The most popular authors of enlightenment France

Who were the most frequently read authors in late Enlightenment France? The question looks beguiling simple, but has proved surprisingly difficult to answer. Indeed, it seems unlikely that it can be answered from a single source or method, especially as most large-scale surveys have to use book production, book sales, book ownership or book borrowings as proxies for the actual act of reading. By bringing together the findings of the most ambitious large-scale historical bibliometric projects, each of which used different sources and methods, this article hopes, at very least, to identify the authors whose books were circulating and being "consumed" in largest numbers. An emphasis on authors rather than texts is helpful here, since it encourages analyses based on the broad genres and literary currents to which an author contributed, rather than the distinctive contribution of an individual text. An authorbased approach also aggregates individual works into larger bodies of work, allowing a more systemic or representative view: lists of top ten authors generally embrace a significantly larger proportion of literary output than lists of top ten books. Finally, it permits a focus on the authors themselves, and specifically, in this article, to ask whether the most popular authors in late Enlightenment France were, like writers of modern bestsellers, generally fashionable or topical authors, whose readers desired to stay up to date with reading trends.