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.