Chapter Six
Crisis, Again, and Administrative Solutions, 1799–1810

The Crisis

In the last years of the eighteenth century, the government poured millions of livres in aid into the book publishing world, and scores of new book publishing and selling establishments opened in the capital. The number of titles registered per year at the dépôt légal climbed steadily from 1797 onward, doubling by 1799 (362 to 740) and increasing by another half in 1802 (1,329), where it leveled off before leaping up again in 1806 (1,536).^[1] Figures for new novels alone reveal a similar trend, increasing steadily from 1795 onward, surging up in 1799 (from 96 to 174), and reaching a plateau at the turn of the century (151).^[2] Yet although the bare numbers indicate a significant revival of the French book trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the account books of Parisian publishers offer a more sobering picture.

In 1799, at least three significant bankruptcies, involving outstanding debts (passifs ) of over 100,000 livres , sent a minor tremor through the publishing community (figure 5).^[3] A second tremor of similar intensity and

[1] Estivals, Statistique bibliographique, 415. See also Bellos, "Conjoncture de la production," 552–557.

[2] Martin, Milne, and Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, xxxvii.

[3] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 8, August 3, 1799, anonymous "printer"; August 30, 1799, Henri Gabriel Nicolle, publisher; and ibid., carton 9, September 3, 1799, Guillaume Denné le jeune, publisher. Despite the monetary reforms of the year IX (1800–1801), Paris printers and publishers continued to compute their accounts in livres rather than francs . According to the expert Guy Thuillier, the use of livres was standard practice in the business community until the end of the decade. In any case, the difference in value, for our purposes, is not very significant: in 1799–1800, 5 francs equaled approximately 5 livres, 1 sou, and 3 deniers . See Thuillier's La Monnaie en France au début du XIXe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1983), 68–69.

financial impact occurred two years later, in 1802.^[4] And in 1803, Paris publishers witnessed a full-scale financial earthquake. Twelve more publishers declared bankruptcy.^[5] The crisis not only widened, it deepened, hitting some of the larger and more extended establishments: Nicolas Fauvelle, a printer, with a passif of 100,458 livres ; Jacques-Denis Langlois, publisher-printer, with debts totaling 102,979 livres ; Nicolas Moutardier, publisher, owing 268,870 livres ; the publisher François Maradan, with 378,329 livres in outstanding debts; François Ouvrier, publisher, with a passif of 110,534 livres ; and François Dufart père , printer and publisher, defaulting on 254,352 livres of debts.^[6] In all, the debts disavowed through bankruptcy in 1803 soared to 1,579,099 livres , bringing the amount of default for the years 1799–1803 to a grand total of 1,773,562 livres .

In the next few years, things only went from bad to worse. Seven more bankruptcies came in 1804, adding another 898,848 livres to the total debt.^[7] Two publishers, Fuchs and Louis-Edme Gérard, each owed over 200,000 livres .^[8] Six more members of the community declared themselves

[4] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 16, August 5, 1802, Mathieu Carvin, publisher; October 22, 1802, Antoine Caillot, publisher; and ibid., carton 17, December 31, 1802, Antoine Lenoir, publisher. The total passif for 1802 (with figures available for only two of the three accounts) was 84,060 livres .

[5] Ibid., carton 18, January 19, 1803, Jacques-Philippe Jacob, publisher-printer; ibid., carton 19, April 14, 1803, Nicolas Fauvelle, printer; April 30, 1803, Jacques-Henri Tardieu, publisher-printer; ibid., carton 20, July 7, 1803, François-Marie Marchand, publisher; July 9, 1803, Louis Cordier and François Legras, publisher-printers; July 19, 1803, Jacques-Denis Langlois, publisher-printer; ibid., carton 21, August 27, 1803, Nicolas Moutardier, publisher; ibid., carton 21, October 12, 1803, Delaplace, publisher; ibid., carton 23, November 2, 1803, François Maradan, publisher; November 2, 1803, François Ouvrier, publisher; November 29, 1803, Henri-Joseph-Philogone Meurant, publisher; and December 1, 1803, François Dufart père, publisher-printer.

[6] See note 5.

[7] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 24, February 2, 1804, Fuchs, publisher; February 2, 1804, Brochot père, publisher; February 10, 1804, Jean-Charles Poncelin and wife GenevièveBéatrix Debarle, publishers; February 16, 1804, Louis-Edme Gérard, publisher; March 28, 1804, Claude-Augustin Léger, publisher; ibid., carton 25, April 11, 1804, Pierre-Henri Genest, publisher; and ibid., carton 26, August 14, 1804, Jacques-Henri Tardieu, publisher-printer.

[8] See note 7.

in default the following year.^[9] This crash brought down some of the oldest, wealthiest, and most reputable members of the Paris community, like Eugène Onfroy, François-Jean Baudouin, and Adrien Leclerc.^[10] The losses for 1805 ran to at least 883,669 livres , not including Baudouin, whose accounts, unfortunately, no longer exist. And the situation was to get worse still. Yet another thirteen bankruptcies marked 1806 (counting François Didot le jeune , whose records have been lost).^[11] Five of these publishers declared over 100,000 livres each in outstanding debts.^[12] The bankruptcy of Frédéric Schoell and Company alone broke the one million livres mark.^[13]

Between 1799 and 1806, then, at least forty-two publishers, printers, or booksellers declared bankruptcy—nearly one-fifth of the publishers in the capital, accounting for almost half the total number of publishing and printing bankruptcies for which we have a record between 1770 and 1806. The outstanding debts of the bankrupt Parisian publishers, printers, and booksellers between 1799 and 1806 came in all to over 5.5 million livres . It was a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Of course, printers and book publishers were not the only sector of the Parisian commercial world to go into default in the opening years of the nineteenth century, and especially in 1805–1806. The year 1805 was altogether one of national financial reckoning, with the crisis precipitated by the declaration of default by the directors of the newly founded

[9] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 27, February 22, 1805, François Ouvrier, publisher; March 6, 1805, Eugène Onfroy, publisher; March 15, 1805, François-Jean Baudouin, printer-publisher; April 11, 1805, Pierre-Marie-Sebastien Catineau, printer; ibid., carton 29, September 12, 1805, Germain-Aignon Benoist-Dumont, publisher; and October 29, 1805, Adrien Leclerc, publisher.

[10] See note 9.

[11] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 32, January 18, 1806, Laurent-Mathieu Guillaume, publisher; ibid., carton 33, February 14, 1806, J. Pierre Hénée, printer-publisher; February 14, 1806, Frédéric Schoell et Cie., publisher; ibid., carton 34, March 20, 1806, Philippe-Laurent Caillat, printer; March 29, 1806, Hermann Henrichs, publisher; ibid., carton 35, April 16, 1806, Mme Richard (widow of Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe), publisher; April 24, 1806, N.-L. Achaintre, publisher; ibid., carton 36, July 2, 1806, François-Marie Marchand, printer; ibid., carton 37, September 4, 1806, Jean-Nicolas Barba, publisher; October 18, 1806, anonymous printer; and ibid., carton 38, December 15, 1806, Frédéric Perlet, publisher. For the bankruptcy of Didot, see AN, ser. BB16, carton 760, doss. 5723, Complaint of M. Marervaux, creditor of Didot le jeune, to the minister of justice, concerning the liability for Didot's debts. He attests that Didot declared bankruptcy on December 2, 1806.

[12] See note 11.

[13] See note 11. Schoell declared his passif (outstanding debts) to be 1,057,584 livres .

Banque de France in November 1805 sending shockwaves throughout the Parisian commercial world and, in turn, causing the number of bankruptcies in Paris to skyrocket.^[14] The troubles in Paris book publishing were thus part of a larger financial storm.

Indeed, the minister of justice reported to the minister of police in April 1803 that the financial crisis, and specifically the loss of easy credit, was driving under "several major Paris publishing houses."^[15] But the crisis also took on specific characteristics within the world of print. According to the prefect of Paris, although the printing industry in that city had long been in a slump, the epicenter of the current crisis was in publishing rather than printing.^[16] Of the forty-two businesses that declared bankruptcy, only four were exclusively printers. Nonetheless, the printers were in no condition to meet such a crisis, for they had troubles of their own.

The battle with the Imprimerie de la République continued, but then Napoleon's coup d'état on 18 brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799), reawakened their hopes. Within a month of the coup the newly constituted consuls received another petition from twenty-five printers of Paris denouncing the monopoly of the Imprimerie de la République. In contrast with the petitions and pamphlets of the year III (1794–1795), the complainants' tone had become less accusative and more beseeching: "All the printing shops of Paris . . . are languishing in ruinous inaction," they wrote. "It is not upon declamations . . . that we found our demand, but upon equality, which grants each citizen the right to utilize his talents."^[17] Their appeals, however, were met with yet another reaffir-

[14] For an overview of the banking and credit crisis of 1805–1806, see A. Dauphin-Meunier, La Banque de France (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 46–52; Robert Bigo, Les Banques françaises au cours du XIXe siècle (Paris: Sirey, 1947), 89–98, 128–133; and Louis Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire à l'Empire (Paris: Mouton, 1978), 282–292. I would like to thank Tom Luckett for sharing his unpublished research on Parisian bankruptcies during the revolutionary period, to appear shortly as "Credit and Society in Eighteenth-Century France."

[15] See the report from the minister of justice to the minister of police of April 28, 1803, in Aulard (ed.), Paris sous le Consulat 4:26.

[16] See the reports from the prefect of Paris to the minister of police of July 11, 1802, and October 19, 1803, in ibid., 3:149 and 4:440–441.

[17] AN, ser. BB4, carton 33, doc. 3, Pétition présentée aux consuls de la République, par les imprimeurs de Paris soussignés [signed "frimaire, an VIII, Knapen, Prault, Stoupe, Clousier, Pierres, Couturier, Ballard, Quillaud, Baudouin, Lottin, Didot l'aîné, Didot le jeune, Agasse, Plassan, Belin, Barbou, Gratoit, Crapelet, Goujon, Migneret, Boiste, Leclerc, Veuve Delaguette, Veuve Panckoucke, Citoyenne Huzard"] (Paris: Stoupe), 1.

mation of the wide purview of the Imprimerie de la République on 19 frimaire, year X (December 10, 1801).^[18]

Further, in October 1803, the Consulate created a commission charged with the task of centralizing and standardizing publishing contracts for classical texts to be used in the schools. This initiative brought forth a collective outcry from eighty-seven publishers and printers of Paris against these new affronts to "the friends of letters and sciences, and of the freedom of the press, rightly understood."^[19] To make matters worse, in the first year of its rule the Consulate implemented radical measures to limit and control the political press: at the moment of the coup d'état in 1799, there were approximately sixty political journals in Paris; by a decree of 27 nivôse, year VIII (January 17, 1800), the consuls reduced that number to thirteen.^[20]

With the losses of government contracts and then the suppression of nearly fifty Parisian periodicals, the financial crisis in the commerical book publishing community hit the printers hard as well. The Napoleonic inspectors therefore compiled a long list of small tragedies to report for the largest and finest printing shops in Paris. In considering the eighty most substantial and reputable printers, for example, the inspector noted that Pierre-Robert-Christophe Ballard "had suffered losses."^[21] As for François-Jean Baudouin's troubles, "his plight is well known" and so required no details. Even Pierre Didot l'aîné , "despite his fame, found himself unable to meet his payments." The Jacobin printer Charles-Frobert Patris, who lost 40,000 livres , and Louis Prudhomme were forced to bankruptcy. The printer Georges-Adrien Crapelet's father, the inspector noted, "died of bitterness, having lost 150,000 francs to publishers." So, too, François Belin and J.-J. Delance "had seen bad times." Jean-Ange Clô had been an associate of Adrien Leclerc "before the latter went bankrupt, causing him a loss of 75 percent," and Jean-Joseph Laurent l'aîné "has been under the threat of bankruptcy." Finally, the giant Levrault establishment "had declared a bankruptcy whose total reached 800,000

[18] Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 403. After yet another round of protests and debates, the purview of the Imprimerie Impériale was again reaffirmed by a decree of March 24, 1809; see ibid., 410.

[19] Les Imprimeurs et libraires de Paris, au Ministre de l'Intérieur (Paris, an XII [1803–1804]).

[20] André Cabanis, La Presse sous le Consulat et l'Empire (1799–1814) (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 1975), 11–13, 319.

[21] All the cases mentioned in this paragraph are in AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

francs." With little else to hold onto when the commercial publishers went under, the printers went with them. It was not surprising that the struggle over government contracts was so intense and so sustained.

The characteristics of the publishing and printing crisis of 1803–1806 were remarkably different from those of the crisis of the 1790s. That decade saw an explosion of the periodical press that caught book publishers off guard. They witnessed the total collapse of the book market following the declaration of the freedom of the press, as well as the devaluation of their stock in the face of the revolutionary demand for nouveautés and lumières . Revolution and then war drove their principal clientele to emigrate and closed down their international markets. In contrast, the early nineteenth century saw a forced contraction of the periodical press by government decree. Book publishing, in turn, appeared to be flourishing, and émigré readers of "long-winded works" were beginning to return to France. What, then, caused the crisis in commercial book publishing? Both the publishers and the imperial government wanted answers.

Government Inquiry

The consuls were aware of the crisis in the book trade. Even before the great banking crisis of 1805, recognition of the need to reform publishing was in the air. On 28 nivôse, year XI (January 18, 1803), for example, the consuls received a report from the head of the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures in Paris, detailing the disarray of the book trade and calling for reform of the legislation of July 19, 1793.^[22] A year later, the newly formed Council of State began a formal inquiry into the situation. The ministers of justice and the police set out to solicit information and policy recommendations from notable printers and publishers in preparation for a full-scale reform. Thus the former printer for the Crown in Paris, Philippe-Denis Pierres, reported on 15 fructidor, year XII (September 2, 1804), that "six months ago, the Chief Justice charged me to draw up a plan for the reorganization of French printing, publishing,

[22] AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 1, doss. 18, "Rapport au gouvernement: exposition des principes qui ont dirigé la rédaction du projet d'une loi relative à la propriété des auteurs," Costaz le jeune, director of the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures, 28 nivôse, an XI (January 18, 1803).

and book selling."^[23] Over the next six years the government was to receive numerous reports and proposals from the elites of France's post-revolutionary publishing and printing world. These memos offer rare insight into the causes and character of the crisis in the republican book publishing world. The universal call was for re-regulation of the trade. But along what lines, and toward what ends?

There was little doubt about the devastating effect the credit crisis of 1805 had on book publishing. The printer Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe issued a pamphlet in 1804 denouncing corrupt "speculators in false bankruptcies" as the main cause of the financial crisis.^[24] But in 1807 the publisher Louis Ravier offered greater illumination on the subject. According to Ravier, after nearly a decade of devastation under the Revolution, the book trade had indeed begun to revive in the last years of the eighteenth century, and especially after the March 1802 Treaty of Amiens reopened the British and European markets to Paris book dealers. No sooner had they begun to take advantage of this situation, however, than the peace broke down, leaving publishers in the lurch with their investments.^[25] But the real key to the recent financial vicissitudes of the publishing world, in Ravier's estimation, lay in the revival of credit institutions under the Directory, and especially the opening of the Commercial Discount Bank in 1797.

With renewed access to credit, book publishers overplayed their hands. The Commercial Discount Bank, Ravier wrote, although a "fecund source of prosperity for those businessmen who use it with measure, . . . has brought about the ruin of several Parisian publishers because of their abuse of it." Some publishers as much as quintupled their capital through credit in order to invest in huge speculations, he reported, and then found that the market did not respond with adequate sales.^[26] Then the crisis hit. They had overextended in anticipation of the recovery of the European market, and then the Commercial Discount Bank was forced to close in April 1803 and to call in its bills at the

[23] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 12684, "Documents et correspondance concernant Philippe-Denis Pierres, imprimeur à Versailles (1741–1808)," feuille 63, Petition from Pierres to His Majesty the Emperor.

[24] Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe, Réflexions sur les contrefaçons en librairie, suivies d'un mémoire sur le rétablissement de la communauté des imprimeurs de Paris (Paris, an XII [1803–1804]); reedited in 1806 as Memoire [Mémoire ]sur le rétablissement de la communauté des imprimeurs de Paris, suivi de réflexions sur les contrefaçons en librairie et sur le stéréotypage .

[25] Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie, xv–xvi.

[26] Ibid., xvi.

very same moment that the newly established peace began to fail. The result was disaster. Here is how Ravier described it:

When this bank was closed down . . . it was impossible to raise the actual sums from their merchandise in order to settle with the bank. This brought on bankruptcies, and more bankruptcies. They succeeded each other during this period with frightening rapidity. . . . For the first time a single publishing house declared a bankruptcy of over a million, and another of more than eight hundred thousand francs, etc.^[27]

Since the renewal of the war with England, Ravier concluded, the French book trade found itself again limited to the borders of the empire.

Beyond the general issue of the credit crisis, publishers and printers blamed factors specific to the state of the industry. Stoupe called for the reestablishment of a printer's guild and a restriction of the number of printing shops as the only remedy to the current moral deterioration, attested to, he asserted, by the large number of literary speculations ending in bankruptcy.^[28] He was seconded in this view by Pierre-Marie-Sebastien Catineau-LaRoche, a printer in Versailles.^[29] Calls for limits on the number of printing shops came from other corners as well. The former royal printer in Orléans, Louis Jacob l'aîné, also demanded new restrictions on the number of printers, but for different reasons than Stoupe. According to Jacob, the problem was not corrupt credit practices, but genuine commercial stagnation, which was driving honest and hardworking printers to the humiliation of bankruptcy.^[30] This stagnation, he argued, resulted from overproduction. There were too many printers serving France, and especially Paris; moreover, they were serving poorly. Thus he wrote:

In the first few years of the Revolution, did the demand for printed matter expand to the point of requiring, in a very short time, the founding of eight hundred printing shops in Paris, in place of thirty-eight, and an equally disproportionate number in the departments? I dare to say no. And I submit that the quantity of posters, the mass of newspapers, and the

[27] Ibid.

[28] Stoupe, Réflexions sur les contrefaçons en librairie .

[29] Pierre-Marie-Sebastien Catineau-LaRoche, Réflexions sur la librairie, dans lesquelles on traite les propriétés littéraires, des contrefaçons, de la censure, de l'imprimerie et de la librairie (Versailles: Catineau-LaRoche, 1807).

[30] Jacob l'aîné, Idées générales sur les causes de l'anéantissement de l'imprimerie, 5.

infinity of other ephemeral works did not replace the void suddenly created by the absence of literature. For a few moments, the printers employed by the government or the local administrations truly did augment the number of their presses; but this expansion could never compensate for the loss of the other work, which ceased the moment men of letters could no longer think of anything but saving their own lives. The disappearance of church books and works of jurisprudence left an equally important lacuna.^[31]

The collapse of the book trade had not been compensated for by the explosion in ephemeral matter. To make matters worse, according to Jacob, what was left of the printing business was now being eaten up by a crowd of new, smaller printers:

Portable printing presses, which sold in profusion, were . . . the first blow. . . . In the beginning acquired merely for a hobby, these little printing presses ended up inspiring commercial ideas and soon started to take over from the old printing shops all biblioquets, or small trade jobs, such as announcements of weddings and deaths, calling cards, posters, leaflets, and so forth.^[32]

Thus, it was not simply the shady financial dealings of a few big Parisian publishers that had brought ruin on the printing and book publishing trades; it was the multitude of new printing shops that had opened as a consequence of the freedom of the press.

These new little printers were responsible not only for driving the larger printers to ruin, Jacob argued; they were also responsible for the moral decline of French literary culture, because they themselves printed the degenerate literary genres that the Revolution had spawned. It was they who had first flooded France with inflammatory political newspapers and then, having exhausted that market, turned to the corruption of youth by propagating romantic novels. And it was not just the number of new printers that plagued the trade and steered it toward less than noble ends; the government, too, had taken its toll on the livelihood of commercial printers: "In the printing business, everything is being centralized in the capital."^[33] Even government jobs were no longer subcontracted out to departmental printers. With too many printers and too little worthy material to print, Stoupe and Jacob asserted, the financial and moral crisis in the trade could be resolved only by restricting the

[31] Ibid., 18–19.

[32] Ibid., 20–21.

[33] Ibid., 23.

number of printing shops in Paris to fifty, and to nine hundred for the nation as a whole.

So much for the problems of printers. The responses of publishers to the government's inquiry revealed a clear consensus that the deregulationist policies of the revolutionary period, and in particular the law on literary property of July 19, 1793, were both legally and institutionally inadequate for commercial book publishing. They, too, clamored for re-regulation. Thus Jacob wrote: "Will it be claimed that in demanding a renewal of the old regulations, one is demanding restrictions upon the freedom of the press? . . . Do not call liberty what in reality is no more than license and piracy."^[34]

After all, Jacob noted, the great eighteenth-century free trade reformer, the minister of finance Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, had exempted the printing and publishing trades from his deregulationist edicts of 1776, in the interest of public order and safety. Pierre-Marie Bruysset, publisher in Lyon, equally condemned revolutionary deregulation as the "first and foremost cause of the decline of the book trade":

At that moment when so many men lost their profession and their resources, the effervescence of thought gave the book trade a momentary allure of prosperity because of the spontaneous explosion in consumption of ephemeral matter. . . . The door to the profession was barely opened to everyone before a crowd rushed in.^[35]

The Paris publisher Pierre-Michel Lamy was less vituperative and more specific. It was not simply that too many people were practicing the trades, it was that the laws organizing them were insufficient: "In 1793, the law that came to regulate us struck at the root of literary property. The results were losses for the foremost publishing houses and universal disorder. Immorality eclipsed the good faith of yore."^[36] Louis Ravier held similarly negative views of the law,

whose penalties, as rigorous as they are, discouraged a few of the least dishonest pirates, but never checked the audacity of the most dangerous. Deprived of adequate means of enforcement, this decree, so to speak, is more troublesome than useful to the publishing world, giving rise to shameful speculations on forms of property that are insecure and soon to expire, in order to obtain the right to pursue in the courts another man,

[34] Ibid., 42–43.

[35] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Pierre-Marie Bruysset, Lyon publisher, "Observations," September 29, 1810.

[36] Ibid., Pierre-Michel Lamy, Paris publisher, May 8, 1810.

who at least as often through ignorance as intention has found himself an accomplice in the dissemination of a pirate edition.^[37]

The duration of literary property claims was too limited. And as there was no definitive public record of property claims, publishers could not even be certain which editions were legitimate and which pirated. Provincial publishers were of like opinion. Catineau-LaRoche, of Versailles, described the legislation of 1793 as "that law which is immoral in principles, and insufficient in its means."^[38] A unanimous call was raised for greater regulation of the publishing as well as the printing world.

Two issues lay at the heart of the publishers' complaints: literary piracy and unregulated competition. The law of 1793, publishers explained, was totally ineffectual as protection against "piracy." The head of the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures assessed the law thus: "The lacunae in the law are so numerous that neither the state administration, nor the law courts, are capable of applying the law in a regular and uniform manner." In order to pursue someone for having produced a pirate edition, he continued,

You must present memoranda and send with the formal grievance a copy of the pirate edition, as well as the original copy of your own certificate of deposit at the Bibliothèque Nationale. . . . That is not all. You must wait for the decision. There are numerous delays, and in consequence the unpunished pirate, who has now been informed that he is being pursued, will not hesitate to get rid of the pirated books.^[39]

The fine arts printer Bertrand-Quinquet, in his Traité de l'imprimerie of 1799, also gave a vivid picture of the problem of pirating since the beginning of the Revolution:

Pirating has become so common in recent times that a printer or publisher who undertakes an edition includes an estimate of his losses to pirated editions . . . in his initial calculations. Before the French Revolution, when the number of printers in this part of Europe was limited and the freedom of the press restrained, Rouen and Lyon were practically the only cities inside France where people dared to engage in this sort of piracy, and even then they did so only with moderation, whereas in Brussels and Liège and throughout Switzerland pirating was openly practiced. . . . Today, now that Paris has seen printers (though in name only) open up in every corner of the city, there are few who would blush at engaging in this dishonorable

[37] Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie, xiv.

[38] Catineau-LaRoche, Réflexions sur la librairie, 30.

[39] AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 1, doss. 18, "Rapport au gouvernement," Costaz le jeune, 28 nivôse, an XI (January 18, 1803).

trade. Most of them do not even reflect on the enormity of the crime they are committing by printing a work that belongs to someone else.^[40]

Like many of the printers whose businesses dated back to before 1789, Bertrand-Quinquet blamed the deregulation of the trade and the new printers for the explosion in pirate editions.

To make matters worse, Louis Ravier added, provincial judges treated accusations of pirating by Paris publishers as persecuting local businesses.^[41] And pursuit of domestic pirate editions was only half the problem, as Paris printer and publisher Jacques-Denis Langlois pointed out. Equally if not more damaging to the French book trade was the lack of effective means of preventing the importation of pirate editions produced across the border.^[42] The Marseille publisher Auguste Mossy voiced a similar complaint about Paris book dealers who were, he claimed, in cahoots with foreign printers.^[43] The law of 1793, silent on the question of importing books, was useless in this situation. Louis Jacob l'aîné revived the old argument of Diderot and the Old Regime Paris Book Guild, demanding that "literary property be respected in the same manner as all other forms of property."^[44]

Behind these observations lay years of harsh experiences, like those of the geriatric author in Sens, Pélée St. Maurice, who discovered in 1795 that the second edition of his work on the cultivation of Italian poplar trees was being pirated in Paris.^[45] His appeal for action, first to the Committee on Public Instruction and then to the minister of the interior, was met with the following response: "Your complaint against the pirate edition of your work could not be more just, but it is before the civil tribunals that you must take it. The police no longer deal with matters of piracy."^[46] Yet the records of the civil tribunals of Paris show no trace of the aging Pélée St. Maurice. Pursuing such a case in the local courts, especially if it involved travel, was a costly and risky business.

[40] Bertrand-Quinquet, Traité de l'imprimerie (Paris, an VII [1799]), 257.

[41] Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie, xv.

[42] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Letter from Jacques-Denis Langlois to M. le comte de Portalis, in response to his request for information, February 27, 1810.

[43] AN, ser. F17, carton 1207, doss. 8, Letter from the publisher Mossy in Marseille to the minister of justice, 22 fructidor, an V (September 8, 1797).

[44] Jacob l'aîné, Idées générales sur les causes de l'anéantissement de l'imprimerie, 48. See also chapter 3.

[45] AN, ser. F18, carton 565, Letter from Pélée St. Maurice to the Committee on Public Instruction, 17 frimaire, an IV (December 8, 1795), and the response of the minister of the interior.

[46] Ibid.

Some people, of course, did take their cases to the courts. The widow of Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine, for example, sued the publisher Nicolas Barba for pirating her late husband's work L'Intrigue épistolaire in 1796.^[47] Barba was sued again in 1797 by François de LaHarpe and his publisher, Mathieu Migneret, for pirating LaHarpe's Du fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire .^[48] And the publisher Jacques-Simon Merlin took Barba and his associate François Dufart to court in 1798 for yet another pirate edition, this time of François Marmontel's Contes moraux .^[49] In 1799, the novelist Félicité Mérard St.-Just and her husband sued the publisher François Maradan for publishing a second edition of her Mémoires de la baronne d'Alvigny without her consent.^[50] Joseph-Gaspar Cuchet's successor, A.-J. Dugour, found himself tied up in the courts in 1799 as well, pursuing the Paris publisher François-Pierre Deterville for a pirate edition of the Dictionnaire élémentaire de botanique .^[51]

Not only did no preventative measures exist to combat pirate editions, but, as the head of the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures observed, pursuit of the perpetrators in the courts after the fact could drag on for years. Thus in the case of the widow of Fabre d'Eglantine, a trial, appeal, and retrial lasted three years.^[52] And her difficulties were minor compared to those of Dugour, who, at the same time that he was battling Deterville over his Dictionnaire élémentaire de botanique, was embroiled in a lengthy suit with the Leroy brothers, printers and publishers in Lyon, over a pirate edition of Rozier's Dictionnaire, ou Cours complet d'agriculture .^[53] Dugour had purchased the Cours complet d'agriculture as part of Cuchet's stock in 1797; Cuchet, in turn, had purchased the privilege from Rozier in 1783. The Leroy brothers now claimed that they had produced this edition of the Cours in 1792—that is, in the period between the abolition of privileges in August 1789 and the new law on literary property of 1793. As a consequence, they argued, they were perfectly within their rights to have

[47] Douarche (ed.), Tribunaux civils 2:305, 318, 426, 471 (April 24, 1796–February 23, 1798).

[48] Ibid., 435 (August 31, 1797).

[49] Ibid., 582–585 (December 3–13, 1798).

[50] Ibid., 618 (February 25, 1799).

[51] Ibid., 606 (January 26, 1799).

[52] Ibid., 305, 318, 426, 471 (April 24, June 10, 1796; August 11, 1797; February 23, 1798).

[53] AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 7, "Consultation pour le citoyen A. J. Dugour, propriétaire du Cours d'agriculture par Rozier, contre les citoyens Leroy, imprimeur-libraires à Lyon," (1797–1803).

produced the new edition.^[54] The case dragged on for at least six years, from 1797 to 1803.

Such arguments were not rare. The comte de Buffon's widow found herself involved in an even more arcane legal dispute with Behemer, printer and publisher in Metz, over her late husband's Histoire naturelle .^[55] "The former privileges accorded to authors of useful works, were they abolished by the laws of August 1789?" her lawyer queried. "Is it legal for a foreigner who has moved to France to market a pirate edition of a work because it was produced in a foreign country that has since been 'reunited' with France?"^[56] It took four years, from 1798 to 1802, and an appeal reversing the decision of a lower court to get a firm decision in her favor.

The widow Buffon was not alone in struggling with these international legal disputes. As Langlois had observed, the problem of foreign pirate editions was endemic. Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre and his publisher in Paris, Laurent-Mathieu Guillaume le jeune, became locked in a long and bitter battle with the Brussels publisher Lefrancq over Bernardin de St. Pierre's own works, as well as those of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian; Stanislas-Jean, marquis de Boufflers; and Marguerite Daubenton.^[57] Lefrancq's lawyers argued, too, that the abolition of privileges in August 1789 had abrogated Bernardin de St. Pierre's claims on his texts between 1789 and 1793.

Bernardin de St. Pierre was not new to the world of literary piracy. He had fought battles over pirate editions since the beginning of the Revolution, first over Paul et Virginie , Etudes de la nature , and the Chaumière indienne between 1791 and 1793, then, in 1796, over a second pirate edition of the Etudes .^[58] That same year, he also declared bankruptcy.^[59] In association with Guillaume le jeune , he then decided to produce another

[54] Ibid., 14.

[55] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, Mémoire on behalf of the widow Buffon against Behemer, 1802.

[56] Ibid., 3.

[57] The dossier concerning this dispute is found in AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Guillaume le jeune, Paris publisher [1802–1806]. For a similar dispute, see AN, ser. F18, carton 565, Mémoire on behalf of the publishers of Brussels against the publishers of Paris, 1807.

[58] See chapter 3 for more on the 1791–1793 battles. For the fight over the 1796 pirated version of the Etudes, see Douarche (ed.), Tribunaux civils 2:282, 329 (February 8, 1796).

[59] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, doss. "Guillaume le jeune, " Aperçu sur les difficultés qui s'élèvent entre les libraires de l'intérieur de la France et les libraires des pays réunis [n.d., n.p.], 3.

edition of his Oeuvres to recover his losses. Shortly thereafter Guillaume, in Brussels on business, discovered that they were yet again victims of pirate editions of the Etudes and Paul et Virginie .^[60] Bernardin de St. Pierre may have been one of the most widely published authors of the revolutionary period, but he was not well remunerated from his writings. In 1806, Guillaume le jeune also joined the ranks of bankrupt publishers.^[61]

Pirate editions and the ambiguities of the law of 1793 were not the only factors undermining the commercial stability of the Paris book publishing community. Just as damaging, according to reports received by the Napoleonic Council of State, was the problem of unregulated editions of the same works, which after the abolition of privileges had entered the public domain. Among his "causes of the troubles in the book trade," for instance, the Paris printer Théodore Demaison listed "the competition of different editions whose editors cannot come to an understanding with one another and thus contribute to their mutual ruin."^[62] Ravier, too, identified "the multiplicity of editions" of the same works as the "second cause [after pirating] for the decline in the business." He explained, "The only reason they produce new editions daily is because the majority of the new printers and book dealers from the revolutionary period are ignorant of the numerous editions that already exist of these works; but they must know that the best book, multiplied too many times, ends up being the worst to sell."^[63] And Pierre-Marie Bruysset, the Lyon publisher, added his voice: "Among the books that have come into the public domain, it occurs sometimes that four or five editions of the same book are produced in the same time, in the same city, and these editions create unintended and ruinous competition for one another, harmful to each of the entrepreneurs."^[64] The former Paris Book Guild publisher César Briand stated the case thus:

Modern publishing consists of all the books that are reprinted endlessly, which are no one's property, and which anyone can make use of by virtue of the law of 1793. This branch of the book trade [is] the most extensive, [and] the most certain, . . . because it . . . encompasses the best books. It could offer an honorable living to all publishers if they were to know how

[60] Ibid., 4, 5.

[61] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 32, January 18, 1806.

[62] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Report from Théodore Demaison, Paris printer, October 14, 1810.

[63] Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie, 3.

[64] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Pierre-Marie Bruysset, "Observations," September 26, 1810.

to make proper use of it, but instead they bring themselves ruin because they abuse it.

They all print the same works for lack of being able, or willing, to come to terms with one another; they print them out of rivalry with each other and end up remaindering them. But the public does not even profit from the low prices because the editions are abridged, inaccurate, and poorly produced, which harms the art and the honor of French publishing in the eyes of Europe.^[65]

Publishers were driving each other under by undermining one another's markets. Unregulated production and over-production, rather than lack of production, lay behind the new crisis in the publishing world.

Bruysset gave several examples of works that had become unprofitable because of unregulated competition: the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle , produced simultaneously by the Bruysset brothers in Lyon, François-Pierre Deterville in Paris, and the Levrault brothers, also in Paris; the Dictionnaire historique , released at the same time in Paris by both the brothers François-Joseph and Louis-Gabriel Michaud and Louis Prudhomme; and the Dictionnaire, ou Cours complet d'agriculture , published by both Pierre Buisson and François-Pierre Deterville, again in Paris.^[66] This last text, which had been the victim of piracy as the private property of A.-J. Dugour in 1797–1803, now, having become part of the public domain in 1803, fell prey to the unchecked competition of Parisian publishers.^[67]

Publishers like Buisson and Deterville had to fight tooth and nail to emerge afloat. Thus, for example, Buisson wrote to one of his editors:

It is of the highest importance for the success of our enterprise with the Cours complet d'agriculture to bring out volume three on the 25th of this month, because our adversaries will release the three first volumes of their edition on the very same day . You can count on it. . . . You know that our adversaries will bring heaven and earth together against us.^[68]

The sad reality was that there were no winners in these wars to capture the market, even in cases where publishers started out in a spirit of

[65] Ibid., Report from César Briand, Paris publisher, April 2, 1810.

[66] Ibid., Pierre-Marie Bruysset, "Observations," September 29, 1810.

[67] The author of the Dictionnaire ou Cours complet d'agriculture, François Rozier, died in 1793, leaving his publisher Dugour until 1803 to exploit the text exclusively. See AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 7, "Consultation pour le citoyen A. J. Dugour, propriétaire du Cours d'agriculture par Rozier," 5.

[68] AN, ser. AA, carton 57, doc. 1526, Letter from Pierre Buisson, Paris publisher, to Dubois, an editor of the Cours d'agriculture, March 14, 1809 (emphasis in original).

cooperation. Such was the case with the beautiful Houel edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Condillac of the year VII (1798–1799).^[69] Six printers and publishers of Paris—Jean Gratoit, Théophile-Etienne Gide, Loret, Laurent-Mathieu Guillaume le jeune , Charles Houel, and Louis Prudhomme—formed a business association to produce Condillac's complete works. Upon dividing up the printed copies of the edition, they agreed by written contract to minimum wholesale and retail prices that none of them were to undersell. The association enjoyed the support of the government, which purchased 150 copies of the complete edition. Loret cut in yet another Paris publisher, Denis-Simon Maginel, and the two of them in turn passed on a significant proportion of their share to the Paris retail bookseller Joseph-Philogone Meurant. Everything went smoothly until Guillaume le jeune ran into financial trouble, which presumably, forced him to make a fast move. On 18 prairial, year VII (June 6, 1799), Maginel received the following note from Loret:

I just received this morning, my friend, a visit from Citizen Hue, book dealer in Rouen, who came to buy some Condillacs from me. He proposed a price that made it impossible for me to do business with him. It seems that Guillaume is selling this book through colporteurs at a vile price. I beg a favor of you. Within the next two days, lock up the door to the warehouse.^[70]

Maginel no doubt locked the warehouse door, but nonetheless, within the next five years Guillaume, Meurant, and Prudhomme were all in default.^[71] Guillaume, cut down first by literary pirates, proceeded to drag others under with his own unprofitable competition. Even more tragically, the Houel edition of Condillac's Language of Calculation , still celebrated as one of the greatest monuments of enlightened science and republican typography, ended up in the remainder bins of the revolutionary literary market.^[72]

[69] The complete history of this edition is documented in the correspondence and business records of the publisher Denis-Simon Maginel and the printer Loret, both of Paris; see AN, ser. AQ24, carton 6, Papiers privés, Maginel, libraire, doss. "C. Loret, imprimeur à Paris, an VII" (1798–1799).

[70] Ibid.

[71] AP, Fond Faillite, D11U3, cartons 23 and 32 (1803 and 1806).

[72] For more on this edition, see Dhombres, "Books," 177–202.

Beneath the financial crisis of 1799–1806 lay a deeper dilemma for the revolutionary publishing world. The law of 1793 had rendered book publishing commercially inviable. The limiting of private copyright claims to ten years after the author's death reduced the commercial value of a copyright to a single edition. Pirating was rampant because there was no effective mechanism to prevent it after the suppression of the royal Administration of the Book Trade. But most serious was the problem of competing editions of works in the public domain, because such editions made up the majority of book commerce. Although the revolutionary government had intended to stimulate commerce by abolishing all exclusive claims to texts whose authors had been dead for over ten years, the lack of a national administration and of a compulsory system for registering editions in print meant that competition could not be regulated, even by the publishing community itself. The fundamental dilemma of commercial publishing under the Republic went beyond the instability of credit institutions and markets; in the final analysis, commerce in the printed word had been rendered "too free" to be capable of fulfilling Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville's revolutionary dream of "spreading light in every direction"—at least through the medium of the printed book. Books require protection in order to exist. Faced with this insight, the Revolution's cultural elites were compelled to abandon their laissez-faire idealism of 1789 and to rethink how the ideal of a free and enlightened Republic could best be achieved.

The government inquiry into the book publishing community, which lasted from 1803 to 1810, brought forth a clamor for re-regulation. Some, like Théodore Demaison and Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe of Paris, Pierre-Marie-Sebastien Catineau-LaRoche of Versailles, Louis Jacob l'aine [l'aîné] of Orléans, and Pierre-Marie Bruysset of Lyon, recommended a return to the Code de la Librairie of 1723, as interpreted by the old Paris Book Guild: reviving a national Administration of the Book Trade to register and monitor copyrights, legally limiting the number of persons permitted to practice the trades of printing and publishing, reinstituting compulsory prepublication registration of all printed matter with the state, and insuring that texts be treated like any other form of property—inheritable and transmissible in perpetuity.^[73] Others, like Langlois, proposed a return only to the règlements of 1777: reestablishing the

[73] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Pierre-Marie Bruysset, "Observations," September 29, 1810; and Théodore Demaison, October 14, 1810.

book guilds and inspectors of the book trade to protect against piracy, and returning to a system of limited privileges on texts as a means of regulating competition in the public domain. He reasoned, "If the law of '93 gives all publishers the right to print all books that belong to the nation . . ., these books belong, above all, to him who represents the nation, and by consequence, to the emperor."^[74] Through the sale of privileges, Langlois suggested, the emperor could finance censors, inspectors, and book guilds.

César Briand was less quick to request a return to the Old Regime. Instead he suggested appropriation and adaptation of one of the most innovative institutions of eighteenth-century publishing, the system of permissions, introduced by Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes in the 1750s when he had served as director of the Administration of the Book Trade.^[75] By requiring publishers to register all editions with a government agency and to receive a permission to publish, Briand argued, this system could insure that no two identical editions of the same text circulated simultaneously or cut into each other's markets. It was a simple idea, and easy to administer through a national registry of works in print. Briand was supported in his proposal by the heir to the Panckoucke publishing empire, Henri Agasse. Indeed, it was no coincidence that Agasse chose the year 1809 to bring out the first edition of Malesherbes's Mémoires sur la librairie et sur la liberté de la presse .^[76] Perhaps Panckoucke had been right in 1790 when he had argued that literary property was fragile, requiring special surveillance and protection to be of value. In the first decade of the nineteenth century the major printing and publishing houses of Paris called almost unanimously for strengthened laws on literary property, the revival of a national administration for surveillance and protection of copyrights, and greater regulation of the commercial exploitation of texts in the public domain. The government was ready to listen.

Remaking the Administration of the Book Trade

The Napoleonic Direction of the Book Trade did not descend deus ex machina in 1810 upon an unwitting world of printers and publishers. Rather, it was born out of a series of negotiations between the government

[74] Ibid., Jacques-Denis Langlois, Paris printer-publisher, February 27, 1810.

[75] Ibid., Report from César Briand, April 2, 1810.

[76] Malesherbes, Mémoires sur la librairie .

and the various constituencies within the publishing and printing world.^[77] As in the early 1790s and 1795–1796, in 1800 the initiative to re-regulate and revive the book trade was accompanied by an equally vigorous effort to restrict the political periodical press. In January 1800, the consuls suppressed all but thirteen political journals in Paris and submitted these remaining journals to continuous surveillance and censorship.^[78] The administrative reorganization of the nation on February 17, 1800, and especially the installation of the system of prefects a month later, made centralized national surveillance of the press an administrative possibility.^[79] The periodical press, however, was not the only form of the printed word to fall under the purview of the prefects.

As early as November 1801, the minister of police, Joseph Fouché, was employing the prefect of police in Paris to confiscate books and pamphlets from printing shops, editors, and booksellers because of their moral, political, or religious content.^[80] These repressive measures were soon to be complemented by preventative ones. The Paris prefect of police thus reported:

By his letter of 20 messidor, year XI [July 9, 1803], the chief minister of justice has charged me to inform all printers and publishers that they must deposit with me two copies of everything that they propose to publish,

[77] This chapter was researched and written in 1983–1984, before I became aware of Bernard Vouillot's unpublished 1979 thesis for the Ecole des Chartres entitled "L'Imprimerie et la librairie à Paris sous le Consulat et l'Empire (1799–1814)," which treats some of the same archival material I consider here. I would like to thank him for his permission in 1989 to consult his thesis, from which I profited considerably in revising this portion of the manuscript, and especially for his references to printed pamphlets concerning the re-regulation of the trades between 1806 and 1810. Nonetheless, my own interpretation of the causes and significance of the revival of the national Administration of the Book Trade differs considerably from Vouillot's. While he sees censorship as the most critical motivation behind, and consequence of, re-regulation, I see the commercial viability of printing and publishing, especially of books, as the central concern in shaping the policies of the Napoleonic authorities, and as the key reason for the support for these measures within the printing and publishing world. See also Vouillot, "Révolution et l'Empire."

[78] André Cabanis, Presse sous le Consulat, 12–13, 319–320.

[79] Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 23–31, 208–209.

[80] For examples, see AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Orders from the minister of police to the prefect of police in Paris to confiscate the following items: Lettres de M. de Fronsac, fils du duc de Richelieu au chevalier de Dumas, 2 vols. in 12, chez Michelet (4 frimaire, an X [November 25, 1801]), because of obscenity; Charles de Tersannes, ou familles rayées de la liste des émigrés, Imprimerie Raquin (13 frimaire, an X [December 4, 1801]), because of its politically controversial content; Sur l'émigration and Religion de l'état, chez la fille Durand (14 frimaire, an XI [December 5, 1802]), because of politically and religiously controversial content.

eight days before they release it. He has charged me, as well, to have the works examined during this period and to send him a report containing my judgment, along with a copy of each work.^[81]

Thus, by the summer of 1803 an obligatory dépôt at the Prefecture of Police had been laid in place. Hundreds of reports from the prefect to the minister of justice concerning individual texts between 1803 and 1804 testify to the execution of these orders. Soon, though, the first consul himself wrote to the minister of justice clarifying that "his intention was not to impose police censorship on works pertaining to the arts and sciences," but only on politically sensitive materials.^[82] The minister of justice consequently instructed the prefect not to send him reports on, or copies of, every work deposited; literary and scientific works, he suggested, should only be inspected briefly and returned, "as soon as you are certain that they treat only the subjects indicated by their titles."^[83] This procedure was given official sanction several months later by a consular arrêt dated 4 vendémiaire, year XII (September 27, 1803), wherein the consuls announced that "in order to assure the freedom of the press, no publisher will be allowed to sell a work before having presented it to a review committee, which will determine whether it requires censorship."^[84] Unlike the dépôt at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the inspection at the Prefecture of Police was obligatory.

The declaration of the Empire and Fouché's return to the Ministry of Police in July 1804 resulted in a further expansion of the surveillance and censorship system. Fouché ordered the prefect to revive the obligatory dépôt of two copies of everything to be published in Paris.^[85] Further, he organized a "Division of the Freedom of the Press" within his ministry. To this division he attached an office of consultants—essentially, a corps of censors.^[86] From the summer of 1804 through 1810,

[81] Ibid., Report from Dubois, prefect of police in Paris, to Fouché, minister of police, 21 vendémiaire, an XIII (October 13, 1804).

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid.

[84] Cited in Peignot, Essai historique sur la liberté d'écrire, 157.

[85] AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Report from Dubois, prefect of police in Paris, to Fouché, minister of police, 21 vendémiaire, an XIII (October 13, 1804); the minister's response is jotted in the margin. Fouché was restored to his post on July 16, 1804.

[86] Ibid. Reports from the Division de la Liberté de la Presse from 18 thermidor, an XII (August 6, 1804) and 18 ventôse, an XIII (March 9, 1805).

then, it was the duty of the prefect of police to send a report and copy of every work published in Paris to the minister of police.^[87]

Regardless whether Napoleon initially intended to limit surveillance and censorship to explicitly political printed matter, nothing, in fact, escaped Fouché and his Division of the Freedom of the Press. The division, of course, continued to work at regulating the periodical press.^[88] They did not, however, restrict their surveillance to political matters alone, as their concern about the harsh reception of Mme de Staël's novel Corinne in the Parisian press suggests.^[89] Nor did they limit their censorship to explicitly political texts: Mme Mérard St. Just's novel Six Mois d'exil ou les orphelins par la Révolution , for example, was prohibited.^[90] Travel literature, as well, received close scrutiny,^[91] and the cross-references of the Dictionnaire universel de la langue française were combed for possible political innuendos.^[92] The division also evaluated works such as Boieldieu's De l'Influence de la chaire, du théâtre et du barreau dans la société civile to determine whether they were worthy of government patronage.^[93] Writings on military subjects were, of course, carefully studied.^[94] Even poetry required close attention and interpretation.^[95]

The case of the Portefeuille volé reveals how sophisticated the functions of the new division had become by 1805. The Portefeuille volé was a collection of light libertine poems, which, according to the censor, were, if a little irreverent, by no means obscene. The publisher, Debray, however, had neglected to deposit a copy at the Prefecture of Police before putting it on the market. As punishment, the prefect ordered the work to be confiscated. The authorities were clearly intent on enforcing conformity to the law. Furthermore, having closely inspected the Portefeuille

[87] Hundreds of these reports remain in AN, ser. F18, carton 39.

[88] See, for example, ibid., Request of the widow Nyon for permission to launch a new journal, 9 fructidor, an XIII (August 27, 1805).

[89] Ibid., Mme de Staël, December 22, 1808.

[90] AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Félicité Mérard St. Just (née Ormoy), 17 frimaire, an XIII (December 8, 1804).

[91] AN, ser. F18, carton 565, Jean-Georges Treuttel and Jean-Godefroy Wurtz, publishers, Paris, September 12, 1806.

[92] AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Dictionnaire universel, [1807].

[93] Ibid., Marie-Jacques-Amand Boieldieu, lawyer, De l'influence de la chaire, du théâtre et du barreau dans la société civile, 18 ventôse, an XIII (March 9, 1805).

[94] Ibid., Denis-Simon Maginel, Paris publisher, Histoire de la campagne de 1800 en Allemagne et en Italie, 18 thermidor, an XII (August 6, 1804), and the Histoire de la guerre entre la France et l'Espagne (October 28, 1808).

[95] Ibid., Portefeuille volé (a collection of poems), 17 floréal, an XIII (May 7, 1805).

volé , the prefect decided that the work, while not dangerous enough to be permanently banned, "should simply be tolerated , it should not be permitted to be advertised, either through posters or in the press. Furthermore, in returning the work to the publisher, tell him that he may not put his name on the title page, so that the publication of this work in no manner appears to have been authorized by the government."^[96] Thus, by 1805 the imperial police had revived not only inspections of booksellers and printing shops, but also the system of permissions tacites and tolérances , by which an officially sanctioned literary civilization could be distinguished from independent and unauthorized cultural initiatives.

The expansion of government censorship and surveillance of the printed word, however, posed constant problems for the administration. Because the government formally recognized the principle of freedom of the press, surveillance and censorship of the book trade were difficult to justify, let alone enforce.^[97] The magnitude of the task overwhelmed the resources of the prefect of police, who was facing resistance from publishers and authors to the obligatory deposit: "The majority of them submit only with repugnance to these measures. I imposed this harness on them as gently as possible, but in the end they want to be rid of it, and confidentially they admit that few of them are complying. If it is Your Excellency's [Fouché's] intention to continue this policy, how are the publishers and authors to be made to comply with it?"^[98] Overextension of the administrative and police resources led to unclear jurisdiction. Enforcement was arbitrary and corrupt. These realities did little to endear the administrative regime to publishers or authors. When Mme Elisabeth Guénard, baronne de Méré, saw her fourth novel confiscated from the publisher even though she had conformed exactly to the dispositions of the law, she appealed directly to the emperor himself for a reform of the laws pertaining to the book trade.^[99]

This kind of influential protest, together with administrative complaints, awakened an interest in investigating and reforming the system. On the basis of what laws did the police require the registration, cen-

[96] Ibid.

[97] See the report from the prefect of Paris to the minister of police to this effect on August 2, 1804, in Aulard (ed.), Paris sons le Consulat 2:445.

[98] AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Report from the prefect of police, Dubois, to the minister of police, January 30, 1806.

[99] For her allegations of corruption, see ibid., Mme Guénard, baronne de Méré (August 1807).

sorship, or confiscation of books? In 1806, the Division of the Freedom of the Press suggested to the minister of police that legal clarification of its activities might make their work easier:

When Your Excellency desired that all printed matter be known to him at its time of publication, he conceived of an idea that is as simple as it is just and necessary, and that infringes no more upon the freedom of the press than the census of citizens infringes upon individual liberty. . . . But in the absence of a law on the freedom of the press . . . you must anticipate that there will be difficult types who will refuse to comply.^[100]

In fact, there had been no formal declaration or definition of the freedom of the press since the constitution of the year III (1795).^[101]

Lack of both formal legitimation of its activities and support from the constituency it policed prevented the division from performing its duties effectively. Comparison of the number of works deposited at the dépôt légal at the Bibliothèque Nationale between 1801 and 1809 and of those deposited at the Prefecture of Police in Paris reveals how limited the scope of the prefect's surveillance was. Of the average sixteen hundred works per year deposited for copyright protection, remaining archival sources suggest that only about sixty to one hundred were inspected.^[102] From the government's point of view, the police surveillance system was as ineffective as it was legally embarrassing. The remedy to this situation lay in identifying the points of convergence between the political interests of the government and the commercial interests of the publishing and printing world.

The Regulation of 1810

As we have seen, in 1804 the ministers of justice and the police were already making formal inquiries among printers and publishers, exploring the possibilities for reorganizing the world of the printed word. The inadequacies of the system of police surveillance exposed in 1806 and 1807 led to action. By 1808 the imperial Council of State began holding

[100] Ibid., Report to the minister of police from Pierre-Edouard Lemontey, Joseph-Alphonse Esménard, Defauchery, and Charles-Joseph Lacretelle le jeune: the members of the "bureau de consultation" of the Division de la Liberté de la Presse (June 26, 1806).

[101] Peignot, Essai historique sur la liberté d'écrire, 155–158.

[102] For the number of works deposited per year at the dépôt légal between 1801 and 1809, see Bellos, "Conjoncture de la production," 554. For extant records of books submitted for inspection at the Paris Prefecture of Police, see AN, ser. F18, carton 40.

regular meetings with the emperor to discuss the situation and present proposals for a forthcoming règlement .^[103] In the same year, a draft of an imperial decree proposing that "a new Administration of the Book Trade be immediately organized" was circulated informally within the publishing world.^[104] The Lyon publisher Jean-Marie Bruysset, recalling that he had "always enjoyed the favor of M. Malesherbes and M. Vidaud de La Tour, former directors-general of the Book Trade," made a bid for the directorship.^[105] The publisher Henri Agasse used the power of his presses to make Malesherbes's views on the regulation of the book trade widely available to the public. Numerous other Parisian publishers and printers, notably Jules-Gabriel Clousier fils aîné , Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe, B. Vincard, Louis Ravier, Joseph Fiévée, and François-Jean Baudouin, also circulated their views in print.^[106] They were joined by colleagues from the provinces, including Bruysset, Louis Jacob l'aîné in Orléans, and Pierre-Marie-Sebastien Catineau-LaRoche in Versailles.^[107] In 1810, the ministers of police and the interior received over twenty solicited and unsolicitied reports and proposals from printers and publishers, disclosing the views not only of Paris notables like François-Jean Baudouin, César Briand, Jacques-Denis Langlois, François Chaignieau, and François Buisson, but also of their brethren in Lyon, Orléans, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, and even Turin.^[108] Three concerns emerge

[103] Jean-Guillaume Locre de Roissy, ed., Discussions sur la liberté de la presse, la censure, la propriété littéraire, l'imprimerie et la librairie qui ont eu lieu dans le conseil d'état pendant les années 1808, 1809, 1810 et 1811 (Paris: Garnery & Nicolle, 1819).

[104] AN, ser. F18, carton 565, Letter from Barthélemy, homme de lettres in Lyon, to M. Cretel, minister of the interior, proposing that the Lyon publisher Bruysset be made director of the new Administration of the Book Trade, June 10, 1808. See also AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Proposal from a former royal censor, Raupt-Bapstein, for the formation of a new college of censors, September 15, 1808.

[105] AN, ser. F18, carton 565, Letter from Barthélemy.

[106] Jules-Gabriel Clousier fils aîné, Notes sur l'imprimerie, la librairie et la fonderie des caractères d'impression (Paris, [1801]); Stoupe, Mémoire sur le rétablissement de la communauté des imprimeurs de Paris; Ravier, Répertoire de librairie; B. Vincard, Projet sur l'organisation de la librairie, discuté par la majeure partie des imprimeurs et des libraires, et par les hommes de lettres, censeurs, etc. . . . soumis aux membres du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, [1809]); Joseph Fiévée, Observations et projet de décret sur l'imprimerie et la librairie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1809); and François-Jean Baudouin, Esquisse d'un projet de règlement pour l'imprimerie, la librairie et autres professions relatives, rédigée d'après les lois anciennes et nouvelles (Paris, 1810).

[107] Jean-Marie Bruysset, Caractères de la propriété littéraire (Lyon, [1808]); Jacob, ldées générales sur les causes de l'anéantissement de l'imprimerie; and Catineau-LaRoche, Réflexions sur la librairie .

[108] See AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Reports from Raymond, a printing shop foreman in Paris, from April 26, May 8, 15, and 17, June 5, 12, and 14, July 14, September 29, October 14, December 2 and 10, 1810, and January 5, 1811; AN, ser. F18, carton 39, Letter from Jean-Antoine-Guillaume Bailleul, Paris printer-publisher, January 2, 1810; AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Letters from François Chaignieau, printer in Paris, January 4, 1810; Joseph-Gaspar Gillé, printer in Paris, January 11, 1810; Pierre Plassan, printer-publisher in Paris, January 28, 1810; François Buisson, publisher in Paris, February 24, 1810; Jacques-Denis Langlois, printer-publisher in Paris, February 27, 1810; François-Jean Baudouin, Paris printer, March 19, 1810; Pierre-César Briand, publisher in Paris, April 2, 1810; Anonymous report on printers in the departments, received April 16, 1810; Letters from Antoine Chambon, printer in Paris, April 27, 1810; Joudou, printer for the prefecture of the department of the Aube, Carcassonne, May 7 and 28, 1810; Pierre Michel Lamy, publisher in Paris, May 8 and 24, 1810; Louis Jacob, printer in Orléans, May 22 and June 14 and 22, 1810; Castillon, printer in Bordeaux, June 28, 1810; Toscanelli, publisher in Turin, July 18, 1810; Théodore Demaison, Paris printer, July 27 and October 14, 1810; Pierre-Marie Bruysset, publisher in Lyon, September 26 and October, 1810.

repeatedly from these reports: (1) the need for greater surveillance and protection against pirate editions, (2) the need to regulate the commercial exploitation of works in the public domain, and (3) the need to restrict the number of printers in order to insure adequate employment.^[109]

The declaration of the rights of genius of July 19, 1793, comprised a single title and a mere seven articles;^[110] it was a legislative act, emanating from the committees of the National Convention. In 1810, a new imperial Administration of the Book Trade was laid into place by executive order. On February 5, the emperor's Council of State promulgated a "regulation of the printing and book trades" comprising eight separate titles and forty-eight articles.^[111] The genius of the regulation of 1810 lay in its synthesis of the political needs of the imperial state and the commercial interests of the major publishers and printers into one coherent administrative vision. Title one of the regulation established a "General Direction," with a director and six auditors, under the minister of the

[109] For testimony on the need to limit printers, see AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Reports from Jacques-Denis Langlois, printer-publisher in Paris; François Baudouin, printer in Paris, and Théodore Demaison, printer in Paris; Anonymous report on departmental printers of April 16, 1810; Reports of Joudou, printer in Carcassonne; Pierre-Michel Lamy, printer in Paris; Louis Jacob, printer in Orléans; Toscanelli, publisher in Turin; and Jean-Marie Bruysset, publisher in Lyon.

[110] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, "Décret de la Convention nationale du 19 juillet 1793, l'an 2 de la République Française, relatif au droit c \a propriété des auteurs."

[111] Ibid., "Bulletin des Lois, no. 264: Décret impérial contenant le règlement sur l'imprimerie et la librairie . . ., 5 février 1810." The following summary quotes from this seven-page document.

interior. Title two limited the number of printers in Paris to sixty (extended shortly thereafter to eighty), each required to possess a minimum of four presses. Suppressed printers were to receive an indemnity. When a printer died, preference would be given to his or her family in selecting a successor. Title three outlawed the printing or publication of anythiug that questioned the duty of "subjects toward the sovereign, or the interest of the state." Prepublication censorship was reimposed: publication of any work, whether new or a re-release in either the private or the public domain, required permission of the General Direction. Title four required all publishers and booksellers to be licensed independently of printers. All new publishers and booksellers, furthermore, had to provide proof of their "clean living and good morals, as well as their attachment to the fatherland and the sovereign." Title five concerned the importation of foreign books: it required all imported books to be registered with the prefects in the border departments and approved by the General Direction and a tariff to be imposed on all imported French and Latin books. Title six revised the laws on literary property, extending private claims on a text to the life of the author, his widow, and their children for twenty years after their deaths. Title seven authorized the formation of a corps of inspectors of the book trade and officers of the police and customs to enforce the regulation. Finally, title eight established a dépôt at the Prefecture of Police, in Paris and every other department, with publishers required to deposit five copies of any work they intended to publish. It was then the prefect's responsibility to send one copy to the dépôt at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The structure, services, personnel, and finances of the new imperial General Direction of the Printing and Book Trades in 1810 can be diagrammed (figures 8–9, tables 4–5). As these figures make clear, the priorities of the new administration, in terms of the commitment of both money and personnel, lay in surveillance rather than censorship. Whereas censorship was episodic and half-hearted throughout the Napoleonic period,^[112] implementation of the decrees of February 5, 1810, mobilized a small army of Napoleonic inspectors and prefects to produce a massive census of every single printer, publisher, bookseller, manufacturer of printing types, colporteur, and keeper of a cabinet de lecture in the entire empire. Thus, an announcement in the newly

[112] See Victor Coffin, "Censorship under Napoleon I," American Historical Review 22 (1916–1917): 291.

Figure 8.
The Imperial Administration of the Book Trade: Administrative Organization, 1810
Source: AN, ser. F4, cartons 2572–2573, doss. 1–2; and BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1362, feuilles 63–64.

founded Journal de la librairie informed the publishers and book dealers of Paris on July 2, 1811, that they were to report in person immediately to the secretariat of the Direction of the Book Trade to declare their intention to continue their businesses.^[113] The fruits of these censuses are still, in large part, extant in the Archives Nationales.^[114] According to the

[113] See Journal de la librairie 1, no. 31 (July 2, 1811): 256.

[114] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, contains the surveys of printers, publishers, and booksellers in every department and city in France, and some material for the "reunited departments." It also contains specific surveys for Paris. Additional material for Paris may be found in AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 2, doss. xxv, "Préfecture de Police, Paris: Etat des imprimeurs qui se sont conformés aux dispositions de l'article XI du décret impérial du 5 février 1810 en présentant à la Préfecture de Police un livret pour être côté et paragraphé," April 4, 1810. For the organization of the survey procedure, see AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Report from Delaubépie, inspector in Paris, March 26, 1810; and AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 2, doss. xxxiv, Request for surveys by the Direction, December 6, 1810.

Figure 9.
The Six Arrondissements of the Paris Inspectors of the Book Trade, 1810–1811.
Source: AN, ser. F4, cartons 2572–2573, doss. 1–2; and BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1362, feuilles 63–64.

results for Paris, in 1810 there were 157 printers and 588 publishers and booksellers in the capital prior to implementation of the new decrees; thereafter, the number of printers in Paris was halved and every bookseller and publisher in Paris either licensed or suppressed.

Paris was assigned special inspectors of the book and printing trades. The city was divided into six arrondissements of inspection, with one man assigned to each.^[115] The inspectors were ordered to conduct vigilant

[115] AN, ser. F4, carton 2572, doss. 1, "Etat nominatif des inspecteurs de la librairie à Paris . . ., 1810." For the creation of their arrondissements, see BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1362, feuilles 63–64, "Lettres et ordres de service de [FrançoisRené-Jean] général baron de Pommereul, directeur général de la librairie et imprimerie, adressés à Gaudefroy, inspecteur de la librairie à Paris, 1810–1814."

surveillance, "not only of the printing, publishing, and bookselling trades, but also of all the professions that service them, such as binders, folders, type founders, press manufacturers, engravers and print dealers, colporteurs, reading rooms, etc.," and every inspector was to keep an exact log of every visit he made and to submit a written report every Monday morning to the director general.^[116]

The General Direction of the Book Trade intended to monitor not only every printer, publisher, and bookseller in the entire empire, but also every piece of printed matter. All printed goods in general commerce at the moment of the regulation had to be registered and stamped.^[117] Every new publication had to be submitted for a récipissé at the Prefecture of Police—a certificate that served as a legal proof of registration and, in effect, a permission to sell the work.^[118] Every new edition or reedition, and even new press runs, had to be declared and permissions granted. The Direction of the Book Trade also established a national Journal de l'imprimerie et de la librairie to announce all legal works "in print,"^[119] with new works to be announced separately from new editions of works in the public domain.^[120] The new regime had begun. And it was a new regime based on surveillance rather than censorship as the chief preventative mechanism of cultural control.

The regulation of 1810 reshaped the social as well as the civic dimensions of print culture. On April 27, 1810, the newly formed General Direction received an appeal from the Paris printer Antoine Chambon. Chambon described himself in the following terms:

[116] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1362, feuilles 31–32, "Lettres et ordres de service du général baron de Pommereul."

[117] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, "Bulletin des lois, no. 264: Décret impérial contenant le règlement sur l'imprimerie et la librairie . . ., 5 février 1810," 2.

[118] AN, ser. F18, carton 40, Instructions from the Director General to "MM. les imprimeurs de Paris," [1810]. He writes, "Some printers are referring to this récipissé as a permission . This is not an abuse of words."

[119] AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 2, "Copie de la circulaire de monsieur le directeur général, concernant le journal du Sr. Pillet, aux inspecteurs de la librairie aux départements," November 27, 1810.

[120] AN, ser. F18, carton 40, Letter from FrançoisRené-Jean, baron de Pommereul, director general, to the minister of police, January 19, 1811.

I have been a printer since the age of twelve; I was a printing-shop worker until 1780 when I became a book dealer, with nothing but the fruits of my savings. I continued this trade until 1790 when, following the example of so many others, I took advantage of the declaration of unlimited freedom of the press across France to return to my original profession. . . . I used every resource I had to establish a little printing shop composed of two presses. . . . It has been my source of livelihood to this day.

Chambon was now to be driven from his chosen profession by the new requirement that all printers have at least four presses. And he had a theory as to why these criteria had been imposed:

For a while now a certain number of agitators, among whom there are a few who enjoy a reputation for rectitude, but many of whom are crippled by debts or dishonored by fraudulent bankruptcies . . ., have been knocking at every door soliciting a regulation of this trade. There is no doubt that the decrees of February 5 are the result of the shady dealings and manipulations of this group. . . . Perhaps these greedy men hope to receive jobs in this new administration . . . in order to pay off their debts and restore their honor.^[121]

Chambon was an acute observer of his community and its fate. The regulation of 1810 was designed by and for the older and larger printing establishments of Paris and the departments. In exchange for a restricted monopoly, they agreed to surveillance. It was the Baudouins and the Agasses, not the Chambons, who would benefit from the Napoleonic system, as they had from the Old Regime. Indeed, at least one-third of the eighty Paris printers retained in 1810 were from families of the old Paris Book Guild.^[122] Lineage counted for something. Yet as the suppression of the Paris printer Demoraine, "printer from father to son for over one hundred years," makes clear, the new regulation did not represent a simple victory of the "old" printers over the "new," but of the bigger and wealthier printers over the smaller ones.^[123]

The regulation was intended to have similar consequences for the publishing world. While taking every step to eradicate all but official journals and ephemeral literature, the General Direction did everything

[121] AN, ser. F18, carton 11a, plaque 1, Report from Antoine Chambon, printer in Paris, April 27, 1810.

[122] See chapter 5.

[123] AN, ser. BB16, carton 772, doss. 4543, Letter from Jean-Baptiste Demoraine, printer in Paris, to the minister of justice, February 8, 1811, protesting his suppression after the implementation of the regulation of 1810, which limited the number of printers in the city to eighty.

possible to restore and improve the commercial viability of book publishing. The regulation significantly extended the duration of private claims on texts, from ten years after the author's death to twenty years after the death of the author and his wife. The commercial value of a writer's work was thus significantly enhanced. The value of publishers' portfolios would increase as a consequence, while the rate at which they would need to replenish their portfolios would diminish. The incessant quest for nouveautés would therefore become less of a commercial imperative. And in exchange for political cooperation with the regime, publishers enjoyed police surveillance and protection of their property from literary piracy.

Even more importantly, the General Direction took significant steps to insure that publishers could fruitfully exploit the public domain, first by requiring registration of all editions of works and, second, by reserving the power to grant, deny, or delay permissions to publish; this made it possible to regulate the number and kinds of editions of a given text on the market at a given moment. With the publication of the Journal de l'imprimerie et de la librairie , publishers themselves for the first time gained an effective means to operate strategically in the public domain. In exchange for the services the government provided in regulating the public domain, publishers and printers paid a per-page fee to the General Direction for all editions they produced of those common works.^[124] This tax single-handedly financed the new administration. The era of the cutthroat free market in common ideas was over.

Assured of sales, works already established as classics now appeared more commercially attractive to publishers than new books. The regulation of 1810 thus marked a victory for the big printers and publishers of lengthy works over the little printers and dealers in ephemeral and periodical literature. The first, but short-lived, head of the Direction of the Book Trade, the comte de Portalis, announced in an early official bulletin: "By recovering a more tranquil course . . . and leaving behind the rebellious, aggressive, and angry tone that it acquired in the past century, the book trade will change its complexion. It will become a commerce in books for libraries and instruction, and cease to be one of

[124] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, "Bulletin des Lois, no. 366," decree of April 29, 1811. See also BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1352, feuille 44, Letter from Pommereul, general director of the book trade, to the Paris inspector Gaudefroy.

seditious pamphlets."^[125] The civilization of "the book" re-eclipsed the revolution of "the press(es)."

Significantly, the next director of the book trade, FrançoisRené-Jean, baron de Pommereul, referred to the tax on publishers as a "dowry" paid to the administration in exchange for the right to reproduce texts in the common domain.^[126] And indeed, the new cultural regime instituted through the decrees of 1810 was a marriage of state regulation and the commercial market, a reshaping through the social metaphor of a family rather than the political metaphor of a republic of citizens. The author, consecrated in 1793 as a civic hero of public enlightenment, now saw the legal lineage of his or her textual property extended not according to political and civic ideals, but along biological and familial lines: a remaining spouse and children replaced the nation as the author's immediate heirs, and authorial legal identity began its course toward reprivatization. Analogically, the relationship between the state and the commerical publishing world was reconfigured within the family metaphor as well: the father/publisher was to offer a "dowry" in the form of a per-page, per-edition tax to the Direction of the Book Trade to insure administrative protection of his daughter/commodity and the reproduction of a national cultural lineage through the printed book. If under the Republic state patronage had advanced philos as a cultural ideal in an effort to temper the eros of the commercial market, now the paterfamilias would serve as the organizing principle for the public transmission of ideas.

[125] Comte de Portalis, Bulletin, no. 268, Announcement from the director of the Administration of the Book Trade (1810); cited in Charles Thuriot, "Documents relatifs à l'exécution du décret du 5 février 1810," Revue critique d'histoire et de littérature, nos. 43–49 (1871): 340.

[126] Ibid.