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 .