Chapter One
The Freeing of the Presses, 1788–1791

What did "freedom of the press" mean in practice? Traditional histories of press freedom in France have limited their inquiries to the story of the abolition of royal censorship.^[1] As important as this subject is, it does not begin to capture the meaning or the magnitude of the cultural revolution that occurred as a consequence of the freeing of the press in 1789. The struggle against royal censorship was simply one aspect of a much broader assault on the entire literary system of the Old Regime. The destruction of that system would completely transform the legal, institutional, and economic realities of printing and publishing and, ultimately, the character of France's literary culture.

Consider a few examples of what the freedom of the press meant to revolutionaries in 1789. The novelist Restif de la Bretonne wrote: "If you want freedom of the press, establish freedom of the professions.

[1] See, for example, Gustave Le Poittevin, La Liberté de la presse depuis la Révolution, 1789–1815 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1975 [orig. ed. Paris, 1901]); Gabriel Peignot, Essai historique sur la liberté d'écrire chez les anciens et au moyen âge, et sur la liberté de la presse depuis le quinzième siècle (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970 [orig. ed. Paris, 1832]); Eugène Hatin, Histoire politique et littéraire de la presse en France, 8 vols. (Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1859–1861); Maurice Tourneux, "Le Régime de la presse de 1789 à l'an VIII," Révolution française 25 (1893): 193–213; Alma Söderhjelm, Le Régime de la presse pendant la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971 [orig. ed. Paris, 1900–1901]); Claude Bellanger, ed., Histoire générale de la presse française, 5 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1969); Natalie Lambrichs, La Liberté de la presse en l'an IV. Les Journaux républicains (Paris: PUF, 1976).

Without this, thirty-six privileged printers will become more cruel tyrants of thought than all of the censors!"^[2] For Restif it was the corporate monopoly of the Paris Book Guild, rather than royal censorship and surveillance, that most constrained freedom of expression and the press. This view was expanded upon by the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier:

Let us now recall all the kinds of tyranny . . . the inquisition of the Royal Censors, the inquisition of the Lieutenant-General of Police,. . . of the Administration of the Book Trade, . . . of the Keeper of the Seals . . ., of the Minister of Paris . . ., of the Stewards of Court Entertainments . . ., of the Gentlemen of the Bed Chamber . . ., of the lawyers . . ., of the Sorbonne . . ., of the issuers of mandates and pastoral letters . . ., of the prosecuting attorneys . . ., of the minister of foreign affairs . . ., of the local governments and the royal officials of the provinces . . ., of the postal system, of the book guilds . . ., of all the valets at Versailles. In all, seventeen inquisitions exercised in France upon the minds of citizens.^[3]

According to Chénier, royal censorship was only the first in a long list of "inquisitions exercised . . . upon the minds of citizens." To Chénier's seventeen inquisitions an eighteenth was added by Louis-Félix Guynement de Kéralio, a former royal censor, who wrote two pamphlets in 1790: De la Liberté de la presse and De la Liberté d'énoncer, d'écrire et d'imprimer la pensée . In these pamphlets de Kéralio asserted that "printed matter sold to the public belongs to the public."^[4] He thus concluded that there should be no private claims to ownership of ideas or texts by authors or publishers. All texts should be freed from particular claims or "privileges" because "public interest is preferable to the mercantile interests of a few booksellers."^[5] In the eyes of these men the freeing of the press was to entail the demise of the entire legal and institutional infrastructure of publishing under the Old Regime: the royal patronage of letters; the royal Administration of the Book Trade and its army of censors, inspectors, and spies; the system of literary privileges that gave publishers and authors exclusive publication rights to texts; and finally, the monopoly of

[2] Restif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits révolutionnaires (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1978 [orig. ed. 1789]), 79.

[3] Marie-Joseph Chénier, Dénonciation des inquisiteurs de la pensée (Paris: Lagrange, 1789), 41.

[4] Félix Guynement de Kéralio, De la liberté d'énoncer, d'écrire et d'imprimer la pensée (Paris: Potier de Lille, 1790), 51; in Archives Nationales (hereafter cited as AN), ser. ADVIII, carton 38.

[5] Ibid., 52.

the Book Guild over printing, publishing, importing, and selling printed matter in France.

The struggle for the freedom of the press was a struggle to found a new cultural regime based on principles derived from Enlightenment philosophy rather than divine right absolutism. This would require a reworking of the very terms and conditions by which ideas emerge and circulate in the world. And it could only be achieved by dismantling and reconstructing the laws and institutions that organized the most basic elements of literary culture: authorship, printing, publishing, and book-selling. The philosophes of the mid-eighteenth century had reworked the epistemological basis of the origins and transmission of ideas. The revolutionaries sought to embody and give life to this "revolution of the mind" in practice.

The theoreticians of press freedom between 1788 and 1791 were not arguing simply about the policing of thought. They were arguing about where ideas come from, how they are to be transmitted, how and by whom the truth should be determined and, then, made known. Who had sovereignty in the world of ideas? A series of philosophical questions suddenly became political ones.

The Politics of Publishing Under the Old Regime

In November 1788, Augustin-Martin Lottin l'aíné , printer-bookseller and devoted member of the Paris Book Guild, set out to publish his Catalogue chronologique des libraires et des libraires-imprimeurs de Paris .^[6] This trade directory cum genealogy of one of the most privileged and exclusive sectors of cultural commerce in early modern France, the Paris Book Guild, burst into print in the same few months that the Estates General proclaimed itself the National Assembly; abolished all "privileges," at least in principle; and in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen announced that "the free communication of thought is one of the most precious rights of man. All citizens can, therefore, speak, write, and print freely."^[7] With the declaration of the freedom of the press, a mania to produce and consume the printed word swept across the nation. Over the

[6] Augustin-Martin Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires et des libraires-imprimeurs de Paris, 1470–1789 (Paris: Lottin, 1789).

[7] Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, promulgated August 26, 1789; an edited version appears in Jacques Godechot, ed., Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 34.

next several years new printing presses popped up left and right, igniting France, and especially its capital, with the flames of incendiary pamphlets of every political bent. Along with so many other trade manuals, legal handbooks, and government directories, Lottin's Catalogue became obsolete—not to say antiquarian—almost overnight. Or did it?

It is worth pausing briefly over Lottin's Catalogue because, broadly conceived, it presents us with a view of the world from one of the key nodes of state regulation of the printed word in Paris on the eve of the Revolution. In both its form and intent it reveals the place that one of the more conservative members of the Paris Book Guild sought to preserve for this institution in the larger order of things.

The title page of Lottin's work (plate 1) is in itself a kind of catalogue of the essential features of licit publication of the printed word under the Old Regime. The symmetry and classical beauty of this work is a modest, but nonetheless monumental, testimony to Colbert's programmatic vision of the organization of commerce under the absolutist state. Reading from the bottom up, we find the king and his approbation of the publication of the work; the royally licensed printer-bookseller in Paris; and the dedication to the university, which was, at least in title, the governing body under whose purview the Paris Book Guild fell within the infrastructure of the royal administration.^[8] Finally, the printers and booksellers themselves are announced, chronologically and alphabetically, by edict, in royal procession. The author of this tableau of the official process of publication figures nowhere on the title page. The king, as God's first representative on earth, is depicted as the sponsor of all knowledge made public through the medium of the printed word. Thus the work discloses its divine origin through the approbation of the king.^[9]

On one side of his chronological tableau, Lottin presents the practitioners of the typographic arts, including not only printers and book-sellers, but engravers and type and paper manufacturers as well. Listed alongside in parallel columns are the individuals whom Lottin describes as the "judges and protectors" of the typographic arts, those royal officials who inspected all printed matter and assessed its quality in both

[8] In 1789 the Paris Book Guild still appeared under the rubric for the university in the Almanach royal (Paris: Debure-d'Houry, 1789).

[9] The legal privilege to publish a book began with the formula "Louis, par la grâce de Dieu, Roi de France. . .." The text of the privilege, by law, had to appear at the beginning or end of any work published with official approbation in France in the eighteenth century.

Plate 1. 
Title page of Augustin-Martin Lottin's Catalogue chronologique 
des libraires et des libraires-imprimeurs de Paris, 1470–1789 
(Paris, 1789). General Research Collection, The New York Pub-
lic Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

formal and substantive terms before it reached the public. Beneath the king and his ministers, the prescribed audience of printed works is divided into four columns: (1) the university, (2) the Parlement, (3) the royal police at Châtelet, and (4) the king's Council of State.

Time divides neatly into centuries, reigns of kings, directorships of the Paris Book Guild, and, most importantly, family cycles, ordered chronologically and also alphabetically by both first and last names so as to emphasize every possible genealogical link. As centuries roll by, we see families rise and fall and rise again. The figures change, yet the essential structure persists. The Catalogue is organized to place Paris at the center of French publishing, to disclose and stress the continuity and coherence of a closed corporate system of production, and to facilitate and encourage its persistence.

The Chambre Syndicale de la Librairie et Imprimerie de Paris (the Paris Book Guild) was a self-regulating corporation of printers and booksellers in Paris, who by royal privilege enjoyed an exclusive monopoly on the production and distribution of printed matter in the capital city.^[10] Since 1686, when Louis XIV had fixed the number of printers in the city at thirty-six, channels of entry into the Parisian printing trade had narrowed steadily in proportion to the increase in population and demand for printed works.^[11] Successful entry into the guild required an apprenticeship and examination by both guild masters and the university. To become a printer also required the timely death of one of the select thirty-six and considerable savings to buy a shop and pay the stiff entrance fees exacted by the guild.^[12] Except for widows of guild members who chose not to remarry, the law prohibited women from printing, publishing, or selling printed works. According to Lottin, in 1788 the guild comprised 241 printers and booksellers.^[13] Initially under the jurisdiction of the University of Paris and the Parlement of Paris, over the

[10] See the Almanach de la librairie (Paris: Moutard, 1781); Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:64–93; and Philippe Minard, Typographes des lumières (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989).

[11] Henri-Jean Martin, "La Prééminence de la librairie parisienne," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:262–282.

[12] On apprenticeship in the eighteenth-century printing and book trades, see Paul Chauvet, Les Ouvriers du livre en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1964); and Minard, Typographes des lumières, esp. 74–100.

[13] Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires . An edited version of Lottin's list appears in Paul Delalain, L'Imprimerie et la librairie à Paris de 1789 à 1813 (Paris: Delalain, [1900]), li–lx. The 1788 capitation tax roll for the Paris Book Guild shows 213 members, of which 37 are printers and 32 are women; see Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter cited as BN), Fond Français (hereafter cited as mss. fr.) 21861, "Registre de la communauté des libraires et imprimeurs de Paris, 1787–1791" (see table 2).

course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the guild became tied ever more closely to the royal administration.^[14]

Three separate branches of the Crown's administration were intimately related to guild affairs. The single most important was the Administration of the Book Trade, a division of the Great Chancellery. The director of the book trade reported directly to the keeper of the seals, who in turn consulted, in particularly sensitive matters pertaining to the book trade, with the king's Council of State. This administration occupied itself at the national level with the organization of the book guilds in the major cities of France and supervised a national network of royal inspectors of the book trade. The royal inspectors oversaw the activities and duties of the guilds in the cities to which they were assigned and, in conjunction with the postal service, were charged with surveillance of the foreign book trade at designated ports of entry into France.

The Administration of the Book Trade also dispensed and registered literary "privileges," which were at once an official approbation of a work, a permission to print, and a kind of copyright, in that they gave the bearer an exclusive monopoly on the publication of a particular work or on publications in a given area of knowledge. Finally, this office was charged with the delegation of manuscripts to the appropriate member of the corps of royal censors. In light of the censor's report, the Administration of the Book Trade then determined the legal status of a work submitted for publication.^[15] By the end of the eighteenth century a work might receive one of six categories of legal sanction: (1) a privilège en librairie, which gave an exclusive monopoly on the publication of a work for a fixed period of time (usually ten to twenty years) to a particular licensed guild publisher; (2) a privilège d'auteur , which gave the author of a work and his or her heirs an exclusive monopoly on the publication of the work in perpetuity; (3) a permission simple , which gave legal authorization to a publisher to produce a single edition of a particular work; (4) a permission tacite, which gave no legal sanction to a work but insured that the authorities would permit and protect its publication and circulation unless

[14] Henri-Jean Martin, "Conditions politiques. La Librairie et les pouvoirs," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:64–93.

[15] See Daniel Roche, "Censorship and the Publishing Industry," in Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800, ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 3–26.

it was denounced, whereupon they might withdraw the permission; (5) a tolérance , which simply meant that the authorities would tolerate at their contingent discretion the circulation of an illegal work; and finally (6), a suppression , which meant that a work and its publisher would be actively pursued by the authorities, the work confiscated and destroyed, and the publisher and author fined and perhaps arrested or banished.^[16]

By law, no one but a registered member of one of the officially sanctioned royal book guilds was allowed to engage in the activities of printing, publishing, or selling printed works in France. In 1777 this regulation was modified to permit authors to publish and sell their own works.^[17] Sample copies of every printed work over three printer's sheets in length produced or marketed in the city of Paris had to be deposited and registered at the offices of the Paris Book Guild.^[18] Shorter publications were registered directly with the lieutenant-general of police. The guild then sent the manuscript to the Administration of the Book Trade, where it was again registered and then sent on to a royal censor for evaluation. Upon the censor's report, the administration determined whether the publisher would be permitted to circulate the book and, if so, what level of approbation and protection the edition would receive. Any pirate editions or illicit works not bearing the name and address of a licensed guild publisher, a royal "privilege," and the approbation of a royal censor printed at the back of the book were confiscated to the advantage of the actual privilege holder, the Paris Book Guild, and the Administration of the Book Trade. The printers and publishers of the city thus enjoyed protection against competition for their labor force and the licit literary market that they monopolized.

Two other branches of the royal administration concerned themselves with the production and dissemination of printed works in the capital under the Old Regime. Of second most importance, in Lottin's view, was the Châtelet, the law courts and offices of the royal police force

[16] Raymond Birn, "The Profits in Ideas: "Privilèges en Librairie' in Eighteenth-Century France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1971): 131–168.

[17] Codes of the book trade for 1723 and 1777; see Almanach de la librairie . An arrêt of the king's Council of State of 1700 prohibited authors from selling their own works. The arrêts of 1777 reversed this decision, making it possible for authors to sell their own works. See H.-J. Martin, "Conditions politiques"; and Birn, "Profits in Ideas"; also Carla Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793," Representations 30 (Spring 1990): 109–137.

[18] On this procedure, see Robert Estivals, Le Dépôt légal sous l'ancien régime de 1537–1791 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1961).

of Paris, under the jurisdiction of the minister of Paris and, in particular, the lieutenant-general of police and his corps of inspectors of the book trade and undercover spies. These men were charged with the censorship of works printed and published in the capital shorter than three printer's sheets. They made regular visits, in conjunction with the book guild officers, to the establishments of the printers and booksellers of the city. They were further charged, along with the postal service and the Paris customs officers, with the inspection of shipments of printed matter moving into or out of the city.^[19] Finally, the minister of foreign affairs controlled the dispensation of "privileges" for the publication of periodical literature and surveillance of the foreign book trade.

The research findings of historians of eighteenth-century literature and the book trade allow us to flesh out the scheme left to us by Lottin and to situate his Paris-centered depiction in the context of the national administration of the book trade.^[20] The system of legal publishing on the eve of the French Revolution is shown graphically in figure 1, table 1, and map 1.

This corporatist system, the godchild of divine-right absolutism, was not, however, without its imbalances. The most striking disproportion, concealed by diagrams and maps, involved the increasing preeminence of the Paris Book Guild within the national system over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^[21] Parisian commerce as a whole tended to be privileged by the monarchy as the crowning jewel of royal civilization, the more cultivated and protected because it lay close beneath the royal eye. It was also the most susceptible to surveillance. By royal decree, the number of Parisian printing establishments was fixed at three

[19] For vivid depictions of the careers and activities of these officials, see Darnton, Literary Underground; and Robert Darnton, "A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 145–189.

[20] See, in particular, Estivals, Dépôt légal; Robert Estivals, La Statistique bibliographique de la France sous la monarchie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1965); H.-J. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société; Chatier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition; Birn, "Profits in Ideas"; François Furet, "La Librairie du royaume de France au 18e siècle," in Bollème et al., Livre et société; E. P. Shaw, Problems and Policies of Malesherbes as Directeur de la Librairie in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1966); J.-P. Belin, Le Commerce des livres prohibés à Paris de 1750 à 1789 (Paris: Belin frères, 1913); John Lough, Writer and Public in France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); and Nicole Hermann-Mascard, La Censure des livres à Paris à la fin de l'ancien régime (1750–1789) (Paris: PUF, 1968).

[21] See Martin, "Prééminence de la librairie." See also Jean Queniart, "L'Anémie provinciale," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:283–284.

Figure 1.
The Royal Administration of the Book Trade: Administrative Organization, 1789
Source: AN, ser. V1, cartons 549–553.

times the number of any provincial city.^[22] In terms of location they also benefited from the most intensive, if not extensive, reading market in France. As Lottin's attention to genealogy suggests, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Paris-centered family empires steadily consolidated a hegemonic grip on licit publishing under the Old Regime. Lottin was right to put Paris at the center of official publishing. It was.

[22] See Roger Chartier, "L'Imprimerie en France à la fin de l'ancien régime. L'Etat général des imprimeurs de 1777," Revue française d'histoire du livre, n.s., no. 6 (1973): 253–279; and Roger Chartier, "La Géographie de l'imprimerie française au XVIIIe siècle," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:290–291. The figures for 1701 are fifty-one printing shops in Paris to thirty in Lyon (nearest competitor); and for 1777, thirty-six in Paris to twelve in Lyon (nearest competitor).

Map 1. 
Royal Inspectors of the Book Trade and the Book Guilds of France, 1789. 
Source: AN, ser. V1, cartons 549–553.

Advantageously positioned at the heart of national administrative life, police power, and royal patronage, Parisian publishers steadily accumulated monopolies on the most lucrative privileges for the major texts of classical literary, religious, and legal civilization. In general, Parisian establishments were large and specialized in what the French call grande édition : the publication of multivolume editions, standard reference works, and educational and religious texts with huge press runs.^[23]

Massive bibliographic studies of the registers of the literary privileges and permissions granted by the royal Administration of the Book Trade and of officially sanctioned periodical literature in the eighteenth century have provided us with a fairly clear sense of what this system of licit publication produced. The picture of official literary culture that emerges from the studies of François Furet, Robert Estivals, and Jean Ehrard and Jacques Roger is essentially one of cultural stagnation and a steadily consolidated reproduction of the traditional religious and literary inheritance of the seventeenth century.^[24] Heavily patronized, protected, and policed, Paris publishers dominated official publishing. And, with a few notable exceptions, they also proved relatively inflexible in the face of new literary and intellectual movements or shifts in the demands of the reading market.^[25] Seeking the literary civilization of the eighteenth century, literary historians who have studied licit publishing have found instead the cultural inheritance of the seventeenth century. The official world of corporate publishing in Paris was preeminent, but fossilized.

But Lottin himself, despite his desire to present a world of coherence and symmetry, was unavoidably aware that licit publishing was not the only publishing in Paris or in France. And in the mere act of documenting the official system over time, history inevitably intruded in Lottin's account. "Interesting facts," "clandestine presses," and "supposed presses that do not exist" could not be ignored and had to be tacked on, disrupting the symmetry of his picture.^[26] Moreover, in his neat four-column classification system, some columns bulge at the expense of others. Thus, as the centuries of the tableau roll by, the thirty-six printers of Paris become slowly engulfed by increasing numbers of royal officers.

[23] H.-J. Martin, "Prééminence parisienne"; and Queniart, "Anémie provinciale."

[24] Estivals, Statistique bibliographique ; Furet, "La 'librairie' du royaume de France au 18e siècle," in Bollème et al., Livre et société , 3–32; Jean Ehrard and Jacques Roger, "Deux périodiques français du 18e siècle," in Bollème et al., Livre et société , 33–60.

[25] Martin, "Prééminence parisienne."

[26] Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires , xx, xxiii.

While the columns of names under the university and the Parlement remain essentially static, those under the police of Châtelet and the king's Council of State run wild: sometimes they must be doubled; finally whole pages must be given over to them. The business of "judging and protecting" the printed word clearly thrived in the eighteenth century.^[27]

Clues like Lottin's unintentional revelations have led historians to uncover and map out a labyrinth of illegal publishing, which seethed underground and across the borders of France during the eighteenth century. Following the theses of Alexis de Tocqueville and Daniel Mornet, these scholars have sought to retrace the dissemination of revolutionary ideas in the century before the Revolution became a reality.^[28] They have revealed widespread production and diffusion of subversive ideas through the medium of the printed word, beyond the laws and institutions of the Old Regime.^[29] Thus, despite the picture that emerged from studies of official registers of literary privileges, we now know that Enlightenment literature was widely diffused in eighteenth-century French society, and that the spread of this new cultural movement was intimately linked with the elaboration of an underground subculture of printers, publishers, literary smugglers, and book dealers in border cities like Neuchâtel, Bouillon, Geneva, Avignon, in the Low Countries (especially Amsterdam), and in Kehl, Germany.^[30] This illicit world also spread within the borders of France, in cities like Troyes and Lyon, in Paris and its suburbs (such as St-Denis, Bourg-la-Reine, or Petit Montreuil), and especially in the Palais Royal.^[31] The realities of eighteenth-century pub-

[27] Ibid., 244.

[28] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1955); and Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française, 1715–1787 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967 [orig. ed. 1933]).

[29] Robert Darnton, "Philosophy Under the Cloak," in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800, 27–49.

[30] On Neuchâtel, see Darnton, Business of Enlightenment; Darnton, Literary Underground; and Robert Darnton, "Le Livre prohibé aux frontières. Neuchâtel," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition 2:342–361. On Bouillon, see Raymond Birn, "Le Livre prohibé aux frontières. Bouillon," in ibid., 334–341. On Geneva, see B. Lescaze, "Commerce d'assortissement et livres interdits. Genève," in ibid., 326–333. On Avignon, see René Moulinas, "La Contrefaçon avignonnaise," in ibid., 294–303. On the Low Countries, see Ch. Berkvens-Stevelinck, "L'Edition française en Hollande," in ibid., 316–325. And on Kehl, see Henri-Jean Martin, "Le Voltaire de Kehl," in ibid., 310.

[31] On Troyes, as well as Paris, see Darnton, Literary Underground, 122–147. On Lyon, see Darnton, Business of Enlightenment . On Paris, see Belin, Commerce des livres prohibés; and Henri Carré, "Quelques mots sur la presse clandestine à la fin de l'ancien régime," Révolution Française 25–26 (1893–1894): 102–126. And on Parisian suburbs and the Palais Royal, see BN, mss. fr. 22070, fols. 198–199, "Mémoire sur l'introduction des libelles dans le royaume et chez l'étranger" (n.d.).

lishing and literary culture thus lay hidden beneath the Colbertian ideal depicted by Lottin and inscribed in the laws, institutions, and programmatic vision of the absolutist state.

Under the Old Regime there were thus two intersecting yet distinct systems of cultural production. In political terms, the one was legal and privileged: it received its justification and legitimation in the idea of the divine origins of all knowledge and in the right of the king as God's first representative to interpret God's knowledge and grant or revoke the privilege to make it public within his kingdom.^[32] The other, in contrast, was illegal and unprivileged: its legitimation inhered solely in the notion of the author as the originator and first owner of a work, freely alienated by contract to a publisher, as with any other form of property. Economically, the one relied on corporate monopolies and closed markets; the other depended on market demand in the "booty capitalist" world beyond the law.^[33] Geographically, the one was centered in Paris and the traditional provincial cities; the other operated underground, beyond the borders of France, or in free zones like the Palais Royal in Paris, which enjoyed immunity from surveillance by the king's police. Culturally, the one was dominated by the classical, legalistic, and religious worldview of the seventeenth-century court; the other propagated les lumières and the romantic spirit of Rousseauism.^[34]

Of course, characterizations of this sort are never as neat as they seem. By the end of the eighteenth century many, if not most, publishers, printers, and book dealers, as well as the royal officials who policed them, in reality conducted their businesses on both sides of the law. Nonetheless, it should now be apparent that when, in 1789, Chénier denounced the "seventeen inquisitions exercised in France upon the minds of citizens," he was calling for the destruction of the entire institutional infrastructure of legal publishing under the Old Regime and for the legalization of the commercial literary culture that lay beyond the law. Alternately, when Lottin, the former chief officer of the Paris Book Guild and official printer for the city of Paris and the king, set out to

[32] This is the actual language of the royal literary privilege, which appeared at the end of all works published with official approbation.

[33] See, for example, Darnton, Business of Enlightenment , 520–530.

[34] On the eve of the Revolution, for example, the Oeuvres of Voltaire were being published in Kehl, Rousseau's Oeuvres in Geneva, the Encyclopédie in Neuchâtel, and Mirabeau's pamphlets in Avignon.

publish his Catalogue in 1789, he had no intention of singing a commemorative swan song to a world he had lost. Rather, he intended to be the Paris Book Guild's most erudite polemicist.

The Declaration of Press Freedom

Freedom of the press was declared through the convergence of mounting public demand for free exchange of political ideas in the 1780s and the Crown's decision to permit discretionary tolerance in the months preceding the meeting of the Estates General in 1789. Historians usually date the beginning of the period of "unlimited freedom of the press" from the royal arrêt of July 5, 1788, which called on "educated persons" to express their views on the procedures for convening the Estates General, or from the arrêt of the Parlement of Paris of December 5, 1788, which gave the first legal sanction to the abstract principle.^[35] Whatever the exact moment of official sanction, there can be no doubt that 1788 marked the beginning of a period of de facto freedom on the streets. The prevailing mood of tolerance, reform, anticipation, and uncertainty surrounding the convocation of the Estates General gave rise to a storm of public debate, which expressed itself in a flurry of pamphlet literature and ephemeral journals.^[36]

It was not, however, until the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on August 26, 1789, that the government sanctioned the freedom of the press as a natural and inalienable right.^[37] But in what particular form was this principle to be embodied? From the official recognition of the abstract principle of press freedom a seemingly endless debate ensued in the National Assembly. The crux of the debate centered on the problem of drawing a just line between liberty and libel, and between opinion and sedition. To what extent could authors be held responsible for the consequences of their ideas? What would be the appropriate channels of recourse against slander?

[35] See, for example, Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française, 1:423–431; Claude Labrosse and Pierre Rétat, Naissance du journal révolutionnaire (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989), 9–17; Eugène Hatin, Manuel théorique et pratique de la liberté de la presse (Paris: Pagnerre, 1868), 22; Peignot, Essai historique sur la liberté d'écrire , 148; Ralph Greenlaw, "Pamphlet Literature in France," Journal of Modern History 29 (1957): 349; Tourneux, "Régime de la presse," 193.

[36] See Labrosse and Rétat, Naissance du journal révolutionnaire, 9–25; Greenlaw, "Pamphlet Literature"; Tourneux, "Régime de la presse"; Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 1, chap. 5.

[37] Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, promulgated August 26, 1789; an edited version appears in Godechot (ed.), Les Constitutions de la France, 34.

In reading through the record of the National Assembly for 1789 and 1790, one cannot help but be struck by what appears to be a major shift, almost overnight, in the orientation of state policy concerning the regulation of the printed word. It appears that the whole system of preventative censorship and corporate privilege, which the Bourbons had so ambitiously developed and Lottin had so painstakingly documented, became an instant nonissue. The endless records of the discussion of press rights contain virtually no references to how printers and the book trade itself should be regulated. True, the debates in the Assembly were focused principally on the future constitution rather than on the present administration. But did that mean anyone could print anything? Could anyone open a printing shop or go into the publishing business, or launch a newspaper or periodical? And what happened to the literary "privileges" of authors, printers, publishers, and booksellers?^[38] What were the consequences of the freedom of the press for the publishing and printing world?

Although the royal arrêt of July 5, 1788, precipitated an era of tolerance for free expression, on April 3, 1789, by another arrêt, the Crown explicitly reaffirmed the entire code that had regulated the French book trade since 1744, and ordered the royal Administration of the Book Trade to enforce it.^[39] Five cartons of reports and correspondence from the Paris office of the Administration of the Book Trade from the years 1788 to 1790 make it possible to recapture the meaning and consequences of the declaration of the freedom of the press from the perspective of those whose job it was to interpret and enforce it.^[40]

When the Crown announced the convocation of the Estates General and invited "educated persons" to comment, the Administration of the Book Trade, located in Paris, was already floundering in unsolicited

[38] See the list of particular privileges in Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires, xx.

[39] A royal arrêt of April 3, 1789, reaffirmed the règlements of the book trade; AN, ser. V1, carton 551. Royal arrêts of May 6–7, 1789, reaffirmed the prohibition on publishing any journal without official permission; see Tourneux, "Régime de la presse," 195–196. For the actions taken against Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville; Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau; and Louis Prudhomme in May 1789 by the royal Administration of the Book Trade, see the letters from the bureau's director, Poitevin de Maissemy, reprinted in Pierre Manuel, La Police de Paris dévoilée (Paris: Desenne, 1791), 61–70. For the attempt of the Estates General to restrict the publication of their proceedings to official journals, see Tourneux, "Régime de la presse," 196.

[40] AN, ser. V1, cartons 549–553.

opinions regarding this great event. Poitevin de Maissemy, a former parlementaire and maître des requêtes , had been appointed to the post of director-general of this administration in late October 1788:^[41] he was thus new on the job. The real driving force and determining character of the office on the eve of the Revolution was its manager, Dieudonné Thiebault, a minor man of letters.^[42] Thiebault had managed the administration since 1785, with the aid of two assistants and three secretaries. It was he who drafted all reports; who framed all policy questions for the keeper of the seals, François de Paule de Barentin; and who corresponded with the provincial inspectors and guild officials.

In the first few months of 1789 the Administration of the Book Trade faced an unprecedented problem: who would be permitted to document, report on, or discuss the Estates General in print? The king's appeal to the people for advice may have been interpreted as establishing liberty on the streets of Paris, but the Administration of the Book Trade was simultaneously marshaling all of its resources to retain its official monopoly on publications discussing the event. By late January, a flood of pirate editions of the royal Lettre de convocation was inundating France.^[43] The administration issued a series of bulletins affirming the exclusive monopoly of the director of the Imprimerie Royale, Etienne-Alexandre-Jacques Anisson-Duperron, over publication of the document.^[44] A royal privilege for the German translation was granted to Frédéric-Rodolphe Saltzmann, the royal inspector in Strasbourg.^[45] But disobedience and contest were endemic within the ranks of the official publishers themselves. The imprimeurs du roi of the various cities of

[41] Siméon-Prosper Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:136 (entry for November 2, 1788). According to Hardy, Maissemy was received as a conseiller de la Cour des Aides on May 18, 1770, and became a maître des requêtes in 1783.

[42] Dieudonné Thiebault (1733–1807). By his own description, the high moment of Thiebault's literary career was his nomination through the influence of D'Alembert and D'Olivet to the Academy of Berlin in 1764. A student of Fénélon, Thiebault edited a Dictionnaire de locution française and authored an Essai sur le style, an Adieu de M. le duc de Bourgogne, and an Adieu de M. de Fénélon . On the eve of the Revolution he also composed a Plan d'enseignement public; AN, ser. V1, carton 553 [1790].

[43] AN, ser. V1, carton 549, Letter from Barentin to Maissemy, January 23, 1789.

[44] A reaffirmation of Anisson's privilege was issued by the king's Council of State on April 18, 1788, and registered at the Administration of the Book Trade in January 1789; AN, ser. V1, carton 549. See also AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 7, "Arrêt . . . qui défend . . . à tous libraires et imprimeurs de la ville de Paris ou des provinces . . . d'imprimer . . . ni débiter . . . des ouvrages, édits [etc.] imprimés de l'ordre de sa majesté à la dite Imprimerie Royale," March 26, 1789.

[45] AN, ser. V1, carton 549.

France challenged the monopoly of the Imprimerie Royale in Paris. The inspector of the book trade in Orléans upheld the local printer for the king, Louis Jacob, and seized Anisson-Duperron's shipment of the Lettre to that city.^[46] The inspector in Caen wrote to the Paris Office requesting clarification of Anisson-Duperron's jurisdiction.^[47] Lyon, according to its inspector, Latourette, was awash with pirate editions.^[48] Cory de Villeneuve, the inspector in Toulouse, reported similar circumstances.^[49] By February, even the German translation was being pirated in Strasbourg.^[50] Anisson-Duperron protested to the Administration of the Book Trade, and Maissemy consequently sent a circular to all the book guilds of France ordering them to respect and protect Anisson-Duperron's privilege. Nonetheless, during the next few months the problem spread to Douai, Nîmes, Bordeaux, and Nancy.^[51] The royal administration held fairly firm in face of the onslaught, but it was clear that the Crown was losing its grip on its own publications.

The pirating of official proclamations was the least of their problems. The Crown clearly had every intention of maintaining control over public discussion of the Estates General. Indeed, by February 1789 the keeper of the seals had appointed a royal censor to devote himself exclusively to works concerning the Estates General.^[52] But by early March the authorities were less sure of their political footing in both Paris and the provinces. Roysans, a royal censor, appealed to the Administration of the Book Trade for clarification of official policy: "M. Fouquet [the inspector at Caen] assured me during his last voyage that it was the government's intention to permit much greater liberty than before to discussions of political matters. . . . I would be extremely obliged, sir, to know what works are to be permitted."^[53] And Roysans was not alone with these questions. By the end of March even Thiebault was beginning to have doubts about

[46] AN, ser. V1, carton 549, contains several letters from January and February pertaining to this incident, in particular, one dated February 15, 1789.

[47] AN, ser. V1, carton 549, Letter from Caen inspector, February 1789.

[48] Ibid., Letter from Latourette, inspector at Lyon, February 1789.

[49] Ibid., Letter from Villeneuve, inspector at Toulouse, February 1789.

[50] Ibid., Letter from Saltzmann, inspector at Strasbourg, February 1789.

[51] Ibid., Reports from Douai, March 1789; Nîmes, March 20, 1789; Bordeaux, April 3, 1789; and Nancy, June 8, 1789.

[52] Ibid., Letter to the Administration from G. Pouvin, "Commis par Msgr. le Garde des Sceaux pour l'examen des ouvrages concernant les étatsgénéraux," February 5, 1789.

[53] AN, ser. V1, carton 550, Letter from Roysans to Maissemy, March 10, 1789.

the authority of the Crown to censor works pertaining to the Estates General. Thus he inquired delicately of the keeper of the seals:

Without wanting to tire you unduly, sire, I should draw to your attention that by all accounts it is clear that an infinite number of "Instructions" for the deputies to the Estates General are going to be published; that these "Instructions" are public acts, signed by those who edited them, and intended to serve as official mandates. . . . Under these circumstances how are they to be censored? It is impossible to submit them to the formality of a "permission" without compromising their status. These documents must be permitted to circulate freely. . . . This is an irregularity, but it is involuntary and temporary.^[54]

Thiebault's policy of temporary and discretionary suspension of censorship became the order of the day. Thus he responded, for Maissemy, to the censor Roysans:

Any publication that is not going to get people riled up or pitch the orders against one another can be advertised and analyzed in the periodical press. . . . I had thought that I had devised a plan . . . that would have instituted a lawful and very extended freedom in place of this unchecked license, but the King has determined that the assembled Estates General should decide on this matter. So we must resign ourselves to live in this disorder and to wait, with resignation, for happier times.^[55]

The Administration of the Book Trade thus found itself in limbo.

This was true not only in matters of censorship, but also in relation to the pressing question among journalists as to who would receive the royal privilege to cover the Estates General in the periodical press. From January through May, the office was swamped with requests for privileges from various editors wishing to launch newspapers or journals under the title "The Estates General."^[56] Royal policy was expressed in one of Thiebault's many responses to solicitors, that "it would be useless at present to authorize a privilege that the freedom of the press could render null, or that the Estates General itself could decide to award to someone else."^[57]

By the end of March, however, royal policy on press coverage took

[54] Ibid., Letter from Thiebault to the keeper of the seals, March 30, 1789.

[55] Ibid., Response to Roysans, March 1789.

[56] AN, ser. V1, cartons 549—552. Between January and June 1789 the Administration of the Book Trade received over twenty requests for exclusive privileges on a journal entitled "The Estates General."

[57] AN, ser. V1, carton 549, Undated response by Thiebault from January-February; similar responses are given in March as well.

another turn. Thiebault now felt "that the best plan is to permit the Journal de Paris , the Journal général de France , and the Mercure de France to publish whatever prudence might authorize" concerning the Estates General.^[58] Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, the press magnate and encyclopedist-publisher, took advantage of this shift in the wind and attempted to shortcut the red tape of the Administration of the Book Trade. In a letter of April 17, 1789, he appealed directly to the minister of finance, Jacques Necker, arguing that he had the most rightful claim to exclusive coverage of the Estates General because, first, he owned the most extensive privileges for periodical publishing and, second, one of his journals, the Mercure , had given "detailed coverage of the Estates General of 1614." Panckoucke also added a political warning to his request: "If the government does not have one authorized newspaper . . . the capital and the provinces will be infected with huge amounts of false information . . . that could do a great deal of damage and stir up trouble."^[59]

But Panckoucke ran up against a dead end: the royal government, Thiebault announced to a solicitor, had decided to leave to the Estates General itself the power and responsibility of "authorizing and monitoring" any publication pertaining to the assembly.^[60] On May 19, 1789, the Estates General adopted the policy Thiebault had earlier suggested to the keeper of the seals: they gave permission to the three journals whose privileges covered political affairs—that is, the Gazette de France (also known as the Journal général de France ), the Journal de Paris , and the Mercure de France —to report on their proceedings.^[61] Panckoucke, among others, however, would continue to negotiate with the representatives of the nation throughout the fall, in the hope of acquiring an exclusive monopoly on coverage for one official journal.^[62]

[58] AN, ser. V1, carton 551, Report by Thiebault, March 17, 1789.

[59] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, Letter from Panckoucke to Jacques Necker, April 27, 1789.

[60] AN, ser. V1, carton 551, Undated report of Thiebault from April-May 1789. On Panckoucke's continuing efforts to create an official journal, see Paul Rapheal, "Panckoucke et son programme de journal officiel en 1789," Révolution française 64 (1913): 216–219. See also Suzanne Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke et la librairie française, 1736–1798 (Pau: Marrimpouey, 1977).

[61] Tourneux, "Régime de la presse," 196.

[62] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, Letter from Panckoucke to Armand-Gaston Camus, president of the National Assembly, November 2, 1789, in which he reasserts the same arguments he made to Necker in the spring. See Panckoucke's article in the Moniteur, November 26, 1789, 3, where he solicits a contract for a "journal de l'Assemblée Nationale." See also the documents edited in Rapheal, "Panckoucke et son programme de journal officiel."

In the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates General, the Crown was slowly ceding its sovereignty over the publication, and hence public interpretation, of political events. Thiebault wrote to the inspector at St-Malo in the early summer of 1789 that in matters of publishing and the press "we must await the future for laws, rules, or principles established by the Estates General. But for now I can only uphold the old regulations."^[63] The Administration of the Book Trade, though affirmed in its powers by the royal arrêt of April 3, had thus begun to await the orders of a new master. But by the summer of 1789 the administration was collapsing from within.

There were signs from early 1789 that the world of official publishing was beginning to fall apart. Fouquet, the inspector at Caen, requested a "leave of absence" in January.^[64] Then the book guild of Toulouse went into revolt against the central administration.^[65] By March, the Paris Book Guild was also mobilizing against the royal règlement of 1777, which had revoked its hereditary claims to privileges on texts.^[66] In April the insubordination of the Toulouse Guild became even more strident.^[67] By May 30, the inspector in Lyon had ceased to send in his reports, and in June, the inspector in Marseille, Marin, resigned his post.^[68] Chenu, the inspector at Metz, held fast but was forced to concede by early July that he had lost control over the situation.^[69] The inspector at St-Malo, Hovins, admitted defeat at the same point.^[70] The situation in Nîmes was

[63] AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Undated report by Thiebault, June-October 1789.

[64] Ibid., carton 549, Undated letter from Fouquet, inspector at Caen, January-February 1789.

[65] Ibid., Undated report from Villeneuve, inspector at Toulouse, January-February 1789.

[66] Ibid., carton 550, Memorandum from the Paris Book Guild, March 1789.

[67] Ibid., carton 551, Undated report from Villeneuve, inspector at Toulouse, April-May, 1789.

[68] Ibid., Letter from Maissemy to Latourette, inspector at Lyon, May 30, 1789; and carton 553, Letter from Marin, inspector at Marseille, June 26, 1789.

[69] Ibid., carton 553, Letter from Chenu, inspector at Metz, July 11, 1789, and Maissemy's response.

[70] Ibid., carton 552, Letter from Hovins, inspector at St-Malo, and response, undated [July 11–28, 1789?].

likewise in total disarray.^[71] In La Rochelle, the book guild began to meet illegally to discuss a pamphlet circulated by the printer Chauvet calling for the abolition of all guilds.^[72] The officers of the postal service reported the refusal of the printers and publishers of Nantes to abide by the royal regulations "on the pretext that the National Assembly has decreed the freedom of the press."^[73] Order also broke down in Nancy.^[74] By July 22, the director of the book trade, Poitevin de Maissemy, wrote a long letter to Villeneuve, the diligent inspector at Toulouse, in his own hand, acknowledging the chaos in Paris and Versailles and his own despair.^[75] Within a week, Maissemy himself abandoned ship; by late July, the keeper of the seals likewise had disappeared.^[76]

By August 1789 the whole system of censorship began to break down. Nicolas-Joseph Sélis, professor of eloquence and censor of the Mercure de France , wrote on August 11 asking for "clarifications" of his duties.^[77] Three weeks after the declaration of the freedom of the press, the Mercure's owner, Panckoucke, was refusing to pay him.^[78] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, stepped in and ordered Panckoucke to pay the censor's pension—though he would not have to submit to censorship—"until laws concerning the book trade have been definitively enacted."^[79]

The baron de Dietrich, censor in Strasbourg, was out of work as well.^[80] In September the editors of the Journal encyclopédique began refusing to submit to, or pay, their censor. The report on this affair reveals that censorship of both foreign and domestic periodicals had broken down completely.^[81] The chevalier de Gaigne, censor in Paris, also wrote lamenting the freedom of the press and begging for further employ-

[71] Ibid., Report from Royez, inspector at Nîmes, August 14, 1789.

[72] Ibid., carton 553, Letter from the office of the "sénéchaussé du siège présidal et de la police de La Rochelle" to the Administration of the Book Trade, June 9, 1789.

[73] Ibid., Letter from the postal inspectors, October 9, 1789.

[74] Ibid., Letter from Chassel, inspector at Nancy, November 12, 1789.

[75] Ibid., carton 552, Letter from Maissemy to Villeneuve, inspector at Toulouse, July 22, 1789.

[76] Ibid., Maissemy's last letter as director, dated July 28, 1789, to Villeneuve, inspector at Toulouse, announcing his resignation; see also Siméon-Prosper Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:396 (entry for July 18, 1789, noting Barentin's resignation).

[77] Ibid., carton 553, Letter from Sélis, August 11, 1789.

[78] Ibid., Letter from Sélis, September 9, 1789.

[79] Ibid., Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Panckoucke, November 12, 1789.

[80] Ibid., carton 552, Letter from Dietrich, August 13, 1789, and response.

[81] Ibid., Correspondence between Thiebault and viscomte de Toustain, September 18 and October 10 and 25, 1789.

ment.^[82] The abbé Gentry, censor of the Journal d'Orléans , was told that "under the present circumstances, he could be tolerant of the conduct of the journalists."^[83] Thiebault began receiving letters from censors renouncing their titles and pensions as well. The abbé LeRoy, Demeunier, and Béranger, for example, asked to be struck from the list of censors in the Almanach royal , which was being prepared for the following year.^[84] The comte de Kéralio made his views clear in his pamphlets on the freedom of the press.^[85] Even the bishop of Boulogne formally renounced his censor's pension before it was suppressed.^[86] The censor Bondy, too, rallied to the Revolution, leading the publisher Siméon-Prosper Hardy to note cynically in his journal: "He knows how to profit from all the latest events."^[87] Conversely, the censor Moreau, "known as a zealous apologist of arbitrary authority and ministerial power," packed his bags and fled Paris.^[88]

Thiebault and his assistants held out alone over the course of 1789 and 1790. A new keeper of the seals, Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé, was appointed on August 5, 1789.^[89] He oversaw the work of Thiebault, who managed to carry on with the aid of a few faithful die-hards like Villeneuve in Toulouse, Havas in Rouen, Hovins in St-Malo, Grélier in Nantes, the baron de Dietrich in Strasbourg, and the officers of the postal service.^[90] These men continued on through the fall, supervising censors, granting privileges, and policing shipments of printed matter.^[91] Convinced that the freedom of the press could not mean the end to government regulation of the book trade, they awaited the new order,

[82] Ibid., Letter from de Gaigne, October 22, 1789.

[83] Ibid., carton 553, Letter to the abbé Gentry, November 17, 1789.

[84] Ibid., Report from Thiebault, November 12, 1789.

[85] Kéralio, De la liberté; AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 38.

[86] AN, ser. V1, carton 553, Letter from the bishop of Boulogne, February 3, 1790.

[87] Siméon-Prosper Hardy, "Mes loisirs," BN, mss. fr. 6687, 8:424 (entry for August 6, 1789).

[88] Ibid.

[89] Ibid., 8:422 (entry for August 5, 1789).

[90] AN, ser. V1, carton 552, Letter from Villeneuve to Thiebault, October 24, 1789; carton 553, Letter from Havas, October 22, 1789; carton 552, Letters from Hovins, October 6, 1789, and Grélier, September 1789; and carton 553, Letter from Dietrich, September 9, 1789, and correspondence with the postal service, September 17 and October 9, 1789.

[91] See the register of privileges for September 30–October 28, 1789; AN, ser. V1, carton 552.

which they expected from the National Assembly as soon as it could attend to the problem of commerce in the world of ideas.

But when the National Assembly did finally legislate on the Administration of the Book Trade in August 1790, it was to suppress what was by then a mere skeleton.^[92] Thiebault's closing report to the keeper of the seals at the end of 1790 states:

The municipality of Paris reserves for itself all that concerns the book trade in this city, and the other municipalities of the kingdom will doubtless follow this example. It seems likely, moreover, that by a natural extension of the freedom of the press, the nomination of censors will no longer take place. . . . If the municipalities take control of policing the book trade, they will want to decide for themselves on the number and selection of printers and booksellers. . . . The general administration of the book trade will not continue in all these areas.^[93]

The royal Administration of the Book Trade had fallen to pieces before his eyes.

The declaration of the freedom of the press and the demise of the royal Administration of the Book Trade, as Thiebault's final report suggests, did not mark an end to public regulation of the printed word. Nor, by 1790, had the National Assembly turned its attention to the implications of press freedom for the world of publishing and printing. Nonetheless, between 1788 and 1790 the character of state sovereignty in the world of ideas had been radically transformed.

The system of publishing instituted by the divine-right absolutist monarchy had been brought to the ground. The seat of sovereignty in the publishing world had shifted from the king and his administration to the National Assembly and the Commune of Paris. It was now in these public assemblies rather than in the antechambers of Versailles that the meaning of freedom in the world of ideas would be interpreted and implemented. Prepublication censorship of the printed word had been suppressed. The notion of privilege, in principle if not in substance, had

[92] AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, "Loi relative à la dépense publique," August 10, 1790. Article 13 reads, "La dépense de douze mille livres affectée au bureau de la librairie sera supprimée à compter du premier janvier 1791."

[93] AN, ser. V1, carton 553, Report "on the book trade," undated [1790], in Thiebault's hand.

been abolished. But most significantly, the whole centralized administration of the publishing world had collapsed.

As the Administration of the Book Trade crumbled the nation was rapidly inundated with an unprecedented volume of printed matter. And behind this craze lay a rapidly expanding printing trade. As early as December 1789, royal officials reported that "the desire for printing shops has become so intense and so widespread that even hamlets will end up demanding them."^[94] If Paris had been the nova of French publishing under the Old Regime, it became a supernova in the first few years of the Revolution.^[95]

On November 12, 1789, Mlle Félicité Guynement de Kéralio wrote to the Administration of the Book Trade to announce her intention to open a new printing shop.^[96] The daughter of a royal censor and herself the author of a noted biography of Queen Elizabeth, she was not foreign to the publishing or printing trades. In fact, bankruptcy papers in the Archives de Paris, filed under the name of the Paris publisher Jean Lagrange, reveal that Mlle de Kéralio was, on the eve of the Revolution, the silent partner in a very substantial publishing business run under Lagrange's name.^[97] With correspondents across continental Europe, Kéralio and Lagrange dealt in a wide variety of genres, including novels, medical tracts, histories, philosophical works, and political writings.^[98]

According to the book trade regulations of the Old Regime, Louise de Kéralio, as a woman, was legally prohibited from opening either a publishing house or a printing shop in her own name. Yet when in August 1789 the National Assembly declared the freedom of the press, she jumped at the chance of having her own business. The Administration of the Book Trade reported to the keeper of the seals: "In consequence of article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Mlle de Kéralio has announced her intention to . . . establish a printing shop under the title National Printing Shop of the District of the Daughters of St-Thomas . She begs you, sire, to honor her establishment with your

[94] Ibid., Report by Thiebault, December 24, 1789.

[95] Ibid., Report from the Paris Book Guild to this effect, November 12, 1789.

[96] Ibid., Report on Mlle de Kéralio, from Thiebault to the keeper of the seals, November 12, 1789.

[97] Archives de Paris (hereafter cited as AP), Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 105, doss. 7454, March 30, 1789.

[98] Ibid.

protection."^[99] Mlle de Kéralio was playing the politics of publishing both ways. On the one hand she asserted her natural right, while on the other she appealed for the privilege of royal protection. Yet the royal approbation she sought was denied on two grounds: "The article that Mlle de Kéralio cites does not state that everyone will be free to print. . . . Never, in particular, has a woman been permitted to acquire a printing shop. She can only keep one if she is the widow of a master printer."^[100] According to the royal agents, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was restricted to men. Further, they insisted, "freedom of the press" did not necessarily mean the freedom to print.

But the royal administration was crumbling. And de Kéralio's was not the only instance of printing and publishing operations surfacing from the cultural underground of the Old Regime. They came rolling across the borders as well. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote to the Administration of the Book Trade on January 16, 1790, announcing that he intended to "have his printing shop"—where he was printing his famous edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres — "shipped from Kehl to Paris."^[101] Thus Voltaire was to reenter Paris, yet again victorious (this time in spirit), on printing presses shuttled across the border in carts. The printers of Avignon, too, began to crawl over the borders into the newly liberated kingdom of France.^[102] Jean-Georges Tretteul and Jean-Godefroy Wurtz, known in Strasbourg as dealers in illicit works, announced their intention, because of the freedom of the press, to set up two printing shops in that city.^[103] Rousseau's Oeuvres, produced across the border by the Société Typographique de Genève, by 1789 openly bore on the title page the name of the royally licensed publisher Claude Poinçot and Paris as the place of publication.^[104] And Poinçot further appealed to the Commune of Paris for restitution of his editions of the abbé Raynal's Histoire philosophique and Rousseau's Confessions , which had been released from the Bastille as it fell.^[105] In 1789 Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, too,

[99] AN, ser. V1, carton 553, Report on Mlle de Kéralio, from Thiebault to the keeper of the seals, November 12, 1789.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Ibid., Report of Thiebault, January 16, 1790.

[102] Ibid., Reports of Thiebault, December 12, 1789, and January 16 and February 11, 1790.

[103] AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 20, doc. 2.

[104] AN, ser. V1, carton 549, Dossier from January-February 1789.

[105] For his negotiations with the Paris Commune, see Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la Commune de Paris (1789–1791), 1st ser. (Paris: LeCerf, 1895), 2:656–657, 671–672; 4:13, 385; and 5:60 (May-June 1790). For a list of some of his livres embastillés , see his declaration of bankruptcy: AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 109, doss. 7739, Claude Poinçot, March 16, 1789.

brought the whole publishing operation of the Encyclopédie back to the city where it had first appeared underground.^[106]

As the legal and institutional infrastructure of official publishing folded between 1789 and 1790, it was not just ephemeral literature that boomed in Paris. The underground subculture of Enlightenment publishing, which had evolved over the course of the century, at last emerged into the light of day from prisons, back alleys, and obscure suburbs, and crossed the borders to open shop in its spiritual home. Paris, once the crowning jewel of absolutist publishing, was rapidly becoming the center from which to "spread light in all directions."^[107]

[106] Darnton, Business of Enlightenment , 481–487.

[107] Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, cited in Hatin, Histoire politique et littéraire de la presse 5:22–23.