Читать книгу The Literary Market - Geoffrey Turnovsky - Страница 9

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Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnête Publication

THE INVESTIGATION INTO WRITERS and the book trade in the early modern period has traditionally presented an exercise in the excavation of origins, driven by the effort to unearth “primitive” instances of what would later develop as standard behavior for writers in the commercial publishing sphere. In his survey of the economic, social, and political realities defined by the printed book in seventeenth-century Paris, Henri-Jean Martin suddenly describes a “prehistory” as soon as he turns to the question of “la condition d’auteur.” The focus on authorship instantly calls up the most underdeveloped aspects of a broad phenomenon that until then had seemed remarkable for its profuseness and penetration, as well as for the complexity of its mechanisms and networks.¹ Why the pervading sense of incipience when the writer makes an appearance? One reason for such an impression, it seems to me, not only in Martin’s account but in others as well, is the marked tendency to conflate a general history of writers and publication with what is really a more specific history, that of writers’ moral and legal claims to compensation from libraires to whom they cede the rights to print and sell their works. Indeed, Martin’s incorporation of the Author into his study transforms it not just into a “prehistory” but more exactly into a “prehistory of droit d’auteur.” Referring to the payment that a writer received for the sale of his or her works, the latter term indicates not a generic but a particular contact with the book trade, one that certainly does not exhaust the range of possibilities. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of much historical work on authorship that payments are assumed to be something especially salient and fundamental.

Martin then tells this aspect of the story largely through an enumeration of the sums obtained by writers in their transactions with libraires²: Benserade’s 150 livres from Sommaville for Cléopâtre; La Calprenède’s 200 livres for Mithridate (also from Sommaville); Tristan’s 600 livres from Courbé and Billaine for three collections of verse (Les amours, Oeuvres chrétiennes, and Vers héroïques); and Scarron’s 1,000 livres from Quinet for the Roman comique, to name a few examples.³ Such figures have the disconcerting effect of seeming at the same time significantly low and significantly high, a fact that further underscores the nascence of the writer’s “condition” vis-à-vis the book trade. They seem low to the degree that they stand out as artifacts of a distant age, elements in a life measured by a distinctly antiquated set of standards. But the payments also appear high inasmuch as we cannot help but read them in contrast to an even more primordial moment when writers received nothing at all from the printers or booksellers who put their works into circulation, other than maybe a few dozen copies of the books in question. Martin will reference this earlier moment explicitly, but it could just as easily remain implicit in its function as a powerful, everpresent myth of authorial origins. When faced with any evidence of writers being monetarily compensated for the “sale” of their writings in the early modern period, whatever the actual sums may be, we instinctively situate those transactions against a putative beginning when writers were not only unpaid but might be expected to contribute themselves to the printing costs.⁴

Moreover, the numbers always seem both highly illuminating and utterly impenetrable. They grab our attention as sharply focused glimpses into the daily lives of early modern gens de lettres, all the more tantalizing given the paucity of true-life documentation on such matters. But the detail, for all its banality, also reminds us of the illusory nature of the insight the numbers appear to offer. For one thing, viewed from this side of three centuries of currency changes and inflation, they strike us as alien and inconvertible. They force the question: what do they amount to in twenty-first-century dollars or euros? Yet most studies that rehearse these types of payments do not even try to establish modern equivalents for the amounts but seek to let the old numbers simply speak for themselves. What, though, can they tell us on their own? Some studies offer conversion systems, but with confusing, improbable, and arbitrary ratios they only seem to make matters worse, raising more questions than they answer.⁵

Of course, even if we could get an accurate idea of what, say, 1,000 livres from 1650 is worth in today’s currency, the more basic problem remains of establishing a “real” value in terms of what it could buy at the time, thereby determining what it was worth to the writer who earned it and, with the money, sought to stake out a place in the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century intellectual field. Benchmarks have been proposed. Viala notes that, “to make a good impression socially, one needed about 3,000 livres a year in the middle of the century, and about 4,000 at the end.”⁶ But this hardly offers a clearer picture than the raw numbers. After all, Viala does not specify what one would need to acquire with those 3,000 to 4,000 livres to present oneself respectably in Old Regime society. More important, such a guideline fails to get at the underlying problem. For if the figures seem opaque it is not simply due to the difficulty of knowing their values in terms of the goods and services they make accessible to aspiring gens de lettres, and which would be crucial for their claims to privileged cultural status. It is because such numbers tell us very little about the effectiveness of these claims in the framework of a society that was considerably less monetized than our own. We can know that with 3,000 or 4,000 livres a writer might obtain some of the basic accouterments required for a literary career in the early modern field. But the figures leave basic questions about access and legitimacy in a culture where these depended relatively more on unquantifiable assets such as personal favor, “qualité,” and “politesse” too unanswered to be illuminating as signifiers of the writer’s “improving” status. A writer might command important payments in the book trade, yet still be shut out of any meaningful place in the dominant social and intellectual networks. Despite the compensation—or more likely because of it—he or she might remain relatively marginalized in Old Regime literary life. The trappings of respectability might be devalorized by the very fact that they were accessed only monetarily and thus stand as the symbols not of the writer’s qualité but of the opposite: ambition, presumption, and thus low stature and rightful exclusion.

The truth, in any case, is that in the context of a history of authorship the growing sums that writers earned from their publishers are really meant not to illuminate the material life to which they explicitly refer, but to propel a narrative of forward movement. That is, the numbers become meaningful less in their concrete relation to the daily lives of writers than in the extent to which they round out the image of an autonomization process marked by writers’ struggles to “live by the pen.” Conspicuously greater than zero, the payments are equally obviously less than what they should be, and in this sense they situate writers on a sliding scale ranging from nonpayment in a primeval past to a “fair price” projected ahead to a time when they might finally earn a “decent” living without recourse to the largesse of patrons.⁷ The writer’s present is thus recast as an inevitably transitional point, not just from the “objective” perspective of the scholar examining the passage of writers from patronage to market, but also from the “subjective” point of view of writers themselves, whom we assume to be driven in their negotiations with publishers by a vision of an ideal future built on a mounting frustration with their present lot as “underpaid.” Their own experience draws on an ambivalent mix of hope and exasperation, which then defines the forward movement both as a psychological framework for understanding writers’ engagements with the book trade, and as a moral imperative by which writers can be judged.

Yet this raises a methodological problem. For the emphasis on income seems to beg the question of what is being studied. We take for granted that the focus on payments leads to the insight that writers became more independent as they were paid more. But the interest in the amounts earned appears in fact to be an outcome of the very history such an analysis seeks to illuminate. The idea that the history of Old Regime writers is the history of their liberation from aristocracy would seem to dictate—rather than ensue from—the enumeration of their payments in the book trade. Put another way, the analysis of rising income, which, with a focus on the legal rights to that income, has easily been the dominant angle in understanding the role of the book trade in the lives of Old Regime writers, does not precede and summon the conclusion that the history of authorship in pre-Revolutionary France consists above all in the gradual liberation of the writer from noble society. It is, on the contrary, the initial assumption that the history of writing must be the history of the liberation of the intellectual from nobility and monarchy that yields an investigation prioritizing the growth in payments from publishers as the privileged markers of this liberation.

Two important consequences need then to be considered. The first is a mirror effect resulting from this basic homology of a particular approach to an object—the teleological focus on “progress” toward the writer’s social liberation—and the object itself—the author seen as the end result of that progress. The effect is one of tautology, for in accounting for the autonomization of writers one cannot help but encounter the “modern author”, inasmuch as the figure is posited from the start as the personified image of this historical process. By the same token, in describing the “condition of the author,” no matter on which period one focuses, one always ends up narrating the same “progress of the writer toward independence” so long as the author is defined a priori as the pivotal agent of this evolution.⁸ As such, one might argue that the “history of authorship” is ultimately the history of itself. The investigation of the rise and development of a specific intellectual figure—the author—more than anything else defines and advances a particular conception of how intellectual practices rose and developed. It is hardly a surprise then that this history tends to find its own image reflected back wherever it may be searching. Whether in the eighteenth, seventeenth, or sixteenth century, the history of authorship inevitably finds an author to be its hero.

Moreover, given this incarnation of a teleology of intellectual liberation in a single figure defined by the process, there is a marked tendency for the history of intellectual autonomization that is the history of authorship to double, in turn, as a history of individualization. This is the case not only in the sense referenced by Foucault in his famous essay “What Is an Author?”—which considered individualization in terms of the focalization of the sources of intellectual authority and coherence in one person⁹—but also insofar as the writing of the history of authorship has so often been drawn to exceptional figures who stand out in their precociousness and unique insight against the mass of their contemporaries, and whose lonely struggles are then considered singlehandedly to drive the narrative. In a characteristic formulation, Raymond Birn observes that Rousseau, “more than any other writer of the eighteenth century, tried to impose his work on a free cultural market…. In his commercial activities as in his creative life, Rousseau was rooted in criteria of understanding that were original and personal.”¹⁰

Conversely, the history of authorship offers a paradoxical or incongruous account as soon as such transcendent cultural icons as Diderot or Beaumarchais are not its protagonists. The literary property debates of the early and mid-eighteenth century were, for instance, engaged not by forward-looking “modern” writers loudly asserting their “natural” rights but by wealthy Parisian libraires who sought to consolidate their privileges and extend their control over the industry. “Ironically,” Carla Hesse remarks, “the argument that ideas were the property of the individual author was first advanced in defense of the monopoly of the Paris Publisher’s Guild on texts whose authors were long since dead.”¹¹ But what makes this “ironic”? Not really the specific circumstances of the literary world in the time, which do not in and of themselves imply that there was anything counterintuitive or strange about the leading role played by the Parisian booksellers and printers in the cause of intellectual property rights, or about the noticeable lack of interest of established gens de lettres in that mobilization. The irony ensues from the prior assumption that a pro-property argument should more fittingly emerge from the struggles and thoughts of a writer claiming those rights in an effort to maximize his or her social autonomy. Only as they are filtered through those thoughts and that heroic struggle do the rise of intellectual property and the birth of the author acquire meaning.

The Precursor’s Silence

One individual through whose consciousness the “birth of the author” is thought to have been refracted is Pierre Corneille. In his long-term study of authorship as a juridical concept from antiquity into the modern age, Bernard Edelman highlights the playwright’s contribution to the “consecration of the author,” which begins with a moment of illumination: “the sudden insight lies in a simple formula: that the genius is free, … and that he owes this freedom only to himself and his own powers.”¹² Bringing this insight to bear into the field of public discourse with his 1637 poem “Excuse à Ariste,” Corneille sparked the polemics of the Querelle du Cid in the course of which “a new sovereignty of the author” was outlined. “In these debates,” Edelman continues, “the eighteenth-century is already anticipated.” Underscoring the playwright’s precociousness, he echoes numerous assessments of Corneille’s foresight. Marc Fumaroli describes Corneille’s “concern for the economic foundation of the activities of the writer” as most unusual for the age. He points to a 1643 request for lettres patentes by which the playwright sought official control over the performance of three of his recent tragedies, Cinna, Polyeucte, and La mort de Pompée, construing the administrative appeal as an endeavor to protect his intellectual property rights in a time when, Fumaroli goes on to argue, “the notion itself was practically unknown.”¹³ Claire Carlin concurs, deeming the petition “a move unheard of at the time.”¹⁴

For Viala, too, Corneille is a “precursor” who mobilized to “benefit from the profits that he could draw from his works.”¹⁵ To be sure, the appraisal from a 1984 article must be nuanced against Viala’s much larger investigation into the commercial and legal claims of gens de lettres in his well-known 1985 study of the Naissance de l’écrivain. There Viala argues that a concern for money and property rights, especially among playwrights, was more widespread in the mid-seventeenth century than had been assumed. In this respect, Corneille stands out less as an extraordinary case for his “unheard of” claims than as a remarkably salient and illustrative one who advanced more forcefully what others were thinking: “Thus dramatists, and particularly Corneille, were the most active in asserting their property rights.”¹⁶ Still, while the tragedian’s singularity is no longer quite so emphasized, it is nonetheless conveyed by the relative dearth of other examples that might more persuasively round out the impression of a broad commitment to property and payments: “Led by dramatic authors, writers acted energetically and persistently to claim their literary property rights, initiating the movement that Beaumarchais would complete in founding the Société des auteurs dramatiques and in obtaining the laws of 1791 and 1793.”¹⁷ Viala goes on to conclude, “the affirmation and practice of literary property certainly already existed, therefore, in the Classical age.”¹⁸ But as further evidence only Quinault and Racine are mentioned, although neither make as straightforward and direct a case for owning the “rights” to their texts—whether printed or performed—as that suggested by the legal recourse of Corneille’s lettres patentes.¹⁹

In truth, the most deliberate, concrete, and widespread indications of a pervasive rise in the commitment among gens de lettres to a proprietary vision of authorship in Viala’s account lie not in anything that writers such as Quinault or Racine said or did, but in the efforts of others to resist the burgeoning sense of economic and legal entitlement. The most compelling evidence is, in other words, negative not positive. Viala describes, for instance, a monarchical backlash “to the demands of authors” in a series of regulations stipulated by the Conseil du Roi between 1618 and the 1660s. Among other things, these rules forbade writers to sell their own books except through the intermediary of a libraire; formally abolished the older and by that time mostly abandoned custom of granting writers general privileges to their entire oeuvre, including to works still to be written; and supported the increasingly common practice of renewing privilèges upon their expiration, which strengthened the position of established publishers who had an incentive to sit on their old stock.²⁰ In each case, Viala argues, the goal of the Conseil was to undermine the claims of writers to payments from the book trade, channeling them instead into the state patronage system to which they were then forced to turn. In the process, of course, the administration would seem to acknowledge the intensification of those claims.²¹

Perhaps, though, the richest vein of evidence mined by Viala to show that something like a proprietary form of authorship was gaining currency in seventeenth-century France is in the proliferation of pejorative and satirical images of the literary “professional,” which run through a varied cross-section of writings. Viala cites the classic lines from Boileau’s “Art poétique” to exemplify the anticommercial discourse of the Classical era, which depicts publishing for personal gain and commercial reward as the sullying of a noble art.

Mais je ne puis souffrir ces auteurs renommez,

Qui dégoûtez de gloire, et d’argent affamez,

Mettent leur Apollon aux gages d’un Libraire

Et font d’un Art divin un métier mercenaire.²²

[I cannot abide these renowned authors

Who tired of glory and starved for money

Pawn their Muse to a bookseller

And make of a divine art a mercenary trade.]

These lines are more typically invoked to illustrate a general disdain for profit within Old Regime literary culture. Viala, though, reinterprets them as an expression of resistance to profound changes that had previously taken place, according to which the writers of the time were already significantly reoriented toward the “market.” They point, in other words, not to the overall low regard in which commercialized literary activities were held but to their rise as “legitimate” practices: “far from signifying that the majority of authors disdained property rights, the satire indicates on the contrary that most pursued them. His discourse is defensive inasmuch as the opposite attitude had enough power to threaten this image [of the noble writer].”²³

Focusing less on the anticommercial gestures per se than on their mounting intensity, Viala presents a strong challenge to the assumptions of an earlier scholarship that bought too easily into the “historical myth” of the Classical-era writer’s indifference to literary commerce.²⁴ The forcefulness and consistency of the denunciations brought by Boileau and others suggest in fact that the reality was otherwise: the book trade occupied a central place in the experiences and aspirations of seventeenth-century writers. At another level, though, Viala’s analysis fails to tackle one of the key premises of the older views. For these strongly associate the commercial engagements of writers with their awakening to legal rights and economic dues, considered as a precondition to the ultimate liberation from the domination of Old Regime elites. Viala has certainly rethought the chronology of this process. While Martin’s “prehistory” suggested that the consciousness of literary property in seventeenth-century literary life was present only in an incipient form, significant only as it anticipates an eighteenth-century authorial revolution,²⁵ Viala essentially argues that the revolution had already arrived.

But precisely in this sense his reconsideration of Classical-era attitudes toward commerce is less probing in its account of how the new entrepreneurial consciousness came to transform intellectual practice in the period. Viala holds to a reading of the book trade’s effect as an institution of modernization, the quintessential function of which was to incite and focalize in gens de lettres a desire for freedom from nobility by offering them opportunities to satisfy this desire. But Boileau’s rhetoric does not support such an interpretation. The lines do suggest that commerce was a draw for writers, which, it should be stressed, was not necessarily a bad thing. In his poem, Boileau also offers a positive image of the writer whose book “is surrounded by buyers in the shop of Barbin.” Commerce did present a clear danger, but not by cultivating in writers a desire for independence from aristocracy. Rather, commerce amplified their ethical weaknesses; it was associated with greed and the blindness into which such a lapse would plunge the writer, who would then lose sight of the type of writer he or she should be. In this respect, the “Art poétique” is more a wake-up call than an admonition, warning writers against their worst natural tendencies, which consist in their self-absorption, not in their desire for autonomy.

We should note, moreover, the lack of any positive portrayal of the “literary mercenary” from the time. It is notable that the proliferating negative images of gens de lettres who take their careers into their own hands by selling their works to libraires contrasts markedly with the absence of favorable or even just neutral depictions of the same phenomenon. On occasion, writers voice a wish for remuneration from a publisher, but this is never overtly connected with a longing for economic self-sufficiency, certainly not a self-sufficiency understood narrowly as the ability to support oneself without recourse to aristocratic patronage. In fact, no writer who enjoyed noble support ever wished not to have it. And those who, like Jean de Préchac in his gallant novella, La Noble vénitienne, own up to their venal motives in publishing do so from an entirely different point of view: “The author having lost some money playing bassette found the means to make up for it by publishing a book from which he recovered the best part of what he had lost.”²⁶ Préchac’s explanation hardly projects a repudiation of the dependency of letters on aristocratic society. On the contrary, through the very image of his commercialized activities, meant not to valorize his labors but to downplay the importance of his writing (he turns to the classic pejorative phrase “faire des livres” to refer to publishing), the admission places him squarely in the culture of the court, with its ludic pastimes and high-risk gambling.

In the absence of direct, positive statements associating the book trade and autonomy in the seventeenth century, literary scholars have fixed on administrative or legal records to substantiate the argument that Classical-era gens de lettres sought freedom through commerce. C. E. J. Caldicott explores Molière’s involvement in the publication of his Oeuvres complètes, chronicled in “archived documents that trace the long and sad story of his conflicts with the Booksellers Guild.” Specifically, he focuses on a series of privilèges issued to both libraires and the playwright in the 1660s and early 1670s. Against a tradition emphasizing Molière’s identity as a court poet and a “man of letters too preoccupied with the problems of his art to care about the correction of his proofs,” Caldicott paints a less familiar portrait of the writer as deeply invested in the publication of his works—“anxious about the quality of the edition”—and ready to fight the booksellers for control over the process.²⁷ Moreover, Caldicott asserts that the struggle was not extraneous to Molière’s sense of his authorial identity, despite the typical coyness of his prefaces. Instead, it was engaged as a critical aspect of the playwright’s effort to construct and control his intellectual self: “Driving the combativeness of the author … is a sense of his rights, and therefore an authorial consciousness.”²⁸ This identity was, in turn, increasingly defined for Molière by the weakening of his ties to the king and the court, and by his perception of a “second career, another way of existing, according to which he would be solely in control of the future of his work.” Caldicott continues, “Forged in the crucible of his solitary battles against the institutional interests of the printers, this authorial consciousness gradually assumed a preponderant role in Molière’s career, up to the point where, as he pushed further along this path, he necessarily granted less importance to his relations at Court.” As such, Caldicott concludes, Molière should be placed “in the ranks of the first modern authors.”²⁹

One is struck, though, by Molière’s silence throughout this story, and by the possibility that such an interpretation of privilèges rests more on a series of presuppositions about why authors would be involved in the gritty details of publication than on any specific sign that the desire for “another way of existing” was what Molière’s intervention into the book trade was all about. Similarly, the arguments for Corneille’s modernity, in the absence of any statement from the playwright himself, have focalized around an administrative document, namely, the request for lettres patentes deposed in 1643. Written by a law clerk named Le Roy and corrected by Corneille, the request for the exclusive rights to “have the above-mentioned theatrical plays, named Cinna, Polyeucte, and La mort de Pompée, staged and represented by a theatrical troupe in whatever place in our Kingdom that he sees fit,” was denied.³⁰ The artifact has nonetheless been seized on as evidence of Corneille’s precocious conceptualization of “literary property.” Assumed to reflect a heightened sensitivity to the economic predicament of writers, the request then indicates the tragedian’s strong sense of his autonomy, of which his forays into the commercial publishing sphere led him to become conscious and which then drove his efforts to pursue his interests there. The lettres patentes—“a move unheard of at the time”³¹—thus stand out as concrete proof of his modernity.

As with Molière’s privilèges, though, Corneille’s reticence should give pause. For one thing, the lettres patentes can be understood in a wholly different framework, that of contemporary theater politics and the intense rivalry between the up and coming Théâtre du Marais, recently founded in 1634 by the actor Montdory, and the more established, quasi-official theater of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which housed the comédiens du roi. Having quarreled with the latter, Corneille famously decided to give his plays to the new troupe, which would perform a series of his works including Le Cid in early 1637. The lettres might then be considered in light of his shifting loyalties insofar as convention dictated that once a play was in print, it was available to be performed by any theatrical company.³² Indeed, editions of Cinna and Polyeucte appeared in 1643.³³ And with a print version of La mort de Pompée in press for the following year, Corneille was perhaps seeking with the lettres primarily to deny the performance rights to his plays to the “troupe royale” out of lingering bitterness, and in order to emphasize his changing allegiances.³⁴

The examples of Molière and Corneille illustrate how central administrative records have been to arguments about the modernization of Old Regime authorship. Both highlight, too, the tendency, in making such arguments, to read certain motives and desires into things like lettres patentes and privilèges that are in reality not so self-evidently manifest in what exist ultimately as no more than signs of the writer’s involvement—sometimes indirect—in the publication process. It is assumed that such documents give expression to a desire on the part of the writer for autonomy, defined specifically as freedom from dependence on aristocracy or monarchy. It is also assumed that this desire for autonomy is a natural one, which the writer had ignored or repressed in patronage relations, but which, in making the legal and economic claims the privilège puts forth, he or she now recognizes and embraces. Finally, it is assumed that once the natural desire for autonomy is given free rein, it will eat away at the foundations of the older order, and ultimately bring it down in order to open up a “new system” or a “new reality.” Herein lies a crux of the modernization argument; the very gesture of taking out a privilège represents a pointed threat to the established order, and a turn to a new one.

But I would argue that such assumptions, grounded less in the peculiarities of the cases than in the logic of a prewritten “history of authorship,” hide as much as they reveal about the role of the book trade in Classical-era literary life. Viala’s emphasis on disparaging images of the “commercial writer” correctly calls attention to a broad awareness of the book trade in the seventeenth century that had been insufficiently valorized in earlier accounts. But when he reads those representations as purely negative reactions to a wider trend toward professionalization, Viala dismisses them as retrograde defensiveness before inevitable progress. On its own merits, the anticommercial rhetoric of writers like Boileau becomes insignificant, functioning merely as a sign of what it represses. A closer look, however, opens up an alternative interpretation, particularly when a key albeit underaccentuated factor is brought out: namely, our sense today that the anticommercial rhetoric is archaic jars strikingly with seventeenth-century perceptions that the attack on literary commerce was a “modern” cause. The pejorative view of the “professional” did indeed articulate an innovation for Classical-era observers. But the innovation was not the entrepreneurial, independent writer. It was a new cultural ideal defined against the self-interest and vulgarity of the commercial writer, and which lay in the “refinement” of letters through integration into court and noble society, and in the “socialization” of gens de lettres as adept participants in le monde.

In such a light, we might reconsider the role played by commercial publication in the lives of seventeenth-century writers in a way that better reconciles the growing centrality of the phenomenon with the apparent deepening of writers’ hostility to it. For it was as it opened up opportunities for intellectuals to establish and project their associations with the privileged and powerful that the vocabulary of literary commerce entered into the discourse of literary selfhood in seventeenth-century France. And accordingly, the book trade burst into the Classical-era field not as the result of a growing desire among writers for liberation from their patrons, nor due to its objective expansion, but as it came to circumscribe a recognizable space in which writers’ ties to elite society would be solidified rather than weakened. In this respect, the book trade became an institution of literary life with implications for the legitimacy of writers. Of course, it did so as a negative field. If a language of commerce was invested with significance for the self-presentation of gens de lettres, it was as this language conveyed the writer’s distance from the “market,” and as it meaningfully expressed, in the terms of reluctance, anonymity, and a refusal to profit, the writer’s lack of contact with its agents and procedures. The language nonetheless became meaningful, and through it, the book trade could be envisioned as an authorial field in which literary identities could be constructed.

The Case of Corneille

The case of Corneille illustrates the transformation. The playwright was widely known—and attacked—in his own time for the attention he paid to the commercialization of his plays: “In truth, he is greedier than he is ambitious,” observes Tallement des Réaux, “and so long as he makes money, he does not torment himself about the rest.”³⁵ La Bruyère paints a similar picture: “he only judges the quality of his play by the money that it earns him.”³⁶ Present from the earliest days of his career, such taunts established what would become an enduring image of the playwright’s abiding interest in profit.³⁷ They also provide a backdrop of “traditional” viewpoints against which Corneille’s foresight is contrasted, underscoring his philosophical and material resistance to the entrenched thinking of his age.³⁸ But a closer look at the anti-Corneille invective in its rhetorical context reveals a more complex situation. While the satirical images have been seized by literary history as direct reflections of a reality in which Corneille was more dedicated than others to the commercialization of his works, they can also be read as effects of a willful effort on the part of those generating them to shape—and fit into—a very different cultural reality, one defined not by growing participation in the “literary market” but by the integration of writers into an aristocratic society that for its part was becoming more intellectual and literate. Central to the articulation of this socialization process were images of exclusion from le monde, tendered not as proof of anything that was happening out in the world but as negative paradigms against which writers could affirm their adeptness for elegant society. Active involvement in the commerce of one’s works emerged as an especially clear figuration of social isolation; and by extension, the refusal of commerce became a powerful signal of the writer’s inclusion.

In fact, the most consistent theme in the attacks against Corneille was a critique of what his detractors perceived to be the playwright’s strong sense of his self-sufficiency, manifest in an arrogant willingness to endow on himself the praise that he should have hoped would come from others. The abbé d’Aubignac, a persistent antagonist, castigates the playwright for his tendency to self-consecration: “this title of Great Man that Monsieur Corneille has given himself,” he writes in the third of four dissertations written against the playwright in the 1660s.³⁹ Literary historians have long pointed out that the quarrel erupting after the performance of Le Cid in early 1637, which is generally viewed as a debate over dramaturgical doctrine, was actually triggered not by Corneille’s failure to respect Aristotelian principles of tragic composition, but by his lack of modesty. Specifically, the Querelle was initiated by a poem Corneille circulated in the months following the success of the play, called “Excuse à Ariste,” in which he celebrates his triumph, depicting it as the sole effect of his own talent. He had, in other words, no support or cabal pushing for him, but only his own merit to thank:

Mon travail sans appui monte sur le Théâtre,

Chacun en liberté l’y blâme ou l’idolâtre,

Là sans que mes amis prêchent leurs sentiments

J’arrache quelque fois trop d’applaudissements,

Là content du succès que le mérite donne

Par d’illustres avis je n’éblouis personne,

Je satisfais ensemble et peuple et courtisans,

Et mes vers en tous lieux sont mes seuls partisans.

[My work without support is staged

And each in liberty can attack or idolize it,

There, without my friends preaching their own feelings

I come away sometimes with much applause,

There, happy with the success which merit brings

I do not try to dazzle anyone with the opinions of illustrious individuals,

I please both people and courtiers,

And in all places, my verse is my only partisan.]

Corneille goes on to conclude notoriously (referring back to his verse):

Par leur seule beauté ma plume est estimée

Je ne dois qu’à moi seul toute ma Renommée.⁴⁰

[By its sole beauty, my pen is esteemed

I owe only to myself all of my renown.]

Much of the ensuing polemic consisted in denunciations of this self-affirmation and the personal failing that it expressed. The tone was set by Jean Mairet, a rival playwright who quickly published a rhymed response taking Corneille to task for, as the descriptive title puts it, “A letter in verse, which he has published, entitled ‘Excuse à Ariste,’ in which, after a hundred expressions of vanity, he says about himself, I owe only to myself all of my renown.” The poem begins:

I am speaking to you, Braggart, whose utter audaciousness

Has in recent days been elevated into the sky.⁴¹

The venomous exchange that launched the Querelle might be seen as incidental to the deeper issues at stake; in the words of Armand Gasté, it was a “chance cause, but a first cause.”⁴² Hélène Merlin, however, has recently argued that the dispute over proper comportment for writers was at the core of the debate. She inverts Gasté’s reading by suggesting that it was the doctrinal questions that were secondary, and no more than a pretext for an engagement with overriding matters relating to the place of writers in an evolving court society and to a consequent redefinition of literary practice.⁴³ To be sure, while doctrinal matters will dominate the judgment of the Académie française, which pronounced more or less the final word in the Querelle at the end of 1637—and which has, in turn, deeply influenced historical representations of the affair—when another playwright, Georges de Scudéry, first raised the question of Corneille’s dramaturgical transgressions in an Observations sur le Cid in the spring, it was in response not to Corneille’s failures as a craftsman of tragedies, but to his ethical lapses as an homme de lettres: “when I saw that he had deified himself by his own authority; that he talked about himself as one would normally talk about others, … I thought that I could not, without cowardice and injustice, abandon the common cause.” Otherwise, Scudéry goes on, “I am good and generous; … I had been happy to know the error without refuting it.”⁴⁴

For Scudéry, the questions about doctrine were subordinated to the problem posed by Corneille’s immodesty, and served, above all, as part of a behavioral lesson designed to show how out of line the playwright was. Corneille rooted the celebration of his triumph in the “applause” he references in the “Excuse.” Scudéry then sets out to show the weakness of the public’s judgment; for the audience is ignorant of the art of theater and will be duped by a spectacle, regardless of the genuine quality of the play: “the People who judge with their eyes, allow themselves to be deceived by that sense which is, of all the senses, the easiest to fool.” Only a closer and more expert examination, in light of the “principles and rules of dramatic poetry,” will indicate what a play is really worth. And in the case of Le Cid such analysis unearths serious flaws, which Scudéry enumerates in detail: “That the subject is worth nothing at all; … that it lacks judgment in its construction; that it has a lot of bad verses.”⁴⁵ With the public’s reception delegitimized as a gauge of the play’s quality, Corneille’s high opinion of his own work based on this acclamation no longer has a reasonable basis, but is now revealed to be an effect of self-delusional and ungainly arrogance. Responding to the following lines from Corneille’s “Excuse”:

Et [je] pense toute fois n’avoir point de rival

A qui je fasse tort en le traittant d’égal,

[And I believe that I have no rival

To whom I do wrong by treating him as an equal,]

Scudéry censures the playwright for such misguided pride with a trenchant appraisal of his writing, which illustrates the inseparability of the doctrinal critique from the ethical attack:

Now as to the versification, I admit that it is the best we have seen from this Author. Yet, it is not perfect enough such that he can say himself that he is leaving the earth; that his flight hides him away in the heavens; that he laughs at the despair of those who envy him; and that he has no rival who is not highly honored when he consents to treat him as an equal.⁴⁶

It is in the context of this fierce polemic on Corneille’s arrogance that the classic image of the playwright as excessively invested in the commercialization of his works takes shape, not for the first time, of course, but in an urgent and reinvigorated elaboration. The image is invoked as further proof of Corneille’s ethical failing. For not only did he deign to sing his own praises, Scudéry writes, “he even had the high opinions he has of himself printed.”⁴⁷ In fact, more than as additional evidence, the passage to print is rendered in anti-Corneille tirades as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is a gesture that finally pushes Corneille over the line, whereas until that point he had merely skirted the limit. Le Cid pushed the envelope, yet despite its errors it could be excused. What had to be called out was the unseemly choice to print it. “This, my friend, is why you are generally blamed, not for having written Le Cid with all the irregularities that can be detected throughout,” explains Mairet, “but only for your indiscretion in delivering it so quickly to a bookseller.”⁴⁸ Another pamphleteer similarly contrasts the fatal decisiveness of publication with other less serious missteps: “You have made just two mistakes that cannot be repaired,” affirms the unnamed author, “one, having your play, which was so well-liked on stage, printed; and the other, having responded to he who criticized you.”⁴⁹

In particular, the anti-Corneille polemic constitutes the gesture of commercial publication in two key and interrelated ways. First, print is represented as a privileged medium for Corneille’s moral failings, one that concentrates and channels his greed and self-regard, transforming them from normal everyday moral lapses into something abnormal, excessive and odious. One broadside, possibly by Scarron, denounces the “excess of avarice which made you have Le Cid printed.”⁵⁰ Another lambastes the “freshly ennobled” playwright for projecting his renown “not by acts of valor, but by newspaper hawkers [crieurs de gazettes],” who do not just circulate Corneille’s arrogance in print: “for the past month [they] have pounded the ears of everyone.”⁵¹ Second, as a conduit of his out-of-control amour propre, print becomes a powerful symbol for Corneille’s inattentiveness to the feelings and well-being of others, and thus of the playwright’s lack of sociability. Mairet criticized Corneille’s rush to print Le Cid because in so doing the playwright repudiated his friends and their sage advice to correct his play before publishing it.⁵² Further on, he represents the move as a selfish rebuke of the actors—“those who obliged you by making your Alchemy worth something”—since it denied them the chance to recoup the profits that were their due given that the circulation of the play in print opened up the possibility for other troupes to stage their own performances and compete for an audience.⁵³

Consequently, Corneille’s publication activities will be closely associated with a representation of his social isolation, conveyed through images of the playwright’s gracelessness and outlandishness. Print thus becomes a mechanism for the transformation of the writer as a veritable monster. Jean Claveret’s “modest” concession to Corneille—“I was prepared to grant that you are a greater Poet than I am, without it being necessary for you to use the voices of all the hawkers [Colporteurs] of the Pont-Neuf to announce it all over France”⁵⁴—renders the latter grotesque by the hyperbolic valence of the adjective “all,” repeated twice, and the reference to “France.” He goes on to propose a deal, agreeing to believe in Corneille’s singular talent as a dramatic poet, so long as the author of Le Cid accepts for his part, as the price of his genius, the radical deterioration of his social persona and stature; indeed, so long as he accepts his fundamental unsuitability for le monde, marked in a single gesture by his precipitous departure once he has sold his works:

But recognize in return that you are, in prose, the most impertinent of those who know how to speak, that the coldness and stupidity of your wit are such that your company makes one pity those who must suffer your visits, and that … you pass in high society [le beau monde] as the most ridiculous of all men. These are truths that will always be confirmed among the most honorable people [les plus honnestes gens] of Paris, of both sexes, where stories of your gracelessness are told that make melancholy itself laugh. You have good reason to flee as soon as you have sold your Poetic goods [denrées Poëtiques].⁵⁵

Later admirers of Corneille would spin this by then legendary awkwardness positively as a sign of the playwright’s dedication to the integrity of his work, marked by his lack of interest in the frivolities of high society⁵⁶; and in light of this reinterpretation of his social ineptness, Corneille’s equally mythologized efforts to sell his “Poetic goods” would themselves be revalorized as significant expressions of this seriousness and authorial independence. But such reasoning says far more about later ideals than about anything that might have been going through Corneille’s head as he transacted with libraires or requested letters patent from the administration, or through the minds of his detractors as they pointed derisively to these negotiations. The discourse of the anti-Corneille forces presented a strong connection between a vision of the playwright’s autonomy and his publishing activities. Yet it was a distinctly symbolic association forged by the use of images of Corneille’s commercial literary activities as powerful figurations of his isolation by those who sought, indeed, to isolate him. The rhetoric does not allow us to conclude that Corneille desired this autonomy, and turned to commercial publishing in order to establish the conditions in which he might claim it. In fact, in its polemical aspect, the invective suggests a relation of influence that goes in the exact reverse direction; publishing activities do not lead to autonomy. It is instead the positing of autonomy—or the perception and imputation of a certain type of autonomy manifested in Corneille’s rude and antisocial demeanor—that leads to the production of images in which publishing activities and venal motives are highlighted.

Thus, if Corneille was assailed for not having sufficiently respected his social ties and obligations, it was not because he sought to go it alone in the “market.” The equation goes the other way; a depiction of the playwright seeking to earn his living commercially became current because of his failure to be integrated into le monde. The social isolation was prior to commerce, and had its roots elsewhere, in a natural aversion for court life and in his attachment to older forms of elite selfhood, which he would articulate against the model of the courtier.⁵⁷ To be sure, the self-sufficiency Corneille celebrates in the “Excuse à Ariste” is set against an image of the court poet who goes obsequiously from “Réduit en Réduit” looking for voices of support:

We speak of ourselves with complete frankness [franchise],

False humility does not bring one credit,

I know what I am worth, and believe what I am told of it.⁵⁸

This is the vocabulary of a “feudal” nobility. Radically self-legitimizing, nostalgic, conscious of its vanishing preeminence, and intensely hostile to the emerging culture of the court with its communal, self-inhibiting ethos, this language is spoken in Le Cid by the Comte.⁵⁹ It is, in any case, hardly that of the professional author looking to make a decent living “by the pen.”

Alternative New Realities of Literary Life

All this raises a key question. Given the polemical nature of the connection tying Corneille as an autonomous writer to commercial publishing, what can we say about the underlying reality of the authorial condition? To what extent, in other words, does the association forged by writers such as Mairet and Claveret point to a real “stratégie éditoriale” pursued by Corneille and characterized by an unprecedented focus on property rights and profits? Answers to the question remain speculative in the absence of any direct statement from the playwright himself. It might, though, be fruitful to pose it a little differently; that is, what reality do these images truly reflect? They are normally assumed to indicate the legal and economic reality of the seventeenth-century book trade and commercial theater, in which Corneille’s participation, gauged by the 1643 “Demande de lettres patentes,” was in fact intense compared to that of his contemporaries.⁶⁰ We have, however, observed that other interpretations of the "Demande" are plausible, according to which it reflects not an effort to improve the legal and economic status of the writer, but contemporary theater and court politics.⁶¹ It is worth recalling, moreover, that the lettres patentes for which Corneille applied did not constitute a privilège en librairie, despite being incorporated by Viala and others into the type of historical account of the development of literary property in which the privilège is often highlighted as a key intermediate stage. “Corneille was not simply content to defend his literary property rights to printed editions; in 1643, he tried to advance them durably to the performances of his plays,” contends Viala, seeming to equate the two mechanisms.⁶²

Yet even granting that the lettres patentes might be fully comparable with a privilège, there are still reasons to doubt that the request was so unusual as to be “unheard of at the time.”⁶³ Nicolas Schapira has recently shown that in fact a good portion of seventeenth-century writers, above all, “literary” authors as opposed to those involved in other kinds of writing—scientific, historical, philosophical, theological—asked for and received privilèges for their works in the Classical age, more than is usually assumed.⁶⁴ Studying the records of the bookseller-printer Toussaint Du Bray, who specialized in printing nouveautés littéraires in the early part of the century, Schapira notes that, while only 6.5 percent of his editions were protected by a privilège granted to a writer in the years from 1604 to 1613, between 1624 and 1633 this percentage rose to 26 percent, and by 1634–36 over half his editions had privilèges directly held by the author. “By the end of the century,” concludes Schapira, “the privilège to the author seems to have become the norm”; indeed, a full ten of the fifteen privilèges the bookseller Claude Barbin held in 1680 had initially been requested by and delivered to gens de lettres.⁶⁵

But, Schapira argues, if writers became increasingly interested in privilèges, it was not out of a nascent attachment to intellectual property or profits. It was instead out of a wish to enhance their reputations as gens de lettres inasmuch as they become aware of the effectiveness of the privilège in conveying royal favor. Bearing the king’s seal and the approving words of a royal censor or a secrétaire du roi, and printed by law in every copy of the book, the privilège was appropriated as an especially functional medium for advertising the social, political, and cultural legitimacy of writers before a public that always remained sensitive to the decorum of authorial gestures and was predisposed to receiving a book with a high degree of suspicion toward the individual who would be connected to it as its author.⁶⁶ In his late seventeenth-century biography of Descartes, Adrien Baillet recounts that the philosopher requested a privilège in 1637 for the Discours de la méthode “to mark his love for and perfect submission to the King.” Living in Holland, Descartes was eager to maintain his good standing with the authorities in France. He would in fact be embarrassed by the eulogistic privilège général Marin Mersenne obtained for him from the Conseil du roi.⁶⁷ Indeed, Descartes’s anxiety shows, as well, that the privilège posed dangers if the effort to acquire it was mismanaged, for it might, in upholding an image of the writer’s favor, also shed light on less admirable efforts of ingratiation and self-promotion. François Charpentier’s satirical account of Martin Pinchesne excitedly reading before a circle of friends the text of a privilège recently granted to him, comically eager to impress them with the official esteem that it conveyed, illustrates the risk.⁶⁸

In either case, the intersection of authorship with the privilège system did not manifest the professionalization of literary activities, as many literary histories assume. On the contrary, Charpentier tells another story in which Georges de Scudéry turns to the mechanism in an effort to bolster— perhaps to fabricate—an image of himself as a retired soldier devoting his idle hours to poetry rather than as a writer earning a living from his plays: “Scudéry went to Saint Germain in order to have a privilège issued in his name, in which he has the King say that he commanded Royal Troupes, whereas truthfully, he has never commanded any troupes other than those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, and a few other troupes of provincial actors.”⁶⁹ The privilège pointed in a wholly different direction, and indeed to quite another cultural reality of which the images of Corneille’s involvement in commercial publication might also be a reflection: not the slow progress of the writer toward professional independence but the evolving stakes of literary legitimacy in the 1630s, in the context of what Alain Viala called “the first literary field.”⁷⁰

This reality is characterized at least in part by two decisive developments. On one hand, we have what might be called a socialization of intellectual practices epitomized by the emergence of distinctly social qualities like politeness and honnêteté as essential criteria for the evaluation of writers and their works. More exactly, this socialization was an “aristocratization” of letters, with “société” understood in the seventeenth-century meaning recorded by the dictionary of the Académie française, which accentuates the pleasure of leisured interactions and the exclusivity of elite gatherings.⁷¹ The process was thus one of the integration of writers into the networks and values of social elites, a process mediated by what Viala calls “institutions of literary life,” such as the Académie, court patronage, and salons. These and other similar bodies offered privileged venues and mechanisms for introducing gens de lettres and their writings into “the Court and high society,” where both authors and their productions would be judged according to emerging worldly criteria.⁷² Charles Sorel offers an allegorical account of this “New Parnassus,” describing the Muses leaving “their rustic caves for golden palaces where they frequently lived, having been received by the nobility of the age.” Apollo abandoned Pegasus, “an old horse” and “hideous beast,” for a stylish “Carriage.”⁷³

At the same time, the elite assimilation of letters was matched by a reciprocal process, a “literary” transformation and redefinition of noble society and identity. We can understand this in two ways. First is the manner described by Delphine Denis, who, in her excavation of the intellectual production of midcentury salon society—“l’archive galante”—highlights the “aestheticization” of a self-consciously rarefied community, according to which the participation of its members consists in efforts to please the others through impressions made by dress, gestures, and language.⁷⁴ These individuals become like works of art, to recall the analysis of Domna Stanton, defining themselves as objects of contemplation.⁷⁵ Yet the pleasure they offer resides in their capacity to focus the attention of others not on their own éclat, but on their beauty as a direct reflection of the excellence of the group and its dynamic. They represent its interactivity and thus its cohesiveness.

This “aestheticization” is as a result fundamentally linguistic, and not only to the degree that the charming exchanges of the group are to be perceived above all in its conversations and correspondences, but also insofar as language—indeed, written language—becomes the primary medium of this representation. Schapira points out that, as a site of refined social and cultural exchange, the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and by extension the “salon,” is as much a discursive construct mythologized by writers who celebrated it as an actual space carved out by the marquise through architectural design.⁷⁶ In this respect, the “salon” is a rewriting of reality through the diffusion of textual depictions, often in letters but also in printed items such Madeleine de Scudéry’s romances, which shape and channel the hopes, anxieties, and choices of those who then seek to situate themselves within this space. Both the “court” and the “Académie française” would circulate in printed media as the sublimated images of a “real” context, whose history they tell,⁷⁷ and which they claim faithfully to imitate—in a 1678 letter to her friend Lescheraine, Madame de Lafayette famously deemed the princesse de Clèves “a perfect imitation of the Court”—but whose perfection and thus authority as institutions legislating social, cultural, and intellectual norms they in fact postulate and impose. The elevation of the “court” and the “salon” as central institutions of literary life in the mid-seventeenth century would depend on this “production of belief” through writing and print in their authority to discern and elevate the good and to exclude the bad.⁷⁸

Which brings us to the second way in which we might understand the “literary” transformation of elite identity; that is, in terms of the growing importance of writing for those who lay claim to the distinction of being noble.⁷⁹ This development grows out of a broader phenomenon: the role played by language itself as a medium of self-expression for a “modern” aristocracy that sought to distinguish itself not only from non-elites but also from a nobility identified with an earlier age, whose coarseness and vulgarity provided a countermodel against which a new elegant “salon” society oriented itself. In the early decades of the century, Rambouillet had created her “théâtre de … divertissements” as a kind of private refuge from the barbaric court of Henri IV: “She said that she found nothing pleasant there.”⁸⁰ The refinement of the pastimes that occupied its participants compared with the amusements of the Louvre—they were the most gallant and polite, to recall Tallement—was in large part the effect of their linguistic nature; for they mobilized intellectual skills not physical dexterity, and thereby reflected an elevation of its noble practitioners who expressed themselves in elegant phrases rather than in feats of strength and prowess. Sorel registers the further development of the linguistic turn in his 1664 La bibliothèque françoise. Surveying works that “deal with [its] purity,” he represents the ascendancy of language as a distinct innovation in elite life: “Today,” he stresses, “we take those who speak French badly to be men of lowly condition and little wit.” Relative to older markers of social superiority, language imposed new imperatives on those who would fashion themselves according to the cultural ethic of mondanité: “One must learn politeness and polish in language [la politesse du langage], as much as in composure, or in the way of dressing and in everything that appears on the exterior.”⁸¹

Sorel emphasizes speaking; but writing was a critical part of the trend. In his treatise from 1630 on “l’honnête homme,” adapted from Castiglione’s Renaissance sketch of the courtier, Nicolas Faret counsels the political and socially ambitious “to develop a good writing style, including for serious matters, for compliments, for love, and for so many other subjects the occasions for which arise everyday at the court. He continues, “those who do not have this facility can never aspire to great functions [grands emplois].”⁸² Faret admittedly focused on official kinds of writing—memoirs and letters—and considered belles-lettres—poetry and other “literary” forms—to be “more agreeable than necessary.”⁸³ Three decades later, however, Molière’s nobleman and would-be poet Oronte from Le Misanthrope would speak to the necessity of “literary” writing for those claiming a rightful place in le monde. Indeed, this is what the central character of the play, Alceste, really hates in Oronte’s sonnet; not so much the bad verse in and of itself, but the idea that he offers it as a privileged expression of his honnêteté.

Monsieur, cette matière est toujours délicate,

Et sur le bel esprit nous aimons qu’on nous flatte.

Mais un jour, à quelqu’un, dont je tairerai le nom,

Je disais, en voyant des vers de sa façon,

Qu’il faut qu’un galant homme ait toujours grand empire

Sur les démangeaisons qui nous prennent d’écrire.⁸⁴

[Sir, these are delicate matters; we all desire

To be told that we’ve the true poetic fire.

But once, to one whose name I shall not mention,

I said, regarding some verse of his invention,

That gentlemen should rigorously control

The itch to write which often afflicts the soul.]

Ordered to testify before the King’s Marshals in a dispute that, for Oronte, has escalated into an affaire d’honneur, Alceste justifies his criticism by pointing out that he did not call into doubt Oronte’s personal credibility as an “honnête homme” in questioning his skills as a poet; after all, what could possibly be the connection?

De quoi s’offense-t-il? Et que veut-il me dire?

Y va-t-il de sa gloire à ne pas bien écrire?

Que lui fait mon avis, qu'il a pris de travers?

On peut être honnête homme et faire mal des vers:

Ce n’est point à l’honneur que touchent ces matières;

Je le tiens galant homme en toutes les manières,

Homme de qualité, de mérite et de coeur,

Tout ce qu’il vous plaira, mais fort méchant auteur.⁸⁵

[His verse is bad, extremely bad, in fact.

Surely it does the man no harm to know it.

Does it disgrace him, not to be a poet?

A gentleman may be respected still,

Whether he writes a sonnet well or ill.

That I dislike his verse should not offend him;

He’s noble, brave, and virtuous—but I fear

He can’t in truth be called a sonneteer.]

At the same time, Alceste does not hesitate to praise other activities and aspects of the courtier:

Je louerai, si l’on veut, son train et sa dépense,

Son adresse à cheval, aux armes, à la danse;⁸⁶

[I’ll gladly praise his wardrobe; I’ll endorse

His dancing, or the way he sits on a horse;]

not because, it would seem, Oronte is any better at these; we have no indication at all that he is a more talented horseman, swordsman, or dancer than a poet. But for Alceste these represent traditional vehicles of aristocratic self-expression and established forms for advancing claims to social and cultural preeminence. Writing poetry, on the other hand, does not: “But, gentlemen, I cannot praise his rhyme.”⁸⁷

Signifying his preference for older practices over new and thus his outdatedness—Philinte repeatedly describes his friend as being out of touch with “the ways of the time [les moeurs du temps]”—Alceste’s antipathy correlatively measures the recent nature of writing’s rise as a medium for the projection of personal quality, contrasted against a set of more obviously traditional activities, with the startling ascendancy of this medium, its surging importance, further reflected in Oronte’s decision to take the matter before the King’s justice. Moreover, it is not only Oronte’s desire to write poetry that is in dispute but more specifically, his intention to circulate the sonnet. Oronte’s approach to the Misanthrope was not just about getting the latter’s feedback but about securing his approbation before “going public” with his verse:

Et, comme votre esprit a de grandes lumières,

Je viens, pour commencer entre nous ce beau noeud,

Vous montrer un sonnet que j’ai fait depuis peu,

Et savoir s’il est bon qu’au public je l’expose.⁸⁸

[Since you have such fine judgment, I intend

To please you, if I can, with a small sonnet

I wrote not long ago. Please comment on it,

And tell me whether I ought to publish it.]

In other words, the activity in question is not simply the honnête writing of a poem but its honnête publication with the requisite inscription of the act of “faire paraître” in a friendship that would compel and authorize it. And clearly what is being figured by “exposer au public” here is publication in print; Alceste’s questions suggest that there is no ambiguity on this point:

Quel besoin si pressant avez-vous de rimer?

Et qui diantre, vous pousse à vous faire imprimer?⁸⁹

[What pressing need do you have to compose rhymes?

And what on earth pushes you to have them printed?]

Reimagined in this way, and invested with a newfound significance for the construction of an identity whose status would be a function of its positioning at the intersections of “literary” and aristocratic life, the print publication of writing was, however, defined by two problems that would fundamentally orient its seventeenth-century practice. First, in having their works printed, writers who aspired to elite social standing ran the risk of projecting not their intelligence or their ennobling esprit, but an arrogant belief in the enduring value of their self-expression such that it deserved the permanence of ink. The danger of publication was, in other words, the danger of publishing nothing more than one’s inflated self-esteem. And indeed, central to the figuration of the “Author” in this period, as this denoted the activity of “bringing to light [mettre en lumière]” a book, was a collection of attributes that were all acute symptoms of the ethical flaw of amour-propre.⁹⁰ In the passage to print, the author was assumed to be driven by vanity, pride, greed, and jealousy. Thus Boileau counseled aspiring poets, “Rid yourself … of authorial arrogance.”⁹¹ To publish was to confront moral opprobrium, a fact that Boisrobert makes clear in the avis to the 1659 reedition of his Epîtres en vers: “I know that I have been accused in high society [dans le Monde] of not neglecting myself in the love that one ordinarily has for oneself and for one’s works.”⁹² Consequently, expressions of modesty downplaying the merit of one’s writing as well as one’s role in its publication were essential. These, of course, abound in the writings of the period, and countless examples could be given. “In all ways, Reader, you are very little obliged to me. I am giving you a rather bad work, and I am only giving it to you with regret,” La Calprenède affirms in the preface to an edition of his 1637 tragedy, La mort de Mithridate, explaining his embarrassment as an “ignorant soldier” to be distributing an unworthy text, and that he did so only once he knew that unauthorized copies, “with two thousand mistakes,” had began to circulate.⁹³

Second, publication might imply that one appealed to a broader public than the audience gathered at court or in the salon, and no doubt more crucially, that one addressed this public as a stranger to it. That is, the move to print introduced an image of the writer elaborated through a sharp differentiation with the reader, one understood spatially, of course, inasmuch as publication bridged but also called attention to the distance separating the two figures. But this distance indicated another separation, which delineated against a collective of readers the solitary, isolated figure of an author who stood apart not simply in space but by talent and genius as well. The cultural logic of honnêteté required, however, that gens de lettres project their integration into groups defined by concentration not expansion, and that they offer their writings neither as vehicles of individual brilliance nor as the effects of their distance from readers but as emblems of their self-effacing participation in the collective venture of polite society.

How, though, might a medium so effective in telescoping a self beyond one’s normal interpersonal networks bring the opposite result of focusing one’s presence within them? Writers had recourse to a number of established strategies: they could inscribe within the work itself the elite group as intended audience and inspiration by the prefatory reference to a circle of friends for whom they had initially produced, and who then convinced them to publish the text or even took it upon themselves to do so; they could restrict the work’s circulation, either by a small print run and stringent control over the distribution of copies—in his 1650 edition of Voiture’s Oeuvres, Martin Pinchesne stresses the “few copies that were printed”⁹⁴—or symbolically by the incorporation into the work of a system of codes, keys, or references targeted to an exclusive group of readers who, knowing the allusions, drew from the text a meaning and a satisfaction that was specific to them and denied to a wider public for whom the references remained opaque and the text frustrating; and finally, they could root the work’s publication in the oral social practices of the court and the salon—or more exactly in a representation of those oral practices that conceived the printed work as derivative of and a prop to the urbane culture of conversations and group readings “à haute voix,”⁹⁵ and writing as the image of speech.⁹⁶

The Perils and Possibilities of Print in the First Literary Field

Providing an alternative backdrop to the conventional image of Corneille as a commercially oriented writer, this other social and cultural reality was constituted by the emergence of print publication as a gesture opening up critical possibilities for aspirants seeking to mobilize their intellectual capital in the quest for enhanced social status. The opportunities had little to do with making money or exercising rights, and even less with the prospect of independence from noble society. At the same time, the alternative reality was characterized by the evolution of publishing as a tremendously fraught act, which extended fatal dangers: “printing is the pitfall [l’écueil],” wrote La Bruyère.⁹⁷ Indeed, publication appeared to subsume and intensify all the defining paradoxes of life in le monde: how to construct a self that would be admired for its humility; how to stand out through self-effacement before the group; and how to command attention by seeking to deflect it away.

In this respect, the act of “faire imprimer” presented to those who sought to write their way into high society, or consolidate their positions within it, the daunting prospect of a very fine line, with little separating success from failure, grace from inept self-promotion, and thus social integration from exclusion and isolation. In the avis to his Epîtres, Boisrobert affirms his modesty against those who questioned it by pointing out that he suppressed from the second edition “the praise which the most famous wits of the time lavished on the first volume.”⁹⁸ But, wanting to valorize the quality of his intellect and his favorability in the eyes of eminent judges of talent, he does not suppress the reference to their existence, a fact that then seems to render the “modest” gesture heavy-handed and forced. The effort was too perceptible and as a result open to ridicule for its apparent hypocrisy. In fact, Tallement’s portrait of Boisrobert will not be kind, recounting the reaction of the comte d’Estrée to Boisrobert’s 1657 Nouvelles héroïques et amoureuses. Remembering the backlash against Corneille, and “seeing that Boisrobert spoke about these Nouvelles as of something beautiful, [the comte] took it upon himself to write a long letter in which he warns Boisrobert, without naming himself, of all the things in his book with which one might find fault.”⁹⁹

But in its postulation of such a fine line, publication also envisioned a vital way to take on the paradoxes of elite intellectual sociability; for it offered the idea of a reconciliation between the seemingly contradictory imperatives of mondanité. Indeed, it was conceived as a medium that was amenable to the projection of a sublimated intelligence, socialized as the ennobling quality of esprit. To be sure, the endeavor was more prone to fail than to succeed. Above all, it was rare that there would be consensus on an individual’s self-presentation through print, and publication revealed itself to be a tremendously heated point of contestation, open to challenge at every turn. Yet if publication became a contentious affair, this speaks not simply to the profound ambivalence of the gesture in the context of seventeenth-century polite society, but also to the fact that the stakes were high and getting higher, as the act of “faire paraître [a book of poem]” was invested with significance for elite life, becoming perhaps the primary medium for advancing claims to elite social status, particularly for those seeking to base that claim on intelligence rather than blood, strength, or fortune. It is in this ascendancy, one can argue, that literary life takes shape. For the rise of print publication as a remarkably effective conduit for the assertion and reflection of social prestige represents one key index of the formation of the “first literary field,” as Alain Viala defined it.

Viala describes a process by which a subset of intellectual practices— namely belles-lettres, referring to a set of creative activities identified by the fact that they are undertaken in view of offering what might be called “aesthetic” pleasure, though they are also closely tied to the pleasures of “society”¹⁰⁰—was distinguished within the broader field of “letters” as they were concentrated in particular spaces—courts, academies, and salons— recognized as privileged sites for their undertaking and appreciation, as well as for the judgment of those engaged in them. According to Viala, the process was one of “autonomization.” However, autonomization is a loaded and multivalent term, as we have seen, which functions at a number of different levels. It can refer to the autonomy of the “aesthetic,” indicating an activity whose end is its own contemplation and enjoyment. It might also point to the autonomy of a discipline whose coherence is recognized and institutionalized, for instance, in a system of prizes or in a pedagogical program.¹⁰¹ Finally, the term can refer to the autonomy of a series of practices viewed together as a sufficient basis for a distinct, coherent, and even valorized social identity, one able as such to support the individual economically and symbolically. It is no doubt this sense that Viala has in mind when he writes, “literary activity has at its disposal a certain autonomy within social structures, and possibilities of work and compensation which are specific to it.”¹⁰²

It would be a mistake, though, to understand the term here in what is certainly its more modern and intuitive signification. For the autonomy of the first literary field had little to do with freedom from the control of the politically powerful and the socially dominant. On the contrary, it was a function of the ascendancy of cultural institutions that were created at the initiative of elites and operated under their stewardship, bringing writers into their orbit rather than out of it. Christian Jouhaud has recently traced what he subtitles “the history of a paradox,” according to which the “growing autonomy” of writers in the Classical age was possible only as the outcome of their growing dependence on authorities. Drawn into relationships of service with patrons and the state, they were made directly subordinate, to be sure. Yet their expanding role in the exercise of political power as propagandists and normalizers of language, as well as in the elaboration of a self-consciously “modern” elite social culture, was at the same time acknowledged and institutionalized, thereby rendering the social identity of writer not just legitimate but desirable, prestigious, and lucrative, and sufficient.¹⁰³ For their part, the gens de lettres of the period consistently conveyed a sense of their own “freedom of expression” as a direct function of their subjecthood vis-à-vis a prince, or of their subservience in strongly hierarchical relations of protection. “I am born free, and we live under the domination of a Prince who lets us peacefully enjoy an honorable license to do as we please,” writes d’Aubignac, justifying the printing of his third Dissertation against Corneille.¹⁰⁴ Such “liberty” was construed as a benefit of the writer’s presence in a rapport that spoke to his or her elevation and legitimacy, and thus to his or her prerogative to speak the personalized language of belles-lettres, which celebrated the self in its connections to a tight-knit and highly exclusive community of exceptional individuals. In the éloge to Voiture with which he prefaces his edition of the poet’s Oeuvres, Pinchesne calls attention to Voiture’s “too familiar” style in his letters and poems to nobles: “he had acquired this privilege by his habit of interacting in this way with the most noble individuals, and by the liberty that they themselves allowed him.”¹⁰⁵

As a result, patronage and service to political and social elites were more likely to be experienced as an opening up of possibilities for “literary” self-expression rather than as a limitation on them. And it is in this opening that seventeenth-century “court writers” located their autonomy, the most powerful figuration of which lay in an image of leisure manifesting their now enhanced standing.¹⁰⁶ This leisure was represented as the crucible of their writing and, in turn, transformed the writing by infusing it with prestige and cachet. Offered as a backdrop to the activities of composing epistles, poems, plays, and prose romances, it rendered the various practices of belles-lettres as credible reflections of their privileged status, and therefore as the vehicles of plausible claims to “noble” identities.¹⁰⁷ The “autonomization” of belles-lettres—and we could add, echoing Timothy Reiss, the invention of “literature”¹⁰⁸—might be gauged by the extent to which such practices became, through the elevation of esprit as a marker of personal quality, sufficient for establishing valorized identities insofar as they were able, in and of themselves, to situate gens de lettres in social milieus where their ennobled selves would be recognized as such: Voiture’s “facility of intellect,” Pinchesne pointed out, “led him to be warmly welcomed by the highest noblemen and princes of the court.”¹⁰⁹

Put another way, the “autonomization” of the first literary field consisted in the process by which the activities of belles-lettristic writing and publishing, as these increasingly opened opportunities for service to political and social authorities, also increasingly afforded possibilities for individuals to represent themselves as integrated into the elite. Expressing gratitude to the Académie for its final judgment in the Querelle du Cid, Scudéry writes: “It is not in the mass of people nor in the cave of a loner that one must seek sovereign reason; it is where I have always found it, that is, in a society of excellent individuals.”¹¹⁰ By dint of their service, they were able to project themselves into a state of leisure that was at the same time a respite from the weighty responsibilities that had come with their social ascension and the underlying reality of their day-to-day existence in the upper reaches of the hierarchy. This leisure was then reinterpreted as the cause rather than the effect of their writing; it was offered as a condition that, in allowing them to “do as they please,” freed them to write, with “freedom” understood not as a “lifting of barriers” but as a “privilege” or “entitlement” ensuing from their high social position. Scudéry depicts himself in his prefaces as a retired soldier having once served the king in battle but now with time to kill: “Poetry is for me an agreeable entertainment, and not a serious occupation,” he writes in the preface to his 1631 tragicomedy Ligdamon et Lidias. “If I write verse, it is because I do not know what else to do.”¹¹¹ Such a stance, of course, downplays any hint of professionalism; and as he would do in the course of the Querelle, Scudéry affects insouciance toward his writing, which contributes to the sense of an identity rooting itself not in any intellectual practice but in his past as a former commander of Royal troops. Poems and plays were no more than side occupations for a now idle man of the sword:

You will easily overlook the mistakes that I have missed, if you realize that … I’ve spent more years amongst arms than hours in my study, and used far more wick firing an harquebus than burning a candle; such that I know better how to arrange soldiers than dialogue.¹¹²

Scudéry was called out on this posturing, as we have seen.¹¹³ But while it was challenged, the image gained credibility. In the polemics of the Querelle, the motif of Scudéry as a soldier who battled heroically for the common cause insinuates itself not only into his own writing but into the language of other anti-Corneille pamphleteers as well. Surprised by Corneille’s attack against him, Claveret imputes it to “a remainder of pride that the arms of the Observateur du Cid [Scudéry] have not yet been able destroy.”¹¹⁴ Mairet brings the militaristic imagery into sharper focus, recounting a critical assault on Le Cid in which “Monsieur de Scudéry slashed twenty times with his sword into its body.”¹¹⁵ Against the arrogance of Corneille, Scudéry offers the model of a viable, honnête intellectual autonomy that was established in two moves: first, a rhetorical inversion by which Scudéry’s “literary” practices are presented as the reflections of his military service and hence of his aristocratic identity, whereas it is really his “service” as a commander of troops and by extension his “noble” self that are the emanations of his writing and publishing activities; and second, the imposition of this inverted relationship into certain quasi-official discourses such as dedications and privilèges, and consequently onto a small but crucial public willing to buy into it—if not fully, since there were many within that public who sought to unveil the artifice of the reversal, then at least somewhat. But no doubt, this was the best for which one could realistically hope. For in the context of the “first literary field” what was at stake was less the undisputed recognition of a “literary” identity than its recognizability, and the possibility that it could be claimed and defended. Opposition not only went without saying but was in the end essential to this recognizability.

“Corneille,” the Book Trade, and Honnête Publication

Commercial print publication became one of the first literary field’s central institutions as it was perceived to open up this honnête autonomy to writers. In this respect, the book trade found its coherence and shape for seventeenth-century cultural life not by offering writers an escape from dependence on aristocratic patrons but in the manner of other formations such as academies and salons, that is, insofar as it offered a medium for the invention and projection of an identity that would be legitimized, valorized, and thus freed to speak by the integration of the intellectual into le monde. It entered into the mental landscape of writers as an “institution of literary life” to the extent that writers appropriated commercial print as a mechanism of their elite acculturation, which in the spaces of self-presentation defined by the printed text—prefaces, dedications, notes to readers, introductory letters, privilèges, and letters patent—facilitated the illustration of their sociability, quality, and esprit.

Correlatively, while we are inclined to assess writers’ early contacts with the book trade as implicit, primitive, and indirect claims to “literary property” or payments, the reality is that these contacts came to play meaningful roles in the literary lives of Classical-era gens de lettres insofar as they were converted into devices and tropes for fashioning, controlling, and polishing their images as honnêtes gens before the elite public from whom they sought their consecration. Even when they expressed proprietary sentiments. Saint-Amant justified the publication of his Oeuvres in 1629 by indicating in the preface his fear that counterfeit copies would circulate if an authorized version did not. The gesture is open to interpretation as a “modern” claim to the ownership of his writing. It is, though, appropriated by the poet not as an assertion of his individual rights but in an effort to find and maintain that fine line between modesty and distinction that was essential to honnête self-presentation. Hence the deep ambivalence of a gesture offered in the end as an expression of both self-effacement and self-promotion, with Saint-Amant initially submitting his concern about pirated copies as evidence of his humility:

The just vexation that I have when I see the many small poets impudently claiming items that they have stolen from works appearing in my name, and the fear I have that some provincial bookseller would have the gall to print these items without my consent, as they have threatened to do, are what have led me to try to beat them to it [printing my poems], rather than any desire I have to acquire in this way glory.

He goes on, though, to suggest that there is in fact nothing wrong with seeking renommée through print. “It is a somewhat too scrupulous philosophy,” he writes of the critical view condemning print publication as vainglorious and uncouth, “that not one of those who preach it would observe it if he had written something worthy of being printed.”¹¹⁶ Saint-Amant’s tack gives his anxiety a distinct resonance, for the stakes are not determined by a writer’s desire to ensure the integrity of his text as an authentic expression of his innermost thoughts. Presumed to be a “natural,” defining authorial desire, the latter motive orients most understandings of the proprietary claims of intellectuals to their writings. But those of Saint-Amant are determined by a wholly different aspiration: the desire for social legitimacy as shaped by the dynamic of a self-consciously “modern,” intellectualized aristocratic culture. It is in this framework that Saint-Amant’s proprietary feelings are conceived and expressed: not as a constrained or embarrassed desire that would be more freely and forcefully articulated if the writer were not so held back by heterogeneous considerations of decorum, but rather as a visible, significant, powerful vehicle of affect and value, which allows the writer, though self-denigration and modesty, to lay strong direct claims to the credibility of the honnête homme.

The negativity of the commercial rhetoric in the self-presentation of Classical-era writers speaks less to the weakness or awkwardness of these writers’ assertions of preeminence than to the complexity of the book trade as an institution that enabled such claims. In this respect commercial publication must be distinguished from those other institutions of literary life—academies, salons, and so forth—with which it nonetheless shares the twofold agenda of integrating intellectuals into aristocratic society and providing le monde with the venues and media for its linguistic reinvention. For while, say, the “salon” as a cultural institution points above all to a specific type of refined, intellectualized sociability into which writers sought to insinuate themselves as they pursued their renown, it also happens to describe an actual space and a real event in an aristocratic household that they might frequent in the effort. As a result, the “salon” is a relatively intuitive concept, in spite of the fact that the conflation of “worldly sociability [sociabilité mondaine]” as a cultural system with the concrete practices of elite sociability can lead to confusion.¹¹⁷

But as it is institutionalized, manifesting the rise of writing and print as social practices and vehicles of personal quality and elite status, the book trade refers, by contrast, to a space from which the writer is absent. It could, in fact, be argued that it is in and through the staged withdrawal of the writer from its sphere that la librairie can be said paradoxically to have been transformed as an institution of literary life, one in which writers might acquire recognized identities as gens de lettres and honnêtes gens, along with the autonomy to write in an ennobling leisure signaled—or even constituted— in the evocation of this disappearance: “[I] have no other goal in this work than the sole desire to please myself: for far from being mercenary, the printer and the actors will bear witness to the fact that I did not sell them that for which they could not pay me,” writes Scudéry in the preface to Ligdamon et Lidias.¹¹⁸

In light of this, Corneille’s pivotal place in the history of writers and publishing becomes more intricate; he was not just a heroic “precursor” who alone among the gens de lettres of the period became aware of his rights and interests as an author, and then took the initiative to act on this awareness. He also came to play an integral role in the staging of this withdrawal as a negative model: “Really, if your writings are remembered by posterity, the fruit that they derive from this will be marvelous,” wrote Claveret, “but it will be in the manner that the Lacedemonians got their slaves drunk, in order to foster a horror of drunkenness among their citizens.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, for those seeking to affirm their absence from the book trade as evidence of their honnêteté, Corneille offered the stark counterexample of presence. His self-promoting rush to publish—“nobody twisted your arm to hasten you into publishing your mistakes with a royal privilège”¹²⁰—and to inhabit the sphere of the book trade in order to try to valorize his identity there was elaborated as a foil against which his detractors could portray their publication activities as symptoms not of their own desire for status and fame, though of course they were this, but of their restraint and selfless dedication to the collective. In his Observations, Scudéry points out that, having had no intention to criticize publicly Le Cid despite his reservations about its doctrinal correctness, he felt obliged to make a statement only out of a sense of duty to the community of honnêtes gens, whose core values were assailed by Corneille’s celebration of self: “I thought that I could not without injustice and cowardice abandon the common cause.”¹²¹ Claveret, too, plays up his gracious reluctance to get involved through a sharp contrast with Corneille’s eagerness to jump into the fray: “I am not happy that a remark so unfavorable to you must come from my pen, and that I am reduced to this shameful necessity of circulating my letter by the same means that you used in order to sell [débiter] your attacks.”¹²²

Corneille’s presence in the publishing world, not as an objective “reality” but as the emblematic figure of an overly strong personal investment in publishing, and therefore of an authorial arrogance and singularity that the honnête writer had to avoid, is ultimately what, in the context of the premier champ littéraire, “commercialization” denotes. It develops, in other words, as a polemical articulation of the self-interest and vanity of writers, to the degree that these moral attributes are rendered particularly visible and readable in their engagements with the commercial production of their writings. It makes sense that writers who emphasized their reluctance to publish in upholding their honnête integration into le monde would be remembered for their resistance before a mounting outside force. But in positing the commerce of letters as an “objective” phenomenon existing independently of its repudiation by honnête writers, such an appraisal obscures the fact that resistance to the book trade was, paradoxically, the framework in which literary commerce took form in the seventeenth century as a viable, which is to say, a conceivable albeit illegitimate authorial mode.

These writers would, by the same token, also be remembered for their attachment to “old-fashioned” practices, attitudes, and values; correlatively, their “anticommercialism” would become one of the identifying traits of their archaicness. Yet this brings to light a historical contradiction, in the context of which the following chapters will situate the formation of the “literary market.” For in the 1630s it was Corneille who, as a bad example, pointed not to the future but to the past, and it was his adversaries who fought beneath the banner of modernization. Those who attacked Corneille for his publishing activities did so not out of respect for tradition but in the name of a progress represented in their minds by the reciprocal integration of writers into aristocratic society and intellectualization of court culture.¹²³ The abbé d’Aubignac criticizes the playwright for not being up to date with current tastes. He chose violent and fantastic subjects such as that of Oedipus, which might have pleased an audience from an earlier, more vulgar age, one still plunged “in that old ignorance which [Corneille] had up to this point found indulgent toward his first mistakes,” but which no longer amused the polite society of midcentury: “it is better to adapt oneself to one’s time when one wants to please,” he writes, warning Corneille to conform to the “values of our century.”¹²⁴ In this reversed dialectic, “commerce,” too, rather than “anti-commerce,” is associated with being behind the times. Corneille’s “eagerness to profit” functions in the Querelle much like his “thirty years of schooling” or his crude Norman patois, namely as the sign of his backwardness.¹²⁵ Underscoring editorial activities that manifest this lack of honnêteté inasmuch they give expression to his vanity and unbridled self-importance, “commerce” indicates not Corneille’s prescient transcendence of the domination of lettres by nobility but the fact that he has yet to enter into this transformative relationship with elites. It places him at the beginning of a process not looking ahead to the end. Described by Mairet as a “clerk’s move [pas de clerc],” his involvement in publication points to an older humanistic model, to an older, coarser nobility that would have better appreciated his out-of-date subjects, and indeed to an earlier time whose real coherence consists in the simple fact that it precedes the elegant fusion of social and linguistic practices that lies at the heart of the new social system of mondanité. Far from a future independence, Corneille’s interventions into the book trade, played up in the polemical writings of his enemies, designate a “prehistory” against which the court elites and salon poets of midcentury would articulate a sense of their own progressiveness.

What is more, this alternative narrative inverts the causal relation between commerce and modernity that is normally posited by the account of the heroic precursor asserting rights. In a standard telling, the expansion of literary commerce induces modernity by offering gens de lettres the material conditions for their social liberation. Commerce in this view operates as an external force that bends and alters the “traditional” practices, attitudes, and institutions of Old Regime literary life according to its own logic. In the confrontation between patronage and the book trade, it is almost always assumed that the latter, in opening up the space of the “literary market,” undermines the former as the opportunities extended by commercial print draw writers away from their rich and powerful sponsors, toward new liberated modes of authorship.

But the story that seventeenth-century writers tell of their own transformation suggests a different sequence, according to which commercialization is not a cause but an effect. As it erupts into the Querelle, for instance, “commerce” is not an objective driving force of change, but a subjective valuation reflecting the social and intellectual evolution that is the institutionalization of the first literary field. In this respect, “commercialization” is not the result of the mounting interest of writers in commercial payments and property rights, as Viala argued.¹²⁶ Rather, it is the expression of a new kind of social judgment of gens de lettres, articulated in the diffusion of images of writers according a disproportionate place to their concrete, motivated involvement in publication. Tallement rehearses in detail the terms of a contract that Jean Chapelain received from the bookseller Courbé for La Pucelle—3,000 livres plus 150 copies including “several which, because of the paper and the binding, cost 10 écus and more.” Commerce surges into the world of letters in this portrait, but not because Chapelain was in fact more involved than other writers in the sale of his works to publishers, or involved in a way that others had never been. Rather, it bursts in as a transparent and powerful signifier of negativity, invoked to complete what is already a critical portrait of an individual whose stature and reputation Tallement wants to undermine.¹²⁷

Finally, it is worth spelling out what is implicit in this analysis, since it will be central to what follows in the next chapters. Literary commerce is not only the effect of a social judgment; it is also, by this same token, the invention of that in the name of which the judgment is pronounced: namely, the cultural ethic of mondanité. And in this respect “literary commerce” does not refer to a natural, instinctive, or primal phenomenon. The tendency, though, in studying the historic role of publication in the evolution of literary practices has been to construe “commercialized” gestures—the demand for direct payment in exchange for works or the claim to property rights— as the manifestations of “true” desires expressive of the fundamental nature of the Author. By contrast, “anticommercial” moves—refusing payment or neglecting rights—are considered to be affected and constrained gestures reflecting incidental desires, such as those for recognition from social and political benefactors, desires assumed to be functions more of the contingent circumstances in which the writer operates than of anything essential to the nature of writing and Authorship. As a result, writers “automatically” move into the market of their own free will once they have the chance, but they enter into patronage relations only because they have to, for lack of an alternative. Commerce is then associated with “liberation” inasmuch as it is considered to furnish writers with just such a possibility, thereby allowing them to act on those defining drives, which had been repressed and disfigured by a symbolic order imposing on literary life a decorum seen as “artificial” since it reflects “nonliterary,” heterogeneous ideals and values.

In the discourses of seventeenth-century literary selfhood, however, the opposition of “true” to accidental desires is exactly inverted. Here, “literary commerce” points to a disfiguration, not of the author, to be sure, but of the social function of the homme de lettres as imagined within the cultural configuration of le monde. And the desire for property rights and droits d’auteur are neither “true” nor “natural” but are the constructs of this symbolic order. Rather than discovered, they are invented as possible modes of writing and literary selfhood, which, driven by authorial self-interest and impoliteness, will offer a counterpoint to legitimacy. This symbolic constitution of “literary commerce” will be critical for gens de lettres of the eighteenth century, for as we will see, they turn to la librairie less for the economic and legal conditions of a social liberation that they will hardly find, but to position themselves vis-à-vis elite society, either within it following patterns inherited from the Classical age or outside of it, according to newer ideals that will root the legitimacy of writers in their sincerity, seriousness, and devotion to truth. It is the argument of this book that the “literary market” as a cultural field grows as much out of the seventeenth-century investment of the “commerce of letters” with meaning for the identity and authority of the intellectual, as out of the economic development of the publishing industry.