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The Paradoxes of Enlightenment Publishing

THE PARAMETERS OF HONNÊTE PUBLICATION are defined in Classical-era debates such as the Querelle du Cid, and subsequent developments in the intellectual field must be understood in their light, including the formation of the literary market. Of course, with its commercial aspects and its decidedly non-elite denizens, the market seems far removed from the social spheres in which an ethic of honnêteté prevailed on writers. I suggest, though, that the essence of the literary market lies precisely in its constitution as a field of honnête publication, which is to say that it evolves first and foremost as a space for the symbolic legitimization of gens de lettres rather than for their economic compensation. In this sense, despite its lead role in a narrative underscoring the radical shift by which writers became “independent” from aristocratic patrons, the market is actually historically continuous with the refined spaces circumscribing seventeenth-century literary life. It develops more than it breaks with a “traditional” view of the cultural field as a system upholding a particular type of social prestige rooted in intelligence and writing. And if the market does represent a shift, it is not because it advances the concept of “autonomy” per se, which, as we have already seen, was no less integral to the valorization of intellectual selfhood in the “first literary field,” but because it formulates a specifically new figuration of autonomy in the language of economic self-sufficiency; the writer became autonomous insofar as he “lived by the pen.” This image of freedom was, in turn, a function of a new conception of legitimacy, defined in a repudiation of the very same aristocratic sensibility in which this particular story of the birth of the modern writer first takes root.

In order to better understand both the broader continuity and the particular transformation that the literary market represents, we turn to the vision of honnête authorship to which the writers who, in a sense, “invented” the market were reacting. We turn to the philosophes who stand as dominant figures in the mid- to late eighteenth-century intellectual world. These well-placed and visible gens de lettres established leading models of intellectual practice not simply for their contemporaries who aspired to lives in letters, but for the modern era. Nicole Masson considers Voltaire to be a “‘prototype’ of the modern intellectual.”¹ In reality, of course, they embodied a set of intellectual conventions that were heavily indebted to the aristocratic patterns identified in debates such as the Querelle du Cid, even as they adapted these patterns in the effort to valorize their own activities as autonomous critics. The fact remains, though, that writers such as Voltaire and d’Alembert were pointedly targeted by those who sought to make a rejection of elite culture and sociability an integral element in a new ideal of literary legitimacy, for they identified the philosophes—with attention to the latter’s cultivation of elites—as especially representative of a corrupt and outdated system.

But while of interest to critical contemporaries, it is striking that the authorial field as envisioned by the philosophes in their contacts with the book trade has remained something of a non-topic in literary histories of the Enlightenment. Conversely, the history of writers and publishing in this period has focused much more on obviously nonphilosophical figures, that is, individuals who, by their own positioning or by the maneuverings of others, have come to be identified against the group of writers recognized at the time and still celebrated today as the philosophes. Rousseau, of course, presents a clear example; as do the “hacks” who inhabited the “literary underground,” so influentially described by Robert Darnton. Indeed, it seems that those down and out types are specifically defined by the two attributes: their exclusion from the intellectual circles of the philosophes, for one, and their dependence, as an outcome of their cultural and social isolation, on commercial publishing activities, for another. We might add Diderot to this list, for he stands as an especially notable protagonist in the history of writers and the book trade in the Enlightenment. To be sure, Diderot was much better integrated into the world of the philosophes than either Rousseau or the pauvres diables of the literary underworld. Yet his role in this history is normally granted in spite of this inclusion. He is pivotal not as a philosophe but to the extent that he was never quite wholly able to assume that identity, constrained as he was both by the memory of his early years writing in relative obscurity for profiteering libraires rather than rich and powerful patrons, and by his continued close involvement with bookselling milieus as the general editor of the encyclopédie. Diderot thus plays a leading role in this history to the extent that, as Darnton observes, he “never fully extricated himself from Grub Street.”²

There is a compelling reason for why the book trade as perceived through the eyes of the philosophes has remained an elusive object of study. Their publishing practices do not present a familiar image of that field but seem to jar with established notions about who the philosophes were and what they stood for. Historically, these writers have been valorized as the heroes of change and modernity, yet their choices in the publishing sphere appear at first glance to hearken back to patterns inherited from the polite writers of the seventeenth century. They were neglectful of their intellectual property rights, and, far from trying to maximize their revenues in an effort to live independently of patronage, “by the pen,” they were more concerned to project their honnête disinterest in the manner of the court and salon poets of the Classical age. As a result, their publishing practices tend to present stumbling blocks, and the attempt to characterize the philosophe as a cultural formation confronts them as paradoxical or anomalous phenomena not easy to incorporate into the standard account of the philosophe’s birth as a “modern” figure. Nicole Masson grants that, although a “prototype,” Voltaire nonetheless “does not yet have an idea that one can or should live by the pen.”³ Likewise, Jules Bertaut is stymied by the incongruity of the same writer’s silence on his rights and dues: “It is a curious fact that Voltaire, normally so determined to profit and who knew so well how to defend his own interests in all his endeavors, … did not show the same combativeness when it came to his literary interests.”⁴

The publishing practices of the philosophes need, in other words, to be rationalized. Either their role must be clarified within the larger philosophical project or they need to be downplayed as extraneous to that project since they reflect not the real thinking of the philosophes but the material and intellectual constraints under which they labored. In the latter sense, Bertaut surmises that payments from publishers were not yet high enough to engage Voltaire in what surely was the lost cause of literary property rights and droits d’auteur: “No doubt, he calculated that the benefit was middling, and that it was not worth the efforts that he would have to apply.”⁵ This is not a ringing endorsement of Voltaire’s choices as a leading author of the Enlightenment, but the statement justifies the writer in light of the underdeveloped state of the publishing industry.⁶ Jacques Douvez, on the other hand, examining Voltaire’s livelihood and seeking to contextualize his publishing strategies with respect to both his fortune and his mission, considers his negligence not just understandable given the state of the book trade, but entirely consistent with a movement that conceived of its objectives largely in the dissemination of new ideas to a public whose reading had always been tightly controlled. Voltaire may well have shown little interest in payments and rights, but, as Douvez reminds us, “his goal was philosophical battle; he thus had to win the favor of booksellers.”⁷

Still a third alternative, of course, is not to attempt any kind of explanation at all of the ostensibly incongruous publishing activities but to acknowledge, insofar as they were not chiefly oriented toward maximizing the writer’s autonomy from elites, that the practices were compromising. They speak to the collusion of writers like Voltaire and Duclos with the established hierarchy, exposing, in contradiction to their own claims, their choice of status and prestige over any true commitment to equality and fairness. Already in the eighteenth century, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, a disbarred lawyer turned journalist and polemicist, in a response to the book trade reforms of 1777, scathingly attacked the “so-called philosophes”—he refers specifically to d’Alembert and Marmontel—for ignoring the debate and neglecting “the property of their creations. All the while they bow at the feet of the most contemptible people in order to obtain puny pensions.”⁸ Linguet, about whom much more will be said in the course of this investigation, had already positioned himself as a fierce adversary of the “encyclopédistes,” and was especially hostile toward d’Alembert who, he felt, had denied him a seat in the Académie française in 1764, effectively blocking his entry into the inner circles of Enlightenment-era literary life and frustrating his ambitions. This view would, however, be taken up by a series of twentieth-century scholars with no personal axe to grind, yet who would call for a comparable reassessment of the conventionally heroic image of the philosophes in light of an attachment to elite culture that, among other ways, was manifest in their choice to disregard their intellectual property rights and authorial dues in favor of “traditional” forms of income and support, including patronage and court sinecures. Darnton is perhaps the most famous and ruthless in his reevaluation of the philosophes as “mandarins fatten[ing] themselves on pensions,” arguing that “Duclos, Voltaire, and d’Alembert urged their ‘brethren’ to profit from the mobility available to them in order to join the elite. Rather than challenge the social order, they offered a prop to it.”⁹ But he is not the only historian to postulate that the philosophes were far more rooted in the traditional values and practices of the Old Regime than has generally been admitted.¹⁰

Articulating conflicting judgments on the place that should be accorded to the philosophes’ publishing activities in the larger scheme of their intellectual project, these three options nonetheless share a common assumption that the activities presented stark inconsistencies with the project, as well as with a fixed ideal of intellectual selfhood that the philosophes are broadly considered to have forged. Standard to most histories of eighteenth-century literature, the ideal is predicated on two moves: first, writers of the period became philosophes in their pursuit of an agenda driven by a critique of conventional ideas and established institutions in the name of a pragmatic and humanitarian rationalism; second, in undertaking the critique, these philosophes lay claim, through a series of characteristic gestures—rejecting patronage, increasing their mobility across Europe, and resorting to strategies of subterfuge in the publication of their writings—to autonomy from the social, political, and religious authorities under whose tutelage writers had long labored. In his early twentieth-century study of Enlightenment-era hommes de lettres, Maurice Pellisson highlights the processes by which the latter became “more and more independent,” and in the process became “more capable of directing the public [l’esprit public].”¹¹ Masson renders the move toward autonomy as a similarly defining aspect of the new intellectual paradigm embodied by Voltaire, whose career can be read, she argues, “as the conquest of independence for the man of letters.”¹² Darnton, of course, counters such rhetoric with a more sober assessment of the philosophes’ indebtedness to social elites, apparent in their reliance on connections and patronage rather than “sales of books.”¹³ But in emphasizing these ties as a shortcoming—as a failure to “challenge the social order”—Darnton ultimately reveals his own beholden-ness to the very same ideal of the philosophe as a fundamentally independent figure.

The examination of the publishing practices of the philosophes in light of a predetermined conception of who these writers were, claimed to be, or indeed failed to be has, however, produced only limited insights into the logic of these practices. It can hardly be said to have generated a clear understanding of what publishing books meant to them. This is an arresting blind spot, though, given the importance that the writers themselves accorded to the activity. When in his 1787 discours de réception to the Académie, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, a man imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, marked the “general revolution … in letters and morals [moeurs],” he did so with a recitation of those moments when the great leaders of the movement broke through, around 1750, as the authors of major works thought to have had a profound effect on a readership whose eyes were then opened onto new ways of thinking; Montesquieu with L’Esprit de lois; Buffon with his Histoire naturelle; and Voltaire with plays and early writings on the English philosophers. Rulhière’s brief history stands in stark contrast to the inclinations of those recording intellectual progress in the Classical era, who as we have seen were more likely to emphasize as turning points the creation of a salon or the cultivation of certain urbane ethos at court. The publication of a book was in the seventeenth century not seriously recognized as a significant moment, either for the culture as a whole or for the individual seeking renown as an homme d’esprit within that culture. By contrast, the philosophes were decidedly authors, and their history is, as Rulhière told it, the story of their publications.

At the same time, though, the philosophical embrace of book publication cannot be adequately explained by juxtaposing the choices and activities of Voltaire or d’Alembert against the Classical-era paradigm of the disinterested court poet, despite the fact that the rejection of the leisured amateur of letters would be incorporated as a central element in the philosophes’ self-presentation. The story is more complicated, for as Darnton shows, the philosophes did not reject the social dimension of writing, or its capacity to integrate individuals into aristocratic networks. They undertook those gestures that remain challenging to modern sensibilities for their apparent subordination of the intellectual objectives of authorship to the “traditional” imperatives of politeness and bienséance. Refusing profits and intellectual property, the philosophes circulated their works in fine editions as gifts to social and political luminaries. Rousseau and his followers would turn to writing as a pointedly nonsocial or even antisocial act by which one gave voice to an “authentic” self defined against a corrupt “civilized” self that had been disfigured by the compromises of life in le monde. Yet for the philosophes, what was at stake was not the integrity of an inner nature, but a distinctly social preeminence constructed within—not outside—the established, albeit evolving hierarchy of the Old Regime.

In fact, this is really the anomaly unearthed by the publishing practices of the philosophes. They bear witness to the rising importance of writing and publishing for a claim to authority that, in its critical inclination, was firmly rooted in an image of the writer’s independence from social and political elites. But for all that, they do not mark a patent shift from elite sociability as the dominant mode of intellectual activity toward a new paradigm that, whether in a professional or proto-romantic vein, was in any case starkly opposed to the ethos of aristocratic sociability. To the contrary, they speak to the philosophes’ persistent elite orientation. But if their publishing practices muddy the conventional image of the philosophes as “autonomous,” a more direct focus on these activities, rather than less attention, is essential to clarifying the problem, I would argue. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a new approach to the matter, which inverts the traditional perspective on philosophical publishing. Rather than examine its paradoxes in light of a fixed notion of who the philosophes thought they were and what they thought they were doing, it instead revisits the very concept of the philosophe as a specific model of literary identity in light of the underlying logic of their activities in the book trade. In so doing, it draws on Christian Jouhaud’s and Alain Viala’s argument to “take seriously” the very concept of “publication” as a salient point of access allowing for “ANOTHER historical perspective” on the central concepts and categories of early modern literary history.¹⁴ The sticking point here involves one such concept: that of autonomy, which is what seems to be problematized by the publishing activities of the philosophes. However, instead of either ignoring these practices or writing off the philosophes themselves for their hypocrisy, a more nuanced study of their engagement with “publication” may show that the lack of clarity actually lies in our understanding of the position that they sought to occupy vis-à-vis monarchs and nobles, and thus of the “autonomy” to which they lay claim, and on which they sought to construct themselves. After all, in the cultural field of the Old Regime, as we have seen, “autonomy” was a complicated, ambiguous notion. It is, above all, one that should not be identified with its modern connotation of a radical severing of the writer’s social, political, and economic ties to the powerful and the privileged.

Indeed, as their writings consistently attest, the philosophes never imagined themselves outside of their interactions with social and political elites. Their vision of themselves as independent and critical writers was rooted in a reconceptualization of these relations, rather than in a repudiation of them. Specifically, philosophical selfhood lay in an inversion, according to which the writers of the Enlightenment no longer worked for the entertainment of royalty and aristocracy in their idle hours. It was instead a reinvented elite, won over to les lumières and wholeheartedly devoted to the triumph of reason and good governance, that mobilized their power and prestige not for their own ends but to serve disinterestedly the philosophes and their campaign. The publishing practices of the latter find their logic in this reimagining of the cultural field. They function as mechanisms of the social inversion in and through which the philosophes set out to define themselves as the advisors and friends of princes. As such, they are integral rather than antithetical to the “autonomy” on which they alleged their identities as writers to be based. In this respect, far from signaling a rejection of the sociability of the seventeenth-century homme de lettres, the autonomy of the philosophe can be considered, in a way, as an even stronger claim to the social integration and ascendance which underlay the transformation of the writer in the courts and salons of the Classical era.

Helvétius’s Privilège

One curious, ostensibly opaque, yet potentially illuminating sequence in the history of Enlightenment publishing occurred in 1757–58, when Claude-Adrien Helvétius did something quite unexpected. Having retired from a lucrative post as a tax farmer and moved to his chateau at Voré, he composed, under the influence of Voltaire and the British sensationalism the latter had made fashionable, a philosophical treatise. Helvétius would certainly have known his work to fall within the purview of a new kind of critical inquiry that sought to challenge metaphysical orthodoxies and moral conventions against considerable resistance. The patterns of publication for such writings were, moreover, long established, with recourse to foreign libraires or clandestine printing in France being the two clear options. Nonetheless, Helvétius took the most unusual step of submitting his manuscript to a censor as a first step in applying for an official privilège from the Direction de la librairie. It was an astonishing move, matched only by the equally extraordinary outcome: the censor gave the green light, issuing his approbation on March 27, which opened the door for the privilège to be granted on May 12.

This marks the beginning of what would blow up as a major scandal in the cultural history of the Enlightenment.¹⁵ Once the privilège was obtained, Helvétius arranged for the work to be published by Laurent Durand, who was an officer in the Paris Guild and an associate of the Encyclopédie publishers. The printing of De l’Esprit began in the summer of 1758. Word soon got out, though, that the book might pose difficulties. The print industry was closely monitored by inspectors, one of whom, Charles-Alexandre Salley, having managed to peruse the manuscript in the print shop, warned the current director of the book trade in late June of the “peculiarity [singularité] of the work.”¹⁶ Charged with overseeing all the aspects of the commercial publishing industry in France, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes was in fact a famous friend of the philosophes. He was mostly sympathetic with their agenda and remained a long-time advocate for restraint in censorship. He was, though, also a conscientious administrator concerned for the integrity of his office, and no doubt believed that little was to be gained either by the philosophes themselves or more generally by writers and booksellers from any kind of controversy. He therefore ordered the printing of De l’Esprit stopped and took the unusual measure of having the work reexamined by a second censor who proposed a series of suppressions involving passages too transparently critical of the Church. Helvétius readily complied with these cuts, and the printing was resumed.¹⁷

De l’Esprit became available on July 27, provoking an instant outcry beginning in the camp of dévots at court, gathered around the queen. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard recalls in his Mémoires being in the antechamber of the dauphin soon after the work was published, when the latter burst out of his apartment with a copy of the book, exclaiming that he was going to show the queen what Helvétius, a maître d’hôtel in her retinue, was printing.¹⁸ The outrage spread to the Parlement, the Jesuits, and the Sorbonne. Malesherbes at once ordered Durand to suspend sales of the book, and under mounting pressure, he had the privilège revoked by an arrêt du Conseil hastily signed by the king on August 11.¹⁹ Helvétius was forced to make a series of retractions, as demanded first by the queen, to whom he was personally attached through his family and court post;²⁰ then by the Jesuits who deemed the first retraction to be insufficiently repentant and far too self-justifying;²¹ and finally by the Paris Parlement whose firebrand avocat général, Jean-Omer Joly de Fleury, had made a mission of curtailing the proliferation of “encyclopedic” writing. The philosophe was dismissed from his position in the queen’s household. And while some contemporaries were actually surprised by the leniency with which he was treated—for instance, he was saved from imprisonment or exile by the intervention of powerful court allies such as Madame de Pompadour and the duc de Choiseul— Helvétius was shaken enough by the episode never again to publish; De l’Homme appeared posthumously in 1772.

Two significant aspects of the affair can be retained, each allowing it to be interpreted in a markedly divergent way. First and no doubt more familiarly, the episode has come across as an emblematic and powerful illustration of the plight of the philosophes in their struggles against reactionary forces in the Old Regime. Indeed, if the event has passed into literary history, it is above all as it has been integrated into a broader story about the increasing repressiveness of the 1750s and early 1760s, when various factions were beginning to perceive and denounce the dangers that an emerging group of writers appeared to pose, articulating in the process the group’s cohesiveness as a rising movement, party, or “sect.” The attacks were underway in 1752 when the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie were suppressed following the scandal unleashed by the heterodox Sorbonne thesis of the abbé de Prades, who was a contributor to the edition. In the years to come, opposition to the “encyclopedists” would take hold in numerous venues including among the dévots at court, among the Jesuits at the Journal de Trévoux, in Parlement where Jansenist sympathies always ran strong, and in “anti-philosophical” journalism and pamphleteering, where writers such as Fréron and Palissot found a platform. From as early as Duvernet’s 1786 biography of Voltaire, the retelling of this mounting hostility has accorded a central place to the mobilization against Helvétius and De l’Esprit, proffered as evidence of the darkening climate.²² Indeed, the affair often stands as a “critical date” or a threshold opening onto a whole sequence of markedly repressive responses.²³

In this view, the affair plays into a conventional understanding of the philosophes that construes their intellectual lives as a function, first and foremost, of censorship. That is, philosophes by definition said what was not supposed to be said, and thus for them writing and publication were in essence direct clashes with the authorities enforcing the limits of what was permissible to say. In this sense, their prison stints, arrests, burned books, and years on the run mark their ascendency just as surely as their bestsellers, academic seats, and theatrical triumphs.²⁴ Belin considers Helvétius a martyr to the encyclopedic cause for having borne the brunt of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to muffle dissent.²⁵ David Smith’s account of the affaire is subtitled “A Study in Persecution,” which underscores a heroic dimension of the philosophical enterprise by portraying Helvétius as a writer who, for the modernity of his ideas, suffers the antagonism of the conservative institutional interests entrenched at court, in the Parlement, and in the Church. Of course, Helvétius was also a retired fermier général, sitting on an immense personal fortune that had allowed him to withdraw to his country estate. His family attachments to the queen provided him with the coveted position of maître d’hôtel ordinaire, and thus credibility and access at the court. This is not to minimize his “persecution” throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1758–59. The pursuit was indeed relentless, continuing far beyond several points at which it might have been abandoned, say, at the moment of the revocation of the privilège in August or of the initial public retraction soon afterward. And it is clear from his correspondence that, in particular, the possibility of exile was a visceral and terrifying one for Helvétius, especially in light of how much he had to lose. We can track a series of desperate letters from September and October in which Helvétius expresses his fear of the impending censure of the Sorbonne, the continued opposition of the dauphin, and a mounting sense that he was going to have to flee.²⁶