can he found in two dossiers of the STN papers entitled "Proces STN contre Duplain" and "Dossier Eneyclopedique." 360 Settling Accounts one of 1780), he jotted the number of missing subscriptions in the left-hand margin. Thus, "4 ... Bergeret de Bordeaux 58 souscriptions,'' meant that Bergeret had bought 58 sub scriptions by February 1779 but Duplain attributed only 54 to him in 1780. In the right-hand margin, Bosset penciled in subscriptions reported by Duplain that had escaped their at tention when they compiled their secret list in 1779. Thus, "Veuve Brun de Nantes 4 souscriptions ... 1," meant that Duplain credited Veuve Brun with 5 subscriptions, though the associates had found only 4 in his books. Bosset added up the numbers in the right-hand margin: 137. Then he added that sum to the total on the secret list: 137 + 7,873 = 8,010-only one short of the 8,011 that comprised their entire stock ac cording to Duplain 's final report. Although he never found that last missing quarto, Bosset was able to account for every other Encyclopedie on Duplain 's list. And by adding up the :figures in the left-hand margin, he was able to show precisely how many subscriptions Duplain had hidden: 978. The dif ferences between the two lists is represented graphically in Figure 9. The secret list included the 500 quartos that Panckoucke had taken from the 1,000 divided with Duplain, but it did not mention Duplain 's 500, nor Perrin 's 422. Thus when Duplain bewailed the collapse of the subscriptions to his associates in February 1779, he knew that all three editions had been sold out, except for the 500 he had dumped on Panckoucke. He had hidden the sales in order to collect the full amount for them, while paying nothing for 500 of the quartos that he sold in the association's name and paying for 422 at half price through the phony intermediary of Perrin. The subscription flow really had abated by 1779, but enough orders continued to trickle in for Duplain to compound the swindle by a more audacious stroke. Posing as Perrin, he offered to buy back Panckoucke 's unsold Encyclopedies (a matter of 166 sets) at half price. And after Panckoucke agreed, Duplain attempted to procure still more cut-rate quartos for ''Perrin'' by salvaging 200 sets from the defets. The associates refused because at last they realized that Perrin was a straw man. Duplain 's "Aperc;u" of October 1779, which later proved to be an accurate preview of his :final version of the subscriptions, showed that the three editions had produced only 8,011 sets and that only 6,589 of that number had been sold directly to subscribers, the other 361 The Business of Enlightenment SECRET DUPLAIN'S LIST OF LIST OF 1779 1780 6, 589 subscriptions 7, 373 subscriptions 422 Perrin (978 hidden subscriptions) 500 Duplain 500 Ponckoucke 500 Ponckoucke TOTAL 8,011 8,010 Figure 9. The Subscription Swindle The only surviving version of the subscription lists is the copy in Bosset's handwriting in the STN papers, dossier "Prod$ Duplain contre STN"; the only reference to the secret copying of it is in the letter from Ostervald and Bosset to the STN, dated from Lyons on February 13, 1780: "le registre des souscriptions ... que nous relevames furtivement et sans qu'il [Du plain] s'en doutat ii ya un an." (For the text of this key letter see Appendix A. XIX.) Basset's margin notes accord perfertly with a memo that he wrote entitled "Souscriptions dans le premier registre qui ne sont point dans le dernier." Both manuscripts fit the version of the swindle described in the "Premier memoire de M. Plomteux" (see Appendix A. XIX). These three documents make it possible to reconstruct Duplain's list of 1780. The only ambiguity concerns the dating of the 137 sales that appeared on the second list and not on the first. It would seem that those sales occurred during the twelve months after February 1779. In that case, the list of Feb ruary 177!1 covere<l 98 percent of the sales and not the full 8,011 subscrip tions. Rut Plomteux's memoir and some other notes hy Bosset indicate that the 137 salPs had been made hy the time the secrPt list was compiled. More over 16 of those 137 subscriptions concerned the first two editions, which certainly had been sold out by thrn. So Duplain was right whPn he complained about the dedine of the subscription rate during the last twelve months of the enterprise: all three subscriptions had already been filled. It was the very 362 Settling Accounts success of the sales that made it possible for him to swindle his partners by pretending that the third edition was a failure. The manuscript for the secret nst is complicated by the provision for the free thirteenth copies. Its entry for Bergeret actually read "4 . . . Bergeret de Bordeaux 58 souscriptions pour 54." meaning Bergeret had taken out 54 subscriptions and therefore had earned four free sets for the four dozen subscribed. The entry for Bergeret on Duplain's list must have read "Bergeret de Bordeaux 54 souscriptions pour 50." Duplain frequently trimmed off a few copies from large orders like Bergeret's. But more often he eliminated entire orders, the most flagrant case being Gaston of Toulouse, who ordered "130 ... 130 pour 120 souscriptions,'' none of which appeared in the list of 1780. The comparison of the two lists raises one final question: why did Duplain hide 978 subscriptions from his associates when he acquired only 922 cut rate and free Encyclopedies from them' The answer seems to be that he would have more than covered the difference of 56 sets if he had received the additional 166 from Panckoucke. He could also fall back on the free thir teenths that he was hiding. And he probably produced more than the 8,011 sets that he declared, or at least planned to produce a scrap edition. 1,422 having gone to Panckoucke ( 500), Duplain ( 500), and Perrin ( 422). By merely counting up the 7,373 subscriptions on their secret list, the associates could measure the extent of the swindle. By this time, Duplain's attempt to wring a few more livres from the Perrin fraud seemed almost comical. He threatened that Perrin would sue, if Panckoucke did not pay for the transport of the 166 sets that were to go back to Lyons from Paris. Panckoucke was quite ready to meet an homrne de paille in court; but feigning a desire to avoid con frontation, he agreed to cancel the sale of the 166 sets and continued to hide· his knowledge of Perrin 's identity in order to ambush Duplain at the meeting of February 1780. The ambush could not succeed unless the anti-Duplain forces could prove the validity of their secret list. D '.Arnal 's 69. On Nov. 14, 1779, Panckoucke wrote to the STN: "Il [Duplain] vient de me mander que desirant m 'eviter un proces, il a engage Perrin a me retroceder les 160 exemplaires de mes Encyclopedies, qu 'il voulait a Paris a 156 livres sans port. J 'ai accepte cette retrocession, qui me confirme de plus en plus que tout cela n 'est qu 'un jeu et que Perrin n 'est qu 'un prete-nom. J e suis bien siir qu 'ii n 'y a eu aucune procedure et qu 'il n 'a pu y en avoir. '' Nine days later, Duplain warned Panckoucke, "Vous avez tort, mon bon ami, de ne pas croire au proces que vous faisait a juste titre le sieur Perrin." On Nov. 27, Panckoucke replied solemnly, and without revealing his knowledge about Perrin, that he stood by his version of the transport costs but would take back the disputed sets. On the same day he sent a copy of both letters to the STN, which had experienced enough of Duplain 's bullying and bluffing to appreciate the irony of the situation. 363 The Business of Enlightenment spy may have got Perrin to talk, but d 'Arnal probably gave Ostervald and Bosset an oral report on the results of his in vestigation, and there is no record of it. Once Duplain sub mitted his own subscription list, however, his associates had a way to verify the fraud. They wrote letters to several of the booksellers, whose subscriptions had been falsified according to a comparison of the two lists. The letters simply asked how many quartos each bookseller had purchased, and the answers confirmed Bosset 's calculations. So the Panckoucke group possessed irrefutable proof that Duplain had cheated them of subscriptions that could be valued as high as 287,532 livres. Once they got Duplain 's list of 1780 into their hands, Panc koucke and his partners had an opportunity to examine one of its most interesting entries: '' Audambron de Salasy & J ossi net 535 souscriptions pour 494. '' That meant that the Lyons firm of Audambron et J ossinet had subscribed for 494 quartos at the usual wholesale price for booksellers of 294 livres plus one free set for every twelve subscriptions, which brought their total up to 535. The same firm appeared on the secret list of 1779 with" 535 pour 535," that is, as having subscribed for all 535 quartos without the benefit of the baker's dozens. The secret list did not mention the price of the subscriptions, but because they concerned local sales, there was good reason to suspect that they had occurred at the retail price rather than at the wholesale prix de libraire. Audambron and Jossi net were not libraires but businessmen, like Perrin. And like Perrin, they had every appearance of operating as a false front to hide sales that Duplain had secretly made at the ex- In retrospect, it seems odd that Panckoucke should have accepted the Perrin deal in the first place. But the situation still looked confused in the summer of 1779- and at that time Panckoucke believed that Duplain had produced about 8,400 complete quartos, not 8,011-so it probably appeared credible that the Perrin sale would rid them of their last sets at a moment when the market had been sated. 70. On the letter-writing campaign see Ostervald and Bosset to the STN from Paris, March 10, 1780: "11 a fallu ecrire plusieurs lettres de Lyon pour nous assurer par des lettres des souscripteurs de la faussete des registres. ' ' As an example of the replies they received see Ranson of La Rochelle to STN, Feb. 19, 1780. The cost of the swindle for the Panckoucke group can be estimated in different ways. A total of 287,532 livres represents the value of the 987 sets at their wholesale price without deducting anything for the free thirteenths, even though Duplain probably sold several baker's dozens. The Panckoucke group's half interest in the enterprise entitled it to half that sum, minus ''Perrin 's'' payment of 65,832 livres, making 77,934 livres. But Panckoucke and his supporters actually developed a different argument in demanding compensation, as shown below. 364 Settling Accounts pense of the association. The Panckoucke group therefore in vestigated Audambron and J ossinet. They discovered that the firm had not taken out any subscriptions at all but merely had operated as Duplain 's local sales agency, having agreed to work for him at a commission of 15 sous per volume or 71/z percent of the wholesale price instead of the 25 percent profit received by genuine retailers. Therefore Duplain had cheated on the sales in Lyons just as he had attempted to cheat on the Parisian sales through the intermediary of Batilliot. He had sold 533 quartos at 3.84 livres each (205,440 livres) instead of 494 quartos at 294 livres each (145,236 livres), thereby swindling the association of 60,204 livres. As Duplain had twice used straw men to hide secret sales, it also seemed possible that he had sold more than the 8,011 sets mentioned in his accounts. His associates did not even know how many quartos he had printed, although the sum of the pressruns probably was 8,525. In that case, Duplain had 514 incomplete ( defectueux) sets-a number that seemed excessive (6 percent of the output). Had Duplain sold some of those 514 quartos on the sly? His offer to salvage 200 of them for another half-price sale to Perrin sounded suspicious, espe cially as the 200 sets reappeared in the credit column of his accounts for 30,000 livres. 'rhey would have fetched 54,390 at the wholesale price (deducting for free thirteenths). So Du plain might have swindled his partners for another 54,390 livres. They believed he had. In their calculations of his fraud they included that sum to cover "le reste de I 'edition, qui est surement vendu. '' But without a genuine subscription list from 1780, they could not prove their case ; and they had to reduce their charge to criminal negligence, as they explained in a memorandum entitled "Griefs contre M. Duplain," which attacked his general management of the enterprise. Having in all likelihood cheated the association on the salvageable defets, Duplain sold the rest of them, a huge mountain of scrap paper, to J ossinet for 20,000 livres. And, to the dis comfiture of the STN, he also sold the speculation on the quarto edition of the Table analyfique to his associate Amable Le Roy for 50,000 livres. All of these maneuvers and manipu- 71. The STN 's papers do not contain a full report on this investigation, but the STN made the accusation emphatic-"nous Pel savons et sommes en etat de le prouver' '-in a deposition that it submitted to the arbitrators of its case against Duplain. '' Dernieres observations'' and '' Memoire contre M. Duplain'' in the dossier "Proces STN contre Duplain." 365 The Business of Enlightenment lations lay behind Duplain 's version of the association's m come, which came to 1,851,588 livres in all. Duplain 's version of the expenses seemed equally suspi cious. The contracts entitled him to make some money from his role as middleman in the printing because they set fixed prices for every sheet, regardless of the actual cost. But he seems to have gone beyond the bounds of customary profit taking. He told Favarger that he cleared 1,500 livres from the printing of every volume of the first two editions; he might have made more, because the STN averaged 5,612 livres in profits from the four volumes it printed for those editions at the price stipulated in the contracts. His profit margin was even greater in the case of the third edition. So his rake-offs on the printing probably totaled about 75,000 livres. There was nothing the associates could do to force Duplain to disgorge that sum, but they had evidence that he had de liberately multiplied the number of sheets in order to increase his profits from the rake-offs at their expense. As explained above, the STN knew from its assistant foreman, who had worked on the Encyclopedie in Pellet's shop, that Pellet had used fraudulent techniques of spacing and paragraphing- 72. As mentioned, the associates suspected Duplain of printing extra copies at several points before the final meeting. The preliminary reglement of Feb. 10, 1779, stated that 6,150 sets of the first two editions had been printed, as was required by the first two contracts. But it said that the third edition was being printed at 2,375 copies, although the third contract set the pressrun at 2,400. The commercial correspondence of the associates contained several contradictory ref erences about the size of the third edition during the next few months. For ex ample, on Feb. 18, 1779, Duplain instructed the STN to print volume 19 of the third edition at 4 reams 17 quires (2,425 copies) "pour fournir aux imperfections des deux editions premieres.'' Aud in a letter to Panckoucke of March 23, 1779, the STN ca1culated the "montant de I 'edition" at 2,360. Panckoucke 's final accounts on the plates, which he called ''le thermometre de l 'affaire,'' showed that they were printed at 8,600, as he had claimed, but they may have included more spoilt sheets than did the printing of the text. All things considered, 8,525 is probably an accurate estimate of the gross output of quartos. The critical issue was the number of sets that were ruined. Bosset asserted that Duplain had sold 54,390 livres' worth of those defectueux sets in a memo that he wrote for the associates, ''Tableau de ce qui devrait nous revenir de l 'entreprise. '' 73. Without going into the long calculations behind this estimate, one should note two considerations. Owing to the printing done by the STN, Duplain profited from the difference between the contractual and the actual printing costs in the case of thirty-two volumes from the 6,150 copies of the first two editions and thirty-five volumes from the 2,375 copies of the third edition. Duplain had to allow some profit to the printers who worked for him, but he forced them to accept very hard terms, particularly in the case of the third edition. Favarger 's remark occurred in a letter to the STN of July 15, 1778: "Il me dit qu'il y a environ 1500 livres a gagner pour Jui de faire imprimer ici plutot que chez nous.'' 366 Settling Accounts tricks that might seem trivial, but that expanded volume 19 by ninety-six unnecessary pages, worth 744 livres. Since Pellet worked hand in glove with Duplain, it seemed probable that they had collaborated on this swindle and that Duplain had made similar arrangements with his other printers. The STN denounced this ''connivance punissable '' in its ''Griefs contre M. Duplain.'' It held Duplain responsible for making the volumes far too fat-up to 136 sheets per volume instead of the 110-115 that it considered as a maximum for the quarto format and the 90 that had originally been planned, "ce qui faisait son compte comme imprimeur mais non point celui de l 'entreprise. '' Having padded the volumes, Duplain went on to pad his expense account. On January 28 he submitted a "Compte general du cont de chaque volume,'' a strange document, be cause he took the volume rather than the edition as the unit in summarizing his expenses. Thus he charged the association 37,214 livres for printing volume 1 in all three editions, 33,590 livres for printing volume 2, and so on, making 1,361,385 livres in all. He received a fixed rate for every sheet, but the number of sheets per volume varied. So by lumping the edi tions together, he could slip a few fictitious sheets into the charges for each volume without arousing suspicion. Unknown to him, however, the associates had been looking for slips for more than a year. They took his "Compte general" back to their inn, procured a copy of the first, second, and third "editions," and started counting sheets. One can imagine them surrounded by stacks of quartos, thumbing through seventy-two volumes sheet by sheet, and calling off sums to Basset, who kept a tally on one scrap of paper, scribbled cal culations on another, and recorded his conclusions in one simple arithmetic expression: 1,361,385 [Duplain's reported costs, in livres] 1,234,296 depense reelle 127,089 trop porte In addition to the printing costs, Duplain had lined up a great many other items in the debit column. He put down 74. The notes, in Bosset's hand, are on loose sheets accompanying the STN's memorandum, '' Dernieres observations a I 'article des 13me et 2 livres 10 sous par exemplaire'' in the dossier '' Proees STN eontre Duplain.'' 367 The Business of Enlightenment 3,000 livres for the use of Pellet's name on the title page, 27,000 livres for the ransom paid to Barret and Grabit, 33,150 livres to Laserre for preparing the copy for the first two editions, and another 3,000 livres for his work on the third edition. The STN found this last debit particularly objec tionable because it believed that Laserre had not done any new work at all on the copy for the third edition. But 3,000 livres was a trifle compared with Duplain 's expense allowance, which had caused such strife during the contract negotiations for the third edition. Panckoucke had agreed to increase the sum fixed for Duplain 's expenses to 16,000 livres. But Duplain wrote into the contract a clause acknowledging his claim to have a '' depense . . . infiniment plus considerable'' and in demnifying him with an ''insurance'' provision. He was per mitted to charge the association for transporting the third edition from Lyons to Geneva, even though he planned to keep it in Lyons. The charge was construed as a fee for assuming the responsibility for any losses that might come from a raid on his shop by the Lyonnais authorities. The real danger, however, was not that the authorities would confiscate the books but that Duplain would inflate his fee. The contract did not set a fixed price for his insurance service, although the associates could have calculated the price easily enough, using the normal transport cost per quintal as a multiplier for the estimated tonnage of the volumes. '' N 'avoir pas pris la plume pour chiffrer nous coutera bien cher," the Neuchatelois wrote to their home office on February 10, 1780. Duplain demanded 104,000 livres for the fictitious transport costs, and they did not see how they could parry that blow. They also objected that he was demanding ''sacrifices horribles, tels que de lui allouer 60,000 livres pour menus frais. '' He had larded his expenses shamelessly, they lamented, and he fought every attempt to trim the fat off them. Finally, the associates wanted compensation for Duplain 's general mismanagement of their affairs. Each of them had been pummeled with complaints from customers whose 75. Duplain reported his expenses in a "Premier compte" submitted on Jan. 28; they can also be known from notes that Bosset took on that occasion, although there are some discrepancies between those notes and some other documents. The STN protested bitterly against the 3,000 livres given to Laserre for his work on the third edition in its ''Griefs contre M. Duplain.'' It is not clear why Duplain should have allotted 33,150 livres to Laserre for the first two editions instead of the 30,600 livres required by the contracts. 368 Settling Accounts quartos had arrived late, or with missing volumes, or with damaged sheets, or with excess packing and transport charges. In his haste to get the Encyclopedies distributed and paid for, Duplain had produced chaos in his warehouses and shipments. He ref used to replace damaged sheets and even to answer requests for replacements. He wrote bills of exchange on subscribers faster than the subscribers could pay for them. And when they requested a delay in the payments, he threat ened to sue. Meanwhile, he had exposed the association to suits from subscribers who had contracted to pay for twenty nine volumes and found themselves charged with thirty-three, owing to his miscalculation about the number of volumes re quired for reducing the folio text and Supplements into the quarto format. Every time he bungled, he played into the hands of booksellers who were looking for a pretext to refuse their payments; for some of his subscribers were as unscrupu lous as he, and others were incapable of paying because they went bankrupt. So when Duplain made his financial report to the associates, he accompanied his accounts with an appalling "Note des debiteurs que M. Duplain reconnais insolvables ou chicaneurs '' : another 128,600 livres to deduct from their profits. Each of the associates arrived in Lyons with his own set of ''griefs'' against Duplain. Panckoucke wanted a reckoning for the 166 quartos that Duplain had contracted to buy while masquerading as Perrin. The STN brought an enormous dossier of claims for its unpaid printing bills, which would have to be adjudicated in the course of the general settlement. And Plomteux came bearing a grudge, for he thought that Duplain was holding on to profits that should have been dis tributed a half year earlier. It was Duplain's hold on the profits that worried the associates. He had paid ail the ex penses, received all the income, and controlled all the rami fications of a financial affair so large and complex that it gave him ample room to exercise all of his talent at embezzlement. The total value of his swindles is difficult to estimate. The associates could prove that he had robbed them of 171,684 livres at the very least. But that sum does not do justice to his 76. The STN summarized its complaints about Duplain 's management in its ''Griefs contre M. Duplain.'' 77. Plomteux to STN, Aug. 16, 1779: "J 'ai paye exactement ma mise et j 'aurais cru que parvenu a placer 7,500 exemplaires, il y aurait du avoir une dividende des benefices que doit avoir rendus une afl'aire aussi brillante.'' 369 The Business of Enlightenment efforts, which probably cost them twice as much. Still, 171,684 livres was an enormous amount of money in the eighteenth century. The printers of the STN normally received about 12 livres a week-relatively high wages, almost as high, in fact, as those of skilled laborers in Paris. Duplain 's peculation was the equivalent of what six or seven of them would make in a lifetime. And it almost certainly amounted to a great deal more, for Duplain covered his tracks by scrambling his ac counts. He followed a general strategy of deflating credits and inflating debits so that his balance sheet would show the smallest possible profit to be divided among the associates at the reglement des comptes. When they arrived in Lyons, they knew that they would have to take the opposite line, showing how great the actual income had been, how small the expenses really were, and how much of the profits Duplain had pocketed. The Final Confrontation in Lyons The full extent of Duplain 's embezzlement only became ap parent to his associates in the course of their long and difficult debates. But they had uncovered his principal swindles before their arrival, and they came in the expectation of finding more. Having gathered together the threads of his intrigues for more than a year, they hoped to find enough corroborative evidence from his accounts to overwhelm him at the final reckoning. They made the usual preparations concerning stagecoaches, hotel rooms, and strategy sessions. Panckoucke, who liked to travel in style, rejected the S'l'N 's suggestion that they book rooms at the Hotel d 'Angleterre, where they had stayed during the last meeting. He preferred the Palais-Royal, a large inn with rooms overlooking the Saone. They finally 78. Any attempt to estimate Duplain 's per,ulation should take account of the fact that he was swindling an association in which he formally had a half interest and Panckoucke the other half. Thus the actual cost to the associates was half the total value of the swindles. Calculating by halves, the associates could demand reimbursement of the following sums: 77 ,934 livres for the hidden 978 subscriptions 30,102 for Audambron and Jossinet 63,648 for the fictitious sheets 171,684 livres They had hard proof of all these swindles, and they had strong circumstantial evidence that Duplain "s expense-padding and such had cost them another 157 ,000 livres, approximately. 370 Settling Accounts compromised on Le Pare, where d 'Arnal reserved a three room suite according to Panckoucke 's specifications: '' J e desirerais que cet apartement flit bien eclaire et donnat sur la rue. Nous etions bien tristement a l 'Hotel d 'Angleterre." Plomteux shared the suite with Panckoucke and traveled with him from Paris. Ostervald and Bosset arranged to arrive from Neuchatel on the same day. In order to coordinate maneuvers with their allies, they took two rooms in the same inn. And in order to have pieces justificatives at hand, they came fully armed with contracts and correspondence. After setting up headquarters on January 26 or 27, the anti-Duplain forces were ready for battle on the 28th. Meanwhile Duplain prepared his accounts. The STN tried to hurry him, but with no success. '' Vous devez bien imaginer que ce n 'est pas l 'ouvrage de trois minutes,' ' he protested to Panckoucke. The Neuchatelois had wanted to hold the meeting in November because they worried about leaving the income from the subscriptions in Duplain 's hands and because they needed to collect their share of it quickly, in order to pay off some heavy debts in December. But Duplain would not co operate. He refused to honor a final series of bills of exchange that the STN wrote on him, forcing it to come up with 30,000 livres to save its account with d'Arnal. And he insisted that he could not put his books in order and collect the payments for the shipments of the last volumes until February. "J e crois avoir fait faire l'impossible en vendant 8,000 Encyclopedies, en les imprimant, et rendant des comptes en 18 a 21 mois,' ' he told Panckoucke. ''Vos Suisses sont des gens aff ames. J e souhaite qu'ils soient rassassies, mais j 'en doute bien fort. Il y a, je suis sfrr, encore 400,000 livres en l 'air." In the last letter that he wrote to the STN, dated January 16, 1780, he again emphasized the difficulties of liquidating so huge an 79. On the preparations see Panekoucke to STN, Nov. 22, 1779, and Jan. 6, 1780, and d 'Amal to STN, Jan, 11, 1780. The STN had originally expected the meeting to be in July or Aug. 1779 and had urged Plomteux to attend it in a letter of May 1, which stressed the danger of being duped by Duplain and the importance for Plomteux to ''nous fortifier de votre appui. Croyez-nous, la chose en vaut la peine. '' Plomteux was on business in Paris when he got word of the final date of the meeting. '' J e sens tout le besoin que nous avons de nous preter mutuellement nos secours, '' he wrote to the STN from Paris on Dec. 11, 1779. 80. Duplain to Panckoucke, Nov. 23, 1779, copy in Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 27, 1779. 81. Duplain to Panckoucke, Dee. 27, 1779, copy in Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 2, 371 The Business of Enlightenment enterprise so quickly, and he warned that there would be some hard bargaining in Lyons: J'ai plus d'occupations que je n'en puis suivre. Vous pouvez arriver a la fin de ce mois. J'espere etre a meme en ce temps de rendre a M. Panckoucke un compte a peu pres juste. 11 y a encore des sommes enormes en arriere, et vous en serez persuades sur le compte que vous en rendra M. Panckoucke. 11 n 'a pas fallu etre manchot pour vendre, imprimer, et realiser en trois ans huit mille Encyclopedies et etre en etat de rendre un compte. Je vous repete, Messieurs, ce que j 'ai ecrit a M. Panckoucke, que mon compte sera entierement conforme au traite, que comme je ne lui demanderai pas une obole de plus que ce que m 'alloue le traite, je ne cederai pas un denier de mes droits. In a formal sense, as Duplain 's letter indicated, the ac counting only involved the two signatories of the Traite de Dijon. But each of them had ceded portions of his half interest to his own associates: Duplain to Merlino de Giverdy, Amable and Thomas Le Roy, and perhaps some other Lyonnais; Panc koucke to the STN, Plomteux, and Regnault. The settling of the accounts might therefore be considered as a general stock holders' meeting. But it was really a confrontation between two camps. The battle began on January 28, 1780. ''Nous avons deja eu quelques scenes rudes au sujet de nos comptes avec M. Duplain,' ' Ostervald and Boss et inf armed their home office on the following day. ''Tels que les combats de coqs en Angle terre, Panckoucke et Duplain se sont donnes de forts assauts. '' Unfortunately, they did not send any other blow-by-blow de scriptions to Mme. Bertrand, who was minding the shop in Neuchatel and was wrought with ''inquietude sur la crise ou vous etes.' ' But their notes and memos make their general 82. The full roster of shareholders varied from time to time and cannot be known completely. Rey had dropped out of the Association at the end of 1777, and Suard apparently had ceded his l/24th interest back to Panckoucke. In a letter to the STN of Dec. 2, 1779, Duplain listed ''MM. Plomteux, Regnault, Grabit, Bougy, qui, je crois, sont tous ses [Panckoucke 's] co-associes.'' Bougy 's name does not appear in any other documents. It is hard to see how Grabit could have bought an interest in the quarto after having threatened to pirate it with Barret. And Regnault, who had quarreled with both Duplain and Panckoucke, seems not to have attended the conference. In any case, Panckoucke 's principal partner was the STN, which actually owned a larger share in the quarto than he did. In a letter to the home office of Feb. 13, 1780, Ostervald and Bosset described the anti-Duplain group as ''nous quatre ... appuyes de d 'Arna! comme troupe auxiliaire' '-that is, Panckoucke, Plomteux, and the two Neuchatelois. 83. Ostervald and Bosset to Mme. Bertrand, Jan. 29, 1780. 84. Mme. Bertrand to Ostervald and Bosset, Feb. 5, 1780. 372 Settling Accounts strategy clear. They meant to keep their susp1c10ns secret until Duplain had committed himself to a fraudulent report on his stewardship. They knew from Duplain's "Aper<;u'' of October, from the secret subscription list, and probably from their spy's reports that Duplain had swindled them on a grand scale. But he had not yet taken the final, fatal step: the sub mission of his accounts. Once he produced his balance sheet, the associates could hold him legally responsible for every fraud they found. They could make their own calculations of debits and credits and their own demand for the profits to be shared. If Duplain stuck by his version, they could force him to justify it with evidence about expenditures and subscrip tions. Then they could strike back with counterevidence from their well-stocked arsenal in Le Pare. And if they forced him to surrender, they could make him accept their terms for a settlement. They were businessmen, not law enforcement officers. They wanted to rescue their profits, not to put Duplain in prison. But to succeed, they had to play their part astutely, to produce their incriminating material at the most effective moments, and to lure Duplain into further self-incrimination, so that in the end he faced a choice of paying compensation or going to jail. January 28, 1780, was therefore a momentous date in the history of the Encyclopedie. Duplain submitted a balance sheet, which showed the following totals: income 1,851,588 livres expenditure 1,718,260 profit 133,328 livres ::\Tot a glorious finale for an enterprise that Panckoucke had expected to be ten times ac; profitable. Duplain also produced the list of fraudulent and bankrupt debtors, which made things look even blacker. And finally, he tried to show how bad the printing costs had been by his '' Compte general du cofit de c~aque volume.'' · As explained above, Bosset took the printing expenses, counted the number of sheets in the editions, and found that Duplain had padded the printing account with fictitious sheets worth 127,089 livres. That discovery put the anti-Duplain group in an excellent position to counterattack. It showed that 373 The Business of Enlightenment Duplain had undervalued the profits by almost 100 percent, merely by manipulating the debit side of his accounts. And it gave the associates a chance to make the most of his fraud on the credits by exposing the true identity of Perrin. A surprise attack on both sides of his balance sheet might overwhelm him. But they would have to prepare the ground carefully. So they withdrew into Le Pare and discussed tactics from .T anuary 29 until January 30 or 31. First the Panckoucke associates needed to agree about a common counterproposition on the profits: how much could they demand from Duplain in order to recover everything he had pilfered'? Panckoucke and Bos set drew up drafts of the accounts as they ought to read after being adjusted for Du plain 's swindles. As a basis for their calculations, they took the costs set by the contracts, the real number of sheets printed per volume (124 on the average), and the total number of Encyclopedies (8,011) for which Duplain had just made himself accountable. Bosset, who was more a financier than a litterateur, produced the more complete version (see Appen dix A. XIX). He allotted only 20,000 livres for the "insur ance" or fictitious transport costs. He demanded a rebate of 48,828 livres for the Perrin fraud. And he came up with a total profit that was 350,000 livres higher than Duplain 's: income 1,946,300 livres expenditure 1,516,082 profit 430,218 livres Bosset then added another 50,000 livres to cover the sale of the quarto Table and 54,390 livres for the 200 extra sets that he believed Duplain had sold at the wholesale price. He also noted that the 33sociates could claim 67,620 more livres, if they could demonstrate that Duplain had sold his 500 sets in the association's name. To prove that last charge, however, they would have to get a subscription list from Duplain. Duplain had of course re fused to put such a weapon in their hands, but they could argue that they were entitled to have an itemized inventaire of the subscriptions in order to decide between his version of the accounts and theirs. If he refused, they would insist that he come up with a half million livres in profits instead of the 374 Settling Accounts 133,328 that he had offered. If he accepted, they would get a crucial piece of evidence for the case they were constructing against him, and they would be able to compare his list with their own. It was therefore important to conceal their secret list while revealing their knowledge of Perrin and to hold fast to the demand for 500,000 livres until Duplain gave ground. '' Voila, ce nous semble, les premieres propositions d 'accom modement que nous pouvons lui faire et dont notre a vis n 'est point de nous departir, a moins qu 'en nous donnant l 'inven taire general que nous demandons il nous mette dans le cas de nous relacher, '' Boss et concluded. Unfortunately, there is no account of the session at which Panckoucke tore the mask off Perrin. The next document in the series on the meeting is a letter of February 6, in which Ostervald and Bosset told Mme. Bertrand that they had just been through a week of fierce argument: ''Ce que l 'on fait un jour peut etre detruit le lendemain ... Nous nous en occu pons le jour et la nuit, et il le faut bien quand on a a faire a gem; de cette sorte. Mais s 'il plait a Dieu et a notre bon droit, nous en sortirons et peut-etre plutOt que ne le pense Duplain, grace a sa friponnerie averee." On the same day, Duplain at last :,;tepped into the trap that had been so carefully prepared for him, by producing his subscription list. According to a '' Releve des registres des souscriptions '' accompanying the list, he could account for only 6,589 subscriptions, aside from the 1,000 he had divided with Panckoucke and the 422 he had sold to Perrin. After subtracting for gift copies and free thirteenths, he asserted that only 6,074 of those sets had pro duced any revenue for the association. By adding that revenue to the Perrin payments, he came up with 1,851,588 livres, the figure he had originally given as the total income of the enter prise. But now, after nine days of debate, the associates could prove that figure was false. They returned to Le Pare, compared Duplain 's list with 85. ''Tableau de c,e qui devrait nous revenir de l 'entreprise,'' a memo on tactics that Bosset wrote as a sequel to his '' Produit net de l 'entreprise tel qu 'ii doit etre reellement.'' Panckoucke submitted a similar memorandum to Bosset and Ostervald, which they labeled '' Aper~u de l 'Encyclopedie fait a Lyon par M. Panckoucke" (.Jan. 30, 1779, in "Dossier Encyclopedique," STN papers). It is less trenchant than Bosset 's but is interesting in two respects: it gave an even lower figure for total expenditure than Bosset did (1,314,493 livres), and it estimated the size of the three editions at 8,450 copies. Bosset calculated that the Perrin swindle came to 48,828 livres by subtracting the Perrin payment and an allotment for the free thirteenths from the wholesale price of the 422 sets. 375 The Business of Enlightenment the secret list they had kept in reserve, and found the 978 missing Encyclopedies. Then they began their letter-writing campaign to acquire further evidence of the fraud. They evi dently put d 'Arnal and his spy on the tracks of the Audambron and J ossinet swindle, which leaped to their eyes during the comparison of the two lists. And they set Plomteux to work on a Memoire, which they could threaten to publish if Duplain would not settle on their terms. . _ Once the Panckoucke associates had prepared their final salvo, Duplain 's def eat was inevitable. They apparently hit him on February 11 with every piece of incriminating evidence they could find. Still Duplain held out. On the morning of the 12th, Bosset raided his shop with a police officer, a bailiff, and an attorney, who confiscated his books. At that point he ad mitted the 48,000 livre Perrin swindle, but he would confess no more. Then the associates threatened to ruin his name by exposing him in court and by publishing Plomteux 's Memoire, a crushing indictment for fraud, malice, and ''insatiable cu pidite" (see Appendix A. XIX). They even applied pressure through his family and friends. And finally, on the afternoon of the 12th, Duplain capitulated. He agreed to pay his associ ates 200,000 livres if they would sweep his swindling under the rug, where it has remained until this day. Denouement On February 13, Ostervald and Bosset sent the happy news to Mme. Bertrand: ''Nous nous empressons, Madame, de vous communiquer la fin de notre combat avec Duplain, qui heu reusement est termine sans sang repandu.'' They considered themselves lucky to have got 200,000 livres from Duplain be cause he had fought until the end to bring them down to 128,000 livres, arguing quite rightly that they would all suffer heavy losses from his attempts to collect the last payments and from his entanglement in subscribers' lawsuits. In fact, 200,000 livres was probably a fair settlement. It was almost as much as the associates would have received, if Duplain had accepted their original, rather exaggerated version of the profits; and it coincided with a later version, which they set at 86. On these last maneuvers see the letter of Ostervald and Bosset to Mme. Bertrand of Feb. 13, 1780. 376 Settling Accounts 400,000 livres. Of course they had had to take extreme mea sures in order to wring so much money out of le roue, as they took to calling him. They had resorted to blackmail, both in the Plomteux Memoire and by verbal threats to "le perdre de reputation tant ici qu'a Paris. " And they also had made concessions on ancillary issues : the settlement with the pub lishers of the octavo Encyclopedie, the quarto Table analy tique, and the defets. All of these matters were resolved in a contract signed by Panckoucke and Duplain on February 12, which liquidated the partnership they had formed three years earlier by the Traite de Dijon. The contract made an appropriate ending to the quarto enterprise because it was a legalized lie. Having torn the fa~ade off Duplain 's embezzlements, Panckoucke now recon structed it. He congratulated Duplain on "l'exacte verite" of the accounts, and he singled out Duplain 's report on the Perrin sale for praise. Not only did Panckoucke testify to the authenticity of the sale, he also explained Duplain's willing ness to reimburse the associates for it as '' un effet de la gene rosite de ses procedes" (see Appendix A. XVIII). That formula, which probably raised some laughs in Panckoucke's quarters, really meant Duplain had bought off his blackmailers. The contract stated that Duplain had paid Panckoucke 176,000 livres in notes that would become due in three in stallments, ending in August 1782. The remaining 24,000 livres came from the octavo publishers. As explained above, they had been lobbying in Lyons to bring their war with the quarto association to au end. They had given Duplain their notes for 24,000 livres, on condition that he would get Panc koucke to open the French market to them. Panckoucke agreed, took the notes, traded them in for octavos, and sold the octavos at a discount, thereby ruining the market that he had abandoned. The Encyclopedie niethodique also figured in the contract, because Pauckoucke acknowledged that Duplain retained the 12/48ths interest in it that had been granted him. As Duplain later sold that interest to his old straw man, J ossinet, for 12,000 livres, the Methodiqtte, like the octavo, helped to cushion 87. "Griefs contre M. Duplain": "Par le tableau detaille qui a ete fait, ii conste que le sieur Duplain a eu de benefice net avant aucun partage et dont ii tient l 'argent plus de 400,000 livres.'' The 50 percent interest of the Panckoucke associates would have entitled them to half that sum. 88. Ostervald and Bosset to Mme. Bertrand, Feb. 13, 1780. 377 The Business of Enlightenment the blow he received at the liquidation of the quarto. Duplain also found solace in the arrangement for the quarto edition of the Table. He had signed over that subsidiary speculation to Barret-having somehow patched up the quarrel over Bar ret's pirating-for 50,000 livres. By the contract of February 12, Panckoucke surrendered his share in the Table, thereby depriving the STN of its own portion and of its hopes to do the printing. According to Bosset 's notes, Duplain had also sold his two warehouses' worth of def ets to J ossinet for 20,000 livres, but they eventually came into the possession of Amable Le Roy, who took over the management of the enterprise during the last stages of its liquidation. Finally, Duplain profited from the sales of the surplus quartos, the 200 or more sets leftover after the distribution of the 8,011. He himself had evaluated them at 30,000 livres. And judging from his record, he may have hidden a great many more assets and embezzlements. So despite the victory of the Panckoucke group, Duplain emerged from his speculation on the quarto as a wealthy man. He could not consider his fortune safely made, however, until he settled with the STN. Ostervald and Bosset had ar rived in Lyons with so many complicated ''griefs'' against Duplain, that they were reconciled to the inevitability of a lawsuit. But how could they sue him over his handling of a book that had been condemned by the Parlement of Paris, the French clergy, the king, and the pope~ It was one thing for the French authorities to tolerate the distribution of the Encyclo pedie, another for them to legitimize its existence in the court room. Fortunately, this problem had been foreseen in the 89. These transactions are clear from the final eontract and the accompany ing documents (see Appendix A. XVIII). The def ets, however, gave rise to some complicated quarrels among Le Roy, the STN, Panckoucke, Duplain, d 'Amal, and Revol. Suffice it to say that the former associates continued to argue over them, with lawsuits and appeals for arbitration, for another two years. A great many subscribers never received replacements for the spoilt and missing sheets of their sets, and consequently some of them refused to make their last payments. Le Roy found his stock of defets insufficient to supply them. And Panckoucke concluded, "Duplain nous a trompe en falsifiant la clause de l 'acte [the final con tract of Feb. 12, 1780]. Le Roy ne s'est engage qu'a fournir ce que les magasins produiraient. '' Panckoucke to STN, Jan. 22, 1782. But ultimately he counseled resignation: '' Il est certain qu 'il [Duplain] a livre ses magasins de defets et qu 'on y a fait pour nous Jes recherches auxquelles il s 'etait oblige par ses actes. Il n 'etait pas oblige a autre chose. Il n 'est pas dit dans la derniere transaction passee a Lyon qu 'il sera oblige de fournir les defets lorsqu 'ils manqueront. Il n 'est pas parle de reimpression ... Ces exemplaires imparfaits ne sont pas absolument sans valeur." Panckoucke to STN, Oct. 7, 1782. 378 Settling Accounts contract for the third edition, which obligated the associates to submit all disagreements to arbitration. Duplain reaffirmed this obligation in a statement that he signed on February 14. Four days later, both sides accepted an agreement on pro cedure. Each party was to name two arbitrators; and if the committee of four failed to agree on a decision, it would choose a single surarbitre, who would make the final ruling. Each party would submit his own version of the STN-Duplain account, supported with pieces ju~tificatives and a rebuttal of the opponent's account statement. The arbitrators would then accept rebuttals of the rebuttals and would hand down a decision. The process was cheap and efficient, the antithesis of the official judiciary system, and it reveals an important feature of the semilegal and clandestine book trade: the sys tem could not function on the principle of honor among thieves. Bookdealers cheated one another so flagrantly that they had developed their own paralegal institutions to keep themselves in check; they could not do business otherwise. The institutional response had answered the social need, be yond the pale of thelaw. Exactly how much Duplain owed the STN in February 1780 does not show through clearly among the welter of con flicting claims. Duplain did not dispute the printing and paper charges, which were fixed by the contracts and which made up the bulk of the STN '~ bills. So those charges were set aside and the differences narrowed to the disputes that had ac cumulated over the last two years. That procedure left plenty of room for disagreement, because according to the STN 's account, Duplain owed it 23,531 livres 18 sous, and according to Duplain 's the STN was 17 ,619 livres, 18 sous, and 3 deniers in his debt. Duplain arrived at this result by legerdemain with his debits and credits, especially the 8,526 livre debt for the disputed thirty-one sehi. But his arguments did not stand up again::;t the evidence that the STN produced from their com mercial correspondence, and the arbitrators began by ruling 90. This account of the settlement between Duplaih and the STN is based on the dossier '' Proces STN contre Duplain,'' which contains the contractual agree ments on the arbitration, dated Feb. 14 and 18, 1780; a half-dozen memorandums and account statements that the STN submitted to the arbitrators; and the ''Sentence arbitJ:1ale'' of Feb. 21, 1780. Commercial cases, which were settled by juges oonsulaires, did not suft'er as badly from costs and delays as the cases brought before the bailliages and, parlements, but bookdealers often preferred tne still more efficient paralegal system. 379 The Business of Enlightenment that he would have to take back all the extra sets he had sent to Neuchatel and pay for their transport. Aside from that dispute and some other issues that were dropped, the two sides remained separated by about 8,000 livres. They disagreed on everything that had given rise to their quarrels over the last two years, from the STN 's demand for reimbursement of its chaperon ( 1,066 livres) to Duplain 's claim for the travel expenses of his clerk ( 124 livres). The STN also demanded compensation for two new items. First, it charged Duplain for all of d'Arnal's expenses: 424 livres for brokerage fees, protets, and interest on the emergency loans that had resulted from Duplain 's refusal to honor its bills of exchange. Secondly, it built a clever but somewhat fa cetious argument around the Audambron and J ossinet swin dle. Duplain had really taken a 25 percent bookseller's com mission on the 535 quartos that he had fraudulently debited to Audambron and Jossinet at the wholesale price. Therefore the STN claimed that it was entitled to a 25 percent rebate on the subscriptions that it had gathered, even though it had origi nally collected them in the name of the association and not as a wholesaler. It would have been reasonable to consider this issue settled by Duplain 's indemnity and the general liquida tion of February 12, but Ostervald and Bosset wanted to squeeze every sou they could get out of Duplain. So they used his confession as grounds for inserting another 4,740 livres in his debits. Then they summarized all their arguments in an impressive tableau: on the left, six gigantic '' Erreurs a notre debit dans le compte de Monsieur .T oseph Duplain''; on the right, four equally large ''Omissions a notre credit.'' They accompanied this sheet with a seven-page "Memoire contre Monsieur Duplain,'' and some other supporting documents. Having stifled their anger for so many months, the Neu chatelois at last had a chance to vent every resentment, to demand jm;tice for every injury, and to expose their associate as a roue. How well Duplain defended himself is difficult to say, be cause his rebuttals have not survived. But he argued from a weak position, having already been forced to confess his mis management of the enterprise as a whole. He evidently tried to counterattack by arguing that his misdeeds were no worse than those of the N euchatelois: they had undermined his 380 Settling Accounts efforts to collect from the subscribers by secretly encouraging their bookseller friends to refuse payment, and they had tried to ruin his side-speculation on the Table analytique by se cretly planning to pirate it. Bosset denied these charges in a deposition of February 14, and Duplain apparently failed to make them stick, although the second one had come close to the truth. The four arbitrators, all distinguished lawyers and busi nessmen, handed down a unanimous, fifteen-page "Sentence arbitrale" on February 21. As they were settling· disputes over specific sums of money, rather than determining guilt or innocence, they did not pronounce on Duplain 's morality; but they showed what they thought of him by granting almost all the STN 's demands. They required Duplain to pay 56,600 livres, only 2,400 short of the maximum requested by Oster vald and Bosset. The N euchatelois wrote home triumphantly that they had got more than they expected. And, at last, they had closed their quarto accounts : ''Nous devons benir Dieu de nous en etre tires comme cela. '' Epilogue Ever since it began business in 1769, the STN had hoped to strike it rich by speculating on the Encyclopedie. When its opportunity came in 1776, it committed a great deal of its capi tal to Panckoucke 's original enterprise, the folio reprint plan, hoping to profit by the huge printing job as much as by its half share in the publishing partnership. But as Panckoucke con tinued to maneuver, scrapping some projects and piecing to gether others, the STN watched its share shrink: from 1/2 of 91. Ostervald and Basset to Mme. Bertrand, Feb. 28, 1780, and also Feb. 22, 1780. In their ''Sentence,'' the arbitrators identified themselves as ''Christophe de la Rochette, avocat, ancien echevin; Joseph-Marie Rousset, ancien echevin; Claude Odile Joseph Baroud, avocat en parlement, conseiller du roi, notaire a Lyon; Jean-Baptiste Brun, negociant a Lyon." They summarized the arguments on each side of each of the disputes but did not make an item-by-item judgment. The 56,600 livres that they awarded to the STN in a lump sum evidently included remnants of the printing bills that Duplain had not paid. The arrangements for this last payment were complicated by the STN 's repugnance at accepting Du plain 's notes and by its need for ready cash. By a complex series of counter signatures and operations on the Bourse, the STN converted a late-maturing note of Duplain 's into a liquid asset of 50,657 Jivres, which it deposited in its be leaguered account with d 'Amal. For further details see Brouillard C, entry for Feb. 29, 1780. 381 The Business of Enli_qhtenment the reprint, to 5/12 of the refonte, and 5/24 of the quarto-not to mention 5/ 48 of the Encyclopedie niethodique. Even more distressing, the printing commissions kept slipping through the fingers of the N euchatelois. They doubled the size of their shop in order to begin work immediately on the reprint in 1776. But they had to postpone that job while Panckoucke organized the refonte, which in turn they had to shelve when he went in with Duplain on the quarto. Duplain allowed them to print only five volumes of his gigantic undertaking, but they consoled themselves with the expectation that they would get to do the refonte later. Panckoucke finally destroyed that illusion in June 1778 by an agreement with some Liegeois, who developed the first scheme for an Encyclopedie methodique. He extorted 105,000 livres from them in return for abandon ing the ref ante and opening up the French market. But he reversed his policy once again a half year later in a second agreement with the Liegeois. This time he abandoned the money and took over the }If ethodique-a neat trick, but one that left the STN without any compensation for the loss of its printing commission. Panckoucke then tried to pacify the N euchatelois with other projects: a plan for a supplementary edition of the plates to the Encyclopedie, a speculation on the works of Rousseau, and the printing job for the quarto edition of the Table analytique. Each of these also evaporated, even the last, which went to Duplain at the final meeting in Lyons, just when the associates exposed his perfidy. In the end, there fore, the N euchatelois concluded that they had been made the stooges of the Encyclopedie adventures. As small-town Swiss, they had been outwitted and outmaneuvered by the sharpest businessmen in France; and they had learned their lesson: "Les libraires de France n 'ont ni foi ni loi, ne sachant pas meme distinguer ce qui e,,;t honnete d'avec ce qui ne l'est pas. ,,92 Actually, the 8T~ had not done badly in its Encyclopedie speculations. Its 5/12 share of Duplain 's 200,000 livre settle ment came to 83,666 livres. That sum plus the return from the sale of Panckoucke 's 6,000 folio volumes, which had been con fiscated in 1770, pretty well covered the 92,000 livres that the STN had contracted to pay to Panckoucke for its share in his rights, privileges, and plates. Having recouped its original 92. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 15, 1780. The transactions with the Liegeois are discussed in Chapter VIII. 382 Settling Accounts investment, the STN still disposed of two sources of profit: its 5/48 share of the Encyclopedie methodique and the 208 quartos it had acquired from the division of Panckoucke's 500 sets. According to the most optimistic calculations of the Neu chatelois, their interest in the Methodique might someday be worth 30,208 livres. But in 1781 when they had run short of capital, they sold their shares to Plomteux for 8,000 livres. The 208 quartos were a more solid asset, despite the decline in demand. The STN evaluated them at 250 livres apiece or 52,000 livres in all, and it eventually did sell them off. Its total profit therefore came to about 60,000 livres on an invest ment of 92,000 livres-a return of 6,5 percent spread over four years, or twice what the STN would have earned had it in vested its money in rentes viageres. The STN also did hand somely on its printing for Duplain, although its ultimate profit is impossible to estimate, owing to his chicanery. When they had tabulated all their credits and debits, however, the N euchatelois felt bitterly disappointed by their experience with the Encyclopedie. They had put their money on the most successful publishing venture of the century, and their part ners had creamed off most of the profits, leaving them about half of what they thought they should have earned. Ostervald and Basset therefore left the Lyons settlement in February 1780 with an unsatisfied appetite for profit and re venge. Their next stop was Paris, where they pursued some of the projects that had eluded them in their dealings with Panckoucke. At first they concentrated on a plan to pirate the quarto Table analytique, a work that could bring in 50,000 livres, they calculated, owing to the demand created by the :mccess of the quarto Encyclopedie. The associates had ceded the rights to the Table to Duplain, who in turn had sold them to the Lyonnais pirates Amable Le Roy and "ce roue de Barret.' ' By underselling Le Roy and Barret with their own pirated edition, the Neuchatelois hoped to "enfin rendre a toutes ces honnetes gens les tours qu 'ils nous ont faits. '' But 93. On these calculations see Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 13, 1780. 94. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, }'eb. 28, 1780. 95. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 15, 1780. 96. Mme. Bertrand to Ostervald and Bosset, Feb. 27, 1780. In Nov. 1779 the Neuchatelois had considered pirating one of Barret's works, or at least black mailing him with the threat of doing so, and Panckoucke had encouraged them in order to ''forcer ce corsaire a nous rendre I 'argent qu 'il nous a extorque. C'est un homme d'une insigne mauvaise foi." Pa:nckoucke to STN, Nov. 6, 1779. 383 The Business of Enlightenment they would have to keep their counterpiracy secret because it not only violated their agreement with Duplain but also contradicted a formal statement they had made to him, which denied any involvement in speculations on a rival Table. Ostervald and Bosset therefore instructed their home office to send confidential notices to certain booksellers on the quarto subscription list, warning them against subscribing to the Le Roy-Barret Table, as a cheaper edition was in press. Neucha tel complied with letters to some of the STN 's most trust worthy customers, including Lepagnez of Besan<,;on, who had collected 338 subscriptions to the quarto Encyclopedie. Un fortunately for the STN, Lepagnez had fallen behind in his payments to Duplain; and in order to receive clemency, he informed Duplain of the plot. Duplain then dashed off a fierce letter to Panckoucke, who exchanged some hard words about the affair with Ostervald and Bosset in Paris. The N eucha telois tried to cover up their piracy by claiming that they had made the offer to Lepagnez before the agreement with Du plain. But that transparent lie failed to meet Panckoucke 's main objection, namely that the STN 's treachery could pro vide Duplain with a pretext for refusing to pay the 200,000 livre settlement. So despite their advanced preparations (they had even ordered a new font of type for the book), the Neu chatelois had to cancel the project and accept another humili ating defeat. The Table fiasco marked a turning point in the relations between the STN and Panckoucke; soon afterward, each of the former allies began to treat the other as an enemy. Having failed to pirate the Table, the N euchatelois laid plans with the Societes typographiques of Bern and Lausanne to produce a counterfeit edition of Panckoucke 's twenty-three volume abridgement of Prevost 's Histoire generale des voyages. At 97. The text of the statement is in STN to Ostervald and Bosset, Feb. 14, 98. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, March 15, 1780. On March 31, 1780, Oster vald and Bosset informed their home office that Duplain had just arrived in Paris and '' se plaint amerement de nous, et il peut avoir raison.'' A year later, Barret and Le Roy quarreled so badly over their common speculation on the Table that they took their differences to court. Barret won the case and then offered to sabotage the sales campaign of Le Roy, whom he characterized as '' successeur de M. Duplain et son digne eleve,'' by a secret arrangement with the STN. But the Neuchil.telois had been too badly burned in their dealings with all three Lyonnais to accept the offer. See Barret to STN, June 17, 1781. 99. STN to Ostervald and Bosset, undated letter, probably from April 1780, and Ostervald and Bosset to STN, April 14, 1780. 384 Settling Accounts the same time, Panckoucke undercut his agreement with Bern and Lausanne by slashing the prices on the octavo Encyclo pedies they had given him, thus ruining the market for which they had paid so dearly. He also refused to give the STN a share in the printing of the Encyclopedie methodique and so snatched away the last of the printing jobs that he had dan gled before them as compensation for canceling the original reprint plan. At this point, the STN began its attempts to get rid of its interest in the Methodique, "afin de n 'avoir rien a demeler dans la suite avec un homme peu digne de notre con fiance. " After selling its 5/48 share to Plomteux, it cut its last ties with Panckoucke, whom it now considered as someone "qui n'est bon ni a rotir ni a bouillir," and it concentrated on the search for a "belle occasion de prendre quelque re vanche " for the five-year partnership in which it had played the dupe. The search led directly to Panckoucke 's pet project, the Encyclopedie methodique. The last and the largest of the eighteenth-century Encyclopedies had two potential advan tages over Diderot's text: it could correct the errors and omissions that had been the despair of Diderot himself, and it could be methodical-that is, instead of following the arbi trary order of the alphabet, it could present a systematic summary of human knowledge, organized by subject and pack aged in a series of thematic dictionaries. This plan seemed so superior to Panckoucke that he expected his new Encyclopedie to drive the old ones off the market, as thousands of readers would want to scrap their antiquated models, whether folio, quarto, or octavo, for the latest version, which would be recog nized everywhere as the only "veritable Encyclopedie. " It was a grand plan, but it contained a flaw that the Swiss soon detected. A pirate could easily extract all the original material from the new text, rearrange it in alphabetical order, and pub lish it as a Supplbnent, in all three formats, to all the previous editions. By purchasing a few supplementary volumes, thou sands of Encyclopedie owners all over Europe could avoid buying an expensive new work from Panckoucke. And by some simple counterfeiting, the pirate could reap what Panckoucke had sown. 100. STN to Bosset, May 16, 1780. See also Ostervald to Bosset, May 14, 1780. 101. Bosset to STN, June 2, 1780, and Ostervald to Bosset, June 8, 1780. 102. Panckoucke to STN, June 1, 1779. 385 The Business of Enlightenment Curiously, the Swiss discussed this plot with the abbe Morel let, an intimate of Panckoucke 's circle who had originally planned to work on Suard's refonte of 1776. Ostervald had come to know Morellet quite well while scouting for manu scripts in Paris and asked his advice about pirating Panc koucke: should the STN reprint some of the constituent dictionaries of the Methodique, or should it attack the whole work at once by producing the alphabetical Supplement? Morellet replied that Panckoucke would defend himself against the first kind of aggression by publishing sections of all the dictionaries simultaneously, so that the entire Encyclo pedie would be finished at once and the pirates could not pick off the individual dictionaries one by one. As to the second plan, Morellet had to admit that it could work, once the Methodique was completed, but he thought that it went beyond the bounds of conventional trade warfare: "Vous feriez un grand tort a I 'enterprise de Panckoucke veritablement im mense et capable d 'entrainer sa ruine, si elle venait a echouer par I 'execution de votre projet ... Il y a qnelque inhumanite a lui faire un tort si grave.' n The STN also consulted one of its Parisian agents, an indigent bookdealer called Monory, who found the plan more terrifying than reprehensible; for, like other small fry in the book trade, he trembled at the thought of Panckoucke 's power: ''Quant au Supplement que vous proposez de l 'Encyclopedie . . . soyez assure qu 'il fera tout ce qui dependra de lui pour en empecher le cours; et il pourra beaucoup contre, a ce que je crois, par plusieurs rai sons que vous pouvez soupgonner. 'no Having sounded the terrain in Paris, the STN prepared for the attack in collaboration with its two allies, the Societes typographiques of Bern and Lausanne, who harbored even greater grudges against Panckoucke. In December 1783 the three confederates met in Yverdon to concert strategy and to draft a prospectus for the Supplement. By January 1784 they had printed the prospectus and opened a subscription, which they announced in the Gazette de Berne. Les societes typographiques de Berne et Neuchatel et M.J.P. Heubach et Compagnie de Lausanne vont travailler de concert a completer les 103. Morellet to STN, May 31, 1783. Morellet also objected that the STN 's attack would hurt Panckoucke 's nuthors, no~ably Marmon tel, a close friend of his who was considering publishing with the STN. 104. Monory to STN, Dec. 25, 1783. 386 Settling Accounts editions de l 'Encyclopedie par ordre alphabetique, a peu de frais pour les aequereurs, et les rendre equivalentes par un Supplement bien entendu al 'Encyclopedie par ordre des matieres qui s 'imprime a Paris. On trouve chez chacune de ces trois maisons le Prospectus de ce Supple ment, qu'elles proposent par souscription, avec les details de ce plan et des conditions auxquelles on peut se le procurer dans les trois formats, folio, quarto, et octavo. On n 'imprimera que le nombre pour lequel on aura souscrit. Then they sent their first ransom note to Panckoucke. They began by reminding him of his foul play during the quarto octavo war. But they bore no grudge, they said, with feigned restraint; for they knew that business was business: ''En poursuivant une entreprise utile pour vous, vous avez nui a ces societes [Lausanne and Bern] ; en poursuivant une entre prise qui peut leur etre utile, il serait possible qu 'elles vous nui"ent. Tel est l 'ordre des choses dans le monde, que le bien de l 'un ne peut se faire sans un peu de mal pour quelqu 'autre. '' Next they explained how their ''enterprise'' would cut the ground from under Panckoucke 's cherished Encyclopedie methodique-not that they meant to destroy his market as he had destroyed theirs: they merely wanted to bring the Metho dique within the range of the poorer run of customers. They would leave the rich to him. Should he feel that they were tak ing the lion's share of the demand, they would be happy to negotiate an agreement with him. Perhaps they should com bine forces: he could handle sales in France while they worked the rest of Europe. Or, should he prefer to run the entire operation, they might be persuaded to give up their plan-if the price were right. The letter dripped with irony and false bonhomie, and it must have given some satisfaction to the men in Bern, Lausanne, and Neuchatel, who had been on the receiv ing end of most of the low blows exchanged across the French Swiss border . 105. Gazette de Berne, Dec. 24, 1783. By this time Heubach had reorganized the Societe typographique de Lausanne as Jean-Pierre Heubach et Compagnie. He continued to employ Berenger and to maintain the affiliation with the other two Swiss firms. 106. On Jan. 10, 1784, Heubach sent the STN an undated copy of this note, which was written by Berenger. Heubach explained that Berenger had sent the proposal to Panckoucke "mercredi dernier" with the approval of Bern but had not had time to submit it to the STN. All three societies had apparently agreed on it in principle a month earlier. The S'fN wanted to reinforce this maneuver by pirating another of Panckoucke 's books, but the others objected that too much aggression might make Panckoucke unwilling to negotiate. Societe typographique de Berne and J.-P. Heubach to STN, Jan. 17, 1784. 387 The Business of Enlightenment In his reply, Panckoucke tried to play for time. He could not consider the proposal, he said, until he had completed the Encyclopedie methodique. In March 1784, Heubach received a copy of the first volumes of the Encyclopedie methodique and wrote that they would do nicely for the Supplement, whose prospects looked excellent: "Avez-vous de bonnes nou velles pour le Supplement?" he asked the STN. "Nous en recevons de plusieurs endroits des nouvelles tres satisfai santes, et nous esperons de pouvoir realiser cette combinaison dans le courant de l'ete." Three months later, the project looked better than ever: the fiow of subscriptions for the pi rated edition evidently remained strong, for Heubach con tinued to report ''des lettres tres encourageantes '' from his commercial correspondence ; and Pierre-Joseph Bue 'hoz of the Academie des Sciences had agreed to prepare all the material concerning natural history. But at that point, all references to the Supplement disappear from the papers at Neuchatel. Like many publishers' projects, it never was rea lized-not, it seems, through any slackening of the zeal for piracy among the Swiss, but because Panckoucke did not pro duce enough of his new Encyclopedie for them to plunder. In the end, therefore, and despite its claims to do business with rondeitr helvetique, the STN proved to be as cutthroat as its associates. It even betrayed its partners when their backs were turned. It plotted with Bern and Lausanne to counter feit Plomteux's edition of Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deitx Indes, and it violated a commitment to its two Swiss confederates by scheming secretly to produce an edition of Rousseau with the Societe typographique de Geneve.11° The N euchatelois had learned to play according to the rules of a very rough game, that is, to dupe or be duped; and they had lost whatever illusions they had had when they entered upon their Encyclopedie speculations. "Il ne faut pas promettre plus de beurre que de pain, ne croire que ce que l 'on voit, et 107. Heubach informed the STN of Panckoucke 's reply in a letter of Feb. 10, 1784. This is the last reference in the Neuchatel papers to Panckoucke, who by then had broken relations with the STN. 108. Heubach to STN, March 1, 1784. 109. Heubach to STN, June 7, 1784. 110. STN to Ostervald and Bosset, Feb. 14, 1780, and Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 8, 1780. 388 Settling Accounts ne compter que sur ce que l 'on tient avec les quatres doigts et le pouce, nm Ostervald and Bosset concluded after their final confrontation with Duplain. Duplain himself played the dirtiest game of all. Eighteenth century booksellers accepted piracy and secret combinations as necessary evils, but they drew the line at fraud and swin dling. So even by the lax, unwritten code of his trade, Duplain stood condemned as the villain of the Encyclopedie venture. To Panckoucke he was '' ce vilain homme, '' to the STN simply ''le roue. 'm When other booksellers mentioned him, they evoked the same picture of unmitigated rapacity. Jacques Revol claimed that Duplain had swindled him for 4,000 livres and had done the same to Duplain 's own cousin, Pierre Joseph Duplain of Paris. Pierre Joseph, an under-the-cloak book dealer and literary agent, had nothing good to say about his cousin in Lyons. And Revol recommended himself as a smug gler to the STN on the grounds that his way of doing business bore no resemblance to Duplain 's. He had known Duplain intimately since childhood, he explained, and felt nothing but distrust for him.11 Duplain himself acknowledged his reputa tion for unscrupulousness, but he attributed it to the machina tions of his enemies, who had foisted upon him "les surnoms de pirate, de corsaire, de forban que l'on prodigue jusqu'a la satiete dans les libelles platement injurieux.' m Opinion in the book trade seems to have been unanimous: he represented literary buccaneering at its worst. Was there nothing more to this man than an insatiable appetite for profit? The question has a certain fascination, both for economic history and the history of the human soul. But it is difficult to answer, because the contemporary picture of Duplain may be a caricature, and his personality does not lll. Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 20, 1780. ll2. Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 10, 1780, and Ostervald and Bosset to STN, Feb. 20, 1780. See also Panckoucke to STN, Nov. 6, 1778, on Duplain 's vilaine time and similar remarks by Plomteux in a letter to the STN of March 22, 1781. ll3. Revol to STN, June 24 and May 8, 1780, and Pierre Joseph Duplain to STN, May 29, 1782. Note also Revol 's comment in a letter of Aug. 13, 1780: '' M. Duplain avait fait mettre en prison le sieur Gauthier [a bookseller from Bourg-en-Bresse]. Nous ignorons Jes circonstances.'' ll4. Memoire a consulter et consultation pour le sfour Joseph Duplain, libraire a LyO'll (Lyons, 1777), p. 5. 389 The Business of Enlightenment show clearly through his correspondence. His letters have a brusque style. They come quickly to the point, in a rushed, imperative manner, as if Duplain were a general issuing or ders from a battlefield. He had to coordinate so many attacks on so many fronts that he easily adopted an embattled tone. In the autumn of 1778, for example, when he was bargaining with Panckoucke over the contract for the third edition, issu ing its first volumes, collecting payments for the previous editions, and plotting the Perrin swindle, Duplain wrote to the STN as follows: "Nous sommes ecrases par les non rentrees, par la provision des papiers pour l 'hiver, par la troisieme edition dont les deux premiers volumes sont en vente, et il ne nous est pas possible de faire face encore a vos demandes.'' ''Nous vous prions a lettre regue de nous faire envoi du tome 24. Nous assemblons et collationnons 21, 22, 23. Nous joindrons a cet envoi tous VOS defets. Nous attendons que M. Panckoucke ait fini le traite nouveau a signer pour vous envoyer un nouveau volume, et il attend, dit-il, votre ratification. Cela ne nous regarde pas. Tout ce que nous pou vons dire a M. Panckoucke, c 'est que nos frais sont immenses . . . Nous sommes assaillis de protets. Toulouse a en arriere 10,000, mais nous conduirons la barque au port.' ni Duplain dashed off a dozen directives like this every day, manipulating battalions of papermakers, printers, and financiers. His cam paign covered France, western Switzerland, and part of the Low Countries, and it had an epic quality. Duplain meant to make the greatest possible profit from the greatest publishing venture of the era. The single-mindedness with which he pursued this prize also reveals something of Duplain 's nature. He was a gambler. He recognized that the quarto Encyclopedie was the chance of a lifetime, and then he staked everything he owned on its success. He sold his shop, his stock of books, his house, and his furni ture and moved into a furnished room, in order to concentrate exclusively on the great affair. And once he had committed himself to this supreme speculation, he conducted it with a brutality that alienated even those booksellers whom he failed to swindle. But he did not care: he had risked everything; he could not turn back ; and in the end he made a fortune. For even after settling with his associates for 200,000 livres, he 115. Duplain to STN, Sept. 15 and Oct. 9, 1778. 390