The circulation of such journals was Europe-wide; and demand for them grew enormously in the news-laden 1770s, with major political upheavals to report from Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, not to mention France itself and—greatest of all—the American struggle for independence. From a few hundred in the 1750s, the Gazette de Leyde was producing around 4,200 copies by 1785. Over half of these were sold outside France; but inevitably by far the biggest single market for French-language journalism was within the kingdom itself. There, local papers also made their appearance. Paris had a weekly news and advertising sheet from early in the century. Lyons had one from 1748, and by the 1780s no self-respecting provincial centre was without one. The Journal de Paris came out daily from 1777. Ten years later, perhaps 70,000 copies of newspapers were being regularly sold, reaching a readership of around half a million.
These developments were paralleled by book production, in so far as fragmentary evidence allows us to reconstruct it. Expanding steadily down to the 1770s, it leaped dramatically after that and went on at an accelerated rate down to the Revolution—though with some spectacular vicissitudes as censorship policies fluctuated. Technically all books, and journals too, could only be published if passed—or awarded the ‘privilege’ of being printed, as it was technically known—by a board of censors headed by an official known as the Director of the Book Trade (Librairie). To win such a privilege they had to contain nothing contrary to religion, government, and morals. The very number of censors, rising from 41 in the 1720s to 178 in 1789, reflects the expanding volume of their work. But, in practice, very few books were banned. Most of those which the censors felt unable to invest with the positive approval signified by a privilege were nevertheless granted ‘tacit permission’ to publish; and even more dubious ones could appear ‘on simple tolerance’, with the mere assurance that the police would not act against them. Nothing short of a full privilege, however, could indemnify a book from independent persecution by either the Sorbonne or a parlement; and the government normally stood aside when a sovereign court condemned a book to be publicly torn up and burned for the subversiveness of its contents. Everybody except (seemingly) the magistrates realized that there was no better way to give a book free publicity. But like journals, an important proportion of the books sold in France came from abroad—from Holland, from Avignon, from Geneva, or from Neuchâtel, another Prussian enclave whose main export appears to have been books in French. Most of these imports were unauthorized, and came in by tortuous routes to avoid the vigilance of customs men. Even authorized imports were sometimes cut to a trickle, as in the early 1770s, by punitive increases in import duties; and in 1783 the whole book trade was plunged into chaos when it was decreed that all imports would have to be inspected by the booksellers’ guild in Paris before delivery to any destination within France. The aim was to weed out pornography, sedition, and pirated editions, but the effect was to make transport costs prohibitive for all books, even in the booming market that had now established itself.
Who bought these ever-proliferating journals, newspapers, and books? Over a third of Louis XVI’s subjects could read and write, and there was a steady market for cheap popular literature such as almanacks and traditional tales of wonder, sold by travelling hawkers and known from their covers as the ‘blue library’. But cost alone restricted the sale of more sophisticated books and journals. A subscription to the Gazette de Leyde cost 36 livres a year, the Année littéraire and the Journal encyclopédique were 24 livres each, and the Courrier d’Avignon, 18. Even the most skilled craftsman would not earn more than 30 livres a week, and most earned half that or less, making even the purchase of an occasional book all but impossible. The better-off themselves might find the cost of keeping up with literature and current affairs daunting; but it was much eased in the course of the century by the appearance of subscription libraries and reading rooms, with membership fees around the cost of a single journal subscription. The first to be recorded appeared in Nantes in 1759, and thirty years later there were five more in this same city, housing more than 3,000 volumes between them. During that time similar institutions sprang up throughout the provinces, devoted, like that established in Bayeux in 1770, to ‘finding decent diversion … in reading literary and political news’.2 Sometimes they had rooms set aside for conversation, too; but discussion was the main function of a different type of institution which also blossomed over the eighteenth century—the literary society. They too had libraries, and subscribed to journals, but they also held regular public sessions, sometimes interspersed with concerts, at which their members read their own works or debated questions of the day. Sometimes, too, they organized public lectures and essay competitions. Open to all, but usually with a much higher subscription than the average reading room, they often adopted high-sounding names: Société de philalèthes, Société de philosophie et des belles-lettres, Logopanthée, Musée, Société patriotique. By 1787, noted a Dijon newspaper,3 ‘One sees societies of this sort in almost all the towns of the kingdom … such an agreeable resource for the select class of citizens in all walks of life.’ The most select of all such bodies, however, were the Academies, where membership was by election only, numbers were often deliberately limited, and the society enjoyed the official recognition of royal Letters-Patent. They, too, were largely a product of the eighteenth century. In 1700, apart from the great metropolitan bodies like the Académie française, the Académie des sciences, and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, only seven provincial academies existed. By 1789 the number had risen to 35. Most had their own premises and libraries, and had in fact usually evolved from humbler literary societies; but in the end academic exclusivism was probably one reason why the latter spread so rapidly. Only 6,000 Frenchmen secured membership of an academy over the whole century, and of these a disproportionate 37 per cent or more were nobles. Yet their cultural pre-eminence was undoubted. Their rare public sessions commanded unrivalled attention, their lists of foreign associates and correspondents conferred unique prestige, and their essay competitions attracted literary hopefuls from far and wide and sometimes helped to launch a promising career: the most famous case was Jean Jacques Rousseau’s triumph in the Dijon Academy’s competition of 1750.
Access to literature, therefore, was not confined to individual buyers of books and journals; but there was no great social difference between those who bought for themselves and those who relied on institutional libraries. The reading classes were overwhelmingly made up of nobles, clerics, and the professional bourgeoisie. Mostly they lived in towns, and uncommercial towns at that. Merchants and manufacturers were far less interested in the world of ideas than magistrates, lawyers, administrators, and army officers. ‘I do not expect you will be able to sell any here’, wrote a bookseller in Bar-le-Duc to the Neuchâtel publishers promoting a new, expanded edition of the famous Encyclopédie, in 1780.4 ‘Having offered them to everybody here, nobody so far has come looking for a copy. They are more avid for trade than for reading, and their education is quite neglected … the merchants prefer to teach their children that 5 and 4 make 9 minus 2 equals 7 than in telling them to refine their minds.’ To join the expanding cultivated élite, in fact, disposable income needed to be spent not only on reading, but before that on the right sort of education.
When Louis XVI came to the throne, the French educational system was in turmoil, as was that of much of Catholic Europe. The cause was the dissolution of the Jesuits, who had dominated the higher education of Catholic élites since the late sixteenth century. Finally disbanded by the Pope in 1773, they had been expelled from France in 1764, and their 113 colleges (out of a total nearing 400) had been sequestrated. Some disappeared, some passed into the hands of other regular orders, some were taken over by secular priests under municipal supervision. In these varying circumstances, the fairly uniform curriculum they had taught dissolved, and although there was much public discussion of what to put in its place, no action on a kingdom-wide scale was taken. In 1
789 one boy in 52 out of the 8–18 age range was attending a college, but the educational experience of them and their predecessors over a generation was much more diverse than that of their fathers and grandfathers. Many more were now boarders, too, cut off for long periods from their families. Even so, solid grounding in the Latin classics was still regarded as the essential foundation of a superior education. Four hours a day of Ancient Rome, its language, and its culture occupied six years of most college courses. Much of the time remaining was devoted to the inculcation of Catholic orthodoxy, although after 1760 there was time in some courses for a little geography, and some French history. Those who went beyond this basic cycle of the humanities, however—and most of those hoping for professional careers did—went on to take a further two years conventionally called ‘philosophy’, where they were introduced to the natural sciences. Here too tradition ostensibly ruled, and the authority of Aristotle went formally unchallenged. But behind this façade the lessons of the scientific revolution of the previous century, and the methods and approaches that had brought them about, had been widely propagated in the colleges from the 1690s onwards. Neither Ancient Rome nor the Christian religion had played much part in the triumph of a rational, experimental approach to natural phenomena, and it was impossible to disguise the fact. Nevertheless the new principles continued to be taught, and by the 1760s Newtonian physics in one form or another were standard fare in most colleges. Nature was to be evaluated in terms of what could be shown to work and achieve useful results. It could scarcely be expected that some at least of those who learned this lesson should not have thought about judging human affairs by the same standards, for all the precepts of obedience and orthodoxy instilled into them in earlier school years.
That, indeed, was the object of the Enlightenment, whose writers set the intellectual agenda for this generation of unprecedented literacy. Enlightenment meant criticism, a belief that nothing was beyond rational improvement, and that nothing was justifiable that could not be shown to be useful to humanity, or to promote human happiness. Its advocates called themselves philosophers, by which they meant independent thinkers committed to the practical improvement of the lot of their fellow men. Most of them thought the way to achieve it lay in appealing to the educated general public in works of polemic, simplification, and popularization—the very opposite, as their opponents did not fail to point out, of the traditional, detached notion of a philosopher. The supreme example, it has always been agreed, was Voltaire. Born in the last years of the seventeenth century and Jesuit-educated, by the time he was 30 he had already won a reputation for witty anti-clerical writings, and he was to remain a prolific poet and playwright all his life. But the direction of that life was changed when, in 1726, he travelled to England. Here he saw the benefits of religious pluralism and toleration, discovered the psychology of Locke, the physics of Newton, and the theoretical empiricism of Bacon. He was overwhelmed: and eight years later conveyed his discoveries to compatriots largely ignorant of English in his Lettres philosophiques. Banned and publicly burned by the parlement, they nevertheless sold sensationally well, making Locke and Newton household names in educated French circles. Voltaire also wrote works of history—indeed, he became historiographer-royal—and in 1746 was elected to the Académie française. But his brushes with authority were as constant as his jibing against the Church, and finally, in 1759, he took up permanent residence at Ferney, close to the safety of the Swiss border. Here he almost literally held court, receiving eminent pilgrims from all over Europe, conducting a voluminous correspondence, and launching ferocious propaganda campaigns against the ‘infamy’ of religious intolerance and barbarous miscarriages of justice. In 1778, after an absence of 28 years, he made a triumphal return to Paris, where he was lionized for four months in a way few writers can ever have experienced. The strain killed him. The example of his success, however, was an inspiration to innumerable ambitious scribblers throughout the later decades of the century, and later revolutionaries would look back on this tireless critic and campaigner against intolerance and injustice as one of their most distinguished intellectual ancestors.
They were more ambivalent about Montesquieu—a magistrate in the parlement of Bordeaux, a feudal lord living in a moated castle, and an apologist for noble power. Yet arguably his intellectual importance was far greater. Five years older than Voltaire, he died in 1755, leaving a much less voluminous body of writings. But he, too, first made his name in the freer-breathing days of the Regency, after Louis XIV’s death, with the satirical, titillating Lettres persanes (1721). He, too, was deeply impressed by a visit to England in 1729, a year after his election to the Académie française. But after that he fell largely silent until 1748, when he published (in Geneva) the sprawling, untidy collection of reflections entitled De l’esprit des lois. It proved the most fertile and challenging work of political thought of the century. Setting out to analyse rather than prescribe, Montesquieu argued that forms of government are the products of natural and historical circumstances and cannot therefore be varied at will. Such arguments offered comfort to all established authorities. Yet he also roundly condemned despotism, the government of one man according to no law but his own caprice; and implied that even true monarchs, who ruled only according to law, were always under the temptation and danger of becoming despotic. Intermediary powers were needed, buffers between them and their subjects, to restrain that tendency. Montesquieu suggested that in France the nobility and the parlements constituted such buffers, and not surprisingly these bodies were eager to invoke his authority in later struggles against the government. Despotism became a convenient battle cry against any exercise of power, arbitrary or not. And despite preaching that no form of government is appropriate in all circumstances, in attempting to provide an explanation for that of England Montesquieu was led to propound an ideal type most calculated to promote and preserve liberty. Political liberty could only flourish, he argued, under moderate governments; and what kept them moderate was the balance and separation of the three arms of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary: ‘In order that power be not abused, things should be so disposed, that power checks power.’5 In a number of ways, Montesquieu seriously misunderstood how the English constitution actually worked; but the principles he thought he saw in it were to prove widely inspirational on both sides of the Atlantic, and not least in revolutionary France.
By the time Montesquieu died, the Enlightenment as a movement was beginning to come together. Persecution and harassment at the hands of the Church, or those under priestly influence, had given a growing band of speculative writers a sense of common purpose. Nowhere was it better expressed than in the great project launched in 1751 by Diderot (perhaps the first writer to live exclusively by his pen) and the mathematician D’Alembert for a multi-authored French version of a successful English compendium of current knowledge, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. The Encyclopédie was, however, intended from the start to be more than a simple factual work of reference. Its purpose was to advance knowledge as well as summarize it, and to promote a critical attitude to everything. Its articles would, wrote D’Alembert in a foreword to the third volume (1753), ‘often give occasion for philosophic reflexions, for which the public seems today to have more taste than ever; thus it is by the philosophic spirit that we shall attempt to distinguish this dictionary. It is in that way above all that it will win the approval for which we are most anxious.’ By then its publication had already been suspended once by order of the royal Council, and as successive volumes continued to appear (soon dwarfing the two of its original model) it came under repeated attack as a repository of scepticism, atheism, and sedition. In 1759, after seven volumes, the whole project nearly foundered when its privilege to publish was withdrawn. It was only saved when Malesherbes, the liberal magistrate who was director of the book trade between 1750 and 1763, granted tacit permission to continue. The remaining volumes, bringing the entire text to seventeen, were published in 1765. No sooner was
the Encyclopédie complete, however, than new and expanded editions began to appear, and in handier formats than the original heavy and expensive folios. By 1789, therefore, something like 25,000 copies of one version or another of this great compendium had been sold, perhaps half of them in France. And although it undoubtedly did constitute a work of reference of unprecedented quality, what sold it was its notoriety—its contempt for authority and its constant irreverent digs at the Church and religion in general. Yet by the time it became a best-seller such criticisms had become much more open and widespread, making the subterfuges and ambiguities behind which it veiled its early audacities seem timid. Diderot, disgusted with the whole enterprise long before the first edition was completed, turned from religious and philosophical to political and economic radicalism in his later years, although long habit had taught him to cover his tracks. When he died in 1784 he was chiefly known as a sentimental playwright and art critic. Nevertheless, few works were more important than the Encyclopédie which he had orchestrated and edited in promoting the values of independent thinking and indifference to authority. ‘Encyclopedism’ became a synonym for a refusal to accept anything uncritically.
Yet even Encyclopedism had its orthodoxies. Hostile to organized religion and intolerance as manifestations of vestigial barbarism and superstition, it held that philosophers were engaged in a winning battle for progress. The world was changing, nothing was doing more than ‘philosophy’ to promote that change, and it was change for the better. The material progress of the arts and sciences (of which the Encyclopédie proclaimed itself a ‘reasoned dictionary’) was inexorably improving the lot of mankind. Even if natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shook their faith in the benevolence of nature, those who considered themselves enlightened continued to believe in the improvement of human institutions. The one significant exception was Rousseau. An autodidact from Geneva, in the 1740s Rousseau made a living in Paris copying music, but moving in aspiring literary circles. He knew Diderot, and collaborated in the early stages of the Encyclopédie. He made his name, however, by disputing Enlightenment orthodoxies, and by the late 1750s had fallen out with all the movement’s leading figures. In the work which first won him public notice, an entry for the Academy of Dijon’s essay-prize competition of 1750, he argued that progress in the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved mankind. ‘Man is naturally good’, he later wrote, recalling the moment when this intuition first struck him,6 ‘and has only become bad because of … institutions.’ This conviction suffused all his writings, emphasized by a direct, emotional style which electrified the reading public throughout Europe. His novels, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Émile, ou l’Education (1762), were best-sellers, moving their readers to tears at the prospect of innocence and virtue preserved and uncorrupted in the face of the snares and iniquities of established society. These triumphs were, however, the achievement of individuals. Rousseau offered no programme for changing society wholesale to restore mankind in general to its primal innocence and goodness. Even his most enduring work, the Social Contract (1762), was not a prescription for political change, but rather a highly theoretical sketch for how political authority might be established legitimately without men losing their natural liberty. It could only work, Rousseau emphasized, in small city-states. Yet coming from the pen of one who had denounced existing society as rotten and depraving, vaunting the sovereignty of a ‘general will’ which was always for the best and never wrong, and full of striking formulas such as its very first sentence which proclaimed that men were born free but were everywhere in chains, it could not fail to stir thoughts of practical change. Though he was at pains to stress that the general will was not necessarily the will of the majority, the term passed quickly into normal usage as meaning just that. And when the established form of government and society collapsed, barely a decade after Rousseau’s death in 1778, he was remembered by those welcoming the new times as a prophet who had seen the future, and even bequeathed it a pattern-book for organizing a regenerated nation along juster and more virtuous lines.
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