Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment (1979) afforded a
remarkable glimpse into an episode of publishing history that
brought Diderot's Encyclopedie to a very large reading public in a
comparatively cheap edition put out by an improvised French-Swiss
publishing consortium. The primary fund of material mined in that
work - the luckily preserved records of the Swiss partner, the
Societe typographique de Neuchatel (STN) - is also widely drawn on
in most of the six articles collected here. Though a lay reader may
need the help of a good general history of prerevolutionary France
to piece together some parts of the picture, the general outlines
are more than accessible. Darnton repeatedly argues that the
structure of restrictions on publishing under the old regime
inevitably created a thriving demi-monde profiting from the idiocy
of the law - as well as an inkslingers' underworld schooled in the
lessons of not only political but literary injustice. Among the
human marginalia he turns up are a bogus bookdealer who (on the
strength of a few knowledgeable-sounding letters) persuaded the STN
to advance him some 2,400 livres' worth of books; a scrivener who
bombarded the STN with proposal after proposal for grandiose
histories, critical analyses, and anti-clerical compendiums of
Cistercian breviaries (depending on the market); and - more
unexpectedly - Brissot de Warville, the ill-fated Girondist leader,
who in 1784 was nothing but a failed philosophe and pamphleteer,
obliged to buy his way out of the Bastille by agreeing to turn
police informer. Other articles comment on: the contrast between
the sanctioned canonization of the more august prophets of reason
(Voltaire, d'Alembert) and the walls of repression and exclusion
penning most would-be-philosophes into the confines of Grub Street;
the day-to-day records suggesting "that preindustrial work tended
to be irregular and unstable, craft-specific and task-oriented,
collective in its organization and individual in its pace"; and the
certainty that - no matter what the 18th-century French public read
- the regime's very perception of books was deformed by a screening
system that merrily classified pornography, political commentary,
and works of atheism as livres philosophiques: i.e., forbidden
books. Though the present, composite work is inherently
specialized, Darnton's lucid efforts to present books as evidence
of labor history, economic structures, and political institutions
may justly be called pioneering. (Kirkus Reviews)
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate
publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers,
smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground
of the Enlightenment. Here are the ambitious writers who crowded
into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters,
but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub
Street-victims of a closed world of protection and privilege.
Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic
pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these "Rousseaus
of the gutter" desecrated everything sacred in the social order of
the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings
and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them. While
censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the
visible publishing industry within the limits of official
orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast
illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers
everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive,
the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have
virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious
selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and
publishers' records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the
fascinating story of that forgotten underworld. The activities of
the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and
literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the
ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book
illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing
history that will inform and delight the general reader.
General
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