Inspired by questions and techniques of l'histoire du livre', this books investigates how print technology in the service of cultural discipleship created the liteary icon known as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. During his lifetime Rousseau asserted an author-centred interpretation of literary property that brought him celebrity and income. However, following the condemnations of Emile and Du contrat social, it also brought him extraordinary personnal grief. After Rousseau's death in July 1778, three disciples envisioned a massive testament of rehabilitation, the Collection complete des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citoyen de Geneve. Containing the first editions of the Confessions, Reveries du promeneur solitaire, and considerable correspondence, the Collection complete offered up Rousseau the martyred sage speaking the language of autobiography. Readers were invited to appropriate lessons from the tragic life. Indeed, the absorption of Rousseau's texts was intended to stir up, manipulate, and change their own lives. Though the Collection complete was an extraordinary literary phenomenon, it proved to be a commercial disaster. Competing editorial agendas tore apart the disciples, and piracies of their edition damaged the enterprise. Rousseau's 'widow' and blood relatives claimed literary property rights inheritance. Subsequently, as the French Revolution unfolded, established strategies behind the marketing of Rousseau shifted. The flexible moral messages of autobiography yelded place to a static political one - that of Rousseau as author of Du contrat social, the pere de la patrie, en embalmed corpse lying in state in the Pantheon. Forging Rousseau is a unique type of cultural analysis, contextualising the commercial publishing history of Rousseau's works in the milieux of the late Enlightenment and Revolutionary period. It is sensitive to major issues concerning book history today: what constitutes an edition, what constitutes a piracy, and competing definitions of intellectual property, icon construction, and literary inheritance.

Today, we are inclined to believe that intellectual freedom has no greater adversary than the censor. In eighteenth-century France, the matter was more complicated. Royal censors envisioned themselves not as fulfilling a mission of state-sponsored repression but rather as guiding the literary traffic of the Enlightenment. By awarding pre-publication and pre-distribution approvals, royal censors sought to insulate authors and publishers from the scandal of post-publication condemnation by parliaments, the police, or the Church. Less official authorizations were also awarded. Though censors did delete words and phrases from manuscripts and sometimes rejected manuscripts altogether, the liberal use of tacit permissions and conditional approvals resulted in the publication and circulation of books that, under a less flexible system, might never have seen the light of day. In essence, eighteenth-century French censors served as cultural intermediaries who bore responsibility for expanding public awareness of the progressive thought of their time.