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PART ONE

WRITING, PUBLISHING, AND LITERARY IDENTITY IN THE “PREHISTORY OF DROIT D’AUTEUR”

The Story of a Transition: When and How Did Writers Become “Modern”?

The “literary market” has been a key concept in accounts of cultural and literary practices in Old Regime France, particularly for studies of the author as a “modern” principle of intellectual coherence and legitimacy. In these accounts, the birth of the author is predicated on the writer’s growing independence from early modern political, social, and cultural institutions, which for their part are presumed to inhibit the sincere, personal expression that will be at the core of the claim to distinction and credibility conveyed by the emerging ideal. This independence has been interpreted in no small measure as a function of the new possibilities extended to gens de lettres by a book trade whose expansion becomes, in turn, a measure of the growing ability of writers, by selling their works to publishers, to extricate themselves from the networks of Old Regime literary life in order to address a broader public, and in so doing claim a new kind of authority.

In the effort to map out this process, scholars have been drawn to identify the first writer “to live by the pen.” Both Alain-René Le Sage and the abbé Prévost have been presented as inaugurators of such an independence for gens de lettres in eighteenth-century France, not for anything that either said on the topic, it should be stressed, but due to the fact that direct earnings from publishing seem to have played a relatively more important role in their overall trajectories than in those of other writers of the time.¹ Still, as Wallace Kirsop points out, “it is not easy—even in the eighteenth century—to discover someone who lives exclusively by the pen.”² Whatever place publishing income occupied in their lives, potential candidates invariably turn out, on closer examination, to have also been deeply implicated in the traditional patronage system, ultimately relying on noncommercial forms of support as much as or more than earnings from manuscript sales. Dubious of the received wisdom about Le Sage and Prévost, John Lough calls attention to their non-market income, including for the former a 600–livre pension from the son of Louis XIV’s foreign minister and for the latter a remunerative priory.³

More fundamentally, though, the search itself is flawed, since it presupposes that writers had already discerned and internalized an essential, qualitative distinction between commercial and noncommercial pay, and that they therefore considered any move on their part toward market-based compensation as, in and of itself, a gesture of repudiation of noble protection in the name of “autonomy.” In early eighteenth-century France, it is not clear that even money-making authors such as Le Sage or Prévost perceived what they earned in the book trade as representing such a choice. Payment from libraires was scarcely destined to replace traditional revenue sources, but to supplement them when the pensions and sinecures proved inadequate to support the livelihood of the writer. In this sense, Prévost wrote for the commercial press not in order to free himself from the protection of the prince de Conti, whose almoner he became in 1735, but because this position, while offering protection and credibility, did not furnish income. It would therefore be more accurate to say that Prévost wrote for the book trade not to escape Conti’s household but to uphold his place within it, and to continue to reap the benefits that such a position brought him.

As a result, more persuasive contributions to the debate have instead focused not on the first economically self-sufficient writers, but on those who initially imagined such independence, even if they were not able to live it out. Rather than identify the “first writers to live by the pen,” these studies seek out those who first postulated the idea, highlighting the conditions in which “living by the pen” initially became thinkable: “at least [a] possibility,” writes Lough.⁴ “In the course of the eighteenth century … we see progressively emerge, if not payment to authors as we understand it, at least the principle of a specific monetary remuneration for literary activity,” observes Henri-Jean Martin.⁵ Jules Bertaut’s 1950s study of Enlightenment-era “literary life” similarly emphasizes an emerging psychological landscape—the rising hope of autonomy through publishing—which anticipates but is not identifiable with actual self-sufficiency: “around 1770, the situation slowly modifies: writers have learned to defend themselves…. On the eve of the Revolution, they foresee that one day—perhaps—they will be able to live by their pens.”⁶ Among those considered to have glimpsed this day early on, Diderot tends to count as a prescient advocate of “professionalism” for writers.⁷ So does Rousseau, if in a different kind of mode, given that he mobilized not for writing as a “métier” but for the legal and commercial recognition of the inviolable connection between a writer and a work.⁸

Yet while they are surely more convincing as descriptions of the hybrid conditions under which writers of the Enlightenment operated, such studies are probably no less idealistic in their characterization of the historical transition that these pioneering writers invoked. The implication is that, even if they themselves did not benefit from its fruits, nonetheless, through their foresight and keen anticipation, these writers represented a transformation in the lives of gens de lettres that was no less real for being deferred into the future. But it is well worth interrogating the nature of the change signaled by this new expectation. Writers envisaged a day when they would be fairly paid for their labors. We presume their visions to be meaningful to the degree that they prefigure an actual evolution. But what if they did not? And what if the development was in fact something quite different?

Describing the late twentieth-century literary field, Robert Escarpit noted that a young novelist bringing a manuscript to a publisher with the hope of receiving a modest income of 10,000 francs for his work “has a lower chance of reaching his goal than if he had bought a lottery ticket.”⁹ Less provocatively, Michèle Vessillier-Ressi nonetheless confirms the view that only a fraction of writers in the contemporary period derive enough from the sale of their writings to publishers to support themselves. The majority—two-thirds, according to the data she has compiled—rely instead on an “accumulation of jobs.” That is, they must hold down secondary employment that not only “pays the bills,” but also, in the absence of direct earnings from publishers, might bolster the legitimacy of the individual’s self-identification as an author, given that these jobs are often as teachers or critics of literature.¹⁰ But “multiple job holding” undermines the autonomy projected in the utopian image of “living by the pen,” and challenges its central association of the social identity of the writer with the fundamental link tying an individual to his or her works, expressed in the defining labor of “faire des livres.”¹¹ Leaving aside the often very visible but statistically outlying exceptions,¹² it must be acknowledged that no writer today can really be said, without some qualification, to “live by the pen,” not according to the meaning that this phrase has acquired in the historiography of early modern literary practices. And in this respect, “modern authorship” is perhaps not a whole lot different from the eclectic and, in the language of Pierre Bourdieu, “heteronomous” array of cultural, institutional, and social exchanges that defined an individual as an homme or femme de lettres in the Old Regime.¹³ As Vessillier-Ressi writes, “we might ask ourselves if the amateurism which was the rule in the economy of creation of the distant past is not still a prevalent phenomenon today in the majority of cases.”¹⁴

If not an “objective” socioeconomic regime in which writers could live by the sale of the products of their creative labors, then what do such writers as Diderot and Rousseau prefigure? What transition—if any at all—do they mark in reimagining literary practice in and through the commercial opportunities and legal rights of book publishing? The elusiveness of the shift is manifest, it seems to me, in a tendency to advance the history of authorship by always pushing the pivotal moment of authorial awakening back in time, with studies at least partly driven by the goal of establishing that the growing attention of writers to their “interests” and “rights” occurred earlier than was thought, say, in the first half of the eighteenth century rather than the second, or in the seventeenth century or earlier.¹⁵ Such research has produced crucial insights into the interactions between writers and the publishing industry in periods overlooked by an older scholarship that figured the early exchanges with booksellers to be devoid of meaning for the lives of writers. What is less clear, though, is how persuasive they can be as accounts of “modernization” in the cultural sphere, for the risk is to assume what ultimately undermines the notion of the author as a construct of modernity: that authorship consists in a timeless potential for self-realization, merely waiting for the right individuals to stumble on the insight. The emphasis on finding an earlier originary moment might presuppose that the desire to “live by the pen” and to write “autonomously” in the sense of writing without any need for aristocratic protection is a universal ahistorical one, which only required writers sufficiently lucid and self-aware to give expression to it. The crux of the matter is then whether such clear-headed writers—as opposed to the ideal of the “author” itself— existed in a particular time, with the underlying thrust often being that prior generations of scholars, who had situated the emergence of “modern authorship” at a later historical juncture, simply lacked the knowledge and appreciation of the earlier age to see how savvy and insightful its best intellectuals really were.

There is a great deal of validity to the point. The effort to find the “first modern author” has certainly been fueled by incomplete knowledge of what comes before. One result is the ridiculous notion that early writers were indifferent to the benefits of print publication, including that of economic gain.¹⁶ At the same time, however, observing that these gens de lettres had extensive and deliberate contacts with the world of the commercial press earlier than had been thought, even in the dawn of print, does not by itself demonstrate their modernity because “modern authorship” does not consist in these contacts per se, no matter how motivated, interested, or proprietary they might have been. On their own, they do not make writers modern. The causality, in fact, goes in the reverse direction; it is writers who transform their contacts with the book trade into powerful signifiers of their modernity. They do so as part of a rearticulation of their legitimacy in terms of a new but contingent vision of their social autonomy from patrons, based on an idealization of themselves as “producers” with “rights” to a livelihood from the income earned on the products of their “artistic” labors—we shall see that other ideals of the freedom of intellectuals were current, even dominant. The book trade and intellectual modernity can be linked to the extent that the new claim to legitimacy conveys an assertion of its progressiveness with respect to the “traditional” ideals that it seeks to replace, and that contacts with the book trade become the privileged testimonials to the liberation on which this legitimacy is based.

The “modernity” of the author who turns to commercial print inheres, then, in the strategic appropriation of an identity defined by this concept of independence, which projects simultaneously the claim to remuneration for the fruits of creative “toil” and the will to pursue a literary life outside of the old networks of royal and noble patronage. Indeed, modern authorship consists in the collapse of the two objectives into one unified motive according to which the expression of desire to be liberated from subordination to protectors becomes at the same time a demand to be compensated for literary labors, while conversely—and herein lies one of the central arguments of this study—the demand for compensation from a libraire, however it may be formulated and regardless of its positive or negative end result, instantly conveys a repudiation in the name of the writer’s dedication and authenticity of all the personal compromises required by participation in an overindulged hierarchical leisure society.

Such a motive, and the claim to a modern intellectual self to which it gives rise, is not the reflection of a timeless longing for freedom of thought or creative control; nor does it ensue from any “natural” sense that one should be paid for the products of one’s labors, whether these are physical or intellectual. The following two chapters instead locate the roots of the new vision in the evolution of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural field, and particularly in a development that might appear unrelated to the narrative of authorial modernization, namely the convergence of “letters”— identified retrospectively as “literature”—with the activities and values of a self-consciously new social elite, which appropriated “literary” writing forms—along with their writers—in assertions of its cohesiveness, brilliance, and, indeed, its modernity. Out of this intellectual and social fusion emerge familiar images of the writer as a “salon” or “court poet,” who far from representing autonomy from elites will come to symbolize the subjugation of literature to “nonliterary” priorities in the Old Regime. Yet the articulation of a new cultural value in the language of elite sociability produces other images of the writer as well, almost as by-products, including most pertinently a view of the writer as too interested in commercial profit and too ready to pursue gain in the book trade. The image, of course, stands as a sharply devalorized view. But this should not lead us to underestimate its importance for the rising culture of honnêteté, in which it functions as a negative foil defining and accentuating legitimate motives and behaviors, such as aristocratic disinterest, leisure and a commitment to upholding the elegant dynamic of the group over one’s own individual brilliance.

For it was to the degree that writing for economic gain in the publishing sector indicated with clarity and self-evidence the intellectual’s exteriority with respect to elite social circles and his or her refusal or inability to abide by their ethical norms that rejections of commercial benefit and “professionalism” could manifest with equal transparency the personal qualities that they evoked. Part I argues that, as an institution of authorial modernization, the “literary market” has its origins here rather than in the “objective” growth of the book trade or the awakening of a long-dormant desire among gens de lettres for independence. We begin, in other words, with the elite socialization of writing, unfolding as a reciprocal process by which, on one hand, intellectual legitimacy was redefined to reflect the values of aristocratic sociability, with writers and their works increasingly esteemed for their refinement, polish, and ability to please in hours of leisure, while on the other hand, aristocratic sociability was reconfigured along intellectual, linguistic, and even “literary” lines. Polite conversation, wit, and belles-lettres prevailed over cruder, physical forms of interaction. Out of this dynamic, an image of the writer’s autonomy gains currency. Formulated in a language of commercial enterprise and profiteering self-interest, it figures the exclusion from the elite group that the successful writer will overcome. The sociability of the legitimized writer contrasts sharply with a writer whose non-integration is indicated by an involvement in the commercial publication of his or her works.

In this process, the book trade was transformed—not as an “objective” artisanal sphere, though its real expansion is not irrelevant to our story. But more saliently it was transformed as a cultural field to the extent that it was envisioned by writers who now looked to their contacts with it as factors and conduits for their social identities as gens de lettres. Investing the transactions, exchanges, and outcomes defining their commercial publishing activities with a potent meaning for their lives as intellectuals, and appropriating the self-presentational spaces that were offered through the printed media, writers reconceptualized “le commerce des livres” as what Viala calls an “institution of literary life,” that is, as a social, cultural, and political framework in which the plausibility and legitimacy of their “literary” identities, and of their identifies as “socialized” gens de lettres, would be affirmed and correlatively contested and undermined. Those writers who mobilized a commercial rhetoric as a decisive element in their intellectual self-presentation, even in a strongly negative way, could be said to have invented literary commerce. For they endowed this particular mode of intellectual practice with the coherence and meaning that it ultimately continues to have for us today.

Chapter 1 focuses on the seventeenth-century case of Corneille. The tragedian has often been highlighted as a precursor of the modern author for what seems a strong interest in the commercialization of his writings, reflected in his tendency to publish plays quickly and in his pursuit through administrative channels of the right to control their performance. Both moves are commonly interpreted as expressions of his aspiration for a “modern,” which is to say here an anti-aristocratic, economically articulated independence. Yet it is not in the writings of Corneille that the image of his commercial savvy is to be found, but in those of his detractors who sought to discredit the popular playwright at the apex of his success. The chapter contends that in the course of the 1637 Querelle that exploded after the triumph of his play, Le Cid, Corneille became a screen onto which the anxieties of gens de lettres were projected as they sought to understand and define a specific category of activity—writing and publishing books—that had to be adapted to what Viala calls the first literary field. These anxieties were not so much reactions to Corneille or the doctrinal infidelities of his play. Rather, they were symptoms of a defining quandary that seventeenth-century gens de lettres faced, which lay in the following paradox: the rise in the status of leisure-oriented writing in elite culture allowed individuals with “literary” talent to claim a more enhanced social identity. But they could do so only so long as that identity adhered to the values of aristocratic sociability, which prescribed that, out of modesty and deference to the group, one downplay one’s writing and publishing activities. As such, only by belittling their literary pursuits could gens de lettres benefit from the social transformation that these pursuits, valorized nonetheless by the same society that demanded their belittlement, made possible.

Chapter 2 follows the evolution of this fraught, ambivalent “anticommercial” ideal into the Enlightenment era, when it continued to impose itself as a prevailing vision while undergoing a substantial transformation at the hands of the philosophes. The chapter focuses on what can be called “philosophical” publishing, that is, the role of publication in the literary lives of those who constructed themselves according to the model of Voltaire. A central paradox has been noted both by eighteenth-century contemporaries and historians and critics of the period: whereas the philosophes are easily considered modern in their relationship to the political and religious authorities of their time, when it came to their intellectual property rights they refused to innovate, hearkening in their activities as writers to established Classical-era tactics of modesty, coy denial, and anonymity. But while these strategies situated the philosophes in a decidedly elite cultural milieu that was far closer to the literary field of Viala than to the commercial field of Bourdieu, they played a different role from similar strategies in the lives of seventeenth-century gens de lettres, by upholding a new formulation of autonomy. Repudiating the “douce liberté” of the leisured aristocrat as well as the uncouth self-sufficiency of a Corneille, the autonomy of the philosophes was defined in a complex negotiation by which writers positioned themselves between a broad public and a network of patrons. In gesturing to an abstract enlightened audience, they projected an autonomy from elites that would ground their authority as critics. These affirmations, however, drew their power as symbolic projections from the philosophes’ proximity to well-recognized and powerful protectors who, through their support of what was becoming known as a “movement,” sanctioned the grandiose selfimages that such writers as Voltaire and d’Alembert presented. “Philosophical” publication was both an effect and the undertaking of this negotiation between an abstract, idealized public and a more concrete readership of elites, in the course of which the philosophes had to adopt contradictory and equivocal postures, or at least postures that necessarily seem as such to us.

More than a century separates Chapter 2 from Chapter 1. This is not meant at all to downplay the significance of changes that took place over the course of those years but to underscore the importance and durability of the honnête framework, which defined and oriented those changes, including not only the rise of the philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century but earlier developments as well: the novella, moralist writing, and the proto-Enlightenment scientific popularizations of Fontenelle and Bayle. I have focused on an early seventeenth-century debate—the Querelle du Cid—in which the evolving parameters and the polemical nature of this framework become especially clear. And by jumping ahead to the philosophes, I am not suggesting that nothing happens between Corneille and Voltaire, but that the figuration of the “literary market” must be understood as a direct and pointed response to the self-presentational rhetoric of a Voltaire or a d’Alembert; and that the latter cannot be understood without understanding its relation to the seventeenth-century discourse of authorial honnêteté, which stands both as a foil to the philosophes’ image of themselves as socially independent critics, and as the condition out of which their assertions of independence could carry any weight.¹⁷