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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.
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