Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France 9780674053984

Citation preview

Harvard Historical Studies • 167 Published under the auspices of the Department of History from the income of the Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest Robert Louis Stroock Fund Henry Warren Torrey Fund

Lost Illusions the p olitics of publishing in nineteenth- century fr ance

Christine Haynes

harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2010

Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haynes, Christine. Lost illusions : the politics of publishing in nineteenth-century France / Christine Haynes. p. cm.—(Harvard historical studies ; 167) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03576-8 (alk. paper) 1. Publishers and publishing—Political aspects—France—History—19th century. 2. Book industries and trade—France—History—19th century. I. Title. Z305.H39 2010 070.50944'09034—dc22 2009011225

For Mark

My poor boy, like you I came here with my heart full of illusions, spurred on by the love of art, swept forwards by an invincible yearning for fame. I soon discovered the hard facts of the writer’s trade, the difficulty of getting into print and the brutal reality of poverty. My enthusiasm, now deflated, and the effervescence of those early days made me blind to the mechanism which keeps the world moving: I had to see it in action, get caught up in the works, run foul of the shafts, get coated with grease and listen to the rattle of chains and flywheels. You will find out as I did that underneath your beautiful dream-world is the turmoil of men, passions and needs. —Étienne Lousteau to Lucien Chardon, in Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–1843)

Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: The Dawn of the Information Marketplace

1

1 The Birth of the Publisher

14

2 The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

48

3 Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

92

4 The Cercle de la Librairie

120

5 Louis Hachette and the Defense of the Publisher

154

6 The Divorce between State and Market

187

Epilogue: The Effects of Liberalization

232

Notes

247

Index

317

Illustrations

1.1 L’Éditeur 1.2 Le Libraire

20 21

2.1 Printer-bookdealer Firmin Didot

61

3.1 Caricature of the almanac publisher 95 Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre 4.1 Emblem of the Cercle de la Librairie (1847)

130

4.2 Title page of the Annuaire de la librairie (1875)

131

4.3 Souvenir from a banquet sponsored by the Cercle de la 132 Librairie (1894) 4.4 Photograph of the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie, 133 117, boulevard Saint-Germain 4.5 Detail of the façade of the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie 4.6 Assembly hall of the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie 4.7 First issue of the Chronique (3 January 1857)

141

147

4.8 The exhibit of the Cercle de la Librairie at the World’s Fair 149 of 1893 in Chicago 5.1 Publisher Louis Hachette

158

5.2 A bibliothèque de gare, late nineteenth century 6.1 Printer-bookdealer Ambroise Firmin-Didot

162 196

134

Ac know ledgments

Given the topic of this book, I am all too aware of the politics—and economics—of publishing not just historically but today. If I have survived this process with my illusions more or less intact, it is thanks to the material and moral support of a number of individuals and institutions. I remain grateful to my mentors at the University of Chicago: Jan Goldstein, Bill Sewell, and Neil Harris. Model scholars and teachers, they have all shaped my work in innumerable ways. In particular, I am indebted to Jan Goldstein for her encouragement, advice, and friendship throughout my graduate career and in the years since. At Chicago, I also benefited enormously from exchanges with my fellow graduate students, particularly in the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France and the Modern European History Workshop. At Chicago, crucial financial support for research and writing was provided by the Division of the Social Sciences, a Department of History Eric Cochrane Traveling Fellowship, a Georges Lurcy Fellowship for Research in France, a Bibliographical Society of America Short-Term Research Fellowship, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Additional research and writing were supported by a Bernadotte Schmidt Fellowship from the American Historical Association and by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, which funded two summers of research as well as a semester of leave for writing. In addition, in the spring of 2005 I was lucky to be able to spend a semester as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. For this opportunity, I am grateful to Robert Darnton. For their assistance with my research in France, I thank the staffs of the following libraries and archives: the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Archives

xiv

Acknowledgments

Nationales; the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; the Archives de Paris; the Institut de France; the Bibliothèque des Arts Graphiques; the Centre des Correspondances, Mémoires, et Journaux Intimes du Dix-Neuvième et Vingtième Siècles; the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Paris; the Centre des Archives du Monde du Travail in Roubaix; and the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), formerly located in Paris and now at the Abbaye d’Ardenne outside of Caen. At IMEC, I thank in particular Agnès Iskander, who assisted me in navigating the archives of the Cercle de la Librairie from my first visit to the rue de Lille in the summer of 1996 to my last visit to the Abbaye d’Ardenne in the summer of 2007. Also in France, Roger Chartier and Jean-Yves Mollier both gave generously of their time and advice. I am grateful to both of them for initiating me into the field of book history in France. Jean-Yves Mollier made available to me not only the rich master’s and doctoral theses completed by his students at the Université de Versailles SaintQuentin-en-Yvelines but also some documents from the Hachette and Lévy publishing firms in his private collection. In addition, Evrard Hachette and Dominique Renouard, descendants of nineteenth-century publishers, offered information about their family history. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Yvonne Bogdanoff and the Pleimling family for their hospitality and friendship on my visits to France over the years. On this side of the Atlantic, I have benefited from the advice and support of a number of groups and individuals. For their questions and comments on presentations of portions of the material in this book, I thank the commentators and audiences at the following conferences: the Conference on Nineteenth-Century French Studies, the conference on “The History of the Book: The Next Generation” at Drew University, the conference on “The Ambiguities of Work” at the Hagley Library, the Society for French Historical Studies (on several occasions), the Business History Conference, the Social Science History Association, and the American Historical Association. I remain especially grateful for invitations to present my work at the Cornell University European History Colloquium, the Drew University Modern History and Literature Colloquium, and the Davidson College History Forum. In addition, many colleagues and friends have assisted me by reading and discussing my work, obtaining research materials, or just providing moral support. In the early stages of revision, while I was in residence in Princeton, Robert Darnton and Carla Hesse provided advice and encouragement. In

Acknowledgments

xv

Charlotte, the history department at UNC–Charlotte has provided a wonderful home not just for me but for my husband. I could not have asked for a more supportive, collegial, and engaging group of colleagues. Although I cannot single out every one in the department who has helped me, particular thanks go to the chairs during my first seven years here, John Smail and Dan Dupre. At UNC–Charlotte, I must also thank the Interlibrary Loan Department for helping me to procure numerous primary and secondary sources. Ann Davis deserves special mention for even helping me to cart around folio volumes of the Moniteur universel when I was eight months pregnant. Since graduate school, Melissa Feinberg and Paul Hanebrink have been good role models, challenging interlocutors, and great companions. Thanks to both of them for their advice and encouragement over the years. Dating back even further, I have appreciated the companionship and support of the friends I made during my junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence: Pete and Karina Frassrand, Heather Powers Sauter, Jeff Rado, and Elias Khalil. By sharing my love of France, they have helped me to sustain my interest in this subject. In the last stages of the project, I benefited enormously from the comments of the two readers for Harvard University Press: one, anonymous; the other, Gregory Brown. Although I have not been able to respond to all of their incisive and thoughtful comments, I very much appreciate the time and care they took with the manuscript. At Harvard University Press, I am grateful for the support of series editor Patrice Higonnet, whose continued interest in the project has sustained me through the long process of review and revision, and editor Kathleen McDermott, whose consummate professionalism has made the publishing process a pleasure—the complete opposite of what Lucien de Rudempré experienced at the hands of the “sultan” publisher Dauriat in Lost Illusions. In addition, I thank editorial assistant Kathi Drummy and copyeditor Julie Palmer-Hoffman for shepherding the manuscript so expertly through the production process. Portions of Chapter 1 appeared in an earlier form in my article “An ‘Evil Genius’: The Construction of the Publisher in the Post-Revolutionary Social Imaginary,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 559–595. For permission to reuse that material here, I acknowledge Duke University Press. I also thank the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Cercle de la Librairie, and the Photothèque Hachette Livre for allowing me to reproduce images in their collections.

xvi

Acknowledgments

Above all, I am grateful to my family. For their love and support, I thank my brothers, Douglas and Ryan, and my parents, David and Marilyn Haynes. I thank my parents, especially, for introducing me to books and for making innumerable sacrifices of money, time, and energy so that I could indulge myself in reading them. In more recent years, I have appreciated the support of my parents-in-law, Gary and Diane Wilson. I also thank “my boys,” Oliver and Simon, whose arrivals in 2004 and 2007 interrupted the revision process temporarily but whose smiles and words have brightened my life immeasurably. Finally, I thank my husband, Mark Wilson, to whom this book is dedicated. I met Mark just before taking my first trip to the archives in Paris. In the dozen or so years since, he has read and discussed this project with me ad nauseum. He has also taken time from his own research and writing to accompany me to France and to care for our children so that I could work on this book. I appreciate his genuine egalitarianism. More important, I treasure his constant companionship.

Lost Illusions

Introduction: The Dawn of the Information Marketplace

In the nineteenth century, the book trade in France was transformed from a restricted craft into a freewheeling business. This transformation was immortalized in a novel called Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, who had himself worked in the trade as a publisher and printer toward the beginning of his career as a writer in the late 1820s. A satire of the commercialization of publishing under the Restoration (1815–1830), Lost Illusions follows the divergent paths of two young friends: one a naive poet from the provincial town of Angoulême named Lucien Chardon (or de Rudempré, as he calls himself), who moves to Paris to pursue a career as a writer; the other, his brother-in-law David Séchard, who despite his own literary ambition remains behind in the countryside to manage a small printing shop owned by his father. In their misadventures with a supporting cast of speculating book publishers, scheming newspaper editors, cutthroat printers, and unscrupulous writers, both Lucien and David become disillusioned with their Romantic ideals about authorship. Through the travails of these two antiheroes, Lost Illusions offers a trenchant portrait of the postrevolutionary book trade.1 At the center of this trade was a new figure, the publisher, who in contradistinction to the artisanal printer and the merchant bookseller specialized in acquiring and marketing the work of authors. A speculator in literary capital, the publisher was the first modern “producer,” in the sense of being a financier or entrepreneur of a cultural commodity. In an era when print was the dominant form of entertainment as well as the dominant medium of information, the publisher exerted considerable cultural influence. This new figure spurred the transformation of the book trade into a big business, shaping the development of what is often called the “literary marketplace”: a system in which printed

2

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

matter is manufactured and distributed by capitalist enterprises, subject to the laws of supply and demand. The publishing business was of obvious economic importance. As early as 1819, Jean-Antoine Chaptal estimated that the publishing industry (including the periodical press) generated 21,652,726 francs per year in France. In 1827, it reportedly employed some 33,750 people and generated some 33,750,000 francs. By 1860, in Paris alone it yielded some 94,166,528 francs, or close to 3 percent of the capital’s total industrial output. Although contemporary claims that the publishing industry constituted 10 percent of the Parisian economy were probably exaggerated, this business did engender some of the biggest fortunes of the time.2 Yet such crude economic measures do not fully capture its significance. Along with art and theater, with which it shared many characteristics in the postrevolutionary period, publishing was the first modern “culture industry.” Foreshadowing the development of film, radio, television, and other mass media, it shaped popular mentalities. Integral to such other nineteenth-century developments as individual selfhood, democratic citizenship, and national identity, the publishing business has played a key role in the formation of the modern world. Despite its importance to modern business and culture, the development of the literary marketplace has been slow to attract the attention of scholars. In comparison to the book trade of early modern Europe, which has been vividly reconstructed by Robert Darnton, among other scholars, the publishing business of the nineteenth century remains relatively obscure.3 In recent years, cultural historians and literary scholars have begun to examine the biographies of some of the major publishers of the period, along with the technological innovations in printing-related industries, the laws regarding press and censorship, and the practices of readers. In their focus on these topics, however, they have often neglected the broader context of the rise of the literary marketplace. To the extent that they do discuss its origins, cultural historians and literary scholars tend to view it as a product of technological and structural change. They characterize the literary marketplace as a natural concomitant of industrialization and modernization.4 However, there was nothing natural about the literary marketplace. Contrary to the assumptions of many scholars, the “laws” of this market were by no means fixed in the nineteenth century.5 In fact, the notion that the production of literature should be left to the market, as opposed to being regulated by

Introduction

3

the state, was often highly contested among members of the book trade and the government. In the nineteenth century, authors, printers, booksellers, publishers, legislators, and administrators disagreed about the nature of literature as a product and about the extent to which it should be regulated. Some argued that literature was a commodity like any other, which should be exchanged in a free market and protected on the same terms as every other property. Others, however, insisted that because it involved ideas that had the potential to influence the public and threaten the state, literature was a unique sort of product, requiring special protections and restrictions. In many places, such protectionists prevented the establishment of a free market for literature well into the nineteenth century. Rather than being a natural product of economic and technological change, the literary marketplace was a contingent outcome of political struggle, on both the professional and national levels. Nowhere was this more true than in France, where the political struggle over the literary marketplace was particularly divisive and protracted. In France, which by many measures was long the world center of cultural production, the monarchical state had viewed print—as well as art, music, and theater—as important to national identity as well as public security. For these reasons, it had exerted tight control over the book trade, along with the rest of the culture industry. During the French Revolution of 1789, state regulation of print was briefly overthrown. Although this deregulation was ultimately reversed by Napoleon, the Revolution still had a lasting effect on the book trade. Among other things, it encouraged an influx of new men into the trade. These men, many of whom called themselves éditeurs or “publishers,” remained committed to revolutionary liberalism. Asserting that literature was a commercial product like any other, they lobbied the postrevolutionary state to liberalize the legislation on publishing. These liberal publishers were opposed, however, by traditional printers and booksellers, who maintained that literature was a unique kind of product, which required continued—and even increased—regulation. For much of the nineteenth century, liberals and protectionists in the book trade battled each other to determine the character of the literary market, particularly regarding the law on entrance requirements and property rights. The battle between these two groups is the subject of this book. In the end, as we will see, this battle was won by the liberal group, because of a shift in both professional and national politics. In the last third of the

4

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

nineteenth century, publishers succeeded in persuading the state to liberalize the literary market. They were able to do so for two reasons. First, they proved more successful than their counterparts in printing and bookselling at organizing themselves to lobby government officials. In particular, they formed a businessmen’s association called the Cercle de la Librairie, founded in 1847. A hybrid between a traditional trade guild, a bourgeois leisure club, and a modern professional syndicate, the Cercle de la Librairie proved to be very effective at influencing state policy on publishing. Second, government officials themselves changed their priorities. They became less concerned with public safety and more interested in economic growth, which made them more receptive to the demands of publishers for liberalization of publishing. Paradoxically, this shift in state policy occurred under the Second Empire of Louis-Napoléon (1852–1870), the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had reregulated the book trade in the first place. Despite its authoritarian character, the Second Empire played a key role in the establishment of a free market for literature in France. While this book emphasizes the role played by politics in the establishment of the literary marketplace, it does not mean to suggest that the business of literature was unaffected by structural and technological change. Between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, the literary marketplace was certainly shaped by the growth of the reading public, a rise in consumption, the development of new sources and forms of credit, the mechanization of papermaking and printing, the invention of stereotypography and lithography, the spread of the railroad, and the institution of mass education. As early as the eighteenth century, a growing public for print spurred a number of marketing innovations by such pioneering entrepreneurs as Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, publisher of the Encylopédie, among other works of the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, there were numerous examples of publishers who invented new products and made large profits, despite the persistence of state controls on the book trade. But their activities were constrained by state regulation until late in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the structural and technological developments that underlay the literary market in nineteenth-century France are now well known, thanks to the work of Jean-Yves Mollier, Frédéric Barbier, and others.6 The political struggles that shaped this market, by contrast, have received little scholarly attention. In an effort to correct this scholarly imbalance, this book

Introduction

5

focuses on political debates instead of economic developments or technological innovations. To illuminate these debates, it concentrates on the book trade (rather than the periodical press) in the city of Paris, where this trade has long been centered. By focusing on politics, the book yields some novel conclusions, not just for book history but for modern European business, social, and political history. First of all, this study counters the old stereotype of the French businessman as conservative and protectionist. By illuminating the struggles undertaken by publishers to legitimize and facilitate their own work, it suggests that they celebrated rather than denigrated entrepreneurialism. Showing how they advocated for commercial freedom even as they relied on state protection, the study emphasizes that this group of capitalists employed liberal discourses, sometimes for corporatist ends.7 Second, the book demonstrates the importance of networking among businessmen and between businessmen and government officials in the construction of a market economy. While such networking has often been overlooked and underestimated by business historians in their focus on macroeconomic trends, on the one hand, and on firm biographies, on the other, it was instrumental in determining the shape of the market, not just in France but throughout the West. Through a pioneering analysis of the Cercle de la Librairie, whose archives permit a rare glimpse at a nineteenth-century businessmen’s association in action, the book contributes to our understanding of bourgeois sociability and its role in economic as well as political change in the nineteenth century.8 Finally, this study highlights the role of the Second Empire in liberalizing the literary market in France and abroad. Reinforcing the conclusions of recent work on the history of liberalism in France, it shows how republican principles and institutions predated the advent of the Third Republic in 1870. At the same time, however, it suggests that, because the deregulation of literature was motivated less by radical, universalist political ideology than by moderate, instrumentalist economic liberalism, the place of intellectual freedom and property in modern French political culture has remained insecure. Like the periodical press and the theater industry, which followed a similar pattern of revolution, reregulation, and deregulation in the century between the fall of the Old Regime and the establishment of the Third Republic, the publishing business illustrates the prolonged struggles and persistent tensions surrounding the establishment of a market for cultural goods in France.9

6

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

From the Old Regime to 1810 The political struggles surrounding the literary market in the nineteenth century date back to the Old Regime in France. Under the Old Regime, the book trade was regulated by the French monarchy, which viewed print as a threat to public order and state security. In an effort to contain this threat, the monarchy established a formal Administration of the Book Trade, which employed a network of inspectors and censors, as well as royal intendants, police agents, and guild officers, to control the production and distribution of print. This administration limited and surveyed the membership of the book trade, with the help of a system of privileges and guilds. By law, printers and bookdealers were required to obtain a “privilege” from the royal administration for each new work that they published. This privilege, which constituted a title of possession as well as a sign of permission, granted its holder temporary, but renewable, ownership over the work in exchange for submission to government censorship. Over time, such privileges came to be monopolized by a patriciate of bookdealers in Paris. In addition to requiring that publications carry this sign of official approval, the monarchy demanded that practitioners of the book trade belong to a chambre syndicale, or guild. Like all other craft guilds, the guilds in the book trade were responsible for ensuring the skill of practitioners and the quality of products. By the eighteenth century, there were over twenty such guilds across France. Of these, the most important was the Chambre Syndicale de la Librairie et de l’Imprimerie de Paris, or Guild of Bookdealers and Printers of Paris, where the French book trade was centered. Founded in 1618, the Paris Book Guild enjoyed a monopoly on the production and distribution of printed matter in the capital. This monopoly was reinforced by a number of royal decrees, including in 1686, when the number of printers in Paris was limited to thirty-six, and in 1723, when the entrance requirements for both printers and bookdealers were tightened. Dominated by a handful of families, the Paris Book Guild was one of the most closed corporations of the Old Regime.10 Of course, even with this system of privileges and guilds, the monarchy never enjoyed complete control over the book trade in France. By the eighteenth century, this system was under serious threat by entrepreneurs both within France and abroad. As Robert Darnton has shown, in addition to the official sector of the book trade, there was a vast “literary underground” of printers and bookdealers who operated outside of the guild system, especially

Introduction

7

in the provinces and along the borders of France. While the exact size of this underground is unknown, evidence on the best sellers of the eighteenth century suggests that the clandestine sector of the book trade had challenged the primacy of the official sector by the end of the Old Regime. Moreover, even within the guild system, there was increasing tension between printers and bookdealers, between masters and journeymen, and between Parisians and provincials. Despite these fissures, the guild system in the book trade remained in place through the end of the Old Regime. When the reformist minister Anne-RobertJacques Turgot abolished the trade guilds in 1776, he excepted the chambres syndicales of printers and bookdealers (along with apothecaries and gold- and silversmiths), on the grounds that they were vital for the protection of the public interest.11 The Old Regime in the book trade was overthrown, however, by the French Revolution. With its attack on corporate distinction of any kind, the Revolution spelled the end of both the privileges and the guilds in this trade. In the summer of 1789, the new revolutionary assembly declared freedom of the press, and within a year, it had suppressed the royal Administration of the Book Trade. By abolishing all privileges, it also nullified the monopolies of printers and bookdealers over individual works. In 1791, with the D’Allarde and Le Chapelier laws against trade corporations, the assembly overthrew the Paris Book Guild. The book trade was now a free field. In an effort to impose responsibility on authors and bookdealers, the revolutionary government recognized the rights of authors, which were now characterized as a “property” rather than a “privilege,” in a “Declaration of the Rights of Genius” in July of 1793. This measure, which aimed to balance the rights of the individual creator with the needs of the public interest in texts, guaranteed the property of authors to their descendants and assigns during their lifetime and for ten years afterward. With the exception of this declaration, however, the book trade remained unregulated. As a result, between the early 1790s and the early 1800s, the trade experienced considerable upheaval: new men from outside of the guild rushed into publishing, authors and publishers found themselves without protection against piracy, and competition increased to the extent that a number of members of the trade were forced to declare bankruptcy. In the face of this upheaval, many members of the trade began to demand some form of reregulation.12 In response to these demands, Napoleon reregulated the book trade with a decree dated 5 February 1810. This decree instituted a number of new state

8

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

controls on the industry. In addition to establishing a new Administration of the Book Trade and a new corps of inspectors, the decree required official licenses of all printers and booksellers. For printers, the number of these licenses was limited—in Paris, for example, first to sixty and then to eighty. At the same time, however, the regulation of 1810 extended the term of literary property rights for authors (and, by extension, their publishers) slightly, to twenty years after they and their spouse had died. While it restricted access to the book trade, the regulation of 1810 thus also provided incentive for individual enterprise. In short, Napoleon’s regulation of 1810 represented a compromise between proponents of strict control and advocates of open competition in the book trade. As Carla Hesse characterizes it, this regulation constituted a “marriage of state regulation and the commercial market.”13 Deliberate as it was, this “marriage” between state regulation and commercial competition was not satisfactory to members of the book trade. The decree of 1810, which remained in force long after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of monarchy, divided members of the trade (as well as of the state administration) into two competing camps: what I have termed a “corporatist” camp, which demanded additional protection, and a “liberal” (defined in the nineteenth-century sense of being for individual freedom and against government intervention) one, which advocated more liberty. The corporatist camp was composed largely of printers and booksellers who were descended biologically or ideologically from members of the old guilds. It insisted that the regulation of 1810 did not go far enough to protect either the book trade or the public interest. The liberal camp, on the other hand, was composed mainly of men who had taken advantage of the deregulation of the revolutionary era to enter the book trade—men who frequently adopted the relatively new title of éditeur, or publisher, as opposed to printer or bookseller. This group wanted not less but more freedom from state regulation. The corporatist camp and the liberal camp in the book trade would battle each other over state policy on publishing for much of the nineteenth century.

The Nineteenth Century To introduce the battle between liberals and corporatists in the book trade, the book begins by examining a development that transformed the trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the emergence of the publisher

Introduction

9

(éditeur) as a new figure separate from the traditional printer-bookseller. Chapter 1 (“The Birth of the Publisher”) describes the origin and work of this figure, who specialized in commissioning, financing, and coordinating the creation, production, and marketing of books by others. In contrast to the long-standing assumption among book historians that the publisher was a product of technological changes, I emphasize the political causes of this specialization. By freeing the book trade from the constraints of the old guild and by replacing perpetual privileges over texts with limited property rights, the French Revolution promoted the emergence of a new occupation whose main focus was to cultivate new literary capital. Although the publisher long remained subordinate to members of other occupations involved in the book trade, he was often attacked—most famously by Balzac in Lost Illusions—as an unskilled and unscrupulous middleman speculator. In attacking the publisher, authors, printers, and booksellers were really attacking the Revolution, which had upset the old order in the book trade. Over the succeeding decades, the new publishers would battle traditional printers and bookdealers over the legacy of the Revolution. The battle between new publishers and traditionalist printers and bookdealers is introduced in the next two chapters, which examine the politics of the book trade in the period between the advent of the Restoration (1814–1830) and the fall of the July Monarchy (1830–1848). Chapter 2 (“The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals”) explains how the aftermath of the Revolution—and especially the reregulation of the press by Napoleon in 1810— divided the book trade into a corporatist and a liberal camp. These camps formed around two issues in particular: licensing requirements for printers and bookdealers, which had been instituted by Napoleon, and literary property rights, which had been guaranteed for ten years after the death of the author during the Revolution and extended to twenty years during the Empire. While liberals demanded the abolition of licensing requirements and advocated the extension of literary property rights, on the grounds that the book trade was a business like any other, traditional printers and bookdealers maintained that the book trade required limits on entry and property, in the name of public safety and education. The desires of both camps remained unmet through the first half of the nineteenth century. Under both the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the state refrained from altering either the licensing system or the literary property law. Although it occasionally flirted with

10

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

liberalization, the government ultimately maintained the status quo, out of concern for the public interest. As publishers struggled to influence state policy on licensing and literary property between the late 1820s and the late 1840s, they began to network with each other as well as with members of the government. As they became increasingly organized, they were accused by their competitors in printing and bookselling of forming a “coterie” at the expense of the “corporation” of the book trade as a whole. Through the case of one of the main instigators of organization among publishers, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, Chapter 3 (“Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie”) describes the associations forged among publishers and between publishers and statesmen, as well as the reactions to these associations by corporatists. In particular, the chapter focuses on a conflict between Pagnerre and a bookdealer named Victor Bouton over a series of projects in which a select group of publishers benefited from state favoritism, including a government loan to the publishing business in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1830; a joint-stock corporation to distribute books in the provinces founded in 1842; a sub-branch of the national discount bank created under the auspices of the government of the Second Republic (of which Pagnerre was a member); and a scheme to offer lottery tickets as “premiums” for purchases of books in the late 1840s. In the end, the opposition of corporatists such as Bouton proved no match for the “coterie” of publishers led by Pagnerre. The story of the conflict between these two members of the book trade suggests that publishers proved more successful than their competitors in printing and bookselling at forging connections with each other and with representatives of the state. By 1847, when Pagnerre and several other publishers founded a formal trade association, the Cercle de la Librairie, de l’Imprimerie, et de la Papeterie (Circle of Publishing, Printing, and Papermaking), the liberal camp in the book trade was well organized to promote its interests. Breaking from the chronological narrative of the rest of the book, Chapter 4 (“The Cercle de la Librairie”) describes in detail the trade association established by publishers. Based on new research in the archives and publications of this association, the chapter argues that the Cercle de la Librairie combined elements of three different kinds of organizations: the prerevolutionary book guild; a new type of bourgeois social organization, imported from England, called the “circle”; and a modern professional syndicate, a form of organization

Introduction

11

that became legalized only in 1884. In a political context that was hostile to association between members of a single occupation, this mix of associational idioms enabled the Cercle to operate with the approval of the state across a number of changes in regime. By reinventing the Paris Book Guild as a cross between a social circle and a professional syndicate, the Cercle de la Librairie survived—and thrived—through the second half of the nineteenth century, across the twentieth century, and up to the present day. This hybrid association proved remarkably effective at influencing state policy in favor of publishers. Although it included printers, booksellers, paper manufacturers, and members of a number of other occupations, the Cercle de la Librairie was founded by and for publishers. With the help of this new association, the liberal camp in the book trade renewed its campaign for liberalization of the market for literature. The fifth and sixth chapters examine the politics of the book trade in the decades following the establishment of the Cercle de la Librairie, under the Second Empire (1852–1870). Chapter 5 (“Louis Hachette and the Defense of the Publisher”) analyzes the continuing power struggle between printers and publishers, through the lens of a conflict between a prominent éditeur of the time, Louis Hachette, and a rival printer, Napoléon Chaix. For almost a decade between the mid-1850s and the mid-1860s, Hachette and Chaix battled over two separate but related issues: whether a publisher had a right to monopolize a sector of the market for print, as Hachette had recently done by establishing with state approval a network of bookstands in railroad stations, and whether he had a right to participate alongside the printer of a work at the international industrial exhibitions. At stake in these two issues was the relative jurisdiction and status of the work of the publisher versus that of the printer. In both arenas, Hachette argued that the publisher who conceived a book, no less than the printer who manufactured it, deserved the title of “producer.” Endorsed by both the Cercle de la Librairie and the state administration, this view prevailed. By the mid-1860s, Hachette had secured both his own monopoly over the railroad station bookstands and the inclusion of publishing at the international exhibitions. Important not just for the Hachette firm but for the entire publishing occupation, these victories served to legitimize the role of the éditeur. They signified a shift in the balance of power in the book trade from corporatists to liberals. Chapter 6 (“The Divorce between State and Market”) concludes the story of the debate between corporatists and liberals over licensing and literary

12

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

property. Following the story from the Revolution of 1848 through the advent of the Third Republic (1870–1940), this chapter shows how the “marriage” between state and market in the book trade that had been instituted by Napoleon was dissolved by his nephew, Louis-Napoléon. Under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, the liberal camp in the book trade came close to obtaining its two main demands: literary property rights were extended to fifty years after the death of the author, not just for native writers but also for foreign ones whose work circulated in France, and licensing requirements were on the verge of being abolished when the Second Empire fell during the Franco-Prussian War. These requirements would be definitively overturned by the new republican government. There are two main reasons for the timing of these measures. First, since the first half of the nineteenth century, the liberal camp of publishers had become more organized. In particular, the Cercle de la Librairie played a major role in lobbying the state to liberalize the literary market. At the same time, though, the state was also reevaluating its priorities. Whereas before it was concerned with protecting public order, now it was interested in promoting commerce. As part of a broader move to deregulate business, including the theater, the Second Empire acceded to the demands of publishers to abolish licensing requirements and strengthen literary property rights. After sixty years of struggle, publishers finally succeeded in persuading the state to divorce itself from the market for print. Given that this “divorce” was motivated by economic as opposed to political liberalism, however, press freedom and literary property would remain compromised in France. What were the consequences of the liberalization of the literary market? The Epilogue sketches the effects of the abolition of licensing and the extension of literary property on printers, booksellers, and authors. Contrary to the expectations of publishers, these measures did not revolutionize the literary market in France, in part because this market was restricted in other ways, often by publishers themselves. To be sure, liberalization did promote growth in the book trade. In the decades following the abolition of licensing, the number of booksellers and printers increased, as did the number of new titles per year and the size of the average print run per title. The extension of literary property also promoted the production of print. However, by enabling producers to monopolize such property in virtual perpetuity, the extension of literary property empowered publishers over authors. This shift in the balance of

Introduction

13

power between the creator and the producer of literature had obvious implications for books and readers. Contrary to its reputation as a haven for artists and intellectuals, fin de siècle France was often less than hospitable to literary creativity, due to the dominance of publishers over the book trade. At the same time, liberalization did not vanquish protectionism in the book trade. In the aftermath of deregulation, protectionism persisted, even among the most liberal publishers. In the face of a “crisis” of the book trade in the 1890s, publishers began to impose their own voluntary controls on the book business: for example, they instituted uniform discounts and model contracts to govern their dealings with booksellers and authors, respectively. In the twentieth century, they would even call for the revival of state intervention in the literary market, especially to control prices. Long after the liberalization of the book market, the politics of publishing left a legacy on literature in France. The story of the politics of publishing in nineteenth-century France is of more than just literary or historical significance, however. It also serves to illuminate contemporary struggles over the information marketplace. Many of the issues that divided corporatists and liberals at the dawn of this marketplace in the nineteenth century—including licensing and intellectual property— remain controversial today. In the context of the current “information revolution,” producers, distributors, and regulators continue to debate the age-old question of whether information is an ordinary commodity, subject only to the market, or an exceptional product, requiring special protections and restrictions. By examining the history of this debate in France, where it resulted in a distinctive approach to the market for print, we can better understand and shape the politics of information, both domestically and internationally, today.

1 The Birth of the Publisher

In Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions, the commercialization of the book trade is exemplified above all by one character: the book publisher Dauriat. Labeled the “king,” “sultan,” and “pasha” of the book trade, Dauriat reigns in despotic fashion over the authors, journalists, illustrators, papermakers, and printers who come to court him in his shop in the Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal in the center of Paris. A speculator in literature, he is interested in the work of authors not for its artistic merit but for its financial potential. As he tells Lucien de Rudempré, whose poetry manuscript he has just rejected, “I don’t publish books for fun. I don’t risk two thousand francs just to get two thousand francs back. I’m a speculator in literature. . . . I use the power I have and the articles I pay for [in the press] to launch a three hundred thousand francs venture rather than a volume in which only two thousand francs are invested. . . . I am not here to be a springboard for future reputations, but to make money for myself and to provide some for the celebrities.” After Lucien acquires fame as a journalist (in part by slandering a rival author published by Dauriat), however, the publisher comes begging for the young writer’s work. As a result of his experiences with Dauriat, Lucien loses his illusions about the literary life. In Balzac’s novel, Dauriat embodies a significant change in the structure of the book trade. Modeled after a flamboyant entrepreneur named Pierre-François Ladvocat, whose shop in the Wooden Galleries was a center of literary activity during the Restoration, Dauriat represents a new type of producer in the postrevolutionary book trade, the libraire-éditeur, or bookseller-publisher.1 In the postrevolutionary era, Balzac was far from the only commentator to notice this new social type. In his depiction of the publisher, Balzac echoed themes developed by many other writers. From the 1820s through the 1840s,

The Birth of the Publisher

15

the new publisher was a frequent subject of plays, novels, satires, essays, and pamphlets by members of the literary and book professions. Typically, these commentators situated the libraire-éditeur in a hierarchy of “merchants” of thought, ranging from the étalagiste or sidewalk salesman at the bottom, through a variety of kinds of wholesalers and retailers, to the publisher at the top. The category of publisher was often then further subdivided into particular types, such as the classical publisher or the romantic publisher. Such categorization of the publisher, which was part and parcel of a broader cultural obsession with occupational typology during the social upheaval caused by both the French and industrial revolutions, indicates that the éditeur was establishing himself as a distinct figure in the world of work in the early nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, this figure was so common that it had become a source of concern for many commentators in the book trade. Bemoaning the profusion of publishers, these commentators complained that the new éditeur now dominated the book trade, at the expense of the traditional libraire, or bookdealer. In 1860, for example, a former booksellerpublisher named Edmond Werdet remarked in a history of the book trade in France that “there are no more libraires [bookdealers], just éditeurs [publishers].” The latter he derided as “manufacturers of plaster figurines” and “industrialists who peddle productions of the spirit.” In the opinion of Werdet, the title of éditeur, previously honorable, had become “the prey of everyone; it belongs to anyone who will parade it around, and it is today so banal that the first merchant to arrive assumes it.” In a short period of time, the publisher had become a ubiquitous feature of the French book trade.2 Who was this figure? When and why did he first emerge? What effect did he have on the book trade in early nineteenth-century France? And how did authors and other members of the trade react to him? These questions, which are of obvious importance to the history of the literary market in the nineteenth century, have not yet been answered by scholars. Although book historians have certainly noted the emergence of the publisher as a separate social type in France, they have not fully explained the causes or consequences of it.3 In an effort to elucidate the history of the specialization of publishing, this chapter examines the meaning, origin, and effect of the éditeur in early nineteenthcentury France.

16

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

The Definition of the Éditeur In his complaint about the abuse of the term éditeur, Werdet suggested that there had been a linguistic revolution in the book trade. In fact, although the word éditeur was not new in the nineteenth century, it had undergone a change in meaning. Derived from the Latin word editor, meaning “author” or “founder,” the term was first used in French in the early eighteenth century. Originally, the term signified “editor,” that is, a scholar who translates, compiles, corrects, annotates, and introduces the work of a (usually deceased) writer. In contrast to the libraire, who was a merchant and often a producer of books, the éditeur was a man of letters. In 1734, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux defined the term éditeur as follows: “Author, scholar who takes care of the publication of the work of another, and ordinarily of a classic author; because Éditeur is not used with regard to either a printing worker or an Author who publishes his own works.” As an example of an éditeur, the Dictionnaire cited Erasmus. Several decades later, the Encyclopédie of Diderot used the example of the Benedictines, who had edited the works of the church fathers, to define the term. According to the Encyclopédie, an éditeur required considerable knowledge, including training in foreign languages. A similar conception of the éditeur appeared in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in the editions of both 1762 and 1778: “The person who takes care to review and to have printed another person’s work.” As an example of the way in which the term could be used, the Dictionnaire added, “This Work appears with a nice Preface by the Éditeur.”4 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the term éditeur began to acquire a new meaning: the capitalist who assumed the risk of producing the work of a (dead or living) author. The word began to connote what in English was already called a “publisher.” As early as the 1760s and 1770s, the term éditeur began to refer to bookdealers who undertook the publication of new literary enterprises, such as the Encyclopédie. As the Encyclopédie itself suggested, this new meaning of the term was a derivation of the ancient Latin word editores, the title given in Rome to officials who were charged with producing spectacles for the people out of their own pockets. In the first third of the nineteenth century, this new meaning of the term began to appear in dictionaries. A new edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, published in 1835, supplemented its old definition (“The person who takes care to review

The Birth of the Publisher

17

and to have printed another person’s work”) with a second usage: “By extension, libraires [bookdealers] sometimes assume the title of éditeurs of the works that they publish at their own expense.” By the end of the nineteenth century, this second definition would become the primary meaning of the term. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Dictionnaire Larousse maintained that “in current usage, the word éditeur applies almost exclusively to the type of libraire [bookdealer] whose role consists of undertaking the printing, the marketing, and the success of a work to which he has some right to dispose.” Thus, between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, the meaning of éditeur had shifted from a savant to a speculator.5 As the definition from the Dictionnaire Larousse suggests, the new meaning of éditeur centered on the function of “undertaking” or entrepreneurship. The primary role of the éditeur was not to manufacture or to sell a book himself. Rather, it was to finance and coordinate the production and distribution of a book by others. The work of the éditeur involved procuring funding from subscribers, financiers, notaries, merchants, and other members of the book trade (who, given the difficulties of obtaining loans from banks, remained the main source of credit); acquiring or commissioning work by authors and artists, to whom he offered increasingly detailed contracts; overseeing the writing and illustrating of manuscripts; obtaining a supply of paper; coordinating the activities of engravers, printers, and binders; marketing publications, by means of subscriptions, catalogs, prospectuses, reviews, and eventually advertisements and posters; and distributing products via wholesalers, commission agents, and retailers. An intermediary between all of the other occupations involved in publishing, the éditeur concentrated on developing new products for new markets. Aiming to create a house “fund” or collection, he focused on publishing new literary works, referred to in the trade as nouveautés, or “novelties,” as well as new editions of old classics. In short, the éditeur was defined by his role in investing capital, both financial and human, to create literary commodities—and monetary profits. In his function of capitalist, the éditeur was similar to a number of other types of cultural entrepreneurs, including the art dealer and the theater manager, who emerged as distinctive figures at about the same time. Like these other entrepreneurs, the éditeur specialized in the work of speculating on new cultural capital.6 Such work was by no means new in the nineteenth century. It had been a fundamental part of the book trade since at least the invention of printing.

18

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Prior to the emergence of the new éditeur, however, this work had usually been performed by a printer (imprimeur) or a bookdealer (libraire). Through the eighteenth century, the book trade remained relatively unspecialized: printers often acted as booksellers and vice versa, and both printers and booksellers served in the capacity of publishers by financing the production of new literary enterprises. The overlap in function between these figures, especially between booksellers and publishers, was a result of the prevailing mode of credit in the book trade: the so-called exchange system, whereby booksellers paid for orders not with cash but with sheets of books. In order to be able to acquire an assortment of books for his customers, a libraire had to publish at least a few works, to offer in exchange for the products of other bookdealers. Of course, there were always exceptions to the general pattern of lack of specialization. As early as the sixteenth century, a number of entrepreneurs were acting as publishers (although they were not yet called such), especially in such commercial centers as Paris, Lyon, Anvers, and Amsterdam. Moreover, following the incorporation of the book guilds in the seventeenth century, there was increasing division between printers and bookdealers. Through the eighteenth century, though, a single craftsman or merchant was usually responsible for most, if not all, of the steps in the production and distribution of a publication, including conception, financing, and marketing. As late as the 1820s, a directory of the book trade categorized a number of bookdealers as libraires-imprimeurs, suggesting that they combined the functions of bookselling and printing as well as publishing. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, however, the function of publishing gradually became a specialization unto itself. Instead of being a small part of the job of a printer or a bookseller, it became the sole occupation of a new member of the book trade, the éditeur.7 Because the division between the functions of printing, bookselling, and publishing occurred so gradually and remained so murky, the title of éditeur was long combined and confused with that of imprimeur and, especially, libraire. Initially, the term éditeur was a modifier or type of libraire. The two words were used together or interchangeably. The compound noun libraire-éditeur was one of several categories of book occupations. In the typology of these occupations, the libraire-éditeur, or bookseller-publisher, was distinguished from the retail bookseller (libraire-détaillant), the wholesale bookseller (libraire-commissionnaire), the antique bookseller (libraire-

The Birth of the Publisher

19

bouquiniste), the used bookseller (libraire-étalagiste), and the booksellermoneylender (libraire-escompteur). The addition of the term éditeur to the title of libraire indicated that the bookseller not only distributed books but also funded and managed the publication of manuscripts. The use of the compound noun libraire-éditeur is exemplified by a guidebook to Paris published in 1824, which said that among the maisons de librairie (book houses) of Paris there were several establishments of a “colossal extent,” but that “most limit themselves to the sale of works published by the libraireséditeurs.” The overlap between the titles of éditeur and libraire, which is seen in literary sources and publishing contracts as well as trade directories and dictionaries, persisted through at least the first half of the nineteenth century.8 Gradually, however, the two titles began to diverge. As early as the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the term éditeur was used alone, in its new sense, in book trade publications and directories. In the 1820s and 1830s, it appeared in trade exposition catalogs, publishing contracts, judicial documents, and literary texts, including plays, novels, and satires of social types. In 1823 and 1834, for example, the catalogs of the national industrial exhibitions used the term éditeur in reference to several of the exhibitors in the category of typography, and in 1839 the publisher Léon Curmer devoted his report on the book trade for the jury of the national industrial exhibition to a description of the work of the éditeur. By the 1840s and 1850s, use of the term éditeur alone was even more common. In 1841, both the specialized book trade directory Annuaire Dutertre and the general business directory Almanach Bottin included a category for “libraires and éditeurs.” Around the same time, the dictionary of professions edited by Édouard Charton recognized that, although the functions of libraire and éditeur were sometimes combined, “generally, the libraire is not an éditeur, he limits himself to doing the commerce of books: he is a bookseller.” Perhaps the most vivid evidence of the separation between the publisher and the bookseller was the essay on “L’Éditeur” written by Élias Regnault for a collection of sketches of social types called Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (“The French as Painted by Themselves”), published by Léon Curmer in 1841. This essay, which characterized the publisher as the “supreme chief of the merchants of thought” and as a “baron of the new industrial feudalism,” distinguished the entrepreneurial éditeur from the simple libraire, or bookseller,

20

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Figure 1.1. L’Éditeur: Illustration by Paul Gavarni for the essay of the same name by Élias Regnault in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, ed. Léon Curmer (1841). Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

who did not risk money on the publication of new work but confined himself to the operation of a retail shop. Accompanying the essay by Regnault was a portrait of the éditeur, bent over a desk, which contrasted with the contemporary image of the libraire, behind the counter or at the door of his shop. (For illustrations of the éditeur and the libraire, see Figures 1.1 and 1.2.) By 1860, when Werdet complained about the explosion in the number of publishers, éditeur had supplanted libraire as the most common label for a specialist in publishing.9

The Birth of the Publisher

21

Figure 1.2. Le Libraire: Anonymous lithograph, ca. 1841. Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

As Werdet’s comments suggest, the label of éditeur was adopted most often by pioneers in the book trade. In contrast to established heirs of the prerevolutionary trade, it designated self-made entrepreneurs. The earliest example of the new type of éditeur was Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (1736– 1798). Although he inherited his trade from his father, who was a booksellerprinter in Lille, Panckoucke reconceived it as a business. Rather than responding

22

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

to the traditional “logic of demand,” he operated by what Jean-Yves Mollier terms the “logic of offer.” In other words, he did not just supply existing markets but cultivated new ones. Between the 1760s and the 1780s, Panckoucke built a publishing empire, whose holdings included the Encyclopédie of Diderot and the government newspaper, the Moniteur universel, among numerous other philosophical and periodical publications. To disseminate these products, he employed a number of innovative marketing practices, including lower prices; smaller formats; installments and subscriptions; new publicity techniques, such as prospectuses and advertisements; and the extension of credit to booksellers. Characterized by his biographer as a “man of action,” Panckoucke was a forerunner of the modern type of publishing entrepreneur.10 The other quintessential example of the new type of éditeur was PierreFrançois (nicknamed Camille) Ladvocat (1791–1854), the model for Dauriat in the novel Lost Illusions, as well as for numerous other caricatures of the éditeur in early nineteenth-century French literature. Son of an architectengineer at Le Havre, Ladvocat entered the book trade by way of marriage in 1817 to Constance Sophie Aubé, a divorcée who owned a cabinet littéraire, or reading room. Between the late 1810s and the early 1830s, from his shop in the Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal, Ladvocat published a number of major playwrights, poets, and memoirists, including Casimir Delavigne, Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, François de Chateaubriand, Madame de Genlis, the Duchess d’Abrantès, and the criminal-turned-police detective François Vidocq. Like Panckoucke before him, Ladvocat revolutionized the book trade with new marketing techniques: in addition to cultivating relationships with journalists, he was one of the first publishers to use posters to advertise books. Often labeled the “prince of publishing,” Ladvocat was famous for his energy and flair in dealing with authors. As his competitor Edmond Werdet later said of him, “Ladvocat was the man of the modern book trade. Gifted with an audacious intelligence, with an indefatigable activity of body and spirit, animated with a lively love for his occupation of éditeur, he knew how to give to commerce in books, to literature itself (I am in a position to prove it), a thrust, a height, a life, which without a doubt would have occurred without him, but much later; and that in itself is a great merit, to be ahead of one’s time.” In the end, Ladvocat’s extravagant lifestyle undermined his publishing business. Beginning in the early 1830s, the publisher declared bankruptcy on three

The Birth of the Publisher

23

separate occasions. Despite the effort of a group of authors to save his business, by donating for publication a collection of essays called the Livre des cent-et-un (“Book of the 101 Authors”), in 1840 Ladvocat left the book trade and became a merchant of furniture and art objects. In his prime, however, Ladvocat epitomized the new type of publisher. When his portrait was exhibited at the Salon of Paris in 1826, as Martyn Lyons has noted, it represented “the consecration of his success and also the accession of the occupation of éditeur.”11 In addition to these two forerunners of the modern publisher, many other entrepreneurs in both book and periodical publishing in Paris in the early nineteenth century adopted the title of éditeur, including Charles Gosselin, Léon Curmer, Eugène Renduel, Gervais Charpentier, Émile de Girardin, François Buloz, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Michel Lévy, and Louis Hachette. Because the title of éditeur overlapped for so long with that of libraire, it is difficult to determine the exact number of publishers per se versus the number of booksellers (or printers) at any given moment. Until late in the nineteenth century, these categories were not separated in trade directories, making a precise count impossible. The Almanach du commerce of Bottin for 1841, for example, did not distinguish publishers from booksellers in its list of 490 “libraires and éditeurs” in Paris. Nonetheless, it is clear that the number of publishers grew substantially—especially in comparison to the number of printers, which remained fixed at eighty in Paris after 1810—between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Between the 1770s and 1810s, the number of libraires in Paris doubled, from about 160 or 170 (plus another 120 peddlers and 50 “merchants of books” outside of the official guild) to over 300. From about 330 in 1816, it increased again to 435 by 1821, 478 by 1826, and 514 in 1831, before stabilizing around 500 for several decades. Although not all of these libraires engaged in publishing, many of them did specialize in the function of the éditeur.12 By the middle of the nineteenth century, this title was pervasive enough to attract the notice of commentators such as Balzac and Werdet.

The Origins of the Éditeur Why did the title of éditeur become so prevalent in the early nineteenth century in France? What caused this new figure to emerge in the book trade in

24

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

that time and place? Traditionally, the emergence of the éditeur has been interpreted as a side effect of structural and technological modernization. The division of labor between the occupations of publishing, printing, and bookselling has been explained as a natural outgrowth of the shift from an artisanal system of production to an industrial one in the book trade. It has been linked to what Roger Chartier called the “new typographical regime” and Frédéric Barbier termed the “Second Printing Revolution” circa 1830. This “revolution,” which began roughly three centuries after the “first” printing revolution instigated by Gutenberg, involved a conjunction of a number of developments, including an increase in demand for print, the expansion of credit, the mechanization of printing and papermaking, the invention of stereotypography and lithography, and the establishment of nationwide distribution networks with the help of railroads, all of which spurred innovation in the form and content of products. According to the standard view of the emergence of the publisher, these developments combined to create a functional need for an entrepreneur to finance and coordinate all of the creative, manual, and commercial tasks involved in the production and distribution of books.13 This explanation for the birth of the publisher was first given by contemporaries of the new figure. For example, in his report on the occupation of the éditeur to the jury of the national industrial exposition in 1839, the publisher Léon Curmer attributed the appearance of this figure to new techniques for reproducing illustrations, which required someone to negotiate between authors and illustrators. According to Curmer, in recent years the book trade had become more than a simple commerce, due to the “profession of Éditeur that has come to implant itself there since the introduction of illustrated books.” Insisting that only the éditeur could prepare the illustration of a book, Curmer described this figure as the liaison between the intellectual and material processes involved in producing and distributing a book, “the point toward which converge a crowd of industries.”14 Since the mid-nineteenth century, the same explanation for the birth of the publisher has been recycled by cultural historians and literary scholars. The connection between the emergence of this figure and the invention of new illustration techniques, for instance, has been repeated almost verbatim by the authors of the essay on the éditeur in volume 3 of the Histoire de l’édition française. According to them, “It was only under the July Monarchy that one began to become conscious of the originality of the function of éditeur. The

The Birth of the Publisher

25

realization of illustrated books played a large role in this consciousness.” More generally, scholars have tended to link specialization with industrialization in the book trade. As Barbier says, “Of course, the emergence of the industrial book trade and the process of massification that accompanies it push toward the specialization and thus toward the individualization of the different functions developing around the printed book.”15 This explanation for the specialization of the publisher is not without merit. The appearance of this figure did coincide with a number of structural and technological changes in the book trade. The birth of the éditeur was fueled by such developments as a rise in readership, the increased use of bills of exchange, the invention of mechanical papermaking and printing, the adoption of stereotypography and lithography, and the opening of cabinets de lecture, or reading rooms. In particular, the emergence of the éditeur was connected to the “consumption revolution,” which increased the demand for books and periodicals as well as other goods. Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, this increase in demand, which was itself connected to a growth in population and literacy, encouraged producers in France (and elsewhere) to specialize in the entrepreneurial function, developing cheaper book formats and new marketing techniques, such as subscriptions and serials. Exploiting the expansion of the market for print, the publisher began to replace the patron as the financier of the work of the author.16 Nonetheless, the traditional explanation for the emergence of the éditeur leaves something to be desired. In emphasizing the role of structural and technological modernization, this explanation tends to reverse cause and effect: it characterizes the publisher as an outcome of innovations that were in fact promoted by him, in his work to develop new products for new markets. In fact, the éditeur began to be noticed as a social type separate from the printer and the bookseller well before the Second Printing Revolution had taken off in France. Although the existence of this figure had been noted in trade publications and literary sources by the 1810s and 1820s, the book trade was not fully industrialized until several decades later. New technologies of papermaking, printing, illustration, and binding began to be invented as early as the late eighteenth century, but they were not widely adopted in France until the mid-nineteenth. In 1827, there were only four papermaking machines in all of France; in 1833, there were only twelve. Printing had begun to

26

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

industrialize by 1830, when printing workers involved in the July Revolution destroyed the mechanical presses of the Royal Printing Establishment, but steam presses remained exceptional and rotary presses were not even invented until the 1850s. A real industrial revolution did not occur in the book trade until the 1860s and 1870s, when rotary presses were adopted and, perhaps even more important, techniques for making paper from wood chips (as opposed to cloth rags) were perfected. The lack of correlation between the specialization of publishing and the Second Printing Revolution is further borne out by a comparison with England, where the “publisher” emerged as a separate figure at the beginning of the eighteenth century, well over a century before the industrialization of the book trade. (By contrast, in the German lands the specialized publisher did not emerge until much later in the nineteenth century, as a result of the decentralization of the book trade.) Such international comparison suggests that the new publisher was at least as much a cause as a product of the Second Printing Revolution. In his quest to cultivate new markets, he promoted the adoption of machine-made papers, stereotype plates, and rotary presses, for example.17 If the éditeur actually predated some of the changes that are usually said to have spawned him, what exactly did cause his entry onto the social scene in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France? The éditeur emerged in conjunction with a major transformation in the regulatory framework of the book trade. This new social type was a product less of industrial revolution than of political revolution. Between 1770 and 1830, the éditeur was engendered by a number of liberal reforms in the law on the book trade, regarding intellectual property rights, trade restrictions, and censorship controls. Together, these reforms encouraged outsiders from the book guild to risk money on—and required them to assume responsibility for—the production of new literary material. The éditeur first emerged in the cracks of the Old Regime and then flourished as a result of the effects of the French Revolution. Under the Old Regime, the opportunities for specializing in publishing were limited, because of the way in which the book trade was structured and regulated. Since the invention of the printing press, the French monarchy had restricted the trade through a system of privileges and guilds. This corporatist system was consolidated under Colbert, who in an effort to restore order to the book trade following the political and economic turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century limited the number of printers and, to a lesser extent, booksellers

The Birth of the Publisher

27

throughout France. As a result of this corporatist policy, the book trade was dominated by a small oligarchy of bookdealers in Paris, who monopolized the privileges for most authorized works, often in perpetuity. With little incentive to innovate, these bookdealers tended to reproduce the same old works—mostly religious and legal texts in luxurious formats—again and again. Outside of Paris, printers and bookdealers were left with producing only local publications, ephemeral works, or pirated editions, to supplement their printing and retailing operations. The corporatist system, which was not effectively enforced by local authorities, did not preclude all innovation, however. In fact, by restricting printing and bookselling to guild members in large cities in France, the absolutist policy may have encouraged entrepreneurialism among (often illicit) producers in provincial and international towns, who were more responsive than their authorized peers to the growing demand for print. As Robert Darnton has shown, by the eighteenth century there had emerged alongside the official book trade a vast “literary underground,” which produced much of the literature of the Enlightenment, in clandestine shops in Paris, in provincial towns, and, especially, in neighboring countries such as Switzerland and Holland. Under pressure from this literary underground, even members of the guild in Paris began to undertake the production of increasing numbers of new works—or new editions of old classics—in new formats for new audiences. From within the guild, Panckoucke, for example, published a number of nouveautés, including encyclopedias, periodicals, and collected works by living authors. Until the late eighteenth century, though, such entrepreneurialism remained constrained by the state.18 Toward the end of the Old Regime, however, the constraints on entrepreneurialism began to be loosened. Responding to criticism from disgruntled authors, provincial printers, and entrepreneurial bookdealers, including Panckoucke, the monarchy reformed the corporatist system. In a series of six decrees issued on 30 August 1777, it broke the monopoly of the Paris Book Guild on the publication of officially authorized texts. Among other things, the decrees of 1777 declared that privileges belonged not to printers or bookdealers but to authors and their families. If a given author ceded his privilege to a printer or bookdealer, the latter could enjoy it for the lifetime of the author or for ten years, whichever was greater. Afterward, the work fell into a public domain, where it was open to competition. The decrees of 1777 also stipulated that privileges would be granted only to new works or reprints whose text had

28

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

been augmented by at least a quarter. With these reforms, the monarchy not only recognized the personage of the author for the first time, as previous studies have emphasized, but also engendered the figure of the éditeur, or publisher. By limiting the term of privileges over individual works, it provided an incentive for producers to develop new paratextual material—such as introductions or annotations—for reprints of classics. It also gave producers a motivation to acquire or commission entirely new works, to which they could assert a temporary claim. In other words, the decrees of 1777 encouraged specialization in the pursuit of new literary capital—the very definition of the occupation of the éditeur.19 Although it began toward the end of the Old Regime, however, the specialization of publishing remained limited before the French Revolution. The decrees of 1777 did not break the monopoly of the Paris Book Guild. Opposed by the guild, the decrees were never registered by the Parlement of Paris. Moreover, even though they challenged the privileges of the book guild of Paris, these decrees did not remove the barriers to entry into the book trade. In order to practice this trade, producers were still required—at least officially—to belong to one of the corporations of printers and bookdealers. Perhaps the most important factor in the emergence of the éditeur, then, was the abolition of the book guilds, along with all other corporations, by the revolutionary Constituent Assembly in March 1791. Following the outbreak of the Revolution, the Paris Book Guild was defended by its members—including Panckoucke, who despite his interest in reform of the book trade wanted to preserve some version of the corporation as a means of policing the property of publishers. Despite their efforts, however, the guild did not survive the attack on privilege by the French revolutionaries. With the abolition of the Paris Book Guild, the book trade was opened to newcomers, including men who had already been practicing it clandestinely and men who chose now to enter it for the first time. Over the next decade, hundreds of such men flooded the trade, causing Balzac later to complain (in terms similar to many other commentators at the time) that “following the Revolution, a crowd of ignorant men, peasants the day before, libraires the next, rushed into a commerce that presented an opportunity for immense profits: the fall of the chambre syndicale of booksellers had given away the secret of blackened paper.” In fact, according to Carla Hesse, between 1789 and 1799 in Paris the number of printers quadrupled and the number of publishers (libraires and éditeurs) increased by at least one-half. Although the

The Birth of the Publisher

29

vast majority of the printers and bookdealers of the old guild survived at least through the first decade of the Revolution, they were joined by a new group of publishers, who entered the trade in two big waves, first between 1789 and 1792 and then between 1795 and 1799. Whereas on the eve of the Revolution there had been 47 printers and 179 bookdealers in Paris, by 1810 there were 157 and 588, respectively. Many of the newcomers specialized in the publishing of new works, particularly newspapers, ephemera, and novels, which were relatively inexpensive to produce.20 The work of these new publishers was promoted by another revolutionary measure, the so-called Declaration of the Rights of Genius, passed by the legislature of the First Republic on 19 July 1793. A response to the anarchy unleashed in the book trade since the beginning of the Revolution in 1789, this declaration redefined the royally granted privileges of authors (and bookdealers) as naturally given rights. In an attempt to balance the individual claims of the author against the collective needs of the public, it limited the right of property in ideas to the lifetime of the author, plus ten years. This term would be extended to twenty years beyond the life of the author and his spouse by the Empire of Napoleon, as part of the reregulation of the book trade in 1810. As a result of this new legislation, much of the literature of the Old Regime fell into the public domain, from where it could be reproduced— in new formats, with new paratextual materials—by anyone. By placing the legal claim to a book less in the text than in the paratext or edition, the revolutionary and imperial legislation on literary property encouraged specialization in the development of new literary capital. As Carla Hesse says of the decree of 1810, this legislation “marked the institutional consecration of the power of publishers.” Like the regulation of 1777, the declaration of 1793 and the decree of 1810 contributed to the birth not only of the modern author but also of the modern publisher.21 Although the regimes of the Empire and the Restoration reversed much of the revolutionary liberalization of the book trade, they did not challenge the status of the new publisher. With the regulation of 1810, the book trade was subjected to a number of state controls. However, these controls proved less restrictive of entrepreneurship than had the privileges and guilds of the Old Regime. The licensing requirement, for example, did not prevent newcomers from entering the book trade. In the postrevolutionary period, as Christophe Charle has demonstrated, publishing was one of the most open occupations.

30

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Although certain sectors of the trade (for instance, nouveautés) were more open to newcomers than others (such as classics), dozens of men established themselves as publishers in the first half of the nineteenth century, in spite of the licensing requirement. In fact, the licensing requirement may actually have promoted the rise of the éditeur: this title itself seems to have been a means to evade the new rule. Because the state required a license only of the imprimeur, who printed books, and the libraire, who sold them, it often allowed the éditeur to operate without one, as long as he did not participate in the manufacture or distribution of his products. In the early nineteenth century, there were numerous examples of éditeurs who remained in business for years without a license, including Ladvocat, who practiced the book trade for a decade before he was finally forced by the administration to complete the formalities for a license. In June 1830, the minister of interior noted, in a circular to the departmental prefects, that there were a number of merchants who had adopted the title of éditeur of works in the public domain in order to practice without a license. Such unlicensed publishers were pervasive enough to become a source of complaint among law-abiding printers and bookdealers. As a former printer named J.-R. Plassan remarked in 1839, the new éditeurs were “people clever in the art of evading the law; who, by circuitous means, introduced themselves in the book trade, where they maintain themselves in a state of flagrant violation [of the law], by refusing to fulfill one of the principal conditions of the right to exercise the profession of bookdealer: the obtention of a license.”22 Not only did the new regime not challenge the status of the éditeur, but it actually reinforced it—for example, in new legislation on policing of the press. Whereas before such policing had relied on prepublication censorship, under the constitutional regimes of the early nineteenth century it began to center on postpublication liability. In assigning liability for the content of a publication, the law now targeted the éditeur alongside—and sometimes above—the printer, the bookseller, and even the author. The responsibility of the éditeur was highlighted for the first time in the Serre Laws, a trio of measures on the press passed by the legislature in May 1819, which were named after the minister of justice who proposed them. These three measures, which represented a step toward liberalism in comparison to the press law of the Empire and early Restoration, specified the offenses that could be committed via the press; the procedures for prosecuting press crimes; and the requirements

The Birth of the Publisher

31

for publishing a periodical. Among these requirements was the designation of an éditeur responsable, a “responsible publisher,” who assumed liability for everything printed in the periodical. Although it originated in the context of periodical publishing, the notion of the éditeur responsable extended to book publishing, too. In the wake of the Serre Laws, which governed the policing of the press for much of the nineteenth century, press law centered at least as much on the publisher as on any other person involved in the publication of a text, including the author. In exchange for obtaining the right of property in his work, the publisher (like the author) was required by the state to assume responsibility for it. As the Dictionnaire Larousse noted, “the libraire éditeur of a book affixes his name to it and thereby becomes responsible toward both the authority and the public for what is published.”23 The responsibility of the publisher was confirmed in jurisprudence, which made explicit the connection between the rights and the duties of producers of publications. As Annie Prassaloff has shown in a study of court cases regarding literary property reported in the Gazette des tribunaux, by the time of the July Monarchy the judiciary had attributed liability as well as property over publications to the éditeur. By virtue of his censorial responsibilities as well as his property rights, the publisher, not the author, was viewed by the courts as the central personage in the production of literature. To underscore the role of the publisher, jurisprudence often employed the term éditeurpropriétaire (“publisher-owner”) as well as éditeur responsable (“responsible publisher”). The rights and responsibilities of the publisher were highlighted especially in cases involving works of a derivative nature, such as reeditions or collections, where the innovation and direction of the éditeur were paramount. In case after case, the courts ruled that contributors to periodicals or textbooks, for example, retained no right over either the property or the content of their work once it had been submitted to the publisher, who was the true “inventor” of the publication. The primacy of the éditeur in postrevolutionary jurisprudence on literary property and responsibility was paradoxical, given that romanticism was at the same time celebrating the “genius” of the author. As Prassaloff concludes, “in an era when the intimate connection between the author and his work inspired the most lyrical flights of fancy, where one could not find an image pious enough to consecrate it, an author could be declared completely foreign to the fate of his work,” in favor of the éditeur.24

32

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Between the 1770s and the 1830s, the emergence of the éditeur was facilitated by a series of decrees, laws, and judgments, which provided a financial incentive for the undertaking of new literary material, opened the production of such material to new talent, and assigned responsibility for the content of this material to the entrepreneur who financed it. As a result of these measures, the revolutionary era witnessed “an unprecedented expansion and democratization of publishing,” in the words of Carla Hesse. During this era, as Frédéric Barbier confirms, established printers and bookdealers in both Paris and the provinces lost their business, their citizenship, or even their life as a result of their association with the Old Regime. In their place emerged numerous newcomers, who benefited from the liberalization of commerce. Although the book trade contracted again following the reregulation by Napoleon in 1810, it was still double its prerevolutionary size. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, a new band of publishers had replaced the old corporation of bookdealers at the center of the trade in Paris. This band expanded during the Restoration, when enterprising men could found a publishing firm with limited capital. Of the 118 éditeurs whose biographies were included in Edmond Werdet’s history of publishing in 1860, 85 had established themselves in business between 1815 and 1830.25 As their origins in the upheaval of the revolutionary era suggest, these newcomers were by and large self-made men. In contrast to printers and bookdealers who had inherited their trade from members of the old guilds, the new éditeurs came from families outside of the book trade, in the petty and middle bourgeoisie. In general, they possessed little or no formal training in the production and distribution of print. Gervais Charpentier, for example, was the son of a sublieutenant in the army, and Pierre-Jules Hetzel was the son of a saddler and a midwife, while Charles Gosselin was an orphan. Although some éditeurs had served apprenticeships as clerks for other bookdealers, others entered publishing from unrelated occupations, including government, military, trade, and finance. For instance, Urbain Canel, who was one of the first éditeurs to publish the work of Balzac, worked as a bookkeeper for a florist before demanding a bookselling license and undertaking a number of publishing enterprises, of both classical and new works. Despite periodic infusions of capital from outside investors as well as government subscriptions, Canel lasted little more than a decade in publishing, before running out of money and returning to his previous occupation of bookkeeper. As Canel’s case suggests, the

The Birth of the Publisher

33

financial situation of the new éditeurs was often precarious. The liberal legislation of the revolutionary era, which had made it easy and attractive to enter the publishing trade, also left the trade vulnerable to competition.26 Although the political causes of the emergence of the éditeur have since been overlooked by cultural historians and literary scholars, they were recognized by contemporaries of this new social type. In the postrevolutionary period, a number of commentators remarked that the Revolution had facilitated entrepreneurship in the book trade. Contrasting the freedom of occupation of the postrevolutionary era with the Old Regime, for example, Edmond Werdet wrote, “Until then [the Revolution], the most restrictive prohibitions, inspired by all the previous legislations, did not cease to oppose to great bibliographical enterprises continual obstacles, which, very fortunately, almost always remained powerless.” Other writers noted that the legislation on literary property had empowered the publisher at the expense of the author. In his sketch of the éditeur, Élias Regnault remarked, “The inventors of literary property should reevaluate this type that they have engendered.” In similar terms, Balzac protested that since the Revolution the law on literary property had promoted the interests of “entrepreneurs,” or publishers, over those of writers.27

The Consequences of the Rise of the Éditeur The complaints by Regnault and Balzac raise the question of the consequences of the rise of the éditeur for the book trade—and especially for authorship. To what extent did the new publisher alter the size and nature of the trade? How did he affect the condition and work of the author? These questions are difficult to answer given the paucity of sources on publishers in the period stretching from the outbreak of the Revolution to the fall of the constitutional monarchy. The era has left nothing comparable to the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, which Robert Darnton has used to reconstruct the workings of the prerevolutionary book trade, or to the records of the Calmann-Lévy and Hachette firms, which Jean-Yves Mollier has employed to trace the shift from the individual publisher to the publishing house in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, with the help of some statistics on the book trade as well as the surviving letters and contracts of a handful of writers, we may draw some general conclusions about

34

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

the effects of the éditeur on books and authors during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although in the long term these effects proved dramatic, in the short term they remained limited, because innovation in publishing was constrained by the postrevolutionary political context, especially the regulation of 1810. The rise of the éditeur did not correlate with any significant change in overall book production, for example. Between the mid-eighteenth and midnineteenth centuries, output in publishing saw only slow and modest growth. In the period from 1760 to 1775, production of books in the French language totaled 2,000 titles (or 3,000 volumes) per year at maximum, excluding the foreign trade. During the Revolution, this number declined to fewer than 1,000 titles per year on average. At the end of the First Empire, it rose again to between 3,000 and 4,000, and under the Restoration it grew to the unprecedented level of 7,000 to 8,000 titles per year. Not until the Second Empire, though, did it see another marked increase, to 12,000 titles per year. Moreover, even though the number of titles increased, the size of print runs (which is really a more precise measure of production) did not. At the end of the Old Regime, the typical print run was somewhere between 750 and 2,000 copies, and most of the “classics” published in Paris averaged between 1,000 and 1,800 copies. This number remained more or less unaltered before 1830, after which it rose gradually to between 1,500 and 2,000 and then, after 1840, to between 2,000 and 5,000. As late as 1860, though, the average printing remained only about 2,800. As Frédéric Barbier has emphasized, before the late nineteenth century (when the average print run finally passed the 10,000 mark) the number of titles grew at a faster rate than did the average printing. Although diversity of publications increased in conjunction with the emergence of the éditeur, availability did not.28 Nor did the rise of the éditeur revolutionize the content of literature as much as might be expected. Although he was often associated with the production of “novelties,” the newest member of the book trade was actually responsible for establishing a canon of “classics” between the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. As William St. Clair has demonstrated in the case of the British book trade, the overthrow of the corporatist system encouraged publishers to issue reprints of old works, which had previously been monopolized by guild members but had now fallen into the public domain. In contrast to novelties, which were sold at high prices so

The Birth of the Publisher

35

that publishers could recoup their investment in the capital of the author, these reprints were marketed at cheap prices for new readerships, including educational institutions and popular audiences. They thus tended to dominate the market for print at the expense of new literature, whose public remained limited to the elite. In France, literary output was no less influenced by the regime of literary property. The restriction of such property first to ten and then to twenty years after the death of the author created a vast public domain of “classics,” which the new éditeurs rushed to exploit. Although they did indeed launch several new authors, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Eugène Sue, these éditeurs also produced countless reeditions, abridgements, translations, anthologies, and collections of existing works. To take one example, the éditeur Baudouin offered for subscription no fewer than six editions of the complete works of Voltaire in the octavo format between 1825 and 1830. At the height of romanticism, the literary market was thus saturated by classicism, as Martyn Lyons has shown. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the best seller list (reconstructed from lists of titles in the Bibliographie de la France and declarations of print runs in the Archives Nationales) was dominated by eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century authors, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Molière, Racine, Fénélon, and La Fontaine, whose collection of fables may have been the most read book during the Restoration in France. As Carla Hesse has emphasized, the rise of the éditeur encouraged consolidation as much as it did innovation in literature.29 In the short term, the new éditeur may have had less of an effect on the number and content of books than on their marketing. By the early nineteenth century, the publisher had introduced a number of new publicity techniques, including subscriptions, prospectuses, catalogs, advertisements, illustrations, and posters. In contrast to the traditional libraire, who let his wares speak for themselves, the new éditeur worked to “puff ” his books, by circulating notices and soliciting reviews. As he developed his own fund or list of titles, each éditeur cultivated a house look or brand—for instance, by creating a unique binding and cover for his publications. To build brand identity, publishers began to group their books into series or collections, some of which were targeted at a petit bourgeois (if not yet working-class) audience. Under pressure from foreign piracies and newspaper serials (called feuilletons), publishers also began to lower book prices, which had remained high despite a decline in costs with the beginning of industrialization. In 1838, the

36

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

publisher Gervais Charpentier instigated a veritable revolution in the book trade by introducing a new collection (called the “Bibliothèque Charpentier”) in the compact octodecimo (in-18) format priced at 3 francs 50, or half of the usual cost, per volume. His example would be followed by a number of other publishers, who began to market their own collections of books at 3 francs 50—or less—and to sell books in parts, priced at twenty sous per installment.30 Recognizing that marketing alone would not get books into the hands of readers, the new éditeurs also introduced a number of distribution practices. While continuing to rely on such customary practices as exchanges with other bookdealers, trade fairs, colporteurs (peddlers), étalages (literally “shelves,” erected along the streets), and cabinets de lecture (reading rooms), they began to develop some new sales tactics. In the 1810s, publishers began hiring commission agents to market their products to booksellers in the provinces. They also began using wholesalers (many of whom had begun their career as a commission agent for a single publisher) to serve as intermediaries between publishers in Paris and retailers in the countryside. To the extent possible, though, they tried to circumvent such intermediaries by dealing directly with retailers, including new “bazaars” and grands magasins, to whom they offered incentives in the form of discounts of 10 to 20 percent and treizièmes (“thirteenths”), or one free copy for every twelve purchased. In the 1840s, publishers also began to form associations, such as a Dépôt Central de Librairie, to distribute their new publications to provincial booksellers. Hence began the practice of envoi d’office, or deposit on commission, a kind of franchise system. As éditeurs concentrated on the acquisition of manuscripts from authors, they left the sale of books to libraires, who specialized in retailing.31 The rise of the éditeur also transformed the occupation of authorship, though it had less of an effect on this occupation than commentary by contemporaries of this new figure would suggest. Contrary to the Balzacian image of the éditeur as a “sultan” or tyrant, the new publisher in fact exerted little power over the author, at least in the short term. Through at least the middle of the nineteenth century, publishers were forced as a result of the limited term of intellectual property to engage in a constant chase after new literary capital. Because publishers were so dependent on their work, authors enjoyed considerable freedom of contract. If authors disapproved of their treatment by one publisher, they were free (at least upon expiration of their contract, whose term was

The Birth of the Publisher

37

usually short) to switch to another one. The most notorious example of this behavior is Balzac, who abandoned one publisher after another, at the slightest dispute or offense, over the course of his thirty-year career. Yet, Balzac was certainly not the only writer to treat his publishers in this fashion. At the time, the average author dealt with thirteen publishers over the course of his career. This pattern, which has been labeled by book historians as pluri-édition (multiple publishers, simultaneously and/or sequentially) in contradistinction to mono-édition (one publisher over a long term), persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Jean-Yves Mollier, “Contrary to what would become the rule several years later, authors still imposed their conditions on libraires-éditeurs. Wandering from one merchant to another, in function of the offer or of the reputation of the professional, they generally conserved the property in their works.” Long after the emergence of the éditeur, writers held the upper hand in author-publisher relations.32 Given their leverage over the new publishers, authors tended to profit from the specialization of the book trade. The effect of the éditeur on the material condition of authorship was gradual. However, the emergence of this figure did make writing a viable career option for the first time. Prior to the late eighteenth century, writers were not usually paid for their work. For their livelihood, they depended on outside sources of income, such as family wealth, royal protection, or noble patronage. Following the birth of the éditeur, however, writers could at least hope to receive monetary compensation (as well as other perks, including gifts, dinners, theater tickets, and free books) for their labor. Such compensation originated with the pioneering éditeur Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, who was one of the first to guarantee payments to authors in notarial contracts as opposed to personal letters. By the early nineteenth century, it was common for a publisher to offer a writer at least a token payment for a manuscript.33 Initially, this payment took the form of a lump sum, in exchange for which the publisher obtained the right to publish a limited edition of the work during a short period of time. (Not until the second half of the century would this payment be based on a proportional fee—or royalty—for each copy printed.) According to author-publisher contracts from the early nineteenth century, the average compensation for a book-length manuscript was between eight hundred and two thousand francs, usually divided into two or more payments. In exchange for this sum, the publisher obtained the exclusive right to print an edition of between one and two thousand copies of

38

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

the work, for a term of one to two years. In the case of Balzac, for example, the contract for his first novel (Clotilde de Lusignan, which appeared under a pseudonym) dated 22 January 1822 entitled him to two thousand francs, to be paid in three installments, for a first edition of fifteen hundred copies (in four volumes, duodecimo). From this sum, Balzac was supposed to pay for his own publicity—a common stipulation at the time. A similar amount of fifteen hundred francs (to be paid in installments of two hundred francs per month, starting from the publication date) was offered to Théophile Gautier for fifteen hundred copies of his novel Mademoiselle Maupin by the publisher Eugène Renduel, in a contract dated 10 September 1833. Even higher payments were commanded by better established and more popular authors, especially for work for the theater and the press. For instance, the best-selling Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received fourteen thousand francs for a second volume of poetry, Nouvelles méditations, in 1823, and even as a young man the popular playwright and novelist Victor Hugo was able to impose “leonine conditions” on such publishers as Eugène Renduel. By the 1840s, Balzac earned eleven thousand francs for the book version of Modeste Mignon, plus an additional 9,500 francs for the feuilleton version in the Journal des débats, while the most popular novelist of the time, Eugène de Sue, received the unprecedented sum (for a work of fiction) of one hundred thousand francs from the newspaper Le Constitutionnel for his novel Le Juif errant.34 Of course, not all authors profited to this extent from the rise of the éditeur. Well into the nineteenth century, many writers—especially beginning ones— still were not paid for their work. In 1813, Charles Paul de Kock, for example, paid over eight hundred francs out of his own pocket to publish five hundred copies of his first novel, The Child of My Wife, in two volumes, and Théophile Gautier’s first work, a volume of poems distributed by the éditeur Marie in 1830, was published at the expense of Gautier’s father.35 Before the development of royalty payments and large print runs in the late nineteenth century, the earnings of authors remained limited. Given these limits, perhaps as few as 10 percent of authors in this era were able to live from writing alone.36 Nonetheless, most authors were better off after the emergence of the éditeur than they had been before. The positive effect of the éditeur on the material condition of authorship was acknowledged by contemporaries. In 1836, for example, the satirical

The Birth of the Publisher

39

newspaper Le Corsaire credited publishers for the prices now fetched by manuscripts: “It is to [us publishers] that literature owes the enormous price which the productions of the spirit have attained. . . . In 1818, a tragedy was purchased for 600 francs, in 1824, we paid 14,000 francs for a comedy and 7,000 francs for a demi-volume of poetry. The progression is prodigious, as one sees. The other publishers are forced to follow the trend, and men of letters today sell their works at whatever price they want. It is true that the publishers pay when they can; but in the end, it is all the same, the prices are magnificent, and it is to us that it is owed.” Other commentators agreed that as a result of the new entrepreneurial “patrons” of literature, the early nineteenth century was a “golden age” for writers.37 Even as they began to earn money from publishers, authors maintained authority over their work. The first publishers did not exert much influence over the writing of authors. Like Panckoucke, whose biographer concludes that he gave only general advice “without a rigid program of authoritative and regular intervention,” most early nineteenth-century publishers did not modify texts in a systematic fashion. Evidence from the correspondence between authors and publishers during this period suggests that the former brooked little interference from the latter. Balzac would sometimes solicit writing advice from a fellow author, such as Eugène Sue, but he would rarely accept it from a publisher. In December 1839, for instance, he withdrew a sketch of “The Notary” from the newspaper Le Siècle (whose editors were worried about offending the notaries among their subscribers) rather than alter it. To avoid such conflict with his publishers, Balzac often specified in his contracts that they were not allowed to alter his submissions. To take another example, George Sand repeatedly insisted that her work be published without changes. In one of many similar letters to her publisher François Buloz (among others), she demanded: “Hold a place in your number [of his literary journal, the Revue des deux mondes]. . . . I insist mainly that it appear right away and without a single word being changed, even under pretext that they are literary corrections. . . . Provided that I do not make myself condemned [for offenses against the law on the press], you have no right to respond to my ideas, and even if I were [condemned], since I sign [my own articles], I would assume myself all responsibility and you would be protected against any fine.” Comparable demands were made of Buloz by the authors Stendhal and Alfred de Musset. To Buloz, Musset wrote in October 1837, “Here is my

40

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

proof, my dear friend, and I beg you to change nothing more.” As late as the early 1860s, Alfred de Vigny succeeded in blocking editorial changes to his collected works, in a contract with the publisher Michel Lévy, which specified that “One will never add a page, a line, a word, in the form of a note, preface, explanation or announcement to any of my works (in whatever format they are printed) to the exact text reviewed and corrected in 1860 and 1861, in my hand. . . . Never will a new editor be chosen for a new edition without imposing on him this condition.” Of course, there were exceptions to this general pattern of authorial resistance to editorial intervention. Early nineteenth-century writers did acquiesce to some cuts and modifications to their writing, especially from publishers of periodicals, who were more vulnerable than publishers of books to state prosecution. Even the cantankerous Balzac acceded on occasion to suggestions and alterations from newspaper editors such as Amédée Pichot, Louis Desnoyers, and Armand Bertin, for moral and political reasons, and he accepted editing from the book publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who was a popular author in his own right and a notoriously interventionist editor. For example, Hetzel reworked an essay by Balzac on “The Lion” for a collection called “The Public and Private Life of Animals.” The apologetic tone of the letter in which the publisher informed the author of the changes he had made to the essay, however, suggests that this kind of editing was exceptional. Such exceptions simply prove the rule: in general, authors in the early nineteenth century did not tolerate editorial changes.38 Over time, the balance of power between authors and publishers would shift in favor of the latter. Due in part to legislative reform in their favor, publishers would gain in authority over authors. Monopolizing literary capital for a longer period of time, they would develop close—and often influential— relationships with a “stable” of authors. As the practice of pluri-édition gave way to a system of mono-édition, the average author’s overall number of publishers would decline to about ten over the course of a lifetime.39 As editorial practice became more systematized, the publisher would exert more control over the work of the author. In short, the author would be subjugated to the publisher. By the end of the nineteenth century, the real éditeur would bear a closer resemblance to the fictional Dauriat, the tyrannical “sultan” of the book trade. When he first emerged in the early nineteenth century, however, the éditeur was far from omnipotent.

The Birth of the Publisher

41

The Reaction to the Éditeur Despite the limits of his powers, however, the new éditeur attracted considerable attention, much of it negative. This figure sparked a strong reaction, out of all proportion to his actual influence. During this period, the éditeur was the object of extensive—and often vitriolic—criticism by authors, booksellers, and printers. Much of this criticism came in the form of satire. Between the 1820s and the 1840s, the éditeur was a ubiquitous personage in literature. The character of Dauriat in Balzac’s Lost Illusions is the most famous example. However, it was by no means the only—or even the first— representation of the publisher in the literature of the time. In fact, the éditeur was portrayed in a number of plays, novels, essays, memoirs, and sketches (or “physiologies,” as they were called), often as a materialist antithesis to the idealist poet-martyr. Like gens de lettres and journalists themselves, who were frequently derided as mercenaries and prostitutes, publishers were chastised by authors for treating texts as commodities.40 At the same time, the éditeur was also targeted by printers and booksellers in a number of pamphlets on the current state of the book trade. Whether fictional or nonfictional, most of the commentary on the newest member of the trade contained the same basic litany of complaints. One of the most frequent complaints about this new figure was that he had degraded the title of éditeur. While this title had previously applied only to erudite and respectable editors, critics of the new type of éditeur asserted, it was now adopted by uneducated and disreputable entrepreneurs. Well before Edmond Werdet, who complained in 1860 that the “honorable title of éditeur has become the prey of everyone,” numerous other members of the book trade decried the shift in the connotation of the word. In 1841, for example, a provincial bookdealer named Victor Fouque grumbled, “In no era besides our own have there existed so many éditeurs, and who merit so little this title, which once was so honorable. There are some who manufacture and sell a book like others sell pepper or clogs, without worrying whether they have published a useful work or not.” In similar terms, the critic F. de Lagenevais decried the degeneration of the title of éditeur, in a piece on illustrated literature for the Revue des deux mondes in 1843: “In the last century,” he wrote, “the functions of the éditeur presumed some literary knowledge, a judgment, a formed taste, but these men who loved literature, who understood it, who encouraged it, have been replaced

42

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

by the coarse and greedy generation of men of affairs, bankers, picturesque publishers, pure merchants without taste and without instruction, interior pirates, so to speak, of the true éditeurs of before.”41 As the comment by Lagenevais suggests, another common criticism of the éditeur was that he was ignorant or even illiterate. This criticism was made by both Werdet and Fouque, for example. While Werdet asserted that French publishers were less well educated than their British and German counterparts, Fouque cited the example of a licensed libraire-éditeur “who is totally illiterate, to the point that he cannot even read the titles of the books that he sells.” The supposed ignorance of publishers was a frequent object of satire by authors. For example, Honoré de Balzac and Frédéric Soulié each caricatured the libraire-éditeur as indifferent to the content of a book, and Hippolyte Bonnellier concluded a novel entitled “The Bookdealer’s Daughter” with the following denunciation of the éditeur by a retiring bookdealer: “[T]he creator of printing would have blushed for his sublime work, if he had been able to predict that one day it would fall under the domination of stupid and coarse men who, adorned with the name of éditeurs, bring to the profession that you are going to exercise ingratitude, ignorance, shamelessness, brutality, and speculation, companion of theft.” To remedy such ignorance, both authors and bookdealers recommended that the government impose additional requirements on aspirants to the title of éditeur, including university-level examinations equivalent to those for the baccalaureate. Of course, the stereotype of the éditeur as unintelligent was exaggerated. In reality, most publishers had been educated at least at the primary, if not also the secondary, level. Nevertheless, they were often portrayed as unlettered.42 Even more commonly, the new éditeurs were characterized as materialist and unethical. Associated with speculation, they were denigrated as greedy and dishonest businessmen, who treated authors and books as nothing more than “deals” and “operations.” Over and over, éditeurs were smeared with terms such as “courtiers,” “industrialists,” “merchants,” “pirates,” “rogues,” “harpies,” and (the worst insult of all at the time) “grocers.” Accused of caring not about art but only about money, the new publishers were condemned by traditional bookdealers and Romantic authors alike for marketing books as if they were ordinary commodities, like spices, bonnets, or shoes. For example, the writer Alphonse Karr asserted that while some publishers were “men of spirit, the vast majority—and not the least successful—sell books like others sell coal.”

The Birth of the Publisher

43

In similar terms, the author of a caricature of the libraire-éditeur for the newspaper L’Universel in 1829 suggested that a publisher advertised his authors in the same manner as a wine merchant marketed his vintages: “Chateaubriand-Champagne, Casimir Delavigne-Mâcon, Lamartine-Bordeaux Lafitte . . .”; book publishers, like wine distributors, were “merchants of drugs.” As such, publishers were identified in the minds of both bookdealers and authors with deception and dishonesty. Éditeurs were repeatedly charged by their critics with “fraud,” “mischievousness,” “piracy,” “disloyalty,” and, especially, “charlatanism.”43 More specifically, the new éditeurs were accused of a long list of shady practices, including defrauding subscribers with fake prospectuses or neverending collections; padding volumes with blank spaces and excessive ellipses; supplementing texts with elaborate frontispieces, chapter headings, and illustrations; reissuing books with new formats, covers, or titles; displaying false edition numbers on title pages; discounting prices for booksellers; offering premiums to book buyers; requiring booksellers to buy an unknown work along with a popular title; and depositing books with merchants other than specialized booksellers. Intended to force sales, such marketing tricks were denounced by Romantic authors and traditional bookdealers as “disloyal” commerce. In 1824, for example, a fictive visitor to the Palais Royal in Paris was horrified at the “charlatanism” of the lavish vignettes, gothic letters, and blank pages in the books for sale in the shop of a publisher who, though unnamed, resembled Ladvocat. The new éditeur was also criticized—or at least caricatured—for his advertising techniques, including prospectuses, catalogs, newspaper advertisements, book reviews, sandwich men, and, especially, posters, which were introduced by Ladvocat in the 1820s. In his attack on the éditeur, for example, the provincial bookdealer Victor Fouque complained that “one of the principal causes of the discredit of the book trade was the profusion of announcements and especially advertisements made at great expense in the newspapers; because their exaggeration and their alleged appreciation of books are almost always dishonest, or imprinted with a charlatanism which inspires defiance in the minds of the least suspecting.” In a more lighthearted tone, the writer Frédéric Soulié satirized the advertising techniques of the éditeur in a description of the occupation of publishing: “. . . the publishing book trade, the book trade of Ladvocat, which Ladvocat pushed to its Herculean columns, this type of book trade that marches, flanked by prospectuses,

44

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

by large posters; straight, audacious, greeting the public, putting the title of a book under his eyes, at all hours, in all places, on his door, in his newspaper, at the theater, at the stock exchange, under his napkin, everywhere.” For such audacious marketing practices, the new publishers were resented by traditionalists in the book trade.44 Above all, publishers were resented by traditionalists because of their role as intermediaries. In contrast to the “real” creators and producers of a book, publishers were viewed as useless and parasitical middlemen between the author and the public. For many commentators, specialization between publishing and retailing had caused inefficiency and exploitation in the book trade. Balzac, for example, decried the division of labor between publishers, wholesalers, and retailers in his article on the state of the book trade in 1830: “We are going to arrive at the true scourge [of the book trade],” the author wrote. “The libraires are divided into three classes: 1. The libraires-éditeurs [publishers] who buy manuscripts, or reprint old authors, and produce them as books; 2. the libraires-commissionnnaires and de détail [wholesale and retail bookdealers], to whom the first deliver considerable portions of their editions; 3. the libraires [small booksellers] of the provinces or of Paris who communicate directly with the buyer. . . . This absurd hierarchy, which has as its goal to charge three taxes on a book, before it reaches the public, is the cause of all of the troubles of this deplorable commerce.” According to Balzac, such specialization profited the publisher, at the expense of the author and the public. To remedy such exploitation, he argued, “It is a matter of constraining a man who has printed a book to pay the author, the printer, and the paper-maker, to sell the work himself to the public, without making it pay three ransoms. Finally, it is necessary to ensure that a volume is produced exactly like bread, and is sold like bread, that there be no intermediary between an author and a consumer besides the [combined bookseller-publisher] libraire.”45 Like Balzac, other critics of the new éditeur also complained that he enriched himself at the expense of others in the book trade. Over and over, the publisher was chastised for his “luxury,” which was a familiar epithet against the new rich in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. Most commentators characterized the éditeur as extravagant in his habits of dress, housing, and dining. They described him as a lavish entertainer who conducted business more often over dinner or at a ball than in his office. Often labeling him a “fat cat,” they satirized his “English cravat,” pocket watch, plush

The Birth of the Publisher

45

furniture, and comfortable carriage. In particular, the publisher was caricatured for his mode of transport. Almost invariably, the commentary on the éditeur remarked that he rode in a cabriolet, or convertible carriage, while his authors were forced to walk. In the eyes of his critics, the cabriolet was symbolic of the éditeur’s extravagance—and of his greed. Exemplary of the sin of luxury was one publisher in particular: Ladvocat. As one legal brief against him charged, Ladvocat was deemed to exhibit a “luxury indecent for a merchant.” In both fictional and nonfictional accounts of the éditeur, however, Ladvocat was just the most egregious example of the extravagance that was perceived to be endemic in publishing. In point of fact, the new publishers were by no means all rich. Nonetheless, they were charged with living “fat” off the work of authors, printers, and booksellers.46 Not all reactions to the new publisher were so negative. The éditeur was praised for publicizing—and financing—the work of writers. As Frédéric Soulié wrote, “[Publishing] is one of the arteries [of Paris] that carries blood to the extremities . . . that which pumps for us [authors], that which distributes and brings to the surface of humanity our thought, our life, our name.” Similarly, the printer Paul Dupont acknowledged that the rise of the éditeur had benefited authorship by liberating writers from dependence on patronage: “[I]f authors have not always had reason to appreciate their publishers, if recriminations have arisen on both sides . . . it is however necessary to agree, to be fair, that many writers would never have been able to make themselves known in literature or in science, if they had not found a publisher who, at his own risk and peril, charged himself with the publication of their works.” Even Victor Fouque, the provincial bookdealer who was the biggest critic of the new type of éditeur, admitted that there was a category of publisher deserving of honor: one who was “constantly occupied in establishing at great expense books that are useful and conscientiously produced; employing honest and licit means for distributing his products, for which he has sacrificed his sleep, his health, and his pocketbook.” As the prime example of the new type of éditeur, Ladvocat was often singled out for special praise as well as for condemnation. This particular publisher was recognized for helping to “consecrate the independence of the occupation of man of letters,” as a group of authors wrote in the introduction to the collection of essays on Paris that they produced in an effort to save him from bankruptcy in 1832.47

46

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Over time, this more positive description of the éditeur would prevail in the social imaginary in France. In part as the result of a campaign undertaken by publishers themselves (including Panckoucke’s son Charles-Louis-Fleury) to defend their role as entrepreneurs, these new figures would come to be accepted by other members of the book trade, including authors. By the end of the nineteenth century, the éditeur would become naturalized or “sacralized,” in the words of Jean-Yves Mollier. However, this process would require decades of struggle on the part of publishers.48

In the wake of the French Revolution, there emerged a new class of entrepreneurs in the book trade. Labeled éditeurs, these new entrepreneurs specialized in supplying the financial and human capital necessary to produce new (or revised) publications. Promoted by revolutionary-era legislation that abolished perpetual corporate privileges and instituted temporary individual rights in texts, éditeurs were ubiquitous by the 1830s, when they were immortalized by Balzac in Lost Illusions. Although their influence long remained limited, the new publishers were viewed with suspicion by the rest of the book trade. When they first emerged, these entrepreneurs were resented by printers, bookdealers, and authors for introducing new strategies and habits into the trade. Characterized as unlettered, immoral, materialistic, and devious, they were denounced as charlatans. Despite the resistance they faced when they first emerged in the book trade, the new publishers would come to play a major role in reshaping the book trade in nineteenth-century France. Following the Revolution, they would reconfigure the politics of publishing. Under the Old Regime, publishing entrepreneurs such as Charles-Joseph Panckoucke supported the guild system, even as they advocated moderate reform. In the wake of the Revolution, however, they became proponents of individual freedom and property, against corporatist regulation. The publishers of the era of Balzac shared a number of characteristics with their predecessors in the age of Diderot, including a reliance on state patronage. Like their forerunner Panckoucke, they often cultivated government favors in the form of subventions and loans, for example. But the new éditeurs departed in significant ways from the libraires and imprimeurs of the Old Regime, in their political goals as well as their business practices. Products of the Revolution, they remained committed to economic,

The Birth of the Publisher

47

if not always political, liberalism. Following the Restoration, they would continue to champion revolutionary-era economic reforms—especially free trade and intellectual property. In line with their interests as entrepreneurs, they would campaign for these causes. In this campaign, they were opposed by more corporatist-minded printers and bookdealers, who now saw their enemies not as the monopolists of the Paris Book Guild but the capitalists who had emerged in the wake of its downfall.

2 The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

Behind the pointed attack on the figure of the publisher lay a deeper anxiety about the state of the book trade in postrevolutionary France. For authors, journalists, printers, and bookdealers, the éditeur was a scapegoat for the effects of the Revolution in this trade. In the eyes of his critics, this new personage symbolized everything that had gone wrong with the production of literature since 1789: the rampant speculation on literary work; the introduction of immoral marketing tactics; the profusion of advertisements and reviews of books; the prevalence of literary piracy; the lack of qualification among bookdealers; the decline in the quality of printing; the cutthroat competition among printers and retailers; in short, the deregulation of the book trade. According to these critics, before the Revolution the trade had been an honorable profession; since then, it had fallen into “anarchy” and “decadence.” As late as 1847, a libraire named J. Hébrard, for example, complained in a pamphlet entitled “On the Book Trade, Its Former Prosperity, Its Current State, Causes of Its Decadence, Means of Its Regeneration,” “Truly, to see the book trade as it is today, is to see an invalid, covered with sores from head to feet, and on which the investigating eye of the doctor discovers everywhere the signs of death.”1 For a traditional bookdealer like Hébrard, the éditeur was just one symptom of the general illness afflicting the production and distribution of print in the aftermath of the Revolution. As Hébrard’s diagnosis suggests, the Revolution left a deep and long-lasting fissure in the book trade. Despite the attempt by Napoleon to mitigate the effects of the Revolution in publishing with the decree of 1810, this fissure persisted long into the nineteenth century. Reconfiguring the old divisions between Parisian monopolists and provincial outliers and between masters and journeymen, the Revolution split the book trade into two main camps: one nostalgic

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

49

for the Old Regime and the other committed to revolutionary liberalism. The first camp, which consisted mainly of established printers and bookdealers, aimed to further reverse the effects of the Revolution on the book trade. The second camp, which was composed mostly of new publishers, or éditeurs, wanted to free the trade from state restrictions. These two camps divided especially over two aspects of the decree of 1810: licensing requirements for printers and bookdealers and property rights over literary texts. Torn between these two camps, the French state long remained paralyzed. At several points between 1810 and 1848, it did reevaluate the legislation related to the book trade. Before mid-century, however, it moved neither to restore the Old Regime nor to advance the revolution in the trade. Under both the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the government toyed with further liberalization of publishing. In the end, however, it decided against altering the regulation of 1810. Throughout the era of constitutional monarchy, the state aimed to protect public order and enlightenment. In the interest of these priorities, both the Restoration and the July Monarchy maintained strict limits on the practice of the book trade. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the battle between corporatists and liberals over the Revolution in the trade thus resulted in a draw. In addition to providing evidence of the persistence of corporatism into the nineteenth century, the story of the debate between corporatists and liberals in the book trade illuminates the ambiguity of liberalism in postrevolutionary France. For example, it shows that French liberals—both within and outside of government—were willing to compromise intellectual freedom for economic freedom and to balance the goals of individual liberty and property with the interests of public order and access. At the same time, the story of the debate between corporatists and liberals calls into question the social identity of the postrevolutionary constitutional monarchies, especially the so-called bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–1848). Despite their connection to a new “notability” of commercial as well as landed elites, these constitutional monarchies remained resistant to the liberal demands of capitalist entrepreneurs.2

The Napoleonic “Marriage” between State and Market The Revolution of 1789 did not just inaugurate a new political system. It also transformed the world of work. During this revolution, many occupations

50

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

suddenly lost the institutions and privileges that had structured their work for centuries under the Old Regime. The book trade was no exception. Like most occupations, including other culture industries such as art, journalism, and theater, it was left in a state of disorganization by the Revolution. In the general attack on corporate distinctions, the book trade lost its traditional regulatory moorings. By 1791, both the literary privileges and the book guilds were abolished. Although the revolutionaries eventually replaced the literary “privileges” of the Old Regime with property rights, they otherwise left the book trade unregulated. While the revolution in publishing was welcomed by many entrepreneurs from outside of the guilds, it was opposed by many others in the book trade. Like doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, butchers, and bakers, to whom they explicitly compared themselves, most printers and bookdealers worried about the effect of deregulation on their occupations. By the early 1800s, these printers and bookdealers complained that the Revolution had brought “license,” “anarchy,” “stagnation,” and “deterioration” to the book trade. Issuing pamphlets with titles such as “General Ideas on the Causes of the Devastation of Printing, and on the Necessity of Restoring to this Occupation as well as that of Bookselling, the Honorable Rank that They Have Both Always Occupied among the Liberal Arts,” they compared the state of affairs since 1789 unfavorably to (what they viewed as) the “golden age” of the book trade under the Old Regime. As one former printer-bookdealer put it in 1807, “During and since [the Revolution], ignorance, cupidity, and bad faith, inseparable companions of disorder, installed themselves in these two occupations; the property of the man of letters, this sacred right, is violated without respect; typography, that brilliant art, which admitted in its breast only enlightenment and morality, is prey to the caprice of he who has no more consulted his ability than his fortune.” To remedy such “disorder,” many members of the book trade demanded that the state reestablish regulatory institutions along the lines of the old guilds.3 It was in response to such demands that Napoleon reregulated the book trade with the decree dated 5 February 1810. Although this regulation did not revive the old guilds, as some members of the book trade had requested, it instituted a number of new state controls on the trade. Among other things, the decree of 1810 established a new governmental department to oversee the production and distribution of printed matter, the Direction Générale de la

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

51

Librairie et de l’Imprimerie, or Administration of the Book Trade. Placed under the jurisdiction of the minister of the interior, this department monitored the work of printers and bookdealers, with the help of a corps of auditors, censors, and inspectors. To facilitate the monitoring of printed matter by this department, the decree of 1810 obligated printers to make a “legal deposit” (dépôt légal) of five copies of each new publication at their local police prefecture, which would in turn announce the title in an official trade journal, the Bibliographie de la France, or Journal général de la librairie et de l’imprimerie, as it came to be called. The centerpiece of the regulation of 1810, however, was the requirement that all printers and bookdealers obtain a brevet, or license, from the state administration. By limiting the number of such licenses— by law for printers and in practice for bookdealers—the administration was able to control entrance to the book trade. To reward printers and bookdealers for acceding to such control, the decree of 1810 also extended the duration of literary property, from ten to twenty years after the death of the author and his widow, for immediate descendants and third-party assigns. While this measure encouraged the publication of new textual material, it still maintained a large public domain of literature, free for reprinting. Like the Declaration of the Rights of Genius of 1793, it defined the rights of authors not as a universal and perpetual property but as a sui generis and temporary concession from the state. By simultaneously restricting and promoting the production of literary work, the decree of 1810 attempted to reconcile critics and advocates of the effects of the Revolution in the book trade. In the formulation of Carla Hesse, the imperial policy on publishing constituted a “marriage of state regulation and the commercial market.”4 However, this “marriage” proved happy for no one. Despite its effort to appease both proponents of regulation and supporters of competition, the decree of 1810 satisfied neither. Instead, the decree divided members of the book trade—and the state administration—into two basic camps: a “corporatist” camp, which demanded additional protection, and a “liberal” camp, which advocated more liberty. Whereas the corporatist camp maintained that the regulation of 1810 did not go far enough in reversing the effects of the Revolution, the liberal one asserted that the regulation went too far. Of course, there were overlaps between and divisions within these two camps. As recent scholarship has shown, liberalism and protectionism were not always diametrically opposed categories in France, either before or after the Revolution.5

52

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Nonetheless, such terms serve to characterize the conflict in the postrevolutionary book trade, which persisted through the nineteenth century. In the conflict over the regulation of 1810, the corporatist camp was composed largely of established artisanal printers and merchant bookdealers. Many of these printers and bookdealers were members of families who had belonged to the old guilds—including the prominent Didot, Delalain, Barrois, and Plassan clans. Alongside these former guild members, the corporatist camp also included petty and provincial printers and bookdealers. Many of these were located in and around the city of Lyon, a historic center of printing, which had lost out to Paris as the locus of the book trade in France. Under the Old Regime, many of these petty and provincial producers and distributors had been at odds with the privileged elite of the Paris Book Guild. In the postrevolutionary era, however, they joined former guild members in opposing the entrepreneurial éditeurs who had come to dominate the book trade. Like the former guildsmen, these petty and provincial printers and bookdealers were interested both in limiting competition in the book trade and in preventing monopolization of this trade by the new publishers. Echoing the language of the printers and bookdealers who had complained of “anarchy” and “license” during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the new corporatists campaigned long into the nineteenth century for a return to prerevolutionary regulations and guildlike institutions. Defending their own role in the trade, which often consisted of producing and distributing reprints rather than new works, corporatists maintained that the book trade necessitated special restrictions and protections, including a large public domain of literary capital. In contrast to the corporatist camp, the liberal one was comprised mainly of new, entrepreneurial éditeurs, or publishers. Whereas the printers and booksellers of the corporatist camp could trace their lineage in the book trade back decades or even centuries, the publishers in the liberal one had entered the trade only recently. They had taken advantage of the relative liberalization of the book trade since 1789 to establish themselves in business. The liberal camp included such new publishers as Charles Gosselin, Léon Curmer, Louis Hachette, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, and J.-B. Baillière. Beneficiaries of deregulation, these publishers tended to favor not more but less state intervention in the book trade. Although they certainly welcomed government protection and patronage of their business, they generally supported free trade. Interested above

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

53

all in decreasing their production costs, increasing their sales outlets, and maximizing their property rights, publishers advocated individual freedom and property in the book trade. However, their liberalism was more economic than political: they were committed to press freedom less for its own sake than as a concomitant of freedom of commerce. In line with their material interests, the two camps in the book trade employed very different political idioms. On the one hand, publishers appropriated liberal individualist economic doctrines, sometimes for decidedly corporatist ends. On the other, printers and bookdealers tended to adopt a more collectivist and democratic worldview. Where publishers invoked Enlightenment principles of natural rights, printers and bookdealers employed more traditional or radical idioms of public interest. On a fundamental level, the two camps disagreed about the very nature of the book and of the work of producing and distributing it. While liberal publishers argued that the book was an ordinary product whose manufacture and circulation should be subject to the same postrevolutionary guarantees of freedom and property as any other, corporatist printers and bookdealers insisted that it had always been a unique commodity that was of potential danger to the public and thus of special concern to the state. For publishers, the book trade was an ordinary business or industry. For printers and bookdealers, conversely, it was a special “art” or “liberal profession.” Beginning in the 1820s, the liberal and corporatist camps would battle each other in an effort to persuade the state to reform policy in their favor. For example, they struggled to influence state policy on such matters as customs rates, stamp taxes, and press laws. However, the battle between these two camps centered on two arenas of debate: one, over the licensing requirements established by Napoleon and, two, over the definition of literary property rights. More than any other topic related to the press, these two issues preoccupied and divided members of the book trade in the postrevolutionary period. On the one hand, liberal publishers lobbied the state to abolish licensing requirements for printers and bookdealers and to recognize literary property rights as inviolable, universal, and perpetual—or virtually perpetual, for at least fifty years after the death of the author. Corporatist printers and bookdealers, on the other hand, demanded that the state preserve—and even strengthen—restrictions on entry to the book trade and on literary property rights. They asked the government to protect both a small “corporation” of

54

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

trained producers and a large public domain of free ideas. The two issues of entrance requirements and ownership rights, which had been linked together since the Old Regime as complementary instruments for policing the press, remained inextricably connected for members of the book trade in the nineteenth century.

The Debate over Licensing From the beginning, the licensing system instituted by Napoleon failed to satisfy either established printers and bookdealers or new publishers. While printers and bookdealers found the system too lax, publishers found it too restrictive. By the 1820s, both camps were demanding that this system be reformed. Under pressure from both sides, the government would begin to reconsider the legislation on licensing in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Before 1848, however, the state declined to reform the licensing system in any substantial way. In the end, its interest in freedom of commerce was outweighed by a concern for public order and a commitment to private property. As conceived by Napoleon, the licensing system was the cornerstone of the press law. In lieu of (or in addition to) censorship, it was the primary tool by which the state controlled the production and distribution of printed matter. According to the decree of 5 February 1810, no one could practice the occupations of printing or bookdealing without a brevet signed by the minister of the interior. To obtain such a license, an aspiring printer or bookdealer had to submit to the Administration of the Book Trade a formal written request, along with his birth certificate; an attestation of his moral standing issued by his mayor and signed by four of his friends or neighbors; a certificate of his skill signed by four other printers or bookdealers; and, if possible, letters of recommendation from members of the book trade, his local community, and/or the state administration. Then, he had to be investigated by the local authorities. He also had to pay a licensing fee and to swear an oath to obey the constitution, to respect the king, and to refrain from distributing any work “contrary to the duties of subjects toward the Sovereign and the interest of the State.” Even if he completed these requirements, there was no guarantee that an individual printer or bookdealer would receive a license. If the aspirant to a license was a printer, he had to compete for one of a limited number of licenses in his town. (When this system was first established in 1810, any

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

55

practicing printer who did not obtain one of the new licenses was indemnified by the state, with the help of the fees paid by the printers who were licensed.) If the aspirant was a libraire, he did not have to compete for a limited number of licenses, but he was still subject to a certain amount of arbitrariness on the part of the administration, which monitored the quantity as well as the quality of bookdealers. As a result of such limitations on the number of printers and bookdealers, the license was a valuable form of personal property, worth between twenty and thirty thousand francs (for printers, at least) and transferable to family members or outside bidders. This property was insecure, however. For any infraction of the law or negligence of his responsibility, a printer or bookdealer could lose his license. For example, if he failed to print his name and address on a work or to deposit the required number of copies of a publication with the authorities in a timely fashion, his license could be revoked by the state.6 Although it originated with Napoleon, the licensing system survived the fall of the Empire in 1814. In fact, this system was strengthened by the new government of the Restoration. Although its constitutional charter guaranteed the “right to publish and print” any opinion within the limit of the law, the new regime insisted that the press required some protections and controls, including the licensing requirement. In a law “relative to the freedom of the press” passed on 21 October 1814, this regime reconfirmed the licenses that had been awarded under Napoleon and reiterated the prohibition against practicing the occupation of printing or bookdealing without official authorization. The law also required printers to declare the title and print run of every work that they intended to manufacture. Furthermore, the administration reserved the right to revoke the license of any printer or bookdealer who was convicted of breaking the law. It also possessed the right to punish any printer or bookdealer who failed to obtain a license, to deposit a publication, or to print his name on a work.7 Although the licensing requirement was upheld by the new regime, it was often violated within the book trade. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, many printers and booksellers worked without a license. In particular, booksellers who distributed their wares outside of formal retail shops— such as country peddlers, managers of kiosks on the streets or in railroad stations, and owners of reading rooms—operated on the margins of the law, which (at least until 1830) was not clear about whether they were obliged to

56

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

obtain a brevet. In addition, unlicensed printers in the suburbs of Paris worked as subcontractors for licensed printers in the capital by using prêtenoms (borrowed names) or opening succursales (branches). Finally, since the decree of 1810 required licenses only of imprimeurs and libraires, many new éditeurs operated without them. In fact, as noted in Chapter 1, the title of éditeur often served as a means of circumventing the licensing requirement. Although such violations of the licensing requirement did not go unnoticed, they often proved difficult for the government to rectify or punish.8 In part because of such violations, the licensing system came under criticism from members of the book trade. At first, such criticism came mainly from corporatist printers and bookdealers. No sooner had the licensing system been established by the imperial regime in 1810 than printers and bookdealers began to complain about it. In a series of pamphlets and petitions issued from the 1810s through the 1840s, they called for reform of this system.9 In the eyes of corporatists, the licensing system was both too arbitrary and too lax. Although the system placed considerable responsibility on licensed printers and bookdealers, it offered them little protection against competition. In their attacks on the licensing system, corporatist printers and bookdealers often objected to the way in which it made them liable for the content of the works that they published. In particular, they balked at the provision of the law of 21 October 1814 that gave the administration the right to revoke the license of a printer or bookdealer whose products were judged to be offensive in some way. In their view, this provision kept printers and bookdealers at the mercy of the state. It left them in constant danger of losing their license and hence their business. In order to avoid this fate, printers especially were forced to spend precious time reading and evaluating the texts that were submitted to them by authors and publishers (who, they argued, were the ones who should actually be held accountable for the content of these texts). They were required to be “more knowledgeable than the most distinguished jurists,” as the former printer and bookdealer J.-C. Lebègue asserted in a pamphlet published in 1843.10 Most printers and bookdealers in postrevolutionary France were willing to assume a significant amount of responsibility for their work in exchange for a certain amount of protection from the government. But they resented the seeming arbitrariness with which the administration granted, enforced, and revoked licenses. If they were to be held responsible for their work, corporatist printers and bookdealers thought, they should also be protected from excessive competi-

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

57

tion. In exchange for their help in surveying printed matter, they expected to exercise a monopoly over their trade. When, despite their cooperation with the state, they encountered competition from unlicensed enterprises, they protested. In particular, printers often complained that they faced unfair competition from the government-run printing house, the Imprimerie Impériale (as it was called under the First Empire) or Imprimerie Royale (as it was renamed under the Restoration and July Monarchy), which was granted exclusive rights over certain kinds of publications.11 But the most common complaint of corporatist printers and booksellers with regard to the licensing system was that it left the book trade too open to new private practitioners. In the years following the decree of 1810, corporatists continued to protest that entry to the trade was too easy. As they had before the reregulation of the trade in 1810, they expressed concern that printing and bookdealing were being invaded by incompetent and unscrupulous speculators. According to a protectionist imprimeur-libraire named Galland, for example, in a letter to the chancellor of France circa 1815, the licensing requirement had not put an end to “this horde of printing shops that have covered the soil of France during our political troubles,” nor had it kept Paris from becoming “one vast bookstore, if one can call thus this collection of clowns and of inept merchants who obstruct the capital, down to the banks [of the river].”12 In the opinion of the corporatists, the licensing requirement failed to prevent unqualified men from practicing the book occupations. In spite of this requirement, they asserted, many members of these occupations—especially those calling themselves éditeurs—operated without a license, and even those who did bother to obtain one often lacked education and skill. Typical of the language of this type of complaint was the following tirade by the provincial bookseller Victor Fouque in 1841: But returning to the subject of the book trade, I could easily say that many individuals devote themselves to this genre of commerce without being licensed; but to what good? Whenever they want, they can immediately obtain a license, just by asking for one: today, anyone who asks for it can obtain this favor without difficulty. The administration has thus contributed, more than anyone, to the decadence of the book trade by delivering licenses without discernment to individuals who are often incapable.13

58

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

As this quotation suggests, corporatists worried that, due to the ineffectiveness of the licensing system, the book trade was being degraded. Once an honorable “art,” it was in danger of becoming just an ordinary industry. This concern was expressed by the former printer Plassan: “Thus, the art illustrated by the [esteemed printers] Étienne would become a trade, and a trade all the more vile in that it would be exercised by the most ignorant of men; to whom, however, and in the name of the king, the minister of the interior would find himself obliged to grant licenses!”14 To remedy this problem with the licensing system, corporatists demanded stricter qualifications for the book occupations along the lines of those required by the old guilds. Often invoking the royal regulation of 1723 as their model, corporatists insisted that all aspiring printers and bookdealers be required to pass exams in Latin and Greek and to serve terms as apprentices and journeymen, in addition to obtaining certificates of their skill and morality and swearing oaths to their king and country. Corporatists also suggested that shop visits and inspections should be resurrected as a means of surveying practitioners of the book trade. According to their proposals, all of these controls would be overseen by members of the trade themselves, organized into chambres syndicales, similar to the old guilds.15 To justify the reestablishment of corporate controls over their trade, printers and bookdealers argued that their products were of vital interest to the public and therefore the state. Insisting that the book occupations should be classified not as ordinary industries but with the liberal arts, they compared themselves to members of other professions that had been regulated by the postrevolutionary state, such as notaries, lawyers, doctors, and pharmacists. Like these other professions, they asserted, their occupations concerned the public health—whether literal or, in this case, figurative—and therefore necessitated special controls. Such an argument was by no means new. It had constituted the basis for the guild system under the Old Regime as well as for the reregulation of the book trade by the Empire. In 1806, a printer-bookdealer named Jacob the Elder had used a comparison between printing and pharmacy in the effort to persuade Napoleon to reregulate the book trade: “What would you say, for example,” he wrote, “about a Government that would let practice pharmacy someone who could not distinguish marshmallow from jalap [a laxative] and who, by his lack of foresight, made you a victim of his ineptitude? Really! Printing and Bookselling may be assimilated to this Occupation as well as to many others of this

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

59

nature. One must be instructed and enlightened in order to practice all of them.”16 Following the reregulation of the book trade (as well as of law, medicine, and several other professions) by the imperial regime, however, this argument remained current among corporatists who were dissatisfied with the Napoleonic compromise between state and market. For example, it was employed by a group of bookdealers from Bordeaux, who wrote in a petition to the Chamber of Deputies in 1822, “Certainly, no one complained when entrance requirements were instituted for notaries, lawyers, attorneys, commercial brokers, and pharmacists [all of whom were strictly regulated by the postrevolutionary state]; so why would one see a privilege in the restrictions imposed on an occupation [such as the book trade] which, on its side, likewise owes some guarantees to society?”17 This argument was recycled yet again in a similar petition addressed to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 by a printer named Amédée Gratiot: “You require apprenticeships, studies, and ranks for the doctor who cares for the body,” Gratiot pleaded. “Won’t you also require initiation rites and studies for the practice of printing, whose mission is to instruct the people and nourish the soul?”18 From the perspective of traditional printers and bookdealers, the book trade was not an ordinary business but a public service. Its practitioners thus required special protections and regulations, stronger even than those instituted by Napoleon. While corporatist printers and bookdealers sought to strengthen the licensing system, liberal publishers wanted to abolish it. In general, liberals agreed with corporatists that the licensing requirement was arbitrary as well as ineffective. However, they thought the solution to this problem lay not in reestablishing corporate controls over the book trade but in freeing the trade from all restrictions. From their perspective, freedom of commerce would facilitate the business of publishing, by increasing the number (and thus decreasing the cost) of producers and distributors of print. In the decade or so following the regulation of 1810, as printers and bookdealers continued to call for more protection, publishers began to advocate deregulation of the production and distribution of printed matter. In 1816, for instance, they joined with authors in protesting the formalities and taxes to which the book trade was subjected in its relations with foreign countries.19 By the late 1820s, they had launched a formal campaign for the repeal of licensing in the book trade. At first, the campaign for deregulation focused on the occupation of bookdealing, as opposed to printing. Given that most members of the liberal

60

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

camp were publishers, they were more concerned about the limitation of libraires—under which fell publishers as well as booksellers—than they were about any restriction of printers. Even as they demanded that the occupation of bookdealing be open to anyone who wanted to practice it, many liberals in the book trade admitted that the number of printers might need to be limited, so that the administration could more easily monitor, trace, and, if necessary, prosecute offenses committed by means of the press. This compromise position on licensing was exemplified by the printer-publisher Firmin Didot, who was also a deputy to the legislature from the Eure-et-Loire in the late 1820s and early 1830s. (For a portrait of Firmin Didot, see Figure 2.1.) Descendant of a prominent family of printers and bookdealers who had belonged to the Paris Book Guild under the Old Regime, Didot was a moderate who fell in between the positions of the liberal and the corporatist camps in the book trade. On the issue of entrance requirements, he urged the government to remove the restrictions on bookdealers but cautioned it against abolishing the licenses of printers. Although he worried that printers were subject to excessive responsibilities under the current law, he thought that they still required special qualifications.20 Didot was not the only one to adopt this position on licensing. During the Restoration, a number of other publishers supported licensing requirements for printers while opposing them for bookdealers. Over time, however, publishers became less willing to compromise on the issue of licensing. By the 1830s and 1840s, the liberal camp in the book trade began to demand that the state abolish licenses not just for bookdealers but for printers, too. In support of their demand for the abolition of licenses, liberal publishers sometimes invoked the revolutionary principles of intellectual freedom and public education. They asserted that revocation of the licensing requirement in the book trade would help to establish the free press promised (but not really delivered) by the constitutional charter of 1814 as well as to facilitate the instruction of people throughout France. As Firmin Didot argued against the arbitrary limitation of the number of bookdealers, “Return freedom to commerce, and soon you will see active young people put their instruction and capital to use, not only in propagating in our departments the taste for studies and for books, but also in engendering, as one sees in the provinces of England and Germany, the taste for bibliography.”21 Such arguments were first articulated by publishers in response to a series of attempts by the

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

61

Figure 2.1. Portrait of the printer-bookdealer Firmin Didot (1764–1836). Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

administration of the reactionary King Charles X (1824–1830) to impose additional responsibility on publishers and printers, especially a repressive “bill on the policing of the press” (nicknamed the “law of justice and love”) proposed by the minister of justice, Count Peyronnet, in late 1826 and approved by the Chamber of Deputies early the next year. Although this bill was eventually defeated by the Chamber of Peers, it prompted members of the book trade to organize against state regulation of the press. Against this bill, for example, some 230 members of the trade signed a petition to the Chamber of Deputies. Labeling the bill a “grave attack on the freedom of the press . . . , on the sacred rights of property, on the eventual progress of enlightenment, [as well

62

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

as] on the existence of an important and honorable branch of French commerce,” the petitioners argued that the press required not more regulation but, rather, more liberty. During their struggle against this bill, liberals in the book trade first began to campaign for abolition of the licensing system.22 In demanding abolition of the licensing system, however, publishers were motivated less by a commitment to intellectual liberty than by an interest in economic liberty. In comparison to newspaper editors such as Émile de Girardin, who opposed the licensing requirement as well as every other restriction of the press on the principle of freedom of opinion, book publishers tended to ground their argument against the licensing requirement in the creed of freedom of commerce. Categorizing book production as an ordinary, “industrial” occupation, not a special, “liberal” profession, they insisted that this occupation should be free and open, like any other, as stipulated by the d’Allarde Law of 1791. This perspective on licensing is best exemplified by a report prepared by a “commission of inquiry on publishing in Paris” for the ministers of King Charles X in 1829. This commission, which was organized along with a number of similar commissions in other branches of industry (including printing and papermaking) as part of an official investigation of the state of commerce in France initiated by the minister of commerce in 1828–1829, was composed of a group of prominent libraires-éditeurs in the capital, including Charles Gosselin, Jules Renouard, Treuttel and Würtz, and the Bossange family. Intended to examine the probable causes of and possible remedies for a recent decline in sales of books, this commission focused on three issues: customs procedures and taxes, literary property, and licensing. In its final report to the administration on 1 June 1829, the commission recommended the following liberal reforms: one, that customs duties should be reduced for all foreign books that were not mere reprints of French ones; two, that literary property should be assimilated to and protected like all other kinds of property; and three, that licenses should be abolished, at least for bookdealers. In support of its demand for the abolition of licenses, the investigative commission on publishing did cite the “need for public instruction.” But mostly it emphasized the principle of freedom of commerce. As explanation for its opposition to the licensing requirement, the commission argued: The license appeared to the commission to be an institution opposed to the principles of liberty consecrated by the [constitutional] Charter [of

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

63

the Restoration government] and enjoyed by all the industrial occupations. Such licenses, which were first created in the time of the corporations and privileges, and which, since they were reestablished in the epoch of military despotism [under Napoleon] have permitted so many troubles and compromised so many existences, should not have survived the establishment of liberty in law: when so many industrial occupations may be practiced freely without a license, it seems difficult to justify such exceptional measures for publishing, whose commerce, so important for the progress of civilization, far from being hampered by the regime of laws, cannot be encouraged enough. Insisting that bookdealing was an “industrial” occupation like any other, the commission of publishers demanded that this occupation be governed by the “common law” and opened to anyone who judged himself capable of practicing it and who paid a uniform entry fee. As the report by the commission of 1829 suggests, liberals in the book trade wanted not to return to the protections of the Old Regime, as did corporatists, but to overthrow all remnants of it.23 The demands of liberals in the book trade did not go unheard by members of the government. From the beginning of the Restoration, liberal legislators and ministers supported—and even preceded—publishers in opposing the licensing system. Like their counterparts in the book trade, liberals in the state contended that this system was contrary to the principles of natural law and constitutional government, including freedom of press and freedom of commerce. In the government, the most vocal advocate of the abolition of licensing was Benjamin Constant, the Romantic writer and liberal theorist who served as a deputy from the beginning of the Restoration until his death in December 1830. Long a proponent of press freedom, Constant first raised the issue of licensing during the debates on the Serre Laws between March and May of 1819. In comparison to the press legislation of the Empire and early Restoration, the Serre Laws were liberal. For example, they repudiated prepublication censorship, gave juries rather than judges jurisdiction over press trials, and allowed anyone to publish a periodical as long as he filed a declaration and paid a security deposit to the administration. But the Serre Laws also held printers responsible alongside authors and publishers for the content of their publications and threatened them with loss of license for any crime or misdemeanor. These laws thus left printers too vulnerable, for Constant’s

64

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

taste. In his interventions in the debates over the Serre Laws, Constant opposed the regulation of printers as inimical to freedom of opinion. Employing metaphors that were common in his many other speeches and writings on the subject, he proclaimed, “[A]s long as they are menaced as they are, exposed in their fortune, in their industry, there cannot be freedom of the press; that is to seek to annihilate it from its base. To pretend to grant freedom of the press, while enchaining the movement of the instrument of the press, is to ask us to labor without a plow, to navigate without a vessel.” Insisting that there would never be freedom of the press without “formal and sufficient safeguards for printers,” he asked that the bills before the legislature be amended, initially, to prevent the arbitrary revocation of licenses from printers and, then, to abolish the licenses altogether. In support of the abolition of the licenses, he argued: I had presumed that there was something in the occupation of printers that demanded from them particular conditions and required them to be subjected to guarantees not at all tolerated by other industries. But since then I have come to understand that it could appear contrary to the principles of the Charter, to the protection and to the liberty that it grants to all industries, maybe even to the intentions of the ministers, to prolong this state of affairs. I thus believe that I must change my amendment [which had originally proposed only that the licenses could not be revoked arbitrarily], and I demand that printers no longer be subjected to the formality of licenses and that they may exercise their industry like other citizens.24 As Constant’s amendment suggests, as early as the late 1810s, liberals in the government were beginning to find fault with the licensing requirement in the book trade. Yet, these liberals were still outnumbered in the administration as well as the legislature by more conservative statesmen, who adhered to the traditionalist line that the book was a unique commodity whose production and distribution required special guarantees. Against Constant’s assertion that (unlike authors and publishers) printers could not be expected to read everything that they published and thus should not be held responsible for the content of the work that they printed, these more conservative statesmen maintained

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

65

that printers were complicit in the act of publication and therefore liable for any offense it caused. According to them, printers were not just “mechanical instruments” but public servants, whose privileges (i.e., licenses) were revocable by the state. For example, the archconservative Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Count de Bonald argued in support of the restriction of the press, “The printer who knowingly prints a dangerous writing may be as guilty as the pharmacist who dispenses poison, knowing that one will make criminal use of it.” In the debates over the Serre Laws, even moderate “doctrinaire” liberals such as François Guizot agreed that printers were responsible, at least in certain cases, for their work. Comparing printers to arms dealers, Guizot stated, “The case is the same as that of an arms dealer who has sold an arm with which a crime has been committed. If he ignored the intention of the buyer, he cannot be reproached; if he knew it, he contributed to the crime; it is the same with the printer.” In the face of such arguments about the responsibility of printers, Constant’s amendment to abolish the licensing requirement failed to attract much support in the legislature. As soon as it was proposed, the amendment was rejected by the minister of justice, Pierre-François-Hercule, Count de Serre, as outside the purview of the proposed laws, which were intended to define and punish crimes of the press, not to remake the law on freedom of the press or policing of the book trade.25 At this point, the government of the Restoration was far too concerned about public order to consider reforming the licensing system. Not until the late 1820s did the state begin to reconsider this system. In the wake of the debate over the bill “on the policing of the press” in 1826–1827, the administration of Charles X came under increasing pressure from publishers and their allies in business and government to abolish the licensing requirement. In March 1828, for example, Benjamin Constant presented the Chamber of Deputies with a resolution to ask the monarchy to reform the legislation on printing and bookdealing and especially the law of 21 October 1814. While it did not go so far as to demand the abolition of licenses altogether, Constant’s resolution did request that the procedures for acquiring and losing brevets be made less arbitrary. Before it could be considered by the legislature, however, this proposal was tabled by Constant himself, in the hope that more comprehensive legislation on the book trade was soon to be introduced by the moderate Viscount de Martignac, who had recently replaced the ultraroyalist Count de Villèle as minister of the interior.26

66

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Following this change in ministry, the liberal camp pressured the government to overhaul the policing of publishing. In response to a petition to the Chamber of Deputies from a printer named Cordier, for example, the printer-publisher and deputy Firmin Didot gave a speech to the legislature in favor of reform of the legislation on the book trade and especially of the licensing requirement for libraires. About the same time, the Chamber of Commerce (of which Didot’s son Ambroise Firmin-Didot was a member) sent a letter to the minister of the interior in favor of the relaxation of entrance restrictions for bookdealers. As justification for its position on the question, the Chamber wrote, “The sale of books is a business like any other.” These demands were not satisfied by the new minister of the interior, however. In May 1828, Martignac did propose a new, slightly more liberal bill on the periodical press. But this bill, which focused mainly on eliminating prepublication censorship, said nothing about the licensing requirement for printers and bookdealers. It thus disappointed liberals in both the book trade and the government, including Didot and Constant. Denouncing the minister of the interior for ignoring their demands, both Didot and Constant requested that the bill be amended to protect printers and bookdealers against the revocation of their licenses. In response, Martignac claimed that he had never promised, either formally or tacitly, to develop a comprehensive law on the book trade. The press bill passed both the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers without the provision to prevent printers and bookdealers from losing their licenses.27 The concerns of Didot and Constant were addressed the next year by a pair of bills on bookdealing and printing presented by the minister of justice, Pierre-Alpinien-Bertrand Bourdeau. Introduced to the Chamber of Peers a mere five days after the investigative commission on publishing in Paris recommended the abolition of licensing in its report to the government, the bills of 6 June 1829 aimed to prevent the administration from arbitrarily annulling the license of a bookdealer or printer. Intended to clarify the law of 21 October 1814, these proposed laws stipulated that a license could be revoked only by judgment of a court. In addition, the bill on bookdealing relaxed the restrictions on this occupation. Although it maintained that bookdealing was a type of commerce that needed to be regulated in the public interest, this bill also emphasized that a license to practice this occupation should be “neither a privilege, nor a favor.” The bill on bookdealing still required aspiring libraires to provide proof of their capacity and morality, unless they were graduates of

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

67

the University, in which case they were deemed “naturally qualified to exercise an occupation for which literary instruction is the principal component of aptitude.” The bill also specified that any bookdealer caught operating without a license would be subject to punishment. But, insisting that no one who had fulfilled the qualifications for the occupation could be denied a license, the bill stipulated that the number of libraires must be unlimited. The bill on bookdealing did not satisfy all of the demands of publishers as articulated in their “request” to the government in 1829. Together with the bill on printing, however, it would have made the regulation of the book trade less arbitrary. But these twin bills fell victim to the contingencies of politics. Before they could be considered by the legislature, the relatively liberal cabinet of Martignac that had proposed them was replaced by the more conservative ministry of Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie, Prince de Polignac. As the regime of Charles X became more reactionary, liberalization of the book trade became increasingly unlikely.28 When this regime fell in July 1830, however, the hope of liberals for reform of the law on the book trade was renewed. In the aftermath of the July Revolution, another effort to abolish licensing requirements in printing and bookdealing was made by the legislature’s most steadfast champion of the cause, Benjamin Constant. In September 1830, Constant introduced to the Chamber of Deputies a new bill on the book trade. The first article of this bill read, “Every citizen is free to practice the occupation of printer and bookdealer, without having to obtain authorization and with no other formality than a declaration made by him to the mayor of his arrondissement.” In defense of his proposed legislation, Constant emphasized the principle not just of freedom of press but of freedom of commerce. Lauding the role that the press had played in overturning the regime of Charles X, he asserted that the benefits of a free press outweighed the inconveniences. The license, in contrast, had numerous disadvantages. For one thing, it hindered trade: “It is a monopoly, and every monopoly is contrary to the true principles of political economy,” Constant argued. “I do not want to anticipate here on the question of determining whether, for certain particular occupations, special guarantees are necessary; but, in any case, the government should not be able to refuse, to anyone who has provided these guarantees, the right to practice the industry chosen by him.” While he admitted that those printers in possession of the limited number of licenses might have to be indemnified for the

68

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

loss of their privileges, Constant insisted that such privileges were antithetical to a constitutional government and free market.29 Constant’s proposal was endorsed by the committee appointed by the legislature to examine it. In its report to the Chamber of Deputies on 8 November 1830, this committee concluded that the public interest did not require licenses but only simple declarations of printers or bookdealers. Although it suggested that a security deposit be demanded of printers (but not bookdealers) to cover any fines that they might incur for their publications, the committee maintained that no other test of their morality or capacity was necessary. “The occupation of printer or of bookdealer is a commercial or industrial enterprise which must be free like the others,” it insisted. “If other professions, like those of lawyer and of notary, have been subjected to restrictions on their numbers, that is because one considers those who practice them to be public officers whose incapacity would compromise the fortune and the peace of families. Nothing similar may be alleged with regard to the two occupations that occupy us here.” In the opinion of this committee, it was up to the public, not the state, to evaluate the quality of the products of particular printers and bookdealers. On the issue of whether printers would have to be indemnified for the loss of their licenses, the legislative committee concluded that because such licenses did not really qualify as properties, they would not.30 As the bill to abolish licensing requirements in the book trade passed to the floor of the legislature, however, it came under criticism. Constant’s proposal provoked a flood of petitions and pamphlets on licensing by members of the book trade, especially by corporatist printers and bookdealers. On the whole, these printers and bookdealers opposed the abolition of licensing. If licenses were to be abolished, they insisted, printers would have to be indemnified. In their opinion, a license was a form of property, which could not be usurped without compensation by the state. Among corporatists, the leading opponent of the abolition of licensing was Georges-Adrien Crapelet, a second-generation printer who had obtained one of the limited number of licenses accorded by the imperial regime in 1811 and served (with another printer, Charles Lahure) as official printer for the Cour de Cassation and the Chamber of Peers. In a series of pamphlets published in 1830 and after, Crapelet defended the licensing system on the grounds that it was needed for “general security” and “public order.” Insisting that some occupations required special guarantees, he wrote,

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

69

“It is necessary, in effect, to recognize that printing has never been and cannot be assimilated to all the other types of industries that do not demand a certain level of instruction.” Against Constant’s proposal, Crapelet asserted that the relaxation of entrance requirements in the book trade would do nothing to liberate the press, which had managed to trigger the Revolution of 1830 in spite of the licensing system. In his view, it was not the licensing system that was hindering the press but the excessive responsibility placed upon printers. If the state nonetheless insisted on abolishing the licensing requirement, he continued, it would have to indemnify printers for the loss of this property. In the opinion of corporatists like Crapelet, such property was at least as deserving of the state’s concern as free trade.31 The issue of whether printers would need to be indemnified for the loss of their licenses divided members of the Chamber of Deputies. While most deputies were sympathetic to the liberal proposal that entry to the book trade should be opened to anyone who wanted to practice it, they were split on how to implement that proposal. Some supporters of the proposal by Constant maintained that licenses could be abolished without any indemnities for the printers who had purchased them, whether from the administration in 1810 or from a license-holder in the years since. In the opinion of this faction, indemnities (like licenses themselves) were contrary to the common law and free trade, not to mention difficult for the state to administer. According to these deputies, the establishment of freedom of commerce would more than compensate practitioners of the book trade for the loss of their licenses. As the liberal deputy Eusèbe Salverte argued in a speech to the legislature on 17 November 1830, after the turmoil of the Revolution, Empire, and Restoration, not just printers but all of the people of France were due an indemnity, yet the only means of indemnifying them was to guarantee liberty for everyone.32 Other supporters of the abolition of licensing in the Chamber of Deputies, however, insisted that printers would have to be indemnified for the loss of their licenses. For example, the printer-bookdealer Firmin Didot, who was an advocate of the abolition of licensing for bookdealers but not for printers, insisted that printers would have to be compensated for the loss of their licenses. Although he was a member of the legislative committee that recommended the bill by Constant, Didot disagreed with the committee’s conclusion that no such compensation was necessary. Asserting that the license was not a privilege but a property, he introduced an amendment to the bill that proposed to

70

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

indemnify all printers whose licenses were abolished, through fees (scaled to the size of the locality) to be collected from all new entrants to the occupation until 1850. “If the unrestrained liberty of the press is necessary for the public good,” Didot argued, “the government must abolish the privilege of printers; but justice, fundamental foundation of liberty, forbids annihilating in their hands their property, without giving them a preliminary indemnity, not only for the cost of the license that they already paid or that they still owe, but especially for the resulting damage [to their business].” This position was endorsed, with minor modifications, by a majority of legislators. After passing the first article of the bill, which abolished licensing in printing and bookdealing, the Chamber of Deputies voted to send the second article (which demanded that anyone who wanted to practice the occupation of printer or bookdealer make a declaration and pay a security deposit to the local mayor or prefect) back to committee for amendment, to require new printers to pay indemnities to licensed ones. As the Chamber continued to discuss the details of such payments, however, the support for indemnification began to dissolve. In particular, the deputies disagreed about how much (if at all) provincial printers should be indemnified for the loss of their licenses.33 In the end, the indecision about indemnification doomed the proposal by Constant to abolish the restrictions on entry to the book trade. In the face of uncertainty about whether and how to compensate printers for the loss of their licenses, the Chamber of Deputies voted first against the article on indemnification and then against the bill as a whole. Concerned that the abolition of licensing without effective indemnification would exacerbate the economic crisis experienced by the book trade in the wake of the July Revolution, even many deputies who favored liberalization of the book trade hesitated to overturn the licensing requirement. Once again, the government postponed reform of the regulation of the book trade. Its reasoning was summarized by the liberal deputy Baron Charles Dupin at the close of debate on the matter: “It is necessary to wait for a more prosperous moment, in order to grant, without detriment to printing, all the liberty that we wish for it.”34 During the eighteen-year reign of the July Monarchy, this “more prosperous moment” never came. Following the failure of Constant’s bill in late 1830, the regime of Louis-Philippe declined to modify the licensing system established by Napoleon, to the chagrin of both corporatists and liberals in the book trade, who continued to clamor for reform of this system. Such reform

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

71

was considered—but rejected—by the July Monarchy on only one other occasion. In late 1845, the administration appointed a commission to prepare “the foundations of a regulation complementary to the regime [i.e., the decree of 1810 and the law of 1814] on printing and bookdealing.” In its report, this commission urged the government not to liberalize the current regulation on the book trade but to strengthen it. Among other things, it recommended that the administration require more “proof of capacity” from printers, such as certification by a special “consultative” committee of members of the book trade.35 However, this recommendation to strengthen qualifications for printers was not enacted by the July Monarchy, which hesitated to endorse any kind of institution that resembled a trade guild of the Old Regime. Concerned about protecting public order but also about avoiding corporate privilege, the constitutional monarchy hesitated to alter the licensing system. When the July Monarchy was overthrown in February of 1848, this system remained in place.

The Debate over Literary Property While they were struggling over the issue of licensing requirements, corporatists and liberals in the book trade were also battling over another legacy of the Revolution in the book trade: literary property rights. Historically, these two issues had been linked through the institution of the privilege, which constituted a title of ownership as well as a mechanism of control over print. As a result of the Revolution, privilege was redefined as property and severed from censorship. However, like the new instrument of government surveillance, the license, the new regime of literary property provoked debate among members of the book trade. In both cases, the debate centered on the proper relation between the state and the market in the dissemination of literature. In the debate over literary property, at issue was the definition and duration of individual as opposed to public claims to texts: Were texts social goods, to which individuals could assert only a temporary title, or were they private properties, to which they should enjoy a perpetual right? To the extent that intellectual work constituted certain rights, were these rights based on genius and hence inalienable from the author, or were they grounded in labor and thus transferable to a third party such as a publisher? In other words, was the definition of such rights founded in the personality of the author or the

72

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

commodity of the text? Indeed, were such rights best termed “rights of authors,” or could they be labeled a form of property, comparable to real estate? These questions preoccupied the book trade in the aftermath of the Revolution. These questions had become a subject of debate in the late eighteenth century. Until then, there had been no legal recognition of “property” in texts nor of “rights” of authors, but only privileges for publications, which were monopolized by members of the Paris Book Guild. The term droits d’auteur, which originated in the realm of the theater, referred not to natural (and transferable) rights to the text as a commodity but to honorific (and inalienable) prerogatives inherent in the person of the author. As the privilege system came under challenge from authors as well as provincial printers and bookdealers in the late eighteenth century, however, new conceptions of the rights of authors began to emerge. In 1777, the absolutist monarchy decreed as part of a broader move to decentralize the book trade that privileges belonged not to printers or bookdealers but to authors. According to this measure, an author could transfer his privilege over a work to a printer or bookdealer, but only for the duration of the lifetime of the author, after which the work fell into a public domain. This decree, which constituted the first legal recognition of the rights of authors (but as a royal grace, not as a private property), provoked considerable debate in the book trade. While it was welcomed by provincial entrepreneurs as well as by authors, who benefited from the limitation of the privileges of the Paris Book Guild, it was opposed by guild members, who defended their privileges as perpetual property rights. This debate was joined by some of the most eminent thinkers of the Enlightenment, as Carla Hesse has explained. On one side stood Denis Diderot, who argued in defense of the privileges of the bookdealers in the Paris Book Guild that ideas were the most inviolable form of property, because they originated in the individual mind. On the other side stood the Marquis de Condorcet, who maintained that, because they inhered in nature, ideas did not belong to individuals, either as a privilege or as a property, but rather to society as a whole.36 This conflict persisted into the Revolution. On the one hand, most guild members, along with some unprivileged playwrights, demanded absolute protection of literary property as an individual right—although they increasingly couched this demand in terms not of an exclusive title but of a temporary

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

73

reward for their contribution to the public good. On the other hand, antimonopolist bookdealers and philosophers defended state restriction of such property, in the interest of public access. In an effort to reach a compromise between these two positions, the revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Genius, which despite its title framed the rights of authors as temporary incentives in the interest of public enlightenment. Limiting the rights of individuals to texts to ten years after the death of the author, this law created a large public domain. This balance between individual and collective claims on texts was maintained by the imperial decree of 1810, which extended the term of literary property only to twenty years after the death of the author and his spouse. However, as Carla Hesse acknowledges, the revolutionary compromise between individual and public claims on texts was contradictory and unstable. In its effort to combine a natural right theory of authorship with an instrumentalist notion of public enlightenment, it undermined the notion of property it sought to guarantee. Satisfactory to neither corporatists nor liberals, this compromise measure would remain subject to debate long into the nineteenth century.37 In the wake of the revolutionary and imperial legislation, there was a shift in the sides of the debate on literary property—as in the debate on property more generally. On the one hand, protectionist printers and bookdealers now asserted that individual rights to texts needed to be limited in favor of the public domain. In the early nineteenth century, corporatists were made up largely of petty and provincial printers and bookdealers. Heirs of the prerevolutionary guildsmen (and revolutionary sans-culottes), they retained the Old Regime notion of property as “a quasi-collective and publicly regulated” title, as William H. Sewell Jr. has characterized it. Given that much of their business consisted of reprints of previously published works, these corporatists did not defend perpetual privileges, as had members of the Paris Book Guild, but rather opposed private claims to texts. Concerned that individual rights in texts would be monopolized by big publishers, they insisted that such rights were not perpetual properties but only temporary privileges, granted by society to authors to encourage the publication of new work. Asserting that ideas belonged to no one individual but to society as a whole, they claimed that literary property was different from other kinds of property. In fact, they often rejected the term “literary property” in favor of that of the “rights of authors.” Resisting the commodification of these rights, they claimed to be concerned

74

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

less with the profit than with the reputation of authors. In defending a large public domain, corporatists thus helped to engender the notion that authors have moral as well as material rights.38 In contrast to corporatist printers and bookdealers, liberal publishers took the position that ideas were a property of the most intimate, sacred, and inviolable kind. Belying their origin in the overthrow of the old Paris Book Guild, the new éditeurs appropriated the arguments of guild members in favor of perpetual monopolization of literary work. Asserting that the right to such work was not just a limited grant from society but an absolute property by nature, comparable to property in real estate, they maintained that this property should be guaranteed as perpetual and universal, at least in principle. While they acknowledged that the rights of authors might need to be limited in practice, in the interest of society, they insisted that these rights be defined not just as a privilege or remuneration but as a property. Aiming to monopolize such rights as much as possible, most publishers demanded that literary property be extended beyond the term of twenty years after the death of the author, as guaranteed by the decree of 1810. In their campaign for greater legal protection of the rights of authors, publishers were joined by writers as well as by artists and musicians. However, for much of the nineteenth century, this campaign was initiated and dominated by publishers. As Geoffrey Turnovsky and Gregory Brown have argued, authors did not necessarily embrace the notion of literary property before the nineteenth century: to the extent that they demanded recognition of their rights, they emphasized their disinterest rather than their interest. Not until after the Revolution did they begin to develop a sense of ownership over (as opposed to status in) their work. During the debate over literary property in the 1830s and 1840s, a number of writers—including Honoré de Balzac, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse Karr, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo—published editorials and lobbied legislators in favor of greater protection of the rights of authors. Balzac, for instance, penned several essays (including a note to the Chamber of Deputies) in favor of recognition of such rights as a perpetual property, and in 1841 Karr proposed a bill on the matter, which read simply, “Article one and only: Literary property is a property.” Inspired by such sentiments, a group of writers founded a professional association, called the Société des Gens de Lettres, in 1838. This association, which counted among its leaders a number of prominent

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

75

writer-statesmen who would play a role in government commissions and legislative debates on the matter, supported the efforts of publishers to obtain further protection of literary property. Despite such examples of support for the extension of literary property, though, authors played only a secondary role in the fight for new legislation on the issue. Even the Société des Gens de Lettres was concerned more with collecting reproduction fees from periodicals than with campaigning for government action on literary property. On this issue, it tended to follow the lead of publishers, at least until the 1870s. In France as elsewhere, the debate over literary property took the form of a commercial struggle between entrepreneurial publishers and small printers and bookdealers. In this debate, the “rights of authors” really served as a cover for the interests of publishers. As David Saunders writes, “In France as in England, a rhetoric of the author’s right in literary property was a routine instrument of publishers’ interests.”39 Among members of the book trade, the debate over the rights of authors took place against a backdrop of nationalization and especially internationalization of commerce in literature. This debate was particularly intense in France during the first half of the nineteenth century, because of a growing problem with literary piracy. Between the 1820s and the 1840s, the works of publishers in Paris were often reproduced without payment or attribution by printers in provincial towns and neighboring countries, especially Belgium. Labeled contrefaçon, or counterfeiting, this piracy encompassed the manufacture not just of exact replica but of any unauthorized editions. Unlike the original editions, which were marketed mainly in multivolume formats to reading rooms, these unauthorized editions were generally small and cheap. Because the unauthorized producers saved on author fees and paper costs, they were able to undersell the original producers, both domestically and internationally. Such piracy was by no means new. Not just technologically but legally, it had long been easy for producers in one locality to reprint the work of those in another. Given that there was little official protection of literary property within individual countries and none between nations before the nineteenth century, piracy was not technically illegal. Under the Old Regime, it had even been welcomed by some bookdealers in France as a means of circumventing the state censorship system. To avoid persecution, controversial works were often reproduced in the countries bordering France, especially Switzerland

76

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

and Holland, and then smuggled “under the cloak” into France.40 In the wake of the Revolution, however, piracy was increasingly resented by French publishers, as well as by authors, as a threat to their literary capital, which they now viewed not as a privilege but as a property. Parisian producers were not entirely innocent of the offense of piracy. Such publishers as the Galignani, Barrois, Baudry, and Bossange firms often pirated English or Spanish works. However, because of the dominance of French language and culture in Europe at the time, French producers claimed to suffer disproportionately from literary piracy.41 In particular, French publishers and printers complained about literary piracy by the Belgian book trade or, as they called it, la contrefaçon belge. Especially after 1830, when it became independent from Holland, Belgium was home to a number of publishing firms whose production consisted mostly of unauthorized reprints of books and periodicals from France. These unauthorized reprints, which were often published as préfaçons even before the originals on which they were based had appeared, were not just sold within Belgium but, especially after 1830, exported to France and other countries where there was a market for French-language publications. Such piracy was not only tolerated by the Belgian government, which did not restrict the number of printers nor protect the property of foreign authors, but was actually encouraged by it. Before the liberation of Belgium from Holland, the Dutch king William I actively promoted such piracy by chartering and financing (through the national bank) a number of joint-stock corporations for the production of unauthorized reprints of French works, as well as by providing subsidies for exporters of printed materials. After Belgium became independent, the production of these firms skyrocketed. Between 1830 and 1845, when these firms began to drive each other out of business, exports of books from Belgium quintupled, from 300,000 to 1.6 million francs— whereas those from France only doubled, from 2 million to 4.5 million, between 1830 and 1842. According to most estimates, at least one out of three books published in Belgium at the time was destined for export. Most of these books were pirated. At the height of the wave of Belgian literary piracy in 1840, over 80 percent of the titles published by two of the most prominent publishers in Belgium, Méline and Hauman, were illicit reproductions of French works. Most scholars now conclude that Belgian piracy did not really harm the business of French publishers and printers. Inside France, high customs

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

77

duties prevented these pirated books from challenging the publications of domestic publishers; outside of France, the illicit works were marketed to a different (lower-class) audience than that targeted by exports from French publishers. In fact, Belgian counterfeiting may actually have helped the book trade in France by pushing it to develop new marketing strategies, especially the compact and cheap format called the “Charpentier,” named after the publisher who was credited with inventing it. Nonetheless, la contrefaçon belge constituted a major grievance among producers of printed matter in France.42 Rather than uniting them against their foreign competitors, the problem of literary piracy divided corporatists and liberals. Printers and publishers disagreed about both what had caused literary piracy and what should be done—by either the French book trade or the government or both—to remedy it. On the one hand, printers and bookdealers persisted in defining literary property as limited, even in the heyday of Belgian literary piracy in the 1830s. Often condoning and even practicing literary piracy themselves, corporatists insisted that ideas belonged not to individual authors or producers but to society as a whole. According to them, piracy was actually a service to the public, which benefited from the cheap reproduction and wide circulation of texts. In the interest of public enlightenment as well as their own business, they opposed the extension of literary property rights either domestically or internationally. To the extent that they viewed piracy as a problem, corporatists saw it not as a legal but as a commercial one. In their opinion, Parisian publishers had only themselves to blame for the illicit reproductions of their works. Because they tended to produce books in large formats and multiple volumes at high prices (for their main customers at the time, the cabinets de lecture), they failed to reach lower-class readers, particularly in other countries. They thus left a market untapped for pirates. To compete with these pirates, corporatists argued, publishers needed to manufacture cheaper editions, especially for export.43 On the other hand, liberal publishers in France denounced literary piracy as a crime against property. From the liberal perspective, literary piracy was not a justifiable means of spreading ideas among the public but a flagrant violation of the right of authors and publishers to profit from their own work. While they admitted that they could do more to compete with their provincial and foreign counterparts, Parisian publishers insisted that the only real solution to literary piracy was stronger legal protection of literary property.

78

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Beginning in the 1820s, publishers campaigned for the enforcement and extension of literary property rights, both domestically and internationally. Sending numerous petitions and delegations to French and even to foreign ministers and legislators, they demanded stricter restrictions on imports of printed matter as well as greater guarantees for literary property of both national and foreign authors and their assigns. In their report to the administration of Charles X on the state of publishing in 1829, for example, publishers requested that literary property rights be increased from twenty to twenty-five years after the death of the author and accorded not just to French nationals but also to foreigners whose governments had agreed to provide reciprocal protections for authors in France. Over the next decade, publishers became more and more insistent that literary property was perpetual and universal. By the late 1830s, they demanded that literary property be extended to at least fifty years after the death of the author and that such property be guaranteed unilaterally as opposed to reciprocally for the works of foreigners.44 In response to the growing concern about literary piracy, the postrevolutionary state soon began to reevaluate the compromise between individual and public rights to texts that had been instituted by the revolutionary and imperial regimes. No more than fifteen years had passed when the government of the Restoration first reconsidered the decree of 1810. In November 1825, King Charles X appointed a commission to study the issue of literary property, with a view toward drafting new legislation on the matter. Chaired by the ultraroyalist Viscount Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, who was director of beaux-arts, the commission included a number of men from the realms of politics, science, and the arts who had a long-standing interest in the matter of literary property, including the writer and professor Abel-François Villemain, the peer Count Joseph-Marie Portalis, and the doctrinaire liberal deputy Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (all former directors of the Administration of the Book Trade), as well as the naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier, the royal commissioner of the Théâtre Français Baron Isidore Taylor, and the actor François-Joseph Talma. After members of the book trade in Paris requested that they be represented in the discussion, two bookdealers, Antoine-Augustin Renouard and Firmin Didot, were added to the commission as well. Despite its intention to reform the law on the matter, the commission of 1825–1826 did not challenge the existing definition of literary property in

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

79

any fundamental way. In his opening statement to the commission, the president La Rochefoucauld criticized the laws of 1793 and 1810 for limiting the duration of the rights of authors. Nonetheless, he concurred with the basic premise of these laws: that the state’s mission in regulating literary property was to balance the rights of the individual author with the rights of society as a whole. In his report to the commission, La Rochefoucauld described the goal of literary property law as follows: “It is necessary to bring together two opposing principles: the compensation due to immortal geniuses and the imprescriptible right acquired by the public to benefit from the works of genius.” With this goal in mind, the commission examined two different ways for strengthening the rights of the author and his family while still preserving those of the public. Initially, the commission focused on protecting the rights of heirs beyond the limited term of literary property, through a system that would soon come to be called a “paying public domain.” As outlined by one of its main proponents, Baron Cuvier, this system would work as follows: literary property would be limited to a term of, say, thirty years after publication of a work, for all heirs and assigns of the author. Once this property became public domain, though, the author’s heirs would still receive a perpetual “retribution” for every reprinting, to be paid by the publisher of the reproduction. From the perspective of its supporters, this system was the best means of strengthening the rights of individual authors without infringing on the rights of society as a whole. However, it was opposed by several members of the commission—above all, by the representatives of the book industry, Renouard and Didot—who objected that the retribution fee would be logistically complicated for the state and financially ruinous for the book trade. Unable to resolve the difficulties involved in administering such a fee, the commission then turned to another means of readjusting the balance between the interests of the public and the interests of the individual: the extension of the term of literary property. In its final report, it recommended that the duration of such property be increased to fifty years after the death of the author, for his spouse, descendants, and/or third-party assigns. The commission’s recommendation was more in line with the interests of publishers than of authors. However, although this recommendation strengthened the right of literary property for the individual creator and producer, it left unchanged the fundamental definition of such property as a special and temporary grant from society.45

80

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Yet, even this compromise proposal on literary property proved too radical for the regime of the Restoration. The final recommendation of the commission was not implemented by the government of Charles X. Buried in the files of the administration, it was mentioned by a member of the Chamber of Deputies in June 1828 in support of a petition from a printer named Delort for new legislation on literary property.46 But neither the report by the commission nor the petition by Delort was acted upon by the government of the Restoration. This government also ignored the plea for extension of literary property to twenty-five years after the death of the author, made by publishers in their report to the administration on the means of improving the book trade in 1829.47 The issue of literary property failed to command the attention of either the executive or the legislative branch before the fall of the Restoration government in July 1830. As literary piracy became a more pressing problem for the book trade, however, the new regime of Louis-Philippe undertook a more serious reappraisal of literary property law. Following the Revolution of 1830, publishers increased their calls for state action against literary piracy. In 1834, for example, the publisher Treuttel and Würtz addressed a letter about the problem of literary piracy to the Chamber of Commerce, which in turn referred it to the ministry of commerce. About the same time, a group of publishers in Paris (which included Treuttel and Würtz as well as such other prominent publishing entrepreneurs as J.-B. Baillière, Germer Baillière, Firmin Didot Frères, Charles Gosselin, Hachette, and Paulin) sent a letter to the ministry of public instruction, demanding action against Belgian counterfeiting.48 In response to these demands, the administration of Louis-Philippe initiated another investigation of the issue. In October 1836, the minister of public instruction, François Guizot, appointed a commission to study the problem of literary piracy under the presidency of Abel-François Villemain, the writer and professor who had served on the commission on literary property in 1825–1826 and would serve as the first president of the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1838. In addition to Villemain, this new commission included the author Victor Hugo, the printers Le Normant and Ambroise Firmin-Didot (son of Firmin Didot, who had served on the commission of 1825–1826), and the publishers Charles Gosselin and Louis Hachette, as well as representatives of the government, the Academy of Sciences, the University of France, and the Royal Library. When publishers demanded that the government address

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

81

literary piracy not just outside France but inside it, too, a parallel commission on literary property was established by the minister of interior. This second commission, which was chaired by Philippe-Paul, Count de Ségur, a general and historian who was a member of the Chamber of Peers under the July Monarchy, included several authors and journalists as well as Ambroise Firmin-Didot, the newspaper publisher Émile de Girardin, and the book publisher Würtz.49 During several months of discussion, these two parallel commissions navigated between the corporatist and the liberal positions on literary property. The commission on literary piracy, for example, divided over whether and how to protect the literary property of foreigners. Although several liberal members of the commission (including, presumably, the publishers Gosselin and Hachette) argued for a unilateral declaration of the rights of authors everywhere, other members objected that such a declaration would harm French producers whose business often depended on reprints of foreign works, while it would do nothing to stop foreign counterfeiters. In the end, the commission compromised between these two positions on international literary property. In its final report, it recommended that such property be guaranteed only on a reciprocal basis to foreign authors whose governments had offered the same protection to French writers. In addition to requesting a number of new customs procedures to staunch the flow of pirated books into France, it proposed the following measure to be included in a new law on literary property: “All works, in French or foreign language, published for the first time abroad, may not be reprinted in France, whether during the lifetime of the author or after his death, before the expiration of a term fixed by treaty, without the consent of the author or his representatives. Every reproduction of said works, in violation of this prohibition, will be labeled piracy and punished accordingly. This measure will be applied exclusively with regard to states that will have provided the same guarantee to works in French or foreign language published for the first time in France.” This proposal by the French commission on literary piracy inspired the British government to enact a law for the reciprocal protection of the copyright of foreign authors and publishers, dated 31 July 1838, which would in turn increase pressure on the French administration to provide similar protection for the British and other foreigners.50 Like the commission on literary piracy, the commission on literary property appointed by the interior minister balanced the demands of liberals and

82

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

the concerns of corporatists. Although in theory it asserted that a literary work was the “absolute property” of its author, in practice it concluded that once the work was published, this property could not be held in perpetuity by the heirs and assigns of the author but had to be shared with society as a whole. In its final report, the commission on literary property recommended that the duration of this property be limited to fifty years from the date of first publication (rather than the death of the author, which was seen by publishers and their supporters as too variable). This recommendation represented a new, more liberal compromise between individual and public claims to texts.51 With the recommendations of these two commissions in hand, the administration of Louis-Philippe began to draft new legislation on literary property. Early in 1838, in response to another petition from the publishers of Paris, the minister of the interior proposed to the Conseil d’Etat a bill on the “property of works of art, science, and literature,” which adopted most of the recommendations of the twin commissions of 1836–1837. After receiving the approval of the Conseil d’Etat, this bill was then presented, in a slightly modified form, to the Chamber of Peers on behalf of the minister of public instruction (who was now Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy), first in January, then again in April 1839.52 As presented to the legislature, the bill was an attempt to renegotiate the “marriage” instituted by the decree of 1810 between state and market, ever so slightly in favor of the latter. Within France, it proposed to extend the term of literary property to thirty years after the death of the author— a compromise between the twenty years guaranteed by the decree of 1810 and the fifty years recommended by the commission of 1836–1837, as well as by the commission of 1825–1826. Internationally, this bill promised to protect the literary property of authors from countries whose governments provided reciprocal guarantees for French authors. Encompassing authors not just of literary but of dramatic, musical, and artistic works, the bill aimed to discourage intellectual piracy by increasing the punishment for counterfeiting. While it was intended to strengthen the rights of authors and their assigns against literary piracy, however, the bill of 1839 was still grounded in a democratic, not a liberal, conception of literary property. In the mold of the Declaration of the Rights of Genius of 1793 and the decree of 1810, it continued to balance the interests of individual creators and producers with the interests of society at large. Based on the assumption that literary property was not a

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

83

property like any other but outside of the common law, this bill maintained strict limits on the rights of individuals to monopolize ideas from the public domain. Such limits were justified, according to the authors of the bill, on the grounds that works belonged not just to their authors but to the public. As the reporter for the committee that was appointed by the Chamber of Peers to study this measure, Viscount Siméon, argued: In effect, as long as a work remains in the hands of its author, it has the character of an ordinary mobile property. The author may keep it, give it, sell it, destroy it, in a single word, use it as he likes. But, as soon as he delivers it to the public, society acquires a right to the work; it becomes a sort of property indivisible between the author and society. The one and the other should benefit from the portion that is due to them: the author, from the product of his work; the public, from the pleasure and the instruction that it brings.53 Although it proposed to extend the rights of authors, the bill of 1839 continued to define literary property as a temporary concession from the state in the public interest. Because it represented a compromise between the corporatist and liberal positions on literary property, this new moderate bill came under fire from both the left and the right. During debate, it provoked sharp divisions between liberals and conservatives in the Chamber of Peers. On the one hand, liberal peers thought that the bill did not go far enough in recognizing literary property as a natural and absolute right. At the head of the liberal opposition to the bill was Count Joseph-Marie Portalis (the first director of the dministration of the book trade under Napoleon and a member of the first commission on literary property in 1825–1826), who worried that, under guise of strengthening the right of literary property, the measure in fact undermined this right, by defining it as a temporary privilege accorded by society. In order to guarantee this right according to principle in quasiperpetuity, Portalis proposed that the Chamber of Peers amend the bill to extend the term of literary property to fifty, rather than just thirty, years after the death of the author, in line with the recommendations of the commissions of 1825–1826 and 1836–1837. In defense of this amendment, Portalis maintained that literary property was no different than any other. “One should not

84

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

misunderstand,” he argued, “that the right of authors is a right of property. It is important to note that this right, even though it may be constrained within tight limits, is no less a right of property, that it belongs to authors, on their own initiative, and not by concession of the law, from the munificence of society, and that, henceforth, it may be regulated, limited, but never abolished or expropriated without indemnity.” The amendment to extend the term of literary property to fifty years beyond the death of the author was seconded by Abel-François Villemain, who had been president of the commission on literary property in 1836–1837 and was now minister of public instruction. Although he rejected the principle of perpetual and unlimited literary property, Villemain still thought the term of such property should be increased by more than just ten years, in order to encourage individual creation and production of literature as much as possible. The minister of public instruction also agreed that the French government should guarantee such property for foreigners, on a reciprocal basis with other nations. These demands were supported by a number of other liberals in the Chamber of Peers.54 The extension of literary property both at home and abroad was resisted, however, by more moderate and conservative members of the Chamber of Peers, who insisted on a more limited notion of the rights of authors. Asserting that literary property was not a natural right but a temporary privilege accorded to authors by society to promote the exchange of ideas, these peers opposed the proposal by Portalis to extend the term of literary property to fifty years after the death of the author. While most supported the term of thirty years stipulated in the original bill, some maintained that the term of such property should be left alone, at twenty years after the death of the author. These moderates and conservatives also opposed the recognition of the rights of authors from other countries, even on a reciprocal basis. Before the bill even reached the floor of the Chamber, the committee that had been appointed to examine it rejected the article that would have guaranteed the rights of foreign authors on a reciprocal basis, on the grounds that the countries from which France most wanted to obtain such reciprocal protection (especially Belgium) would never renounce piracy, while those from which it wished to remain free to steal (such as England) would force it to grant this protection. The committee also opposed the use of the term “literary property” with regard to the work of authors. In the title of the bill, it requested that this term be replaced with “rights of authors.” Although the original title was in the end maintained,

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

85

other liberal provisions were blocked by moderate and conservative peers during the final vote on the bill. On 31 May 1839, the Chamber of Peers approved the new legislation on literary property, but without either the amendment to extend the term of such property to fifty years after the death of the author or the provision to guarantee the rights of foreigners to such property on a reciprocal basis.55 The bill on literary property passed to the Chamber of Deputies, where it sat for almost two years before it was finally introduced by the minister of public instruction, Villemain. In the meantime, the government was barraged with comments on the matter of literary property by members of both the liberal and the corporatist camps in the book trade. Between 1839 and 1841, authors, jurists, newspaper editors, book publishers, and printers sent numerous petitions and delegations to the government in an effort to influence the final legislation. Liberal publishers lobbied the government to extend the term of literary property to at least thirty, if not fifty, years after the death of the author. They also pressed it to reconsider the provision to protect the property of foreign authors. In May 1840, for example, a number of prominent publishers in Paris visited the minister of public instruction to demand that the law include a universal declaration of literary property, and in January 1841, another group of publishers, including J.-B. Baillière, Léon Curmer, FirminDidot Frères, Charles Gosselin, Louis Hachette, and Jules Renouard (son of Antoine-Augustin, who had served on the commission of 1825–1826), petitioned the legislature to modify the bill to guarantee the rights of authors outside of France not just on a reciprocal basis but on a unilateral one, in a manner “absolute and without restriction.” Some of these publishers later appeared before the commission appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to examine the bill. To generate international support for a unilateral declaration of literary property, these same publishers also sent a form letter to their colleagues abroad, asking them to endorse such a declaration. In response to these moves by publishers to encourage the Chamber of Deputies to strengthen the law on literary property, corporatist members of the book trade asked the government to leave this law alone. In some “observations” on the bill of 1839, the printer Crapelet, for example, opposed the protection of the rights of foreign authors, either reciprocally or unilaterally. Arguing that the publishers who had advocated universal recognition of literary property were not representative of the majority of the book trade, Crapelet insisted that if such

86

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

property were guaranteed internationally on either a reciprocal or a unilateral basis, many printers and bookdealers in France would lose a significant source of business: reprints of works from abroad.56 After considering the opinions of a number of publishers and printers as well as writers and artists, the committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to examine the measure proposed a more liberal version of the bill “relative to the rights of authors of works of literature, science or art,” as it was now entitled. Under the influence of its secretary, the Romantic poet and liberal politician Alphonse de Lamartine, this committee modified the version of the bill passed by the Chamber of Peers to strengthen the rights of authors within France and abroad. Although it did not go so far as to proclaim the principle of perpetuity, the legislative committee did insist that once intellectual work took material form, it was a property, comparable to real estate or any other commodity. In response to the counterargument that such work belonged to no one individual but to all of society, the committee distinguished between the disembodied idea, which was a gift of God or genius available to all of society, and the material object, which was a property possessed by the individual producer. As the reporter for the committee, Lamartine, said in presenting the revised bill to the Chamber of Deputies in March 1841: “The idea comes from God, serves men and returns to God, leaving a luminous wrinkle on the forehead of him to whom genius has descended and on the name of his sons; the book falls into commercial circulation, and becomes a value producing capital and revenue like any other value, and is susceptible under this title to be constituted as property.” In line with this definition, the committee recommended that the bill guarantee the rights of authors for fifty (as opposed to just thirty) years after their death, a period of time that would encompass the lifetime of their immediate heirs and would encourage publishers to invest in new works. In defense of this extension of the term of literary property, Lamartine explained to the Chamber of Deputies: “Your committee has amended the proposal of the Government in the direction of an arbitrary [term] that is more liberal, more generous, more equitable, and more in keeping with the true processes of speculation.” In an effort to make France a leader in the fight against literary piracy, the legislative committee also demanded that the bill include the provision for recognizing the property of foreign authors, on a reciprocal basis, which had been rejected by the Chamber of Peers.57

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

87

Although it thus satisfied a number of the demands of liberals in the book trade, the committee’s version of the bill on the rights of authors faced considerable opposition in the Chamber of Deputies. Against Lamartine and his supporters were arrayed a number of deputies, including Augustin-Charles Renouard, son of the bookdealer Antoine-Augustin Renouard who had served on the commission on literary property in 1825–1826 and brother of the publisher Jules Renouard who had served on the commission on literary piracy of 1836–1837; Frédéric Portalis, son of Joseph-Marie Portalis who had unsuccessfully demanded liberalization of the bill passed by the Chamber of Peers in 1839; and Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, who as former minister of public instruction had introduced the original bill to the Chamber of Peers. These deputies argued that the revised bill granted excessive rights to individuals, particularly publishers, at the expense of legitimate interests of society. Chastising the commission headed by Lamartine for surpassing the intentions of the government, they maintained that, while the legislation on the rights of authors might need to be improved, it did not need to be reconceived from scratch. Asserting that knowledge, like light or air, belonged to no one once it was published, they argued that the rights of authors were not a perpetual property but only a temporary remuneration. Rejecting the term “literary property,” they insisted on calling this remuneration “right of author” or “right of copy.” These deputies asserted that the increase in the duration of such rights to fifty years after the death of the author would constitute a new form of privilege, antithetical to the principles of the postrevolutionary regime. Like the privileges of the Old Regime, they suggested, these increased rights would stifle competition, increase prices, encourage piracy, degrade literature, and hinder intellectual exchange. These rights would benefit not authors, but only speculators. As Augustin-Charles Renouard argued before the Chamber: When free competition was introduced in our general legislation on the debris of old privileges, a new industrial right was founded. Today we are quietly conquered by a reaction which exercises its wits in finding new ways of killing competition. . . . The love of money, which has already too much invaded literature, will re-double in intensity, and will degrade it completely. One will enrich the families of authors; but one will impoverish their glory. I am wrong to say that the families of authors will be enriched: speculation will have soon absorbed these breeding grounds

88

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

of intelligence by the attraction of its capital. The old book privileges, against the prolongation of which the parlements, in the sixteenth century, rendered memorable decrees, will be reborn, young in form, better guaranteed by the more effectively repressive force of our modern societies and armed with a longer duration.58 To prevent the revival of privilege feared by Renouard, opponents of the revised bill insisted on limiting the rights of authors to thirty years after the death of the author. This shorter term, they argued, would keep French law in line with that of most other countries (such as Prussia, whose law of 1837 guaranteed the rights of authors for this term) and would thus facilitate international negotiation on the issue. Opponents of the bill presented by Lamartine also objected to the extension of such rights to foreigners, even on a reciprocal basis. Insisting that this was a matter for diplomacy rather than for legislation, they argued that the reciprocal recognition of literary property between countries would not help but actually harm the book trade in France. In sum, a number of deputies opposed the strengthening of literary property either at home or abroad, on the grounds that it would harm the public interest. As the deputy Dubois (of the Loire-Intérieure) argued on the first day of general debate on the revised bill, “[T]his law, which one presents as the emancipation of thought, is, in the eyes of many people, an obstacle to the movement and the progress of enlightenment.”59 Responding to the opposition to the bill presented by Lamartine, several moderate members of the Chamber of Deputies attempted to remodify it along the lines of the original bill passed by the Chamber of Peers. At the suggestion of the minister of public instruction, Villemain, who (though not opposed to the extension of literary property to fifty years after the death of the author) endorsed the term of thirty years as a significant improvement over the current legislation, these moderates moved to amend the first article of the bill, to restore the more limited term approved by the Chamber of Peers. While some deputies defended the longer term of fifty years and others advocated the current term of twenty years after the death of the author, in the end a majority approved the compromise term of thirty years. In its discussion of the article related to the protection of the rights of foreign authors (number 18), the Chamber of Deputies likewise retreated from the relatively liberal position of the committee headed by Lamartine. In response to the lobbying of

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

89

publishers, one deputy, the Marquis de La Grange, proposed to amend this provision to make such protection unilateral as opposed to just reciprocal, but this amendment was rejected in favor of one by Augustin-Charles Renouard, which made even reciprocal protection not automatic but only possible. Rather than guaranteeing such protection by legal statute, Renouard’s amendment said only that reciprocity could be accorded at the discretion of the government by diplomatic treaty.60 Even in its watered-down form, however, the bill on the rights of authors did not garner enough support to pass the Chamber of Deputies. After more than two weeks of debate, this house of the legislature rejected the bill in its entirety, by a vote of 154 to 108. In the assessment of the deputies themselves, the bill had been made unworkable by the various contradictory changes to it. In their effort to protect artistic and musical as well as literary works, the deputies had not been able to agree on the nature of the rights of authors. In some places of the bill, they seemed to define these rights as an inviolable form of property; in other places, they sought to limit them in the interest of the public domain. As one observer later explained, “After a confused, embarrassed discussion of eight days, in which each detail created new difficulties, the chamber, vanquished by its powerlessness, rejected the project as a whole.”61 In failing to reform the law on the rights of authors, the Chamber of Deputies opted for the compromise between private and public claims on texts established by the law of 1793 and modified by the decree of 1810. After five years of discussion of the issue in government commissions and legislative debates, the legislation on literary property remained unchanged. In the mid-1840s, the French state would take some small steps to strengthen the protection of literary property both domestically and internationally. In addition to addressing the problem of literary piracy in customs laws and treaties, the government enacted some new measures on literary property. In 1844, the legislature passed a law that extended the rights guaranteed to the families of authors by the decree of 1810 to the spouses and children of dramatic authors, who had previously remained under the law of 1793. Under continued pressure from publishers to combat foreign literary piracy, the administration also began to negotiate a series of treaties for the reciprocal protection of literary property with individual nations, starting with Piedmont-Sardinia in 1843. During discussion of these measures in the legislature, members of both houses asked the government to draft a new,

90

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

more comprehensive law on literary property. Before the end of the July Monarchy, however, such pleas for a new law went unanswered. Reluctant to upset the delicate balance between individual and public claims to texts that had been instituted during the Revolution and Empire, the state refrained from altering the legislation on literary property.62 Through the middle of the nineteenth century, then, individual claims to texts remained limited in the public interest. Contrary to the long-standing assumption that an idealist, author-centric definition of intellectual property had emerged by the end of the revolutionary era in France, an instrumentalist, public-oriented notion of the rights of authors persisted here. Moreover, to the extent that it recognized intellectual property, French law grounded such property in the materiality of the text rather than the genius of the author. In an effort to provide commercial incentives for publishing, it treated texts as transferable but temporary commodities, which could be “owned” by individual producers only for a short time before falling into a public domain. Much like Anglo-American law, French law continued to adopt a commodity-based rather than a personality-based definition of literary property.63

As this chapter has shown, the Revolution of 1789 divided members of the book trade. The division in this trade was by no means healed by the “marriage” of state regulation and market competition instituted by Napoleon in 1810. In fact, this marriage proved unsatisfactory to almost everyone involved in the book trade. In the eyes of traditional practitioners of the book occupations, it did not go far enough toward reversing laissez-faire. Conversely, in the eyes of new éditeurs, the compromise went too far in tempering individual competition. By the 1820s, both the corporatist and liberal camps in the book trade were demanding reform—if not outright repudiation—of the compromise regulation of 1810. Despite the dissatisfaction with this marriage, however, it remained intact through both the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Although each regime considered measures that would have relaxed government limits on the book trade, neither was willing to risk the consequences of divorcing the state from the market. Committed to protecting public order and public access, and stymied by the difficulties of funding indemnities for printers or of administering retribution fees for the families of authors, the early nineteenth-century French state

The Battle between Corporatists and Liberals

91

hesitated to renegotiate the compromise established by Napoleon. In the end, neither the Restoration nor the July Monarchy significantly altered the legislation on either licensing or literary property. As a result, the law on these issues continued to strike an uneasy balance between individual rights and public interests. Prior to 1848, the story of the battle between corporatists and liberals in the book trade thus illustrates the continuity across political regime in approach toward the literary market. The supposedly bourgeois July Monarchy, for example, proved no more responsive to the demands of publishers for liberalization of licensing and literary property than did the authoritarian Napoleonic Empire or restored Bourbon monarchy. Despite this continuity in state policy, however, the battle between corporatists and liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century was not without effect. Out of the struggle for reform of the regulation of 1810, both camps emerged more organized. In particular, liberal publishers began to form a number of different kinds of associations—from joint-stock corporations, to mutual aid funds, investment banks, investigative commissions, and trade organizations. Often inspired by concern about Belgian literary piracy, these associations would make publishers more effective in their campaign for reform of state policy on the book trade.

3 Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

In the wake of the Revolution of 1848, a writer and bookdealer named Victor Bouton launched a campaign against a group of publishers in Paris. In the name of provincial booksellers, Bouton attacked these publishers for their business practices, especially the use of primes, or premiums, to market their books. Following the revolution, this group of publishers had formed a business partnership, called the Union des Éditeurs, to purchase tickets to a lottery that had been organized for the benefit of artists and writers, which they then offered as bonuses to purchasers of their books. To Bouton, this marketing scheme was anticompetitive as well as unethical. By privileging a small elite of publishers, he asserted, it constituted a “monopoly,” to the detriment of the “corporation” of the book trade. For Bouton, this “monopoly” of publishers was all the more threatening, because it had previously benefited from a state loan to industry following the Revolution of 1830 and it was now connected to the leadership of a new trade association, the Cercle de la Librairie, founded in 1847. Noting the overlap between the officers of the trade association and the organizers of the lottery, Bouton challenged the right of these publishers to represent the book trade as a whole. In the second of two pamphlets that he published against the lottery, he criticized the big entrepreneurs associated with the new Cercle de la Librairie for pretending to help the small booksellers of the provinces, while really acting to steal their business. Depicting these entrepreneurs as mustachioed bourgeois, he satirized them as “big fish” who swallowed the small fry in the book trade: It has come to my attention that the Cercle de la Librairie is meddling [in the lottery] and pretends to be the expert: “Little booksellers,” it says, “Ingrates that you are, let yourselves join the lottery. Don’t you know that the

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

93

big fish are made for eating the little ones and that the Cercle de la Librairie is composed of big eaters? Come, you are not content with the dinners that they organize and with [their trade publication] the Journal de la librairie, which commemorates them. But when these citizens drink, eat, embrace each other, and give each other compliments, it is for you that they eat, it is for you that they drink, it is for you that they embrace each other, and their compliments should flatter you. When they sponsor lotteries, it is for you! See how fat they are! Doesn’t it make you cry for joy, die of happiness? And you say afterward that publishing is not prospering and that other industries are not jealous of it! Come, you are ingrates who are not convinced that, in order to give such good dinners and such beautiful speeches, they need the lottery, quickly, one lottery, two lotteries, three lotteries—that will pick up business and that will provide bread to the artists and to the men of letters who work so hard for the publishers!1 With biting sarcasm, Bouton attacked the big éditeurs of Paris for colluding with each other at the expense of the rest of the book trade. In his attack on the entrepreneurs behind the lottery, Bouton singled out one publisher in particular: Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. A publisher of republican pamphlets and almanacs, Pagnerre had begun his career as a clerk for Charles Gosselin, who was a successful éditeur of Romantic literature. When Gosselin retired to the countryside in 1845, Pagnerre acquired his license and business. A moderate republican who would later support LouisNapoléon Bonaparte, Pagnerre was a leader of the opposition to the July Monarchy. In the late 1840s, he helped to orchestrate the banquet campaign in favor of the extension of suffrage. Following the Revolution of 1848, he was the secretary of the provisional government as well as a member of the constituent assembly of the Second Republic. In this capacity, he was involved in the establishment of a Comptoir National d’Escompte, or National Discount Bank, to aid small business in the wake of the revolution. In addition to serving as director of this discount bank, Pagnerre also founded (along with the publisher Louis Hachette) a sous-comptoir de garantie, or subsidiary guarantor, of the bank specifically for the book trade. At the same time, he was the first president of the Cercle de la Librairie and a founder of the Union des Éditeurs. In the eyes of Bouton, Pagnerre epitomized the “big fish” in publishing. In the first of his pamphlets against the lottery scheme,

94

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Bouton assailed this particular “big fish” for exploiting his position to benefit a small coterie in the book trade: Fifteen years ago the house of Gosselin (today Pagnerre) owed the State 60,000 francs; the house Lecointe-Furne 250,000 francs, etc. After February [1848], industry demanded a discount bank. The provisional government delegated Pagnerre [to organize it]. Always the same old dive and the same companions. Pagnerre passed on 50,000 francs to this one, 30,000 to another, 60,000 to the neighbor, Furne himself absorbed close to a quarter of a million. . . . Damn! The same suffering industrialists had cost the government of July [1830, following the revolution that replaced King Charles X with Louis-Philippe] an enormous capital; from the first day of the Republic [established in February 1848] one finds them again with their hand in the purse. Calling for the police to arrest Pagnerre, Bouton continued: If the Lottery of Artists is authorized with such-and-such a goal, at suchand-such address, under the patronage of such-and-such, it is not authorized in the sordid hands of a Pagnerre; Pagnerre is under the threat of the law for having organized a private lottery: It is a scandal that must be repressed. We are waiting for the Prosecutor of the Republic. I ask you, Monsieur the Minister of the Interior, to order an inspection of the shop of Pagnerre, and I beg you, R. P. Carlier [the chief of police], to make a raid there. Seize for me this devil. For his role in the lottery as well as the loan of 1830, the discount bank of 1848, and the Cercle de la Librairie, Pagnerre was denounced by Bouton as an unscrupulous monopolist.2 (For a caricature of Pagnerre, see Figure 3.1.) The attack by Bouton on Pagnerre was motivated by personal animosity. Himself a shady character, Bouton (who sometimes went by the pseudonyms of René Didier or Vaute) had come into conflict with Pagnerre on several occasions in the past. A native of the Vosges region, he had arrived in Paris in the 1830s. A painter as well as a writer, he was a radical republican but also a vehement antisocialist. On several occasions, he was imprisoned for his provocative publications. Under both the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, however,

Figure 3.1. Caricature of the almanac publisher Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre (1804–1854): “Ex member of the Provisional Government, and continuing to follow attentively the march of political events, the libraire Pagnerre understood that the moment had come to occupy himself seriously with the sale of the Comic Almanach.” Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

96

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

he was himself suspected of being a police informer. At the same time, he tried, with limited success, to establish himself in the publishing business, first as a salaried employee and then on his own as an editor of almanacs. In the early 1840s, Bouton worked for Pagnerre as a clerk. In 1845, after being fired from this position, he was charged by Pagnerre with stealing and publishing personal letters from the republican writer and politician Louis de Cormenin, who was one of Pagnerre’s authors. In the resulting trial, which attracted a large crowd from the milieus of literature and politics, Bouton was acquitted of theft but was required to return Cormenin’s letters and to pay damages to Pagnerre. The acquittal did nothing to quell the animosity between Bouton and Pagnerre. Following the Revolution of 1848, Bouton assailed his former boss in a sketch of Pagnerre for a series of “Revolutionary Profiles by a Red Pencil” that he published against the leaders of the new republican government. In the conclusion of this sketch, Bouton issued a declaration of war against the republican publisher: “In sketching this portrait of Pagnerre,” he wrote, “I assure him that I would never have flogged him so, if he had not, since the 24th of February [the establishment of the Second Republic], thought himself above reproach. He has an egoism and a presumption such that I wanted to drive this arrow right into his wing. I reserve for him one last stroke: I swear, if he doubts my skill, to send this last stroke right into his heart. The game has begun. One knows my card.” In response to this provocation, Pagnerre charged Bouton with libel. Again, though, Bouton avoided a guilty verdict, this time on a technicality. Given their history, the attack by Bouton on Pagnerre over the lottery scheme may be seen as a quest for revenge.3 On closer examination, however, the conflict between Bouton and Pagnerre is part and parcel of a bigger struggle over the organization of the book trade in France in the mid-nineteenth century. In accusing publishers of forming a privileged “monopoly,” Bouton was not just being paranoid; this accusation had some basis in fact. Between the late 1820s and the late 1840s, publishers had indeed begun to collaborate regularly and effectively. Overcoming the state’s resistance to organization among members of the same occupation, publishers formed a number of associations, for social, charitable, lobbying, and business purposes. Despite their varying aims, these associations contained the same basic group of publishers, centered around Pagnerre. Although it sometimes invoked the memory of the old trade guild, this group bore more resemblance to a modern business cartel. Out of this loose combi-

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

97

nation emerged one of the first durable trade associations in publishing, or any other industry, the Cercle de la Librairie. In organizing itself, the new cartel of publishers benefited from state protection. Although the state at first blocked the collective activities of this group of publishers, it came to tolerate and even favor them, for example, with subsidies and loans. Government patronage proved critical to the new association of publishers, even as the group lobbied for economic liberalism. As they engaged in collective enterprises under state auspices to promote their business, publishers came under attack by printers and booksellers, who were less successful at organizing themselves, in part because of government repression of any association that resembled a prerevolutionary trade guild. Printers and booksellers accused publishers of forming a “patriciate” or “coterie” at the expense of the trade as a whole. They charged publishers with “unfair competition” and “disloyal trade,” in violation of the postrevolutionary principle of free trade. Mixing protectionist and liberal idioms, they criticized the “coterie” of publishers for violating both corporatist unity and commercial liberty. Arguing that this coterie travestied the ethos both of the old corporate order and of the new liberal economy, printers and booksellers denounced such collusion. Although collusion among entrepreneurs has long been a feature of capitalism, it has not received much attention from business historians.4 By analyzing the “coterie” of publishers, this chapter aims to highlight the role of business associations and state protections in the development of a “free” market. In order to understand the struggle over association between old and new members of the book trade, I focus on four episodes involving the coterie of publishers: an attempt to found a “circle” for publishers in 1829; the participation by publishers in a state loan to commerce and industry following the Revolution of 1830; a wave of association among publishers in the 1830s and 1840s, which culminated in the foundation of a second, permanent, “circle,” the Cercle de la Librairie, as well as the sous-comptoir in publishing in the late 1840s; and, finally, the use of “premiums” in the form of tickets to lotteries to market books, especially by the Union des Éditeurs, from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s. Although these activities of publishers have been described before, particularly by Nicole Felkay in her book on the publishers of Balzac, they have not been placed in the broader context of the struggle between corporatists and liberals in the book trade.5 Together, these four episodes reveal

98

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

that by the late 1840s, publishers had succeeded in organizing themselves, first into a loose business combine and then into a formal trade association. In contrast to printers and bookdealers, who failed to combat this organization, publishers were better positioned to influence state policy on the book trade. The battle between Bouton and Pagnerre illustrates the beginning of a shift in power in the book trade, from corporatists to liberals, which would have significant consequences for the literary market.

The “Circle” of 1829 The origins of the battle between Bouton and Pagnerre dated back almost twenty years, to the late 1820s, when publishers first began to form associations to defend and promote their occupation. As they became more and more prevalent in the book trade, the new éditeurs began to cooperate with each other. Gradually and haphazardly, they began to organize meetings, petitions, committees, social events, and business enterprises together. Such organization was facilitated by a number of trade journals and directories, especially a supplement to the official trade journal, the Bibliographie de la France, called the Feuilleton. Created in 1825, the Feuilleton functioned as a bulletin board for the book trade: it publicized sales of goods and services, job openings, trade auctions, address changes, inventions, bankruptcies, deaths, laws, treaties, and meetings of interest to people in the trade. With the help of such publications, publishers began to undertake a number of collective activities. In 1826 and 1827, for instance, they joined with printers and booksellers in writing collective petitions against the reactionary press bill proposed by Charles X. In 1828, they planned a party for the book trade, which was held on the premises of the restaurateur Grignon and attended by some five hundred notables in publishing. Following this special event, which was deemed a big success, they established a society for “book trade balls” to plan similar activities. In 1829, publishers organized a commission to investigate the state of the book trade, which submitted a report to the government in favor of abolition of licensing requirements for bookdealers and extension of literary property rights. About the same time, they also began forming joint-stock corporations with each other to fund business enterprises. Many of these corporations were intended to combat the problem of literary piracy by facilitating distribution. In October 1828, for instance, several éditeurs in Paris

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

99

established a joint-stock operation called the Librairie Parisienne Française et Étrangère, to market their books in Brussels. Such collective action was often provoked by the debates over literary property rights as well as over licensing requirements. In their effort to obtain absolute freedom and property in the book trade, publishers relied increasingly on associations, both formal and informal.6 These early associations were composed of a relatively constant group of publishers. Over and over in the rosters of the petitions and associations organized by publishers, the same names appeared: J.-B. Baillière, Bossange (both Martin and Hector, his son), Didot (both Firmin and Ambroise), Charles Gosselin and later his successor Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, Louis Hachette, Victor Masson, Panckoucke (first C. L. F., then Ernest), and Treuttel and Würtz. Most of these publishers were located in the 11th (now 6th) arrondissement of Paris. They were thus neighbors as well as colleagues. Members of the generation of éditeurs who came of age with the Restoration, these men would rise to dominance in the book trade by the 1830s and 1840s. As business leaders, many of them served in official institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Bank of France, and the Chamber of Deputies. Firmin Didot, for instance, was a representative in the legislature in the late 1820s and early 1830s. He also served on the government commission on literary property established by Charles X in 1825. His son Ambroise Firmin-Didot was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, as well as of the government commission on literary property of 1836–1837. Drawing on their experience in civic affairs, these men were instrumental in forming associations among publishers.7 In the late 1820s, this core group of publishers attempted to formalize their relationship with each other by establishing a cercle, or circle, in the book trade. Founded on 26 February 1829, the first cercle de la librairie was organized by many of the same publishers who participated in the commission of 1829, including Charles Gosselin, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, and Martin Bossange. Founded by forty-two bookdealers, the circle was to be composed of one hundred members, of which seventy would be publishers or bookdealers, twenty would be printers, and ten would be paper manufacturers. According to its statutes, new members had to be recommended by three members, and all members had to pay a one-time fee of sixty francs as well as annual dues of one hundred francs. In order for a vote to be held, at least fifty-one

100

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

members had to be present. The circle was to be administered by an executive committee of nine members, including a president, two vice presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer, who would be named each year by a general assembly. The first president of the circle was the publisher Würtz, and the first secretary was Charles Gosselin. Within a few months, the new association rented a meeting place at 15 rue Saint-Germain-des-Près, just down the street from Gosselin’s publishing house.8 Modeled after a type of businessmen’s association developed by the English, the cercle was intended to be part trade organization, part leisure club. The association sought to prevent bankruptcy, combat piracy, arbitrate conflict, and stimulate trade, while also promoting sociability in publishing. According to its organizers, the circle in publishing was conceived as a “family meeting,” which would facilitate business. As they wrote to the prefect of police in Paris in an effort to obtain official approval for their association, “In Germany and in England, there is no town of any significance that is not provided with a circle, place of relaxation for some, occasion to do business for others; the cercle de la librairie, by offering to the practitioners of that occupation as well as those connected to it the occasion to see and to know each other, will contribute greatly to expanding one of the most extensive branches of industry in France.” Insisting that this was a business and not a political organization, the founders of the circle emphasized that it would be a boon to commerce in books.9 When the circle was first organized, it seemed likely to obtain the approval of the state. In March 1829, the government newspaper editorialized that this new association of publishers had “nothing in common with the old chambre syndicale [trade guild of the Old Regime],” but would nevertheless be a tool for “discipline” among its membership. After considering the letter he had received from the organizers of the circle, the prefect of police recommended to the minister of the interior that the association be permitted. While the prefect did ask that the statutes of the circle be amended to ban card games, liquor, pamphlets, and political discussion from its meetings, he said that he saw “no other obstacle to according authorization” to this organization.10 Within just a few months, however, the administration reversed its position on the book trade cercle. Before the minister of the interior had acted on the recommendation of the prefect of police, King Charles X replaced his relatively liberal cabinet with a reactionary one, thus jeopardizing official authorization

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

101

of the association. On 16 September, a new prefect of police wrote to the minister of the interior, who was also new, to inform him that the leaders of the new circle had rented a space in the rue Saint-Germain-des-Près, which they intended to open to the membership on the first of October. In response, the minister of the interior asked the prefect of police for his opinion about the legality of the circle. In mid-October, the new prefect concluded that the purpose of the proposed cercle de la librairie was too imprecise and thus suspect. According to him, because the circle was potentially not just a commercial association but also a political one, it endangered public order. At the same time, he asserted, it also threatened to constitute a monopoly, which might harm freedom of commerce as well as freedom of opinion. As the prefect argued in a letter to the minister of the interior: If this association of the principal bookdealers and printers of the Capital has as its goal to establish in their favor a kind of monopoly to the detriment of their brothers, whom they would then maintain in their dependence; if the proposed establishment had as its result to place in the hands of its associates the entire book trade, giving them an influence over this portion of the industry of a great city that could then be exploited not only at the expense of other publishers but to the profit of a single opinion or coterie; if it was, finally, a coalition, at first only commercial, but capable of soon becoming political, Your Excellence [the minister of the interior] would doubtless see more than one disadvantage in approving a vague request about which one can suppose all kinds of things. One could even see in that request a design to establish a kind of corporation, completely contrary to the current legislation. Fearing a return to something like the book guild of the Old Regime, the prefect of police urged the minister of the interior to forbid the book trade circle. The minister did not hesitate to follow the prefect’s advice. In late October 1829, he officially refused permission to the circle, on the grounds that it threatened freedom of commerce. As the minister of the interior explained in a letter to the prefect of police in early November, the state’s view at this point was that such a circle in publishing constituted “a sort of coalition to the prejudice of the other printers, bookdealers, and paper merchants in the capital.”11

102

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

The first major attempt by publishers to form a trade organization was thus obstructed by the government. Through the end of the Restoration, the circle of publishers remained informal. Although they managed to form ad hoc commissions to address particular issues, they failed to establish a durable trade association. Because such an association was too reminiscent of a prerevolutionary trade “corporation” or guild, it was not tolerated by the Restoration Monarchy, which prohibited any meeting of more than twenty people in the same occupation, in line with the Napoleonic Code. Although the new éditeurs had begun to cooperate with each other, they were prevented from formalizing their association by the political context before 1830.

The Loan of 1830 Following the Revolution of 1830, the political context became more favorable to the collective activities of publishers. This revolution, which was sparked by a crackdown on the press, was supported by most members of the book trade. In fact, a number of printers and publishers fought alongside writers and workers on the barricades to overthrow the Bourbon King Charles X. As a result of the revolution, many of these printers and publishers saw their business disrupted: during the revolution itself, several printers had their mechanical presses destroyed by workers, and between July and December of 1830, some twenty-five libraires-éditeurs were forced to declare bankruptcy.12 In recognition of their effort and suffering, the new regime of the Orléanist King Louis-Philippe assisted members of the book trade, especially publishers. This new regime, which was sympathetic to the interests of commerce and finance, was friendlier than its predecessor to the big publishers who had founded the first cercle de la librairie. For instance, the government purchased official subscriptions to a number of their publications. Unlike its predecessor, it also tolerated organization among these entrepreneurs. In a law dated 10 April 1835, the government of Louis-Philippe officially prohibited associations of more than twenty people, but it tacitly allowed such associations among middle-class businessmen, including publishers. As state officials became more favorable to organization among publishers, however, printers and booksellers became more resistant to it, causing conflict within the book trade. In the 1830s and 1840s, the corporatist camp in the trade began to attack the big publishers of Paris as a “coterie.”

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

103

One of the first measures of the new regime that provoked conflict within the book trade was a loan granted to commerce and industry. Intended to alleviate the financial crisis that had befallen France in the wake of the Revolution of 1830, this loan was approved by the legislature in October of that year. Totaling thirty million francs, it was to be distributed by the minister of finance, who would be assisted by a commission of prominent businessmen and financiers. This commission was in turn to be advised by the chamber of commerce in each locality. According to the regulation governing the loan, all recipients had to deposit merchandise or equipment with the state as collateral as well as pay interest of 4 percent. A large portion of this loan was given to the book trade. As soon as the loan was announced, members of the trade applied for a share of it. In a petition to the commission responsible for distributing the loan, several notable publishers requested that their trade be given three million of the thirty million francs to be granted by the government. In support of their request, they argued that because the book trade constituted 10 percent of all industry in crisis, it deserved 10 percent of the loan. This request, which was backed by the minister of finance as well as by the official newspaper the Journal des débats, was fulfilled to a large extent. In the end, the government commission granted to publishing and printing over 2.7 million francs, or 9 percent of the total loan. At least half of this amount went to publishing.13 Within the book trade, the loan was divided between a small number of entrepreneurs, most of whom were publishers. Out of a total of 440 members of the book trade who requested aid, only seventy-four (or 16.5 percent) received it. Of these, forty-nine were publishers. Many of these were the same publishers who had been involved in the commission and the circle in publishing in 1829. For example, Hector Bossange received first sixty thousand francs and then an additional forty thousand; Charles Gosselin received sixty thousand; Jules Renouard, sixty thousand; J.-B. Baillière, forty thousand; and Aimé André, thirty thousand. Of the other recipients of the loan, most were also prominent publishers, such as Pierre-François Ladvocat (the flamboyant éditeur in the Wooden Galleries at the Palais Royal who was immortalized in Balzac’s Lost Illusions), who received forty thousand francs; the Widow Béchet (a publisher of Balzac), who received one hundred thousand francs; and Alphonse Levavasseur (a renowned literary publisher), who received forty thousand francs. The periodical publisher Paulin, in whose offices the July

104

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Revolution had started, received thirty thousand francs. Some loans went to more traditional members of the book trade, such as the printers Georges Crapelet, Didot father and son (who together received three hundred thousand francs, by far the largest sum awarded), and Paul Renouard. For the most part, however, the money granted by the government was concentrated among a select group of new entrepreneurs in Paris.14 Despite their success in obtaining a large share of the loan to commerce and industry, these publishers were not free of financial insecurity. Less than a year after he received a government loan, for example, Pierre-François Ladvocat was on the verge of bankruptcy, despite the assistance of his authors, who donated a collection of satirical essays, Le Livre des cent-et-un, for publication. Likewise, bankruptcy befell the publisher Hector Bossange, who had received a loan not only from the government but also from the financier Jacques Laffitte. As their shares of the loan began to fall due, many of these publishers claimed that they were unable to repay them. In 1833, the government began to sell the collateral that had been deposited as a guarantee for the loan. In the case of publishers, this collateral consisted mainly of books. Fearing that a sudden release of these books onto the market would further damage their business by causing a price decrease, these publishers lobbied the government to forgive their loans.15 This lobbying was spearheaded by a publisher named Martin Bossange, who proposed that the books that had been deposited as collateral should be donated to the ministry of public instruction, which could in turn use them to supply libraries in the provinces. Known as Bossange Père, the publisher was the head of a family of bookdealers who specialized mainly in the foreign book trade and who participated actively in the campaign for extension of literary property. Although Martin Bossange himself had not received a portion of the loan to commerce and industry, his son Hector had. Like his son, Martin Bossange was connected to the financier Jacques Laffitte, who was both a minister and a legislator in the early years of the July Monarchy. His proposal to forgive the loans to publishers was presented to the Chamber of Deputies by Laffitte, as an amendment to a bill on the budget in April 1833. Echoing Bossange, Laffitte argued in defense of this measure that it was “in the interest of the book trade, as well as in the interest of the government and the departments to which books would be given.” In the legislature, Bossange’s proposal was supported by a number of deputies, including the printer-publisher

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

105

Firmin Didot, whose family had received a large share of the government loan. The proposal was opposed, however, by several deputies on the grounds that it favored a select group of publishers (and their financiers in the private sector) at the expense of the entire book trade, while giving provincial libraries only the “dregs” of their products. In response to this concern, Bossange wrote a second pamphlet, in which he insisted that the books now held by the government as collateral were some of the finest works produced by their publishers and suggested that in any case they could be exchanged for other works by the same publishers.16 Outside of the Chamber of Deputies, Bossange’s proposal garnered some support, for example, from the Journal des débats and in a petition by a number of publishers who had not benefited from the loan (but who were nevertheless close associates of those who had). But the proposal also met with vehement opposition. The main opponent of this measure was a bookdealer named Warée. The official publisher of the Royal Court and the Order of Lawyers, Warée had not participated in the loan to commerce. In a pamphlet against the proposal to forgive the loan, he asserted that this measure benefited not “the general interest of the commerce” of publishing, as Bossange and Laffitte had suggested, but only a handful of privileged publishers with connections to high finance in France. Calling the proposal to forgive the loan a “bill of indemnity accorded to speculators,” Warée suggested that these “speculators” had been favored by the commission that administered the loan because of their connection to “the so-called cercle de la librairie, a cercle whose members were not all solvent libraires.” In a second pamphlet, Warée again insisted that the recipients of the loan constituted a “coterie,” at the expense of the rest of the book trade. Moreover, he accused this “coterie” of unfair competition. Any penny granted to the coterie, he argued, was “borrowed from the sweat of the honest industrialist.”17 Despite the efforts of Bossange and other publishers to counter such assertions, the government sided with Warée. Hesitant to accord any more special privileges to the publishers who had benefited from the loan of 1830, the Chamber of Deputies ended its session without acting on the amendment by Laffitte. Over the next few years, a number of people in politics and publishing, including Bossange himself, would continue to lobby the government to forgive the loans to publishers. But the government refused to reconsider the issue. It is not known what happened to the books deposited by publishers as

106

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

collateral for the loans. Over time, they were probably sold by the government to private buyers. This move may have contributed to the collapse of several publishing houses in the 1830s. In the absence of government forgiveness of the loans to publishers, Bossange’s own business suffered: in 1833, he exchanged the best works of his fund for a government grant of twenty thousand francs; in 1843, he ceded his business to Paulin, founder of the periodical L’Illustration.18 Even more significant was the effect of this episode on the book trade as a whole. In the wake of the debate over the loan, opposition to the “coterie” of publishers began to mount among traditional printers and booksellers.

The Second Cercle de la Librairie and the Publishing Sous-Comptoir Although they had failed to persuade the government to forgive their debts, the “circle” of publishers who had benefited from the loan of 1830 did not cease to organize in defense of their interests. Despite the law of 10 April 1834, which forbade association within a single trade, collective activity among publishers increased under the July Monarchy. In December 1835, for instance, they formed a commission to raise money for the victims of a fire in the rue du Pot-de-Fer that had destroyed a printing shop and book bindery containing unbound sheets of the works of numerous publishers. Intended as a retroactive mutual insurance fund, this fund-raising commission endured for almost a year, raising over sixty thousand francs. This cooperative effort in turn inspired more mobilization among publishers. Issues of the Feuilleton of the Bibliographie de la France from the late 1830s and early 1840s contain numerous references to petitions, meetings, commissions, and delegations organized by publishers.19 As the last chapter suggested, many of these activities were a response to the problem of literary piracy, especially by Belgian printers and publishers, which preoccupied the book trade in France during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1834, for example, the publishers Furne, Gosselin, and Firmin-Didot Frères formed a distribution company called the Sociétés de Paris, Londres et Bruxelles pour les Publications à Bon Marché to export cheap editions of their publications to England and Belgium. In 1836, following the establishment of the government commissions on literary piracy and literary property by the ministers of education and the interior, publishers in Paris formed their own private commission

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

107

to investigate the commercial (as opposed to legal) strategies that they might employ to defend their business against foreign competition. One of the strategies proposed by this commission was the establishment under the protection of the French government of a Société Nationale de la Librairie Française to market inexpensive editions of French works abroad. This “national company,” as it was called, was endorsed by a number of publishers, including Bobée and Gosselin. To counter literary piracy, publishers also formed more informal associations to monitor infractions, undertake lawsuits, and organize boycotts against suspected pirates in the provinces (which, unlike foreign countries, were governed by French law on literary property). Between 1831 and 1837, one such group of publishers made over thirty seizures of pirated books from diverse booksellers in France.20 In addition to organizing to combat piracy, Parisian éditeurs also cooperated to undertake publishing enterprises. In so doing, they relied increasingly on the institution of the joint-stock corporation. Although this form of business partnership was still subject to strict legal restrictions in France, it was used extensively by members of the publishing business. In 1833, for example, something like half of the joint-stock corporations registered with the commercial court of Paris involved the publication of newspapers, periodicals, or books. In fact, these corporations became so common in publishing that they became objects of caricature in the press. In July 1836, the satirical newspaper Le Corsaire ran a spoof of such a corporation, which was headed “Prrrospectusss: Share-holding Company for the Exploitation of the Book Trade; under the legal name: BLAGOSCAT and COMP. Current capital: 000,000 francs. Future capital: 300,000 francs.” Although many of the jointstock corporations in publishing were short-lived, they were nonetheless prevalent enough by the late 1830s and early 1840s to attract the attention of critics.21 Of the joint-stock corporations in publishing, the most notorious was a partnership called the Comptoir Central de la Librairie, which was founded by Charles Gosselin and Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre in 1842. Modeled on the centralized book exchange of the German Confederation, this “central counter of the book trade” was intended to serve as a clearinghouse between the publishers of Paris and the booksellers of the provinces. This corporation lasted only three years. It was dissolved and liquidated in 1845. Critics of the Comptoir Central de la Librairie blamed its failure on the greed and depravity of the

108

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

publishers involved. In his history of the book trade in France, the bookdealer Edmond Werdet, for example, attributed the demise of this association to the individualism and “isolation” of publishers. Given the legal and cultural obstacles to association in France at the time, however, what is remarkable about the “comptoir” is that it was organized at all. The mere existence of such a partnership indicates that publishers were cooperating to a surprising degree in the early nineteenth century.22 Like the early associations of publishers in the late 1820s, the trade commissions and business corporations of the 1830s and 1840s involved a core group of publishers. Again, the list of organizers of such associations featured familiar names: J.-B. Baillière, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Louis Hachette, C. L. F. Panckoucke, Paulin, Pillet Senior, Eugène Renduel, Treuttel and Würtz, and, especially, Charles Gosselin and his successor, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. Gosselin initiated many of the collective activities and organizations in publishing from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s. In addition to being a founder of the cercle of 1829 and a beneficiary of the loan of 1830, he was an organizer of the commission to raise money for the victims of the fire of 1835, the private commission on literary piracy in 1836, the “national company” created to produce inexpensive books for export in 1837, and the Comptoir Central de la Librairie of 1842. He also was responsible for sending numerous petitions and delegations to the government on behalf of the publishing industry. When Gosselin retired from publishing in the mid-1840s, his partner Pagnerre assumed leadership not only of his firm but also of the publishing occupation. Drawing on his experience with Gosselin, including in the Comptoir Central de la Librairie, Pagnerre would continue to organize publishers.23 In comparison to new publishers, traditional printers and bookdealers were less successful in organizing. Contrary to the common assumption that they demonstrated a strong sense of trade solidarity, master printers, for example, struggled to forge an effective organization before the last third of the nineteenth century. The relative weakness of organization among printers was due to opposition by the state, which sought to prevent the resurrection of anything like a trade guild. In 1838, a commission of printers in Paris did propose the establishment of a chambre syndicale, modeled on the prerevolutionary printing guild. Led by the printers Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Georges Crapelet, and Henri Fournier, this chamber aimed to monitor qualifications, survey workshops, arbitrate disputes, and negotiate wages in the printing indus-

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

109

try. However, the organization failed to obtain the approval of the government. Arguing that “the creation of this Chamber . . . would call to mind the corporations [of the Old Regime] which one could not think of reviving,” the minister of commerce urged the minister of the interior to refuse to authorize such a chamber of printers. Despite this official prohibition, the group of printers in Paris continued to cooperate informally and unofficially. Calling itself an “association” rather than a “chambre syndicale,” it organized a number of banquets and negotiated a series of wage agreements with printing workers on behalf of master printers in the 1840s. During this period, printers also published a number of trade journals, which editorialized in favor of state policies in their interests, such as the maintenance of licenses. However, such collective action among printers continued to be opposed by the state. In the mid-1840s, for instance, the government commission that had been appointed to examine the regulation of the book trade rejected the institution of a chambre syndicale of printers as contrary to “freedom of industry.” As late as the 1850s and 1860s, the Parisian association of printers was still operating in an irregular fashion, with only fifty-some members and without government authorization. In an annual report to the general assembly in early 1857, for example, the president of this association, Thunot, could say only, “Our institution has survived, and it has been useful by that alone. The efforts that we have made for twenty years, to obtain legal recognition of our Chamber, have not yet born their fruit; let us, however, protect ourselves from discouragement.” In the provinces, associations of printers were similarly weak.24 Booksellers were no more successful than printers at organizing. In comparison to their counterparts in the German lands, for instance, retail booksellers in France were unable to form a pressure group to resist the domination of the book trade by publishers. Not until the early 1890s would book retailers establish a durable trade association. As late as 1899, a leader of this association of booksellers, called the Chambre Syndicale des Libraires de la France, was still calling for a “tighter connection and union” among its members. For much of the nineteenth century, the corporatist camp in the book trade was much less organized than the liberal one.25 While printers and booksellers were discouraged from forming a chambre syndicale, publishers were allowed to establish a formal trade association, toward the end of the July Monarchy. In the spring of 1847, a group of publishers in Paris founded a new Cercle de la Librairie. Unlike the circle of 1829,

110

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

the new Cercle de la Librairie proved to be a durable and successful trade association. Benefiting from a political climate that was more favorable to association, at least among the liberal bourgeoisie, the new Cercle de la Librairie was tolerated by the authorities of the July Monarchy as well as of the succeeding regimes. The new Cercle de la Librairie involved the same “coterie” of entrepreneurs who had been undertaking collective activities and receiving government favors since the late 1820s, including J.-B. Baillière, Pillet Senior, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, and Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. Pagnerre, in particular, played a large role in the foundation and organization of the new association. In addition to helping to draft the statutes and rent some rooms for the association, he was elected secretary, and then president, of the Cercle.26 Pagnerre was the orchestrator—along with the prominent publisher Louis Hachette—of one of the first acts of the new Cercle de la Librairie: the establishment of a credit institution for the publishing business, following the Revolution of 1848. After this revolution, the leaders of the Cercle petitioned the state to issue a loan to commerce as it had done in 1830 or, barring that, to establish a special bank, to revive credit. In March, the provisional government charged Pagnerre with creating and administering a Comptoir National d’Escompte (National Discount Bank) to assist small business owners who had trouble obtaining cash from existing banks and financiers in the wake of the crisis. The capital of this discount bank, which totaled twenty million francs, came in equal parts from state bonds, municipal obligations, and subscriptions from businessmen, especially in the Chamber of Commerce of Paris, which was instrumental in the creation and management of the Comptoir. In this new institution, publishers played a large role: they constituted one of the largest groups of subscribers, after bankers and merchants, and they had several representatives on the executive “discount council,” including Jean-Baptiste Baillière (who would later become a board member of the Bank of France), Langlois, and the Didot brothers. The new credit institution operated by discounting (i.e., exchanging for cash, after subtracting a “discount,” or fee, of about 5 percent) bills from businesses in Paris and the provinces that had been affixed by at least two signatures of reputable merchants. Because small businessmen often had trouble meeting this condition, the national discount bank created a number of branches, or souscomptoirs, for particular localities and industries, which served as guarantors for businessmen in exchange for deposits of deeds or goods. Not surprisingly, given Pagnerre’s role in establishing this system, one of the sous-comptoirs was de-

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

111

voted to the book trade in Paris. Located at the Cercle de la Librairie, the souscomptoir in the book trade was administered by many of the same publishers involved in the leadership of the new trade association. Its board was composed of Baillière, Dupuy, Gratiot, Guillaumin, Joubert, Laboulaye, Langlois, Lecoffre, Mathias, and Plon, all prominent members of the Cercle. With the help of the sous-comptoir, which was organized as a share-holding corporation, substantial loans were obtained by several publishers, including Furne, Masson, Mathias, and Plon.27 The sous-comptoir in the book trade may not have made a significant difference to the finances of most publishers. Faltering as early as 1849, when a meeting of its general assembly failed to obtain a quorum, it seems to have disappeared by the mid-1850s. Out of sixty-four million francs in deposits in the sous-comptoirs of Paris from July 1851 to July 1852, only one million were in publishing. As Jean-Yves Mollier has concluded, the sous-comptoir proved “incapable, due to lack of sufficient capital, of stimulating business” in publishing. Nonetheless, the sous-comptoir de garantie reinforced the organization and identity of publishing as a branch of industry. It thus became symbolic of the influence of the “patriciate” of publishers, especially Pagnerre. Like the Cercle de la Librairie itself, it fueled criticism among printers and bookdealers of the “coterie” in publishing.28

The Lottery of 1848 Following the establishment of the Cercle de la Librairie, the attacks on this “coterie” increased in number and vehemence. Corporatist printers and booksellers denounced the publishers involved in the new association as monopolizers who engaged in “dishonest,” “immoral,” and “unfair” competition. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the campaign against publishers was focused on one of their most controversial marketing practices: primes, or premiums, for book buyers, in the form of novelty trinkets or, more frequently, lottery tickets. In mid-nineteenth-century France, the use of a prime to market a product was by no means new. The term prime, which can mean either “venal charge” or “supplementary bonus,” originally connoted an insurance premium or export incentive. In addition, it was used to designate the return on a stock investment. By extension, a prime came to mean any kind of return—or

112

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

bonus—for the purchase of a product. Often, the bonus took the form of a chance at winning a jackpot in a lottery. In publishing, this strategy was used to market books as early as the mid-1830s. In the spring of 1835, for example, a publishing house run by the Pourrat brothers offered premiums to subscribers of the collected works of the Romantic writer Chateaubriand. This example was imitated by a number of other publishers. In the fall of 1835, two groups of publishers (one called the “Librairie Moderne” and the other called the “Société des Éditeurs Unis”) organized lotteries to entice consumers to buy their books. According to the scheme of the Librairie Moderne, each buyer of a book priced at seven or seven and a half francs would receive a ticket good for forty-eight chances in twelve monthly drawings of five thousand francs (divided into lots of 2,000, 1,500, 1,000, and 500) or a total jackpot of sixty thousand francs. As many as twelve other such projects were organized in late 1835 and early 1836. In defense of these schemes, publishers argued that premiums in the form of lottery tickets would redistribute profits from the middleman to the customer, in the manner of a joint-stock corporation, while also encouraging reading. However, the organizers of these lotteries met with considerable opposition, both within and outside the book trade. For example, a group of booksellers in Paris signed an agreement to refuse to stock books with premiums, and in a speech to the Councils of Commerce, Manufacturing, and Agriculture in Paris, the prominent printer-publisher Ambroise Firmin-Didot denounced lotteries as an immoral and anticompetitive business practice. In response to such criticism, in May 1836 the government outlawed lotteries.29 The law against lotteries, however, left a loophole: according to Article 5 of this law, exceptions would be made for subscriptions whose proceeds were destined exclusively for charitable or artistic causes, as long as they were authorized by the administration. In the wake of the Revolution of 1848, this loophole was used by a number of publishers to market their wares, often at discounted prices, with tickets to a lottery that had been authorized by the government to benefit artists and writers. While this scheme was initially blocked by the minister of the interior under pressure from a group of printers and bookdealers, after a change in minister it was later revived under the name Union des Éditeurs. Led by Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, the president of the Cercle de la Librairie and the founder of the sous-comptoir in publishing, this group purchased some two hundred thousand francs’ worth of tickets in

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

113

the lottery, to offer as premiums to buyers of their books. (According to a later judicial brief, only twenty-five thousand francs’ worth of these were actually distributed with books.) Given oral approval by the minister of the interior on two separate occasions, the Union des Éditeurs overlapped in its membership with the new trade association in publishing, as well as with the various petitions, commissions, and joint-stock corporations that had been organized by publishers since the 1830s.30 Like the earlier schemes to market books with premiums, the lottery tickets offered by the Union des Éditeurs in 1848 were criticized by antiestablishment members of the book trade, especially Victor Bouton, the former employee and die-hard enemy of Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. In a number of pamphlets and petitions, printers and bookdealers attacked the Union des Éditeurs. These critics made three basic arguments against the lottery. First, they opposed the lottery on legal grounds. Insisting that the loophole in the law of 1836 permitted lotteries only in the interest of art, not of commerce, critics of the Union des Éditeurs insisted that it was illegal. In the words of the legal publisher Warée, who had earlier opposed forgiveness of the loan of 1830 to publishers, “One cannot assimilate to an act of charity, to an encouragement to art, a speculation having for its object the well-being of a few industrialists, at the expense of the commerce of the book trade.”31 Printers and bookdealers also opposed the lottery on moral grounds, asserting that it was harmful to public order and legitimate competition. As Bouton claimed, “It is also for order [that I am preaching]. And truthfully, strange things are happening [as a result of the lottery] in the departments of France, to the detriment of public order and security.” In particular, critics argued that the lottery posed a threat to workers, who would be tempted to gamble rather than save their money. Others emphasized the anticompetitive and unethical nature of the lottery organized by the Union des Éditeurs. Repeatedly, printers and bookdealers accused the publishers involved in the lottery of “dishonest” or “unfair” competition. This argument was made, for example, by a traditional bookdealer named Louis-Théophile Barrois, a vehement opponent of the Cercle de la Librairie, who called the lottery a “disgusting traffic” that would harm “honest commerce.” Barrois aimed to prevent the lottery from “ruining” and “dishonoring” the book trade. Likewise, Victor Bouton criticized the lottery as antithetical to “honest” commerce in France. Because the members of the Union des Éditeurs employed their own agents

114

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

or peddlers to distribute books with premiums, Bouton argued, the lottery stole business from retail booksellers, especially in the provinces. Labeling this marketing scheme a “perturbation of true work,” he insisted that it hindered “the liberty of transactions” and destroyed “the loyalty of industry” in the book trade.32 Above all, opponents of the Union des Éditeurs argued that it constituted a “coterie.” Moreover, they linked this coterie to the same group of publishers who had used collective action to win favor with the state since at least 1830. The publisher Gervais Charpentier, for example, denounced the publishers behind the lottery of 1848 as a patriciate. “If one follows the path of many of these éditeurs during the last twenty years,” Charpentier wrote in a pamphlet against the lottery: one sees them, in 1830, soliciting and obtaining a portion of the loan of thirty million francs granted by the State to commerce. In 1833, they petitioned the legislature to return their collateral to them, without paying of course, and to absolve them of their debt. In 1835, they placed their establishments up for lottery for exaggerated sums of money, and both the judiciary and the legislature were forced to intervene. Later, they flooded all of the ministries, that of M. Guizot, as well as that of M. Thiers, with requests for public subscriptions [to their works], and they obtained them. One of them thereby received more than a million francs. In 1841, several of them founded, under the name of Comptoire [sic] central de la librairie, an establishment that was, according to their prospectus and their speeches, supposed to give to publishing a formerly unheard of prosperity and splendor. Two years later, this establishment was closed, after having devoured more than one hundred thousand francs, paid, as always, by the small to the profit of the great, and the liquidation [of this establishment] will never end. In 1848, one finds again the same men demanding the creation of a [national] “comptoir d’escompte,” in large part at the risk of the State: it was granted; then, a [trade] “sous-comptoir” of loans against guarantee: it was granted. Today, it is three million francs that they need; and, as this sum would not suffice to satisfy them, they address themselves to the most insatiable of all vices, counting on the infirmity of human reason to triple and even sextuple this sum.

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

115

Similar terms were used by the bookdealer Barrois to attack the publishers in the Union des Éditeurs. “They published advertisements worthy of charlatans,” Barrois wrote in one of his pamphlets against the lottery: They hung over the shops of the Éditeurs-Unis calico banners, as do entertainers, when, wanting to attract the money of the public, they announce the extraordinary exposition of some marvelous trick. These messieurs, I agree, are the big wigs of the book trade. We others are only the small people; but we have the law on our side, it is clear, it is positive; the judicial power, which has governed us almost single-handedly for the last twenty years, is independent of all of the calculations of money of a coterie that wants to procure some for itself at any price. The same argument was repeated by the bookdealer Warée: “In 1830, after the revolution of July, the book trade endured the commercial crisis, it also received its share of the loan of 30,000,000. The publishers admitted then are again today the most devoted partisans of the subscription with premiums. . . . In 1848 as well as in 1830, the publishers who are members of the Cercle de la Librairie resplendent in luxury have exploited political events, by looking to connect them to the causes of their distress.” While Warée admitted that this was a clever move, he argued that these publishers were responsible for their own difficulties. The connection between the lottery and the elite in publishing was also made by Victor Bouton, in his attack on the “big fish” of the Cercle de la Librairie. Elsewhere, Bouton accused “Sir Pagnerre and his consorts” in the Union des Éditeurs of forming “a monopoly to the detriment of a corps d’état.”33 Encouraged by Bouton, printers and booksellers throughout France campaigned against the Union des Éditeurs. In 1849, a group of bookdealers in the town of Le Mans sent a petition to the minister of the interior against the participation by publishers in the “lottery for artists.” According to Bouton, this petition was supported by bookdealers in other provincial towns, including Nantes, Metz, Tours, and Blois. A similar complaint was forwarded to the Chamber of Deputies by a group of bookdealers in Paris, including Barrois and Charpentier. This petition, which denounced the Union des Éditeurs as a “gaming monopoly” whose end was “enriching themselves by ruining others,” was signed by several members of the Cercle de la Librairie, who were

116

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

subsequently taken to task by the administrative council for violating the association’s “goal of maintaining between all the members sentiments of union and of fraternity.” As this example suggests, the debate over the lottery exacerbated the divisions in the book trade, between Paris and countryside as well as between big publishers and small bookdealers. During the controversy over the lottery, the bookdealers of Le Mans, for instance, attacked the trade journal the Journal de la librairie for failing to represent the interests of provincial as opposed to Parisian members of the book trade. In response, the publishers in the Union des Éditeurs implied that at least one of the Le Mans bookdealers had pirated their work on behalf of Belgian publishers. As the accusations between the two sides flew back and forth, Bouton wrote to the Journal to reiterate his “support [for] the lambs against the wolves, the right of the weak against the abuses of the strong.” Finally, after the publishers Bohain and Mirès, who had used lottery tickets to market remaindered books, were found guilty by a correctional court in Paris of violating the law, Bouton initiated his own lawsuit against the Union des Éditeurs.34 To counter the campaign against the lottery, the Union launched a campaign of its own against Bouton and his associates. First, in late 1849, it sued Bouton for libel. About the same time, the Union decided that all proceeds from sales of books with lottery tickets would be donated to the Cercle de la Librairie. In early 1850, following the verdict against Bohain and Mirès for distributing remaindered books with lottery tickets, the Union des Éditeurs wrote a letter to the prosecutor of the Republic to defend the legality and morality of the publishers’ actions. In response to this verdict, these publishers announced that they would cease offering lottery tickets as premiums. Reacting to the attacks by the booksellers of Le Mans, the Union des Éditeurs also published a letter to the editor of the official trade publication, the Journal de la librairie, in which they claimed that the lottery was not an “odious monopoly” but “only an application of the principle, common in the book trade, that the discount should increase in proportion to the size of purchase.” In their effort to defend themselves, the publishers in the Union des Éditeurs were supported by the Cercle de la Librairie, of which they themselves were prominent members. In the summer of 1850, the officers of the Cercle appointed a committee to determine whether these publishers had committed any wrongdoing. Not surprisingly, given that many of the officers of the Cercle de la Librairie were involved in the Union des Éditeurs, the committee found nothing wrong with the lottery. Of course, such support from

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

117

the Cercle de la Librairie only fueled criticism among printers and booksellers that this association represented a coterie in the book trade.35 Initially, the campaign against the lottery met with success. In the case brought by Bouton against the Union des Éditeurs (in which Charpentier, Barrois, and other bookdealers were called as witnesses), the eighth chamber of the court of correctional police for the department of the Seine ruled that the sale of books with tickets for a lottery was a crime, according to the law of 21 May 1836 as well as Article 410 of the Napoleonic Penal Code. For this crime, the publishers in the Union des Éditeurs were sentenced to fines of one hundred francs each, plus damages. According to a new electoral law passed shortly thereafter, they also lost their voting rights. The judgment against the Union des Éditeurs was upheld on appeal to the Cour d’Appel de Paris. However, on 9 August 1850, it was annulled by the highest court in France, the Cour de Cassation, and sent for retrial to the Cour d’Appel d’Orléans, which ruled in favor of the Union des Éditeurs. In its decision, the court argued that because the lottery had been authorized by the government and did not infringe on freedom of commerce, it was legal. In addition to losing his case against the Union, Bouton was found guilty of libel, in two separate cases, for his publications against these publishers. In April 1850, in a case initiated by the publisher Bixio, Bouton was sentenced to six months in prison, damages of four thousand francs (reduced to two thousand francs upon appeal), and fines of one thousand francs. In another libel case brought by the Union des Éditeurs later the same year, Bouton was sentenced to another six months in prison plus five hundred francs in fines. His printers, Beaulé and Meignan, who were presumed to have known that their client was “defamation incarnate,” as the prosecutor asserted, were also sentenced to pay fines and damages. Following these verdicts, publishers were allowed to continue offering premiums—including tickets to authorized lotteries—with their books. There is evidence from the early 1850s that both the minister of the interior and the prefect of police remained concerned about publishers who were marketing books with premiums, often without the proper licenses. But their concern never resulted in any systematic action against publishers offering premiums. On the issue of lotteries, the “big fish” of the Cercle de la Librairie had defeated their opponents.36

In the end, the corporatist rebel Bouton proved no match for the liberal entrepreneur Pagnerre and his cohort. Following the conclusion of their legal

118

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

battle over the lottery of 1848, Pagnerre and Bouton went their separate ways: Pagnerre into the heights of the business world, Bouton into the depths of the radical underground. At one end of the spectrum was Pagnerre, who remained a leader of the book trade. Resigning from the government upon the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as president of the republic in December 1848, he devoted the rest of his life to the publishing trade association that he had helped to found. In addition to retaining his position as director of the sous-comptoir in publishing, he held the office of president of the Cercle de la Librairie until his death at the age of forty-nine on 29 September 1854. At that point, his mantle as leader of the book trade was assumed by various other members of the “coterie” in publishing, including his partner in the administration of the sous-comptoir, Louis Hachette, who would become increasingly powerful in the trade in the late 1850s and early 1860s. At the other end of the spectrum was Bouton, who remained a denizen of Grub Street. When he could not pay the fines and damages associated with his libel case, he was imprisoned for debt in 1853. Remaining in prison for five years, he was apparently pressured into becoming a secret informer for the government of the Second Empire. Once out of prison, he struggled on the margins of the book trade and the art world, undertaking the production of various periodicals and collections related to heraldry. More and more embittered, he continued to rail against the establishment until his death several decades later. In a “Testament” published in 1870 to warn the new republican government to defend itself against reactionaries, Bouton wrote, “I will fall, one will kill me; but at least when I am no longer here, you will say to those who will strike me down that I remained a revolutionary, and that I conducted myself like an old member of the Convention [of 1793], repeating these words: Perish my memory, as long as my country is saved!”37 The divergent paths of Pagnerre and Bouton foreshadow the history of the book trade in the second half of the nineteenth century in France. Despite the attack on the “coterie” described in this chapter, publishers would remain better organized than printers and booksellers. With the help of their new trade association, the Cercle de la Librairie, they would increase the pressure on the state to deregulate the market for books. This association would prove instrumental, for example, in persuading the government to extend the term of literary property rights and to abolish the licensing requirement for printers and bookdealers several decades later.

Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre and the Publishing Coterie

119

However, the criticism of publishers as a coterie was not without effect. As the next chapter will show, such criticism pushed publishers to link their association to the “corporation” of the book trade as a whole. To defuse the attack on the Cercle de la Librairie, they adopted elements of the “corporate idiom” of more traditional printers and booksellers. Into their new businessmen’s association, they incorporated language and symbolism from the trade guild of the Old Regime. Combining this corporate idiom with the structures and practices of both a bourgeois leisure association and a modern professional syndicate, the leaders of the Cercle de la Librairie forged a new kind of trade organization, which proved highly effective at protecting the interests of its main constituency: publishers.

4 The Cercle de la Librairie

In the development of the conflict between corporatists and liberals in the book trade, a decisive factor was the foundation, in 1847, of the Cercle de la Librairie. One of the first publishing trade organizations anywhere, this association purported to represent all of the book occupations.1 Its official title was the Cercle de la librairie, de l’imprimerie, de la papeterie, de la fonderie, et de toutes les industries qui se rattachent à la publication des oeuvres de la littérature, des sciences, et des arts (or Circle of Publishing, of Printing, of PaperManufacturing, of Type-Founding, and of All the Industries Connected to the Publication of Works of Literature, Science, and Art). From the beginning, however, this association was organized by and for publishers. Most of its members were partisans of the liberal as opposed to the corporatist camp in the book trade. Under the influence of these publishers, the Cercle de la Librairie pursued the liberal agenda, including the abolition of licensing requirements and the extension of literary property rights. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it proved to be an effective promoter of the interests of publishers. Despite its importance to the history of the book in nineteenth-century France, however, the Cercle de la Librairie has not been studied in any depth. Aside from a few brief overviews and scattered references, this association has received little attention from book historians, in part because its records were unavailable to researchers until the mid-1990s, when they were acquired by the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (Institute for the Memory of Contemporary Publishing). Based on extensive research in the heretofore unexploited archives of the association, this chapter tells the story of the Cercle de la Librairie, from its establishment in 1847 until the end of the nineteenth century. Situating this organization within the broader context of

The Cercle de la Librairie

121

associational life in nineteenth-century France, I show how the Cercle de la Librairie negotiated the official restrictions on trade organizations to become a successful institution for publishers.2 When the Cercle de la Librairie was founded in 1847, association within a single trade was constrained by the political culture. Following the abolition of privilege during the Revolution, any kind of “intermediary body” between the individual and the state was viewed with suspicion. In 1791, organization by workers in the same trade was prohibited by the Le Chapelier Law. This constraint on association was reinforced by Article 291 of the Napoleonic Code in 1810, which outlawed any meeting of more than twenty people without official authorization, and by a law of April 1834, which prohibited the subdivision of associations into sections of fewer than twenty members to circumvent the Napoleonic Code. By the end of the nineteenth century, in contrast, the political culture was more accepting of the notion of collective representation within a trade. The first step toward the recognition of occupational associations was taken in 1868, when the Second Empire legalized meetings of chambres syndicales, or trade unions. Then, in 1884, the government of the Third Republic created a new juridical entity called the syndicat professionnel, or professional syndicate, which soon became widespread as a form of association among entrepreneurs as well as workers. Following this law, the number of such syndicates among employers alone grew from 101 to almost 1,400 in the next decade.3 Through this shifting political landscape, the Cercle de la Librairie was able to maneuver, thanks to a peculiar and fluid amalgamation of institutional forms. The Cercle succeeded by combining the structures, discourses, and practices of three different types of associations: a prerevolutionary trade corporation, a bourgeois leisure association called a “circle,” and a modern professional syndicate. Despite the fact that it represented liberal entrepreneurs, the Cercle de la Librairie reappropriated elements of what William H. Sewell Jr. has termed the “corporate idiom”: the language, symbolism, rituals, and activities of the old craft guilds.4 With this backward-looking idiom, however, it mixed the more modern discourses and practices of the bourgeois circle and the professional syndicate. Depending on the context, the Cercle might emphasize one of these idioms over the others. In the beginning, for example, the idiom of the old “corporation” helped the Cercle to defuse criticism from corporatist printers and bookdealers that it represented only the

122

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

elite of publishing, while the idiom of the circle helped it to avoid repression by the authorities, which were more tolerant of social organizations than of occupational ones. As the institution of the professional syndicate gained acceptance in the political culture, the models of the guild and the circle became less important to the Cercle. Through the end of the nineteenth century, however, the leaders of the Cercle continued to mix all three idioms. In this way, they forged a durable institution for publishers. This association survived across the Revolution of 1848, through the Second Empire, into the Third Republic, and beyond. Although it is no longer as influential as it was during its heyday at the turn of the nineteenth century, it still exists as a professional association today. The story of the Cercle de la Librairie challenges some common assumptions about association among businessmen in nineteenth-century France. First, it shows that the so-called corporate idiom was by no means limited to workers. This idiom was also appropriated by employers, including new entrepreneurs who had no connection to—or interest in—the old guilds. Second, the story of the Cercle illustrates that nineteenth-century French businessmen were not as individualistic and unsociable as the long-standing stereotype of them suggests. Despite the obstacles to association, they cooperated together to a significant extent. In fact, if the book trade is any indication, French entrepreneurs were more effective at organizing than their English and American counterparts. Moreover, the story of the Cercle demonstrates that not all employers’ organizations were protectionist. Such organizations were not necessarily motivated by fear of workers or support for tariffs. In the case of the Cercle, businessmen associated in support of free trade, at home and abroad. Such association among businessmen thus contributed to the establishment of a free market. It also contributed to the growth of a civil society. A distinctly bourgeois and masculine form of sociability, the Cercle de la Librairie educated its members in democratic practices while also integrating them into civic affairs—for example, through its connections with such commercial institutions as the Chamber of Commerce, the Tribunal de Commerce, and the Comptoir National d’Escompte. By illuminating the role of such business associations in civil society, the history of the Cercle de la Librairie reinforces the conclusions of recent scholarship that the development of associational life was instrumental in the emergence of representative government.5

The Cercle de la Librairie

123

The Foundation and Organization of the Cercle de la Librairie Paradoxically, the new association of liberal bourgeois publishers was initiated by a corporatist bookdealer named Hébrard. A commission agent and used bookseller, Hébrard specialized in the sale of stocks of books obtained at public auction. From July 1846 to June 1847, he also published a monthly trade advertiser called the Bulletin de la librairie, which was intended to provide bookdealers with an alternative to the official Bibliographie de la France for publicizing their wares. Like many traditional bookdealers, Hébrard was nostalgic for the Old Regime in the book trade. In the winter of 1847, he initiated a campaign to restore the old corporate order in this trade. The motives for this campaign were outlined in his pamphlet “On Publishing, Its Former Prosperity, Its Current State, Causes of Its Decadence, Means of Its Regeneration,” published in the spring of 1847. In this pamphlet, Hébrard argued that the book trade had degenerated since the French Revolution. Locating the “height of the splendor” of the book trade in the eighteenth century, he bemoaned the “ruin” of the trade since 1789. To remedy this “ruin,” he proposed a combination of state regulation and corporate reorganization. In particular, he advocated the creation of a new chambre syndicale, along the lines of the prerevolutionary book guild. In the conclusion to the pamphlet, he wrote, “Let us first rebuild on the foundation of the old edifice, men will come spontaneously, capable of reconstructing it and returning it to its former luster. . . . Under the benevolent protection of the government, a chambre syndicale will do the rest.” To discuss the creation of such an organization, Hébrard had already called a series of meetings of members of the book trade at his shop at 13, rue de Savoie.6 Responding to Hébrard’s call for a chambre syndicale, several major publishers in Paris began to organize a new association for the book trade. Toward the end of January 1847, seventeen members of the book trade held a preliminary meeting at Hébrard’s shop to discuss his proposal. In a subsequent meeting at Hébrard’s on 23 March, nineteen members of the trade voted to found a new “cercle de la librairie.” To draft the statutes of this association, they appointed a committee of five publishers: J.-B. Baillière, Jules Delalain, Charles Hingray, Mathias, and Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. On 1 April, the statutes proposed by this committee were approved by an assembly of seventy-one members of the book trade at the mairie of the 11th (now 6th) arrondissement in

124

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Paris. Electing the scientific publisher J.-B. Baillière as president of its “committee of organization,” this assembly decided that the new circle would be established as soon as it had one hundred members, of whom at least fifty must be “founders” who had purchased a share in the association. Immediately, sixty members of the book trade joined the association. Of these, half agreed to be founders. Over the next few weeks, a number of meetings were held to attract new members to the organization. By 22 April, the goal of over one hundred members, including fifty founders, had been attained. On 5 May, the association held its first general assembly, again at the mairie of the 11th arrondissement. Attended by sixty-seven members, this assembly signed the association’s act of incorporation and elected its first officers: Ambroise Firmin-Didot, president; J.-B. Baillière and Charles Hingray, vice presidents; Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, secretary; and Pierre-Augustin-Jacques-François Pillet (known as Pillet Senior), treasurer. By the end of May, a committee led by the secretary Pagnerre had found a meeting place for the group, at 5, rue des Petits-Augustins (now rue Bonaparte). On 6 August, the association was inaugurated with a party attended by some 150 people. Less than a year after the first meeting called by Hébrard to found a chambre syndicale for the book trade, the Cercle de la Librairie was constituted.7 The new Cercle de la Librairie, however, was not the kind of chambre syndicale that Hébrard had envisioned. A voluntary association rather than a statesponsored guild, it was a social club as much as a professional organization. For its organizers, the Cercle de la Librairie had two distinct, albeit overlapping, goals: to encourage relations between members of the book trade and to promote the trade’s interests. The Cercle was organized like a shareholding corporation. According to its statutes, it was funded by subscriptions from founding members who purchased shares in the association priced at two hundred francs each, in exchange for interest of 5 percent per year. The capital generated by these subscriptions was used to fund the facilities and amenities of the Cercle, which were open to members from 8 a.m. to midnight daily. Like other bourgeois associations, the Cercle de la Librairie embodied a tension between exclusion and equality. Membership in the Cercle was selective. It was restricted to practitioners of the book trade who had been sponsored by two members of the association and then approved by secret ballot in a general assembly. Membership was also limited by the association’s dues, which were initially set at one hundred francs, plus a facility fee of fifty francs (reduced to

The Cercle de la Librairie

125

twenty-five francs for “founders” who had purchased a share in the association), per year. Within its membership, however, the association was democratic. The Cercle was governed by a conseil d’administration, or administrative council, of fifteen members: one president, two vice presidents, one secretary, one treasurer, and ten counselors. These officers were elected by a majority vote of the general assembly of the association on an annual basis. Meetings were run according to parliamentary procedure.8 In contrast to the earlier attempt by publishers to found a cercle, the new Cercle de la Librairie was a durable and successful organization. Surviving the Revolution of 1848, the association grew in size and influence over the next several decades. By May 1848, it had 157 members. By 1868, this number had grown to 209, plus another 200 corresponding members in the provinces. By 1881, the Cercle had 317 regular members. In 1856, the association did face a serious crisis, when it discovered that its salaried manager had misappropriated its funds. As a result of this crisis, the association reconstituted itself, with a new group of founders and a new set of statutes. At the same time, the association moved its premises down the street, to 1, rue des PetitsAugustins (Bonaparte). In the late 1870s, the Cercle de la Librairie realized a long-time dream of obtaining a building of its own. Under the leadership of the chiefs of the Hachette publishing firm, Louis Bréton and Georges Hachette, a separate shareholding association was formed to raise money for the construction of such a building, on the corner of the new boulevard SaintGermain and the rue Grégoire-de-Tours. The total cost was 640,000 francs, which was divided into shares of one thousand francs. Designed by the renowned architect Charles Garnier, of Paris Opera fame, the new building for the Cercle de la Librairie was inaugurated in December 1879. It was expanded in 1895 and again in the twentieth century. It is still standing at 117, boulevard Saint-Germain today.9 Although its legal status remained somewhat questionable, the new Cercle de la Librairie was accepted by the authorities. In 1854, it received official authorization from the prefect of police in Paris. For years, the association tried but failed to obtain identification as an institution of “public utility,” a status that would have allowed it to own property. With the legalization of professional syndicates in 1884, however, the Cercle de la Librairie was recognized as a trade organization. After a slight modification of its statutes, it obtained the legal status of a “civil personality,” which enabled it to buy, sell, and inherit

126

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

property. But alongside this new function as a professional syndicate it retained its role as a social organization, at least until the early 1890s, when a new tax on leisure associations pushed it to abandon the amenities that classified it as such. Although the association maintained its title as a cercle, it transformed itself into an umbrella organization for a number of specialized syndicates in the book trade, including a Syndicat des Éditeurs (Syndicate of Publishers), a Syndicat des Libraires Détaillants (Syndicate of Retail Booksellers), and a Union des Maîtres Imprimeurs (Union of Master Printers). By 1899, the Cercle de la Librairie had approximately thirty such affiliates.10 As its official title suggests, the Cercle de la Librairie, de l’Imprimerie, de la Papeterie, et cetera, was supposed to embrace and represent members of all of the occupations involved in the book trade. From the beginning, however, it was controlled by publishers. With the exception of a few printers and bookdealers who were descendants of members of the old guild, most of the founders of the Cercle were new publishing entrepreneurs. The main corporatist behind the association, Hébrard, quickly disappeared from its ranks. Disgruntled that the chambre syndicale he had proposed had degenerated into “a place of dissipation, a reason for spending and gambling,” he was no longer a member of the Cercle in late 1848. Soon afterward, Hébrard apparently went bankrupt, then died of cholera. The new association’s leadership also consisted mainly of publishers. Although the first president, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, was a printer-publisher whose family had been in the book trade since the eighteenth century, he was soon succeeded by the republican publisher Pagnerre (the “big fish” who was denounced by the radical bookdealer Victor Bouton), who served in this office until his death in 1854. During the first half-century of its existence, the Cercle de la Librairie was presided over by some of the most prominent publishers in Paris, including the educational and trade publisher Louis Hachette and several of his associates and descendants (Louis Bréton, Georges Hachette, and Armand Templier), the scientific publisher Georges Masson, and the literary publisher Louis-Jules Hetzel. Likewise, the rank and file of the association were dominated by publishers. The requirements for membership alone restricted involvement in the Cercle de la Librairie to the most prominent members of the book trade, many of whom specialized in publishing. Of the original 119 members, sixtyeight were libraires-éditeurs, compared with eighteen printers and fourteen paper manufacturers. Publishers consistently constituted at least one-third of

The Cercle de la Librairie

127

the membership of the Cercle, while printers constituted less than 20 percent. In 1881, for instance, 119 out of 317 members were libraires, while only sixtyseven were some type of printer. In 1886, 35 percent of the members were libraires, while only 18 percent were imprimeurs; another 7 percent were hybrid libraires-imprimeurs. Of course, the category of “libraires” included booksellers as well as publishers. Although precise information on the occupational identity of the membership of the Cercle is difficult to obtain, however, it is clear that publishing was the prevailing specialization in the association, especially in its administration.11 In addition to being dominated by publishers, the Cercle was also centered in Paris. From the beginning, it did invite members of the book trade in the provinces to visit the Cercle whenever they came to Paris. However, the association never effectively involved provincials in its activities. Although it claimed that “it was not in the exclusive interest of the bookdealers, printers, paper-manufacturers, and type-founders, etc., of Paris that our Cercle was founded, [but] in the general interest of all the industries that are included there,” the Cercle de la Librairie really represented the publishing business in the capital.12 Because it was dominated by elite Parisian publishers, the Cercle de la Librairie came under criticism from other members of the book trade. No sooner had it been established than the association was opposed by traditional printers and booksellers. One of the first critics of the Cercle was the bookdealer Théophile Barrois, whose family had been in the book trade for centuries. In a series of pamphlets written in response to the efforts by Hébrard to reorganize the book trade, Barrois maintained that a circle was the wrong approach to take to improve the trade, because it would inevitably be limited to an elite of rentiers, or pensioners, who were the only people who could afford the money and leisure required to participate in this type of association. Attacking the “luxury” of such a circle, he instead proposed the establishment of a “lloyd,” a sort of commercial exchange, where businessmen could trade information about their correspondents and goods. This “lloyd,” which would be open exclusively to bookdealers, not printers, would require dues of only five francs per month. Despite Barrois’ opposition, the Cercle was established. However, his criticism of the Cercle de la Librairie was echoed by numerous other printers and bookdealers, especially in the provinces, over the years.13

128

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

The Corporate Idiom of a Guild To counter such criticism, the Cercle de la Librairie relied heavily on the idiom of the “corporation” of the book trade. Ironically, one of the main inspirations for the new bourgeois circle was the corporate idiom of the prerevolutionary book guild. Although the new association was composed largely of entrepreneurs in publishing who had no connection to the old guild, it made extensive use of the forms and practices of the corporation of the book trade. The organizers of the Cercle did not—and could not, given the political context— resurrect whole cloth the chambre syndicale of the Old Regime, as the corporatist founder Hébrard had hoped. Nonetheless, they incorporated into their new association numerous elements of the old corporation, including language, symbolism, historiography, rituals, and activities. Although the new association was by no means a reincarnation of the guild, it represented “an honorable tradition of the former corporation of printing and bookdealing and of the paternal administration of its guild,” as the industrialist printer Paul Dupont wrote in a history of printing published in 1854. The corporate idiom enabled the Cercle de la Librairie to invent a tradition for itself, as a descendant of the Paris Book Guild.14 The corporate idiom of the Cercle de la Librairie is most obvious in the rhetoric used by its leaders. Much like workers in mid-nineteenth-century France, the entrepreneurs in the Cercle reappropriated the language of the prerevolutionary craft guilds in their effort to forge a new kind of association for themselves. In meetings, assemblies, publications, and events, they employed such words as “family,” “corps,” “solidarity,” “loyalty,” “brotherhood,” and “fraternity” to characterize their organization. Such language was especially pervasive in the speeches given by the leaders of the Cercle before general assemblies and on special occasions. For instance, it was used by the first president Ambroise Firmin-Didot in a report to the membership in June 1849, in which he urged the members of the Cercle to “tighten more and more those ties of brotherhood [confraternité] that unite us, in order to obtain by mutual assistance results which isolated efforts could not attain.” To take another example, a similar report in January 1853 by the second president, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, used a number of corporate terms to advocate the utility of cooperation: “And if new perils necessitated new efforts,” he admonished, “it is again to the ties that bind together our diverse industries, to the

The Cercle de la Librairie

129

habits of brotherhood [confraternité] that bring us incessantly together, to the sentiments of union that animate us, finally, to the institution that tightens these ties, creates these habits and fortifies this union, on which it would be necessary to call, certain to find in this bundle [faisceau] of all our forces the spontaneous, active, and persevering initiative which, alone, could yet save us.” In this speech, a particularly noteworthy term is faisceau. Derived from the Latin word fasces, the word literally connoted a bundle of sticks but also symbolized the power of cooperation. Although this term was rare in the discourse of the leadership of the Cercle, it suggests the strength of corporatism in the association.15 A more common word in the records of the Cercle was corporation. Like workers, the entrepreneurs in the Cercle used this word (which, as Sewell emphasizes, came into usage during and after the Revolution) to mean both the trade as a whole and the guild—or other institution—that represented it. For example, they referred to the Cercle as the “corporation” of the book trade, to deflect criticism that the association was elitist. In another imitation of the language of the old guild, the members of the Cercle called each other confrères, or brothers, as in this address by Pagnerre in November 1851: “This year as in the preceding ones, we are happy, dear Confrères, to note the relations of benevolence, friendship, and fraternity, which have been established between the members of our Society.” On occasion, the members of the Cercle even called their president a syndic, the title of the chief officer of the old guild.16 The symbolism of the Cercle de la Librairie was also reminiscent of that of the prerevolutionary book corporation. In fact, the founders of the Cercle took as their emblem a medal created by the Paris Book Guild on the occasion of the royal decree on the book trade in 1723: on one side of the medal was the coat of arms of both the city and the University of Paris; on the other side was a sun and a book, accompanied by the words Ex Utroque Lux (“Out of This, Light”). These words became the motto of the Cercle. The iconography of the medal of 1723 was used over and over, in mementoes and monuments for the Cercle. For example, it appeared on jetons, or tokens, given to its officers and honorees; on the title pages of its publications; and on the programs for its special events. It was also incorporated into a frieze above the door of the hôtel that was designed by Garnier for the Cercle de la Librairie on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The hôtel incorporated other references to the

130

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

Figure 4.1. Emblem of the Cercle de la Librairie (1847), inspired by the medal of the Paris Book Guild issued in 1723 on the occasion of the promulgation of the royal regulation on bookselling and printing. Fonds Cercle de la Librairie, Archives IMEC.

prerevolutionary book corporation, too. Around the outside of the edifice were carved the names of the masters of the early printing trade, including Didot, Gutenberg, Manuce, Elzevier, and Estienne. Inside the building, over the mantle of the fireplace in the billiard room was a painting of the “tree of science,” with the arms of the former guilds of bookdealers and public writers of Paris suspended from its branches. Around this same room, a frieze displayed the monograms of the first printers and booksellers of Paris. With such imagery, the Cercle de la Librairie positioned itself as a descendant of the old Paris Book Guild.17 (See Figures 4.1–4.5.) The Cercle also continued the tradition of the old guild by commemorating and researching its history. For example, it elected as its first president a member of the Didot family of printers, which had been prominent in the Paris Book Guild before the Revolution, in “memory of the services rendered by [his] ancestors to the diverse branches of the typographical art.” In 1885, as the descendant of the old guild the Cercle de la Librairie participated in the groundbreaking ceremony for an addition to the Sorbonne, whose history was intertwined with that of the corporation. For its library, the Cercle collected

ANNUA IRE DE LA. LIBRAIBJE, DE L'IMPRIMElUE DE LA PAPETERIE DU COM.IIERC& D& LA MUS!QOl~ ET DES ESTAMPES

•

RT D t: S PROifES SION$ QU I CO NCOURBNT

A J.A I' Uli i. JC A TION

DES f$ U ,'llt:S .Q£ J. A

I.JTThATU IU

DES sca:sC£ $ !.T DES AltTS

A nnee 1. 875

PARIS CRRCLE DE L.\

IJIIRAIRI ~,

DE L'UlPIU!IBRIH , DE LA

I'~PHlERI &

DU COMliEROE DE LA llUS!QUP. P.T DRS ESTAM PBS

Juillct. 1.875

Figure 4.2. Title page of the book trade directory, Annuaire de la librairie, published by the Cercle de la Librairie in 1875, with emblem of the Cercle. Fonds Cercle de la Librairie, Archives IMEC.

Figure 4.3. Souvenir from a banquet sponsored by the Cercle de la Librairie, 23 April 1894, with the emblem of the Cercle. Fonds Cercle de la Librairie, Archives IMEC.

The Cercle de la Librairie

133

Figure 4.4. Photograph of the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie, 117, boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris. Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

records and memorabilia from the prerevolutionary book corporation, including medals and trademarks. In its trade journal, it reproduced documents related to the history of the book trade, such as a charter between the stationers and the University of Paris dating from 1275. It also published numerous historiographical articles and pamphlets on such topics as the trademarks

Figure 4.5. Detail of the façade of the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie, by Charles Garnier, from the Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics (4th series, vol. 7, 1880). Département des estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Cercle de la Librairie

135

used by early modern printers and bookdealers, the locales occupied by the Paris Book Guild, and the origins of the Bibliographie de la France. Many of these publications were authored by Paul Delalain, a fourth-generation printerpublisher who acted as unofficial historian for the Cercle de la Librairie from the 1870s until the 1910s. Among his most important historical publications was a directory of printers and bookdealers during the French Revolution (from 1789 to 1811), which traced the membership of the trade between the publication of the famous catalog by Augustin-Martin Lottin in 1788 and the official directory commissioned by Napoleon in 1813.18 In addition to reviving the language, symbolism, and history of the Paris Book Guild, the Cercle de la Librairie assumed some of the functions of the old guild, including credit and training. For instance, it revived the corporate practice of facilitating loans to members of the book trade: following the Revolution of 1848, it sponsored the sous-comptoir d’escompte, or branch discount bank, in publishing. In keeping with the tradition of the old guild, the Cercle also provided information and education to members of the book trade. For instance, it published semiregular trade directories, which were modeled on those “published each year, before 1789, by the old community of printers and booksellers of Paris, whose chambre syndicale was located on the rue du Foin Saint-Jacques [in the neighborhood of the University].” Although it did not resurrect the apprenticeship system in the book trade, the Cercle did assume some of the educational function of the old guild by sponsoring lectures on topics of interest to members of the trade, by granting scholarships to vocational schools to the sons of workers in the trade, and (in the early twentieth century) by organizing courses on bookselling and publishing for employees in the trade. Of course, such activities were now voluntary and informal, rather than obligatory and official as they had been under the guild. Moreover, they were organized on behalf not of traditional artisans and merchants but of liberal entrepreneurs in publishing. The lectures, for example, often promoted liberal policies in the book trade. Nonetheless, many of the activities of the Cercle were inspired by the corporate practices of the Old Regime.19 The revival of corporate practices in the Cercle de la Librairie was most apparent in its charitable activities. Like the Paris Book Guild before it, the Cercle provided both paternalist and mutual aid for members of the book trade and their families. For example, it routinely offered secours, or financial

136

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

assistance, to people affiliated with the trade who were in need, especially retirees and widows. Soon after it was founded, the Cercle established a special caisse, or fund, for such assistance. To maintain this fund, it persistently requested donations and occasionally organized fund-raisers. In addition, the Cercle helped to create separate mutual aid and retirement funds for workers and employees in the book trade. Finally, it administered nonmonetary assistance to families in the trade. For instance, during the Franco-Prussian War, it distributed foodstuffs donated by British publishers to workers in the trade; beginning in the 1880s, it placed elderly employees and widows in a retirement home established by the will of the publisher Galignani; and in the early twentieth century, it administered an orphanage for the book industries. With these various charitable activities, the Cercle de la Librairie continued the guild’s tradition of providing for the “family” of the book trade.20 Like the guild before it, the Cercle de la Librairie constituted a “moral community.” Following the tradition of the guild, this community observed the annual holiday of the old patron saint of the book trade, Saint-Jean-PorteLatine, on 6 May, with banquets and alms. In a spirit of solidarity, the membership of the Cercle also rejoiced and mourned together through all of the major events of their lives. When a member married off a child (often to an offspring of another businessman in the book trade), for example, he usually invited his “brothers” in the Cercle to the wedding, and he sometimes made a charitable donation to the association’s aid fund. The association also celebrated the careers of “elder” members and loyal employees. In 1868, for instance, it participated in a “family party” for one of its founders, J.-B. Baillière, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his publishing firm. The previous year, a similar “family party” was held in honor of a bookstore clerk named Pierre Roussel, on the occasion of his retirement after forty-one years of service to the Aillaud firm.21 In solidifying the moral community of the book trade, the Cercle de la Librairie played an even more important role at the time of death. Although the new association did not usually pay for the funeral of a member, as the old guild had done, it still exhibited the “seemingly obsessive concern with funerals” that was characteristic of the corporate idiom, according to Sewell. The Cercle commemorated its deceased members with eulogies, obituaries, mementoes, and statues. It also sent formal condolences to the deceased’s families

The Cercle de la Librairie

137

and dispatched collective delegations to their funeral services and processions. In 1864, for example, most of the members of the Cercle attended the funeral of its president, Louis Hachette, at which one of the eulogies was given by the prôte, or chief, of the printing shop of Lahure (who had printed most of the books published by Hachette), in the name of “all those who contribute to the manufacture of the book.” At the funeral for another leader of the association, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, in 1876, the cortège was followed by the administrative council of the Cercle (as well as of the Chambre des Imprimeurs, to which Firmin-Didot had also belonged), and a eulogy was given by the current president of the Cercle, Jules Basset. Such rituals were intended not only to honor the dead but to reunite the living, as the speeches delivered on these occasions reveal. Take, for example, the eulogy for the publisher Charles Furne (who had produced Balzac’s Comédie humaine in the 1840s), delivered at his funeral in 1859 by the printer Jules Claye on behalf of the Cercle, which began, “All of us, Messieurs, whom this tomb brings together, all of us who represent a family, friends, confrères, let us associate our regrets and our tears.” In emphasizing the familial and fraternal nature of the funeral, Claye (like other members of the Cercle on other such occasions) echoed the corporate idiom not just of the prerevolutionary guilds but of contemporary workers’ associations, which likewise used death as an occasion to increase their sense of moral solidarity.22 Long after Hébrard’s nostalgia for the Paris Book Guild inspired the foundation of the Cercle de la Librairie, the corporate idiom persisted in this new association. Although it was dominated by a new brand of éditeur who was by no means nostalgic for the order of the Old Regime, the Cercle nonetheless borrowed elements of the prerevolutionary book guild in an effort to legitimate itself. Countering criticism that it represented a “coterie” in publishing, the Cercle employed language such as “corporation,” “family,” and “fraternity” to demonstrate that it embraced the entire book trade. To solidify this “corporation,” it adopted some of the functions of the old guild, including arbitration, almsgiving, and funeral rituals. As a means of inventing a tradition for itself, the Cercle also revived the symbolism and history of the prerevolutionary book trade. In the context of postrevolutionary France, the corporate idiom of the Cercle may seem antiquated or quaint. But it played a crucial role in forging what was ultimately a very modern trade association.

138

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

The Bourgeois Idiom of a Cercle As its very name indicates, though, the Cercle de la Librairie was never a replica of the old corporation in the book trade. However much they employed the corporate idiom in their new association, the new éditeurs in the Cercle realized that it was not possible—let alone desirable—to resurrect the old book guild in mid-nineteenth-century France. With the exception of Hébrard, the founders of the Cercle de la Librairie harbored no regrets about the demise of the guild since the Revolution. Recognizing that the form of the guild was no longer feasible in the postrevolutionary context, they adopted another, more liberal, mode of organization in their effort to forge a community in the book trade: the voluntary association. This mode of organization was more compatible with the political culture of individualism—and hence more palatable to the state. Under both the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, the idiom of the voluntary association enabled publishers to fraternize and cooperate with each other, despite severe restrictions on trade organizations.23 In publishing, the new voluntary association took the form of a cercle, or circle. Imported during the Restoration from England (where it was often called a “club,” a term that was anathema to the French as a result of the Revolution), the cercle was a leisure association. According to the preeminent historian of associational life in nineteenth-century France, Maurice Agulhon, the cercle was the “typical form of bourgeois sociability.” It was defined as an “association of men organized to practice together a disinterested (non-lucrative) activity or even to enjoy together non-activity or leisure.” Originally, the term derived from court life, where groups gathered around the sovereign for conversation and gaming. By extension, it referred to the kind of socializing that occurred among acquaintances in salons and cafés. Gradually, the word came to designate a formal organization devoted to leisure. Like an English gentlemen’s club, the cercle offered amenities, such as refreshments, games, and newspapers and magazines. The cost of these amenities was shared equally by all of the members through a subscription. In France, this form of association first became popular in the provinces, where salons and cafés were scarcer than in Paris. Following the Revolution of 1830, however, it spread to the capital, where such fashionable cercles as the Jockey Club and the Cercle Agricole were founded. By the 1840s, the cercle was a very popular form of organization. In

The Cercle de la Librairie

139

1843, there were some two thousand cercles throughout the country. By the late nineteenth century, when the cercle began to be supplanted by other, more specialized, types of associations, there were almost five thousand cercles in France, leading Gustave Flaubert to note in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, “One [meaning the bourgeois] must always belong to a cercle.” In Paris, there were still only twenty-one cercles in 1860. By 1865, however, there were thirtythree. In the capital, this form of association reached its height of popularity in 1885, when seventy-three cercles were counted. Although most of these cercles were consecrated exclusively to recreation, others assumed multiple functions, including mobilization for political or professional causes. In the early 1830s, for example, a Cercle Général de Commerce was founded among merchants in the clothing trade, and in the mid-1840s, a Cercle de l’Industrie was established for heads of industry. Like these other cercles of businessmen, the Cercle de la Librairie was a hybrid social-professional organization.24 Given its multivalent form, the cercle proved to be a useful instrument of organization for the book trade. To combat competitive individualism in this trade, the Cercle de la Librairie relied heavily on the circle’s function as a leisure association, especially in its early years. Designed as a “place of relaxation for some, occasion to conduct business for others,” it aimed to counter “isolation” and encourage “cooperation” among businessmen in publishing. According to the statutes of the Cercle, one of its primary goals was to “establish habitual and daily relations between those who compose it.” With this goal in mind, the Cercle sponsored a number of amenities and activities to encourage members to spend their leisure time together, including refreshments, reading materials, games, lectures, musical and dramatic performances, banquets, and balls.25 One of the main functions of the association was to maintain a space where members could fraternize. Within a few months of its foundation, the association rented an apartment at 5, rue des Petits-Augustins, with room for leisure activities as well as business meetings. In 1856, it moved to another, more commodious, apartment down the street at 1, rue des Petits-Augustins. The importance of socialization to the association is seen in the repeated efforts by its leaders, beginning with Louis Hachette in the early 1860s, to undertake the construction of a building for the Cercle.26 In 1879, this goal was finally realized when the association moved into the new hôtel designed by Charles Garnier on the recently constructed boulevard Saint-Germain. This building was a

140

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

physical embodiment of the bourgeois idiom of the cercle, or leisure association. A monumental structure, it contained a reading room, a game room, and a ballroom, as well as a number of meeting rooms. All of these rooms were furnished in comfortable, if not luxurious, style. (For a photograph of the general assembly hall in the Hôtel du Cercle, see Figure 4.6.) A portrait of everyday life at the Cercle de la Librairie may be glimpsed between the lines of the “internal regulations” of the association. According to a version of these regulations issued in 1856, the premises were open from morning until midnight. Upon entering, members were required to leave their coats, canes, and umbrellas in the antechamber and, on days when the general assembly was meeting, sign a register and wait to be announced by one of the servants kept by the association. Inside the Cercle, no hats or dogs were allowed, and smoking was permitted only in the entryway or the game room. In the library, members were to remain silent and leave books and periodicals in the room. Members were technically—though certainly not practically—forbidden from discussing politics or religion and from organizing plots or coalitions. No nonmember was allowed on the premises of the Cercle, unless he was a visitor to Paris who had obtained temporary permission from the administrative council to frequent the association during his stay. No subscription could be collected and no placard could be posted without the prior authorization of the administrative council. No gift or tip was to be given to the servants of the Cercle. These regulations suggest that the Cercle was a rather staid gentlemen’s club.27 To encourage members to frequent this club, the association provided refreshments, reading materials, and games. Every evening, members were offered drinks, such as coffee, cognac, rum, Bavarian beer, and (in winter) tea, initially for free and then for a small charge. On Wednesdays, they could have dinner if they requested it in advance. Day or night, they could use the library of books and periodicals acquired by the Cercle through subscription or donation, which was organized and cataloged by the founder J.-B. Baillière. In the evening, they could also play (for a fee) “games of skill,” such as cards, chess, checkers, dominoes, or billiards. Although “games of chance” were strictly forbidden in accordance with the law, the Cercle did sponsor “pools of honor,” in which prizes were awarded to the winners of a game or lottery, to raise money for the association. Of the various activities organized by the Cercle de la Librairie, the most popular seems to have been billiards. The minutes of the

Figure 4.6. Photograph of the assembly hall at the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie. Fonds Cercle de la Librairie, Archives IMEC.

142

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

administrative council suggest that the association was obsessed with this game. One of the main concerns of the officers was to ensure that the association had the necessary space and equipment for billiards. In December 1849, the officers even authorized a visit by an expert pool player to give the members tips about the game. Billiards remained an attraction of the association from its beginning through the 1890s, when the taxes on leisure associations pushed it to get rid of its pool tables. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the self-appointed historian of the Cercle, Paul Delalain, fondly remembered the billiard games that occurred after meetings of the general assembly or, more regularly, on Friday evenings, for “pools” funded by the association’s entry fees. In particular, he recalled a competitive match with the head of the Hachette publishing firm, Louis Bréton. For his victory in this match, Delalain was awarded a copper-embossed wooden cigar box.28 Such attractions were not always enough to draw visitors to the Cercle on a regular basis. In an addendum to the history of the association published in 1881, Baillière remarked, “It is rare that the Cercle receives visitors during the day; from time to time, in the evening, a few whist players, and on Fridays, several billiard players.” By way of explanation for their lack of participation in the association, members of the Cercle often complained that their business left them little time for leisure. As Alfred Firmin-Didot, the son of the association’s first president, wrote in a letter to Baillière in 1882, “I am the first to deplore, like you, that the Cercle de la Librairie is not a more frequented meeting place. But I believe that it suffers the same fate as all the other cercles of a single industry or a single profession. We are so busy, in effect, with our business during the day, that evenings are generally consecrated to family or to social duties. Hardly only bachelors may therefore take advantage of the cercle.” In addition, participation in the Cercle was hindered by the numerous political crises of the nineteenth century. For instance, the June Days of 1848 disrupted the association to such an extent that its officers issued a plea to all members “to resume the habitual course of their former distractions and to return, with more assiduity than ever, to the meetings of each evening that have begun to establish between us sentiments of confraternity, which it is important to maintain, which it is important even to increase.” Following this plea, attendance did increase. By September 1849, the publishing trade journal noted that despite the fact that it was vacation season, “the soirées of the Cercle have been rather regularly attended for some time.” Even in periods of

The Cercle de la Librairie

143

relative calm, however, attendance at the Cercle tended to be sporadic and light. In the early 1850s, for example, it averaged around a dozen members (about 10 percent of the total) per day. Looking back on the 1860s and 1870s, when he was a new member of the Cercle, Paul Delalain remembered that the regular gatherings on Friday nights “attracted only a small number of members, from 10 to at most 25; but they had also the charm of intimacy.” In 1898, some 252 meetings were held on the premises of the Cercle, by some four thousand visitors, but most of these were for professional rather than social purposes.29 To increase attendance at the Cercle, the leadership would from time to time organize special events, such as lectures or soirées. These special events proved very effective at promoting relations between members of the Cercle. From the outset, the association organized a wide variety of leisure activities, including lectures, musical and dramatic performances, magic shows, exhibitions, charity auctions, banquets, and balls. On a semiregular basis, the association threw soirées, many of which ended with lotteries or billiards, for various prizes offered by the administration. In February 1859, for instance, the Cercle hosted a “celebration of fraternity,” which concluded with a tombola, or drawing. According to a report in the trade journal, this drawing excited the “most uninhibited hilarity.” In addition to such parties, the association organized occasional banquets in honor of members who had received recognition at the international expositions, who had been nominated to the Legion of Honor, or who had served the Cercle in some noteworthy way. Banquets were also held to celebrate important occasions for the association, such as anniversaries. In 1860, for instance, over a hundred members attended a dinner in honor of the thirteenth anniversary of the Cercle. (Figure 4.3 shows an invitation to one of these banquets.) More regularly, the Cercle offered guest lectures, musical concerts, theater performances, and exhibitions of book and graphic arts. Such events, which increased in frequency following the construction of the new hôtel in the late 1870s, drew large numbers of members and guests to the Cercle. The annual ball in the winter of 1850, for example, was attended by five to six hundred notables of Paris, including not just members of the book trade but also writers, lawyers, artists, journalists, members of the Institute of France, representatives of the legislative assembly, members of the municipal council, governors of the Bank of France, officers of the Comptoir National d’Escompte, and officials of the 11th arrondissement

144

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

(according to the pre-1860 division of the city), where the Cercle was located. A more spontaneous party in the winter of 1870, attended by most of the notable members of the book trade, was reported by the trade journal to have been both “very numerous and very brilliant.” A public exposition of the works of the popular illustrator Gustave Doré in 1885 drew hordes of visitors to the Cercle. Such activities were deemed a success by the leadership of the Cercle. At the dinner to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of the association in 1860, for example, the president at the time, Jules Delalain, credited the sociability of the cercle with improving relations in the book trade: The creation of our Cercle, which today enters into its fourteenth year, has been the primary cause of our good relationships and our frank friendships. Before the foundation of the Cercle, though our work aimed in the same direction and though our intellects were tuned toward the same goal, we lived in isolation, we knew each other only by name and we met each other only in an unproductive spirit of competition. The more intimate relations that have been established between us have fortunately modified this situation, and have caused us to embrace our business in a manner more broad and less personal. As this quotation suggests, the Cercle de la Librairie relied heavily on the “intimate relations” of a leisure association to promote cooperation in the book trade.30 The idiom of voluntary association remained important to the Cercle, until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the difficulty of attracting visitors on a regular basis, the association maintained its identity as a social club. On at least one occasion, it was almost transformed into a purely professional organization. In the midst of the crisis in 1856, when the association’s funds were embezzled by its manager, its leadership considered changing the Cercle into a simple “syndicate,” which would meet only on certain days, to defend the interests of the book trade. This proposal, which was introduced by the publisher Louis Bréton of the Hachette firm, was opposed, however, on the grounds that the Cercle in its current form served a valuable function. As the council member Eugène Roulhac said in defense of the current form of the Cercle, “Outside of the inarguable services rendered to the [book] industries by the diverse commissions named in its breast in days of

The Cercle de la Librairie

145

great crisis, the Cercle incessantly produces a great good, by uniting confrères who appreciate each other better, by extinguishing hostile rivalries, by maintaining equity in relations. There is reason to believe that the creation of a syndicate of the book trade, by distancing the frequent relations between former members of the Cercle, would dissolve the bundle [faisceau] of our associations.” Instead of transforming the Cercle into a syndicate, the administrative council decided to reconstitute the association in its same form, with new founders and new statutes, on 25 April 1856. In the succeeding decades, the Cercle went to great pains to maintain its status as a social club. Although this status made it subject to a tax on leisure associations, it fought to keep its salons and (until 1895) its billiards, which it deemed a “pleasant resource.” Not until the end of the nineteenth century would it relinquish its role as a social organization. Once the association was designated a professional syndicate, in accordance with the law of 1884, it gradually abandoned most of the accoutrements of a leisure association, until it remained a “circle” in name only. Through the end of the nineteenth century, however, the bourgeois idiom of a cercle remained integral to the Cercle de la Librairie.31

The Professional Idiom of a Syndicate Just as it was not a true “corporation,” however, the Cercle de la Librairie was never a typical cercle. In fact, the Cercle de la Librairie often behaved less like a social club than like a trade syndicate—of bourgeois entrepreneurs rather than of proletarian workers. From the beginning, the Cercle de la Librairie sought to defend the interests of the book trade, vis-à-vis the rest of the business community, the public, and especially the state. In addition to facilitating “relations” among members of the trade, the association’s primary goal was “to constitute a real, complete representation of all of the occupations that contribute directly or indirectly to the publication and the propagation of works of literature, science, and the arts.”32 In the beginning, the Cercle subordinated its role as a trade representative to its function as a social cercle for political reasons. Over time, however, this role was tolerated—and even encouraged—by the state. Under first the Second Republic and then the Second Empire, the association came to be considered a legitimate agent of the book trade. By the time the Third Republic legalized the professional syndicate in

146

l o s t i l lu s i o n s

1884, the Cercle de la Librairie had long been recognized as the official organization of the publishing business in France.33 In its role as a professional syndicate, the Cercle undertook a number of initiatives on behalf of the book trade, from organizing trade exhibits to producing professional periodicals and business directories, from arbitrating legal disputes to advising the government on international commercial treaties, from participating in conferences on literary property law to campaigning against stamp and paper taxes. To oversee these initiatives, the association established a number of regular committees, including a committee for the trade journal and a committee on literary property. On occasion, it also appointed special committees, for instance, to organize its library or to investigate conflicts between individual members of the trade. The Cercle also delegated members to represent the book trade in a number of municipal and national institutions, including the Chamber of Commerce and Tribunal de Commerce. With the help of the connections that it formed with political leaders in these institutions, the association was able to influence government policy on publishing. One of the main services performed by the Cercle was to disseminate information about the trade. From the beginning, the association used the official trade publication, the Bibliographie de la France, as well as its advertising supplement, the Feuilleton, to publicize products, sales, deaths, positions, and events of interest to people in publishing. In October 1856, it acquired the Bibliographie from the printer Pierre-Augustin-Jacques-François Pillet (Senior), who had been publishing it since it was founded by Napoleon in 1811. Under the auspices of the Cercle, the publication was expanded to include another supplement, the Chronique, to report on meetings, laws, and debates relevant to the book trade. (For the cover of the first issue of the Chronique, see Figure 4.7.) Beginning in 1858, the Cercle published special editions of these publications (which were collectively referred to as the Journal de la librairie et de l’imprimerie) to advertise the lists of new books published for la rentrée (i.e., the back-to-school season) in September and les étrennes (i.e., the New Year’s holiday) in January. With a circulation of between one and two thousand (or more, for the special advertising editions), the Journal de la librairie et de l’imprimerie constituted the single biggest source of revenue for the Cercle. In addition to the trade journal, the Cercle published business directories, exhibition catalogs, and historical works relevant to the book trade. It also compiled and disseminated information about domestic and foreign

II' ~r J.-.

T O IUt"

• J. ..... ....

~· I •

J,

l ?i51.

CHRO NIQ UE DE l ' IMPI\IMERIE ET DE LA LIB II \T ill E. S,Otam a lr('. - t.tl11*-•btt• 41 connil 4"edn•illii'"''IOI lin C«tl116e lllll!rwh1c dt t'in1priaencl ftlllt (enf•~m. - Slt..atJo• 4u droi t llllltn•ational •lei• prorriht llltfn.lre" •ttbtll\u.:.-Nlmfogfe: M. 4o S•hudJ'•

t'

jamaia ~ J e rJporuii'CI • tn l,tn,~ qui a pr6&id6 ft. sa t~311 0n ~ mnl• n.vtlc o tC!1nps de nou-

''t'nux besofns 110 JOnt m11nlfc-Jt~• ', t t ~lCUI~tra lc journal fie d()llt'lillh·II Jllnl all:t tJUelilionsd'ilr l tr~t jt~ 11~ral uno J>lnce n«t:t. ~tendne. La llhrn!rle tl lt'alndumics qui s'y rnu11d1tnt

n.ppelllltnt done de IC!IIf'l \'. Jl"UrYOif Cft e~an~ uoc publica linn •t~ci.tlt, lon.ro< lJ. reln.ite de M. Pille' ptrc a mb a l.a •h,potitioo d• Ctt-~ le };JtJnftll W f4 I.A ....~~. (.tii.C t"i.«oGSta!Ke t$l d'..ta•l ptus epptrloat q•e de aoo..esu cit· ' " " ~1ltD~ pour IIIMd lie && •m.ioo que fiOirt: u«