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.