Chapter Two
The Fall of the Paris Book Guild, 1777–1791
Royal Reform and Revolutionary Mobilization
The royal Administration of the Book Trade in France had collapsed by January 1791, and it was not to be resuscitated for almost twenty years. But the most powerful cultural institution of the Old Regime, the Paris Book Guild, did not fall with the Bastille. In fact, its members were quietly holding a meeting to admit a new printer into their ranks on the very day that the Parisian masses toppled what had become the preeminent symbol of royal tyranny.[1] To historians of the French Revolution, the last register of the meetings of the Paris Book Guild, which recorded the group's formal activities from 1787 to 1791, has appeared to be a profoundly disappointing source.[2] In it we read endlessly of the reception of apprentices, booksellers, and printers; their examinations; the attestations to their religious faith and moral standing; their participation in the processions of the rector at the university and in the parish; and the annual roll call for the royal "capitation" tax. Indeed, the entries for the eighty-eight meetings of the guild over this period depict a world more reflective of urban corporate life during the late reign of Louis XIV than of Paris in the throes of revolution (plate 2).
Upon closer reading, of course, the great events of these years are visible, refracted dimly and elliptically through the lens of corporate
[1] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs de Paris," entry for July 14, 1789.
[2] Ibid., December 7, 1787–March 18, 1791. For mentions of the source, see, for example, Chauvet, Ouvriers du livre 2:28; and Estivals, Dépôt légal, 100.
Plate 2.
Register of the Paris Book Guild: Entry for the meeting of July 14, 1789.
The Paris Book Guild was quietly admitting a new printer into its ranks as the
masses toppled the Bastille. Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Manuscrits.
ritual. The exile of the Parlement of Paris, for example, is quietly acknowledged by a notation of the absence of parliamentary representatives at the rector's procession on August 7, 1788.[3] And later, on April 24, 1789, the register records that the guild's officers had "assembled the entire community through written notice . . . to nominate commissioners and examiners to draft the 'cahiers de doléances' of the publishers and printers of Paris."[4] Still, with the exception of a few similarly unrevealing disclosures, the register of the Paris Book Guild rolls over 1788, 1789, 1790, and 1791 without ever noting even the formal suppression of the guild's existence.
Yet it is the very historical dissonance of the register of the Paris Book Guild as a document of the Revolution and its anachronistic character that present the historical problem: What was the position of the Paris Book Guild on the eve of the Revolution? What role did it play in the Revolution itself? Did the Guild form part of a corporatist-aristocratic reaction, as some historians have suggested?[5] Did its members passively or stoically submit to their fate, as others have supposed?[6] The answers lie beneath and beyond the circumspect inscriptions of the guild's cautious official guardians.
The Paris Book Guild was quick to mobilize its presses and its members to insure that it would be represented at the Estates General as a corporation. On December 6, 1788, Siméon-Prosper Hardy, a bookseller on the rue St-Jacques and member of the guild, recorded in his journal the receipt from guild officers of a copy of a memorandum submitted to the king: the judges and counsellors of the city of Paris requested a special separate delegation of representatives from the Corporations of the Arts and Trades of Paris to the Estates General to assist the Crown in reestablishing the "credit and confidence" of the realm.[7] The printer
[3] BN, mss. fr. 21861, entry for August 7, 1788.
[4] Ibid., entry for April 24, 1788.
[5] Louis Radiguer, Maîtres imprimeurs et ouvriers typographes (Paris: Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition, 1903), 141–146.
[6] William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 87.
[7] Siméon-Prosper Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:164 (entry for December 6, 1788). See also Etienne Martin St. Léon, Histoire des corporations de métiers (Paris: Alcan, 1909), 601.
of this memorandum was the highest officer of the Paris Book Guild, the syndic André-François Knapen (see table 2). The pamphlet went straight from his presses to its constituency, the guilds that elected the judges and counsellors of the city of Paris.
By December 16, 1788, Hardy records having acquired a copy of a petition of the Six Corporations of Paris calling for a more proportional representation of the Third Estate—that is, one cleric to two nobles to three members of the Third Estate, giving the Third Estate an assured representation of 50 percent.[8] Hardy judged this to be a "configuration that today appears to conform most closely to equity . . . and to the spirit of the institution." And he was not the only member of the Paris Book Guild who held this opinion. On December 22, 1788, the guild register recorded that "several members of the guild requested a general assembly of the guild in order to propose that the guild adhere to the petition of the Six Corporations."[9] The following day Hardy received a sealed copy of the petition from the guild officers and a notice for a general assembly of the guild.[10]
The guild officers dared to mention the purpose of this meeting only in a marginal note in the official register.[11] And they recorded no account of the deliberations or their outcome. Fortunately, Hardy was more forthcoming in his private journal:
Sieur Cellot, publisher and former printer . . . held forth very directly and with great vehemence in favor of the petition; he urged that everyone support it, and that we do so hastily by giving it our unanimous signature. But he was wisely and forcefully countered by sieur Charles-Guillaume LeClerc, publisher, former syndic, and former judge-counsellor of the city . . ., who argued vigorously that we should not give formal written support to the petition so quickly. . . . His proposal passed by a vote of nineteen to fourteen. . . . But as all of those who wanted to support the petition announced their discontent and left having refused to sign anything, this tumultuous assembly decided to defer the final deliberation.[12]
We have no trace of the final outcome of the debate over the adherence of the Paris Book Guild to the petition for proportional representation. However, the Parlement did allow the Six Corporations to submit their
[8] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:172 (entry for December 16, 1788).
[9] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté," entry for December 22, 1788.
[10] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:185 (entry for December 23, 1788).
[11] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté," entry for December 24, 1788.
[12] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:186 (entry for December 24, 1788).
petition to the king.[13] And only a week later, on December 27, 1788, Minister of Finance Necker persuaded the king to decree the doubling of the number of representatives of the Third Estate.
The debate in the Paris Book Guild over the petition made clear that their disagreement was over strategy rather than substance. The division—and it was close—was between the strident and the cautious. At bottom guild members had firmly allied their interests with the Third Estate and were agitating, even if not officially, for enlarging that group's representation. At a purely legalistic level, this is not at all surprising. Nor was it particularly revolutionary by the end of December 1788. After all, the publishers, printers, and booksellers of Paris were formally members of the Third Estate. Furthermore, others were beginning to point out that real political change lay not merely in increasing the number of representatives of the Third Estate, but rather in putting an end to a political order based on the division of society into separate privileged estates.
The cultural politics behind the guild's support for the movement to double Third Estate representation were soon elucidated in a pair of anonymous pamphlets, Remerciment des libraires de la rue S. Jacques à M. Necker and Réponse des libraires du Palais Royal, au remerciment de leurs confrères de la rue Saint Jacques, à M. Necker , which appeared in early January "chez Desenne, Gattey, and Petit, libraires, au Palais Royal."[14] The Remerciment was a grub-street satire of the corporate cultural vision of the Paris Book Guild, in which the booksellers of St-Jacques offer profuse thanks to the minister of finance for the decree doubling the number of representatives of the Third Estate. Why? Because, the pamphlet explained, the decree would restore political order and in so doing put an end to public interest in the political ephemera sold in "that magical palace [the Palais Royal], which, like a sun sucking up water and leaving the plains desiccated, has consumed all the business in the capital."[15] Necker had thankfully put an end to the political crisis and hence to the craze for political pamphlets sold beyond the jurisdiction of the king and his book guild by booksellers in the Palais Royal. Readers
[13] Martin St. Léon, Histoire des corporations, 601–602.
[14] Remerciment des libraires de la rue S. Jacques à M. Necker, suivi de quelques autres pièces relatives aux circonstances (Paris: Desenne, Gattey, Petit, 1789); and Réponse des libraires du Palais Royal au remerciment de leurs confrères de la rue Saint Jacques, à M. Necker (Paris: Desenne, Gattey, Petit, 1789).
[15] Remerciment, 6.
would now mercifully return to the literary fare offered by the privileged publishers on the rue St-Jacques.
The pamphlet thus transformed the cultural geography of Paris into an allegory of the political debate between reformers, who wanted to modify the system of representation by orders, and revolutionaries, who wanted to abolish distinctions by order altogether. From the perspective of the Palais Royal, the doubling of the Third Estate was far from revolutionary. On the contrary, it only served the interests of those bent on maintaining corporate privileges and distinctions—like those of the Paris Book Guild, whose members worked and lived on the rue St-Jacques. The privileged publishers, the booksellers of the Palais Royal taunted, could not survive in a competitive cultural world based on consumer demand rather than state monopolies.
The Réponse des libraires du Palais Royal, au remerciment de leurs confrères de la rue Saint Jacques , in contrast, sounded a conciliatory note—one stressing the potential symbiosis rather than the conflict—between the publishers of St-Jacques and the Palais Royal:
You feign jealousy of our place in the magic palace, but in reality it is you who control big publishing and bring so many volumes to the light of day. And you have an interest in our being there, to expose your books to the gaze of the curious . . . We are there, from the first sound of the trumpet in the journals, to distribute [your works]. You know, dear colleagues, everything depends on timing, and no one knows better than us how to make the most of it.[16]
The real division within the publishing world, the Réponse suggested, lay not between the privileged and the unprivileged, nor between book and pamphlet publishing, but between publishing books and retailing them. The publishers of the rue St-Jacques, they urged, should abandon their defense of privileged orders and cultural monopolies and instead work together with the booksellers of the Palais Royal to take advantage of the opportunities that a publishing world based on free-market principles could offer in compensation.
Some members of the Paris Book Guild were soon won over by arguments calling for an end to the division of public life into privileged orders. Hardy himself, one of the hesitators in the guild debate over the petition, soon enthusiastically noted the publication of Emmanuel Sieyès's
[16] Réponse , 11–12.
Qu'est-ce que le état? in his journal and its author's call for an end to the division of the nation into privileged estates.[17] But others within the guild remained firm in defense of their privileges and the old corporate publishing world. Nor was it merely the reestablishment of "credit and confidence" that the guild hoped to achieve from the opportunity for reform presented by the convocation of the Estates General.
On January 5, 1789, a week after the debate on the doubling of the Third Estate in the Paris Book Guild, Poitevin de Maissemy, director of the royal Administration of the Book Trade, received a memorandum from "the Printers and Publishers of Paris."[18] Dieudonné Thiebault, chief officer of the administration's Paris bureau, informed his newly appointed superior that the memorandum was "well known"; indeed, it had already been presented to the former director in the same terms.[19] Another copy of the same memorandum dated 1787 confirms Thiebault's report.[20] This mémoire had served as a position piece for the Paris Book Guild and was presented to each new head of the royal Administration of the Book Trade with the hope of gaining a ministerial ear for guild interests. It allows us to locate the posture of the guild in relation to the royal administration on the eve of the Revolution. The mémoire opened in the following terms:
Your elevation to Minister of Laws has given hope to the Book Trade. Ruined, devastated by the six arrêts of the Royal Council of August 30, 1777, we dare to beg you to restore the regulations of 1723. . . . Ten years have sufficed to reveal the vices of the new regime. . . . Of these arrêts , those concerning pirate editions and the duration of privileges are the ones that have dealt the worst blows to the Book Trade.[21]
On the eve of the Revolution, the Paris Book Guild was already at war with the Crown and its administration, and had been for over ten years. As far as the guild was concerned, the "old regime" had come under
[17] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:223 (entry for February 3, 1789). Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le état? [Paris, 1789].
[18] AN, ser. V1, carton 550, Report by Thiebault, February 5, 1789.
[19] Ibid.
[20] BN, mss. fr. 21822, "Archives de la chambre syndicale des libraires et imprimeurs de Paris," fols. 2–10.
[21] AN, ser. V1, carton 550, "Mémoire," February 5, 1789, fol. 1r.
assault in 1777. For the officers of the Paris Book Guild, the convocation of the Estates General represented an opportunity to restore rather than to dismantle the corporate publishing monopolies of the Old Regime.
The dispute between the Paris Book Guild and the Crown was no small squabble. The decrees of 1777 had represented the culmination of a fifty-year debate between the Crown and the Paris Corporation of Printers and Publishers concerning the nature and duration of royal literary privileges. The royal Code de la librairie , established to regulate the Parisian publishing world in 1723, and extended to the entire nation in 1744, had defined a literary "privilege" as at once an official approbation of the work, a permission to publish, and a kind of copyright, in that a privilege assured its holder a legal exclusivity on the commercial publication of the work.[22] While in principle the Crown could revoke or extend privileges at will, by the end of the seventeenth century the centralizing and corporatistic royal administration had in practice encouraged the consolidation of a monopoly by the Paris Book Guild on the lion's share of the literary inheritance of France.[23] It did this by conferring extensive privileges for publication of both individual texts and whole areas of knowledge to particular Paris publishers and then renewing these privileges automatically over generations.[24]
To protect their monopoly against the protests of excluded provincial publishers, the Paris publishers began in the late seventeenth century to evolve their own interpretation of the meaning of the literary privilege. In 1726, the Paris Book Guild commissioned the jurist Louis d'Héricourt to write a legal brief arguing that a privilege was not a royal "grace" to be conferred or revoked at the king's pleasure, but rather a royal confirmation of an anterior property right. Invoking John Locke's notion of the origins of property in appropriation, d'Héricourt argued that the property in ideas is derived from labor: "It is the fruit of one's own labor, which one should have the freedom to dispose of at one's will."[25] According to the Paris Book Guild, privileges were nothing more than the legal confirmation of a preexisting property right founded in the
[22] For the text of the Code of 1723, see Jourdan, Decrusy, and Isambert, eds., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises , (Paris: Belin-Leprieur, 1826), 21:216–252.
[23] H.-J. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société ; H.-J. Martin, "Prééminence de la librairie parisienne"; and Birn, "Profits in Ideas."
[24] See Birn, "Profits in Ideas," esp. 139.
[25] Cited in ibid., 144.
author's labor and transmitted to the publisher through a contract. Ironically, the argument that ideas were the property of the individual author was first advanced in defense of the monopoly of the Paris Book Guild on texts whose authors were long since dead.[26]
By the middle of the eighteenth century the issue of literary privileges became caught up in a more general movement by enlightened royal officials to deregulate commercial life, including commerce in ideas, by dismantling the corporate monopolies created by Colbert. Although the royal reformer A.R.J. Turgot had exempted the book guild from his famous decrees of 1776 suppressing commercial monopolies, the Crown heeded the advice and counsel of successive officers of the royal Administration of the Book Trade and through six arrêts on August 30, 1777, announced an important shift in its policies concerning the book trade.[27] The king's Council of State issued a series of decrees intended definitively to refute the guild's interpretation of literary privileges as confirmations of property claims and to decentralize the publishing world by breaking up the Parisian monopoly on the nation's cultural inheritance.
In the 1777 decrees the king's council made its interpretation of "privilege" explicitly clear: "A privilege for a text is a grace founded in Justice. . . . The perfection of the work requires that the publisher be allowed to enjoy this exclusive claim during the lifetime of the author . . . but to grant a longer term than this would be to convert the enjoyment
[26] Mark Rose makes a similar observation about the source of property arguments in the English context; see "The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship," Representations 23 (1988): 56.
[27] Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the director of the royal Administration of the Book Trade between 1750 and 1763, argued for revising the code on the book trade to allow authors to publish and sell their own works, rather than requiring them to use licensed publishers and booksellers, in his "Memorandum on the Necessary Regulations to Prevent the Printing, Selling, and Importing of Bad Books," written sometime during his tenure and first published in his Mémoires sur la librairie et sur la liberté de la presse (Edited by E. Rodmell [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979; orig. ed. Paris: Agasse, 1809], 175–178). Notes for a second memorandum, advancing similar arguments, were written by François Marin, general secretary of the Administration of the Book Trade, at the request of Joseph d'Hemery, inspector of the book trade in Paris, and submitted to the new director of the royal administration, Antoine-Raymond-Jean-Gaulbert de Sartine, in 1764. See BN, mss. fr. 22183, "Représentations et observations en forme de mémoire sur l'état ancien et actuel de la librairie et particulièrement sur la propriété des privilèges, etc., présentées à M. Sartine par les syndic et adjoints, et en marge les observations que M. Marin a faites sur chaque article, d'après les notes instructives que je [d'Hemery] lui ai remises par ordre du magistrat" (March 1764); cited by Birn, "Profits in Ideas," 153–154.
of a grace into a property right."[28] The Crown thus reaffirmed the absolutist interpretation of royal privileges as an emanation of the king's grace alone and not the recognition of a property right.
The decrees created two categories of literary privilege. Privilèges d'auteur , which legally recognized the author for the first time, were to be granted to authors in recompense for their labor and held by them and their heirs in perpetuity , unless sold to a third party. Authors were thus for the first time in fifty years permitted, indeed encouraged, to hold on to their manuscripts and to engage in publication rather than sell their manuscripts to publishers. Publishers' privileges, or privilèges en librairie , by contrast, were to be limited to the lifetime of the author and nonrenewable. After the author's death, these texts returned to the "royal domain" to be enjoyed by any royally licensed publisher, with the king's permission. The Crown hoped that by making these lucrative legal books available to provincial publishers they could be wooed away from the booming traffic in pirated and illicit works. In an effort to institute these reforms on a new footing, the Crown, by another arrêt of the same date, legitimized all pirate editions anterior to the arrêt .[29] Thus in 1777, with a stroke of the royal pen, the cultural capital of the Paris Book Guild, as embodied in inheritable literary privileges, had been threatened with extinction.
Not surprisingly, the Paris Book Guild did not receive any of these arrêts passively, and it outlined its position succinctly in its mémoire to Maissemy of January 1789:
The arrêt concerning the duration of privileges . . . renders the property rights of authors illusory. . . . The dispositions of this arrêt are founded upon the principle that a publisher's "privilege" is no more than a "grace founded in justice." . . . But . . . a "privilege" is nothing more than the guarantee of the author's property in his work. . . . If property is incontestable there can be no distinction between an author's "privilege" and that of a publisher. . . . Why this violence against the sacred principle of property?[30]
In its most strident moment, the guild denounced the arbitrary manner in which the royal council determined the matter: "No authority can take our property from us and give it to someone else."[31]
The positions of the Crown and the Paris Book Guild in this debate
[28] Jourdan, Decrusy, and Isambert (eds.), Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises 25:108–123.
[29] Ibid., 121, 123.
[30] AN, ser. V1, carton 550, "Mémoire," February 5, 1789, fols. 1v, 2.
[31] Ibid., fol. 2v.
ring with dissonance and irony to the modern ear. On the one hand, the Crown, in defining the legal claims on a text as a royal "grace," revocable and mutable at the king's will, had sought to liberate the literary inheritance of France from the monopoly of a privileged corporate elite, to acknowledge the author as the creator of his or her works, and to create a competitive commercial market in ideas. On the other hand, the Paris Book Guild sought to defend its corporate monopoly on the entire literary inheritance of France by defining literary privileges as royal confirmations of sacred and inalienable property rights, inhering originally in a contract between author and publisher. Inviolable by any human authority, property in texts was, according to the guild, a natural right merely ratified by royal privilege.
The dispute between the Crown and the Paris Book Guild in 1789 over the meaning of privilege and who had power to determine this question was not, however, purely theoretical. A good deal of evidence suggests that the guild had, in effect, gone on strike against the efforts of the royal Administration of the Book Trade to implement the six arrêts of 1777 and was still in full resistance to the Crown on the eve of the Revolution.
Following the proclamation of the arrêts of 1777, the Administration of the Book Trade began to implement the reforms pertaining to the new limits on the literary privileges held by members of the Paris Book Guild. The exclusive claims of guild members over thousands of titles were systematically limited or revoked.[32] The Crown then began to give permission to provincial publishers to produce and market works that had previously been the exclusive privilege of members of the Paris Book Guild.[33] The Paris guild, however, refused to register the six arrêts ,
[32] BN, mss. fr. 22004, "Archives de la chambre syndicale de la librairie et imprimerie de Paris, bureau de la librairie: état des privilèges; état des titres de propriété fournis par les libraires de Paris" [1777]; 22005, "Archives de la chambre syndicale . . ., feuilles des jugements des privilèges derniers et définitifs conformant à l'article XIe de l'arrêt de conseil du 30 août 1777 sur la durée des privilèges"; and 21832, "Archives de la chambre syndicale," feuilles 26–40, "No. 2, Tableau des ouvrages jugés communs ou qui le deviendront à l'expiration des privilèges dont ils sont revêtus, par l'arrêt de conseil du 30 août 1777, portant règlement sur la durée des privilèges en librairie." Another arrêt of July 30, 1778, further increased the discretionary power of the administration by allowing the keeper of the seals to extend the duration of privileges beyond ten years at his own will; see Augustin-Charles Renouard, Traité des droits d'auteur dans la littérature, les sciences et les beaux arts (Paris: Renouard, 1838), 180.
[33] See BN, mss. fr. 1682, Collection Joly de Fleury, "Librairie, imprimerie et censure des livres: règlements sur la matière, 1607–1789," feuilles 168–235 (1779–1780) and 250–268 (1780).
to enforce them, or to recognize the legality of the claims of those who did. Instead, its members mounted a public campaign against the arrêts in a series of pamphlets.[34] And they took their case to the Parlement of Paris, which remonstrated in favor of the guild position.[35] The guild succeeded in keeping its cause alive in the courts well into the 1780s, thus lending legal credence to their obstruction of the royal administration.[36]
Sometime after January 1782, at the behest of the Parlement of Paris, the guild prepared a Compte rendu par les syndics et adjoints de la librairie des faits relatifs à l'exécution des arrêts du Conseil du 30 août 1777 concernant la librairie .[37] According to this report, the arrêt pertaining to pirate editions had been settled amicably with the royal administration: the keeper of the seals had agreed to let the Paris guild prohibit the sale of the newly legitimated provincial pirate editions in Paris.[38] With the most controversial arrêts , however, those pertaining to privileges, the situation was different, in part because the guild was not fully able to prevent the implementation of the arrêts , nor at every point was it in its interest to do so. Thus, the guild recognized and registered authors' privileges because these conformed to its view that exclusive commercial claims should be perpetual.[39] But when it came to publishers' privileges the situation was more complex. The guild refused to implement any policy that either explicitly or tacitly recognized the new royal "permissions" to publish formerly privileged works.[40] In fact, the guild was seizing any shipment of books from the provinces for which a privilege had once been held by a member.[41] The Paris Book Guild was thus engaged in a full-scale war
[34] For examples of Paris Book Guild propaganda against the arrêts, see [Charles-Guillaume LeClerc], Lettre à M [sur la propriété littéraire] [Paris, December 19, 1778], BN, imprimés; and the Lettre d'un libraire de Lyon à un libraire de Paris [Paris, 1779], Musée de l'Imprimerie & de la Banque, Lyon.
[35] AN, ser. V1, carton 550, "Mémoire," February 5, 1789, fol. 7v.
[36] The legal history of the Paris Book Guild's case in the Parlement is documented in BN, mss. fr. 1682, Collection Joly de Fleury, "Librairie, imprimerie et censure," feuilles 168–235, 250–268. See also Renouard, Traité des droits d'auteur, 166–193. The guild ultimately lost.
[37] BN, mss. fr. 1682, Collection Joly de Fleury, "Librairie, imprimerie et censure," feuilles 168–173.
[38] Ibid., feuille 170.
[39] Ibid., feuille 169.
[40] Ibid.
[41] The Compte rendu presented to the Parlement by the Paris Book Guild in 1782 gives examples of this practice: "Un S. Baume, libraire à Nîmes, conçut, il y a quelques années, le dessin de faire une édition de l'Histoire ecclésiastique de M. de Fleury. Il en existait une somme considérable de in-12 et de in-4 dans les magasins des Libraires de Paris qui en avaient le privilège. . . . Depuis les arrêts de 1777 . . ., il [le S. Baume] a voulu faire venir [l'édition] à l'adresse du S. Baume: Nous l'avons suspendue"; ibid., feuilles 171–172.
with the royal council and the Administration of the Book Trade when the Estates General was convoked in May 1789. The guild placed its hopes first on the Parlement and then on the Third Estate to defend its corporation and its perpetual monopoly on literary privileges, as they had been interpreted under the Code of 1723.
Corporate Politics in Paris and Versailles
Throughout the summer and fall of 1789 the city of Paris was swept into a revolutionary fervor, propagated and sustained by an unprecedented and seemingly relentless outpouring of printed matter. The task of restoring a modicum of public order fell on the municipal authorities.[42] Among the first acts of the Police Committee of the Commune of Paris were measures to define the limits of legal publication. On July 24, the committee issued an ordinance prohibiting the distribution of any printed matter without the name of the printer.[43] The printer, in the event that he or she could or would not identify the author, was to be held legally accountable. During the fall of 1789, the municipal police, in concert with Lafayette at the head of the National Guard and the royal police force connected to the Châtelet, set out to quell this tidal wave of placards, journals, and pamphlets through a series of regulatory and repressive measures.
Every effort was made to control the practice of colportage, first by requiring colporteurs to identify the source of their merchandise, then by prohibiting the sale of any "calumnious printed matter" or "inflammatory writings."[44] They were then prohibited from crying their wares.[45] And finally, in December, the municipal government attempted to limit the number of colporteurs to three hundred, who were to be registered with the police.[46] On August 25, the National Guard made
[42] Lacroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1st ser., 1:v.
[43] Ibid., 82. See also Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 31, 181–183.
[44] Lacroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1st ser., 1:82, 117, and 211 (July 24 and 31 and August 2, 1789); 2:550 (November 4, 1789); and 1:421, 432–444 (August 31 and September 1, 1789).
[45] Ibid., 2:215–216 (October 8, 1789).
[46] Ibid., 3:174, 179 (December 21, 1789).
the first of its raids of the Palais Royal, thus violating the police immunity of that cultural free zone of the Old Regime.[47] A wave of raids of printing shops, booksellers, and newsstands and arrests of colporteurs ensued in the Palais Royal and throughout the city, conducted both by the Old Regime police force of the Châtelet and by the revolutionary Commissioners of Police of the Paris Districts.[48]
These regulatory and repressive measures did not go unnoticed. Pamphlets like the Enterrement des feuilles volantes. De profundis des petits auteurs. Agonie des colporteurs decried this assault on political ephemera and its producers.[49] In a series of articles published in the Révolutions de Paris beginning on October 17, 1789, entitled "Conspiracies Against the Freedom of the Press," the ultrarevolutionary journalist Elysée Loustallot depicted the formation of a fatal coalition of the king's ministers; corrupt deputies in the National Assembly; representatives of the Commune of Paris; the mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly; and the head of the National Guard, the marquis de Lafayette, against unlimited freedom of the press. The military authorities, he wrote, "have made fair game of the freedom of the press throughout the city."[50] The decree registering colporteurs, he cautioned, was a means of recruiting "three hundred spies."[51] Further, the officers of the Paris bureau of the royal Administration of the Book Trade "are still occupying their offices at the town hall."[52] In view of the persecutions of writers, printers, and colporteurs by the Commissioners of Police of the Paris Districts, he wrote, one would be tempted to believe that the French had only changed masters.[53]
[47] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:448 (entry for August 25, 1789).
[48] See, for examples of Châtelet-conducted arrests, AN, ser. Y, "Procès-verbal du Châtelet, saisies des libelles par les commissaires de police sous les ordres de M. le général de police," nos. 10012, 11441, 11518, 12083, 12085, 13016, 13582, 14353, 14583, 14584, 15022, 15100, 16008 (January 13, 1789–December 9, 1790). For examples of arrests by the commissaires de police des districts, see BN, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (hereafter cited as nouv. acq. fr.) 2696, fol. 109, "Procès-verbal du district de St. André des Arts, saisies des libelles," October 9, 1789; and 2666, "Procès-verbal du Comité du district de St. Roch," fols. 29, raid chez Vaufleury, Palais Royal, July 9, 1790; 62, raid chez S. Pain, Imp.-Lib., Palais Royal, July 1790; 84, arrest of colporteurs, Palais Royal, August 11, 1790; 105, arrest of colporteurs, Palais Royal, September 9, 1790.
[49] Enterrement des feuilles volantes. De profundis des petits auteurs. Agonie des colporteurs ([Paris]: P. de Lormel, [1790]).
[50] Révolutions de Paris, no. 15, October 17, 1789, 2–6.
[51] Ibid., no. 24, December 19, 1789, 30.
[52] Ibid., no. 21, November 28, 1789, 28.
[53] Ibid., no. 62, September 11, 1790, 550.
Indeed, it appeared that the revolutionary government was carrying through with enhanced vigor the policy of the Crown's cultural police against grub-street literary culture. After all, it was the keeper of the seals who had initially enlisted the Paris Book Guild in 1788 to regulate and register colporteurs.[54] And it was the royal council in 1787 that had taken the first legal measures to permit raids of bookshops within the Palais Royal.[55] The Palais Royal, the source of sedition under the Old Regime, became an equally insidious fomenter of dissent under the new, and the government, now concerned to check further radicalization of the Revolution, ironically was authorized to apply the total license of martial law to bring about its demise as a center of sedition.
As municipal authorities took over, and even extended, the policing powers of the crumbling royal administration, the Paris Book Guild, too, sought to remake itself as a municipal, rather than a royal, institution. On August 4, 1789, the National Assembly abolished the principle of privilege, but it deferred resolution of the question of corporate monopolies and privileges.[56] The problem was handed over to the Committee on Public Contributions and was not to resurface in the assembly until February 1791. The administrative fate of the Paris Book Guild for the next two years, however, had been largely determined before the famous proclamation of August 4.
According to a report in the Révolutions de Paris , the director of the royal Administration of the Book Trade, Poitevin de Maissemy, began meeting with the municipal Committee of Police in late July 1789 to instruct them "on the best means of preventing the circulation of inflammatory pamphlets." The report added that the meeting "suggested that the municipal government will support the conservation of the book guild."[57] These suppositions of the Révolutions de Paris were soon vividly confirmed.
On August 2, the Commune of Paris decreed that all publications circulating in Paris had to bear the name of either the author, the printer,
[54] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs," entry for January 19, 1788.
[55] BN, mss. fr. 22102, Collection Anisson-Duperron, feuilles 258–259: "Arrêt du conseil d'état du roi, concernant le commerce de librairie dans les lieux privilégiés, du 4 septembre 1787."
[56] See Sewell, Work and Revolution , 86. For the National Assembly's discussion, see Jérôme Madival and Emile Laurent, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, 1st ser. (Paris: Dupont, 1898), 8:349.
[57] Révolutions de Paris , no. 4, August 6, 1789, 30–31.
or the bookseller and had to be registered with the Paris Book Guild with the deposit of a sample copy.[58] This decree, at least formally, allowed the guild to retain its policing functions intact.[59] Thus, under the authority of the municipality, the guild recovered its power to determine, if not what was printed or who printed it, at least what could legally make its way to the Parisian marketplace, and thus the ability to protect the literary privileges of its members. The royal Administration of the Book Trade was left merely to reaffirm this municipal initiative retroactively.[60] Two days before the National Assembly formally decreed an end to privilege, then, the Paris Book Guild appeared to recover its authority under the wing of municipal authorities.
This victory did not go unnoticed in the Parisian press. The day after the publication of the municipal decree, the following statement, written by Elysée Loustallot, appeared in the Révolutions de Paris : "At a moment when freedom of the press has insured a victory for public and personal freedom . . ., the Provisional Committee [of Police] has passed an ordinance concerning the Book Trade that is more repressive than were all the absurd regulations of the inquisitorial police that existed before the Revolution." From Loustallot's perspective, the demise of the royal Administration of the Book Trade had served only to enhance the power of the Paris Book Guild to control what made its way into print: "It is as though a prisoner were told that he was free because he was permitted to stroll in the prison yard." And the economic, as well as the political implications of the decree were clear:
[A] league exists between the printers and publishers against men of letters, and this incredible situation forces them either to pay very high rates for printing or to share the profits from their works with the publishers. These are profit-making professions, and because authors need a publisher's name in order to get a work printed, it is simple to make them pay for using it.[61]
In essence, for a work to be approved by the Paris Book Guild, it had to bear the name of a printer or bookseller that the guild would recognize.
[58] P.-J.-B. Buchez and P.-C. Roux, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (Paris: Paulin, 1834), 2:191, 246; and LaCroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1st ser., 1:82.
[59] This interpretation of the decree is confirmed by a report on the policing and registering of privileges by the Paris Book Guild found in the papers of the Administration of the Book Trade, AN, ser. V1, carton 553, November 3, 1789.
[60] Ibid., Report from Dieudonné Thiebault to the keeper of the seals concerning the registration of permissions at the office of the Paris Book Guild, November 3, 1789.
[61] Révolutions de Paris, no. 4, August 3, 1789, 43–44.
The guild appeared to have devised a means of preserving its monopoly on the book trade in the city. Within a month after the National Assembly had declared the freedom of the press, the Révolutions de Paris was calling for the retraction of that "strange article in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, whose glaring equivocations leave citizens vulnerable to all sorts of despotic and intolerant abuses."[62]
But the guild's victory soon appeared illusory. In October the reorganized commune appointed Pierre Manuel as its chief administrator of the "division of the book trade." Manuel was no friend of the guild or its monopolies. The Révolutions de Paris reported that under Manuel's administration "the police issued permits to all citizens allowing them to receive book shipments directly at the customs office" rather than at the office of the book guild, thus checking the power of the guild to control what could be imported into the city.[63] Until Manuel left this post at the end of 1790, the power of the guild to defend their privileges was thus effectively circumvented.
Nonetheless, the book guild continued to meet straight through 1789 and 1790. But in face of the popular enthusiasm for freedom of the press, its members opted to lay low and to conduct their business and their politics behind the scenes. They ceased appearing in public processions, and many members refused to sign the register of their meetings.[64] In October 1789 the guild's officers ceased to perform their regular inspections of the shops of printers and booksellers of the city (figure 2).[65]
Still, the officers of the guild continued to make every effort to protect their privileges and interests in both theory and practice. And after Manuel's departure, Syndic Knapen and the guild managed once again to succeed in gaining the sympathies of the municipal authorities. As late as January 1791, for example, an article in the Révolutions de Paris entitled "Vexations of the Book Guild" reported that
M. Villette, publisher, ordered some books from Maëstricht. The parcel was seized at the office of the book guild reputedly because it contained "incendiary pamphlets." These pamphlets were several copies of The Adventures of Télémaque . M. Villette . . . went to City Hall, where one of [Mayor]
[62] Ibid., no. 10, September 13, 1789, 11.
[63] Ibid., no. 73, November 27–December 4, 1790, 409.
[64] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs," entry for October 7, 1789.
[65] BN, mss. fr. 21946, "Registre des ordres de MM. les généraux de la librairie et imprimerie de la France," July 1, 1770–October 1, 1789.
Figure 2.
Inspections and Meetings of the Paris Book Guild, 1789–1791
Source: BN, mss. fr. 21936 and 21861.
Bailly's men . . . responded, on the mayor's behalf, that "he was aware of the situation; that the publishers of the book guild were right to want to protect their privileges, and that the books had been fairly confiscated."
The Révolutions de Paris was so outraged by this renewal of the guild's prerogatives that it could not resist further comment: "Because [the Paris inspector of the book trade] d'Hémery and his comrade Knapen took Télémaque for an incendiary pamphlet , an honest citizen has had his property confiscated, his commercial relations disrupted, and it should be no surprise why these men cling to their vile functions with such tenacity."[66] Moreover, the tenacious chief officer of the guild, Knapen, appeared to have succeeded with the municipal authorities where he had failed with the royal administration: any privilege on Télémaque could be upheld only on the basis of the Code of 1723, not that of 1777.[67] The author of The Adventures of Télémaque, François de Salignac de la Fénélon, had been dead for well over ten years.
And while the Paris Book Guild made every effort to retain its grip on the Parisian market in the printed word, it was also marshaling its resources to gain attention and interest for its cause from the deputies of the National Assembly at Versailles. Thus on September 9, 1789, the officers of the guild convened its membership, "in the manner prescribed by the . . . regulations of . . . 1723," in order to vote to make a gift of 20,000 livres to the National Assembly.[68] This symbolic overture to the new sovereign was soon followed, on November 12, by a direct appeal to the new keeper of the seals, Champion de Cicé, soliciting "the suppression of the private unlicensed printing shops that have been established in Paris."[69] Champion de Cicé, in consultation with the minister of foreign affairs, counseled the guild to be patient for new regulations, which they assured would be forthcoming from the National Assembly.[70]
The Paris Book Guild awaited the promised legislation. But when,
[66] Révolutions de Paris , no. 80, January 15–22, 1791, 89. Fénélon's Aventures de Télémaque was originally published in 1699.
[67] For the history of the dispute between the guild and the royal administration over LaVillette's status as a book dealer and his business practices, see AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Correspondence between Poitevin de Maissemy and the Paris Book Guild, June 9, July 10, and August 12, 1789.
[68] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté," entries for September 29–30 and October 1, 1789.
[69] AN, ser. V1, carton 553, Report from Thiebault to the keeper of the seals, November 12, 1789.
[70] Ibid.
three months later, a proposal concerning freedom of the press did emerge from the Committee on the Constitution, it was silent on both the issue of who had the right to own a printing press and the status of the Paris Book Guild. And where it addressed the question of literary property, it proposed only a slight modification of the dispositions of the royal arrêts of 1777 regarding the duration of publishers' commercial claims.[71] This first effort by the National Assembly to offer a positive legal definition of freedom of the press did not bode well for the Paris Book Guild or its interests. But fortunately for the guild, the law, presented by Emmanuel Sieyès on behalf of the committee, was defeated by the assembly.[72]
The guild was quick to respond to the threat represented by the Sieyès proposal. During 1790 the guild's officers redoubled their efforts to sway the National Assembly to support the maintenance of the book guild, limitation of the number of presses in Paris, and recognition of publishers' literary privileges as property rights. In February, the officers paid a visit to the president of the merged Committees on Agriculture and Commerce. Not finding him in, they left a letter and a memorandum pleading against revocation of their monopolies on the publishing and printing trades:
An infinite number of people who can barely read have established boutiques in all the quarters of the capital, putting their names and the sign Bookseller on their doors, a title which they have unscrupulously usurped. . . . We dare to hope that . . . the National Assembly will soon want to turn its attention to the Book Trade: this guild has always been exempted when corporate monopolies have been suppressed, as much because of abuses and piracy . . . as because the sale of bad books will soon infect France if everyone is free to enter the book trade.[73]
And they continued: "Those who have opened new printing shops have taken the words 'Freedom of the Press' to the letter, interpreting them
[71] France, National Constituent Assembly, Committee on the Constitution, "Projet de loi contre les délits qui peuvent se commettre par la voie de l'impression et par la publication des écrits et des gravures, etc., présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale, le 20 janvier 1790, par le Comité de Constitution," in Procès-verbal de l'Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Baudouin, 1790), 11:1–24. For an extensive discussion of this proposal, see chapter 3.
[72] Ibid.
[73] AN, ser. DXIII, carton 1, doc. 12, Letter from the Paris Book Guild to the Committee on Agriculture and Commerce, February 24, 1790, signed by Knapen, syndic; and Cailleau, Mérigot le jeune, Nyon l'aîné, and Delalain, adjoints.
to mean the 'freedom of the presses.' All of France . . . has an interest in limiting this freedom of the presses. You are witnesses to the dangers to which this liberty, today degenerated into license, can expose the nation."[74] The Committees on Agriculture and Commerce recorded the memorandum and letter on March 5, 1790, and then forwarded copies to the Committee on the Constitution.[75]
Along with these private negotiations, the guild publicly circulated a printed Mémoire addressed to the National Assembly that, in a newly acquired revolutionary idiom, vividly evoked and denounced the consequences of the declaration of press freedom:
Since last January the professions of the printers and publishers of the university have been shamelessly swallowed up: insurrection gave birth to license, and disorder reigned through anarchy. The aristocrats had their incendiary writings printed, lighting the fire of revolt in the hearts of the French: clandestine presses were . . . insufficient to quench their rage; they needed an even greater number. They evolved this false interpretation of freedom of the press .[76]
The guild officers violently denounced the municipal police's "division of the book trade," as well, for "pretending to be competent in the affairs of the book trade," for insisting that the municipal government was capable of taking over the functions of the royal Administration of the Book Trade, for permitting the establishment of "supernumerary printing shops" and for justifying the existence of these printing shops with the assertion that "freedom of the press is a right that . . . no one can be denied."[77] As a consequence of this municipal policy, they testified to the National Assembly, in the year following the declaration of the freedom of the press the number of printing presses in the capital had grown from thirty-six to two hundred! And it was these new printers, financed by counterrevolutionary aristocrats, they asserted, who were fueling the flames of popular insurrection and preventing the restoration of public order.
[74] Ibid., fol. 3r.
[75] AN, ser. AFI, Procès-verbal des Comités d'Agriculture et de Commerce, 51st session, March 5, 1790. For the copy sent to the Committee on the Constitution, see AN, ser. DIV, carton 50, doc. 1452.
[76] [Jean-Augustin Grangé] Mémoire présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale pour le corps des libraires et imprimeurs de l'Université (Paris: Grangé, 1790), 4.
[77] Ibid., 8.
The guild did not miss this opportunity to lash out at its great adversary, the Révolutions de Paris:
Antipatriots have given the printer of the Révolutions de Paris, which is devoted to the aristocracy, the necessary sum to establish a beautiful printing shop, and in less than two years this new printer has acquired houses in both the city and countryside, and he is keeping a carriage. Marat, who is in the pay of the enemies of the state, also has a printing shop of which he makes such bad use.[78]
These "suspect men," they asserted, were responsible for the Sieyès proposal and had, moreover, "succeeded in winning over the Committee on the Constitution, by arguing that the freedom of the press belongs equally to the intruders, who have arbitrarily appropriated [these professions] without authorization."[79] The guild officers again pleaded that the only way to prevent continuous assaults on the government and on respectable people was for the government to revive the regulations of 1723 limiting the number of printers and controlling the book trade. Even that great advocate of free trade Turgot, they observed, had exempted the book guild from his famous decrees of 1776 because of the political dangers of an unregulated circulation of printed matter.
These appeals did not fall on entirely deaf ears. The National Assembly was becoming increasingly aware of the range of issues uncovered by the principle of press freedom. The problem could not be reduced to municipal policing of libelous or seditious ephemera produced locally for local consumption. The keeper of the seals himself was at a loss as to how to proceed. He appealed for guidance in a letter to the president of the National Assembly's political watchdog, the Committee on Investigations, on June 22, 1790:
While awaiting . . . the promulgation of regulations that could affect the printing trades I have not upheld the old regulations and have only enforced those that concern essentially the property rights of authors and printers. In accordance with this policy a bundle of books was brought to the office of the book guild and inspected by the printer-publishers. The pamphlet [one found in the bundle] is not pirated, and it threatens no one's property, but nonetheless the officers of the guild thought that they should request my advice, as [the pamphlet] is directed against the work of the National Assembly. . . . The shipment will not be released until I give
[78] Ibid., 5.
[79] Ibid., 15.
the order, and I did not think I should make this decision without knowing your wishes.[80]
The keeper of the seals's inquiry raised large questions: How was literary property to be protected? How were the national and international markets in printed matter to be regulated or policed? Who, if anyone, had the right to inspect shipments of printed matter?
It also evidenced the undeniable fact that the Paris Book Guild was performing essential functions, not only in policing literary property but also in protecting the National Assembly against the criticisms of its opponents. Despite the formal declaration of "freedom of the press," that summer the Committee on Investigations pragmatically solicited the services of the guild to inspect shipments of books and pamphlets into the capital in order to identify and suppress counterrevolutionary printed matter.[81] Elysée Loustallot's charges of a conspiracy among deputies of the National Assembly, municipal authorities, and the guild was not without truth.
This unofficial solicitation of guild services by the Committee on Investigations did not resolve the larger question of the future role of the government in the regulation of the publishing world. But it did inspire new hopes for the guild officers that their services might be rewarded in the anticipated legislation on the book trade. They sent another memorandum to the National Assembly, which was forwarded to the Committees on Agriculture and Commerce on September 6, 1790.[82]
Then in early 1791 the keeper of the seals wrote again, with yet greater eloquence and urgency, to the president of the Committee on Investigations: "I want my decisions to be constitutional, and to conform to the principle of liberty as it has been conceived by the National Assembly. . . . Whose right is it to judge . . . a book and to give the order for it to be seized?"[83] He recommended that the Committees on Investigations, on
[80] AN, ser. DXXIX bis, carton 32, doss. 334, doc. 17, Letter from the keeper of the seals to the Committee on Investigations, June 22, 1790.
[81] For the committee's dealings with the Paris Book Guild, see ibid., doc. 16, Letter from the keeper of the seals to the Committee on Investigations, June 28, 1790; doc. 13, Letter from the keeper of the seals to the Committee on Investigations concerning a meeting between the Paris Book Guild and the committee, August 10, 1790; and doc. 12, Report from the guild to the Committee on Investigations, August 13, 1790.
[82] AN, ser. AFI, Procès-verbal des Comités d'Agriculture et de Commerce, 124th session, September 6, 1790.
[83] AN, ser. DXXIX bis, carton 16, doss. 182, doc. 7, Letter from the keeper of the seals to the president of the Committee on Investigations, January 9, 1791.
the Constitution, and on Agriculture and Commerce convene together to settle the question.[84] The Committees on Agriculture and Commerce received the same letter and took the initiative to convene the committees "in order to propose a law concerning these matters of great importance to the book trade and to literature."[85] The Committees on the Constitution and on Agriculture and Commerce finally met in May 1791 and recommended a formal legislative proposal "concerning the property in scientific and literary productions."[86] But there was no mention of the Paris Book Guild in the proposal. This was because the Paris Book Guild, along with all other Corporations of the Arts and Trades, had been suppressed definitively on March 17, 1791, two months earlier.[87]
Ironically, the law that served as the death warrant of the Paris Book Guild concerned guilds or corporations only indirectly. It was a tax law, sponsored by the Committee on Public Contributions. This law suppressed all corporations and then created a new license tax, the patente, which was to be levied on all businesses. The ideology of freedom of commerce was here deployed as much in the service of state revenues as in that of social, economic, or cultural freedom: more businesses meant more business taxes.
On March 18, 1791, the day after the formal suppression of all guilds and corporations, the officers of the Paris Book Guild assembled for a rector's procession at the church of St. Jacques des Hauts-Pas to send their last collective prayers to God.[88] They soon began to register at the City Hall for individual business licenses in conformity with the new
[84] Ibid.
[85] AN, ser. AFI, Procès-verbal des Comités d'Agriculture et de Commerce, January 12, 1791; and AN, ser. DXXIX bis, carton 16, doss. 182, doc. 10, Letter from the Committees on Agriculture and Commerce to the Committee on Investigations, January 13, 1791.
[86] AN, ser. AFI, Procès-verbal des Comités d'Agriculture et de Commerce, 224th session, May 23, 1791; and François Hell, Rapport fait à l'Assemblée Nationale par M. Hell, député du Bas-Rhin, sur la propriété des productions scientifiques ou littéraires (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791), AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 16.
[87] France, National Constituent Assembly, Committee on Public Contributions, Decree of March 17, 1791, in Collection générale des décrets rendus par l'Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Baudouin, 1791), 52–62.
[88] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs," entry for March 18, 1791.
patent law.[89] The liquidation of the corporation was conducted by the "department of domains" of the Paris Commune.[90] Disputes over the fate of the guild's funds and over ownership of suspended books held in the guild's warehouses dragged on into 1796.[91] The archives of the Paris Book Guild at our disposal today were finally transmitted to the Bibliothèque Nationale by the keeper of the National Archives in 1801.[92] The legacy of the official records of the guild, however, leaves many crucial questions unanswered. Why did the guild so stubbornly and persistently maintain the reactionary posture it did in face of the national mandate for the freedom of the press and the abolition of privileges? Were the official politics of the guild's officers representative of the views of its 220 members? After holding out so long against the current of opinion, why is there not more evidence of protest against the law suppressing the guild when it was finally passed?
The Paris Book Guild comprised diverse constituencies. The roll call for the royal capitation , the head tax for 1788, along with Augustin-Martin Lottin's Catalogue . . . des libraires et libraires-imprimeurs of 1789, enables us to determine the relative wealth of guild members and to distinguish the select 36 printer-publishers from the remaining 194 publishers and booksellers.[93] Table 2 presents a roll call of the guild on the eve of the Revolution, divided by relative wealth into the twenty classes of payment of the head tax.[94] It also allows us to locate the officers of the Paris Book Guild within the larger corporate structure.
[89] For traces of the implementation of this patent law, see AN, ser. H2, carton 2103, "Bureau de la Ville de Paris, Lettres Patentes, 1791–1797."
[90] Lacroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 2d ser., 3:196 (March 18, 1791) and 4:183 (May 19, 1791).
[91] For disputes over the adjudication of the guild's holdings, see Pétition des membres du ci-devant corps de la librairie et imprimerie de Paris, présentée à l'Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Knapen, June 10, 1791); and AN, ser. F17, carton 1233, doc. 3, Report by the Temporary Commission on the Arts, 15 vendémiaire, an IV (October 7, 1795).
[92] Henri Omont, ed., Catalogue général des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, ancien petit fond français (Paris: Leroux, 1898), 1:403.
[93] BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté," Capitation roll prepared by the Lieutenant-General of Police, along with the officers of the Paris Book Guild, entry for August 12, 1788; Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires . In fact, there were thirty-seven legally registered printers in Paris in 1789.
[94] By an arrêt of the Council of State of March 14, 1779, the capitation tax for each corporation in Paris was established at a fixed sum. The members of a given corporation were divided, according to relative wealth, into twenty classes, each of which was assigned a proportional amount of the total capitation to be paid by the corporation. For the arrêt, see Jourdan, Decrusy, and Isambert (eds.), Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises 26:48–51.
André-François Knapen, the guild's highest officer, the syndic, was the key intermediary between the guild and the government. He was one of the thirty-six printers and also held the titles of printer for the Court of Aides and printer for the Parlement of Paris.[95] In the seventh class on the head-tax roll, he was relatively well off but by no means one of the wealthiest members of the guild. Knapen had been hit hard by the royal council arrêts of 1777 concerning the duration of literary "privileges." The royal administration, according to its own figures, had revoked his exclusive privileges on at least sixty-two titles.[96] Jean Luc III Nyon l'aîné , a second officer (adjoint ), was a bookseller and member of one of the largest family empires within the guild. Four other immediate family members and at least one cousin, Paul-Denis Brocas, appear on the 1788 head-tax roll.[97] An uncle, Nicolas-Henri Nyon, was one of the thirty-six privileged printers, and among his other titles was that of printer of the Parlement of Paris.[98] Nyon l'aîné figured in the ninth class for the head tax and, with the rest of his family, fell into the wealthiest half of the guild, though not near the top. André-Charles Cailleau, the second adjoint , was also one of the thirty-six city printers and fairly wealthy, falling into the fourteenth head-tax class.[99] The third adjoint , Nicolas-Augustin Delalain l'aîné , bookseller, fell into the eleventh head-tax class, as did his son. Being solely in the book publishing and selling business, the Delalain family had been hit extremely hard by the arrêts of 1777, which revoked their privileges for 227 titles.[100] Nonetheless, Delalain l'aîné was still well off in relation to the guild at large. Jean-Gabriel Mérigot le jeune , the fourth and last adjoint , remains the most obscure. A book publisher and retail dealer, he fell into the eighth capitation class; he was thus relatively well off compared to both the other officers and the guild as a whole.
[95] See Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, lvi.
[96] BN, mss. fr. 21832, fols. 26–40, "No. 2 Tableau des ouvrages jugés communs ou qui le deviendront à l'expiration des privilèges dont ils sont revêtus, en exécution de l'article XI de l'arrêt du conseil du 30 août 1777 portant règlement sur la durée des privilèges en librairie." This document catalogues at least some of the privileges suppressed by the arrêt, and the names of the publishers who held them.
[97] For the connection between the Brocas and Nyon families, see BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre de déclarations pour la contribution patriotique, 1789–1791," entry no. 3, December 27, 1789. Nyon l'aîné identifies Mme Brocas as his aunt.
[98] For the names, titles, and addresses of the Nyon family, see Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, lviii.
[99] Ibid., lii.
[100] BN, mss. fr. 21832, fols. 26–40, "No. 2 Tableau des ouvrages jugés communs."
The guild's officers were not its wealthiest members, but they were some of its most privileged, and thus had more to lose with the demise of their monopolies. Three of the five were either printers or had family ties to the printing trade. Two were tied closely to the Parlement, and at least two had suffered serious losses as a consequence of the arrêts of 1777. Not surprisingly, they became virulent defenders of their hereditary literary privileges, their monopoly on the printing presses of the capital, and the power of the guild to inspect shipments of books into the city. They were joined in their struggle to preserve traditional guild privileges by other privileged printers, like Augustin-Martin Lottin, the guild's scholarly polemicist, and Philippe-Denis Pierres, one of the king's printers, who inscribed his vituperative rage against press freedom alongside his forced "patriotic contribution."[101] It was precisely these "old printers . . . who sell to the rich, and only to the rich," that Restif de la Bretonne, among others, had hoped the freedom of the press would drive under.[102]
However, the guild's officers and the privileged thirty-six printers of Paris were not the only members of the guild to defend this institution's continuance after the declaration of the freedom of the press. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, the encyclopedist publisher and press magnate, and by far the wealthiest member of the guild, also mobilized both his pen and his journal, the Mercure de France , to argue for retaining some form of a guild after 1789. In two articles published in the Mercure on January 23 and March 6, 1790, Panckoucke argued for the formation of an "unrestricted book guild."[103] But Panckoucke's guild differed significantly from the Bourbon corporation that the officers of the Paris Book Guild sought to preserve. His guild was conceived more like a modern businessman's association. The trade should be open to all, and the guild should admit any honest businessman capable of paying its fee. The guild would provide paternalistic charitable services for workers within the trade and thus woo them away from fly-by-night operations. Its essential function, however, would be to serve as a surveillance network, in coordination with public authorities, to police the property rights of authors and publishers.
[101] For Lottin, see chapter 1. On Pierres, see BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 111, May 11, 1790.
[102] Restif de la Bretonne, Nuits révolutionnaires, 230.
[103] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, "Sur les chambres syndicales," Mercure de France, January 23, 1790; and "Sur l'état actuel de l'imprimerie," ibid., March 6, 1790, esp. 35. See also Darnton, Business of Enlightenment, 501–502.
Panckoucke's publishing background and interests differed significantly from those of the officers of the book guild.[104] As early as 1777 he had proclaimed himself against perpetual privileges on literary texts for publishers; his own greatest ventures had been conducted beyond the world of privileged texts.[105] Nor did he believe in a corporate monopoly on the means of producing the printed word: the presses. In fact, he badly needed more presses in Paris to meet the production schedule of his Encyclopédie .[106] Panckoucke's crucial motive for defending the concept of the guild, in short, was to regain control over the work force and to aid in the policing of property.
Panckoucke was not alone in believing that maintenance of the Paris Book Guild and freedom of the press were not incompatible goals. A whole second stratum of the Paris Book Guild shared his vision of a guild open to all: the younger and less well-off booksellers of the guild and the myriad of ambitious printing-shop workers who held little prospect of advancing within the old structure of the guild. With the declaration of freedom of the press, they jumped at the chance to become the thirty-seventh, thirty-eighth, or thirty-ninth printer of Paris. Such was the case with the bookseller Pierre Leroy, who made his request to the keeper of the seals on October 20, 1789.[107] He was followed by the son of the widow Valade on November 15; Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas Crapart, bookseller, on December 12; and Jacques-Denis Langlois, also a licensed bookseller, on January 19, 1790.[108] Quickly, and more spontaneously, other minor book dealers from the bottom of the Paris Book Guild ranks joined in, such as Martin-Sylvestre Boulard, the future author and printer of the Manuel de l'imprimeur (1791), and François Momoro, a man soon to leave his mark in Parisian revolutionary politics.[109]
[104] The definitive study of Panckoucke's career is Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke . See also Darnton, Business of Enlightenment .
[105] [LeClerc], Lettre à M .
[106] Ibid.; and AN, ser. VI, carton 553, Report on a letter from Panckoucke to the keeper of the seals, June 6, 1789. The edition in question is Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, ed., Encyclopédie méthodique, 166 vols. (Paris, 1789–1832).
[107] AN, ser. V1, carton 553, Letter from Pierre LeRoy, Paris book dealer, October 20, 1789.
[108] Ibid., Letters from Valade, Paris bookseller, November 15, 1789; Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas Crapart, Paris bookseller, December 12, 1789; and Letter in favor of Langlois fils, Paris bookseller, January 19, 1790.
[109] On Boulard, see BN, nouv. acq. fr. 2666, fol. 6 [1790]. And on Momoro, see Lacroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 2d ser., 3:16, 340, 574, 719, 768, 771; 4:460; 5:391, 432, 485; 6:99–100, 105, 648, 658; 7:29, 48, 50, 643; and 8:621. For more on Momoro's career, see below, chapter 5.
To these can be added, Pierre Plassan, Gillé fils , Jacques Mérigot l'aîné , Laurent-Mathieu Guillaume le jeune , Jean Cussac, François Belin, François Colas, and HonoréClément DeHansy.[110] In sum, many of the new printers of Paris came from within the ranks of the old guild (see table 2). While these men evidenced desire for reforms within the guild, they were not necessarily against the guild, because as book publishers and sellers they were aware of the commercial necessity of policing the publication of printed matter.
In the first few years of the Revolution, the members of the Paris Book Guild held together as a coalition in defense of their guild. But it was a negative coalition formed out of two competing but seemingly inseparable conceptions. For the old guard, whose fortunes were based on printing monopolies and a closed market in privileged texts, the guild was defended as a productive entity. Yet there were significant new elements at both the top and bottom of the guild's spectrum of fortunes, men and women whose careers had been or were to be made in a competitive market, beyond the borders and on the margins of the corporatist system. For these individuals the imperative to maintain the guild resided in the commercial need to police property and to assure the financial stability of their ventures. Over the course of 1789, 1790, and 1791, these two visions were inextricably interwoven in defense of the same institution. As with many issues, however, the Revolution sorted out old contradictions in new ways. By 1791 it became clear that the legislative process of the National Assembly would resolve the issues of freedom of commerce and protection of property in the world of ideas independently of each other. The Gordian knot had been cut, and the coalition within the guild collapsed. And with it went many of the oldest Parisian publishing fortunes.
[110] See AN, ser. F18, carton 11A, plaque 1, Letter from Plassan to the Ministry of the Interior detailing his career since 1789, January 28, 1810; ibid., Letter from Gillé to the Ministry of the Interior detailing his career since 1789, January 11, 1810; Lacroix (ed.), Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1st ser., 1:386 (November 25, 1790), wherein Mérigot l'aîné proposes the establishment of a new printing shop; AN, ser. Y, no. 15021, doss. Bossange, February 14, 1790, in which Guillaume is charged with printing pirate editions; and, on Cusac, Belin, Colas, and DeHansy, AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés," [1811].
A Cultural Elite in Economic Crisis
The king's printer Philippe-Denis Pierres was not alone when he proclaimed in 1790 that his profession was "lost and prostituted."[111] Similar laments echoed both publicly and privately throughout the Paris publishing world from 1789 through 1793. In August 1789, the printer Jean-Baptiste-Paul Valleyre protested to the Administration of the Book Trade that he was being menaced and ruined by a new printer.[112] François-André Godefroy, a bookseller, wrote to the office in September testifying that "our sales are nearly dead."[113] In November, François Gueffier, one of the wealthiest printers of the Paris Book Guild, decried "the decimation of the industry."[114] Guillaume Debure l'aîné , a publisher from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the guild, testified in December: "I am losing considerable sums on books."[115] The bookseller Méquignon l'aîné acknowledged "the extreme penury of the business" in the spring of the following year.[116] So, too, the bookseller Jean-Baptiste Gobreau remarked a few months later on "the considerable losses I have taken" and "the current radical loss of business."[117] Even Charles-Joseph Panckoucke commented on "the extreme distress in which the book trade finds itself."[118] At the end of 1790, the bookseller Jean-Augustin Grangé presented a collective Mémoire to the National Assembly on behalf of the printers, publishers, and booksellers of the capital. Here he queried before the representatives of the nation, "Are we now to be without means and out of business?"[119]
Laments and testimonies continued over the next several years.
[111] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 111, May 11, 1790.
[112] AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Letter from Valleyre to Poitevin de Maissemy, August 19, 1789.
[113] Ibid., Letter from Godefroy to the Administration of the Book Trade, September 11, 1789.
[114] For Gueffier's position in the guild, see table 2. For his protest, see BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 10, November 24, 1789.
[115] For the position of the Debure family in the guild, see table 2. For his testimony, see ibid., entry no. 34, December 24, 1789.
[116] Ibid., entry no. 79, March 12, 1790.
[117] Ibid., entry no. 108, May 7, 1790.
[118] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, "Avis sur l'encyclopédie par ordre de matières," Mercure de France , February 27, 1790, 155.
[119] Cited in Radiguer, Maîtres imprimeurs et ouvriers typographes , 143.
Jacques-Denis Langlois, a bookseller, wrote to the Committee on the Constitution that he had "greatly suffered in his bookselling business because of losses."[120] The publishers of religious books Vincent Petit and the widow Despilly protested to the Ecclesiastical Committee that six hundred families in the religious book trade were on the verge of ruin.[121] In the National Assembly, the deputy Charles de Lameth testified on behalf of a Paris bookseller that, "earning nothing by printing good books," he was being driven to produce incendiary pamphlets.[122] In 1793, Léger Moutard, a printer and the second wealthiest member of the guild, wrote to fellow printer and bookseller Antoine-Louis-Guillaume-Catherine Laporte lamenting "the enormous losses that I have suffered."[123] So, too, Jean-Luc III Nyon l'aîné, former officer of the Paris Book Guild, testified to the minister of the interior that "our business is totally wiped out."[124] Several months later, his brother Pierre-Michel Nyon le jeune was to use almost identical terms to describe his plight: "From 1789 to this day, my business has been completely demolished."[125]
Were these men and women telling the truth? Or were they merely evoking a picture of financial plight for political and economic purposes, to defend and enhance their monopoly on the printed word? After all, testimony of material duress was almost a required credential of good citizenship during the first years of the Revolution. Furthermore, the statements cited above appeared in somewhat suspect contexts, such as justifications of the modesty of their "patriotic contributions," deferrals of payments to creditors, and requests for government subsidies or contracts.[126] Elysée Loustallot, the vigilant watchdog of press freedoms
[120] AN, ser. DIV, carton 50, doc. 1452, Letter from Langlois fils to the Committee on the Constitution, [1790–1791].
[121] AN, ser. DIX, carton 81, doc. 623, Letter from Petit and Despilly, publishers, to the Ecclesiastical Committee, January 10, 1791. See also AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 20, Mémoire présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale au nom des imprimeurs-libraires, propriétaires des privilèges des divers liturgies de France (Paris: N.-H. Nyon, 1790).
[122] Buchez and Roux (eds.), Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française 4:270, proceedings of the National Assembly for January 12, 1791.
[123] AN, ser. BB 16, carton 703, doss. 17, Ministry of Justice, Letter from Moutard to Laporte, May 11, 1793.
[124] AN, ser. F17, carton 1004c, doss. 650. Committee on Public Instruction, Letter from Nyon l'aîné to the minister of the interior, June 30, 1793.
[125] Ibid., carton 1008a, doss. 1374, Committee on Public Instruction, Letter from Nyon le jeune, 8 frimaire, an II (November 28, 1793).
[126] See BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry nos. 10 (November 24, 1789), 34 (December 24, 1789), 79 (March 12, 1790), and 108 (May 7, 1790). On deferrals of payments, see AN, ser. BB16, carton 703, doss. 17, Ministry of Justice, Letter from Moutard to Laporte, May 11, 1793. And on requests for government subsidies or contracts, see AN, ser. DIV, carton 50, doss. 1452, Committee on the Constitution, Letter from Langlois fils [1790–1791]; and AN, ser. F17, carton 1004c, doss. 650, Committee on Public Instruction, Letter from Nyon le jeune, 8 frimaire, an II (November 28, 1793).
for the Révolutions de Paris , adopted this latter interpretation, persistently decrying the Paris Book Guild, its members, and "their scandalous profits."[127] But the bankruptcy records in the Archives de Paris suggest that for once Loustallot was wrong.
The Paris head-tax roll for 1788, declarations for the national "patriotic contribution" (1789–1791), and declarations of bankruptcy (1789–1793) together offer a fairly accurate picture of the wealth of the members of the Paris Book Guild and the fate of their affairs during the first few years of the Revolution. Figure 3 gives a breakdown of guild members according to head-tax class and profession.[128] Declarations of total assets at bankruptcy by seventeen members between 1789 and 1793 provide a rough estimate of the thresholds of actual wealth within the guild; these figures are presented beneath the capitation classes.[129]
Figure 3 can be cross-checked by an alternative measure of relative wealth provided by individual declarations for the "patriotic contribution" (figure 4).[130] Taken together, figures 3 and 4 show the extreme
[127] See Révolutions de Paris, no. 23, December 12–19, 1789, 17.
[128] It should be noted that whereas libraires (publishers and/or booksellers) were prohibited by law from owning printing shops, imprimeurs were legally allowed to print as well as to publish and retail books. Thus, while all members of the guild were technically libraires, only some were imprimeurs . The character of these enterprises varied widely. The assessment for each of the twenty capitation tax classes was established along a sliding incremental scale (4–200 livres ), the ratio narrowing toward the bottom. Figure 3 plots the twenty classes on an absolute scale, correlating each class according to its assessment in livres to reveal the relative metric "distance" between them.
[129] For the exact figures on which these estimates are based, see appendix 2, "Declarations of Bankruptcy."
[130] The contribution patriotique was a forced loan levied by the National Assembly in 1789. It required all citizens to sacrifice, one time only, one-quarter of their net revenue to the service of the state. In contrast to the capitation tax, the "contribution" to be paid was determined by each individual rather than by the lieutenant of police and the guild officers. It also differed from the capitation in that the "contribution" was based on a percentage of the individual's actual revenue, rather than on a fixed sum paid by the guild as a whole and divided proportionally among its members. Figure 4 correlates the range of declarations for the "contribution" (72–6,000 livres ) with the incremental scale used to determine the payment of the capitation, for purposes of comparison.
Figure 3.
Estimates of the Relative and Actual Wealth of the Paris Book Guild By Correlation of Capitation Tax and Declarations of
Bankruptcy, 1789–1791 Note: On the distinction between publishers and printer-publishers, see further chapter 2, note 128.
Sources: BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs"; and AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6.
Figure 4.
An Alternate Estimate of the Wealth of the Paris Book Guild by Correlation of Patriotic Contributions and Declarations of
Bankruptcy, 1789–1791 Note: On patriotic contributions, see further chapter 2, note 130.
Sources: BN, mss. fr. 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs"; and 21896, "Registre des déclarations
pour la contribution patriotique."
polarization of wealth among the privileged purveyors of literate culture in Paris, whose assets spanned practically the entire wealth spectrum of the Parisian population above indigence.[131] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Léger Moutard, Gérard Barbou, FrançoisNoël Debure le jeune , the widow Desaint, and Antoine-Louis-Guillaume-Catherine Laporte formed a kind of superelite, living in a different world from the hundreds of small book dealers and modest printers who swelled the lower ranks of the guild. The contrast between these two groups could not have been sharper, as there were relatively few medium-scale establishments to bridge the enormous gap in material wealth and social milieu that divided them. Of the 123 guild members who provided the information requested for the "patriotic contribution"—that is, concerning living situation and property holdings—only 18 declared themselves owners of their residence, and only 4 identified themselves as the principal tenants of the houses in which they lived.[132]
In 1788, Panckoucke boasted eight hundred workers and employees in his pay. He owned elegant homes in Paris and Boulogne and maintained personal relations with both the most famous literary figures of the period and the most powerful ministers at the court of Versailles.[133] A man as at home in fashionable salons as in noisy printing shops, Panckoucke formed part of the politico-cultural elite that ruled France on the eve of the Revolution.[134]
The Debure-d'Houry establishment, formed by a marriage between two of the oldest families in the Paris Book Guild, cut a similar profile in the social landscape of the late eighteenth century. FrançoisNoël Debure le jeune declared his total wealth (minus his wife's dowry) at 1,870,247 livres in 1790. The couple owned a country house in the village of Massy, with "outbuildings, a garden, and landholdings comprising
[131] For estimates of the socio-economic breakdown of the Parisian population in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Adeline Daumard and François Furet, Structures et relations sociales à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1981), 76–100.
[132] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," 1789–1791.
[133] For a description of Panckoucke's social milieu, see David I. Kulstein, "The Ideas of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Publisher of the Moniteur universel, on the French Revolution," French Historical Studies 4, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 307–309.
[134] Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Régime, vol. 2: Les Pouvoirs (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), 210, 218.
around seventy acres," assessed at 95,650 livres ; a maison bourgeoise in Paris, with "a coach entry and garden, . . . on the rue Copeau" and "half of an entire establishment . . . on the rue Neuve François, also with a coach entry, a garden, and ice cellar." They were creditors of the Estates of Brittany and Languedoc and of the duc d'Orléans, among numerous others.[135]
These grands bourgeois , despite having the same official profession and "privileges" as their fellow guild members, lived in worlds apart. More representative, at least quantitatively, of the Parisian merchants of the printed word on the eve of the Revolution were types like François Momoro, on the rue de la Harpe with a stock of eleven titles in his boutique, his entire fortune;[136] or Jean Fabre, a bookseller on Pont St-Michel whose 30,245 livres' worth of books constituted nearly all he had in the world.[137] These two were joined by hundreds of other small printers and booksellers, like Charles Guillaume on the place du Pont St-Michel, who assessed his entire "belongings and merchandise" at 1,500 livres;[138] or Lefevre on the rue des Mathurins, who estimated his merchandise at 1,500 livres and his "furniture, suits, linens, and the everyday clothing worn by husband, wife, and children" at the same sum.[139] In second-floor printing shops and wooden storefronts, the majority of the "privileged" members of the Paris Book Guild produced and disseminated the printed word in Paris, with neither hope nor aspirations of entry into the literary salons of Panckoucke or the genteel country-manor circles of the Debure-d'Houry family.
The members of the Paris Book Guild, then, were dramatically polarized, related, it would seem, only by inverse correlation. But statistics do not tell the entire story, of either fortunes or personal destiny. Money flows. And individuals live or work together, marry and do business with one another. However extreme the contrasts of wealth and social standing within the guild, the Paris publishing world was in reality a very tightly woven community. And it was the weave of this fabric as much as its constituent threads that would shape and determine its fate.
[135] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7844, July 26, 1790.
[136] See table 2 for his position in the guild (20th capitation class); and AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7811, June 8, 1790.
[137] See table 2 for his position in the guild (15th capitation class); and AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 109, doss. 7763, April 3, 1790.
[138] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 2, January 22, 1793.
[139] Ibid., ser. D4B6, carton 108, doss. 7711, February 20, 1790.
While the count provided by the head-tax roll for 1788 lists 213 guild members, only 163 family names appear on the list (see table 2). Moreover, at least eleven of the largest of these families were related by marriage: Nyon-Brocas, Knapen-Delaguette, Didot-Barrois, Didot-Regnault, Lottin-Pierres, and Debure-d'Houry.[140] The Paris publishing community was, above all, a community of blood relatives and in-laws who sought to consolidate and enhance their family empires. And guild members also lived together and rented from one another. For example, Cellot fils lived with Cellot le jeune .[141] Tillard, Duchesne, and Crapart all lived with their mothers.[142] And Mme Didot, the widow of Barrois, shared a roof with Didot l'aîné .[143] Cohabitation and space sharing, moreover, did not require formal family and apprenticeship bonds. Plassan worked as Panckoucke's agent, and Ruault as the director of his printing shop.[144] The two widows Tillard and Leroy shared a household.[145] The printer Stoupe rented from Debure.[146] The publisher Hardy lived with the widow Desaint; Babuty with the Debures; Ballard with Mlle Simon; Lamy with Leroy; Froullé with Didot fils aîné ; Gueffier le jeune with Onfroy; and Saugrain le jeune with Leroy.[147] Thus in daily life, family, household, and social ties frequently spanned the great divisions in wealth and living standards, rendering them less sharp.
Even more important, perhaps, than kinship bonds or social connections was the high degree of financial interdependence among Parisian printers, publishers, and booksellers, a result of their labyrinthine business transactions. The detailed business accounts of seventeen members
[140] For Nyon and Brocas, see BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 3, December 22, 1789; Knapen and Delaguet te, no. 73, March 9, 1790; Didot and Regnault, no. 97, March 29, 1790; Didot and Barrois, no. 27, December 22, 1789; Lottin and Pierres, no. 16, December 9, 1789; and for Debure and d'Houry, see AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7844, July 26, 1790.
[141] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations," entry no. 11.
[142] Ibid., entry nos. 58 (February 26, 1790), 110 (May 7, 1790), and 120 (May 14, 1790).
[143] Ibid., entry no. 27, December 22, 1789.
[144] See AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs ci-après désignés," [1811], entries for Plassan and Agasse.
[145] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 58, February 26, 1791.
[146] Ibid., entry no. 7, November 17, 1789.
[147] For each of these shared households, see, respectively, ibid., entry nos. 23, December 18, 1789; 40, December 27, 1789; 53, February 23, 1790; 54, February 23, 1790; 86, March 23, 1790; 80, March 16, 1790; and 114, May 11, 1790.
of the Paris Book Guild for the years 1789 to 1793 held at the Archives de Paris enable one to reconstruct a partial, but nonetheless significant, picture of the maze of business relations among guild members (see appendix 1).[148] Strikingly, ninety members—almost half the guild's total membership—appear in fifteen of these accounts.
Nor were patterns of indebtedness unidirectional. Individuals sometimes appeared as both creditors and debtors in a single account, and some of the wealthiest members of the guild, such as Debure-d'Houry and Moutard, were debtors to more minor figures like Valleyre and Briand. Debits and credits flowed in both directions. In the publishing world, debts were an index not of simple dependency, but of ongoing reciprocity. Indebtedness was not simply an unavoidable, or even a regrettable, fact of economic life; it was rather a way of life, the essence of good business relations in a world where financial institutions were few, metal coins scarce and cumbersome, communication slow, and transportation time-consuming, expensive, and often dangerous. All these factors combined to encourage the conduct of business as the elaboration of a continuous and, if successful, expanding web of debts and credits, negotiated through bills of exchange and letters of credit.
The evidence suggests that the guild functioned as a kind of credit union in a time of highly unpredictable production and distribution and uneven and episodic markets. It was better business to keep creditors at bay and uncollected debts in the coffer. Debts and credits were passed on through multiple countersignatures rather than squared up, because unsettled accounts functioned as a kind of private currency that at once maximized options and insured the continuance of business relations. Credit, as much and perhaps more than capital, was the stuff of economic life. Hence the members of the Paris Book Guild, both rich and poor, were inextricably tied to one another's economic fate.
Although the practice of pursuing indebtedness could lead to a positive mutual interdependence, it often led to illiquidity as well. The figures provided by guild members in declaring their "patriotic contributions"—a requirement that citizens offer the government one-quarter of net revenues and 2.5 percent of their precious metals—warrant fur-
[148] The list in appendix 1 cites members of the Paris Book Guild only . Of course, many of these businesses had extensive financial relations beyond the guild, in Paris, the provinces, and abroad.
ther examination (figure 4).[149] Because these declarations were made under written oath at the office of the Paris Book Guild,[150] they should in principle offer us an index of the net revenues of declarants.
The declarations of Paris Book Guild members ranged from 72 to 6,000 livres , surprisingly modest figures in light of the declared assets presented in figure 3 and appendix 2. François Prault, for example, declared on March 16, 1790, that his net revenue for that year amounted to 1,200 livres .[151] But seven months later when, on November 20, Prault filed for bankruptcy, he estimated his total assets at 329, 935 livres .[152] When Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, the guild's wealthiest member, declared his contribution on April 30, 1790, he estimated onequarter of his net revenue at 6,000 livres .[153] One current expert on Panckoucke's publishing business estimates that his total assets at this time were somewhere near 2,500,000 livres , that is, close to one hundred times his declared annual net revenue.[154] Were Prault and Panckoucke simply guilty of unpatriotic tax evasion? Evidence suggests otherwise.
While Panckoucke, Prault, and others no doubt took advantage of any loopholes the law afforded, it is unlikely that they, or the other declarants, resisted conformity to the letter of the law. A week before he made his contribution, Panckoucke had published an article under his own signature in the Moniteur universel in which he declared that "only a complete execution of the patriotic contribution can save the state" and the French business classes as well. He then held up the corporations of Paris as models of conformity to the law and urged all citizens to follow their example.[155]
If we take Panckoucke and other guild members at their word, they had substantial assets and credit but little revenue. This fact suggests an alternative interpretation of the contrast between their large assets and
[149] France, National Constituent Assembly, Procès-verbal de l'Assemblée Nationale, October 6, 1789, 5:1–12.
[150] Ibid., arts. 3 and 5.
[151] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 82, March 16, 1790.
[152] See appendix 2.
[153] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations," entry no. 31 (undated).
[154] The estimate was given by Robert Darnton, author of The Business of Enlightenment, a study of Panckoucke's business, in conversation with the author at Princeton University in February 1985.
[155] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, "Sur la contribution patriotique," Moniteur universel, no. 97, April 7, 1790 (Reprint Paris: Panckoucke, an III [1795–1796]), 396.
their modest declarations: the corporate publishing and printing establishments of Paris were incredibly insolvent on the eve of the Revolution. This situation left them unable to respond effectively to the rapidly changing circumstances, legal, political, and institutional, that ensued from the declaration of the freedom of the press and the suppression of the guild.
Everyone is talking bankruptcy: someone has even dared to utter this word in the National Assembly: it has reverberated in public squares, in cafés, and in the clubs.
CHARLES-JOSEPH PANCKOUCKE, MONITEUR UNIVERSEL, ARPIL 7, 1790
In the spring of 1790, Panckoucke was worried about bankruptcy. Indeed, the frightening possibility of a declaration of default by the French state was on many people's minds during this first uncertain year of National Assembly rule. The royal government's suspension of payments to the Caisse d'Escompte in 1788 precipitated a financial crisis that reverberated through the French commercial world from Marseille to Le Havre.[156] Far from exempt from this crisis, Parisian merchants found themselves at its epicenter.[157] And the realities of bankruptcy were even closer to home for Parisian publishers like Panckoucke. Between 1789 and 1793 at least twenty-one Paris publishers, booksellers, and printers—seventeen of whom were members of the Paris Book Guild—declared themselves in default, with more than half the total bankruptcies occurring in 1790 alone. For the Paris Book Guild, clearly, 1790 was a year of financial reckoning. Significantly, as these figures reveal, pub-
[156] For a general overview of credit, risk, and business failure in the eighteenth century, see Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For the difficulties of the Caisse d'Escompte and the ensuing credit shortage in the early years of the Revolution, see Robert Bigo, La Caisse d'escompte (1776–1793) et les origines de la Banque de France (Paris: PUF, 1927), 117–148. For the consequences of this crisis in the commercial world, see Pierre Dardel, Commerce, industrie et navigation à Rouen et au Havre au XVIIIe siècle (Rouen: Société Libre d'Emulation de Seine-Maritime, 1966), esp. 394–395; Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au XVIIIe siècle (Marseille: Institut Historique de Provence, 1973), esp. 427–464; and, for Paris, Tom Luckett, "Credit and Society in Eighteenth-Century France" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, forthcoming). Dardel, Carrière, and Luckett find an upsurge in bankruptcies in Rouen, Le Havre, Marseille, and Paris in 1788–1789. I am grateful to Tom Luckett for drawing my attention to these studies, and for sharing his yet unpublished findings on bankruptcies with me.
[157] Luckett, "Credit and Society."
lishers declared nearly as many bankruptcies between 1789 and 1793 as in the preceding twenty-year period, 1770–1789 (see figure 5 and appendix 2). The total liabilities on the twenty-one bankruptcies from 1789 to 1793 ran over 4,000,000 livres .[158] Bankruptcy was not simply a looming possibility within the Paris publishing world: it was a frightening reality (figure 5).
As Clément Martin has observed, the causes and the economic significance of declarations of bankruptcy are not at all self-evident.[159] Broadly speaking, in a given industry they are as often an index of economic growth—albeit unstable—as of decline. Nonetheless, in revolutionary France, businessmen, unless they were engaged in fraud, generally sought to avoid declaring default; and when they were forced to do so, it was because they found themselves overextended and hence unable to make their payments. Furthermore, as Martin points out, however general a crisis appears, its causes are most frequently best understood through analysis of the particular situation of each industry rather than of broader price or credit trends. The accounts of the bankruptcies of Parisian publishers between 1789 and 1793 confirm the value of this localist approach: financial interdependence and illiquidity set off a domino reaction in the publishing world, transforming a series of discrete crises into collective catastrophe.
On January 21, 1789, the publisher Siméon-Prosper Hardy entered the following information in his journal:
Jean Lagrange , book dealer . . . on the rue Honoré near the place Palais Royal, where he seemed to conduct a thriving business and to have extensive dealings . . . in modern speculations, has just closed up shop, abandoned his establishment, . . . supposedly to go to London, leaving in commercial circulation a considerable number of notes all covered with fictional and false endorsements, having had the temerity to allow himself to forge the signatures of four businessmen . . ., of whom three are his
[158] This estimate is based on a computation of the individual declarations of bankruptcy extant in the Archives de Paris. Louis Radiguer estimates the total passif of Paris printers and publishers in 1790 at 30,000,000 livres but does not indicate how he arrived at that figure (I assume that he is quoting the figure given by the publisher Jean-Augustin Grangé in his Mémoire présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale, 11). Grangé's estimate suggests that my own is probably extremely conservative. See Radiguer, Maîtres imprimeurs et ouvriers typographes, 143.
[159] For the most penetrating assessment of the problems involved in the historical interpretation of bankruptcies, see Clément Martin, "Le Commerçant, la faillite et l'historien," Annales E.S.C. 35, no. 6 (November-December 1980): 1251–1268.
Figure 5.
Bankruptcies Declared by Paris Publishers, 1770–1806
Source: AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6 and D11U3.
partners: namely MM. Debure-d'Houry, printer-publisher, Durand neveu , and Cuchet , publishers.[160]
Ironically, this "speculator" in Enlightenment works helped to trigger a crisis in the publishing world of the Old Regime, not by conquering markets or reading publics, but by abusing his credit and credibility within the old corporate structure. The irony went further: Mlle Louise de Kéralio, a member of the aristocratic literati and Lagrange's invisible partner, was forced to file bankruptcy papers for the business after he fled.[161]
Within a year, two of the victims of Lagrange's forgery, Durand neveu and Debure-d'Houry, filed for bankruptcy as well.[162] As figure 5 illustrates, bankruptcies led to more bankruptcies. Debure-d'Houry, for example, appeared in the accounts of nine of the seventeen declarants of bankruptcy in the guild between 1789 and 1793, while Durand figured in six (see appendixes I and 2). And the consequences reverberated far beyond the fates of those forced to formal declarations. Debure l'aîné lost 8,000 livres in the Durand bankruptcy;[163] Panckoucke stood to lose 30,000 livres in three other bankruptcies (those of Debure, Poinçot, and Savoye).[164] Over half of the guild families (90 of 163) figured in accounts of the seventeen declarants, who alone owed at least 800,000 livres to members of the book guild.[165] There are indications, moreover, that the crisis of 1790 threatened to spread from Paris to the provinces.[166] The publishing world of the Old Regime was on the verge of collapse.
Matters would have been even worse had it not been for the intervention of the Crown. In its proceedings for June 8, 1790, the royal
[160] Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:207 (entry for January 21, 1789).
[161] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 105, doss. 7454, March 30, 1789.
[162] For the Debure-d'Houry bankruptcy, see ibid., carton 110, doss. 7844, July 26, 1790. The papers of the Durand bankruptcy are no longer extant, but evidence of its occurrence can be found in BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 34, December 24, 1789.
[163] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations," entry no. 34, December 24, 1789.
[164] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7844; carton 109, doss. 7399: and carton 111, doss. 7944.
[165] This estimate is based on the declared debts of members of the Paris Book Guild in the accounts of the bankruptcies found in the Archives de Paris, Fond Faillite. See appendix 2 for detailed references.
[166] AN, ser. DIV, carton 30, doss. 728, Committee on the Constitution, "Liberté de la presse, commerce de la librairie, réhabilitation des faillites. Fiévrier 1790-janvier 1791 (7 pièces)," especially the letters from Toulouse decrying the collapse of the book trade and an increase in bankruptcies. See also BN, mss. fr. 11708, "Procès-verbal des délibérations du bureau de Paris," June 8, 1790.
Plate 3.
Declaration of bankruptcy by Sieur Debure-d'Houry, one of the wealthiest
members of the Paris Book Guild, July 26, 1790. Archives de Paris.
Administration of the City of Paris registered receipt of a memorandum presented by MM. Nyon l'aîné , Didot le jeune , Moutard, Cuchet, Guillot, and Huguet, publishers, printers, engravers, type and paper manufacturers in Paris, containing an exposé on the dangers with which they were threatened by the default of funds in circulation and by the personal bankruptcy of M. Debure-d'Houry, who was the principal creditor for the activities of their business. The city administrators summarized their response to the associates in the following manner:
Considering that the ruin of the six partners would entail that of several thousands of persons, in the capital as well as in the provinces, and that the reaction to this disastrous event could have unheard-of consequences, even for the public weal . . .; that the shareholders enjoy the most unimpeachable reputations and constitute one of the most important sectors of the book trade, . . . [the administration] has resolved to send its good officers to procure the access they desire to the National Assembly and the government, in order to obtain an open line of credit for 1,200,000 livres in bills of exchange . . . endorsed by the six partners. . . . MM. de Joly and de Juissieu have, moreover, been authorized to present themselves to the minister of finance and to do in this manner all that they deem necessary to insure its success.[167]
A series of negotiations ensued over the summer of 1790 between the city administration, the associated members of the Paris guild, Minister of Finance Necker, and the king himself.[168] A cache of letters and doc-
[167] BN, mss. fr. 11708, "Procès-verbal des délibérations du bureau de Paris," June 8, 1790.
[168] The documents of these negotiations were removed from the king's armoire de fer in 1793 by the Committee on Domains and have since been lost. However, at the time of their removal the following inventory of their contents was prepared by the committee and is still extant in AN, ser. C, carton 183, portfolio 107, nos. 384–393, "Inventaire des papiers saisis aux Tuilleries: armoire de fer." It reads as follows: "no. 384, chemise d'une liasse de papiers titrés de la main du roi; affaires des libraires de Paris [n.d.]; no. 385, lettre des libraires sociétaires de Paris, dans laquelle ils demandent au roi un provisoire de cent-cinquante mille livres [n.d.]; no. 386, écrit de la main du roi par lequel il announce qu'il a cautionné sur les fonds de la liste civile, les libraires associés pour une somme de 1,050,000 livres [n.d.]; no. 387, lettre de M. Necker au roi, relative au cautionnement accordé aux libraires associés. La date est de la main du roi, 29 juillet 1790; no. 388, lenre du roi à Necker dans laquelle il announce son intention de faire une avance de 150,000 livres aux libraires associés, et de les cautionner sur la liste civile du surplus de la somme dont ils ont besoin pour remplir leurs engagements, St Cloud, le 27 juillet; no. 389, lettre des libraires dans laquelle ils se plaignent au roi des lenteurs du ministre des finances à remplir les voeux du roi à leur égard [n.d.]; no. 390, écrit de la main du roi, par lequel il prend les mêmes engagements que dans la lettre no. 388 [n.d.]; no. 391, arrêt du Bureau de la Ville de Paris portant témoignage honorable en faveur des libraires associés [n.d.]; no. 392, mémoire de la société des libraires qui demande au roi de venir à son secours; cette société sollicite une avance à divers époques d'une somme de 1,200,000 livres [n.d.]; no. 393, actes notaires relatifs au cautionnement accordé par le roi à la société des libraires de Paris, 16 août, 11 et 28 septembre, 1790."
uments discovered by the revolutionary government after August 10, 1792, in the king's secret armoire de fer revealed that by July 1790 the king had decided to subsidize the guild and had made them a personal advance of 150,000 livres .[169] By August the full subsidy of 1,200,000 livres received notarial authorization.[170] The king thus succeeded in averting an immediate and total collapse of the old elites of the Paris Book Guild. The monarchy, after all, needed their presses and markets. Retaining cultural power was crucial to the fate of the regime. Over the rocky course of 1789, for example, it was the head of this partnership, Nyon l'aîné, who faithfully propagated works affirming monarchical authority, such as the Tableau des droits réels et respectifs du monarque et de ses sujets .[171]
The Révolutions de Paris was quick to elucidate the broader implications of this royal act of cultural patronage:
On August 4, the king stood security for the funds on the civil list for the associated booksellers in the amount of 1,200,000 livres . This act of benevolence is founded on the concern inspired in the king for the fate of these booksellers and the numerous artisans whom they employ, and who would find themselves without work. . . . The benevolence of his majesty makes a striking contrast with the unjust pursuits of the civil and military leaders of Paris against the press. It is well known that the associated booksellers do not employ a tenth part of the workers who are supported by the enterprises that the freedom of the press has allowed to blossom.[172]
The journal was right. The forces of cultural production were shifting elsewhere, and the Crown, in a desperate effort to maintain control over public opinion and cultural life, was bailing out a dying literary civilization.
Four months after the Crown's subsidy was enacted, the Paris publishing world was still in crisis. In a meeting of December 24, 1790, the
[169] Ibid., nos. 386, 387.
[170] Ibid., no. 393.
[171] For the royal approbation of Nyon's timely publication of the Tableau des droits réels et respectifs du monarque et de ses sujets, depuis la fondation de la monarchie jusqu'à nos jours, ou théorie des lois politiques de la monarchie française, see AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Letter from Nyon to the Administration of the Book Trade, and response, September 25, 1789. This edition ultimately received a royal subsidy.
[172] Révolutions de Paris, no. 56, August 4, 1790, 172.
Committees on Agriculture and Commerce of the National Assembly heard a report concerning "a petition from the publishers of Paris, presented by the municipality, in which they make public how their businesses continue to suffer."[173] The committees responded in much the same fashion as the Crown. On the same day they decreed:
There shall be entrusted to the municipality of Paris assignats in an amount up to 1,500,000 livres against the sale of national lands, to be distributed under the direction of the municipal government in various loans to different publishing houses in Paris that demonstrate that, as a consequence of public circumstances, they find themselves unable to meet the terms of their former obligations.[174]
Thus during the fall of 1790 at least 2,700,000 livres poured from royal and municipal coffers to the aid of the foundering cultural elites of the Old Regime. But the National Assembly had thrown good money after bad.
The Révolutions de Paris had correctly linked the crisis in the Paris Book Guild to the declaration of the freedom of the press and the revolutionary mandate to "spread enlightenment." The guild crisis was not, in origin, a fiscal crisis. The source of the problem lay in the allegiance of many prominent guild members to a system of cultural production and a literary civilization that were both rapidly becoming obsolete. The economic crisis in the guild was, in that sense, a symptom of cultural revolution.
The publishers of Paris lamented in their petition to the Committees on Agriculture and Commerce that "the Revolution completely obliterated the value of the major books that they stocked in their shops, of the costliest articles, and of those whose sale formerly was most assured."[175] Within a few years, the Revolution had swept their way of life and the culture it produced into the past. The stock of the most prominent publishers of Paris—spiritual, legal, pedagogical, and historical—lost its commercial value as nouveautés and lumières flooded the capital. Thus Debure l'aîné declared in December 1789: "I am losing considerable
[173] AN, ser. AFI, "Procès-verbal des Comités d'Agriculture et de Commerce," 179th session, December 24, 1790.
[174] Ibid.
[175] Ibid.
sums on works of jurisprudence."[176] So, too, Antoine Maugard listed in his declaration of bankruptcy on June 26, 1790, "works whose sale has been suspended by circumstances: Code de la noblesse, Remarques sur la noblesse, Lettres sur les dangers des abrégés des lois ."[177] Petit and Despilly, publishers of liturgies, wrote to the National Assembly in January 1791 to protest the ruin of six hundred families which would result from the division of France into departments, the consequent suppression of sixty-two bishoprics, and the proposal to standardize the liturgy of those remaining. They stood to see their privileges on the extant liturgies evaporate into thin air: "Twelve to fifteen million in commercial value . . . will be lost."[178] Nyon le jeune protested as well:
Citizen legislators, from 1789 until this day my business has been completely wiped out by the suppression of the religious houses charged with education, by the inactivity of the colleges; elementary books for classes and for religious use that composed almost the whole of my stock are a total loss. . . . I can estimate the nonvalue of my classical books at 60,000 livres . . . as they are no longer in use.[179]
The classical, legal, and religious culture of the Old Regime ceased to reproduce itself.
The elites of Old Regime cultural commerce were driven under along with the culture they produced. Between 1789 and 1793 eighteen members of the guild were forced to bankruptcy. Another twenty-two gave evidence of being on the verge of default. These were not establishments on the margins of Old Regime publishing but those at its very heart: the Debures, Nyons, Moutards, and Méquignons. The king's printer Philippe-Denis Pierres sold his printing shop in 1792 and was to die an employee of the postal service in Dijon in 1808.[180] His former rival, the director of the Imprimerie Royale, Jacques Anisson-Duperron, saw his
[176] BN, mss. fr. 21896, "Registre des déclarations pour la contribution patriotique," entry no. 34, December 24, 1789.
[177] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7829.
[178] AN, ser. DIX, carton 81, no. 623, "Adresse à l'Assemblée Nationale au nom et par les chargés du pouvoir des libraires et imprimeurs propriétaires des privilèges des différents liturgies de France," January 10, 1791. See also Mémoire présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale au nom des imprimeurs-libraires, propriétaires des privilèges des divers liturgies de France (Paris: N.-H. Nyon, 1790), AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 20.
[179] AN, ser. F17, carton 1008a, doss. 1347, Letter from Nyon le jeune, 8 frimaire, an II (November 29, 1793).
[180] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 12684, feuilles 2–12, 23–24, Letters from Pierres to the minister of justice and bibliographic note [1803].
monopoly on royal publications eclipsed by the new printer of the National Assembly, François-Jean Baudouin.[181] Anisson-Duperron was to fall under the blade of the guillotine in 1793.[182] By the year III (1794–1795) Debure l'aîné was working as an employee of the Temporary Commission on the Arts, cataloguing the libraries confiscated from émigrés.[183] Knapen fils , the son of the last syndic of the Paris Book Guild, left the publishing business and went to work as a functionary of the Ministry of the Interior.[184] Those who held out would be faced with the task of remaking themselves and their enterprises as the Revolution remade the literary world.
[181] AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Letter from Anisson-Duperron to the Administration of the Book Trade, and response, concerning the purview of Baudouin's printing shop.
[182] AN, ser. BB16, carton 703, doss. 17, May-August 1793; and Pétition des créanciers-fournisseurs d'Anisson-Duperron (N.p., [1793]), AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 20.
[183] AN, ser. F17, carton 1199, doss. 1, Temporary Commission on the Arts, 20 germinal, an III (April 9, 1795).
[184] Ibid., carton 1204, doss. 7, Memorandum from Knapen fils, employee in the fourth division of the Ministry of the Interior, to the Committee on Public Instruction [1800?].