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Introduction

TWO BRIEF AND UNDERSTATED ANECDOTES can frame this study. They illustrate the ambiguities that will be at the core of my account of the “modernization” of intellectual identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly to the degree that this book explores the historical process of the “birth of the modern author” in light of continuities with the values and behaviors of the early modern period rather than, as is more traditionally done, in terms of a sharp break with them.

The first is told by Paul Pellisson in the history of the Académie française, which he wrote in the late 1640s and early 1650s at a time when he was lobbying for a seat in the assembly. Remembering the strong interest in theater of the Académie’s first patron, Cardinal Richelieu, Pellisson recounts how the cardinal brought together five of the leading dramatists of the day in the mid-1630s—among whom the best known was Pierre Corneille—and commissioned them to write a series of plays based on subjects and arrangements of his own inspiration, including a 1635 Comédie des Tuileries, celebrating the palace next to the Louvre that Catherine de Médicis had built after the assassination of her husband Henri II in 1560; a now lost Grande pastorale from 1637; and a tragicomedy called L’aveugle de Smyrne, which was performed a month later.¹ Each of the cinq auteurs was assigned to write one act of each play. For this, Pellisson observes, the writer received a pension from the minister, along with “considerable gestures of generosity [quelques libéralitez considérables], when they succeeded to his liking.”² To explain what he means by “libéralitez,” Pellisson reveals what one of the playwrights, Guillaume Colletet, had confided to him:

Thus M. Colletet assured me that, having brought to him [Richelieu] the Monologue from Les Tuileries, the latter was especially drawn to the following two lines [sic] from the description of the Carré d’eau:

[At the same time, I saw on the banks of a stream]

The female duck dampened by the muddy water,

With a hoarse voice and a flap of her wings,

Reinvigorate the male duck which languished at her side,

[Au même temps j’ai vu sur le bord d’un ruisseau,

La cane s’humecter de la bourbe de l’eau,

D’une voix enrouée, et d’un battement d’aile,

Animer le canard qui languit auprès d’elle,]

And after listening to the rest, he gave him from his own hands fifty pistoles, with the obliging words that they were only for those two lines which he had found so beautiful, and that the King was not rich enough to pay for the rest.³

The second story dates from almost two hundred years later. When Victor Hugo published his play Cromwell in 1827, he removed from the famous preface a historical excursus originally intended as part of it. Having recently founded the Revue de Paris, Louis-Désiré Véron approached Hugo about printing the excerpt in his new journal in return for a reasonable fee. In a letter from May 18, 1829, Hugo laid out the terms on which he might agree to this:

I am eager, Monsieur, to respond to the kind solicitation that you addressed to me yesterday.

I have never sold a manuscript, however thin it might be, for less than 500 francs.

But I have, on occasion, given them away, and I could do it again.

If you are interested in the fragment for which you do me the honor of asking, you could have it for 500 francs (or for nothing). Choose. Whatever your choice, I will agree with pleasure.⁴

At one level, both exchanges highlight attitudes and views that seem appropriate for their times. Colletet’s desire to please his patron appears as fitting for the seventeenth century as Hugo’s aggressive response to the commercial journal editor for the nineteenth. At another level, however, both convey these attitudes and views in an unexpected way, in the evocation of a transaction through which the writer gained a specified sum of money. We really anticipate the opposite; we expect instead that the core values in question for both the Classical and the Romantic writers would be communicated through a repudiation, sublimation, or “euphemization” of monetary payment, whether in the pseudo-aristocratic indifference to gain of the court playwright or in the Romantic poet’s grandiose rejection of commerce in the name of Art, Beauty, and Humanity. In these two stories, though, money is not only unconcealed, it is highlighted.

It is emphasized both to the degree that it is quantified—which in itself calls attention to its prominence—and inasmuch as it is incorporated into the heart of a representation that intends to valorize the writer on the receiving end of the payment. What is more, the money indicates more or less precisely what we would assume a rejection of money to signal; not the crass and unseemly commercialization of art and literature, but the fundamental incommensurability of the writer and his works with an economy presumed to measure only the ordinary and the mediocre. The fifty pistoles Richelieu hands to Colletet do not assess the base economic value of the verse and, in establishing such an equivalency, demean its true artistic worth. They gauge instead the inestimable beauty of the monologue insofar as the fifty pistoles express the minister’s inability to compensate the lines and establish any fair equivalency, even with the king’s fortune at his disposal. Likewise, the choice that Hugo presents to Véron between zero and what is clearly offered by the poet, with his reference to a “thin” work and emphasis on “no less than,” as an extravagant price intended to challenge the commercial sensibility of the editor aims to put the writer off the scale, and in the process articulate the transcendent quality of his writing by summoning an image of the impossibility of its valuation by a middling market price.⁵

It is important to add as well that both images of money have what can be characterized as a tenuous, nontransparent relation to the “real” economic contexts to which they allude. Richelieu’s praise—“the King was not rich enough to pay for the rest”—did not represent with any accuracy at all either the king’s finances or the economic relationship between the monarch and Colletet, who, we can safely assume, would have felt that the king did have the funds to compensate him. Hugo’s case is more complex due to the fact that his rhetoric is less hyperbolic than that of Richelieu, and conveys in this respect a more “realistic” image of the writer/publisher transaction. Five hundred livres was a lofty figure for Véron, who proposed a lower sum in response. This surely felt like a normal business negotiation to the editor. But the counter-offer, which was soundly rejected by Hugo who opted to give his text to the editor for nothing, speaks to the degree to which the poet’s “500 livres” did not fully correspond to the “500 livres” that had entered into the economic calculus of Véron. Five hundred livres did not, for Hugo, open the door to a back and forth over the price of the text, but affirmed the opposite: his refusal or inability to negotiate his literary insight or talent. In this respect, the same sum carried two substantially different significations.

We are accustomed, of course, to considering hard numbers as privileged points of access into an undisputed reality. In their “quantitativeness,” they conjure up the rawness, materiality, and noneuphemized nature of this reality, and thus its “objectivity.” Yet here the numbers take us in a completely different direction. They lead us not toward but away from the “objective lives” of writers, and into a highly stylized symbolic universe whose logic is not the need to “make a living” or the maximization of economic profit, but the complex and polemicized dynamics of intellectual, literary, and artistic legitimacy as these play out in shaping the strategies of self-presentation through which writers seek to establish their credibility and authority.

The symbolic appropriations and transformations of commercial and economic images in the efforts of defining and articulating intellectual value are the subject of this book. Influenced by work on “self-fashioning” and the “presentation of self,” the chapters that follow set out, in highlighting such efforts, to shed light on the evolution of intellectual identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to enhance our understanding of their “modernization,” particularly to the extent that the latter process has so often been figured in the economically coded terms of a passage from an archaic, constraining patronage system into the realm of the market⁶ Accounts of this transition tend to view it as a self-evident move from the perspective of the author, who is assumed “naturally” to want to be free from any dependence on noble patrons, and thus to pounce on the chance to do so once the opportunities present themselves. The only question, then, is the availability of these opportunities in an underdeveloped Old Regime publishing industry, and accordingly, much attention has been given to tracing the evolution of the objective circumstances that made the transition seem inescapable, with an emphasis on rising payments to writers and the legislation of intellectual property law. But in truth writers had a far more complex relationship with the commercial publishing system. The latter did exist “objectively,” of course, and established real conditions that would positively and negatively affect the attitudes and choices of writers. These conditions evolved throughout the period in question, and this evolution—consisting broadly in an expansion of the book trade as well as in a moderation of censorship, if not in any radical changes to the official regulations or to the underlying technology of the publishing industry—is an essential factor for understanding, in turn, how authorial practices developed into the modern era.

However, it is a central contention of this book that accounting for these conditions is not sufficient for explaining the modernization of intellectual identities. More exactly, it is not sufficient for explaining the particular “modernization” that has become the standard narrative in the history of authorship, and which identifies modernity with the specific vision of an autonomy from traditional political and social elites articulated in commercialized images of the writer following two distinct and contrary patterns: the writer is viewed as either economically self-reliant and “earning an independent living” or subject to the exploitation of cruel publishers. We shall see that these contrasting figurations of the writer in the “literary market” are ultimately two sides of the same coin. For now, though, it is enough to point out that the modernization process signaled by the idea of a transition from patronage to market has its roots not just in the “objective” expansion of the print trade. For they lie as well in the successive battles that were waged, from the Querelle du Cid in 1637 to debates over philosophical identity in the eighteenth century, over what constitutes legitimacy in the intellectual field and over who can lay claim to the exalted and authoritative designation of being an homme de lettres or an author. “Modernity” was not in these battles a self-evident or unambiguous state. Construed as an essential dimension of the prestige to which writers aspired, it was an upshot of the polemical claims of writers to authority and influence. It was, in other words, an assertion of legitimacy. “Commerce,” in turn, conceived not in terms of writers' actual transactions with, say, agents of the publishing industry, but as a series of topoi projecting stylized images of their experiences in the book trade as central to their claims to legitimacy—in other words, conceived as “commerce” existed in the language of the writers themselves—emerged as a powerful signifier of this modernity; indeed, perhaps as the most powerful signifier of it.

This book describes, in a way, how that came to pass. It argues that the integration and elevation of images of commercial literary activity within the self-presentational rhetoric of writers engaged in the decisive battles over legitimacy comprise an equally important development for the evolution of intellectual practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Though influenced by changing conditions in the publishing sphere, this development was not a direct translation of them. Instead, it was defined by two related aspects: first, an investment of meaning in economically themed images that then clearly conveyed the writer’s authority and preeminence— thus the writer’s refusal to accept income from a publisher stood as an instantly recognized sign of his or her aristocratic quality, and second, the inevitable noncorrespondence of these images to the “objective” reality of the writer’s commercial dealings with publishers and patrons, inasmuch as the images sought not a “realistic” account but a conceptual transformation of the cultural sphere as a space in which the writer’s transcendent status would be readable and widely accepted.

The “literary market” is an illuminating concept by which this process can be accessed in all its nuances. It has of course played a familiar and prominent role in much scholarship on the evolution of authorship in the Old Regime as one of the principal institutions allowing writers to make a transition out of the patronage system and into modernity. Such accounts, though, have not always adequately described the complexity of the passage, and thus of the market’s function. Nor have they appreciated the capacity of the market, as a model, to figure the constitutive ambiguity of writers’ engagements with money and commerce in the period, a fact that is suggested by a consistent inability to reconcile the contradictory articulations of the market’s role in this process as an institution of liberation and economic self-reliance for writers, on one hand, and as a newly oppressive system subjecting gens de lettres to its mercantile logic, on the other. This is due, I would argue, to a tendency associated with the overriding focus on “objective” circumstances to identify the market too directly with the publishing industry or the book trade, and thereby to consider it primarily as another facet of the “true lives” of writers. But the “literary market” is a qualitatively different type of configuration, which finds its conceptual coherence not in the economic reality of the book trade but in the convergence of the book trade’s “objectivity” with the evolving expectations of those who aspire to a literary identity.

Thus we can envision a publishing sector without writers, or more exactly without living writers with something at stake—whether income or esteem—in a particular print job. Explaining why property rights for the earliest works were nonexistent, Diderot described the Renaissance book trade as an authorless industry: “the first privileges had for their object only ancient works.”⁷ By contrast, we can hardly envision the literary market without living writers bringing into their contacts with the book trade an urgent investment in its outcomes, and engaging publication through an array of ambitions, anxieties, and frustrations which, in turn, clearly characterize for us the figure of the “modern author.” This is because the literary market is the product of their investments and anxieties. For while it is not the book trade per se, the market is the perception and representation of the book trade by writers who turn to it and conceptualize it, through their aspirations and fears, as a system whose fundamental purpose is not making and selling books, but transforming manuscripts into Great Works, and identifying individuals, on the basis of these works, as esteemed and independent Authors. Its currency is legitimacy, autonomy, and prestige. Money has value to the extent that, by its abundance or its dearth, it can be converted.

A reconsideration of the market can therefore probe much more than changes in the publishing sphere. It also offers an entry into the shifting mentalities of writers and into their evolving ideals of legitimacy as they struggle, in the framework of an established cultural order whose standards and conventions were nonetheless a target of incessant debate, to lay claim to valorized identities. To push matters farther, the market is not just a specific image of the publishing sphere but also the effort to impose this image as a faithful representation both of an artisanal sector—the print industry— that really was about intellectual identities and values, and of a cultural field whose outlines were precisely those of the book trade. It is, as such, necessarily a rhetorical or a polemical construct, the pertinence of which lies in the degree to which its claim to being a faithful depiction of things is accepted, believed, or more subtly and accurately perhaps, indulged—by readers who do not so much wholeheartedly “believe” in the authors’ biased view of the publishing world, as grasp the importance, for the realization of literary value and hence for their own self-esteem as consumers of Literature, of sustaining the illusion. Thus, they go along, for instance, with received ideas about the poverty of a writer in order to uphold a collective belief in his ennobling struggle, which then grounds the value of his work and the symbolic payoff of reading it. In this fashion, the literary market takes form as an “instrument … of the struggle for the definition of reality,” to adapt the terms of Pierre Bourdieu.⁸

To be sure, Bourdieu’s work, particularly his model of the “field,” is paramount for my study, which argues, in a sense, that the market’s emergence is concomitant less with the development of the book trade per se than with its conceptualization as a field of authorship. Formulated as a “literary” or “cultural” field, or as a “field of cultural production,” the concept seeks to define, beneath these variances, the logic of the literary and artistic world with reference to a specifically modern vision of intellectual autonomy, traced to the late nineteenth century and defined in light of at least two key variables.⁹ The first is the colonization of the cultural world by the bourgeois industrial economy of the Second Empire, with its “exaltation of money” and utilitarian ethic.¹⁰ The field in this scenario defines the autonomy of writers in terms of a free space that they carve out for themselves where “artistic,” not “economic,” values predominate, and in which they can then ignore the demands of the industry and the conventional tastes of a large readership in order to act as their own public and judges, according to the “pure aesthetic” values of l’art pour l’art.¹¹ The second is the decisive role played by “cultural intermediaries,” such as art dealers, agents, publishers, critics, and others who mediate the relation between artists and publics, shaping the perception of the former by the latter. Here the theory of the field stands in opposition to a sublimated, Romantic notion of artistic value as the pure emanation of the genius and travails of a singular individual by emphasizing the extended network of actors who collectively contribute—either supportively or antagonistically—to what Bourdieu called “the production of belief” in the value of the work and in the brilliance of the artist. Ultimately, the model problematizes rather than defines autonomy.¹²

This second conceptualization of the field is crucial for my analysis, which assumes literary value to be an object of mediation or, to recall Greenblatt, of negotiation between a diverse array of agents bringing heterogeneous interests—intellectual, social, political, economic—into the process.¹³ Indeed, the battle is not simply about the amount of value or whether it is negative or positive, but over its quality and meaning: what is “literary value”? What effects—pleasure, utility, beauty, truth—generate this value? Who is authorized to determine and measure it? And what exactly does “literary” denote in this framework? For the “literary field” does not simply demarcate a space in which one could practice “literature,” but one in which the concept of “literature” itself, as a specific kind of intellectual activity, became knowable and as a result debatable. The term is very much a dependent variable in this study. It is not a given and will not be presumed self-evidently to account for the success of a work or a writer. Instead, the assumption will be that a critical part of any writer’s success lies in his or her ability to impose a specific conceptualization of his or her activity as “literary,” to have the activity seen and appreciated as such.¹⁴

My focus on literary or intellectual value as a site of mediation leads me to depart in salient ways from Bourdieu’s first view of the field as starkly bifurcated into autonomous and nonautonomous zones. For Bourdieu, the two zones are, as it were, ontologically equivalent in that both are assumed to be actual spaces in which individuals actually behave according to the logic imputed to their respective fields. A purely venal culture industry takes shape and sparks the opposition of a group of writers and artists who really do retreat into rarefied circles where they experience a radical disconnect—in the form of failure, obscurity, and poverty—from the industry and its commercial public. One consequence of such a bipolar schema is that the values and practices characteristic of the autonomous subfield tend to come across as defensive responses to the overbearing influence and philistinism of the bourgeois culture industry. Indeed, for Bourdieu, literary and artistic autonomy ultimately seems to rest on accepting the power and crassness of the nonautonomous zone, even emphasizing its corruption in order then to do everything in the opposite way and to have the contrarian gestures valorized, in turn, as heroic and necessary. In this respect, Bourdieu’s famous description of the field as an “economic world turned upside down” should be understood in light of the immense efforts and suffering that go into such a reversal. Likewise, as an articulation of the field’s basic rationality, “disinterested interest” explains not the facile indifference of an aristocrat to an economic gain that he hardly needs, but an urgent and sublime effort of self-denial.

Bourdieu draws in large measure on literary sources for this view, most famously on Flaubert’s 1869 novel L’éducation sentimentale. I am not suggesting that we reject such sources as fantasies—this study will itself be primarily concerned with them—but it seems obvious to point out that their agenda is not an “objective” or totalizing depiction of the cultural sphere. Literary sources have “literary” interests at heart; they highlight particular issues— related to, say, the integrity or the livelihood of writers—at the expense of a whole host of other concerns that are of equal possible relevance for the broad functioning of the cultural sphere. Furthermore, if they do address such issues as the profitability of publishers or the preferences of readers, it is to address them not as such but only insofar as they affect authorial concerns¹⁵ The upshot is that the “autonomous field” as conceived by Bourdieu is not “out there” in the world. It is instead the effect of a specialized, partial vantage point, which sees the field as autonomous to the extent that the cultural sphere is viewed, against its inherent complexity and heterogeneity, through the narrow lens of literary priorities, and assumed to exist solely for the purpose of consecrating writers and their works. The same logic dictates that anything not serving literary interests first and foremost be relegated to “nonautonomy” and caricatured as pointedly anti-literary. It is in this effort that the language of economics is polemically wielded, in order to devalorize such influences as venal and profiteering. In any case, the “nonautonomous” field is no more “real” or “objective,” but takes shape as a by-product of the conceptual fantasy of the “autonomous field” and the “autonomous writer.” The “exploitative publisher” and the “bourgeois reader” are indeed part and parcel with those whom they are presumed to torment.

My contention is that the relation between autonomous and nonautonomous, as well as between symbolic and economic, is far more permeable than Bourdieu allows. Not because one is merely the denial of the other, but because neither has a real existence. The dichotomies belong to a single vision of purity that, in rescuing “literature” from the forces of co-optation, had to play up the danger of those forces, and indeed had perhaps to invent them. Nor is the literary market an actual place. Like Bourdieu’s subfields, it offers a postulation or an argument about how the cultural world should operate, how it should function in the interest of bolstering the formation and valorization of certain intellectual identities. With roots in early modern debates over the definitions of literary legitimacy, the “market” developed in a prolonged effort to transform the field of play for specific writers—namely, for those seeking to define themselves as outsiders with respect to an established cultural order whose authority was increasingly open to contestation—by changing how the intellectual field was perceived. The market imposed new meanings on familiar outcomes—for instance, the noble leisure that was traditionally considered to be the most proper condition for lettres became, in this view, indecent and demeaning—and it offered new outcomes as meaningful: those, above all, which ensued from the print publication process.

For in the framework of the literary market print publication was symbolically invested in ways that it had never been.¹⁶ “As an exhibition makes a painter,” remarks Bernard Lahire in his recent study of La condition littéraire, “so publication, in a large measure, makes a writer.”¹⁷ The fact is, though, that there was no such clear-cut connection between literary identity and publication in early modern literary culture, in which writers endeavored to be recognized for their respectability and elegance as honnêtes gens rather than for the brilliance of their books. We shall see that publication was an intensely fraught issue, and writers were far more prone to obfuscate or downplay their contacts with the world of print rather than to appropriate them as decisive factors of their credibility. The connection was not given but forged in the same debates that advanced the market as a conceptualization of the cultural sphere. Accordingly, publication processes were integrated in new ways into the self-presentations of writers, who no longer underscored their distance from the book trade—say, by expressing indifference to or ignorance of its outcomes—but highlighted their involvement.

Most often, they did so by playing up the bad treatment to which they were subjected, along with their inabilities, as “disinterested” writers prepared to suffer for their art, to negotiate with publishers concerned only to make a profit. But decent pay could figure, too. In any case, both experiences at bottom proved exactly the same thing: that through contacts with the commercial publishing world the writer was independent from the corrupt elites who for so long had ruled the cultural sphere. This was without a doubt the fundamental logic of the “market,” which in all of its positive and negative permutations envisioned a field in which the links tying a specific vision of intellectual legitimacy—based on social autonomy from traditional elites—to a vision of authorial economic participation in publishing (whether this was successful or not) were self-evident, such that an evocation of the latter easily and persuasively conjured up a belief in the former, that is, in the writer’s credibility. Whether depicted being robbed by a libraire or as the recipient of a handsome payment, the writer at the center of such a representation was in either case independent from a patron, and extricated from the rationale of the corrupt world that patronage evoked: pleasing, leisure, entertainment.¹⁸ With its roots in Old Regime polemics rather than in the “natural” desires of writers, the association of legitimacy, social autonomy, and economic self-sufficiency is at the core of our contemporary understanding of the author and the intellectual. A lack of a sense of its historical contingency and development has clouded many analyses of the modern cultural sphere and the condition of the modern writer within it.

From a broad historical viewpoint, the problem of the field has often imposed itself as a problem of identifying the first one. This is, of course, what inspired Alain Viala to describe in such influential terms the literary field of the seventeenth century, which he so famously called “le premier champ littéraire” in a refinement of Bourdieu’s effort to situate the first field in the late nineteenth century.¹⁹ He would back off from this assertion to some degree, despite the compelling nature of the argument.²⁰ Nothing, though, could be farther from the spirit of how this study employs the concept of the field. My goal is to understand authorial modernity not in terms of a decisive break with an old culture of honnête intellectual activity, but as “modernity” took root and developed within early modern culture. Thus, one of my assumptions is that the key principles of honnête publication— and in particular, the construal of autonomy as a function of legitimacy rather than legitimacy as a function of a specific ideal of autonomy—remain at the heart of modern literary life and identity, even though the latter, oriented around ideals of sincerity and selfless dedication, are presumed to be in fierce opposition to the ritualized codes of honnêteté (the duplicity— another notion advanced by Viala—is critical to my account). Moreover, to the degree that literary honnêteté, as it evolved in the seventeenth century and into the Enlightenment, was predicated on assertions of its own innovativeness and progress with respect to previous intellectual traditions and strategies, depicted as more constrained and primitive, we might add that the literary field, to the extent that it is always in some measure a field of honnête publication, is by the same token always a “first literary field.”

Finally, this book is both about Old Regime France and not about it. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France presents a rich historical context in which to explore how these issues play out. And inevitably they do so, as the term itself of honnête publication implies, in ways that are specific to the time and place. My study seeks, of course, to identify and elucidate these particularities. My hope, however, is that this study will also broach, and propose some answers to, broader questions regarding the engagement of writers with commerce, and the ways in which commerce in turn shapes and is shaped by writers’ battles over legitimacy and its definitions, not just in France or under the Old Regime, but anywhere and anytime that money enters into the literary enterprise.