The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

276 Pages·1985·43.303 MB·English

by  Robert Darnton

"THIS SPLENDID HISTORICAL WRITING.
IS
THE
LITERARY"
THE
OF
OLD
REGIME
Robert Darnton
J
Wmi
^
m^
*3*
1$ si
m
l^n .*->* „~~"—.r:+*M<&6\
Ipfl^^
^^^^=359^
^^U^gT
- "> X-^
41
v%
^ >^M^Z*WWWW

The Literary Underground
of the Old Regime

THE
LITERARY
UNDERGROUND
OF THE
0LD REGIME
Robert Darnton
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
y London, England
—
Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data
Darnton, Robert.
The literary underground ofthe Old Regime.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
—
1. U—nderground literature F—rance. 2. France
History Revolution, 1789-1799 Causes and character.
I. Title.
IX 133.3.D37 944.04*2 82-2918
ISBN 0-674-53656-8 (cloth) AACR2
ISBN 0-674-53657-6 (paper)
Preface
THIS BOOK BRINGS TOGETHER PIECES OF A WORLD THAT
fell apart in the eighteenth century. It was a world, or
underworld, that lived from the production and diffusion of
illegal literature in prerevolutionary France. In its day it
was invisible to all but the initiate, and since then it has
been buried under so much history that it might seem to
Why
be beyond excavation. even try to put it back to-
gether?
I would answer in the first place that the reconstruction
ofworlds is one of the historian's most important tasks. He
undertakes it, not from some strange urge to dig up ar-
chives and sift through old paper, but because he wants to
talk with the dead. By putting questions to documents and
listening for replies, he can sound dead souls and take the
measure ofthe societies they inhabited. Ifwe lost all contact
with the worlds we have lost, we would be condemned to
live in a two-dimensional, time-bound present, and our own
world would turn flat.
That may sound rather grand as a way to introduce a
book about Grub Street hacks,, pirate publishers, and under-
the-cloak peddlers of forbidden books. But the subject is
more important than it may seem; for a great deal of litera-
ture has been forbidden throughout the course of history,
and still is today, as anyone knows who has watched the sam-
izdat and the "flying university" contend with the prison
camp in Eastern Europe. The underground was especially
PREFACE
VI
important in the eighteenth century, when censorship, the
police, and a monopolistic guild ofbooksellers attempted to
contain the printed word within limits set by the official
orthodoxies. When it conveyed heterodox ideas, the word
spread through the underground. But how? Historians
know very little about the way legal literature was written,
printed, distributed, and read under the Old Regime. They
know still less about prohibited books. Yet most of what
passes today for eighteenth-century French literature circu-
lated on the shady side of the law in eighteenth-century
France. This book provides a tour of those circuits.
I was able to uncover them because seventeen years ago I
walked into a historian's dream: an enormous cache of un-
touched archives, the papers of the Societe typographique
de Neuchatel in the municipal library of Neuchatel, Swit-
zerland. The Societe typographique was one ofthe largest of
the many publishing houses that grew up around France's
borders in order to supply the demand for pirated and pro-
hibited books within the kingdom. Its papers contain the
richest vein of information about an eighteenth-century
publisher anywhere in existence. After working through
them, —I decided to consult complementary sources in
France archives of the police, the Bastille, and the book-
—
sellers' guild and to write a series of studies of the book
as a force in eighteenth-century Europe. The first install-
ment, The Business ofEnlightenment: A Publishing History of
the Encydopedie, 1775-1800, appeared in 1979. This is the
second.
Having explored as much of the literary underground as
possible, I realized that it could be pictured more effectively
by a set of sketches than by a grand tableau. Sketching in
history provides a way of catching men in motion, of hold-
ing subjects up to unfamiliar light and examining their
Preface vit
complexities from different angles. It also can convey the
sense ofcoming up against surprising varieties of humanity
in the course of research. While working through the ar-
chives, dossier-by-dossier, letter-by-letter (there are 50,000
letters in the Neuchatel collection), I was constantly
struck by the impression of a life looming up from obscu-
rity, taking on a distinct, personal shape, and playing itself
out while writing, printing, or peddling books. It is an ex-
traordinary sensation to open a dossier of fifty or a hundred
letters that have lain unread since the eighteenth century.
Will they come from a Parisian garret, where a young au-
thor is scribbling away, his vision suspended between Par-
nassus and the threats rising from the landlady on the
ground floor? Will they recount the travails of a paper-
maker on a remote mountainside as he curses the weather
for spoiling his size (finish) and damns the ragpickers for
missing deliveries? Perhaps their semilegible scrawl will
have to be read aloud so that the ear can pick up messages
that baffle the eye, and the outline ofa smuggling operation
will come into focus. They may take you into a printing
shop where workers heave at presses, or under counters
where seditious books are stocked, or around circuits where
salesmen spread Enlightenment from horseback, or down
great rivers to entrepots like Amsterdam and Marseille and
far-flung literary marketplaces: Lisbon, Naples, Frankfurt,
Leipzig, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow.
The letters could come from anywhere and reveal any-
thing, for they often take you by surprise. Just when you
think your author is about to snare a dowry, he is run out of
town by lettre de cachet. Just when a crate ofbooks is due in
port, it is seized by privateers. Your businessman turns into
a confidence man; your philosopher becomes a police spy.
Humanity keeps changing shape under your eyes as you
'-
VltUf IL~ f/^
PREFACE
Vlii
watch the publishers' speculations unravel and the wagon-
loads of books rumble across the continent. The world that
printing set in motion had a comedie humaine of its own, so
rich and complex that it cannot be compressed within the
covers ofa single volume. So I have tried to sketch its most
interesting sectors, leaving systematic study for a later work.
While investigating the baroque characters who inhab-
ited the literary underground, I ran into some classic histori-
cal problems. How deeply did the Enlightenment penetrate
into French society? How much did radical ideas contribute
to the destruction of the Old Regime? And what were the
connections between Enlightenment and Revolution in
France? When reexamined from the perspective ofpublish-
ers' archives, those questions seem less abstract and more
down-to-earth than in their textbook formulations. If they
cannot be answered in an absolute sense, they can be re-
duced to manageable proportions and worked through in
narrative form as a series ofcase studies. This book presents
the cases.
In doing so, it attempts to argue for a broadening of in-
tellectual history and to suggest that a mixed genre, the so-
cial history of ideas, could contribute to a fresh assessment
of the age of the Enlightenment. By reading and rereading
the great books ofthe eighteenth century, historians and lit-
erary scholars have built up a picture of the Enlightenment
as a distinct phase in western civilization. Without disput-
ing the value of their labor, I would like to urge the impor-
tance ofgoing beyond the books in order to confront a new
How
set of questions: did writers pursue careers in the Re-
public of Letters? Did their economic and social condition
have much effect on their writing? How did publishers and
booksellers operate? Did their ways of doing business influ-
ence the literary fare that reached their customers? What