Forgotten best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

When I set out over a decade ago to create a database of the trade of an eighteenth-century Swiss enlightenment publishing house call the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel (STN), it was largely because I accepted the key assumptions of previous authorities. In particular, I did not sufficiently question assertions concerning the 'representative' value of an archive which, the literature assured me, was the best of all possible archives on the French enlightenment book trade. As a Swiss pirate publisher secure in a Prussian-ruled principality in the heart of Europe, the STN could and did trade almost anything, from almost anywhere, to everywhere in Europe. I was more sceptical, however, of claims that the STN might even have dared to trade sexual-political libelles about Frances's Austrian-born Queen Marie-Antoinette, whose marriage to Louis XVI united the two most powerful families in Europe. For if such works were traded before the Revolution, my research had already revealed that they certainly did not circulate in the volume previous work had suggested, and this called into question widely-accepted claims that they helped to descralize the French monarchy and began the revolutionary "political education" of a people too ill-educated to "assimilate" Rousseau in the original. The importance of the illegal trade, which Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton have both claimed embraced half of all books in circulation, clearly lay elsewhere. The STN archive would, I hoped, reveal where.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)51-65
Number of pages15
JournalFrench History and Civilization
Volume7
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • history
  • Europe
  • book industries and trade

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