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.