Chapter Five
The New World of the Printed Word, 1789–1799

The Democratization of the Presses

The Paris bookseller François Momoro was thirty-three years old when the Revolution began. He had arrived in Paris from his native Besançon in 1780. In 1787 he was admitted as a bookseller by the Paris Book Guild.^[1] His bookshop stocked a mere eleven titles, which he estimated in 1790 to have a total value of 19,720 livres . Momoro was one of the myriad of small Parisian book dealers with little hope of advancement within the Old Regime book guild. But with the declaration of the freedom of the press in August 1789 Momoro's career prospects suddenly opened up before him. Embracing the revolutionary movement wholeheartedly, he quickly opened a printing shop at 171 rue de la Harpe and boldly declared himself the "First Printer of National Liberty" (plate 7). Within a year he had added four presses, ten cases of type, and a small foundry for making type characters; his business assets now totaled 30,108 livres .^[2] In the publishing and printing world Momoro was still a very small fry. But he was soon to make a big name for himself in ultrarevolutionary politics.

Momoro understood the power of the press, and he believed in unleashing its revolutionary potential. Further, he knew the business from the bottom up. In 1793, he composed and published a little treatise on

[1] Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires, 126.

[2] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 110, doss. 7811, Faillite de François Momoro, [June 8, 1790].

printing, the Traité élémentaire de l'imprimerie, which was intended to put the practical knowledge of printing within the reach of a wide audience.^[3] It remains the single best source of eighteenth-century printing shop slang. He also used his press to launch a career in radical revolutionary politics, soon becoming the official "Printer for the Cordeliers Club." His printing business evolved along with the revolutionary politics of the Parisian sections, serving as a propaganda machine, first for the Cordeliers Club and then, by the winter of 1794, for the Hébertists. He produced pamphlets, minutes of meetings of the Cordeliers, and handbills and posters for several of the Parisian sections, and he also did a significant business by sending the publications of the Paris Cordeliers out into the provinces to be read before the tribunals of provincial clubs.^[4]

When he was arrested in February 1794, the police inventoried his commercial stock. With the exception of a few sheets of a Manuel du républicain —found literally under the presses—Momoro's entire stock consisted of pamphlets, handbills, and, most important, sectional posters.^[5] His business was devoted exclusively to, and depended almost entirely on, the printed ephemera that sustained the revolutionary political life of the Paris sections.

Not surprisingly, Momoro worshipped Jean-Paul Marat as a political and cultural idol and modeled his revolutionary career after him. After Marat's death, Momoro aspired to succeed him as the cultural champion of the little people. He convinced the Cordeliers Club to produce a continuation of the Ami du peuple under his editorship. His first issue received the number 243, to establish a direct lineage from Marat's last issue, number 242. Its rhetorical style resonated deeply with that of the martyred Marat:

The Cordeliers Club, justly alarmed by the new dangers that menace the Republic, and convinced of the necessity of enlightening the people to the odious and perfidious plots of new conspirators, has resolved to repair . . . the loss of Marat, that ardent defender of the rights of the people, through

[3] François Momoro, Traité élémentaire de l'imprimerie (Paris: Momoro, 1793).

[4] For examples of provincial dissemination, see AN, ser. W, carton 78, plaque 1, nos. 61, 69, Momoro's correspondence with Richard and Lulier of February 19 and March 7, 1794.

[5] For the Manuel du républicain, see AN, ser. W, carton 76, plaque 2, no. 106, Minutes of a search chez Momoro, 29 ventôse, an II (March 19, 1794). For the inventory of Momoro's stock, see AN, ser. W, carton 78, plaque 1, no. 68, 10–20 ventôse, an II (February 28–March 10, 1794).

Plate 7. 
Portrait of François Momoro, "First Printer of National Liberty" (n.d.). 
Momoro was one of the most militant new printers in revolutionary Paris. 
He was guillotined by the revolutionary government as an agitator in March
1794. Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille, France.

a journal that will be edited in the name of the Club and in the spirit of its principles. Like Marat, the Club will publicize terrible truths; like him, it will stand up to the daggers of assassins; it will denounce all traitors without exception, and tear the masks from the enemies of the fatherland.^[6]

Momoro also entered into negotiations with Marat's widow to convince her to collaborate with him in publishing an edition of Marat's Oeuvres . Like numerous other Parisian publishers, in 1794 he began soliciting the Commission on Public Instruction in the hope of receiving one of the government's newly authorized publishing subsidies for the project.^[7]

Between 1789 and 1794 Momoro had built his entire business around agitational ephemera designed to expose counterrevolutionaries and their perfidious plots. The careers of sectional politicians and municipal bureaucrats were made and broken through his neighborhood terrorist media campaigns. At a moment's notice a flood of handbills and posters could pour forth from his presses, turning public opinion almost instantaneously. These political tactics, however ruthless and demagogic, proved effective—at least in the short run. By 1794 he had become president of the Cordeliers Club and served on the directorate of the department of Paris.

There is also significant evidence to suggest that Momoro did quite well in his business of revolutionary ephemera. The Revolutionary Tribunal heard repeated depictions of Momoro as a greedy opportunist and ambitious parvenu, a man notorious for shady business dealings who had declared bankruptey twice.^[8] They also testified that he had gotten rich—too rich—in recent times: his wife lived in "scandalous luxury," with "sumptuous furniture," a "superb wardrobe," and even a carriage. But it was not just his enemies who remarked on his financial success: his uncle, the local barber, stood up in his defense, describing Momoro as an upstanding and sober businessman who, despite his bankruptcies, was worth, by 1794, 80,000 livres .^[9] In the first four years of the

[6] AN, ser. W, carton 77, plaque 5, no. 334, L'Ami du peuple, no. 243 [1793–1794], 1–2.

[7] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 3:485, 499, 530, 559; 4:789; 5:169.

[8] For testimony against Momoro concerning his business dealings and his wealth, see AN, ser. W, carton 78, plaque 1, no. 6; plaque 2, no. 120; plaque 3, no. 191; and AN, ser. W, carton 339, doss. 617, for Fouquier-Tinville's "acte d'accusation," which includes the charge of fiscal opportunism, March 24, 1794.

[9] AN, ser. W, carton 78, plaque 3, no. 1919, Testimony of François Legendre, 29 ventôse, an II (March 19, 1794).

Revolution Momoro's business in printing revolutionary propaganda appears to have expanded, perhaps as much as twofold.

Momoro's career, however dramatic, was not untypical. In 1789 Parisian printing exploded. In the first few years of the Revolution the industry was swept by a new generation of little printers, most of them former printing-shop workers or small book dealers who seized the cultural space opened by the declaration of freedom of the press and commerce, bought a few presses, and entered into the fast-paced world of revolutionary cultural agitation through the production of political ephemera.

Trade journals, commercial almanacs, and government surveys from the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods offer striking testimony to the numbers of these businessmen. In 1789, Lottin's Catalogue chronologique listed the 195 libraires (publishers and book dealers) and 47 imprimeurs (printers who might be publishers and retail book dealers as well) who were legally authorized in Paris. Only a year later, in a memorandum to the National Assembly, the Paris publisher Jean-Augustin Grangé claimed that the number of printing shops in Paris had climbed to 200.^[10] Although this was perhaps an exaggeration, ten years later, in 1798–1799, a more neutral source, M. Duverneuil's Almanach du commerce de Paris , advertised the names of 337 publishers/book dealers and 223 printers in the capital. And after another decade, an official government survey of 1810–1811 recorded 508 publishers/book dealers and 157 printers.^[11] Thus, over the course of the revolutionary decade 1789–1799, the number of active printers had at least quadrupled, while the number of publishers increased by at least one-half as a consequence of the deregulation of these industries. Even after the Napoleonic decrees

[10] [Grangé], Mémoire présenté à l'Assemblée Nationale, 4.

[11] For Lottin's totals for 1789, see Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, li–lx; and for Delalain's original source, see Lottin, Catalogue chronologique des libraires . The three available sources for numbers of publishers and printers in Paris in 1798–1799 are M. Duverneuil, ed., Almanach du commerce de Paris (Paris: Vve Valade, an VII [1798–1799]); Henri Tardieu-Denesle, ed., Almanach typographique (Paris; an VIII [1799–1800]); and Pierre Roux, ed., Journal typographique et bibliographique (Paris, 1797–1810). Finally, for the years 1810–1811, the best sources are the government surveys found in AN, ser. F18, carton 10a, plaque 2, and carton 25. For the figures offered by the government after the reregulation, see the Journal général de l'imprimerie et de la librairie (Paris: Pillet, 1810–1811).

of 1810 limited the number of printers to eighty, the printing world had nearly doubled in size. The Revolution thus marked a moment of unprecedented expansion in both productive power and the sites of distribution of the printed word in the capital.

The available statistical evidence, moreover, suggests that the greatest share of this expansion occurred during the revolutionary decade 1789–1799. In 1900, the publisher and bibliographer Paul Delalain compiled a masterful registry of every printer, publisher, and bookseller he could identify in Paris for the years 1789–1813.^[12] Using this register as a base, it is possible to establish the number of active printing and publishing businesses, date their founding, and trace the longevity of their enterprises with some accuracy.^[13] It is further possible to distinguish the multitude of ephemeral enterprises that appeared and disappeared in response to the heightened demand for printed debate at critical political conjunctures, on the one hand, from the longer-term printing and publishing businesses that succeeded in installing themselves permanently within the cultural infrastructure of the capital, on the other. The result is a near-complete picture of the new printing and publishing enterprises established during the two decades spanning the Revolution and the Napoleonic period (figure 7).

Over the twenty-six-year period 1788–1813, approximately 1,224

[12] Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie .

[13] Delalain was a meticulous and conservative bibliophile. As a consequence, he excluded 181 names of individuals or establishments that he determined to be fictive, redundant, or ephemeral, dating principally from the period 1789–1795, and he excluded 75 individuals because he found them in only one source. To avoid redundancies, he lists as a separate index 61 descriptive names, such as the Imprimerie de l'Ami de l'Ordre, de l'Egalité, or des Révolutions de Paris, that printers gave to their establishments. Proper names posed certain problems. Simple questions of spelling variations could be resolved by cross-checking addresses. Less easy to clarify were establishments employing fictive or anagrammatic names, addresses, and dates. Although TEYGAT for Gattey or ROUGYFF for Guffroy were fairly unproblematic, what about "Clairvoyant imprimeur-libraire de leurs Altesses sérénissimes, Nosseigneurs les princes fugitifs, à l'enseigne de la Lanterne," or "Au pays de la liberté, de l'Imprimerie de la Résurrection, l'an de la vraie lumière 5590"? Delalain found at least forty-five titles of this kind in the first five years of the Revolution; he excluded them from his main registry because they did not represent separate establishments; see Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, xxiv–xxv. Delalain's totals from his index of individuals by profession are 438 printers and 1,177 booksellers/publishers, totaling 1,615 (1790–1813). My calculation of the total number of actual establishments, as opposed to individuals, is 337 printers and 887 booksellers/publishers, totaling 1,224 (1788–1813). In both cases printers are counted only as printers, even if they also performed the services of publishers and booksellers.

Figure 7.
New Printers and Publishers in Paris, 1789–1810
Note: Darker area represents printers and publishers in business for eight or
more years; lighter area represents those in business for less than eight years.
Sources: Paul Delalain, L'Imprimerie et la librairie à Paris de 1789 à 1813
(Paris: Delalain, [1900]) and AN, ser. F18, cartons 10a and 25.

printing, publishing, and bookselling establishments were active in Paris: 337 printing houses and 887 booksellers/publishers. A little fewer than half of these businesses (166 printers and 403 booksellers/publishers) were active for at least one-third of the period. Major changes of regimes (1789–1791, 1795–1796, and 1804) ushered in new generations of printers and publishers.^[14] It is not surprising that these political upheavals would be accompanied by spasmodic increases in the production and consumption of printed matter. Interestingly, however, if we consider only the longer-term establishments—those in business for over eight years, or one-third of the period in question—the upsurge of new businesses that otherwise appears to accompany the declaration of the first Empire in 1804 disappears entirely. The new world of printing and publishing, then, was forged during the two great liberal moments of the revolutionary decade: in the wake of the freeing of the press (1789–1791) and in the period of renewed liberalization of press laws during the Directory (1796–1799).

Did this sudden expansion of the power to print and publish transform the cultural topography of the capital? Apparently not. In 1807, the Paris guidebook Le Pariséum described a literary landscape much like that found at the end of the Old Regime: "The majority of the publishers have their warehouses and shops on the Quai des Grands-Augustin. Nouveautés are sold in the Palais Royal, in the wooden galleries."^[15] As Bernard Vouillot has shown, printing and publishing enterprises remained concentrated around the university, where they had formerly been restricted by royal regulation: that is, in the area roughly circumscribed today by the rue St-Jacques, the rue Soufflot, the rue Vaugirard, the rue de Rennes to the place St-Germain des Prés, the rue Bonaparte to Pont Neuf, and the quais of the Left Bank back up to St-Jacques. The

[14] A quick glance at Delalain's list reveals that because he based his list on published sources alone, his information is weak for the period before 1797. Similarly, his dating of enterprises is strongly biased toward the years of his sources: 1797–1798, 1804, and 1811–1813. Fortunately, the manuscript surveys of Paris booksellers, publishers, and printers, compiled by Napoleonic inspectors between 1810 and 1811 and currently found in the F18 series at the Archives Nationales (cartons 10a and 25), allows the bias in the published sources to be corrected against, because these surveys provide actual dates of entry into the profession attested to by some form of written proof, most frequently a privilege or patente . Consequently, the dates of the founding for approximately half of the establishments listed in Delalain have been redated.

[15] J.-F.-C. Blanvillain, Le Pariséum, ou tableau actuel de Paris (Paris: Piranesi, 1807), 205.

largest expansion of printers was eastward up the Left Bank, remaining as close by the old neighborhood as possible. The greatest expansion of book dealers, in contrast, was outward from the Palais Royal into the new wealthy neighborhoods on the Right Bank.^[16]

Just as printers remained closely tied to their prerevolutionary neighborhoods, so too, as Philippe Minard has recently shown, did they remain wedded to their old craft mode of production.^[17] With the two exceptions of the national printing house and Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's enormous shop with twenty-seven presses, the printing shops of the revolutionary period increased in number but not in scale, containing on average between four and ten presses.^[18] Indeed, the most distinctive feature of the revolutionary world of print was the proliferation of many small shops like Momoro's, rather than an expansion of the more established shops.

Furthermore, apart from minor improvements in typesetting and the introduction of night work to produce daily newspapers, the technology of printing (the two-strike wooden handpress) and the basic division of labor between pressmen and compositors remained essentially unchanged from the Old Regime into the nineteenth century. To Philippe Minard, Roger Chartier, and Daniel Roche, in fact, the most striking feature of the world of print during the Revolution is the very persistence of "the old typographical regime":^[19] the printing community was enlarged as a consequence of the freedom of the press, but its character was not fundamentally changed.

The crucial transformation in the world of revolutionary print cannot be found in the development of new technologies, or in the reorganization of the relations of production within the printing shop. Rather, it must be sought more broadly in the impact of the transformations of the political and legal institutions within which those technologies and relations of production were embedded, that is, in the collapse of the closed

[16] Bernard Vouillot, "La Révolution et l'empire. Une Nouvelle Réglementation," in Chartier and Martin (eds.), Histoire de l'édition française 2:533.

[17] See Philippe Minard, "Agitation on the Work Force," in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print, 107–123.

[18] Ibid. See also Robert Darnton, "L'Imprimerie de Panckoucke en l'an II," Revue française d'histoire du livre, n.s., no. 23 (1979): 359–369; Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale .

[19] The phrase is Roger Chartier's; see his "Ancien Régime typographique," Annales E.S.C., no. 36 (March 1981): 191–209. See also Minard, "Agitation in the Work Force"; Minard, Typographes des lumières; Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche, "Les Livres ont-ils fait la Révolution," in Chartier and Roche (eds.), Livre et Révolution, 9–20.

corporate printing world of the Old Regime, the introduction of laissez-faire cultural policies, the consequent redistribution of the cultural power to print, and the freeing up of the possible ends toward which that cultural power could be deployed.

Who ran the presses of the Revolution, and to what purposes? A look beyond the raw numbers reveals that three-quarters of the printers and almost two-thirds of the booksellers/publishers of the old Paris Book Guild, though suffering badly, managed to survive at least through the Directory (until 1799). One-third of the guild families still had active members in the professions in 1811, and a full one-quarter of the eighty printers selected by the Napoleonic administration were from families of the eighteenth-century guild.^[20] These figures indicate that despite their serious financial difficulties immediately following the freeing of the press and the collapse of the guild, a significant sector of the old eighteenth-century publishing elite maintained a critical presence in the industry.

But they also sustained two large infusions of new blood in the periods of the constitutional monarchy (1789–1792) and the Directory (1795–1799). Old families, such as the Delalains, the LeClercs, and the Barbous, scrupulously restricted their business and marital relations to other families of the old guild.^[21] Far more common, however, were those businessmen who followed the instinct not only to band together, but also to draw in new blood and capital. With a few notable exceptions, the new empires of the Revolution thus look more like those of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Pierre Didot l'aîné , François-Jean Baudouin, and François Belin, who strategically built bridges between the old elites and the new. The Panckoucke family, for example, drew in weaker members of the old guild, like Nicolas Ruault and Pierre Plassan, as managers and directors of their expanding establishments; at the same time, they brought in, through marriage and business, new associates like Henri Agasse and Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste.^[22] The Didot-Maginel-Léger nexus and the Baudouin-Imbert-Mame-Hacquart-Rondonneau-Prault conglomerate; the associations of Belin-Leprieur-Rozet-Delance

[20] For the persistence of the families of the Paris Book Guild, see Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie . For the selection of the eighty printers of Paris in 1811, see AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

[21] See Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, 52.

[22] Ibid.; and AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs."

and Duprat-Letellier; and Crapart, Caille, and Ravier Company all disclose similar patterns.^[23] New publishers grafted themselves onto the old elites, forming associations, and fusing new capital to old. However exaggerated, there was an element of truth in what the director of the national printing house had said: the printers and publishers of the Old Regime were not driven under by new speculators who appeared after the freedom of the press; rather, they were engulfed by them.

But what were the characteristics of these new empires? Between 1789 and 1799 the number of printing shops in Paris better than quadrupled, from 47 to 223. When the Napoleonic administration undertook a door-to-door survey of Parisian printers in 1810, the number stood at 157. Of these, the 80 that best met the qualifications established by the administration were allowed to remain in business, provided they swore political allegiance to the new regime and they had the requisite scale—at least four presses and enough type to run them full time—and financial security as printing establishments.^[24] These eighty shops constituted a core of the largest and more successful printing establishments to emerge from the revolutionary period.

The majority of the new printing shops of the revolutionary period arose to meet the explosive demand for political news and debate that accompanied the declaration of the freedom of the press in 1789.^[25] Of the 196 new newspapers (the publishing of which required many more presses than did book publishing, since extensive press runs and continuous production were necessary)^[26] that appeared in Paris in 1789, fewer than half (90) can be attributed to the old printers of the book guild.^[27] It is thus not surprising that great numbers of new printing shops emerged in the early years of the Revolution—at least fifty-five in Paris between 1789 and 1790 alone.

But the Terror, and then the dismantling of sectional politics after

[23] Ibid.

[24] AN, ser. F18, carton 1, "Décret impérial contenant le règlement sur l'imprimerie et la librairie . . . 5 février 1810," title 2.

[25] Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:436. The number of journals produced in Paris went from 4 in 1788 to 184 in 1789, 335 in 1790, and 236 in 1791. In contrast, from the year II (1793–1794) to the year III (1794–1795) the numbers jumped only from 106 to 137, fell in the year IV to 105, climbed in the year V to 190, and finally settled in the year VI at 115.

[26] Ibid., 435.

[27] My calculations are based on the information provided in Pierre Rétat, Les Journaux de 1789. Bibliographie critique (Paris: CNRS, 1989).

Thermidor, spelled the end to popular political activity and debate, and hence to quick profits in political journals and ephemera. After 1793, political repression cut down the desperate and unprotected along with the militant and outspoken. Thus, formerly wealthy and respected members of the old Paris Book Guild, such as Philippe-Denis Pierres, François Froullé, and Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet, having suffered the abolition of their privileges and witnessed the collapse of their businesses, soon found themselves driven into the production of illicit ephemera in order to survive.^[28]

Cuchet, who had specialized in publishing scholarly scientific and agricultural works, was one of the wealthiest members of the book guild in 1789.^[29] In July 1794, Cuchet presented the following account of his career since the beginning of the Revolution to the Committee on General Security:

[A] zealous partisan of the Revolution, I embraced it with the enthusiasm of a free man. An elector in 1789, I was one of the first to take up arms. The morning of July 14 I was in town, and in the afternoon I marched among the brave French Guards to take the Bastille. . . . On October 5 I marched with the Parisian army . . . to Versailles. I have proof of all of these facts. . . . After these great events, I was overcome by the darkest misfortunes; I went bankrupt. Heartbroken, pursued by creditors, menaced by captivity . . . I lost my spirit, I lost my reason, and weakened by torment I clung to any branch that could save me from the storm. . . . Citizens, I am not guilty of treason; I succumbed to the excesses of woe. I printed three of four works on the monarchy.^[30]

Whatever his actual political beliefs, Cuchet was driven by the collapse of the book trade after 1789 from his business in grande édition into the

[28] See AN, ser. BB3, carton 81a, fols. 361–364, Pierres, printer, 25 nivôse, an II (January 14, 1794). For Froullé, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1005a, doss. 743bis, Letter from Froullé to the Committee on Public Instruction, July 27, 1793; and AN, ser. W, carton 332, no. 566, 8 ventôse, an II (February 26, 1794). Finally, for Cuchet, see AN, ser. F7, carton 4658, doss. 4, 24 messidor, an II (July 12, 1794); and AN, ser. W, carton 53, doss. 3401, 8 thermidor, an II (July 26, 1794). For the corporate status and wealth of Cuchet, Pierres, and Froullé on the eve of the Revolution, see table 2.

[29] See AN, ser. F7, carton 4658, doss. 4, 24 messidor, an II (July 12, 1794); this dossiet gives a list of some of Cuchet's stock. See also AN, ser. ADVIII, carton 7, "Consultation pour le citoyen A. J. Dugour, propriétaire du Cours d'agriculture par Rozier." A.-J. Dugour bought Cuchet's business, including this work, in 1796.

[30] AN, ser. F7, carton 4658, doss. 4, Cuchet, publisher, 24 messidor, an II (July 12, 1794). For more of Cuchet's business troubles in the early years of the Revolution, see Gaspar-Joseph Cuchet, Avis (N.p., [January 11, 1789]).

shady world of counterrevolutionary ephemera, only to stand trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Yet it was not simply the last relics of the old cultural regime who found themselves in danger. The Terror struck to the left as well as the right, at young as well as old, in its effort to impose political unity on the warring nation. Momoro, too, found himself denounced before the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1794 as a counterrevolutionary conspirator because of his association with the ultrarevolutionary Hébertist movement.^[31] A death sentence on March 24 thus brought to an abrupt end one of the most prominent new printing establishments of the revolutionary period.^[32] Momoro instructed his wife in his last letter: "You will not be able to maintain the printing shop. Dismiss the workers. . . . I leave you my memory and my virtues. Marat taught me how to suffer."^[33] Momoro's presses were soon confiscated by the government.^[34]

Behind ideological hot-heads like Momoro stood numerous new printers of nouveautés and peddlers of printed matter who found themselves suddenly at risk of losing their lives for a journal or pamphlet they had simply printed "in consequence of the freedom of the press, and to make a living."^[35] By the end of 1794, the honeymoon between youthful revolutionaries and the printing press was definitively over.

Despite the unhappy fate of individuals like Momoro, on the whole it was the new printing shops founded early in the Revolution that survived into the Empire. Twenty-one of the eighty shops selected for retention in 1810 were owned by members of the old guild; thirty-five

[31] The entire dossier concerning Momoro's arrest and conviction is conserved in AN, ser. W, cartons 76, 77, 78, and 339.

[32] AN, ser. W, carton 339, doss. 617, "Acte de condamnation contre François Momoro, et al.," 4 germinal, an II (March 24, 1794).

[33] AN, ser. W, carton 77, plaque 1, no. 47, "Billet de Momoro à sa femme," [February-April 1794].

[34] Duprat, Histoire de l'Imprimerie Impériale, 166.

[35] AN, ser. W, carton 339, doss. 8, Jean-Pascal Sétier, printer in Paris, September 4, 1793. For other, similar, cases, see AN, ser. W, carton 21, doss. 1160, Gallier, printer, 9 pluviôse, an II (January 28, 1794); AN, ser. F7, carton 4722, doss. 3, Gérard, printer, 10 prairial, an II (May 29, 1794); AN, ser. F7, carton 4645, doss. 2, Chemin fils, 8 messidor, an II (June 26, 1794); and, for a printer named Senneville (Rioux-Maillon), see AN, ser. F7, carton 4775, doss. 17, doc. 4, 21 messidor, an II (July 9, 1794), and AN, ser. F7, carton 4774, doss. 93, doc. 3, 13 thermidor, an II (July 31, 1794).

were founded in the period 1789–1793, nine in the period 1795–1799, and fifteen in the period 1800–1810—that is, almost half of the printers of 1811 came from the time of the constitutional monarchy.^[36] The printers of 1811, furthermore, break down by specialization (possible for sixty-four of the eighty) as follows: newspapers and periodicals, 19; administration, 12; literature, belles lettres, and nouveautés , 11; classical works, 4; theater, 3; religion, 3; foreign languages, 3; sciences, medicine, and agriculture, 2; arts, 2; almanacs, 2; ephemera, 2; law, 1.^[37] Clearly, periodical publications were the single most important source of employment in the new printing world.

It was not just old fortunes like those of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Pierre-Robert-Christophe Ballard, François Colas, or Antoine Demonville that followed the winds of revolutionary literary culture and shifted toward newspaper and ephemeral publishing.^[38] New fortunes were made from the periodical press as well. Thus, the Napoleonic inspector who wrote up "notes" on the eighty largest printing establishments in Paris recorded a whole new generation of wealthy printers as well: François Chaignieau l'aîné , "rich from his Courrier universel "; Henri Agasse, "printer of the Moniteur , . . . stockholder and editor at 3,000 livres a year"; Jean-Baptiste-Etienne-Elie Lenormand, "former worker, a parvenu who can always be reproached for having printed pamphlets. But the presses of the Journal de l'Empire have cured him of that"; or Louis Prudhomme, "rich, Révolutions de Paris , a hot-head."^[39] The association of the freedom of the press with both "the presses" and la presse is not a phonetic coincidence or a mere play on words: it is a historical reality.

The freeing of the press and the consequent deregulation of printing and publishing after 1789 led to an unprecedented democratization of the printed word. The number of printing and publishing establishments in Paris more than tripled during the revolutionary period, allowing much broader social initiative and participation in the production of the printed word than ever before and, consequently, in the public exchange of ideas. Not surprisingly, the literary forms created by the freed presses were more democratic as well. Ephemeral publishing was less capital-intensive than book production, and its success depended on

[36] See Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie; and AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

extensive, as opposed to intensive, markets. These literary forms were made for (and often by) people who inhabited the world of Momoro rather than that of Condorcet and Sieyès, with little money to spend and little leisure time to read. This is not to suggest that there was no popular literary culture prior to the French Revolution. But with the declaration of press freedom and the collapse of the literary institutions of the Old Regime, the center of gravity in commercial printing shifted perceptibly from the elite civilization of the book to the democratic culture of the pamphlet, the broadside, and the periodical press.

The Publishers of the Republic

In contrast to the world of ephemeral printing and newspapers, book publishing and bookselling saw their most dramatic expansion during the period of the Directory (1795–1799) (figure 6).^[40] After a precipitous crash in 1789, the number of new titles registered annually at the dépôt légal turned steadily upward: from 287 in 1796 to 657 in 1798, and reaching 740 in 1799 (see figure 7).^[41] The number of novels published in France (but not necessarily registered), after a dramatic drop from 1789 to 1795, also began to expand dramatically after 1796, peaking in 1799.^[42] These trends attest to a new infusion of capital, both government and commercial, into book publishing after the end of the Terror, and in particular after the Treaty of Basel (1795), when European markets were reopened to French businesses. But how many book publishers were there? And what did they publish?

Because it was less closely monitored, the world of revolutionary book publishing and selling is more difficult to reconstruct than that of printers and the periodical press. Furthermore, the French word libraire is a murky term, used indiscriminately to describe anyone engaging in a whole series of related activities, from retail bookselling to investing in, or coordinating, the printing, publication, or distribution of an edition.

[40] One hundred twenty-one new publisher-booksellers appeared between 1789 and 1793, and 183 appeared between 1795 and 1799.

[41] For reasons I cannot explain, my own calculations differ slightly from those presented in Estivals, Statistique bibliographique, 415. Estivals's figures are as follows: 1794, 371; 1795, 308; 1796, 240; 1797, 345; 1798, 475; 1799, 815.

[42] Martin, Milne, and Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, xxxvi–xxxix. The number of new titles appearing in 1794 was 16; 41 appeared in 1795, 54 in 1796, 73 in 1797, 96 in 1798, and 174 in 1799.

In his listing of 887 Paris libraires , for example, Delalain included anyone who sold books from a fixed location—even the bouquinistes along the quais —together with the largest publishers in the capital. But how are the publishers to be distinguished from the booksellers? And who were the biggest Parisian publishers of the revolutionary period? How did the shape of the publishing world evolve after it was freed from the constraints of corporate monopoly and regulation?

Business records of individual publishers during the revolutionary period are scarce and fragmentary. Fortunately, the records of the dépôt légal prove more illuminating. In order to guarantee legal protection for individual editions, the law of July 19, 1793, required publishers or authors to deposit two copies of their work at the dépôt at the Bibliothèque Nationale, for which they received a récépiscé , a receipt that served as legal proof of ownership of the edition. Because the names of each depositor, along with the date, title, and format of each publication, were recorded in the register, it is possible to reconstruct a complete record of legally documented publications for the period July 1793–December 1799.^[43] The register thus offers an illuminating record of publishers of new editions during the period, as distinct from distributors and booksellers.

No single group, including individual authors, made greater use of the dépôt légal than Paris publishers. In the six years between 1793 and 1799, 272 publishers with businesses in Paris deposited at least one work; their submissions account for 1,969 of the total 2,778 works registered—nearly two-thirds of the total (see appendix 5). Thus, more than one-quarter of the 887 establishments listed as Paris libraires by Delalain between 1789 and 1813 can be shown to have engaged directly in publishing.^[44] The number of publications deposited per publisher over the six-year period ranged from 1 to 90 for books, and as high as 286 for music and song sheets. As with printers, approximately one-third (72 of 272) of the publishers of the revolutionary period can be identified as former guild members or their relations.

While 213 publishers made only one deposit, 37 deposited between five and fifteen books, and an elite core of 15 publishing houses registered between seventeen and ninety books in the period 1793–1799:

[43] BN, Archives Modernes, CXXIX, "Registres du dépôt légal des livres imprimés," reg. 1.

[44] The percentage is in fact probably somewhat higher, as Delalain's list extends to 1813, whereas I have limited my survey of the dépôt to the years 1793–1799.

Pierre Didot l'aîné , Henri Agasse, Pierre Plassan, Louis Rondonneau, the Cercle Social, François Buisson, Honnert, Henri Jansen, Aubry, Pierre-Sebastien Leprieur, Mathieu Migneret, François Maradan, L. C. Huet, Pierre-Etienne Cholet, and Jean-Nicolas Barba.^[45] By number of new editions deposited for copyright protection, these fifteen emerge as the biggest publishers in the capital during the period of the Republic.

Of the fifteen, four were former members of the Paris Book Guild (Didot l'aîné , Buisson, Plassan, and Maradan), and one was the direct successor of a guild family (Agasse). Twelve of the fifteen were also printers, and half had dealings in periodical publishing as well. Closer inspection of the record of their deposits offers an extraordinary window into the character of their portfolios and a chance to trace how their literary enterprises evolved over the course of the republican period. Six specialized in theatrical works. Two dealt solely in literature, one of them exclusively in popular novels. Several others had significant concentrations in literary nouveautés . Six of the big publishing houses dealt in "arts and sciences"—that is, in works of high literature, history, classical texts, philosophy, and the sciences. One published almost only popular educational books. One alone concentrated entirely on philosophy and politics. By reconstructing the profile of these fifteen publishing enterprises over the years 1793–1799 we can recover something of the literary landscape of the first Republic, together with the processes by which it was forged through the forces of both commercial markets and government patronage.

Philosophy and Politics

Philosophical and political publications are often said to have made the Revolution, but how did they fare under it? On July 25, 1793, a publishing group that called itself the Cercle Social became the first depositor at the newly founded dépôt légal of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The group registered thirty-four publications, many dated as far back as 1791. Despite its short-lived publishing career (1790–1793) the Cercle was to be one of the largest literary depositors of the republican period. As Gary Kates has masterfully demonstrated in his recent study of the group, this was no mere commercial publishing house. Rather, it was founded in 1791 by a group of revolutionary intellectuals known as the Confédération des Amis de la Vérité, whose explicit intention was to

[45] See appendix 5.

regenerate French political and cultural life through the propagation of enlightened and liberal ideas.^[46] As one of its most famous participants, the marquis de Condorcet, wrote in a Cercle publication of 1791, "The knowledge of printing makes it possible for modern constitutions to reach a perfection that they could not otherwise achieve. In this way a sparsely populated people in a large territory can now be as free as the residents of a small city. . . . It is through the printing process alone that discussion among a great people can truly be one."^[47]

The Cercle printing shop on the rue du Théâtre Français in the radical Cordeliers district was directed principally by Nicolas Bonneville and Louis Reynier, though it enjoyed continuous support from a wide range of well-known politicians and intellectuals, including Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, François Lanthenas, the marquis de Condorcet, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine, and Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray.

In its effort to bring all of France into political dialogue with itself, the Cercle Social launched an exceptionally wide and innovative range of publications, addressed to a broad spectrum of audiences. Gary Kates has identified 180 books, newspapers, pamphlets, and ephemeral pieces published by the Cercle between 1791 and 1793, 40 of which ended up in the dépôt légal . The lion's share of the works deposited for legal protection were books and pamphlets concerned with politics and political philosophy, including authors such as John Oswald, the marquis de Condorcet, Etienne Clavière, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Publicola-Chaussard, Nicolas Bonneville, and Joseph Lavallée, as well as the French translation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man , by François Lanthenas. But they also deposited a popular orientalist novel, three plays, a collection of Bonneville's poems, Lavallée's geography of France, an account of travel in the Sahara, a collection of Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck's writings on natural history and his journal of natural history, and a work on the military fortification of Paris by A.-P. Julienne de Belair.

In 1792 the Cercle also published an extraordinary spectrum of periodical publications, ranging from the Bulletin de la bouche de fer , which offered a forum for exchange of ideas open to all citizens; through readers' letters; to Condorcet's more highbrow political journal the Chro-

[46] Kates, Cercle Social . The following discussion is based largely on this work, and especially on part three, "The Imprimerie du Cercle Social," 175–270.

[47] Marie-Jean-Antoine Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Des conventions nationales (Paris: Imprimerie du Cercle Social, 1791), 18; cited in ibid., 180.

nique du mois , the rural Feuille villageoise , and Louvet de Couvray's news broadside the Sentinelle, which was intended to reach the sans-culotte reader on the streets of Paris.

The Cercle publishing house reached its apogee in 1792, along with the political group to which it was most closely attached, the Girondists. From the very start, the Cercle Social was generously patronized by Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, who put up an initial 26,000 livres to open the printing shop. As minister of the interior in 1791–1792, Roland continued to lavish subsidies on the publications of the Cercle: first from the secret funds of his ministry, and then, more overtly, from the 100,000 livres assigned by the National Assembly to his controversial office of propaganda, the "Bureau de l'Esprit." The Sentinelle alone received 11,000 livres in 1792.^[48] Roland's resignation in January 1793, however, and the exclusion of the Girondists from the National Convention five months later, spelled the end of the Cercle Social. The key leaders and authors for the publishing house were soon under arrest or in hiding. In fact, the deposit of thirty-four works at the dépôt légal on July 25, 1793, was probably one of Nicolas Bonneville's last acts before his arrest.

The Cercle made a minor reappearance in the records of the dépôt after the fall of the Jacobins, for in 1794 two deposits are recorded in its name, another in 1796, and yet another in 1799.^[49] The records of the dépôt thus confirm Gary Kates's conclusion that with the end of government patronage and the political persecution of its key members, the group collapsed. The Cercle Social may have been the most innovative cultural experiment of the revolutionary period, but its fate was tied to politics rather than the market. Despite the initial profits of the Bulletin de la bouche de fer , as a publishing venture the Cercle was a commercial failure, unable to sustain itself without government favor and subsidies.

Popular Literature

Several publishing enterprises proved that it was possible to make a profit in book publishing, even in the most turbulent moments of the Revolution—but not from serious political and philosophical works. As Villebrune observed in 1794, in the early years of the Revolution it was prose

[48] Kates, Cercle Social, 228, 235–242, 260–261.

[49] Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine's Intrigue épistolaire and Pierre Manuel's Etude de la nature et de l'homme in 1794, Pierre-Simon de Laplace's Exposition du système du monde in 1796, and the Vie du Capitaine Thurot (ed. of 1791) in 1799.

fiction that captured what remained of the book market.^[50] Not surprisingly, several publishers concentrated almost exclusively on novels.^[51] By far the most successful in the early years of the Revolution was Pierre-Sebastien Leprieur, on the rue de Savoie. In 1794, he registered sixteen popular novels in small formats (in 12 and 16) at the dépôt légal . Among them were six by François-Guillaume Ducray-Duminil: Alexis, ou la maisonette dans les bois (1793, orig. ed. 1789), Petit-Jacques et Georgette (1794, orig. ed. 1789), Lolotte et Fanfan (1794, orig. ed. 1788), Le Codicile sentimental et moral (1794), Les Cinquantes Francs de Jeannette (1798), and Coelina, ou l'enfant du mystère (1798); two by Joseph-Marie Tréogate de Loaisel: Dolbreuse, ou l'homme du siècle (1794, orig. ed. 1783) and Lucile et Milcourt (1794); one by Pivert de Senancour: Aldomen, ou le bonheur dans l'obscurité (1794); and two, Félix et Pauline (1794) and Félicie de Vilmard (1798), by Pierre Blanchard. These were exactly the kind of popular novels that the head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Villebrune, and the director of the Commission on Public Instruction, Ginguené, complained were infecting the minds of citizens with useless fictions and idle pleasures.

Leprieur was in business before 1789, but he had not been a member of the Paris Book Guild. According to records of the Napoleonic administration, Leprieur opened shop in Paris in 1784.^[52] Significantly, this date coincides closely with the first edition of Tréogate de Loaisel's Dolbreuse , which appeared in Paris in 1783, though with Amsterdam on the title page as the place of publication. With the suppression of the book guild Leprieur surfaced on the Parisian scene, and over the course of the Revolution he built a major publishing house on the commercial demand for prose fiction. He dealt exclusively in popular novels, children's stories, and fairy tales, most notably those by Ducray-Duminil, Tréogate de Loaisel, and Blanchard, and between 1794 and 1799 deposited twenty-six editions (eight in 1794, three in 1795, two in 1796, one in 1797, three in 1798, and nine in 1799). His first edition of Ducray-Duminil's Victor, ou l'enfant de laforêt (1797) introduced the French to the roman noir . It swept the nation like wildfire, rapidly becoming one of the most widely

[50] For more on the prose fiction of the early years of the Revolution, see Malcolm Cook, "Politics in the Fiction of the French Revolution, 1789–1794," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 201 (1982): 237–340; and Martin, Milne, and Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français .

[51] Many publishers handled novels, but several handled them almost exclusively, including François Louis, Lavillette, J.-J. Lepetit, and J.-J. Delance.

[52] See AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Registre de MM. les libraires de Paris qui ont déclaré vouioir continuer leur état—ou l'abandonner" (1811).

read French novels of the revolutionary period.^[53] By 1799 he had moved his business into the heart of the old publishing world, on the rue St-Jacques. In 1806, Leprieur's daughter married LéonardFrançois Belin, scion of an old eighteenth-century printing family. Their union led to the creation of the Belin-Leprieur Company, which was to become one of the important publishing houses in the nineteenth century.

While Leprieur's line of romances and gothic thrillers captured the imagination of an entire generation of young revolutionary readers, the editor Aubry answered the government's calls for authors and publishers to woo the minds of future citizens toward a more useful and edifying reading diet.^[54] Aubry, describing himself as an "editor and publisher of works for republican instruction," established his business at 2, rue Baillet, near the rue de la Monnaie, in 1791.^[55] Three years later he deposited six educational works for children—Syllabaire républicain pour les enfants , Petit Traité de grammaire française , Principes de J. J. Rousseau , Premières Notions de morale , Rituel républicain , Eléments d'arithmétique décimale —and a technical pamphlet on dying processes. In 1795 he added a new French adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to his list. In 1798–1799, he brought out a series of works on weights and measures, several more children's schoolbooks, including a French Petrarch, and an almanach. In all, between 1794 and 1799 Aubry registered twenty-two titles at the dépôt légal .

Aubry also dealt in commissions and catalogue sales on a large scale. Giving himself the title of "director of the cabinet bibliographique ," he edited the trade journal Feuille de correspondence du libraire between 1791 and 1793 and then launched another trade journal, the Magasin du bibliophile , in 1797. Aubry was one of the very few publishers to announce, by his own reports to the government, that his business was thriving in

[53] For more on the popular novel during the revolutionary period, and on Tréogate de Loaisel and Ducray-Duminil in particular, see Cook, "Politics in the Fiction of the French Revolution"; and Pierre Barbéris and Claude Duchet, eds., Manuel d'histoire littéraire de la France, Vol. 4: 1789 à 1848 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972), esp. 138–147 and 366–377. See also James Smith Allen, Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981).

[54] For Aubry's solicitations of government patronage and his submissions to the schoolbook competitions, see Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 4:41, 466; and AN, ser. F17, carton 1010a, doss. 2403, for Aubry's submissions to the competitions opened by the Committee on Public Instruction (1794).

[55] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Registre de MM. les libraires de Paris qui ont déclaré vouloir continuer leur état—ou] l'abandonner" (1811).

the year II.^[56] A catalogue of his stock from that year lists seventeen titles in "public instruction" published or in press under his name, and a retail stock of forty-three additional titles from other publishers that was dominated by the works of the major philosophes (especially Voltaire and Rousseau), geographies, atlases, and travel literature.^[57] Having built a fortune in commissions, Aubry deployed his literary capital to meet the republican demand for a revolutionary pedagogy. By 1798 Aubry, like Leprieur, moved off the back streets to a prominent address in the heart of the old publishing world on the Quai des Augustins.

Arts and Sciences

Six of the top depositers at the dépôt légal dealt in serious works of high literature, history, philosophy, and the sciences. The most notable among them was Pierre Didot l'aîné , the eldest son in the most distinguished branch of the greatest family in eighteenth-century French typography and printing.^[58] In 1789, at least seven members of the Didot family were engaged in publishing. Pierre Didot's establishment was on the rue Pavée André des Arts when the Revolution began. Despite a brief flirtation with political periodical publishing in 1789, he concentrated his energies during the revolutionary period on maintaining the tradition of fine arts printing and elite literary culture.^[59] Indeed, Didot's main ambition during the Revolution was to eclipse the works of his great rival, the Italian editor and printer of classical texts Giambattista Bodoni.

During the six years of the Republic, Didot registered thirty-one volumes at the dépôt légal . Upon its opening in 1793, he immediately deposited his lavish folio edition of Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica et Aeneis , printed with the neoclassical typefaces designed by his younger brother Firmin Didot and including twenty-three plates engraved after drawings by Gérard and Girodet. His beautiful editions of classical texts continued to appear regularly at the dépôt . Along with classical works, he also took on a treatise on Islamic monies translated by the great orientalist

[56] AN, ser. F17, carton 1010a, doss. 2403.

[57] For Aubry's list of stock in the year II (1793–1794), see ibid.

[58] For a brief history of the contributions of this family to the art of printing, see Albert J. George, The Didot Family and the Progress of Printing (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1961).

[59] In 1789, Didot printed the first two issues of the Véridique, a weekly political journal of moderate temperament, which covered the proceedings of the National Assembly; see Rétat, Journaux de 1789, 265–267.

Isaac-Silvestre de Sacy; a series of classical French authors, including Molière (1795), Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1796), Pierre-Joseph Bernard (1797), Jean Racine (1798), and Nicolas Despréaux (1799); the stories and fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1795, 1798) and Simon-Pierre Mérard St. Just (1796); as well as an edition of the Maximes et réflexions morales of François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1796), several collections of poetry, a few educational books, and some works on weights and measures.

Despite the vicissitudes of revolutionary print culture, Didot was to see his cultural ambitions realized. His Oeuvres de Racine were judged by both the National Exposition of 1806 and the London Universal Exposition of 1851 as "the most perfect typographic production of all countries and all times."^[60] Didot's conservative bias toward the classical French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not, it should be noted, prevent him from collaborating with Gide and Gay on the publication of an English novel in translation, the Vicaire de Wakefield , in 1797.

Didot did not succeed by his own resources alone. The government of the Directory lent significant support to his enterprise. In 1795 they purchased his edition of the constitution of 1791 with engravings by Helman and Ponce.^[61] And in 1797 the minister of the interior invited him to move into the rooms at the Louvre formerly employed by the Imprimerie Royale, there to produce his beautiful editions of French classical authors, which came to be known as his "éditions du Louvre."^[62] In 1810, the Napoleonic inspector described Pierre Didot as a man of "merit and literary refinement. It is not possible to have a better equipped printing shop, with the most beautiful characters and every possible advantage. Superbly located. Honest, upright, and respectful; but despite his fame he finds himself reduced to circumstances where he cannot meet his expenses."^[63] Still, the Napoleonic regime maintained Didot's license to print, despite his financial instability.

Didot's career illustrates the persistence during the revolutionary period of the elite literary culture and the typographic traditions of Old Regime Paris, with its emphasis on classical literature, fine arts printing,

[60] Ibid., 8.

[61] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:429 (January 15, 1795).

[62] Edmond Werdet, De la librairie française (Paris: Dentu, 1860), 203–205.

[63] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

and large-format, multivolume luxury editions. But Didot was able to continue his projects only with the help of government subsidies, and even then, as the Napoleonic inspector reported, he was unable to meet his costs. Villebrune, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the year II, had been right when he reported that with the Revolution, the elite market in lavish editions was too weak to sustain itself independently.

Three other descendants of the old Paris Book Guild, however, showed greater adaptability to the new cultural demands and possibilities of the revolutionary period: Pierre Plassan, François Buisson, and Henri Agasse. Plassan began his career working for Charles-Joseph Panckoucke on the rue des Poitevins. By 1792 he had his own establishment, nearby on the rue du CimitièreAndré des Arts. His first dépôt submissions were made in 1796: three volumes of an edition of the Oeuvres de Virgile , translated by Desfontaines; two volumes of the Oeuvres de Montesquieu ; and Ladivco Ariosto's Orlando furioso , in four volumes. In 1798, though, his business took a new direction with the deposit of the Histoire naturelle des poissons by Etienne de la Ville, comte de Lacépède, and the Voyage de Lapérouse . In 1799 he deposited several more of Lacépède's works, thus definitively marking his shift toward the natural sciences. In that same year, he also published his first work of contemporary fiction, Joseph Fiévèe's novel Freédéric . Thus, over the course of the republican period Plassan's ventures evolved from classical and eighteenth-century philosophy toward the natural sciences and then, finally, the novel.

Under Lacépède's protection, Plassan became the printer for the Legion of Honor. When he died in 1810, his son was maintained as a printer by the Napoleonic authorities. But they had this to say about Plassan the elder: "Well kept shop [but] was resistant to police surveillance. He has just died. The emperor has ordered the suppression of his edition of Pagenel's manuscript entitled 'Essai historique et critique de la Révolution française."'^[64] Plassan had thrived under the Directory. Devoting himself to the propagation of republican philosophy and the natural sciences, he easily gained the favor of the intellectual establishment and the republican government. With Napoleon's coup d'état however, both the cultural and the political winds shifted, pushing Plassan toward not only the vogue in the novel but also the political opposition.

François Buisson, on the rue du Hautefeuille, near to the Cordeliers, had been in the publishing business since 1783, when he brought out his

[64] Ibid.

women's fashion magazine the Cabinet des modes .^[65] It was a huge success, and in 1786 he launched an international edition from London entitled the Magasin des modes nouvelles françaises et anglaises , which he was to continue during the revolutionary period as the Journal de la mode et du goût .^[66] Buisson also had a boutique in the Palais Royal. He was thus in a very good position to move into political journals after the declaration of the freedom of the press in 1789—and even a bit before. It was Buisson who first flew in the face of the Old Regime literary police and published Brissot's Patriote français in the spring of 1789. If the Patriote français was any example, political journals were highly profitable ventures.^[67] Within a year he had also taken up the Cercle Social's Bouche de fer , as well as the ultrarevolutionary Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France , edited by Jean-Louis Carra and Louis-Sebastien Mercier.^[68] He continued with the Annales until December 1794, claiming as many as six thousand subscribers.^[69] In 1795, after Thermidor, he also submitted three issues of the Journal de l'opposition for copyright protection at the dépôt légal .

But Buisson was interested in more than periodicals. Between 1794 and 1799 he registered fifty books at the dépôt . In 1794 alone he made ten deposits, ranging from a political potboiler he had produced in 1792 entitled the Vie privée du maréchel de Richelieu , to French translations of serious philosophical works such as Thomas Gordon's Discours historique sur Tacite et Salluste , Jean-George-Adam Forster's Voyage philosophique sur les bords du Rhin , Adam Smith's Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations , and several other works of political and constitutional thought and political economy, like the multivolume Bibliothèque physioéconomique . Buisson's London connections, not surprisingly, led him to specialize in translations, especially from the English.

In 1795 and 1796 his interests became increasingly literary. He published several works by Denis Diderot (his Essai sur la peinture, La Religieuse, and Jacques le fataliste ), more voyages , and an English novel in translation. From 1797 to 1799 Buisson continued to publish English novels

[65] For the date of his establishment, see ibid., "Registre de MM. les libraires de Paris qui ont déclaré vouloir continuer leur état—ou l'abandonner" (1811). For the Cabinet des modes, see Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:319.

[66] Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:495–496.

[67] For the profits made on publishing the Patriote français, see ibid., 439.

[68] For Buisson's involvement in the Patriote français and the Annales patriotiques et littéraires, see Rétat, Journaux de 1789, 398–399; and for his involvement in printing the Bulletin de la bouche de fer, see Kates, Cercle Social, 185.

[69] Rétat, Journaux de 1789, 32–35.

and philosophy (notably Adam Smith's Théorie des sentiments moraux ), and he added a group of memoirs, correspondences, contemporary histories, and political tracts, such as Benjamin Constant's Suite de la contrerévolution de 1660 en Angleterre , to his list. Finally, he also produced a collection of exemplary Lives , intended for the schools: a Vie de Catherine II , a Vie de Voltaire , an Esprit de Mirabeau , a Vie de Général Hoche , and a Vie de Benjamin Franklin .

Although a member of the Paris Book Guild, Buisson in his willingness to put his name on Brissot's Patriote français in 1789 revealed a man who cared little for the traditional authorities or their regulations, and who kept his business closely attuned to the pulses of the revolutionary movement. This was as true of his serious books in the years after Thermidor as it was of his revolutionary political journals of the years 1789–1794. Indeed, Buisson's book publications from 1794 to 1799 resonated very closely with the cultural policies espoused by Grégoire, Chénier, Garat, and others in the chambers of the Commission on Public Instruction and on the floor of the National Convention, especially after Thermidor: consider his anglophilia, and especially his interest in English political economy; his timely publication of Diderot's Essai sur la peinture just as the convention began to seek theories and examples of an enlightened aesthetics; and his exemplary civic Lives intended for the schools. In fact, there is evidence of direct government patronage of at least two of Buisson's editions from this period: Adam Smith's Théorie des sentiments moraux and the Vie de Général Hoche .^[70] Having founded his fortune first in fashion magazines and then in ultrarevolutionary political journals, by Thermidor Buisson was well established as one of the two largest publishers of serious enlightened philosophy and literary culture in the capital. The other was Henri Agasse.

In 1794, at the height of the Terror, Henri Agasse assumed directorship of the Paris publishing business of his father-in-law, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke.^[71] Comprising twenty-seven presses and employing over a hundred workers, Agasse's establishment on the rue des Poitevins was

[70] For Joseph Garat's proposal that the Commission on Public Instruction pay for the translation of Adam Smith's Théorie des sentiments moraux, see Guillaume (ed.), Procèsverbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 5:169 (1794). On government subsidies and purchases of the first two editions of the Vie de Général Hoche, see AN, ser. F17, carton 1215, doss. 5. For diverse purchases of works from Buisson by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1794, see AN, ser. F4, carton 2554.

[71] Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, 495.

the largest privately owned commercial printing and publishing house in France, if not the world.^[72] Along with the printing shop, Agasse came into possession of two of the largest publishing ventures of the revolutionary period: Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's monumental stepchild of Denis Diderot's great Encyclopédie, the Encyclopédie méthodique ; and the largest daily newspaper in France, the Moniteur universel .^[73]

The Moniteur was the first large-format national daily political newspaper in France.^[74] Like many Parisian publishers and printers, Panckoucke created the Moniteur in response to the public demand for "news" after the freeing of the press in 1789. But in contrast to the majority of those new Parisian periodicals, which modeled themselves on Brissot's Patriote français , the Moniteur prided itself on the accuracy of its political information rather than on its political opinions or the rhetorical skills of its authors. Its meticulous stenographic coverage of National Assembly proceedings immediately established the Moniteur as an unrivaled source of daily political information for the country. Its success was immediate, and by 1791 Panckoucke could boast of eighty-five hundred subscribers. The Moniteur was the only periodical to survive the political vicissitudes of the revolutionary period. Recognized—even by the government under the Terror—as one of the most accurate sources of political information, by 1794, when Agasse took over, the Moniteur was receiving considerable state subsidies to insure its continuance. In 1799 it became the government's official newspaper. By 1810 Henri Agasse was described by the government as "one of the most honest men in the world, who has sacrificed everything for his father-in-law, Panckoucke. He prints the Moniteur and other works that are important and full of merit. A superb printing shop that runs day and night. A rich business. . . . He enjoys a comfortable life; on top of his income as the key stockholder, he receives an income of 3,000 livres for editing." Indeed, because he left the running of the printing shop to his director, Ruault, Agasse was free to pursue his own interests in publishing.^[75]

[72] Darnton, "L'Imprimerie de Panckoucke."

[73] For more in the Moniteur, see Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, 475–490; also Kulstein, "Ideas of Charles Joseph Panckoucke." For a complete history of the Encyclopédie méthodique, see also Darnton, Business of Enlightenment .

[74] The following discussion of the Moniteur is based on Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, 475–484; Darnton, Business of Enlightenment, 484; Bellanger (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française 1:435, 441, 487–489, 507, 510, 535, 550, 554–558; and Popkin, "Journals," 151–154.

[75] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

Using his Moniteur profits, Agasse was able to sustain a serious publishing house, concentrating, like his father-in-law, on philosophy and natural sciences. Agasse registered twenty-five publications at the dépôt légal over the course of the republican period. Not surprisingly, his first deposit was the fifty-second to fifty-sixth installments of the Encyclopédie méthodique . Deposits of this work were to appear regularly on the dépôt lists during this period. Agasse also inherited a significant list of other books from Panckoucke; many of these, including François Dupuis's rationalist exposé of the Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universelle, two editions of Jean de La Fontaine's Fables , and Montucla's Histoire des mathématiques , he successfully published during the Revolution.^[76]

In 1795, following a government encouragement of 32,000 livres, Agasse registered a new work at the dépôt: Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit .^[77] He made no further deposits until 1798, when he suddenly submitted a group of seventeen new titles: several scientific works by Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck and the chemist Antoine Baumé, as well as several works in political economy, including Adam Smith's Essais philosophiques . In 1798–1799 he also published two works intended for public instruction and an English novel by William Godwin.^[78] Finally, in 1799, he began publishing LaHarpe's monumental survey of literary history, the Lycée, ou cours de littérature .

Despite their obvious differences, the revolutionary careers of all four of the "serious" book publishers—Didot l'aîné , Plassan, Buisson, and Agasse—had common characteristics that are worthy of attention. For one thing, all were printers as well as publishers. Although the enterprise Agasse inherited from Panckoucke was unparalleled in scale, it bore some striking resemblances to Buisson's business. First, the fortunes of both were founded in the unprecedented demand for political and commercial periodicals that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and especially after the freeing of the press in 1789. Second, each used this wealth derived from printing and publishing newspapers to launch less lucrative publishing ventures in serious works of philosophy, literature, and science. And third, both displayed a special interest in political economy and English works, particularly those of Adam Smith. As for Plassan, the report of the Napoleonic inspector suggests

[76] Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, 491–495.

[77] AN, ser. F4, carton 2554, doss. 4.

[78] The two works for public instruction were a French grammar and François de Neufchâteau's L'Institution des enfants, ou conseils d'un père .

that his financial security was also linked to his printing business rather than his book publishing ventures.

All four of these publishers, moreover, relied to some extent on government subsidies to publish their serious books. The one among them who devoted himself exclusively to the fabrication of luxurious fine editions, Pierre Didot, was found to be unable to meet his payments. Serious works of high literature, science, and philosophy, in short, were incapable of sustaining themselves on the market: they required subsidies, whether in the form of profits earned from printing or periodicals, or in the form of government encouragements. If these careers are any indicator, they suggest that Villebrune and Grégoire were right: the revolutionary free market in ideas was incapable of spreading enlightenment, at least by means of printed books.

This is not to suggest that their enterprises did not respond to the demands of both the commercial market and the government's cultural agendas as they evolved throughout the republican period. They did. Indeed, we find an overwhelming interest in travel and political economy during the years just after Thermidor generally, with the evolution in the stocks of Agasse, Buisson, and Plassan more specifically revealing trends from classical and enlightenment philosophy, first toward travel narratives, political economy, and the natural sciences, and then toward the novel, especially the English novel. Even Didot l'aîné 's intensely conservative cultural instincts by 1798 could no longer check the irresistible temptation to invest in the publication of Vicaire de Wakefield .

Official Culture

The government's cultural policies played no small role in reorienting Paris publishing during the republican period. Government agencies alone deposited fifty-two works for copyright protection during those years. But the impact of official cultural policies extended far beyond government publications. In his speech to the National Convention on the need for "encouragements for men of letters" in 1794, Henri Grégoire noted with special concern the recent commercial failure of an edition of the works of the German archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The fate of works of great intellectual value such as this, Grégoire insisted, could not simply be left to the vicissitudes of the commercial literary market. They required government support.^[79] Whether the Winckel-

[79] Grégoire, Rapport sur les encouragements , 5.

mann edition received a government subsidy remains a mystery, but Grégoire was probably referring to the edition of Winckelmann's Histoire de l'art chez les anciens , which was submitted to the dépôt légal by the editor Henri Jansen in 1794. There can also be little doubt that the new cultural climate after Thermidor, initiated by Grégoire's call for a republican history and greater awareness of foreign cultures and geography, along with Garat's demand for translations of the important new German and English works, played no small role in reversing Jansen's fortune.

Henri Jansen arrived in Paris from The Hague in 1770 and applied his knowledge of German, English, and Dutch to a career as a translator and editor.^[80] By 1791, Jansen had gone into publishing.^[81] His business was foundering when it came to Grégoire's attention in 1794, whereupon it suddenly flourished under the Directory. Between 1793 and 1799 Jansen submitted to the dépôt légal more than twenty editions of serious works in history, politics, and philosophy, beginning in 1793. In 1794, the edition of Winckelmann's Histoire de l'art appeared on the dépôt registers, followed in 1795 by a translation of an Italian work of political philosophy. In 1796–1799 he deposited another group of philosophical and political works in translation, notably Joseph Priestley's Discours sur l'histoire et sur la politique and Emmanuel Kant's Projet de paix perpetuelle , as well as several volumes of voyages in Africa. Whether Jansen owed his brief but important publishing career directly to state patronage or merely to the cultural climate created by the government under the Directory remains obscure, but Jansen's publishing career clearly left him well placed and well regarded within elite political and cultural circles. In 1804, Jansen left the publishing business to become the librarian to Charles-Maurice de Périgord, and after 1810 he was appointed as one of Napoleon's imperial censors of the book trade.^[82]

Although the origins of the printer and publisher Honnert, who appeared on the rue du Colombier near the Abbaye St-Germain in 1795, are even more obscure, his connection to the cultural policies of the Directory cannot be mistaken. In 1796 Honnert's establishment housed the office of the Nouvelliste littéraire des arts et sciences , a literary journal edited by Lenoir and Morin, formed after Thermidor with the explicit purpose of wooing readers away from the passions of politics and to-

[80] For biographical information on Jansen, see Michaud frères (eds.), Biographie universelle 20:550–551.

[81] See the entry for H.-J. Jansen, in Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie à Paris, 109.

[82] Ibid.

ward useful sciences and the civilities of good literature.^[83] Between 1795 and 1799 Honnert deposited sixteen of a total twenty volumes of the Soirées littéraires ou mélanges de traductions nouvelles des plus beaux morceaux de l'antiquité, a collection of classical literature in translation edited by the former royal censor and former professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Navarre, Jean-Marie Louis Coupé.^[84] The great nineteenth-century bibliographers François and Louis-Gabriel Michaud described the Soirées as "a kind of journal intended to restore good taste in literature."^[85] There can be little doubt about the official character of this effort to soften the spirits and refine the manners of citizens by spreading classical literature: volume two was registered at the dépôt directly in the name of the Committee on Public Instruction. Apart from the Soirées , Honnert deposited five more volumes of classical literary texts, including Homer, Ovid, and Seneca, translated and edited by Coupé, and a volume of erotic novellas and poems by Eusèbe Salverte. Clearly well connected in the political circles of the Directory, in 1799 Honnert became the publisher of Lucien Bonaparte's novel La Tribu indienne . Then suddenly, like Jansen, after 1802 Honnert disappeared from the publishing scene. Nevertheless, however short-lived their enterprises, Jansen and Honnert made no small contribution to the revival and propagation of classical literature, philosophy, and science under the Directory.

Theater

At least six of the great publishing fortunes of the revolutionary period were made—or remade—in the genre of theatrical works. While Didot l'aîné cautiously crafted his fine editions of Racine and Molière the streets of republican Paris were being flooded with cheap editions of popular plays, vaudevilles, comic operas, and faits historiques .^[86] Between 1793 and 1799, the dépôt légal registered nearly three hundred theatrical

[83] The Nouvelliste littéraire was published in Paris from germinal, an IV (April 1796), to germinal, an IX (April 1806). See also above, chapter 4.

[84] For more biographical information on Coupé, see Michaud frères (eds.), Biographie universelle 9:349–351.

[85] Ibid., 351.

[86] On the traditions of boulevard theater and vaudeville in the eighteenth century, see Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). And on the explosion of popular theater after the collapse of the Old Regime privileges for theaters, see Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution , esp. 201–229.

works: approximately fifty per year, almost all originating in Paris. Under the Republic, the Paris publishers L.-C. Huet, Pierre-Etienne Cholet, Louis Rondonneau, François Maradan, Mathieu Migneret, and Jean-Nicolas Barba reoriented the world of dramatic publishing from elite editions of the Oeuvres de Molière toward the popular Souper de Molière or Le Quart d'heure de Rabelais —and made a fortune in the process.

The popularity of comic opera and vaudeville alone was so intense that by the end of the period of the Directory two of these publishers, Huet and Cholet, specialized in these subgenres exclusively, and another, Rondonneau, devoted an entire sideline of his publishing business to it. The three of them alone accounted for 163 (over half) of the plays deposited at the dèpôt between 1793 and 1799. L.-C. Huet first appeared in the Paris publishing world, according to the Napoleonic inspectors, in 1792.^[87] He began submitting works to the dèpôt légal shortly after it opened in 1794, starting with an operatic version of Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre's popular romance Paul et Virginie . Over the course of 1794 he registered nine more theatrical comedies, many with explicitly historical and political themes, such as Les Vrais Sans-culottes and La Prise de Toulon, as well as operatic romances like Roméo et Juliette . He also submitted a vaudeville by Louis-Abel Beffroy de Regny (known as "Cousin Jacques") entitled Allons, ça va, ou le Quaker en France, and a fait historique in one act, La Famille indigente . Huet made few deposits between 1795 and 1798. But his business must have continued to grow, because by 1800 he had opened a second shop.^[88] And suddenly, as if in a panic, Huet appeared at the dépôt légal in 1799 with fifty-four plays, comic operas, and vaudevilles, ranging from serious tragedies like Baudouin l'aîné's Démétrius to light comedies like the Dupe de même by François Roger. His panic no doubt had something to do with Pierre-Etienne Cholet and his Théâtre et Imprimerie du Vaudeville.

With the exception of publishers of sheet music, Pierre-Etienne Cholet was the single most frequent depositer at the dépôt légal , registering ninety theatrical works between 1794 and 1799 alone. The earliest trace we have of Cholet's publishing activities during the revolutionary period is his first

[87] AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

[88] Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, 101. Delalain first places Huet on the rue Vivienne in 1797; a second shop, at the Palais du Tribunat, galerie du théâtre français, was opened in 1800. Huet is last traced by Delalain in 1804. The widow Huet becomes Mme Masson shortly thereafter and continues in business until her death in 1816. Nicolas-Charles Huet appears on the rue St-Jacques between 1810 and 1812.

deposit, of the play L'Heureuse Décade, divertissements patriotiques, vaudeville , in 1794. Cholet soon became the official printer and publisher of the Théâtre du Vaudeville.^[89] The exact date of his association with the theater remains unclear, but in 1798 Cholet suddenly registered seventy-one vaudevilles, faits historiques, and comedies for copyright protection. By 1799 he had a printing shop on the rue des Droits de l'Homme and a bookshop on the rue de Malthe, at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, and was referring to himself as the "printer and publisher of the Vaudeville Theater."

Cholet's stock, more than that of anyone else, captured the revolutionary culture of working people. He had a line of eight harlequin plays in which traditional characters found new company with figures of a more decidedly revolutionary bent: thus, for example, Arlequin décorateur, Arlequin cruello, Arlequin pygmalion, Arlequin tailleur , and Arlequin tout seul were joined by those notorious disseminators of popular revolutionary culture Arlequin afficheur and Arlequin journaliste . It was Cholet, as well, who issued popularized classics like the Souper de Molière and Le Quart d'heure de Rabelais . He also published a series of new revolutionary plays that recounted historical tales, such as the life of Rousseau in the Vallée de Montmorency, ou J. J. Rousseau dans son hermitage, as well as dramatizations of recent news events depicting the little heroes of the Revolution in their everyday struggles to ward off the clergy, save the nation, console a broken family, or nurse the wounded and orphaned, in one-act faits historiques like Encore un curé, Le Divorce, La Fille soldat, Le Canonier convalescent . Thus the publisher Louis Prudhomme reminisced in 1814, with no small measure of cynicism and tragic insight:

The Directory, which needed to corrupt the inhabitants of Paris in order to reenslave them more easily, and to make them forget the misery they had suffered and the famine that plagued them, multiplied the number of . . . theaters. There were theaters in shopfronts, and even on the fourth floors of houses in the faubourgs St-Jacques, St-Antoine, St-Martin, St-Denis, etc. . . . We saw at a shoemaker's, at the back of a courtyard, in the faubourg St-Denis, a theater, illuminated by candle stubs stuck onto the walls. This shoemaker was playing the lead roles of theatrical masterpieces.^[90]

Where Henri Grégoire had envisaged the regenerative possibilities of "a new theater" infused with republican values, Louis Prudhomme, the

[89] The Théâtre du Vaudeville was founded in 1791. It remains unclear exactly when Cholet first became associated with it.

[90] Louis Prudhomme, Voyage descriptif et philosophique de l'ancien et du nouveau Paris. Miroir fidèle (Paris: Prudhomme, 1814), 1:24.

former publisher of the ultrarevolutionary Révolutions de Paris , insisted on a more Rousseauian, and hence more tragic, view of the popular craze for theater. He saw it as a cultural ruse to divert the masses from their political reenslavement by the wealthy ruling oligarchy of the Directory who had repressed the popular political movement in Paris after Thermidor.

Whether inspired by a self-conscious cultural conspiracy on the part of the political elites or by a popular longing for solace and entertainment, the commercial success of popular theater, and especially vaudeville, during the later years of the Directory is a fact. In the same few years, 1797–1799, the printer, law book publisher, and director of the national depository for laws, Louis Rondonneau, could not resist the temptation to get in on the vaudeville mania.^[91] He associated with Huet and Thomas Brunet to produce thirty issues of a specialized periodical entitled Les Diners du vaudeville, eighteen issues of which ended up in the dépôt légal . But with the end of the republican period, the craze for vaudeville waned, and by 1807 the Paris guidebook Le Pariséum noted that "vaudeville has been out of fashion for some time."^[92] Not surprisingly, however, at least some of the fortunes made in theater were quick to shift to new cultural terrain.

From Theater to the Novel

Three of the major publishers of the revolutionary period, François Maradan, Mathieu Migneret, and Jean-Nicolas Barba, used fortunes they built producing theatrical works to become key figures in the resurgence of literature, and particularly the novel, toward the end of the Directory period. The most prominent of them was the former Paris

[91] For more on Louis Rondonneau's career during the Revolution, see Delalain, Imprimerie et la librairie, 184. His own biographical statement, written in 1814, can be found in the papers of the Ministry of Justice, AN, ser. BB16, carton 783, doss. 867. He was employed to catalogue manuscripts for the Académie de Belles Lettres from 1780 to 1788, then as manager of the office of accounting for the Assembly of Notables, and finally for the Estates General. In 1791, Rondonneau became "manager of the office of decrees and the archives of the keeper of the seals for the minister of justice," from which post he resigned in 1793. According to his account he founded the dépôt des lois with Anisson-Duperron, and then attempted to buy part of Anisson's biens des condamnés after his death (see AN, ser. AA, carton 56, doc. 1524). In 1793 he bought out the former guild member Prault's collection of laws, which became the basis of his dépôt . Between 1793 and 1799 he registered twenty-one titles at the dépôt légal . His first deposit is a law book, but then he went into theater publishing with Thomas Brunet in 1797. Rondonneau continued his business with his son Jacques-Charles until 1813. Over the course of the Revolution, Rondonneau regularly supplied the government with laws. In 1809 he ceded his business to his son-in-law, Dècle, who was not maintained as a printer in 1810. Finally, Rondonneau made a bid to become the official royal dépôt des lois in 1814.

[92] Blanvillain, Pariséum, 322.

Book Guild member Maradan, with premises on the rue André des Arts. Maradan had specialized in the theater before the Revolution.^[93] He also had extensive dealings in the underground book trade of the Old Regime.^[94] In 1789 and 1790, Maradan, like many publishers, ventured briefly into periodical publishing.^[95] And like many members of the old guild, he went bankrupt on April 24, 1790.^[96] Although he was forced to sell off a large amount of his stock in theater,^[97] Maradan rebounded—in no small part by rebuilding that same business in popular theater. In 1794, he registered at the dépôt légal nineteen plays (both contemporary and classic), a children's schoolbook, a translation of Edward Gibbon's Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l'empire romain , one book on medicine, and a physics text by Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck. In 1795, in collaboration with another publisher, Smits, Maradan received the controversial government contract for the new fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie .^[98]

Then in 1796, he published a purportedly titillating novel by Mme Félicité Mérard de St. Just and another medical text. The next year, three English novels in translation appeared at the dépôt in his name, as well as two works of contemporary political history. In 1798, this trend in Maradan's deposits away from theater and toward science and English novels continued with the deposit of Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria ou le malheur d'être femme ; another novel, Frédéric et Jenny ; and two more medical works. In 1800, the newspaper Amis des lois reported that Maradan's light literary publications had captured the Parisian literary market. He apparently could not print them fast enough.^[99] Maradan sustained a second bankruptcy on November 2, 1803.^[100] But he appears to have bounced back yet again, this time not through theater, but through the novel. In 1804

[93] See Jean-Yves Mollier, L'Argent et les letters. Histoire du capitalisme d'édition, 1880–1920 (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 325.

[94] See Belin, Commerce des livres prohibés; and AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 106, doss. 7773.

[95] Between 1789 and 1790 Maradan published the Journal de la ville, the Journal de la ville, par Jean-Pierre-Louis de Luchet, and finally the Journal de la ville, par une société des gens de lettres . See Rétat, Journaux de 1789, 134–139, 404.

[96] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D4B6, carton 109, doss. 7773, Declaration of bankruptcy, 1790. Maradan's assets totaled 701,035 livres, and his debits amounted to 646,953 livres .

[97] See Mollier, Argent et les lettres, 325.

[98] Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d'Instruction Publique 6:404–405, 443–444, 501, 621, 680, 683, 688. See also Alphonse Aulard, ed., Paris sous le Consulat, (Paris: Le Cerf, 1903–1909), 3:416–417.

[99] See Aulard (ed.), Paris sous le Consulat 1:330.

[100] AP, Fond Faillite, ser. D11U3, carton 23. His assets totaled 584, 429 livres, and his debits amounted to 391,020 livres .

Maradan moved to the rue des Grands Augustins. By 1807 the guidebook Pariséum cited Maradan as the premier Paris bookdealer specializing in novels.^[101]

A similar pattern can be detected in the career of Mathieu Migneret. Before the Revolution, Migneret was the shop floor supervisor for the guild printer François Gueffier. With the declaration of the freedom of the press Migneret opened his own printing shop on the rue Jacob. Migneret did not, however, start registering works at the dépôt until 1797, when he brought out six theatrical comedies and vaudevilles. At the same time, he also began depositing a series of François de LaHarpe's works, including De l'état des lettres en Europe (2d ed.), Du fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire (2d ed.), La Guerre déclarée par nos derniers tyrans à la raison, and Réfutation du livre de l'esprit , as well as a medical text, Alexis Boyer's Traité complet d'anatomie . In 1798, Migneret moved more solidly in the direction of theater, registering three operas and ten dramatic comedies. He also brought out LaHarpe's Pseautier .^[102] But in 1799 Migneret took a new turn, depositing an English novel, Le Faux Ami , by Mary Darby Robinson.^[103] During the next few years Migneret really struck gold, with editions of Chateaubriand—first Le Génie du christianisme , and then Atala —who sold so well and so fast, Migneret could barely keep him in print.^[104]

But no career more vividly illustrates the evolution of key publishers from theater to the novel over the revolutionary period than that of Jean-Nicolas Barba. Barba first appeared in the Palais Royal in 1791, where he took over the fledgling establishment of two old members of the Paris Book Guild, Jean-Nicolas Duchesne and Théodore Dabo.^[105] He also bought the huge stock of theater titles that Maradan was forced to sell after his bankruptcy in 1790.^[106] Between 1795 and 1799 Barba registered thirty-eight works at the dépôt . His first deposit

[101] Blanvillain, Pariséum, 205.

[102] In 1801 he bought de LaHarpe's entire corpus from the author; see Christopher Todd, Voltaire's Disciple: François de LaHarpe (London: Modern Humanities Research Library, 1972), 73.

[103] During the first Empire, Migneret's business took yet another turn. In 1810 he was described by the Napoleonic inspectors as dealing exclusively in medicine and surgery and as attached to the emperor's surgeon, Boyer. He was maintained as a printer in 1810. See AN, ser. F18, carton 25, "Notes sur les imprimeurs après désignés" (1810–1811).

[104] See Alphonse Aulard (ed.), Paris sous le Consulat 2:229, 282; 4:699.

[105] See Nicole Feikay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, 1822–1837. Essai sur la librairie romantique (Paris: Promodis, 1987), 31, 34, 89, 106–107; and Mollier, Argent et les lettres, 325.

[106] Ibid.

was Charles-Pierre Ducancel's Thermidorean drama L'Intérieur des comités révolutionnaires . All of his titles were in theater, ranging from serious tragedies like Marie-Joseph Chénier's Azémire or the theatrical rendering of Voltaire's great anticlerical cause in Jean Calas , to comic operas like Severin's Le Villageois qui cherche son veau .

He was also a notorious literary pirate and dealer in pornography. In 1796, he was accused of pirating Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine's Intrigue épistolaire , and in 1797, Migneret's edition of de LaHarpe's Du fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire .^[107] By 1802 Barba was, as the prefect of Paris described him, "very well known for this kind of trade."^[108] Barba also orchestrated numerous illegal editions of the marquis de Sade's Justine , until the police finally discovered his secret warehouse in 1802.^[109] Known for driving hard bargains, both legal and illegal, Barba was enormously successful.

By 1795 he had moved to the rue Git-le-coeur, in the heart of the old publishing district, and he maintained a second shop in the Palais Royal. Five years later he also had an outlet nearer to the theater at the Palais du Tribunat. Having founded one of the great publishing fortunes of the revolutionary era through popular theater, pornography, and literary pirating, Barba, too, branched out into the novel, beginning with Guillaume-Charles-Antoine Pigault-Lebrun's libertine romances. By the 1820s Barba had become one of the first editors of Honoré de Balzac.^[110] Like Maradan and Migneret, Barba was instrumental in turning Paris publishing from classical theater to the romantic novel, from civic to domestic genres.

The early years of the Revolution witnessed an explosion in the number of newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera that poured forth to

[107] For the case of Fabre d'Eglantine, see Aristide P. Douarche, Les Tribunaux civils de Paris pendant la Révolution (1791–1800): documents inédits recueillis avant l'incendie du Palais de Justice de 1871 par Casenave (Paris: Le Cerf, 1905–1907), 2:305 (5 floréal, an IV [April 24, 1796]). For the case of LaHarpe, see ibid., 2:435 (14 fructidor, an V [August 31, 1797]).

[108] See the report of the prefect of Paris to the minister of police of September 11, 1802, in Aulard (ed.), Paris sous le Consulat, 3:245.

[109] For the history of this case see the reports from the prefect of Paris to the minister of police of July 27 and 29, September 10 and 11, 1802, and September 13, 1803, in ibid., 3:178, 180, 245, 247, and 250.

[110] See Nicole Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, 31, 34, 89, and 106–107; and Jean-Yves Mollier, Argent et les lettres, 200.

meet the public demand for political news and debate after 1789. After being strictly limited to thirty-six for over a century, the number of printing shops in Paris therefore suddenly quadrupled. Yet while the periodical press flourished between 1789 and 1794, book publishing collapsed as a consequence of the ruthless deregulation of the book trade and the diversion of the nation's elites toward political rather than cultural concerns. Even so, political news was not all that thrived after the freeing of the presses: cheap popular romances did as well. After Thermidor, massive government intervention in the publishing world and the reopening of international markets ushered in a new cultural moment marked by a revival of book publishing in all genres, but especially classical literature and history, as well as political economy and the natural sciences. Theatrical and pedagogical works addressed to a broader audience also flourished after 1795. Finally, by 1798, the novel, and particularly the English novel, had begun to capture a significant share of the Parisian literary market.

The printing and publishing fortunes of the French Revolution thus disclose two major cultural consequences of the freeing of the presses in 1789. First, there was a deep yet perceptible shift of the center of gravity in commercial printing, from an elite literary culture centered in the production and consumption of expensive and time-consuming books toward a democratic culture of ephemeral pamphlets, broadsides, song sheets, and especially newspapers and periodicals. Second, the greatest publishing houses of Paris developed their literary portfolios more broadly, moving from classical texts, enlightenment philosophy, and politics in the early years of the Revolution, toward theater, history, and the sciences under the Directory, and finally toward the novel with the coming of the first Empire. If Agasse's Moniteur, with its eighty-five hundred subscribers, most embodied the nineteenth-century legacy of Panckoucke's Encyclopédie by putting useful information and enlightened opinions into the hands of the people, it was publishers like Maradan and Barba who, through fortunes amassed in popular theater, pornography, and literary piracy, created a bridge spanning the cultural distance between the salons of Voltaire and the literary marketplace of Balzac.

The New Literary World

Taken as a whole, the records of the dépôt légal for the years 1793–1799 offer an extraordinary panorama of the literary civilization created by

the French Revolution, or at least of those productions to which authors and publishers attributed enduring value and hence sought to insure their legal claim (table 3). Music and literature clearly dominated commercial publishing, despite the bias of official deposits toward works published or supported by, or seeking favor, from the government. Only in 1793 did deposits of political works exceed those in literature, and that almost exclusively because of the deposits of the Cercle Social. Publishers of sheet music and songs were by far the most frequent clients of the dépôt légal , and most notably Imbault, Naderman, Vogt, Pleyel, and Boyer, who deposited between 40 and 280 pieces of sheet music each during the six years of the Republic. In the category of literature, the popular literary genres, such as songs, theater pieces, and novels, as opposed to classical literature, poetry, memoirs, and correspondence, dominated the publishing world of the Revolution. On the whole, the record confirms the perception of the head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune, that it was fictions rather than truths, literature rather than history, philosophy, and science, that issued forth from the freed presses and literary markets after 1789. While deposits in all categories of literature, with the exception of songs, increased markedly in 1798, the novel showed a striking upward trend a year earlier, in 1797 (see appendix 5). By 1801, the annalist Pujoulx wondered when the passion for novels would be sated: "First it was a rage, then it became an addiction; now it is nothing short of a mania. . . . They are translated, composed, recopied, old ones are reprinted; and in spite of this, the demand for them can barely be satisfied."^[111]

Nor was it just the political elites who expressed suspicions and concern about the corrupting effects of a literary market dominated by popular romances. Outcry against the novel came from members of the old publishing elite as well, who remained wedded to a vision of literary life firmly rooted in classicism, entombed in lengthy and lavish volumes, and sustained by patronage and protectionism rather than market demand. Thus the publisher Louis Ravier wrote that novels

render those who read them soft and effeminate; the young reader . . . no longer sees anything in a military career but perils and exhaustion, in jurisprudence nothing but the art of negotiation and empty debate, in the duties of a husband nothing but burdens, and in commerce nothing but cold calculation. His thoughts will turn only to repose and pleasure.

[111] J.-B. Pujoulx, Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Mathé, 1801), 26.

. . . Novels pass from the hands of [women and young men] into those of their children, and from there into the servants' quarters, and from there into the kitchen; they bring all the diverse classes of society together, . . . by seeding passion in every heart they seduce them by the same principles of weaknesses or exaltation.^[112]

For Ravier, freedom of commerce in publishing seemed to be corroding the most fundamental elements of the natural, social, and civic orders: the distinctions between children and adults, men and women, and servants and mistresses. Jacob l'aîné, former syndic of the book guild in Orléans, drew an even broader picture of the evils that had ensued from the revolutionary deregulation of the printing trades and literary commerce. He saw a direct connection between the explosion in the number of journals and ephemeral literature in the early years of the Revolution and the boom in the novel as the republican period closed:

When France found itself inundated with journals that disappeared almost as quickly as they saw the light of day, each journalist still wanted to keep his own printing shop. One or two presses, a single type character, sufficed to satisfy this ambition. Abandoned by their subscribers, they rebuilt their businesses in novels, the graveyard of literature, good taste, or more accurately, the seed of corruption and scandal. . . .

The new book dealers became the entrepôts of the novelists, so that they could spread with profusion . . . the poison that is distilled in the majority of their works.^[113]

Both Jacob and Ravier explicitly linked the craze in the novel to the freeing of the press and deregulation. Journals, political ephemera, and then the novel, according to Jacob, were the three distinctive cultural contributions of the liberated printing and publishing world of revolutionary Paris. Further, he argued that with the waning (and, he might have added, repression) of political passions after Thermidor, the producers of journals and political ephemera redirected their enterprises toward novels, in order to exploit more private passions—those of the heart.

Moreover, Ravier and Jacob both insisted that the private consumption of novels was not without public and political consequence. Despite their seeming innocence, novels corrupted public morals and weakened

[112] Ravier, Répertoire de la librairie, xliii–xliv.

[113] Louis Jacob, l'aîné, Idées générales sur les causes de l'anéantissement de l'imprimerie et sur la nécessité de rendre à cette profession, ainsi qu'à celle de la librairie, le rang honorable qu'elles ont toujours tenues l'une et l'autre parmi les arts libéraux (Orléans: Jacob l'aîné, 1806).

the body politic, tempting young men and women away from the responsibilities and duties of family life and effeminizing the sons of the Republic. Novels celebrated private pleasures over public virtues. Worse still, by passing freely between wives and maids, they eroded class boundaries within the household and threatened to disrupt the social as well as the sexual and civic order.

But if popular literature, and increasingly the novel, dominated the literary markets of the Republic, the copyright records nonetheless reveal a positive impact of intensive government patronage beginning under the Terror and expanding after Thermidor, particularly in scientific and technical publishing, but also in classical literature, history, travel, and political philosophy (see appendix 5). These works clearly contributed in no small part to the revival of book publishing after Thermidor. As Jean Dhombre has shown, scientific publishing not only revived, but it also considerably improved both the quantity and the quality of texts produced in the closing years of the Directory.^[114] Publishers like Aubry, Plassan, Honnert, Buisson, Agasse, and Jansen all responded to the government's calls from the year II (1793–1794) on for a new pedagogy, a new literature, a new history, and a new science.

A central cultural tension thus emerged in the publishing world under the Republic: between a commercial literary market dominated by political journals and novels that inflamed the public and private passions of citizens, on the one hand, and a subsidized official culture that sought to inculcate the cool discipline of scientific reason and to propagate the republican virtues of utility, productivity, and the public good, on the other. In the literary world at any rate, the revolutionary tension between capitalism and republicanism came to express itself as a rivalry between eros and philos .

[114] Dhombres, "Books: Reshaping Science."