Introduction

In 1789, revolutionaries in France embarked on a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization by liberating the printing and publishing world from the corporate institutions of the absolutist state and implementing a system of free-market exchange in the world of ideas. In so doing, they opened up unprecedented possibilities for French men and women to translate their thoughts and opinions into print, to circulate them among one another, and to spread them throughout the world. By reconstructing the new publishing world that emerged from the revolutionary struggles of the publishers and printers of Paris and the nation's new cultural legislators between 1789 and 1810, I hope with this book to open up a new view of the relationship between democratic revolution and modern cultural life.

Historians and literary critics have traditionally treated the literary culture of the French Revolution with total disregard if not utter contempt. Thus the literary critic Béatrice Didier recently observed that "most literary histories depict the revolutionary period as a catastrophic epoch for literary creativity."^[1] But historians have lately begun to challenge this negative view of revolutionary cultural life. The work of François Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Lynn Hunt, in particular, has put the problem of culture squarely at the center of the history of the French

[1] Béatrice Didier, Ecrire la Révolution, 1789–1799 (Paris: PUF, 1989), 5 (my translation).

Revolution.^[2] Instead of viewing the Revolution as a catastrophic interruption of the longer durée of French cultural progress, these historians have asserted rather that it marked a beginning, indeed a founding moment in the shaping of modern cultural life. Borrowing insights from both symbolic anthropology and literary theory, these historians have argued that revolutionary politics, by asserting the rule of "the people" over the rule of the king, precipitated nothing less than a total reworking of public modes of representation and systems of signification: the symbolic replaced the iconic; a utopian, "mythic present" replaced tradition; and transparency replaced dissimulation. These historians have convincingly demonstrated that a distinctively modern political culture issued forth from the revolutionary period.

However, the French Revolution did not simply produce new cultural forms suited to the new regime; it reorganized the most basic mechanisms of cultural power, and in so doing it opened up cultural life to new producers and instituted new, and sometimes contradictory, modes of cultural production. In order to grasp the full magnitude and the significance of the cultural revolution that occurred in France between 1789 and 1799, we must look not only at the new systems of meaning that the Revolution produced, but deeper still, at the new systems of making meanings that the Revolution, both wittingly and unwittingly, made possible. This calls for a shift of focus from symbolic and textual interpretation to a history of cultural practices.^[3]

[2] See, in particular, Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); François Furet, Pensée la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); and Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

[3] The socio-cultural historians who descend from the French Annales school offer a valuable orientation for such a project; since the publication of L'Apparition du livre by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958, there has been what can only be described as an explosion of research in the history of printing, publishing, reading, and "the book" in early modern Europe, and particularly in early modern France. Main landmarks of this historiography include Febvre and Martin, L'Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Geneviève Bollème et al., Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1965); Henri-Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIle siècle, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1969); Natalie Z. Davis, "Printing and the People," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 189–226; Natalie Z. Davis, "Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983): 69–88; Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des lumières en province. Académies et académiciens provinciaux (1680–1789) (Paris: Mouton, 1978); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire de l'édition française , 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1983-); Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'ancien régime (Paris: Seuils, 1987); and Roger Chartier, ed., Les Usages de l'imprimé (XVe–X1Xe siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1987).

This book thus sets out to explore not the political culture of the Revolution, but rather its cultural politics. It asks what kind of cultural system the Enlightenment philosophers envisioned, and what kind of cultural world their revolutionary heirs ultimately created. Was cultural power redistributed along with political power after 1789? If so, according to what principles and along what lines? What was the relationship of political authority to revolutionary cultural life, and how did this relationship evolve over the course of the Revolution? Was there simply one "revolutionary culture," or did revolutionary politics open up the cultural world to competing cultural visions and practices? Who produced the culture, or cultures, of the Revolution and toward what ends?

The book begins by examining the revolutionary movement to liberate Enlightenment thought from the repressive cultural institutions of the Old Regime through the battle cry for "freedom of the press." Both the meaning and the consequences of the declaration of press freedom encompassed far more than simply an end to prepublication censorship. This declaration brought down the entire literary system of the Old Regime, from the royal administration of the book trade, with its system of literary privileges and its army of censors and inspectors, to the monopoly of the Paris Book Guild on the professions of printing, publishing, and bookselling. Between 1789 and 1793, the mandate to liberate the Enlightenment from censorship and to refound cultural life on enlightened principles translated itself into a massive deregulation of the publishing world. By 1793 anyone could own a printing press or engage in publishing and bookselling. What is more, with the abolition of privileges and prepublication censorship, it appeared that anyone could print or publish anything. Thus the first few years of the Revolution saw the corporatist literary system of the Old Regime entirely dismantled and replaced with a free market in the world of ideas.

These changes did not, however, inaugurate the kind of cultural life their authors had envisioned. Cultural anarchy ensued in the wake of the declaration of "freedom of the press." The collapse of royal regulation

put the notion of authorship itself into question. Pamphleteers reveled in anonymity, while literary pirates exploited the demise of authors' "privileges." Far from propagating enlightened ideas, the freed presses of Paris poured forth incendiary, and often seditious, political pamphlets, as well as works that appeared libelous or obscene to the new men in power. Once legalized and freed for all to copy and sell, the great texts of the Enlightenment fell out of print. The revolutionary reading market demanded novels and amusements, not science and useful knowledge. In the face of these first consequences of the freeing of the press, the cultural policy-makers in successive national assemblies came to recognize that they would have to intervene directly in the world of publishing if their ideal of an enlightened republic was to be realized. As a result, between 1793 and 1799 the republican government deployed a series of new initiatives intended to refound cultural life on liberal principles.

These republican experiments in democratizing the publishing world, however, were unable to avert a continuing commercial crisis in Paris publishing after 1799. Why did the laissez-faire policies of the republican government fail to produce a viable commercial book trade? How did the Napoleonic regime succeed in wedding the commercial interests of big printers and publishers to its own political needs? Finally, what were the consequences of the Napoleonic re-regulation of the printing and publishing world in 1810 for the character and future of French literary culture in the nineteenth century?

The cultural history of the French Revolution is above all a story of political conflict over cultural power—the power to create and circulate meanings, and the power to interpret them. How was this power to be embodied, distributed, organized, and regulated? The modern publishing world in France emerged as a result of repeated political struggles and negotiations between Paris publishers and the cultural policy-makers of the revolutionary governments between 1789 and 1810, as they tried to reconcile their capitalist economic impulses with their enlightened cultural ideals. It is only by reconstructing this story of the political revolution in publishing that we can begin fully to understand the process by which French literary culture issued from the salons of Voltaire into the commercial publishing world of Balzac.