Chapter Four
Cultural Crisis and Literary Politics, 1793–1799

In order to liberate thought and facilitate the progress of enlightenment, the National Convention inaugurated an era of freedom of commerce in the world of ideas. Between 1789 and 1793, the government dismantled the legal and institutional infrastructure that had organized French publishing. With the law of 1793, the National Convention recognized the property rights of living authors but abolished all former literary privileges. As a consequence, the entire literary inheritance of France was released from private hands into the public domain. In place of the vast cultural bureaucracy of the Old Regime, the revolutionary government merely established a voluntary legal depository at the Bibliothèque Nationale. There would be no national administration to regulate or inspect the book trade during the republican period.

The disastrous consequences of this deregulationist cultural policy for book publishing were immediately apparent. Continuing crisis in the publishing world throughout the republican period prompted the government to rethink its laissez-faire policies toward the printed word and to evolve two distinct paths of reintervention into publishing: the centralization and expansion of government printing on the one hand, and subsidies to commercial publishing on the other.

The Cultural Crisis of the Year II

The reign of "the rights of genius" began as the Revolution entered into its darkest moment. On September 2, 1793, the National Convention

applied the finishing touches to the law on literary property.^[1] Yet the very same day, the deputies also passed an emergency decree requisitioning all Parisian presses for the service of the nation.^[2] This was only one of the many ironies of the political riptide in which the purveyors of the printed word, new and old, were to find themselves. Authors had been granted their political rights and publishers given a clear legal footing for their commerce. It was to be near impossible, however, for them to make use of, let alone benefit from, this new legal situation.

The wars at home and abroad wreaked havoc on national and international commerce in the book trade. By July 1793 the assignat had lost approximately 75 percent of its face value.^[3] The government then responded to soaring inflation with the maximum , extended to all goods and services on September 29, 1793.^[4] Monetary fluctuations threw the book market into chaos, and then brought it to a standstill. According to the editor of the Courrier de la librairie , Chemin fils, by the time a book dealer's price list reached customers, it could no longer be guaranteed. He therefore announced that he was discontinuing his catalogue sales until "the market restabilizes."^[5] J.-F. Morin and A. Lenoir, the editors of the Nouvelliste littéraire , repeatedly echoed similar difficulties with price fluctuations because of the war and the assignat .^[6] Inflation and monetary restrictions brought Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's production of the Encyclopédie méthodique to a halt in 1795. And according to Panckoucke, he was not alone: "The most everyday books are lacking, the stockrooms are empty, and no one dares to go to press."^[7]

To make matters worse, because of the war the government prohibited exports of any kind to hostile nations. The book trade with Austria,

[1] Madival and Laurent (eds.), Archives parlementaires 73:293–294.

[2] AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 20, doc. 17, "Décret de la Convention Nationale du 2 septembre 1793 . . . portant que tous les imprimeurs de Paris sont en état de réquisition pour le service public," [Paris: 1793].

[3] Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 1: 1715–1799 (Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1963), 226.

[4] François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Marabout, 1973), 518.

[5] Chemin fils, ed., "Avis important," Courrier de la librairie, no. 27, prairial, an III [May-June 1795], 1.

[6] The Nouvelliste littéraire was published in Paris from germinal, an IV, to germinal, an IX (April 1796–April 1806); see especially nos. 7–8, 8; and nos. 9–10, 8.

[7] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Mémoire sur les assignats et sur la manière de les considérer dans l'état de la baisse actuelle (Paris, 1795); cited by Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, 495.

Belgium, England, and Spain therefore ground to a halt. Trade with neutral countries, notably Switzerland, was disrupted as well.^[8] Domestic commerce, too, was in a state of chaos as a result of the revolts in the south and the civil war in the west. The Paris publisher Louis Ravier later recalled the wartime loss of sales as the most important cause of the "prolonged stagnation in the book trade."^[9] Disruptions of the book trade by the war were so extensive that even the most sought-after works, such as Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais's famous Kehl editions of Voltaire's works, could not find a market. And if Voltaire could not sell, Ravier reflected, nothing could, because "it would take nothing less than Voltaire to survive such violent blows."^[10]

Statistical evidence also suggests that by 1794 book publishing was at a near standstill. The newly established legal depository at the Bibliothèque Nationale registered only 69 works in its first four months of operation (July 21–December 31, 1793).^[11] Many of these works were not even new titles from the year 1793, but editions dating back to 1791. In 1794, the dépôt recorded receipt of only 396 titles, as compared to the 728 registered by royal authorities in 1787, or the global figure of 1,687 works, both legal and illegal, published in 1788!^[12] The figures compiled by Angus Martin, Vivienne G. Milne, and Richard Frautschi in their massive Bibliographie du genre romanesque français reveal a strikingly similar pattern to those of the dépôt légal: the publication of fiction dropped dramatically from over one hundred new novels in 1789 to only sixteen in 1794. The number of reeditions of novels reveals a less dramatic, but similar, decline for the same period.^[13] Thus, despite the "declaration of the rights of genius," by the year II Paris book publishing was in a state of crisis.

In early March 1794, Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune, the director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, sent separate reports to the Com-

[8] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Letter from Batilliot, Paris publisher, to the Committee on Public Safety, 12 floréal, an II (May 1, 1794). See also Jean-Baptiste Le-febvre de Villebrune, "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie," 29 ventôse, [an II] (March 19, 1794), in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:612, 613, 617.

[9] Louis Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie (Paris: Crapart, Caille & Ravier, 1807), xv.

[10] Ibid., 260.

[11] BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1, July 1793 to the year VII [September 21, 1799].

[12] According to Estivals, Statistique bibliographique, 405, 415.

[13] Angus Martin, Vivienne G. Milne, and Richard Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français (Paris: France Expansion; London: Mansell, 1977), xxxvi–xxxix.

mittee on Public Safety and the Committee on Public Instruction declaring a crisis in Paris publishing: "There is total stagnation. Something must be done . . . as much for the general good of the fatherland as to avert the total ruin of the publishers of Paris."^[14] Villebrune outlined the central causes of the crisis in book publishing as follows:

First: Fewer customers; [in former times,] many useless people fastidiously formed libraries that they were incapable of reading. Incapable of being republicans, they have fled the country.

Second: Those who educate themselves and read in order to educate themselves, absorbed by the defense of the fatherland or by the posts that they occupy, are not reading or are reading much less.

Third: The interruption of commerce with hostile countries has closed this branch of export.

Fourth: The obstacles imposed on commerce with neutral countries.^[15]

Emigration and war, in short, had closed down literary markets by depriving dealers of aristocratic, bourgeois, and foreign customers.

While the war ravaged the elite book market both within and beyond France, the Terror deprived publishers and printers of the new markets in political literature that had opened up after the collapse of state censorship in 1789. By 1792 repression had begun to send an icy chill across the printing and publishing trades. The laws of December 4, 1792, and especially March 29, 1793, turned political journalism and pamphleteering into potentially lethal professions: any call for the dissolution of the present government became punishable by death.^[16] The law against suspects of September 17, 1793, still further smoothed the path from the printing press to the guillotine.^[17] In the Histoire générale de la presse française , Jacques Godechot writes: "From June 2, 1793, until the fall of Robespierre and the great Committee on Public Safety on 9 thermidor, year II [July 27, 1794] . . . the press no longer enjoyed any freedom."^[18]

Not surprisingly, between 1792 and 1793 the number of journals published in Paris dropped by one-half, from 216 to 113. In the year II

[14] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 2836, feuille 27, Report from Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune to the Committee on Public Safety, on the state of the book trade, 12 ventôse, an II (March 2, 1794).

[15] Villebrune, "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie française," in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:613.

[16] Jacques Godechot, "La Presse française sous la Révolution et l'Empire," in Bellanger (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:504.

[17] For the application of this law against journalists, see ibid., 508.

[18] Ibid.

the number of periodicals circulating in Paris hit an all-time low of 106 for the revolutionary period (1788–1799).^[19] Further, the repression of unpatriotic printed matter was not limited to political journals. No genre was above suspicion. Surveillance extended from posters and pamphlets to novels and scientific publications.^[20] Even the character of a bookseller's clientele could come under scrutiny.^[21]

Terror ground the Paris printing presses to a halt. Thus one of the minister of the interior's secret agents in Paris, Le Breton, reported on March 3, 1794:

Printers are complaining that even at the very modest wage rates for which they are now working, they can no longer find any work because of the large number of printing shops that have been suppressed. They say that if people were allowed to express their ideas freely they would not be in this situation. They would have too much work and there would not even be enough printers in the city.^[22]

The stifling of public discussion and dissent left the commercial presses idle.

The war and the Terror thus conspired with scissorlike inevitability to cut down the old book dealers along with the militant young political printers of Paris. Another secret agent of the Interior Ministry, the bookseller Siret, summed up the state of the publishing and printing world in Paris at the end of December 1793:

The thirty-six formerly privileged printers who used to have an exclusive monopoly on all the typographical work in the capital continuously em-

[19] Ibid., 436, 504.

[20] For an example of posters, see Chemin fils, printer, 26 messidor, an II (July 14, 1794), in AN, ser. F7, carton 4645, doss. 2. For pamphlets, see François Froullé, printer, and Thomas Levigneur, bookseller, 8 ventôse, an II (February 26, 1794), in AN, ser. W, carton 332, no. 566, and AN, ser. AF II, carton 294, docs. 107–108; Philippe-Denis Pierres, printer, and Jean-Nicolas Barba, publisher, 25 nivôse, an II (January 14, 1794), in AN, ser. BB3, carton 81a, docs. 361–364; and Charlier and Senneville (Rioux-Maillon), booksellers, germinal-thermidor, an II (March-August 1794), in AN, ser. F7, carton 4774, doss. 93, doc. 3; AN, ser. F7, carton 4775, doss. 17, doc. 4; AN, ser. F7, carton 4637, doss. 4; and AN, AF II, carton 294, doc. 145. For an example of novels and scientific publications, see Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet, publisher, 8 thermidor, an II (July 26, 1794), in AN, ser. W, carton 53, doss. 3401, and AN, ser. F7, carton 4658, doss. 4.

[21] For suspect clientele, see Victor Desenne, publisher, September 19, 1793, in AN, ser. F7, carton 3688, doss. 3, doc. 2.

[22] Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur, Rapports des agents secrets du ministre de l'intérieur (Paris: Picard, 1910–1978), 5:50, "Rapport de Le Breton, 13 ventôse, an II" (March 3, 1794).

ployed twelve to fifteen hundred workers. Four hundred presses running continuously consumed at a minimum, in Paris alone, 250,000 reams of paper a year; today they don't even consume half this much.

The new printing shops to which liberty has given birth, although numerous, have in general very little work, to judge by the number of presses they can keep busy. It is easy to become convinced that, including journals, posters, pamphlets, all varieties of literature, and trade jobs, paper consumption only barely equals what it did in former times.^[23]

Bust had followed boom. And although Siret observed that the former members of the Paris Book Guild were suffering the greatest losses, the new presses of Paris, according to his report, now too found themselves underemployed.

To make matters worse, in the fall of 1793 the Committee on Public Safety announced its intention to achieve governmental and national unity by centralizing government patronage and production of printed matter. But this intensification in the production and dissemination of official documents did not lead to an increase in government contracts for Paris printers. It resulted, rather, in the expansion of government printing houses at their expense.

The effort to centralize the publication of laws, begun with the requisitioning of pressmen and presses in September 1793, received new impetus on November 18, 1793, from a report to the National Convention by Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne on behalf of the Committee on Public Safety.^[24] The committee proposed that the government compile one complete and exclusive Bulletin des lois , to be printed and distributed exclusively by a national "imprimerie des lois." This measure, he wrote, "is simple because it removes all of the intermediaries so that there will no longer be any separation between the legislator and the people. . . . This luminous idea was conceived under the Constituent Assembly. . . . Be wise enough to draw upon it and make use of it in your turn in order to consolidate the Republic."^[25] When the convention promulgated its principles of revolutionary government on 14 frimaire, year II (December 4, 1793), the first section of the decree made provisions to com-

[23] Ibid., 1:415–416, "Rapport de Siret, 5 nivôse, an II" (December 25, 1793).

[24] Report by Billaud-Varenne to the National Convention, 28 brumaire, an II (November 18, 1793); cited in François-Antoine-Brutus Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale de France (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1861), 144–146.

[25] Ibid., 146.

mence implementation of the Billaud-Varenne plan.^[26] The "intermediaries"—that is, commercial and departmental printers—were to be removed from the process of government publication.

A decree of 27 frimaire, year II (December 17, 1793), transformed the old printing shop for the royal lottery on the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs into a new Imprimerie de l'Administration Nationale.^[27] The national Imprimerie des Lois was then constructed in the Maison Beaujon in the faubourg Honoré during the winter and spring of the year II. In order to produce a Bulletin des lois with press runs estimated at two hundred thousand copies, the printing shop had to contain 120 presses.^[28] The new printing house was supplied, in part, by the construction of new presses, but also through confiscation of the presses of suppressed printers.^[29] For example, when Jacques Anisson-Duperron, the director of the Imprimerie du Louvre (formerly the Imprimerie Royale), perished in the Terror of the spring of 1794, his presses were moved from the Louvre to the Maison Beaujon.^[30] The presses of Momoro, Hébert, Froullé, Nicolas, Parisau, Deschamps, and Tassin de l'Etang—all similarly convicted as counterrevolutionaries—met the same fate.^[31] With the printed word as its most powerful medium, the government wielded repression and centralization simultaneously in the effort to produce a unified political culture.

The Committee on Public Safety did not limit its interest in controlling the printed word to the publication of laws. Their propaganda efforts led them into all genres of printed literature. Less than a year after the abolition of the royal academies and literary societies, the committee initiated an effort to establish a corps of official writers.^[32] On April 16, 1794, it sent out a call to all poets "to celebrate the principal events of the

[26] Ibid., 147.

[27] Ibid., 154.

[28] Ibid., 151.

[29] One hundred new presses were ordered from the shop at the Imprimerie du Louvre. According to Duprat, thirty new presses were actually delivered; ibid., 152.

[30] Ibid., 165.

[31] Ibid., 166. For more on the fate of Froullé's business, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:311.

[32] The National Convention suppressed all official societies and academies by their decrees of August 8 and 12, 1793. For the plans of the Committee on Public Safety, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1008b, doss. 1487, Letter from the Committee on Public Safety to the Committee on Public Instruction requesting a list of patriotic writers, 17 frimaire, an II (December 7, 1793); AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, for the decree ordering the printing and distribution of the Recueil des actions héroiques et civiques des républicains français , 130nivôse, an II (January 2, 1794); and ibid., doss. 8, for the Committee on Public Safety's calls for patriotic poems, hymns, and plays, 27 floreéal, an II (May 16, 1794).

, an II (May 16, 1794).

Revolution, to compose hymns and patriotic poems, republican dramatic plays, to publish the heroic actions of the soldiers of freedom . . . to give to history the severity and firmness appropriate to the annals of a great people."^[33] These works, the committee promised, would be printed by the government. Further, while systematically repressing independent publishing of journals and pamphlets, the government committed its own presses and millions of livres, in the form of secret discretionary funds attributed to various ministries and committees, to both officially sanctioned and unofficially subsidized ephemeral literature.^[34]

The consumption patterns of the industry's most critical resource—paper—are telling evidence of the expansion of government publishing. By the winter of 1793–1794 the Commission on Provisions and Subsistence became concerned about potential government shortages of paper.^[35] But according to the minister of the interior's agent, Siret, there was no real shortage of paper, only a change in patterns of consumption, which created the appearance of a shortage:

Paper consumption . . . is not as prodigious as one would think; it is rather its concentration that makes it appear so great to our eyes. Commercial consumption barely equals what it did before the Revolution. There is thus no real increase in consumption but that which is the result of the work of the Convention, the executive power, and of the tasks delegated to other constituted authorities.^[36]

Only the government was consuming more paper. Commercial printers were consuming less.

[33] AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 8, "Extrait des registres des arretes[arrêtés du Comité de Salut Public," 27 floréal, an II (May 16, 1794).

[34] For the extent of officially and unofficially subsidized publications, see Alphonse Aulard, "La Presse officieuse pendant la Terreur," Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française, 1st ser. (n.d.): 227–240; Pierre Caron, "Les Publications officieuses du Ministère de I'Intérieur en 1793 et 1794," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 14 (1910): 5–43; Claude Perroud, "Roland et la presse subventionnée," Révolution française 62 (1912): 206–213, 315–332, 396–419; Albert Mathiez, "Mélanges. La Presse subventionnée en l'an II," Annales révolutionnaires 10 (1918): 112–113; and Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse franéaise 1:510. The Committee on Public Safety submitted nine technical and educational pamphlets to the dépôt légal in its own name in 1794; see BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1, July 1793 to the year VII [September 21, 1799].

[35] Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur 1:414n.5, "Adresse . . . sur la consommation du papier du 9 frimaire [an II]" (November 29, 1793).

[36] Ibid., 415–416, "Rapport de Siret, 5 nivôse, an II" (December 25, 1793).

A look at the number of books registered for legal protection at the Bibliothèque Nationale during the revolutionary period, in conjunction with figures for legal and illegal book publishing in the decade before 1789 and for Parisian periodicals produced during the Revolution, provides a vivid depiction of the scissorlike cultural crisis of the year II (figure 6).^[37] As Daniel Roche and Roger Chartier have observed, compilation and interpretation of bibliographic statistics from the revolutionary period is a problematic affair.^[38] Not only are the sources fragmentary, but basic definitions of what constitutes a "book," a "periodical," or a "publication" vary widely. Two separate studies for the years 1790–1791 and 1799 conclude that current statistics may represent as little as half the actual amount published in this period. Nevertheless, all available evidence, both quantitative and otherwise, suggests that the basic shape of the curve

[37] A definitive quantitative study of French publications during the revolutionary period has thus far eluded historians. The discontinuous and fragmentary nature of the extant documentation from the revolutionary period is one of the most telling consequences of the deregulationist cultural policies of the government. Because there was no obligatory national deposit between 1789 and 1810, no definitive national record remains of books in print. Numerous book dealers attempted to fill this gap with commercial trade journals; yet as invaluable as these are, none achieved the comprehensiveness aspired to, and none survived for more than a few years of the period in question. The only known bibliographic source that spans the entire revolutionary period is the manuscript register of the dépôt léga at the Bibliothèque Nationale, from its founding on July 19, 1793, to the revival of the national Administration of the Book Trade in 1810, now conserved in the Archives Modernes of the Bibliothèque Nationale, CXXIX. Several decades ago the most noted bibliographer of the Old Regime and the Revolution, Robert Estivals, made a monumental effort to tabulate all official government records of French publications for the eighteenth century, including the revolutionary period; see Estivals, Statistique bibliographique, 404–405, 415.

[38] For a discussion of the technical problems in arriving at definitive bibliographic statistics for the revolutionary period, and an assessment of the problems with Estivals's work in particular, see Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche, "L'Histoire quantitative du livre," Revue française d'histoire du livre, n.s., no. 16 (1977): 480; and Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche, eds., "Les Livres ont-ils fait la Révolution?" in Livre et Révolution , Mélanges de la Sorbonne 9 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), 12–13. Registration at the dépôt légal was completely voluntary, and thus it cannot be considered an accurate account of what was actually in print. As figure 6 reveals, the numbers of works more than doubled when deposit became obligatory with the Napoleonic re-regulation in 1810. Further evidence that the actual number of books in print probably needs to be nearly doubled is cited by Roche and Chartier in "Livres ont-ils fait," 12; see also Jean Dhombres, "Books: Reshaping Science," in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print, 178–181. Further, the dépôt functioned poorly, as Estivals has shown, and as a consequence is severely biased, largely for the logistical reason of proximity, toward Parisian authors and publishers. The number of works submitted by non-Parisian publishers between 1793 and 1799 totaled only 92 out of 2,593; the first foreign deposit was made only in 1796 (see appendix 5).

Figure 6.
Correlation of Officially Registered Books and Parisian Periodicals Published Between 1789 and 1800
Sources: for books, Robert Estivals, La Statistique bibliographique de la France sous la monarchie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 404–405, 415;
for periodicals, Claude Bellanger, ed., Histoire générale de la presse française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 1969), 1:436.

is essentially accurate.^[39] As David Bellos puts it, "The general contours of the evolution are . . . clear enough: expansion toward the end of the eighteenth century, a brutal crash during the revolutionary period, a slow recovery at the end of the eighteenth century, a modest and stable level under the Consulate, [and] growth under the Empire."^[40]

After expanding rapidly in the 1780s, book publishing plummeted following deregulation in the early years of the Revolution. Yet whereas book publishing collapsed, between 1789 and 1792 the periodical press boomed, only to be dramatically cut back in 1793 by political repression. By 1793, a crisis in both book and periodical publishing is indisputably clear. Finally, a distinct revival in book publishing during the Directory (1795–1799), Consulate, and early Empire (1800–1808) was accompanied by a notable decline (due again to government repression) of the periodical press.

The crisis of the year II crushed the Paris publishing and printing world with multiple blows. Inflation and war completely disrupted the elite book market, both within and beyond France, while political repression shut down the new mass markets in popular political newspapers and ephemera. More harmful still than the contingencies of the Terror and the war was an alarming new development in the government's cultural policies: the centralization of government printing and publishing at the Imprimerie des Lois. Deprived of both elite and popular, foreign and domestic markets, as well as of the work created by the expansion of government publishing, the newly liberated Paris publishing and printing world found itself in desperate straits. Throughout the fall and spring of the year II, Paris printers, individually and collectively, sent desperate appeals for work to the Committee on Public Instruction.^[41] Their appeals did not go unanswered.

[39] The overall contours of figure 6 are further confirmed by Martin, Milne, and Frautschi in their massive Bibliographie de genre romanesque français: the publication of novels dropped dramatically from several hundred new ones in 1789 to only sixteen in 1794. Further, some of the limitations of the dépôt are in fact virtues: the bias toward Paris, for instance, actually increases its statistical significance for the Parisian publishing community.

[40] David Bellos, "La Conjoncture de la production," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition française 2:552.

[41] See AN, ser. F17, carton 1008c, doss. 1559, Letter from Beauvais, printer, rue de la Sorbonne, to the Committee on Public Instruction, requesting to be requisitioned as a consequence of their decree, [1793–1794]; AN, ser. F17, carton 1009a bis, doss. 1992, Letter from Lavoye, printer, to the Committee on Public Instruction, 25 pluviôse, an II (February 13, 1794); and AN, ser. F17, carton 1009b, doss. 2071, Appeal for employment from Deltufo, printer, to the Committee on Public Instruction, 9 prairial, an II (May 28, 1794). Finally, the committee registered receipt of an appeal from "printers without occupation" on 5 prairial, an II (May 24, 1794); see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:471.

Cultural Thermidor

As the Committee on Public Safety pursued its objective of political unity by centralizing and nationalizing the production of printed matter, the Committee on Public Instruction was made painfully aware of the initial results of its fledgling cultural policies pertaining to the printed word. They had liberated man's reason from the inquisitions and superstitions of the Old Regime and given legislative consecration to his genius and its fruits. They had abolished private claims on the great classical and Enlightenment texts and made them the inheritance of all. They had opened the professions of printing, publishing, and book-selling to anyone. But it was clear that "enlightenment" was not spreading in every direction, at least not by means of the printed word.

In early March 1794, the Committees on Public Safety and Public Instruction each received separate reports from Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, concerning the state of publishing.^[42] Something had to be done, he insisted, to reverse the total stagnation of the book trade.^[43] With the exception of rare books and military maps, Villebrune argued, there could be no reason to prohibit the export of printed matter, even to hostile nations. The economic benefits of allowing exportation of books were obvious. Villebrune, however, was not a man of narrow commercial concerns. He appealed, in all sincerity, to the cultural vision of the committee as well: "It is important to the French nation that its revolutionary principles be propagated beyond its frontiers, because thus impregnated with liberty, the diverse peoples who surround us will resist all the better the perfidious plots of their tyrants."^[44] By relegalizing the export of books, commercial pub-

[42] BN, hour. acq. fr. 2836, feuilles 27–29, Report from Villebrune to the Committee on Public Safety concerning the state of the book trade, 12 ventôse, an II (March 2, 1794), forwarded to the Committee on Public Instruction on 24 ventôse, an II (March 14, 1794); and AN, ser. F17, carton 1009c, doss. 2216, Report from Villebrune to the Committee on Public Instruction entitled "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie française," received by the committee on 29 ventôse, an II (March 19, 1794). This second report has been reproduced in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:612–618.

[43] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 2836, feuille 27, Report from Villebrune to the Committee on Public Safety concerning the state of the book trade, 12 ventôse, an II (March 2, 1794).

[44] Villebrune, "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie française," in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:614.

lishing could be revived and at the same time be made to serve as an agent of global revolution.

But it was not just the lack of production and markets that worried Villebrune. It was also the kind of works publishers were producing that disturbed him. There was no guarantee that commercial publishing houses, if revived, would rise as a vanguard of republican literary culture. In fact, the streets of Paris offered ample evidence to the contrary. Thus, for example, the agent Mercier reported to the minister of the interior on 17 nivôse, year II (January 6, 1794): "The marchands des nouveautés are selling lots of books better suited to corrupting morals than to improving the minds of citizens. Without public morality there will be no true republicans."^[45] Villebrune's own observations confirmed these reports of the negative influence of the freed presses on public morals. He offered the following diagnosis of the situation:

Consider the publisher for a moment as any ordinary manufacturer. His business augments and diminishes in proportion to the orders he receives. The type of product in which he invests his industry is that for which there is the greatest demand. . . . But at the same time as the fashions of the moment determine the nature of his product, he in turn, by the works with which he inundates his fatherland, acts upon the tastes of his fellow citizens, implanting in an ever greater number of heads further fantasies, daydreams, and useless notions which a few opinion makers have made the rage of the moment. Thus there is a relationship between the moral judgment of the publisher and public morality. When the caprices of fashion encourage courses of study that are destructive of reason, or immoral readings, the publisher spreads this venom into all classes of society, and the immorality of the Old Regime Court reaches into even the most remote corners of the country.^[46]

In Villebrune's view, a pattern of feedback between the reading public and the commercial publisher made cultural transformation through purely laissez-faire commercial publishing impossible. The vicious circle of cultural reproduction was all the more difficult to break because of the power of the printing press, which multiplied exponentially the culture that it reproduced. The most immediate cultural consequence of the freeing of the press, he concluded, was the uninhibited and contin-

[45] Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur 3:211, "Rapport de Mercier, 17 nivôse, an II" (January 6, 1794).

[46] Villebrune, "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie française," in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:614.

uous reinfection, indeed spreading, of the decadent literary tastes of the Old Regime Court.

The problem, as Villebrune saw it, was how to intervene in such a manner as to break the cycle of reproduction without undermining or compromising the newly instituted rights of freedom of commerce, expression, and the press. The answer was not simple:

Where minds are not already shaped, it is to be feared that the tastes of consumers imbued with prerevolutionary ideas will not be in harmony with the spirit of the nation. In this situation, the mercantile interests of the publisher do not coincide with the national interest, and it becomes necessary for the government to intervene in the publishing world. . . . But in what way? The prohibition of works contrary to republican principles is indispensable. . . . But there are other works, as dull as they are useless to the development of the mind: they cannot be prohibited merely for that. Works of this genre form the large majority of what is printed, they are the most sought after. . . . Among these works are compilations, excerpts, [and] almost all novels. . . . The publisher is not guilty for engaging in this kind of business . . . because these works have no other vice than their uselessness.^[47]

If this decadent literary culture of the Old Regime could not be censored, how were the reading habits of the nation to be reformed? Villebrune thought he had an answer:

The fatherland should offer the publisher a compensation that will balance in his eyes the benefits that he sacrifices for the greater good. . . .

First: Civic awards to the publishers who in the course of the year have published the greatest number of useful works.

Second: . . . To honorific awards could be added the acquisition of copies of works judged to be useful [for the national library system]. By this organization of encouragements, the book trade will preserve all the liberty it needs to keep itself alive, and the government, by a constant, but not onerous, policy, could redirect people's minds from their former emptiness toward more useful objectives.^[48]

The Old Regime had attempted to shape minds through a system of censorship and privileges. Under the Republic these mechanisms were to be replaced by "awards" and "encouragements." The principles of freedom of commerce, expression, and the press could thus be upheld.

Villebrune's reports reveal an important shift in both the underlying principles and the practical aspects of revolutionary cultural policy. His

[47] Ibid., 615.

[48] Ibid., 615–616.

proposal betrayed a recognition that a "free market in ideas" was not adequate to insure enlightenment of the nation. The minds of citizens, if freed from prescriptive constraints, might not naturally or easily reason toward enlightenment or the public good. Eighteenth-century France, even after the fall of the Old Regime, was not, after all, a state of nature. Indeed, the very mechanism on which the government had placed so much faith as an agent of enlightenment, the printing press, had proved that it could act equally as a force obstructing the course of reason, by reproducing and multiplying the public's preference for an aristocratic reading diet of books intended for leisure and pleasure, rather than for works that encouraged the republican virtues of productivity and self-improvement. These sober insights of the year II contributed to a significant redefinition and expansion of the revolutionary government's patronage of the printed word.

Villebrune's call for positive government intervention in the nation's cultural life could not have been more timely. Indeed, it is possible that his reports were solicited by the two committees to which they were sent. The Committee on Public Instruction, at any rate, had just been called upon to reassess the question of literary patronage. With the nationalization of state finances in 1790 and the suppression of the royal academies and literary societies in 1793, government patronage of cultural and intellectual life had fallen into total disarray.^[49] As early as 1791, the National Assembly had seen the need to encourage the production of patriotic works for educational and political purposes, but persistent suspicion of any official reinstitutionalization of culture prevented anything more than stopgap measures and piecemeal discretionary patronage on the part of the government.^[50] In February 1793, therefore, the

[49] For more on the deinstitutionalization of government patronage, see Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 228–285; Françoise Waquet, "La Bastille académique," in La Carmagnole des muses. L'Homme de lettres et l'artiste dans la Révolution, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), 19–36; and Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 168–192.

[50] A decree of the National Assembly of August 3, 1790, assured financial encouragement for "les artistes, savants, gens de lettres, élèves, auteurs de recherches utiles aux progrès des sciences et des arts" (title 2, article 6). Another decree, on August 14, 1790, assured that the assembly would honor all current government subsidies and contracts for the arts, sciences, and letters, and instructed that reports and bills should be submitted to the Committee on Finance. The National Assembly awarded several subsidies and pensions over the course of 1790–1791. See Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbal du Comité d'Instruction Publique, xi, xvi. For early efforts to encourage patriotic, and especially anticlerical, writing, see the assembly's decree of November 23, 1791, exhorting citizens to produce works against fanaticism and promising public compensation; see ibid., 59.

National Convention ordered the Committee on Public Instruction to prepare a report assessing state financing of cultural patronage. In so doing it offered the occasion for a systematic rethinking of the appropriate relationship of republican government to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation.^[51]

The project received new momentum during 1793 from the repeated calls for public assistance from authors as notable as Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre who had lost the pensions and positions they had held under the Old Regime.^[52] On July 20, 1793, the committee assigned Henri Grégoire the task of drawing up a major report and proposal for legislation to encourage the arts, letters, and sciences.^[53] By early February 1794, the Committee on Public Instruction ordered Grégoire to collaborate on the proposal with the Committee on Public Safety.^[54] Villebrune's reports on the state of the book trade were forwarded to Grégoire to assist him in his task.^[55]

Griégoire's report, Sur les encouragements, récompenses et pensions à accorder aux savants, aux gens de lettres et aux artistes, was finally presented to the National Convention on 17 vendémiaire, year III (October 5, 1794).^[56] Grégoire explicitly rejected the noninterventionist, laissez-faire stance that had until then oriented the cultural policies of the revolutionary

[51] AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, Decree of 13 frimaire, an II (December 3, 1793). Article 4 of the decree is cited by Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:413n.3: "Sur la proposition des Comités de Liquidation et de l'Examen des Comptes, la Convention Nationale chargea le Comité d'Instruction Publique de se faire rendre compte . . . de l'emploi des sommes accordées pour l'encouragement des arts utiles, les genres d'invention, les noms des auteurs, et la récompense à accorder à chacun d'eux."

[52] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 1:356 (February 22, 1793); 4:14 (March 23, 1794); and 4:1016 (July 6, 1794).

[53] Ibid., 2:85 (July 20, 1793), and 2:342 (August 24, 1793).

[54] For the collaboration of the two committees on this report, see ibid., 3:432 and 4:93.

[55] See the marginal notes on both reports: BN, nouv. acq. fr. 2836, feuilles 27–29, Report from Villebrune to the Committee on Public Safety concerning the state of the book trade, 12 ventôse, an II (March 2, 1794), forwarded to the Committee on Public Instruction on 24 ventôse, an II (March 14, 1794); and AN, ser. F17, carton 1009c, doss. 2216, Report from Villebrune to the Committee on Public Instruction, "Considérations sur le commerce de la librairie française," reproduced in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:612–618.

[56] Henri Grégoire, Rapport sur les encouragements, récompenses et pensions à accorder aux savants, aux gens de lettres et aux artistes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, an III [1794–1795]). See also Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:758, 766–767.

government. He also sounded a distinctly Thermidorean note. The heart of the problem, Grégoire asserted, lay in the adherence of the convention to the cultural theories advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts:

We are all aware of what Jean-Jacques thought, or at least what he wrote, about the utility of the sciences. But he also contended that a large republic is a chimera, and that a people who delegates representatives to govern for them ceases to be free. We have already, through our acts, rejected his views in resolving these two latter questions: we can proceed in the same manner with the question of the sciences. If the abuse of a thing reflects upon the thing itself, then virtue would be a vice: Instead of arguing about abuses, it is necessary to prove that abuse is inseparable from the sciences. . . . In a country where wealth and vanity carry weight over everything else, where one studies only to draw attention to oneself and to advance in society, and not for self-improvement, virtue diminishes and the price of talent increases. . . . But if talent is only applauded when it embodies the characteristics of the beautiful, the just, and the good, then the arts will soon recover their moral character. Pleasing talents whose sole purpose had seemed only to make life a bit more charming will then reveal their hidden utility. Painting, engraving, poetry, and music will recover their original dignity. With us, as with the ancients, they will become resources in the hands of the government. The hymns of Tyrtheus, that of the men of Marseille, and the happy effects that they have produced are irrefragable proofs.^[57]

Grégoire announced a cultural Thermidor: just as representative government was to eclipse direct democracy, so too cultural representation would replace the social ideal of transparent and unmediated exchange between the government and its citizenry, as well as exchange among citizens themselves. Refuting Rousseau, Grégoire argued that there was nothing inherently corrupt or corrupting about culture itself. Rather, cultural life reflected the mores of the society that produced it. Old Regime culture was vain and decadent because Old Regime society had been so. Virtuous societies, like the classical republics, proved that a beneficent and virtuous culture was both possible and desirable. Further, he asserted, citizens would, if given the opportunity, incline naturally toward a more virtuous culture. The government needed to provide that opportunity. Massive government intervention in intellectual and cultural life was necessary, as much to assure the economic and political strength of the nation as to contribute to the happiness of its citizens.

[57] Grégoire, Rapport sur les encouragements, 10–11.

On a more practical level, Grégoire used the information provided by Villebrune and others to depict for the convention the pitiful situation in which authors, editors, and publishers now found themselves. The great works of men of letters are rarely appreciated by the commercial reading public in their own time, he observed. In revolutionary moments literary tastes become narrowly focused on the immediate concerns of the present, ignoring the more abstract, elevated, and timeless themes of great thinkers. It was not surprising, then, that "Milton's Paradise Lost , Winckelmann's history of art, or Stewart's research on political economy had met with public disdain." In times of revolution, such works require even more support than they normally would. Moreover, the laws protecting literary property were so inadequate that "if, on the contrary, a work is well received, every literary pirate will rush to publish it." Thus, he lamented, "the possessors of some of Mably's unpublished manuscripts, amounting to about three volumes, have suspended their publication out of fear of pirate editions."^[58] The fate of such important publishing ventures could not be left to the vagaries of the revolutionary market.

The inherent faults of commercial publishing were only further exacerbated by the particular circumstances of the Revolution, Grégoire continued. He denounced the political persecution of men of letters under the Terror. Finally, and most importantly, French publishing had been devastated by the collapse of the international book trade because of the war. Like Villebrune, Grégoire saw the revival of the international market in French books as critical both to the revival of commercial publishing and to the propagation of revolutionary principles: "It is opinion that demolishes thrones: a good book is a political weapon."^[59] Thus Grégoire concluded: "The nation should pay for the printing of good books, and compensate their authors by giving them either part or all of the edition: the power to do this is in your hands."^[60] Upon hearing Grégoire's report, the National Convention voted 300,000 livres to be distributed annually by the Committee on Public Instruction, for "encouragement and awards" to men of letters, scholars, and artists.

Grégoire's report marked the official end of the National Convention's laissez-faire cultural policies. It also marked a crucial turning point in revolutionary patronage of the printed word. Over the next three

[58] Ibid., 5.

[59] Ibid., 3–5, 12.

[60] Ibid., 19.

years the publishing world was to receive millions of livres in "encouragements" dispensed through the Executive Commission on Public Instruction (established by the Committee on Public Safety in 1794) and then, after the suppression of the Committee on Public Safety in 1795, by the Ministry of the Interior's Bureau of Encouragement and Awards.

Government cultural patronage that directly or indirectly benefited the publishing world during the republican period took three essential forms: (1) prizes awarded through government-sponsored competitions in the writing and editing of elementary school books, which amounted to 193,000 livres and untold profits from sales;^[61] (2) subsidies accorded to men of letters by the decree of October 5, 1794, amounting to 605,500 livres in 1794–1795;^[62] and (3) direct subsidies and public credits, granted first by the Executive Commission on Public Instruction and then the Ministry of the Interior, to the authors, editors, publishers, and printers of individual works or editions that the government wished to encourage.

While the exact amount that reached Paris publishers and printers is impossible to calculate, the budgets for the Commission on Public Instruction for the years II to IV, conserved in the papers of the commission's director, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, suggest the dimensions of republican cultural patronage after Thermidor: 2.5 million livres went directly into cultural patronage, and another 16.25 million livres' worth of credit was extended!^[63] The year III (1794–1795), in particular, marked a moment of intensive government intervention in cultural production, even after accounting for unprecedented inflation. To put these sums into

[61] For commissions of school textbooks, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 1:36, 57, 84, 85, 92–101, 493, 495; 2:lxii, 127, 216, 306; 3:xi, 364, 371, 372; 4:ix, xxx, xxxi, 41, 42, 45, 370, 751, 768, 917, 934; 5:xxvi, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, 541; and 6:xiii, 82, 173, 502, 544, 569, 634, 642, 852, 897, 898. See also AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, 9 pluviôse, an II (January 28, 1794); and AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Report to the Ministry of the Interior on the results of the competition for elementary schoolbooks, 13 floréal, an IV (May 2, 1796).

[62] For the decrees authorizing these expenditures, see Rapport fait à la Convention Nationale, au nom du Comité d'Instruction Publique, par Marie-Joseph Chénier . . . 14 nivôse, an III (January 2, 1795); Rapport sur les récompenses à distribuer aux savants et aux artistes, présenté au nom des Comités d'Instruction Publique et des Finances dans la séance du 27 germinal, an III (April 16, 1795); and Rapport et projet de decret [décret] présenté à la Convention Nationale dans la séance du 18 fructidor . . . sur les encouragements destinés aux savants, gens de lettres et artistes, par Villar (September 4, 1795), all in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:380–387 and 6:86–90, 624–631.

[63] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9192–9193, "Instruction Publique: Collection Ginguené"; also in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:948 and foldout.

perspective, we can compare them to total expenditures over the same period for the other activities of the commission. "Encouragement and awards" figured second in priority only to educational institutions in the commission's budget.^[64] Indeed, with the exception of educational institutions (5,349,174 livres ), the commission spent twice as much on this category (2,550,830 livres ) as it did on any other item. But who were to be the beneficiaries? And what were "useful works"?

Protest and Patronage in the Years III and IV

The French victory at Fleurus on 8 messidor, year II (June 26, 1794), marked not only the reconquest of Belgium but also the reversal of the nation's position in the European theater. The country was no longer in imminent danger of invasion. In the next year France would make peace with Prussia (April 5, 1795), Holland (May 16), and Spain (July 22). The civil war in the Vendée ended as well, in February 1795. Victory and peace brought an end to the Terror, the fall of Robespierre (July 27–28, 1794), and the abolition of the maximum (December 24, 1794). Release from danger both within and without also elicited a flood of grief and protest across the nation. And the publishing community, in Paris as well as the departments, had plenty to complain about.

In late December 1794, the National Convention, with its Girondist members restored, registered the wrath of printers nationwide against the laws passed under the Terror that had centralized government document printing at the newly formed Imprimerie des Lois and Imprimerie de l'Administration Nationale in Paris.^[65] The convention also received a lengthy exposé from the Agence des Lois extolling the efficiency and economy of the Imprimerie des Lois.^[66] The government decided to reexamine the question and as a result, on 8 pluviôse, year III (January 27, 1795), issued a new decree concerning government printing. While it met the demands of the departmental printers, this law could not have been less favorably disposed to the interests of the commercial printers of Paris.

[64] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9193, feuille 49, "Collection Ginguené. Compte sommaire des expenditures de la Commission de l'Instruction Publique, an II–IV" (1793–1796), also edited in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:948 and foldout.

[65] For the laws of 14 and 27 frimaire, year II (December 4 and 17, 1793), see Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 169.

[66] Ibid.

The law reestablished the system whereby national laws were reprinted in the departments from samples sent by the Imprimerie des Lois, thus returning a significant amount of government work to departmental printers. But the convention decreed additionally that because the lmprimerie des Lois—now to be called by the much grander title of Imprimerie Nationale—would lose the work of printing huge runs of the Bulletin des lois for the provinces, its purview was to be extended far beyond the speeches, laws, committee reports, and administrative documents of the convention and other offices of government: "[The National Printing Shop] will be charged with printing . . . the first editions of all works intended for public instruction that are adopted by the convention, and all scientitic and artistic works that are to be printed by order of the convention and at the expense of the Republic."^[67]

Through a series of laws passed during the spring of 1795, the convention consolidated and extended the domain of the new Imprimerie de la République (renamed again in April) from government laws to national education and patronage of the "arts and sciences." Then in June they again confirmed the legal monopoly of the Imprimerie de la République on all areas of printing, advising all official agencies that "in no case were they permitted to have printing done at government expense in either commercial or foreign printing shops."^[68] Far from quelling the discontent of Paris printers, these laws outraged an even wider segment of the Paris printing community.^[69]

The response was vociferous (plate 6). In a series of petitions and memoranda presented to the National Convention during the spring of 1795, seventy-five Paris printers denounced the national printing houses as monopolistic instruments of state tyranny that violated the basic rights

[67] Cited in ibid., 173. For more on the development of artistic, scientific, and educational printing at the Imprimerie de la République, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:255–256, 486, 494; and 4:94, 631.

[68] The law renaming the Imprimerie Nationale as the Imprimerie de la République was passed on 18 germinal, year III (April 7, 1795); its attributions were reconfirmed by a law of 21 prairial, year III (June 9, 1795). See Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 178, 185.

[69] For an example of a Parisian printer who lost his government contract for educational printing to a government printing shop, see the case of Louis Reynier, printer and bookseller, whose job printing the Journal sténographique des cours de l'école normale was taken over by the Imprimerie des Lois on September 20, 1795, in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:706.

Plate 6. 
A type specimen for the Paris printer Guffroy celebrating "freedom of the press" 
(1795–1796). Archives Nationales, Paris.

of freedom of commerce, expression, and the press.^[70] They queried: "If there is only one printing shop, what meaning can 'Freedom of the Press' possibly have? We protest this system of centralization. It was invented by Robespierre. He created it, as you well know, in order to bring all the reins of tyranny into his own hands: We should need to say no more."^[71] These were certainly not trivial accusations in 1795.

The director of the Imprimerie de la République, Duboy-Laverne, responded to these accusations in kind:

The Revolution gave rise to a huge number of new printing shops directed by men who up until that moment knew absolutely nothing about the typo-

[70] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Petition to the National Convention from the printers of Paris, [22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795)]; and AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883, "Mémoire sur les inconvénients et les dangers des deux Imprimeries de I'Agence des Lois et des Administrations Nationales," 22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795); "Pétition des imprimeurs de Paris à la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)]; "Addition au mémoire présenté par les imprimeurs de Paris à la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)].

[71] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Petition to the National Convention from the printers of Paris, [22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795)].

graphical arts. And their number has grown so great that they are now driven to intrigue in order to find work. . . .

There are now four hundred printing shops where formerly there were thirty-six. . . . Should the public treasury be the guarantor of these shady speculations? . . . And should the Republic renounce an establishment . . . that has proven itself so important as a guarantor of public order?^[72]

The director of the government printing shop, in short, blamed unrestricted access to the printing trade and the poor business sense of its new practitioners for the sufferings of Parisian printers. He also reminded the convention that centralized control over the publication of laws and government documents was indeed critical to maintaining both public order and the authority of the convention.

But were the protesters in fact new printers, as the director of the Imprimerie de la République charged? The protest documents of that spring, and their signatories, reveal a different picture. Of the seventy-five printers identified as having signed at least one petition or mémoire , thirty were former members of the Paris Book Guild, their in-laws, or their direct successors (see appendix 3).^[73] Considering the signatories of just the initial petitions—that is, those who spearheaded the protest—we find that over half were former guild members or their relations. They were also those who had been among the guild's wealthiest or most eminent printers and publishers: AndréFrançois Knapen (ex-syndic), Léger Moutard, Gérard Barbou, Jean Cussac, Augustin-Martin Lottin, François Belin, the widow Valade, the widow Delaguette, Pierre-Robert-Christophe Ballard, and so on. To these can be added "new printers" like Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's son-in-law, Henri Agasse, and the successors of Philippe-Denis Pierres (former printer for the king), Jean-Michel Eberhart and Baudelot.^[74] Thus, far from representing new speculators, the protest was mobilized by a core of the oldest printing establishments in the capital, those who

[72] AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883: Réponse de l'Agence de l'Envoi des Lois aux mémoires et pétitions adressés à la Convention Nationale par plusieurs imprimeurs de Paris sur les prétendus inconvénients et dangers des Imprimeries executives " [after 20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795), 1; and 6].

[73] The following signators were associated by familial or business relations: Henri Agasse, son-in-law of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke; Louis Cordier, associate of François Legras; Dupont, successor to Gilles Lamesle; Fuchs, son-in-law of Eugène Onfroy; J.-J. Delance, associate of Auguste-Pierre Belin; Jean-Michel Eberhart and Baudelot, successors to Philippe-Denis Pierres.

[74] For the status of these individuals within the Old Regime guild, see figure 5.

had been hit hardest by the abolition of their privileges and the collapse of the book market.^[75]

The real irony was the transformation of die-hard corporatists like Knapen and Lottin into vociferous proponents of freedom of commerce and the press:

These privileged printers . . . intend to grab for themselves the printing of "everything pertaining to legislation, administration, and public instruction," that is, everything worthy of being printed. . . . The printers of Paris . . . are citizens . . . . They demand only freedom of competition. They love the fatherland. They are not foreigners.^[76]

To give one printing establishment a monopoly on government contracts of all kinds was, they argued, to treat commercial printers as foreigners—indeed, the law of 8 pluviôse (January 27) had attributed the same status to both groups. To be deprived of the possibility to publish and print literary works consecrated by the nation's representative institutions was to be denied a role in the production of a national literary civilization. In fact, if the state itself published and printed all that it deemed worthy of publication, there would be no need for commercial publishers or printers:

What new work would they dare to undertake? Every author, flattered by the possible suffrage of the convention, will present his manuscript. The convention will decree to have it printed at the expense of the nation if it finds it worthy. And in the contrary case, what printer would want to run the risk of printing a book that, having been rejected by such a solemn judgment, will already have public opinion set against it?^[77]

The key issue, of course, concerned the millions of livres in government subsidies for publishing made available through the Commission on Public Instruction. With 2.5 million livres in subsidies and contracts and 16 million more in public credit at stake, it is not surprising that the printers of Paris responded so violently when the Commission on Public

[75] It should be noted that I am advancing a significantly different interpretation of this protest than the one presented by the official historian of the Imprimerie Impériale, François-Antoine-Brutus Duprat, who, not surprisingly, accepts and defends the version put forward by the printers of the Imprimerie des Lois and the Imprimerie de l'Administration; see his Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale , 354–399.

[76] AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883, "Pétition des imprimeurs de Paris è la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)], 3.

[77] AN, ser. C, carton 536, doc. 1883, "Mémoire sur les inconvénients et les dangers des deux Imprimeries de l'Agence des Lois et des Administrations Nationales," 22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795), 5.

Instruction was ordered to deal exclusively with government printing shops.

The government's various agencies and committees, however, were not unanimously pleased with the National Convention's renewed effort to centralize government publishing in one great national printing shop, and there is significant evidence of official resistance to implementation of this policy over the course of 1795.^[78] The resistance of the Commission on Public Instruction was particularly notable. On June 14, 1795, the director of the Imprimerie de la République sent that commission a memo demanding that it conform to the laws requiring all printing jobs for public instruction to be executed by the government's printing shop.^[79] Indeed, expenditures disclosed by the proceedings and the budget of the Commission on Public Instruction suggest a lack of compliance with both the spirit and the letter of the laws centralizing publications.

After Thermidor, the cultural policies initiated by the Committee on Public Safety and the Commission on Public Instruction, respectively, thus began to come into conflict. The records of the Commission on Public Instruction, government deposit records at the dépôt légal, and what remains of the accounts of the Interior Ministry's Division of Public Instruction (1794–1799) leave little doubt that despite their complaints about increased centralization, Parisian publishers and printers in fact began to enjoy significant direct government patronage through the Commission on Public Instruction, under the auspices of encouraging the "arts and sciences" and "public instruction."^[80] As fragmentary as the evidence is, these three sources alone allow us to identify at least fifty Paris publishers and printers who enjoyed encouragements or contracts for "public instruction" from 1794 to 1799. Over sixty-two different publications or publishing projects received some kind of government

[78] Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 180, 187.

[79] Ibid.

[80] The following discussion is based on a systematic survey of all government contracts with Paris printers and publishers mentioned in the following sources: Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique; the papers of the Ministry of the Interior pertaining to public instruction, found in AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Ministère de l'Intérieur, "Comptabilité générale, Instruction Publique, Sciences et Arts, an II–IV"; and the register of deposits at the dépôt légal from 1793 to 1799, in BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, reg. 1, July 19, 1793-an VII (September 21, 1799).

support, whether in the form of actual government purchases or subscriptions, the provision of paper, warehouse space in public buildings, or use of government printing presses. And although the documents often fail to provide the monetary sums of these encouragements and contracts, the sum total of accounts that I have actually been able to locate from this period exceeds 1,000,000 livres . Clearly, then, Paris publishers enjoyed considerable patronage from the government as a consequence of the government's new policy to "encourage and reward" the arts and sciences during the republican period.

But what kind of commercial publishing did the Commission on Public Instruction promote? In his report on encouragements and awards of October 1794, Grégoire outlined the basic guidelines of the Commission on Public Instruction's patronage. Grégoire's stress was clearly on the sciences, especially those with practical applications, and on grammar and foreign languages, which were crucial, in his view, to the maintenance and expansion of French economic and political power. First and foremost, the natural and applied sciences, scientific illustration, travel literature, geography, and cartography, were to receive particular attention. And not just research and writing, but intensive scholarly exchange, urgently needed to be facilitated: "There are almost no more periodicals to serve as depositories for new inventions, and to keep a record of the progress in human understanding."^[81] The National Convention had been right to abolish the closed corporate academies, but it should not hesitate to support individual authors, scholars, editors, or nonrestrictive literary and scientific societies.

In the course of his report, though, he also celebrated literary pursuits as being vital to the life and health of the Republic: "The art of social life, perfected by Jean-Jacques and Mably, does it not hold an honorable rank among the forms of knowledge? A good poem, does it not have as much merit as a good machine?" He told the National Convention, "You need a new theater, a new history, and a new dictionary of your language"—and so, too, philosophy, poetry, and especially songs. Villebrune was no doubt pleased with the vision of a morally regenerated republican literary culture espoused by Grégoire. Indeed, the only literary form notably missing from Grégoire's list of genres worthy of patronage was that which Villebrune had earlier denounced as the very source of the cultural decadence perpetuated by commercial publishing: prose fiction. Gré-

[81] Grégoire, Rapport sur les encouragements, 15–20.

goire, like Villebrune, reasoned that if the public were presented with a more edifying cultural alternative it would eventually opt for it.

Villebrune and Grégoire were to see their policies implemented by the new head of the Commission on Public Instruction, Pierre-Louis Ginguené.^[82] Ginguené cut a distinctly different figure in the cultural landscape than either Villebrune or Grégoire. Despite their radical ideas, both Grégoire and Villebrune had been well established within the official cultural institutions of the Old Regime. Grégoire had been a Jesuit professor, distinguished for his philosophical writings by the Academy of Metz, before his election as a representative of the lower clergy to the Estates General in 1789.^[83] It was not surprising that he now advocated the revitalization of an elite scholarly culture.

Villebrune, too, emerged from a traditional scholarly milieu. A classicist, orientalist, and philologist, he was renowned for his knowledge of twelve languages. The younger generation found him tedious. One of Ginguené's assistants described him as a "bitter character." He was one of those "old erudites who bore the Republic of Letters with their tiresome debates."^[84] Villebrune became head of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the winter of 1793 as a consequence of an arrêt of the Committee on Public Safety that "invited the minister of the interior to nominate citizens of proven patriotism" to replace the Girondists purged from the library administration.^[85] In fact, he replaced Ginguené's friend and patron Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort after this Girondist's dismissal.^[86] Villebrune, needless to say, was a Jacobin of unquestionable credentials.

[82] Regrettably, Ginguené has not yet found a biographer. For more on his revolutionary career, see Joanna Kitchen, Un Journal "philosophique": "La Décade," 1794–1807 (Paris: Minard, 1965), 3–19.

[83] Although he has been the subject of many books, Grégoire, like Ginguené, has not been the subject of a definitive biography. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), is the most extensive treatment of the political aspects of Grégoire's struggle for religious and racial equality. The recent, but brief, study by Bernard Plongeron, Abbé Grégoire ou l'arche de la fraternité (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1989), deals with the religious dimension of Grégoire's life. Most relevant here is the study of Grégoire's linguistic reforms during the Revolution by Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une Politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). For biographical information, see also Albert Soboul's foreword to the Oeuvres de l'abbé Grégoire (Paris: EDHIS, 1977), 1:ix–xvii.

[84] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6:347 (8 messidor, an III [June 26, 1795]).

[85] Ibid., 3:142n.3.

[86] Ibid. See also Louis-Gabriel Michaud and François Michaud, eds., Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1816), 16:476.

Ginguené, by contrast, rose to prominence in the Commission on Public Instruction during the fall of 1794, serving as director from July 1795 through its dissolution three months later. He then continued to serve as head of the Division of Public Instruction in the Ministry of the Interior.^[87] He was a man of the Thermidorean moment who, after a brief imprisonment under the Terror, achieved power under the sponsorship of the minister of the interior, Joseph Garat.^[88] He could not have been more different, in political as well as cultural terms, from the erudite head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune, or the philosopher turned Jacobin legislator, Henri Grégoire.

Ginguené emerged from the grub-street journalistic circles of the Old Regime, becoming after 1789 a vocal advocate of popular literature in opposition to scholarly culture.^[89] An editor of the Feuille villageoise from 1791 through 1795, he believed that knowledge had to be taken out of the libraries and into the streets. He articulated his cultural program cogently in 1792 in a proposal for government subsidy of an encyclopédie populaire et portative:

The people hunger for instruction. They don't have time to read volumes, or the means to buy them. In order to put science within their reach, it has to be liberated from the huge tomes where scholars have buried it, and put into little booklets. . . . As a boy I had a love of books which for the longest time was an unhappy passion. My parents were not wealthy enough to be able to satisfy my literary tastes. . . . What a difference it would have made for me, who at that age, and for a good while after, could get my hands on nothing more than the romances of the Twelve Knights of France and the Bibliothèque bleue.^[90]

Rather than regenerating scholarly culture, Ginguené wanted to transform it, to democratize it by bringing it out of the libraries and to the people through the medium of chapbooks and periodicals.

Yet despite the contrasts in their cultural visions, Ginguené, Villebrune, and Grégoire all agreed on at least two things: the deleterious

[87] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:xviin. 1; 5:25n.1, 28 (annexes); 6:452, 835n.2.

[88] Ibid. See also Michaud frères (eds.), Biographie universelle 16:476 and notes.

[89] Michaud freres [frères] (eds.), Biographie universelle 16:475–476. For his association with the prerevolutionary grub-street milieu, see the entry for Ginguené in Antoine Rivarol's "Petit Almanach de nos grands hommes," in his Oeuvres complètes, 2d ed. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968 [originally published 1808]), 5:91.

[90] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9192, feuilles 118–121, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, "Copie du projet de L'Encyclopédie populaire envoyée à quelques hommes de lettres, citoyens, au mois de mars 1792."

effects of popular novels on the minds of citizens; and the need for the government to commission French publishers to produce enlightened texts, containing useful scientific and moral knowledge, in order to reform the literary tastes of the nation. The subsidies of the Commission on Public Instruction suggest that both the Jacobin scholars and the Girondist populist left their mark on revolutionary literary patronage.

In light of the reports by Villebrune and Grégoire, it is not surprising to discover that the Paris publishing group Smits and Maradan were soon commissioned to produce a new edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie , in fifteen thousand copies.^[91] Or that the Commission on Public Instruction purchased the plates for the comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelie from the publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke for 50,000 livres .^[92] Similarly, they ordered one hundred copies of Edmé Mentelle's Analyse du cours de géographie , as well as Jean-Gabriel Mérigot le jeune 's edition of Simonin's Traité d'arithmétique .^[93] They also patronized numerous other publishers and printers of scientific works.^[94] With Grégoire's call to revive scientific periodical publishing, Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet, having narrowly escaped the guillotine for his counterrevolutionary pamphlets, now found his Journal de physique, de chimie, et d'histoire naturelle infused with new life by the patronage of the Commission on Public Instruction.^[95] So, too, the Journal des mines and the Bulletin de l'Ecole de Santé prospered from newfound official support.^[96]

As Grégoire had insisted, classical languages, history, and philosophy were not to be neglected either. Thus the printer Haubout was assisted

[91] Decree of the National Convention, premier jour complémentaire, an III (September 17, 1795), in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6: 404–405. See also ibid., 443–444, 501, 621, 680, 683, 688.

[92] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 6:561.

[93] For the former, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, "Ministère de l'Intérieur: Comptabilité générale, Instruction Publique"; for the latter, AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, August 6, 1798.

[94] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Bernard and Regence, Paris booksellers, 13 thermidor, an III (July 31, 1795), arithmetics, geometries, and algebras by Etienne Bezout; Barrois, l'aîné, Paris bookseller, 16 messidor, an III (July 4, 1795), works on meteorology; ibid., doss. 3, Laurent-Eloy Goujon, Paris bookseller, prairial-messidor, an II (May-June 1794), maps and geographical dictionaries.

[95] AN, ser. F17, carton 1214, doss. 12, November 23, 1794, in which the Committee on Agriculture orders fifteen hundred copies on the recommendation of the Commission on Public Instruction.

[96] For the former, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Dupont, printer of the Journal des mines, 23 messidor, an III (July 11, 1795); for the latter, Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:315, 336.

in his effort to bring out an edition of Tacitus's Histoire romaine , as were the classicist Johannes Schweighäuser with his Polybii megalopolitani historiarum and the publisher Jean-Antoine-Guillaume Bailleul with his Politique d'Aristote .^[97] The commission also followed through with its mandate to regenerate modern history and philosophy. Thus Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe and Jean Servières, a printer and a publisher in Paris, brought out the new edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres edited by Charles Palissot de Montenoy, with considerable official aid.^[98] Likewise, both Claude-François Poinçot fils and Pierre-François Didot le jeune received assistance in producing their editions of Rousseau's Oeuvres .^[99] The commission purchased copies of the Louis-François Barrois l'aîné edition of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably's Oeuvres .^[100] And the commission purchased three thousand copies of the marquis de Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain from the Parisian publisher Henri Agasse, to be distributed "throughout the Republic, in a manner most useful for public instruction."^[101] Etienne Bonnet de Condillac's Logique was purchased for the students at the Ecole Normale as well.^[102] Nor did the commission overlook the need to encourage contemporary historical models, such as those commissioned for the Recueil des actions héroiques et civiques des républicains français or depicted in the Vie de Général Hoche .^[103] Contemporary philosophy and politics, from Jean-Paul Marat to Adam Smith and Moses Mendelssohn, received encouragement too.^[104] Moreover, flying directly in the face of the decrees centralizing the printing

[97] On Tacitus's Histoire romaine, see AN, ser. F18, carton 565, 15 ventôse, an IV (March 5, 1796). On the Polybii megalopolitani historiarum, see Guillaume (ed.), Procèsverbaux 6:89; and BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1. And on the Politique d'Aristote, see ibid.

[98] AN, ser. F17, carton 1306, doss. 1025, 13 messidor, an III (July 31, 1795). See also Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:742, 789–790, 938; 5:360, 384.

[99] For Poinçot, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:106, 410–411, 609–610; and AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, Letter from Poinçot fils, publisher, to the Corps Législatif, 17 floréal, an VI (May 6, 1798). The edition was begun in the year III (1794–1795). For Didot le jeune, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:210.

[100] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:970.

[101] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, 15 thermidor, an III (August 2, 1795).

[102] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:491.

[103] For the Recueil, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, "Secours et encouragements aux sciences et aux arts," and doss. 8, "Extrait des registres des arrêtés du Comité du Salut Public," 27 floréal, an II (May 16, 1794). And for the Vie de Général Hoche, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1215, doss. 5, "Secours et encouragements."

[104] For support of an edition of Jean-Paul Marat's Oeuvres, see Guillaume (ed.), Procèsverbaux 3:485, 499, 530, 559; 4:789; 5:609–610. For support of editions of Adam Smith's Théorie des sentiments moraux and Moses Mendelssohn's Oeuvres, see ibid., 5:169.

and publishing of laws, they purchased an elegant edition of the Constitution from Pierre-François Didot le jeune and regularly ordered laws from Louis Rondonneau.^[105]

But government encouragement extended beyond the scholarly culture of scientific, classical, and Enlightenment books. True to Ginguené's vision of an enlightened popular literary culture, the commission subsidized numerous educational, philosophical, and political journals aimed at a broader reading public, such as the Journal des censeurs , the Journal de l'homme libre , the Décade philosophique et littéraire , the Feuille du cultivateur , the Feuille villageoise , and the Républicain français .^[106] They subsidized and distributed educational political pamphlets;^[107] so, too, republican almanacs and democratic catechisms, as well as engravings of the republican martyrs Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau.^[108] They commissioned the printing of songs and music to be distributed at revolutionary festivals.^[109] Nor did they overlook efforts to win a popular female reading public over to the Thermidorean regime, like Citizeness Boosère's Triomphe de la saine philosophie, ou la vraie politique des femmes , which they ordered to be "distributed by her in various departments of the Republic."^[110]

[105] For Didot le jeune ibid., 5:429. For Louis Rondonneau, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 3, Rondonneau, Paris, 25 fructidor, an II (September 11, 1794).

[106] The Journal des censeurs was printed by Langlois fils; see AN, ser. F18, carton 21, Letter to the Commission, December 8, 1795. For the Journal de l'homme libre, see AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, 16 thermidor, an II (August 3, 1794). For the Décade philosophique et littéraire, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Say, Paris editor and printer, 19 floriéal, an III (May 8, 1795); see also Joanna Kitchen, Journal "philosophique." For the Feuille du cultivateur, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Lefebvre, director of the printing shop of the Feuille, I fructidor, an III (September 18, 1795). For the Feuille villageoise, see ibid., doss. 5, Louis Reynier, printer of the Feuille, 30 brumaire and 12 frimaire, an III (November 20 and December 2, 1794); see also Melvin Allen Edelstein, "La Feuille villageoise." Communication et modernisation dans les régions rurales pendant la Révolution (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977). And for the Républicain français, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Goujet-Deslande, 5 messidor, an III (June 23, 1795).

[107] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Dupont, printer of the Nouvelle Instruction sur les poids et mesures, 23 messidor, an III (July 11, 1795); see also the publisher Lemercier's contracts for several political pamphlets, AN, ser. F18, carton 21, May 11, 1797.

[108] For almanacs, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:296; and for catechisms, see BN, Archives Modernes, cxxix, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1, Catéchisme français à l'usage des écoles primaires (1795), deposited by the Committee on Public Instruction. On the engravings of martyrs, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 6:47.

[109] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:850.

[110] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Boosère, 28 vendémiaire, an III (October 19, 1794). See also Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:138.

After Thermidor, the government dispensed enormous sums on cultural patronage intended to promote republican values, by wooing the public away from the passions of politics and romance and toward forms of learning and reading that encouraged civic order and contributed to the public good. The political motivations behind the government's new cultural initiatives became even more explicit when the laws of 9 and 13 vendiémiaire, year IV (September 30 and October 4, 1797), imposed a stamp tax on all periodicals, with the exception of monthly periodicals relating exclusively to "arts and sciences."^[111]

The commercial publishing world of Paris responded rapidly to the cultural initiatives and patronage of the Commission on Public Instruction. In May 1796, the publisher J.-J. Lucet launched a new trade newsletter entitled the Bulletin de littérature, des sciences et des arts , to be devoted entirely to announcing "decrees concerning the arts and artists, prizes and honors awarded for technical achievements, discoveries and inventions . . . everything concerning literature, the arts, and the sciences."^[112] In his prospectus Lucet hailed Grégoire's report and the legislation on encouragements and awards of October 1794 as the founding of a new cultural regime, when at last men of letters and artists

can begin to recover their original dignity, and literary commerce to develop its immense resources. Artistic and scientific liberty will give birth to masterpieces, and soon, with the aid of national subsidies, the French Republic of Letters will recover its former splendor. At last we have left the era of horror and barbarism when monsters insisted that men of learning deserved only the guillotine.^[113]

His Bulletin , he avowed, would insure that the works of men of letters singled out by the commission for encouragements and awards would be made known to the entire publishing community. "Sciences and arts" had become the new catch phrase in the book trade for works supported by the republican government.

Others followed in Lucet's wake. Thus on August 16, 1796, the editors of the Nouvelliste littéraire , Morin and Lenoir, announced that they were adding the subtitle "des sciences et arts" to their newsletter. In their

[111] Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:544–545.

[112] Bulletin de littérature, des sciences et des arts, 2 vols. (May 1796–1803); see "Prospectus," 1:2.

[113] Ibid., 1:1–2.

avis to the reader they, too, sounded the Thermidorean call for a literary culture devoted to reason, utility, and self-improvement:

O French, so celebrated of old in the sciences, you who were the jewel upon Parnassus, flee, flee forever your political newspapers, those scions of bad taste and passions. Rediscover Voltaire, Racine, and Fénélon: their logic is worth more than that of Babeuf and the Frérons. What good do your political journals serve? To corrupt your taste, to embitter your heart, and to stir up disagreements with your best friends.^[114]

Morin and Lenoir offered cultural pursuits as an alternative to politics. They not only reviewed and advertised all new works in the arts and sciences deemed worthy of attention by the government, but they also offered a "varieties" section in their newsletters, which featured poems and articles on various cultural issues and events intended to woo readers away from the passions of partisan politics toward more rational pursuits such as science, philosophy, and poetry. Issue number 31 of May 19, 1797, for example, carried an ode celebrating the powers of the microscope set to a popular vaudeville tune.

A whole new generation of publishers emerged in response to the government's policies. Some, like A.-J. Dugour and Durand, "booksellers for education, the sciences, and the arts" (established 1796), bought out withering old guild establishments like that of Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet. Similarly, Adrien Egron bought out the widow Valade in 1798 and in 1799 Pierre-Henri Genets l'aîné took over Jean Servières's business. Others went into association with old elites, like Ballio with Jean-François Colas (1796) or François Legras with Louis Cordier (1797). Then there were those who founded new houses, like P. Bernard, "printer-publisher for mathematics, the sciences, and the arts," in 1797; Adrien-Joseph Marchand, "printer-publisher of agricultural works," in 1798; Marie-Rosalie Vallat-la-Chapelle, the widow of Huzard, "printerpublisher for agriculture and veterinary medicine," in 1798; or J.-B.-M. Duprat, "bookseller for mathematics," in 1797.^[115] Villebrune had been right: government initiative and patronage could, at a minimum, redirect the orientation of a sector of the publishing world.

As the reversal after 1796 of the curve of book production in figure

[114] Nouvelliste littéraire (published in Paris from germinal, an IV, to germinal, an IX [April 1796–April 1806]), nos. 15–16, 30 thermidor, an IV (August 17, 1796), 1.

[115] See these names in Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, 7, 15, 69–71, 73, 86, 102, 126, 142.

6 suggests, peace and the consequent reopening of international markets after the Treaty of Basel in 1795, along with the infusion of millions of livres in government patronage between 1794 and 1796, stimulated a revival of book publishing during the period of the Directory. For the first time since 1789 book production began to rise, while the production of journals declined.

A Partial Victory for Centralization

But the Thermidorean moment of peace and of encouragement and awards did not last forever. As the contraction of Ginguené's budget for the year IV (1795–1796) suggests, government subsidies for the arts and sciences began to dry up. The Commission on Public Instruction was to see its patronage powers eclipsed in the fall of 1795 by the newly founded Institut National.^[116] In fact, on October 26, 1795, the day after the Institut was founded, the commission met for the last time.^[117]

In filing his closing report to the minister of the interior, Ginguené expressed his fear that the creation of the Institut would spell the end to the pluralist and democratic patronage system evolved by the commission. The Institut, he argued, by patronizing authors rather than books, would recreate the corporatist and castelike literary culture of the Old Regime Court:

Despotism, which always had reason to fear scholars and men of letters, thought it best to attach them to the regime, or at least . . . to guarantee their silence, by installing them in academies. . . . Many of these scholars and men of letters believed that although they had accepted these favors, they had not compromised their independence. . . . Yet it is nonetheless true to say that it is among those who were not touched by these perfidious benefits that one finds the energetic and profound writers who have contributed the most to the nation's understanding of its rights, and who did the most to bring about the fall of the monarchy and the founding of a Republic.^[118]

[116] The Institut was founded by a decree of 3 brumaire, year IV (October 25, 1795); see Martyn Lyons, France Under the Directory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 94; and, for the original decree, AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 3, 3 brumaire, an IV (October 25, 1795).

[117] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6:1.

[118] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9192, feuilles 102–103, [1795], "Projet de rapport à présenter au ministre de l'intérieur (sur l'établissement du Bureau d'Encouragement des Sciences et Lettres)."

The commercial cultural world of grub street and the literary marketplace, not the privileged academies and salons of the high Enlightenment, Ginguené reminded the minister, was what had won the nation over to the Republic. "A government founded on enlightened principles," he wrote, should not revive the cultural institutions of absolutism. Indeed, it should not give its official sanction to any single cultural institution. Rather, the government should maintain "varied relations" with the nation and its intellectual luminaries through an "open correspondence." Instead of creating a new caste of officially designated intellectuals, the government should establish an office of cultural patronage open to appeals for cultural assistance from all citizens:

Some will send the government works they have already published, either in simple homage or to propose that they be distributed in the schools and national institutes or to the public at large, or perhaps they will request grants or subsidies; others will send in a completed manuscript, or a draft, or a proposal for a work, or even a simple prospectus, asking that their work be printed by the nation or that they be given the means to complete their work and publish their ideas themselves.^[119]

Ginguené believed that the role of a truly democratic and republican government should be to support the spread of good books and ideas—not a closed caste of authors. The government should support the activities of writing and publishing, not writers as individuals. There should be no officially privileged cultural elite. It was this institutional vision that embodied his ideal of a truly democratic and self-enlightening republic, "encouraged" by its government.

As prescient as Ginguené's vision was, it was never to be fully realized under the first Republic. The minister of the interior did create an "Office of Encouragement" to exercise discretionary patronage in cultural matters, under the directorship of Ginguené;^[120] but it never achieved the scale of the Commission on Public Instruction, or of the office that Ginguené had proposed.^[121]

By the year IV (1795–1796), the nation's economy was plagued by soaring inflation, with the assignat falling to less than 1 percent of its face

[119] Ibid.

[120] See BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9193, feuilles 2, 6, 23, 36, "Papiers Ginguené," pertaining to his directorship of the "Direction Générale de l'Instruction Publique, 5e Division du Ministère de l'Intérieur."

[121] Ibid., feuilles 6, 23, 141–147, an V-an VIII (1796–1800).

value.^[122] In the following two years, the government was finally driven to partial bankruptcy in order to consolidate its debts.^[123] With the fiscal crisis, the government's budget for cultural patronage was drastically reduced and recentralized. The minister's Office of Encouragement was forced to make severe cutbacks, and by November 19, 1796, Ginguené reported that its very existence was imperiled. Literary patronage lost its status as a distinct division of the ministry: henceforth it would figure only as a line item in the minister of the interior's discretionary budget.^[124]

The founding of the Institut and the suppression of the Office of Encouragement were not the only events to mark the victory of cultural centralization. On 12 vendémiaire, year IV (October 5, 1795), the printing of laws was recentralized at the national printing shops in Paris.^[125] The departmental printers were again dispossessed. To accommodate the reconsolidation and expansion of government publishing in Paris, on 14 brumaire, year IV (November 4, 1795), the Imprimerie de l'Administration Nationale was swallowed up by the Imprimerie de la République.^[126] There was now only one government printing house in Paris.

The deregulationist and laissez-faire policies toward commerce in ideas implemented by the National Assembly and the National Convention between 1789 and 1793 spelled economic disaster for commercial book publishing. What is more, they totally confounded the expectations of the cultural legislators who had endorsed them. Far from producing an enlightened Republic, the newly freed printing and publishing world, left to its own devices, could barely produce at all. And what it did produce appeared hardly enlightened to the new men in power.

[122] Lyons, France Under the Directory, 180.

[123] Ibid., 183–184.

[124] See BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9193, feuille 23, "Papiers Ginguené," Report to the Minister of the Interior, 29 brumaire, an V (November 19, 1769). For examples of cutbacks, see the letter from the Ministry of the Interior to the Paris printer Jean-Baptiste Brasseur announcing that although they had subsidized the first two editions of his Vie de Général Hoche, they could not subsidize the third, though they would like to, "if their financial situation were less difficult." They added that there were many schools that could use this book; AN, ser. F17, carton 1215, doss. 5, 10 brumaire, an VIII (November 1, 1799).

[125] Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 175.

[126] Ibid., 188.

The economic crisis in the printing and publishing world in the year II thus converged with a crucial shift in revolutionary cultural policy. By 1794 the struggle against the monarchy, church, and aristocracy took on an overtly cultural dimension. Cultural legislators were forced to recognize that if left to follow their own desires, citizens, as well as the publishers and printers who satisfied their appetites for reading material, might not naturally incline toward republican ideals. Sobered by this insight, the National Convention abandoned its laissez-faire approach to publishing.

Rejecting the Old Regime model of preventative censorship and corporate regulation, the republican government evolved two distinct new strategies for intervention in the publishing and printing world. The first, spearheaded by the Committee on Public Safety in its decrees on revolutionary government of November-December 1794, involved the expansion and centralization of government printing and publishing, as part of the committee's effort to impose political and cultural unity on the divided nation. This strategy was not checked by Thermidor but continued throughout the Directory and Napoleonic period as well.

A second form of government intervention in publishing came from the Commission on Public Instruction. Rather than attempting to nationalize the production of printed matter, it embarked on an ambitious effort to reshape the commercial literary market by a system of encouragements and rewards for writers and commercial printing and publishing establishments which contributed to the public good. Over the course of 1794–1799 the commission spent huge sums in the form of government encouragements in order to woo publishers away from the tempting profits to be made by exploiting the passions aroused through political journals and romantic literature. Official subsidies and rewards were offered to those publishers proffering the cooler virtues of philosophical inquiry, self-improvement, and public utility.

To implement these policies the government, first through the Commission on Public Instruction and then through the Ministry of the Interior's Office of Encouragement, embarked on an unprecedented experiment in democratic cultural patronage. The committee and the office offered the possibility of cultural patronage to all citizens, irrespective, at least formally, of class, occupation, gender, or any other criterion. In so doing they shifted the basis of government patronage from writers to writing, from publishers to books. The democratic cultural policies of the Thermidorean moment, however, were soon

eclipsed by the revival of the corporatist model of government patronage embodied in the new Institut National.

These successive developments in revolutionary cultural politics had a significant, and sometimes contradictory, impact on commercial publishing and printing in the capital during the republican period. Already hit hard by the collapse of the book market and then the repression of political literature under the Terror, commercial printers saw themselves further dispossessed by the ever-expanding Imprimerie de la République. Yet at the same time, the peace declared after Thermidor, along with the patronage of the Commission on Public Instruction, opened up a wide range of new opportunities for commercial publishing, both within and beyond France.