THE WRITING PUBLIC THE WRITING PUBLIC Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France Elizabeth Andrews Bond CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bond, Elizabeth Andrews, author. Title: The writing public: participatory knowledge production in enlightenment and revolutionary France / Elizabeth Andrews Bond. Description: Ithaca, [New York]: Cornell University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031941 (print) | LCCN 2020031942 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753565 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501753572 (epub) | ISBN 9781501753589 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Letters to the editor —France —History — 18th century. | Mass media and public opinion — France —History —18th century. | France —Intellectual life —18th century. | France —Social conditions — 18th century. Classification: LCC DC33.4 .B65 2021 (print) | LCC DC33.4 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/42 —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031941 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2020031942 Cover illustration: Newspaper sellers during the French Revolution, 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France. To my parents Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Production and Distribution of the Information Press 17 2. The Writers, Self-Presentation, and Subjectivity 39 3. Reading Together, Book References, and Interacting with Print 60 4. Popular Science and Public Participation 87 5. Agricultural Reform and Local Innovation 112 6. Bienfaisance, Fellow Feeling, and the Public Good 133 7. Communicating the Revolution 155 Conclusion 179 Appendix A 185 Appendix B 189 Notes 203 Bibliography 239 Index 267 Acknowledgments It is my pleasure to be able to thank everyone who has helped me research and write this book. Support from the Council for European Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Princeton University Council of the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation made multiple research trips possible. The American Association of University Women, PEO (Philanthropic Education Organization), and the Council for European Studies Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship afforded me two years to write. A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend supported the final stages of preparing this book. My gratitude goes especially to Timothy Tackett for his mentorship. Tim has generously read countless drafts of this work over the years. At each stage, I have benefited from his critical eye and deep knowledge of the eigh- teenth century. It has been a privilege to work with such a gifted historian and engaged mentor. I am also thankful to Ulrike Strasser and Sarah Farmer for reading proposals, writing letters, and sharing their feedback. For her scholarly engagement with my research and for her friendship, I thank Helen Chenut. In Irvine and in Paris, Helen and Tim opened their home to gradu- ate students and faculty from around the world. I have learned a great deal about scholarly friendship from them. Rachel Fuchs first fostered my inter- est in French history at Arizona State, encouraged me to pursue graduate school, and met me for lunch whenever I was back in Tempe. She was a won- derful historian and energetic advocate of junior scholars, and I am grateful to have known her. My research in France was shaped by the generosity of historians there. I would like to thank Pierre Serna, Philippe Minard, and Antoine Lilti for invit- ing me to participate in their seminars while I conducted my research. Jean- Clement Martin drove to Poitiers on a very snowy day to show me around the bibliothèque municipale and the Société des antiquaires de l’ouest, and to share his advice on my project. While in Aix-en-Provence, Michel Vovelle invited me to his home to discuss my work. I am grateful for the kindness and intellectual generosity of all the historians who met with me during ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS my time in France. My work was aided a great deal by the expertise and assistance of librarians and archivists in Paris and in the provincial collec- tions where I worked. I would also like to thank the French families who extended their hospitality to me, especially Mary and Hervé Kergall. While I conducted research in the provinces, Fulbright alumni welcomed me to their homes, especially François Pitavy and Danièle Pitavy-Souques, Anne Raynaud-Reversat, and Elisabeth and Eric Limongi. Life in Paris researching this book was made all the more rewarding and fun by the friendship of the graduate students and early career researchers I met there. I have shared facets of my work in progress at meetings of the Ameri- can Historical Association, Western Society for French History, Society for French Historical Studies, Society for the Study of French History, the George Rudé Seminar, the Council for European Studies, the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, and the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am thankful to the many fellow panelists, audience members, and colleagues who have shared their insight and feedback on my work in prog- ress. Special thanks go to Jack Censer who shared his expertise on the history of the press with me in the early stages of this project. Meghan Roberts read the manuscript with care and provided invaluable feedback. The participants in the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshop at Indiana Univer- sity helped me work through an early draft of chapter 3. At Ohio State, the Premodernist Group and the History of the Book Group kindly invited me to share chapters in progress at key stages. My colleagues in the Department of History have made Ohio State Uni- versity a welcoming and intellectually rich place to finish this book. I am grateful to Alice Conklin and Kristina Sessa for reading the manuscript and sharing their advice. Randolph Roth and John Brooke met with me to discuss early drafts of the manuscript. Clayton Howard and Jennifer Eaglin provided helpful feedback on early drafts of chapters. I would also like to thank Theo- dora Dragostinova, Kristina Sessa, Mytheli Sreenivas, and Ying Zhang for the invitation to join their writing group, their comments on the introduction, and their moral support. It has been a pleasure to work with the book team at Cornell University Press. I wish to thank Emily Andrew for her support of this project and for guiding the book through press. I am grateful to Lori Rider for her copyedit- ing, Sandy Aitken for her indexing, and Jennifer Savran Kelly for overseeing the production of the book. I would also like to thank the anonymous read- ers for their thoughtful engagement with my work. They encouraged me to think deeply about my project. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Finally, I wish to thank my family. My love goes to my husband, Rob, who has supported and encouraged me since the beginning of this project. My sister, Madeline, has shared many phone calls and visits over the years as we have each pursued our own research. I am grateful for her insight and friendship. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents, Gail and Keith, reading to me. They shared with me their love of learning and supported my education at every stage. I dedicate this book to them. THE WRITING PUBLIC Introduction On February 12, 1786, a letter to the editor appeared in the Affiches du Beauvaisis that described how readers interacted with the newspaper. The anonymous writer explained to the editor, “Your weekly papers are a sort of literary arena, where every athlete should have the right to present oneself, to choose an adversary and to combat them, without however, straying from the bounds of decency and one’s public and private honesty.” He expressed his disagreement with a letter to the editor in the previous week’s newspaper, but he assured the editor that he intended only to combat his interlocutor in the press and to adhere to sociable norms of civility and honest conduct. 1 Newspapers like the Affiches du Beauvaisis formed a collective space that invited participation. In conceptualizing the newspaper as an arena, this writer reflected a sense of the affiches as a site for the horizontal exchange of ideas where writers could grapple with new information and with one another. While this writer addressed the Affiches du Beauvaisis in particular , his comments described an entire genre of general information newspapers commonly referred to by historians as “the information press,” which bur- geoned in the 1770s and 1780s and persisted throughout the early years of the Revolution. 2 Such newspapers shared two key characteristics—a capacious coverage of various subject matter and the publication of letters from their readers. The editors of both Parisian and provincial newspapers 1 2 INTRODUCTION expressed the same goal that this writer identified: to invite their readers into the conversation. Between 1770 and 1791, thousands of letters to the editor appeared in such newspapers, where writers participated in an itera- tive process of debate and exchange. The newspapers that made up the information press proliferated after mid-century in Paris and in the provinces, where they appeared under such titles as Affiches, annonces, et avis divers , and were known generically as affiches.