Conclusion

The story of Paris publishing in the French Revolution suggests that literary historians and critics may need a more complex view of the relationship between modern revolutions and cultural change, one that accounts for the political and legal as well as the socio-economic forces that work to reshape the cultural world. There can be little doubt, as socio-cultural historians descending from both the Annales and the Frankfurt schools suggest, that the eighteenth-century expansion of commerce in the printed word placed unprecedented pressures on public authorities of the revolutionary period to create a cultural regime grounded in market relations rather than state-controlled corporate monopolies. However, the cultural policies of revolutionary legislators mediated the expression of socio-economic forces through laws, institutions, and political ideals, which reflected their changing conceptions of the public good and which emerged as a result of political negotiation with the private interests of authors and publishers. Indeed, the revolutionaries' economic and cultural values were not always in harmony.

As Jürgen Habermas and Robert Darnton, among others, have stressed, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought accompanied the developing commercialization of the printed word in the eighteenth century.^[1] In France, the complicity between black-market booty capitalism working beneath the corporate monopolies of the absolutist state, and the underground cultural movement to "spread enlightenment"

[1] See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989 [orig. German ed. 1962]); and Darnton, Business of Enlightenment .

beyond the reach of state censorship was particularly intense. It is not surprising, therefore, that when French cultural revolutionaries seized power in 1789, they turned to the deregulated free market as the ideal mechanism for disseminating Enlightenment thought. Seemingly, the people yearned for underground Enlightenment literature, and the market yearned to deliver it. But once capitalist market relations, as well as the cultural movements they had helped to transmit, were formally legitimated through economic and cultural legislation, the complicity between market capitalism and the cultural program of the Enlightenment collapsed. The reading public demanded amusement rather than education, tales of private passions rather than reasoned discourses on public virtue. And in response to these demands, the liberated commercial presses of the revolutionary period poured forth novels rather than philosophy. Far from representing the commercial triumph of Enlightenment culture, the Revolution represented its undoing. The central dilemma in reshaping the publishing world during the French Revolution became the problem of reconciling the economic ideal of a free market in the world of ideas with the cultural ideal of propagating enlightened science and philosophy.

The process of resolving this dilemma, through negotiation and trial and error, caused the revolutionaries to rethink old ideals. Between 1789 and 1793, the entire infrastructure of licit publishing under the former regime was swept away—the royal Administration of the Book Trade, its censors and inspectors, the system of literary privileges, the academies, and the printers' and booksellers' guilds. As this officially sanctioned literary civilization crumbled, the cultural underground of the Old Regime emerged into the light of day. Enlightenment publishing enterprises moved from the borders of France to its capital. The periodical press boomed. Hundreds of new printing shops and booksellers appeared in the capital "to spread light in every direction."

The revolt against absolutist literary civilization brought anarchy in its wake. Until 1791 there were no national laws limiting what could be said or depicted in print. Only in 1793 were particular claims to authorship or ownership of a published text legally defined. The unlimited freedom to publish remained largely unchecked, except by the sporadic efforts of municipal authorities and the contingent decisions meted out in lower civil and criminal courts. The legal status of the printed word in the period from the abolition of privilege in August 1789 to the laws on sedition and libel of 1791 and literary property of 1793 was never fully resolved.

Following the "October days" of 1789, the National Assembly took its first steps toward founding a new legal regime to regulate the printed word. The Sieyès proposal of 1790 sought at once to define the legal limits of freedom of expression in periodical and ephemeral literature and to protect the claims of authors and publishers on texts as forms of property. In so doing, the proposal politicized the tension in Enlightenment epistemology between the individual/subjective and universal/objective nature of ideas. The conflict over authors' versus public rights gave expression to two competing visions of how the Enlightenment should be translated into a way of life. Horrified by the explosion of seemingly endless quantities of inflammatory pamphlets and newspapers that fueled revolutionary radicalization, the cultural elites within the government sought to restrain public expression by holding authors legally accountable for what they said in print and by encouraging the publication of ideas in less inflammatory forms, such as books rather than newspapers and pamphlets. Sieyès, Condorcet, and Chénier were themselves some of the greatest practitioners of the arts of journalism and pamphleteering, but as they endeavored to consolidate the new regime they came increasingly to promote a conception of Enlightenment culture as, in essence, a culture of "the book"—that is, of lengthy and dispassionate reflection on the world, produced by professional authors who would own and thus be legally accountable for their ideas. This vision of a "republic of letters," forged in reaction to the explosion of ephemera in 1789, stood in sharp contrast to Condorcet's earlier idealistic conception of a cultural world in which public exchange of ideas would be an authorless and classless form of social action, most fully embodied in the model of the periodical press.

Nonetheless, when the National Convention reshaped the political and legal identity of the author, from a privileged creature of the absolutist state into a civic hero of public enlightenment, it did not merely recreate the author as an absolute bourgeois property owner. The declaration of the rights of genius of July 1793 represented an effort to synthesize these two competing visions of Enlightenment cultural practice. Rather than resolving the tension between arguments for the natural rights of authors and instrumentalist notions of the rights of the public, the law gave expression to this tension in the idea of "limited property rights." Individual genius was to be protected and remunerated during an author's lifetime; at death, however, his or her work became part of the public domain, the property of all. Enlightened

culture was thus to be transmitted through authored books, but books freely accessible to everyone. With this declaration, in short, the entire literary inheritance of Old Regime France was released from private hands into the public domain.

By the middle of the year II (1794), however, the Commission on Public Instruction of the National Convention and its successors under the Directory and the Consulate became painfully aware that their policies had not resulted in the enlightened literary culture they had envisioned. Liberated from the constraints of Old Regime civilization, citizens did not naturally incline toward reason, science, and utilitarian good. The commercial presses poured forth fictions rather than truths. The cultural policy-makers of the convention thus arrived at the sobering insight that the presses, if left free to respond to the demands of the commercial market, could become agents of passion rather than reason, leisure rather than utility, and conservatism rather than change.

Furthermore, commercial book publishing as a whole was foundering. Ironically, with the severe limitations on private claims upon texts and the abolition of any centralized administration of the book trade, texts that had entered the public domain were rendered commercially inviable. The lack of preventative measures against pirate editions and the exclusive reliance on municipal authorities and civil courts proved wholly inadequate in the face of cutthroat competition over limited literary markets. The duration of exclusive claims on texts was so short that the value of many manuscripts diminished sharply, allowing only one or possibly two editions. For multivolume works, ten years was totally insufficient for the production and distribution of even a single edition. Finally, the works to which the convention had been most concerned to insure public access, that is, the classics of French literary civilization in the public domain, were rendered commercially worthless. Without an exclusive commercial claim, at least on an edition, publishers facing the prospect of being undercut by a second or even third competitive edition of the same work were driven away from the classics into nouveautés and ephemera. Texts in the public domain had become "too free" to be spread through the mechanism of the commercial market.

The nation's governments responded to these dilemmas of republican publishing with three successive strategies. The year II witnessed the beginnings of an intensive effort, initiated by the Committee on Public Safety, to centralize the production of printed matter so as to insure dissemination of what they deemed to be enlightened republican cul-

ture. Thus the government assembled the Imprimerie de la République, a single printing shop of unprecedented dimensions and productive power. This effort to establish state hegemony over the means of producing printed matter was met with vociferous but ultimately ineffectual opposition from Parisian and provincial printers alike.

The Commission on Public Instruction sponsored a second phase of intervention in the free market in ideas with its policy of "encouragements and rewards." Through massive infusions of capital, it sought at once to bail out French publishing, to subsidize the publication and diffusion of "useful works," and, through saturation, to transform, it hoped, the reading tastes and habits of the nation. Whatever the immediate impact of these two strategies, they proved financially untenable and ultimately failed to resolve the underlying crisis in commercial book publishing.

A third effort to reshape cultural life to match the ideals of the new regime in power occurred at the opening of the nineteenth century. A massive financial crisis in the book trade coincided with a systematic effort by the Napoleonic administration to control the periodical press and trade in political ephemera. As in 1790, the initiative to restrict the press was accompanied by measures to revive book publishing. Political consolidation brought cultural consolidation in its wake. The reforms of the book publishing world during the Napoleonic period were of deeper and more lasting consequence, however, than the limited and brief revival of prepublication censorship. Indeed, the regulation of 1810 did not constitute a restoration of the old cultural regime: control of the world of print was to be principally through surveillance, not censorship.

The regulation of 1810 did not lay a new basis for the commercial exploitation of texts, though it did extend the property claims of the author to his or her immediate family. This revision of the laws on literary property recast the legal notion of authorship in biological rather than political terms: rhetorically, the author was transformed from the civic hero of public enlightenment into the private figure of the chef de famille . But the most unprecedented aspect of the 1810 regulation was the creation of institutional and administrative conditions necessary for the commercial exploitation of texts in the public domain, by regulating editions of common texts. This legal differentiation encouraged re-editions, rather than first editions—that is, cultural reproduction and consolidation, not innovation.

If the law of 1793 was a "declaration of the rights of genius," the regulation of 1810 marked the institutional consecration of the power of publishers. The idea of private claims on particular editions of public

texts allowed the ideal of democratic access to a common cultural inheritance to be reconciled with capitalistic exploitation of that cultural commons. The year 1810 opened the doors to the world of publishers' series like Pléiade and Livre de poche , with their respective editions of Voltaire, Rousseau, or Diderot. The cultural capital of modern publishing in the public domain would inhere in the paratext rather than in the text itself—that is, in the particularities of the edition (its notes, format, paper, preface, and so on). These distinctions now became the crucial elements in the commercial divisions of the literary market.^[2] The texts themselves, at least in spirit, were to remain free for all.

The year 1810 also marked the victory of the ideal of enlightened civilization as a civilization of "the book," a civilization existing above the course of events, authored and owned by professional intellectuals. It was here, at these ethereal heights, among these chosen individuals, that progress in human understanding was meant to take its course. Every effort was made to eradicate the cultural populism of the republican period. The indigenous media of the masses, from almanacs and the periodical press to popular song sheets, were vigilantly censored and controlled and would remain so throughout the nineteenth century. In the first year of the Restoration, the Crown released all works over the length of twenty printer's sheets from the tutelage of prepublication censorship.^[3] The implications of this oligarchic cultural reaction, this politics of literary genres, did not go unnoticed, or unchallenged, by Benjamin Constant:

All enlightened men seemed to be convinced that complete freedom and exemption from any form of censorship should be granted to longer works. Because writing them requires time, purchasing them requires affluence, and reading them requires attention, they are not able to produce the reaction in the populace that one fears of works of greater rapidity and violence. But pamphlets, and handbills, and especially newspapers, are produced quickly, you can buy them for little, and because their effect is immediate, they are believed to be more dangerous.^[4]

By creating a two-tiered cultural regime that left elite literary culture uncensored while popular literary forms were still rigorously policed,

[2] For further discussion of the centrality of "paratextuality" to postrevolutionary literary culture, see Genette, Seuils .

[3] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, "Loi relative à la liberté de la presse sanctionnée et publiée le 21 octobre 1814," title 1, art. 1.

[4] Benjamin Constant, De la liberté des brochures, des pamphlets et des journaux (Paris, 1814), 1.

the Restoration monarchy remade the "republic of letters" yet again, this time as a république censitaire : a cultural oligarchy.

Of course, the victory of "the book" was not a total one. Even among the carefully selected eighty printers of Paris there were individuals, such as Jean-Gabriel Dentu, who resisted the Napoleonic reshaping of revolutionary literary culture. Like Antoine Chambon, Dentu had been a printing-shop worker who took advantage of the declaration of press freedom in 1789 to open his own shop (plate 8). Unlike Chambon, however, Dentu was spectacularly successful. As the survey inspector of 1811 described Dentu, "He has built a first-class printing shop and publishing house, and has just opened a superb boutique in the Palais Royal that is well stocked with books. He does business in all genres."^[5] Dentu's was one of the new fortunes of the revolutionary period, and he easily met the material criteria for selection by the new regime. Nonetheless, Dentu did not quite fit into the regime's view of things. Even in the earliest and most glowing accounts of his lavish establishment, the inspector of his district felt obliged to note that "he is suspicious of government surveillance and sees himself as the master of his establishment."^[6] It was an inauspicious beginning for relations between Dentu and the new regime.

FrançoisAndré Gaudefroy, a Paris inspector of the book trade, took over the arrondissement of the Hôtel de Ville by rotation on July 1, 1813.^[7] Gaudefroy was a provincial bibliophile from Amiens in his midfifties who had taken the inspectorship in Paris better to pursue his passion for books.^[8] But he found himself constantly outstripped by the fast pace of the capital and its wily purveyors of the printed word. The move to the arrondissement of the Hetel[Hôtel de Ville brought him into daily contact with the printer Dentu.

Dentu drove Gaudefroy mad.^[9] Every time Gaudefroy entered Dentu's

[5] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

[6] Ibid.

[7] For biographical information on Gaudefroy, see BN, nouv. acq. fr. 1362, feuille 53. For his assignment to the arrondissement of the Hôtel de Ville, see ibid., feuille 120.

[8] See ibid., feuilles 53 and 59. Gaudefroy's passion for books earned him a reprimand from the director for conflict of interest in his dealings with booksellers.

[9] This concluding account is from ibid., feuilles 173–174, Report from Gaudefroy to the director general of the book trade, Pommereul, concerning the printer Dentu, [1813].

Plate 8. 
Galeries de bois, Palais Royal, Paris (1825). Jean-Gabriel Dentu's bookshop 
in the Palais Royal is depicted on the left of this woodblock engraving by the 
illustrator F. Meaulles. Kubler Collection, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York.

printing shop for inspection, the presses were absolutely still and totally empty. Although Gaudefroy was certain that "he always starts printing again . . . the moment I leave his shop," he could not catch Dentu in the act. He was also certain that Dentu printed secretly all night. Still, "at no matter what hour of the day I arrive at his printing shop, I have never seen a single sheet . . . in press." Dentu was too quick for him.

Gaudefroy knew that Dentu was the source of numerous venom-filled pamphlets attacking the regime, such as the Etat de la France sous la domination de Bonaparte . But it was less the content of these pamphlets than Dentu's independence that really got under Gaudefroy's skin: "M. Dentu, having founded his business upon the principles of Jacobinism,

to which he owes the beginnings of his fortune, behaves as though he is still living in that time of piracy and anarchy. He is the sort who will always be in open rebellion."

It was Dentu's arrogant defiance of state surveillance, his libertarianism, that unnerved the inspector. Dentu wore him down. After several weeks Gaudefroy had to admit defeat to his superior. Telling the director of the book trade that he could no longer face making his regular visits to Dentu's shop, he begged for a reprieve:

Today I have only one sincere wish to ask of you, Monsieur le Directeur, which is that despite the pains I have suffered for the past five months, and the financial sacrifice that moving from the capital would entail . . ., if in each district of inspection there are no more than four printers as immoral as this one, I would prefer to be transferred immediately to the farthest corner of France.

The nineteenth century was to inherit the revolutionary cultural traditions of Dentu, along with the authoritarianism of Gaudefroy.