French censorship on the eve of the Revolution

The censorship apparatus of the ancien régime has generally been seen as ineffectual, helpless even, when faced with a rising tide of philosophic and scandalous works. Eventually, these flooded the entire kingdom and set the scene for a revolution characterized by the freedom of radically subversive texts to circulate in public space. This conclusion is generally tied to the teleological myth of a heroic enlightenment that swept everything before it and helped 'cause' the French revolution of 1789. With thousands of clandestine, pirated and unlicensed works circulating, no one was quite sure what was and was not permitted. Meanwhile, at the heart of the regime, enlightened administrators such as Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who between 1750 and 1763 served as the Directeur de la librairie [Controller of the Book Trade], connived at the circulation of enlightenment classics such as the Encyclopédie and protected the philosophes who produced them. Moreover, highly subversive works of scandal and political pornography were pumped into the Bourbon realm by entrepreneurial extra-territorial publisher-wholesalers such as the Swiss-based Société typographique de Neuchâtel [hereafter STN]. So extensive was this clandestine and pirate commerce that Roger Chartier suggests the illegal sector accounted for half of all books sold in pre-revolutionary France. However, he does not distinguish between the types of illegal work, which ranged from hardcore pornography and scandalous political libelles through to pirate copies of innocuous, permitted works. This chapter suggests that this model is inadequately attuned to developments in the final two decades before 1789, when a resurgent Bourbon government tightened its control over the printed word, both inside and beyond French borders. This campaign crushed the extra-territorial publishing industry and brought howls of protest from domestic publishers. If the French Revolution was a revolution of print, it was a reaction against a tightening and increasingly effective royal publishing and censorship regime, not the ultimate triumph of an autonomous public sphere. At the heart of Bourbon police apparatus was a system of licencing and amnesties put in place in August 1777 and a brutal decree of 12 June 1783 aimed (ostensibly) at foreign-produced political libelles. These measures, together with others aimed at the newspaper press, consolidated a century-old practice of bringing printers, publishers and writers into collaboration with the regime.