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Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: a Case Study in the Sociology of Literature

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Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: a Case Study in the Sociology of Literature Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Darnton, Robert. 1971. Reading, writing, and publishing in eighteenth-century France: A case study in the sociology of literature. Daedalus 100(1): 214-256. Published Version http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023999 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3403046 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ROBERT DARNTON in Reading, Writing, and Publishing Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature Non numerantur sed ponderante. ?Marc Bloch1 have a Historians always taken what society writes, publishes, as a to its never and reads guide culture, but they have taken all its as a as books guidebooks. Instead, they select few works repre sentative of the whole and settle down to write intellectual history. Of course those select few may not deserve to serve as cultural attach?s. If chosen without proportional representation, they may a in is give distorted view of reading habits the past. Nowhere the more at culturopomorphic distortion produced by miscast classics issue in a than the study of the French Enlightenment, subject at located the crossroads between the traditional history of ideas more recent and trends of social history. see as a Social historians tend to the Enlightenment social phenomenon?one of the forces of "innovation" opposing "inertia" in use the Old Regime (to the vocabulary of the Annales school). to a They attempt situate the Enlightenment within general cul texts. cul tural context rather than to explicate its And they study ture statistics of or quantitatively, often working from authorship book This will their work in order to see production. essay survey can in what conclusions be drawn concerning writing and reading to eighteenth-century France and will then attempt show how that an of work might be supplemented by investigation eighteenth was an eco century publishing. Publishing activity where social, cannot nomic, and cultural forces naturally converged. But it be in to understood, the eighteenth century, without reference politi a cal factors. So final section will deal with politics and pub as an lishing aspect of the prerevolutionary crisis. 214 Reading, Writing, and Publishing I culture back The quantitative study of eighteenth-century goes to an Mornet. Mornet article published sixty years ago by Daniel measure tried to literary taste under the Old Regime by tallying which had up titles in five hundred catalogues of private libraries, in Paris area 1750 mostly been printed for auctions the between one and 1780. He found lonely copy of Rousseau's Contrat social. libraries contained a small Eighteenth-century surprisingly percen tage of the other Enlightenment classics, he discovered. Instead with works of men and their shelves bulged the history's forgotten women: Th?miseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, Mme. de Graffigny, and Mme. Riccoboni. Eighteenth-century booklovers divided French literature into "before" and "after" Cl?ment Marot. When they it was La Henriade and the read the philosophes, the Voltaire of Rousseau of La nouvelle H?loise.2 to Coinciding ironically with the "great books" approach the some study of civilization, Mornet's research seemed to knock out of He a at in the pillars of the Enlightenment. made gap, least, the view that the Social Contract prepared the way for Robespierre, ever and his followers have been trying to widen the breach since.3 some in Meanwhile, the Rousseauists have repaired of the damage a on counterattack Mornet's evidence.4 Why should private libraries to as an important enough have printed catalogues be taken indi a to and readers? cation of book's appeal ordinary impecunious they ask. They point out that the message of the Social Contract could it have reached the general reading public through the version of in numerous book five of Rousseau's highly popular Emile, through or came editions of his collected works, through editions that out during the momentous last decade of the Ancien R?gime, which not case Mornet's study did cover.5 So Mornet's remains unproved, or either right wrong. some Nonetheless, Mornet raised fundamental problems that to was have only begun be faced: What the character of literary culture under the Old Who in the Regime? produced books eigh were teenth century, who read them, and what they? It will be to in impossible locate the Enlightenment any cultural and social context are until those questions answered, and they cannot be answered by traditional methods of research. The most influential to a new attempt formulate methodology has been Robert Escarpit's Sociologie de la litt?rature (Paris, 1958 ).6 215 DAEDALUS now As his title suggests, Escarpit, director of the Centre de at to sociologie des faits litt?raires Bordeaux, wanted define the a new He objects and methods of branch of sociology. treated books as in a the of writer agents psychological process, communication as a and reader, and also commodities, circulating through system of production, distribution, and consumption. Since the author a in plays crucial role both the psychological and the economic on the writ circuits of exchange, Escarpit concentrated study of ers. a to They constitute distinct segment of the population subject on normal demographic laws, he argued, and this assumption he a produced demographic history of authorship. In order to survey the literary population, he began with the on back pages of the Petit Larousse, moved to bibliographies and a writers biographical dictionaries, and emerged with list of 937 born between 1490 and 1900. He then worked this material into a in terms two-page graph, where the "fait litt?raire" appeared of the rise writers and fall of under the age of forty. Escarpit observed that the proportion of young writers rose after the deaths of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon. The Edict of Nantes also coincided with an of was cut short first upsurge youth, which after the triumph of and then the To Richelieu following the collapse of Fronde. was events Escarpit the conclusion clear: political determine liter ary demography. He confirmed this interpretation by reference to a England, where the Armada produced "vieillissement" among was overcome writers that only by the death of James I. is a It stirring spectacle, this adjustment of the literary popula tion to battles, edicts, revolutions, and the birth of sovereigns. But it leaves the reader confused. Is he to believe that a kind of intellec tual contraception took hold of the republic of letters? Did writers limit their out to Bess population of loyalty Good Queen (and or was curse on Victoria, too), vieillissement their the queens? Did men start in in to more young writing England order make life or difficult for Charles I, did they stop in France in order to show disaffection for Louis XIV? If one should discount any conscious motivation, why did young writers decrease in numbers after the accession of Louis XIV and increase after the accession of Louis XV XVI? and Louis And why should the birth and death of rulers so more have such demographic importance?or much than the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, which do not disturb the undulations as a of Escarpit's graph, although 1830 appears great turning point? 216 Reading, Writing, and Publishing answers The to these questions might be found among the de over 410 ficiencies of Escarpit's statistics. To take 937 writers years is to a spread the sampling pretty thin?an average of 2.3 writers or a man year. Adding subtracting single could shift the graph by 5 cent or some per more, yet Escarpit hung weighty conclusions on a such shifts?his distinction, for example, between youthful romantic movement and the middle-aged character of literary life under the no Empire. More important, Escarpit had idea of how went a many writers uncounted. He evidently believed that few men case dozen (Lamartine and twenty-three others in the of the an early romantics ) could represent, demographically, entire literary new generation. A few individuals could, to be sure, represent a trend or cultural movement not the stylistic but phenomena that can be analyzed demographically, like generational conflict and the of to resources. adjustment population Escarpit attributed the sociological differences between eigh teenth- and to two nineteenth-century writing other factors: "pro vincialization" a and professionalization. He detected rhythmic "alternance Paris-province" by tracing the geographical origins of his authors. But preselected the geographical argument suffers from the same statistical fallacies as the so demographical, and Escarpit fails to prove that the Paris of Balzac dominated French literature more than the Paris In case any of Diderot. the of professionaliza seem tion, Escarpit's conclusions sounder. He produced two more statistical tables to show that there were middle-class pro or fessionals, writers who lived entirely from their pens, in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century. But his argument is not the fact that the in the helped by percentages table of eighteenth century writers add up to 166 per cent.7 In this instance, Escarpit drew his statistics from The French Book in Trade the Ancien R?gime by David Pottinger, another of the example quantitative study of authorship. Pottinger pro ceeded by combing biographical dictionaries for information about six hundred "writers" who lived between 1500 and 1800.
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