Protest and Patronage in the Years III and IV
The French victory at Fleurus on 8 messidor, year II (June 26, 1794), marked not only the reconquest of Belgium but also the reversal of the nation's position in the European theater. The country was no longer in imminent danger of invasion. In the next year France would make peace with Prussia (April 5, 1795), Holland (May 16), and Spain (July 22). The civil war in the Vendée ended as well, in February 1795. Victory and peace brought an end to the Terror, the fall of Robespierre (July 27–28, 1794), and the abolition of the maximum (December 24, 1794). Release from danger both within and without also elicited a flood of grief and protest across the nation. And the publishing community, in Paris as well as the departments, had plenty to complain about.
In late December 1794, the National Convention, with its Girondist members restored, registered the wrath of printers nationwide against the laws passed under the Terror that had centralized government document printing at the newly formed Imprimerie des Lois and Imprimerie de l'Administration Nationale in Paris.[65] The convention also received a lengthy exposé from the Agence des Lois extolling the efficiency and economy of the Imprimerie des Lois.[66] The government decided to reexamine the question and as a result, on 8 pluviôse, year III (January 27, 1795), issued a new decree concerning government printing. While it met the demands of the departmental printers, this law could not have been less favorably disposed to the interests of the commercial printers of Paris.
[64] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9193, feuille 49, "Collection Ginguené. Compte sommaire des expenditures de la Commission de l'Instruction Publique, an II–IV" (1793–1796), also edited in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:948 and foldout.
[65] For the laws of 14 and 27 frimaire, year II (December 4 and 17, 1793), see Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 169.
[66] Ibid.
The law reestablished the system whereby national laws were reprinted in the departments from samples sent by the Imprimerie des Lois, thus returning a significant amount of government work to departmental printers. But the convention decreed additionally that because the lmprimerie des Lois—now to be called by the much grander title of Imprimerie Nationale—would lose the work of printing huge runs of the Bulletin des lois for the provinces, its purview was to be extended far beyond the speeches, laws, committee reports, and administrative documents of the convention and other offices of government: "[The National Printing Shop] will be charged with printing . . . the first editions of all works intended for public instruction that are adopted by the convention, and all scientitic and artistic works that are to be printed by order of the convention and at the expense of the Republic."[67]
Through a series of laws passed during the spring of 1795, the convention consolidated and extended the domain of the new Imprimerie de la République (renamed again in April) from government laws to national education and patronage of the "arts and sciences." Then in June they again confirmed the legal monopoly of the Imprimerie de la République on all areas of printing, advising all official agencies that "in no case were they permitted to have printing done at government expense in either commercial or foreign printing shops."[68] Far from quelling the discontent of Paris printers, these laws outraged an even wider segment of the Paris printing community.[69]
The response was vociferous (plate 6). In a series of petitions and memoranda presented to the National Convention during the spring of 1795, seventy-five Paris printers denounced the national printing houses as monopolistic instruments of state tyranny that violated the basic rights
[67] Cited in ibid., 173. For more on the development of artistic, scientific, and educational printing at the Imprimerie de la République, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:255–256, 486, 494; and 4:94, 631.
[68] The law renaming the Imprimerie Nationale as the Imprimerie de la République was passed on 18 germinal, year III (April 7, 1795); its attributions were reconfirmed by a law of 21 prairial, year III (June 9, 1795). See Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 178, 185.
[69] For an example of a Parisian printer who lost his government contract for educational printing to a government printing shop, see the case of Louis Reynier, printer and bookseller, whose job printing the Journal sténographique des cours de l'école normale was taken over by the Imprimerie des Lois on September 20, 1795, in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:706.
Plate 6.
A type specimen for the Paris printer Guffroy celebrating "freedom of the press"
(1795–1796). Archives Nationales, Paris.
of freedom of commerce, expression, and the press.[70] They queried: "If there is only one printing shop, what meaning can 'Freedom of the Press' possibly have? We protest this system of centralization. It was invented by Robespierre. He created it, as you well know, in order to bring all the reins of tyranny into his own hands: We should need to say no more."[71] These were certainly not trivial accusations in 1795.
The director of the Imprimerie de la République, Duboy-Laverne, responded to these accusations in kind:
The Revolution gave rise to a huge number of new printing shops directed by men who up until that moment knew absolutely nothing about the typo-
[70] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Petition to the National Convention from the printers of Paris, [22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795)]; and AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883, "Mémoire sur les inconvénients et les dangers des deux Imprimeries de I'Agence des Lois et des Administrations Nationales," 22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795); "Pétition des imprimeurs de Paris à la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)]; "Addition au mémoire présenté par les imprimeurs de Paris à la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)].
[71] AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1525, Petition to the National Convention from the printers of Paris, [22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795)].
graphical arts. And their number has grown so great that they are now driven to intrigue in order to find work. . . .
There are now four hundred printing shops where formerly there were thirty-six. . . . Should the public treasury be the guarantor of these shady speculations? . . . And should the Republic renounce an establishment . . . that has proven itself so important as a guarantor of public order?[72]
The director of the government printing shop, in short, blamed unrestricted access to the printing trade and the poor business sense of its new practitioners for the sufferings of Parisian printers. He also reminded the convention that centralized control over the publication of laws and government documents was indeed critical to maintaining both public order and the authority of the convention.
But were the protesters in fact new printers, as the director of the Imprimerie de la République charged? The protest documents of that spring, and their signatories, reveal a different picture. Of the seventy-five printers identified as having signed at least one petition or mémoire , thirty were former members of the Paris Book Guild, their in-laws, or their direct successors (see appendix 3).[73] Considering the signatories of just the initial petitions—that is, those who spearheaded the protest—we find that over half were former guild members or their relations. They were also those who had been among the guild's wealthiest or most eminent printers and publishers: AndréFrançois Knapen (ex-syndic), Léger Moutard, Gérard Barbou, Jean Cussac, Augustin-Martin Lottin, François Belin, the widow Valade, the widow Delaguette, Pierre-Robert-Christophe Ballard, and so on. To these can be added "new printers" like Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's son-in-law, Henri Agasse, and the successors of Philippe-Denis Pierres (former printer for the king), Jean-Michel Eberhart and Baudelot.[74] Thus, far from representing new speculators, the protest was mobilized by a core of the oldest printing establishments in the capital, those who
[72] AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883: Réponse de l'Agence de l'Envoi des Lois aux mémoires et pétitions adressés à la Convention Nationale par plusieurs imprimeurs de Paris sur les prétendus inconvénients et dangers des Imprimeries executives " [after 20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795), 1; and 6].
[73] The following signators were associated by familial or business relations: Henri Agasse, son-in-law of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke; Louis Cordier, associate of François Legras; Dupont, successor to Gilles Lamesle; Fuchs, son-in-law of Eugène Onfroy; J.-J. Delance, associate of Auguste-Pierre Belin; Jean-Michel Eberhart and Baudelot, successors to Philippe-Denis Pierres.
[74] For the status of these individuals within the Old Regime guild, see figure 5.
had been hit hardest by the abolition of their privileges and the collapse of the book market.[75]
The real irony was the transformation of die-hard corporatists like Knapen and Lottin into vociferous proponents of freedom of commerce and the press:
These privileged printers . . . intend to grab for themselves the printing of "everything pertaining to legislation, administration, and public instruction," that is, everything worthy of being printed. . . . The printers of Paris . . . are citizens . . . . They demand only freedom of competition. They love the fatherland. They are not foreigners.[76]
To give one printing establishment a monopoly on government contracts of all kinds was, they argued, to treat commercial printers as foreigners—indeed, the law of 8 pluviôse (January 27) had attributed the same status to both groups. To be deprived of the possibility to publish and print literary works consecrated by the nation's representative institutions was to be denied a role in the production of a national literary civilization. In fact, if the state itself published and printed all that it deemed worthy of publication, there would be no need for commercial publishers or printers:
What new work would they dare to undertake? Every author, flattered by the possible suffrage of the convention, will present his manuscript. The convention will decree to have it printed at the expense of the nation if it finds it worthy. And in the contrary case, what printer would want to run the risk of printing a book that, having been rejected by such a solemn judgment, will already have public opinion set against it?[77]
The key issue, of course, concerned the millions of livres in government subsidies for publishing made available through the Commission on Public Instruction. With 2.5 million livres in subsidies and contracts and 16 million more in public credit at stake, it is not surprising that the printers of Paris responded so violently when the Commission on Public
[75] It should be noted that I am advancing a significantly different interpretation of this protest than the one presented by the official historian of the Imprimerie Impériale, François-Antoine-Brutus Duprat, who, not surprisingly, accepts and defends the version put forward by the printers of the Imprimerie des Lois and the Imprimerie de l'Administration; see his Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale , 354–399.
[76] AN, ser. C, carton 356, doc. 1883, "Pétition des imprimeurs de Paris è la Convention Nationale," [20 messidor, an III (July 8, 1795)], 3.
[77] AN, ser. C, carton 536, doc. 1883, "Mémoire sur les inconvénients et les dangers des deux Imprimeries de l'Agence des Lois et des Administrations Nationales," 22 pluviôse, an III (February 10, 1795), 5.
Instruction was ordered to deal exclusively with government printing shops.
The government's various agencies and committees, however, were not unanimously pleased with the National Convention's renewed effort to centralize government publishing in one great national printing shop, and there is significant evidence of official resistance to implementation of this policy over the course of 1795.[78] The resistance of the Commission on Public Instruction was particularly notable. On June 14, 1795, the director of the Imprimerie de la République sent that commission a memo demanding that it conform to the laws requiring all printing jobs for public instruction to be executed by the government's printing shop.[79] Indeed, expenditures disclosed by the proceedings and the budget of the Commission on Public Instruction suggest a lack of compliance with both the spirit and the letter of the laws centralizing publications.
After Thermidor, the cultural policies initiated by the Committee on Public Safety and the Commission on Public Instruction, respectively, thus began to come into conflict. The records of the Commission on Public Instruction, government deposit records at the dépôt légal, and what remains of the accounts of the Interior Ministry's Division of Public Instruction (1794–1799) leave little doubt that despite their complaints about increased centralization, Parisian publishers and printers in fact began to enjoy significant direct government patronage through the Commission on Public Instruction, under the auspices of encouraging the "arts and sciences" and "public instruction."[80] As fragmentary as the evidence is, these three sources alone allow us to identify at least fifty Paris publishers and printers who enjoyed encouragements or contracts for "public instruction" from 1794 to 1799. Over sixty-two different publications or publishing projects received some kind of government
[78] Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 180, 187.
[79] Ibid.
[80] The following discussion is based on a systematic survey of all government contracts with Paris printers and publishers mentioned in the following sources: Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique; the papers of the Ministry of the Interior pertaining to public instruction, found in AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Ministère de l'Intérieur, "Comptabilité générale, Instruction Publique, Sciences et Arts, an II–IV"; and the register of deposits at the dépôt légal from 1793 to 1799, in BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, reg. 1, July 19, 1793-an VII (September 21, 1799).
support, whether in the form of actual government purchases or subscriptions, the provision of paper, warehouse space in public buildings, or use of government printing presses. And although the documents often fail to provide the monetary sums of these encouragements and contracts, the sum total of accounts that I have actually been able to locate from this period exceeds 1,000,000 livres . Clearly, then, Paris publishers enjoyed considerable patronage from the government as a consequence of the government's new policy to "encourage and reward" the arts and sciences during the republican period.
But what kind of commercial publishing did the Commission on Public Instruction promote? In his report on encouragements and awards of October 1794, Grégoire outlined the basic guidelines of the Commission on Public Instruction's patronage. Grégoire's stress was clearly on the sciences, especially those with practical applications, and on grammar and foreign languages, which were crucial, in his view, to the maintenance and expansion of French economic and political power. First and foremost, the natural and applied sciences, scientific illustration, travel literature, geography, and cartography, were to receive particular attention. And not just research and writing, but intensive scholarly exchange, urgently needed to be facilitated: "There are almost no more periodicals to serve as depositories for new inventions, and to keep a record of the progress in human understanding."[81] The National Convention had been right to abolish the closed corporate academies, but it should not hesitate to support individual authors, scholars, editors, or nonrestrictive literary and scientific societies.
In the course of his report, though, he also celebrated literary pursuits as being vital to the life and health of the Republic: "The art of social life, perfected by Jean-Jacques and Mably, does it not hold an honorable rank among the forms of knowledge? A good poem, does it not have as much merit as a good machine?" He told the National Convention, "You need a new theater, a new history, and a new dictionary of your language"—and so, too, philosophy, poetry, and especially songs. Villebrune was no doubt pleased with the vision of a morally regenerated republican literary culture espoused by Grégoire. Indeed, the only literary form notably missing from Grégoire's list of genres worthy of patronage was that which Villebrune had earlier denounced as the very source of the cultural decadence perpetuated by commercial publishing: prose fiction. Gré-
[81] Grégoire, Rapport sur les encouragements, 15–20.
goire, like Villebrune, reasoned that if the public were presented with a more edifying cultural alternative it would eventually opt for it.
Villebrune and Grégoire were to see their policies implemented by the new head of the Commission on Public Instruction, Pierre-Louis Ginguené.[82] Ginguené cut a distinctly different figure in the cultural landscape than either Villebrune or Grégoire. Despite their radical ideas, both Grégoire and Villebrune had been well established within the official cultural institutions of the Old Regime. Grégoire had been a Jesuit professor, distinguished for his philosophical writings by the Academy of Metz, before his election as a representative of the lower clergy to the Estates General in 1789.[83] It was not surprising that he now advocated the revitalization of an elite scholarly culture.
Villebrune, too, emerged from a traditional scholarly milieu. A classicist, orientalist, and philologist, he was renowned for his knowledge of twelve languages. The younger generation found him tedious. One of Ginguené's assistants described him as a "bitter character." He was one of those "old erudites who bore the Republic of Letters with their tiresome debates."[84] Villebrune became head of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the winter of 1793 as a consequence of an arrêt of the Committee on Public Safety that "invited the minister of the interior to nominate citizens of proven patriotism" to replace the Girondists purged from the library administration.[85] In fact, he replaced Ginguené's friend and patron Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort after this Girondist's dismissal.[86] Villebrune, needless to say, was a Jacobin of unquestionable credentials.
[82] Regrettably, Ginguené has not yet found a biographer. For more on his revolutionary career, see Joanna Kitchen, Un Journal "philosophique": "La Décade," 1794–1807 (Paris: Minard, 1965), 3–19.
[83] Although he has been the subject of many books, Grégoire, like Ginguené, has not been the subject of a definitive biography. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), is the most extensive treatment of the political aspects of Grégoire's struggle for religious and racial equality. The recent, but brief, study by Bernard Plongeron, Abbé Grégoire ou l'arche de la fraternité (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1989), deals with the religious dimension of Grégoire's life. Most relevant here is the study of Grégoire's linguistic reforms during the Revolution by Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une Politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). For biographical information, see also Albert Soboul's foreword to the Oeuvres de l'abbé Grégoire (Paris: EDHIS, 1977), 1:ix–xvii.
[84] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6:347 (8 messidor, an III [June 26, 1795]).
[85] Ibid., 3:142n.3.
[86] Ibid. See also Louis-Gabriel Michaud and François Michaud, eds., Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1816), 16:476.
Ginguené, by contrast, rose to prominence in the Commission on Public Instruction during the fall of 1794, serving as director from July 1795 through its dissolution three months later. He then continued to serve as head of the Division of Public Instruction in the Ministry of the Interior.[87] He was a man of the Thermidorean moment who, after a brief imprisonment under the Terror, achieved power under the sponsorship of the minister of the interior, Joseph Garat.[88] He could not have been more different, in political as well as cultural terms, from the erudite head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune, or the philosopher turned Jacobin legislator, Henri Grégoire.
Ginguené emerged from the grub-street journalistic circles of the Old Regime, becoming after 1789 a vocal advocate of popular literature in opposition to scholarly culture.[89] An editor of the Feuille villageoise from 1791 through 1795, he believed that knowledge had to be taken out of the libraries and into the streets. He articulated his cultural program cogently in 1792 in a proposal for government subsidy of an encyclopédie populaire et portative:
The people hunger for instruction. They don't have time to read volumes, or the means to buy them. In order to put science within their reach, it has to be liberated from the huge tomes where scholars have buried it, and put into little booklets. . . . As a boy I had a love of books which for the longest time was an unhappy passion. My parents were not wealthy enough to be able to satisfy my literary tastes. . . . What a difference it would have made for me, who at that age, and for a good while after, could get my hands on nothing more than the romances of the Twelve Knights of France and the Bibliothèque bleue.[90]
Rather than regenerating scholarly culture, Ginguené wanted to transform it, to democratize it by bringing it out of the libraries and to the people through the medium of chapbooks and periodicals.
Yet despite the contrasts in their cultural visions, Ginguené, Villebrune, and Grégoire all agreed on at least two things: the deleterious
[87] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:xviin. 1; 5:25n.1, 28 (annexes); 6:452, 835n.2.
[88] Ibid. See also Michaud frères (eds.), Biographie universelle 16:476 and notes.
[89] Michaud freres [frères] (eds.), Biographie universelle 16:475–476. For his association with the prerevolutionary grub-street milieu, see the entry for Ginguené in Antoine Rivarol's "Petit Almanach de nos grands hommes," in his Oeuvres complètes, 2d ed. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968 [originally published 1808]), 5:91.
[90] BN, nouv. acq. fr. 9192, feuilles 118–121, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, "Copie du projet de L'Encyclopédie populaire envoyée à quelques hommes de lettres, citoyens, au mois de mars 1792."
effects of popular novels on the minds of citizens; and the need for the government to commission French publishers to produce enlightened texts, containing useful scientific and moral knowledge, in order to reform the literary tastes of the nation. The subsidies of the Commission on Public Instruction suggest that both the Jacobin scholars and the Girondist populist left their mark on revolutionary literary patronage.
In light of the reports by Villebrune and Grégoire, it is not surprising to discover that the Paris publishing group Smits and Maradan were soon commissioned to produce a new edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie , in fifteen thousand copies.[91] Or that the Commission on Public Instruction purchased the plates for the comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelie from the publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke for 50,000 livres .[92] Similarly, they ordered one hundred copies of Edmé Mentelle's Analyse du cours de géographie , as well as Jean-Gabriel Mérigot le jeune 's edition of Simonin's Traité d'arithmétique .[93] They also patronized numerous other publishers and printers of scientific works.[94] With Grégoire's call to revive scientific periodical publishing, Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet, having narrowly escaped the guillotine for his counterrevolutionary pamphlets, now found his Journal de physique, de chimie, et d'histoire naturelle infused with new life by the patronage of the Commission on Public Instruction.[95] So, too, the Journal des mines and the Bulletin de l'Ecole de Santé prospered from newfound official support.[96]
As Grégoire had insisted, classical languages, history, and philosophy were not to be neglected either. Thus the printer Haubout was assisted
[91] Decree of the National Convention, premier jour complémentaire, an III (September 17, 1795), in Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6: 404–405. See also ibid., 443–444, 501, 621, 680, 683, 688.
[92] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 6:561.
[93] For the former, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, "Ministère de l'Intérieur: Comptabilité générale, Instruction Publique"; for the latter, AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, August 6, 1798.
[94] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Bernard and Regence, Paris booksellers, 13 thermidor, an III (July 31, 1795), arithmetics, geometries, and algebras by Etienne Bezout; Barrois, l'aîné, Paris bookseller, 16 messidor, an III (July 4, 1795), works on meteorology; ibid., doss. 3, Laurent-Eloy Goujon, Paris bookseller, prairial-messidor, an II (May-June 1794), maps and geographical dictionaries.
[95] AN, ser. F17, carton 1214, doss. 12, November 23, 1794, in which the Committee on Agriculture orders fifteen hundred copies on the recommendation of the Commission on Public Instruction.
[96] For the former, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Dupont, printer of the Journal des mines, 23 messidor, an III (July 11, 1795); for the latter, Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:315, 336.
in his effort to bring out an edition of Tacitus's Histoire romaine , as were the classicist Johannes Schweighäuser with his Polybii megalopolitani historiarum and the publisher Jean-Antoine-Guillaume Bailleul with his Politique d'Aristote .[97] The commission also followed through with its mandate to regenerate modern history and philosophy. Thus Jean-Georges-Antoine Stoupe and Jean Servières, a printer and a publisher in Paris, brought out the new edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres edited by Charles Palissot de Montenoy, with considerable official aid.[98] Likewise, both Claude-François Poinçot fils and Pierre-François Didot le jeune received assistance in producing their editions of Rousseau's Oeuvres .[99] The commission purchased copies of the Louis-François Barrois l'aîné edition of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably's Oeuvres .[100] And the commission purchased three thousand copies of the marquis de Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain from the Parisian publisher Henri Agasse, to be distributed "throughout the Republic, in a manner most useful for public instruction."[101] Etienne Bonnet de Condillac's Logique was purchased for the students at the Ecole Normale as well.[102] Nor did the commission overlook the need to encourage contemporary historical models, such as those commissioned for the Recueil des actions héroiques et civiques des républicains français or depicted in the Vie de Général Hoche .[103] Contemporary philosophy and politics, from Jean-Paul Marat to Adam Smith and Moses Mendelssohn, received encouragement too.[104] Moreover, flying directly in the face of the decrees centralizing the printing
[97] On Tacitus's Histoire romaine, see AN, ser. F18, carton 565, 15 ventôse, an IV (March 5, 1796). On the Polybii megalopolitani historiarum, see Guillaume (ed.), Procèsverbaux 6:89; and BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1. And on the Politique d'Aristote, see ibid.
[98] AN, ser. F17, carton 1306, doss. 1025, 13 messidor, an III (July 31, 1795). See also Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:742, 789–790, 938; 5:360, 384.
[99] For Poinçot, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:106, 410–411, 609–610; and AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, Letter from Poinçot fils, publisher, to the Corps Législatif, 17 floréal, an VI (May 6, 1798). The edition was begun in the year III (1794–1795). For Didot le jeune, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:210.
[100] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:970.
[101] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, 15 thermidor, an III (August 2, 1795).
[102] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:491.
[103] For the Recueil, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1258, doss. 2, "Secours et encouragements aux sciences et aux arts," and doss. 8, "Extrait des registres des arrêtés du Comité du Salut Public," 27 floréal, an II (May 16, 1794). And for the Vie de Général Hoche, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1215, doss. 5, "Secours et encouragements."
[104] For support of an edition of Jean-Paul Marat's Oeuvres, see Guillaume (ed.), Procèsverbaux 3:485, 499, 530, 559; 4:789; 5:609–610. For support of editions of Adam Smith's Théorie des sentiments moraux and Moses Mendelssohn's Oeuvres, see ibid., 5:169.
and publishing of laws, they purchased an elegant edition of the Constitution from Pierre-François Didot le jeune and regularly ordered laws from Louis Rondonneau.[105]
But government encouragement extended beyond the scholarly culture of scientific, classical, and Enlightenment books. True to Ginguené's vision of an enlightened popular literary culture, the commission subsidized numerous educational, philosophical, and political journals aimed at a broader reading public, such as the Journal des censeurs , the Journal de l'homme libre , the Décade philosophique et littéraire , the Feuille du cultivateur , the Feuille villageoise , and the Républicain français .[106] They subsidized and distributed educational political pamphlets;[107] so, too, republican almanacs and democratic catechisms, as well as engravings of the republican martyrs Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau.[108] They commissioned the printing of songs and music to be distributed at revolutionary festivals.[109] Nor did they overlook efforts to win a popular female reading public over to the Thermidorean regime, like Citizeness Boosère's Triomphe de la saine philosophie, ou la vraie politique des femmes , which they ordered to be "distributed by her in various departments of the Republic."[110]
[105] For Didot le jeune ibid., 5:429. For Louis Rondonneau, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 3, Rondonneau, Paris, 25 fructidor, an II (September 11, 1794).
[106] The Journal des censeurs was printed by Langlois fils; see AN, ser. F18, carton 21, Letter to the Commission, December 8, 1795. For the Journal de l'homme libre, see AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524, 16 thermidor, an II (August 3, 1794). For the Décade philosophique et littéraire, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Say, Paris editor and printer, 19 floriéal, an III (May 8, 1795); see also Joanna Kitchen, Journal "philosophique." For the Feuille du cultivateur, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Lefebvre, director of the printing shop of the Feuille, I fructidor, an III (September 18, 1795). For the Feuille villageoise, see ibid., doss. 5, Louis Reynier, printer of the Feuille, 30 brumaire and 12 frimaire, an III (November 20 and December 2, 1794); see also Melvin Allen Edelstein, "La Feuille villageoise." Communication et modernisation dans les régions rurales pendant la Révolution (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977). And for the Républicain français, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Goujet-Deslande, 5 messidor, an III (June 23, 1795).
[107] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, Dupont, printer of the Nouvelle Instruction sur les poids et mesures, 23 messidor, an III (July 11, 1795); see also the publisher Lemercier's contracts for several political pamphlets, AN, ser. F18, carton 21, May 11, 1797.
[108] For almanacs, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:296; and for catechisms, see BN, Archives Modernes, cxxix, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1, Catéchisme français à l'usage des écoles primaires (1795), deposited by the Committee on Public Instruction. On the engravings of martyrs, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 6:47.
[109] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 4:850.
[110] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4, Boosère, 28 vendémiaire, an III (October 19, 1794). See also Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux 5:138.
After Thermidor, the government dispensed enormous sums on cultural patronage intended to promote republican values, by wooing the public away from the passions of politics and romance and toward forms of learning and reading that encouraged civic order and contributed to the public good. The political motivations behind the government's new cultural initiatives became even more explicit when the laws of 9 and 13 vendiémiaire, year IV (September 30 and October 4, 1797), imposed a stamp tax on all periodicals, with the exception of monthly periodicals relating exclusively to "arts and sciences."[111]
The commercial publishing world of Paris responded rapidly to the cultural initiatives and patronage of the Commission on Public Instruction. In May 1796, the publisher J.-J. Lucet launched a new trade newsletter entitled the Bulletin de littérature, des sciences et des arts , to be devoted entirely to announcing "decrees concerning the arts and artists, prizes and honors awarded for technical achievements, discoveries and inventions . . . everything concerning literature, the arts, and the sciences."[112] In his prospectus Lucet hailed Grégoire's report and the legislation on encouragements and awards of October 1794 as the founding of a new cultural regime, when at last men of letters and artists
can begin to recover their original dignity, and literary commerce to develop its immense resources. Artistic and scientific liberty will give birth to masterpieces, and soon, with the aid of national subsidies, the French Republic of Letters will recover its former splendor. At last we have left the era of horror and barbarism when monsters insisted that men of learning deserved only the guillotine.[113]
His Bulletin , he avowed, would insure that the works of men of letters singled out by the commission for encouragements and awards would be made known to the entire publishing community. "Sciences and arts" had become the new catch phrase in the book trade for works supported by the republican government.
Others followed in Lucet's wake. Thus on August 16, 1796, the editors of the Nouvelliste littéraire , Morin and Lenoir, announced that they were adding the subtitle "des sciences et arts" to their newsletter. In their
[111] Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:544–545.
[112] Bulletin de littérature, des sciences et des arts, 2 vols. (May 1796–1803); see "Prospectus," 1:2.
[113] Ibid., 1:1–2.
avis to the reader they, too, sounded the Thermidorean call for a literary culture devoted to reason, utility, and self-improvement:
O French, so celebrated of old in the sciences, you who were the jewel upon Parnassus, flee, flee forever your political newspapers, those scions of bad taste and passions. Rediscover Voltaire, Racine, and Fénélon: their logic is worth more than that of Babeuf and the Frérons. What good do your political journals serve? To corrupt your taste, to embitter your heart, and to stir up disagreements with your best friends.[114]
Morin and Lenoir offered cultural pursuits as an alternative to politics. They not only reviewed and advertised all new works in the arts and sciences deemed worthy of attention by the government, but they also offered a "varieties" section in their newsletters, which featured poems and articles on various cultural issues and events intended to woo readers away from the passions of partisan politics toward more rational pursuits such as science, philosophy, and poetry. Issue number 31 of May 19, 1797, for example, carried an ode celebrating the powers of the microscope set to a popular vaudeville tune.
A whole new generation of publishers emerged in response to the government's policies. Some, like A.-J. Dugour and Durand, "booksellers for education, the sciences, and the arts" (established 1796), bought out withering old guild establishments like that of Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet. Similarly, Adrien Egron bought out the widow Valade in 1798 and in 1799 Pierre-Henri Genets l'aîné took over Jean Servières's business. Others went into association with old elites, like Ballio with Jean-François Colas (1796) or François Legras with Louis Cordier (1797). Then there were those who founded new houses, like P. Bernard, "printer-publisher for mathematics, the sciences, and the arts," in 1797; Adrien-Joseph Marchand, "printer-publisher of agricultural works," in 1798; Marie-Rosalie Vallat-la-Chapelle, the widow of Huzard, "printerpublisher for agriculture and veterinary medicine," in 1798; or J.-B.-M. Duprat, "bookseller for mathematics," in 1797.[115] Villebrune had been right: government initiative and patronage could, at a minimum, redirect the orientation of a sector of the publishing world.
As the reversal after 1796 of the curve of book production in figure
[114] Nouvelliste littéraire (published in Paris from germinal, an IV, to germinal, an IX [April 1796–April 1806]), nos. 15–16, 30 thermidor, an IV (August 17, 1796), 1.
[115] See these names in Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, 7, 15, 69–71, 73, 86, 102, 126, 142.
6 suggests, peace and the consequent reopening of international markets after the Treaty of Basel in 1795, along with the infusion of millions of livres in government patronage between 1794 and 1796, stimulated a revival of book publishing during the period of the Directory. For the first time since 1789 book production began to rise, while the production of journals declined.