The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

      The Paradoxes of Enlightenment Publishing

      THE PARAMETERS OF HONNÊTE PUBLICATION are defined in Classical-era debates such as the Querelle du Cid, and subsequent developments in the intellectual field must be understood in their light, including the formation of the literary market. Of course, with its commercial aspects and its decidedly non-elite denizens, the market seems far removed from the social spheres in which an ethic of honnêteté prevailed on writers. I suggest, though, that the essence of the literary market lies precisely in its constitution as a field of honnête publication, which is to say that it evolves first and foremost as a space for the symbolic legitimization of gens de lettres rather than for their economic compensation. In this sense, despite its lead role in a narrative underscoring the radical shift by which writers became “independent” from aristocratic patrons, the market is actually historically continuous with the refined spaces circumscribing seventeenth-century literary life. It develops more than it breaks with a “traditional” view of the cultural field as a system upholding a particular type of social prestige rooted in intelligence and writing. And if the market does represent a shift, it is not because it advances the concept of “autonomy” per se, which, as we have already seen, was no less integral to the valorization of intellectual selfhood in the “first literary field,” but because it formulates a specifically new figuration of autonomy in the language of economic self-sufficiency; the writer became autonomous insofar as he “lived by the pen.” This image of freedom was, in turn, a function of a new conception of legitimacy, defined in a repudiation of the very same aristocratic sensibility in which this particular story of the birth of the modern writer first takes root.

      In order to better understand both the broader continuity and the particular transformation that the literary market represents, we turn to the vision of honnête authorship to which the writers who, in a sense, “invented” the market were reacting. We turn to the philosophes who stand as dominant figures in the mid- to late eighteenth-century intellectual world. These well-placed and visible gens de lettres established leading models of intellectual practice not simply for their contemporaries who aspired to lives in letters, but for the modern era. Nicole Masson considers Voltaire to be a “‘prototype’ of the modern intellectual.”¹ In reality, of course, they embodied a set of intellectual conventions that were heavily indebted to the aristocratic patterns identified in debates such as the Querelle du Cid, even as they adapted these patterns in the effort to valorize their own activities as autonomous critics. The fact remains, though, that writers such as Voltaire and d’Alembert were pointedly targeted by those who sought to make a rejection of elite culture and sociability an integral element in a new ideal of literary legitimacy, for they identified the philosophes—with attention to the latter’s cultivation of elites—as especially representative of a corrupt and outdated system.

      But while of interest to critical contemporaries, it is striking that the authorial field as envisioned by the philosophes in their contacts with the book trade has remained something of a non-topic in literary histories of the Enlightenment. Conversely, the history of writers and publishing in this period has focused much more on obviously nonphilosophical figures, that is, individuals who, by their own positioning or by the maneuverings of others, have come to be identified against the group of writers recognized at the time and still celebrated today as the philosophes. Rousseau, of course, presents a clear example; as do the “hacks” who inhabited the “literary underground,” so influentially described by Robert Darnton. Indeed, it seems that those down and out types are specifically defined by the two attributes: their exclusion from the intellectual circles of the philosophes, for one, and their dependence, as an outcome of their cultural and social isolation, on commercial publishing activities, for another. We might add Diderot to this list, for he stands as an especially notable protagonist in the history of writers and the book trade in the Enlightenment. To be sure, Diderot was much better integrated into the world of the philosophes than either Rousseau or the pauvres diables of the literary underworld. Yet his role in this history is normally granted in spite of this inclusion. He is pivotal not as a philosophe but to the extent that he was never quite wholly able to assume that identity, constrained as he was both by the memory of his early years writing in relative obscurity for profiteering libraires rather than rich and powerful patrons, and by his continued close involvement with bookselling milieus as the general editor of the encyclopédie. Diderot thus plays a leading role in this history to the extent that, as Darnton observes, he “never fully extricated himself from Grub Street.”²

      There is a compelling reason for why the book trade as perceived through the eyes of the philosophes has remained an elusive object of study. Their publishing practices do not present a familiar image of that field but seem to jar with established notions about who the philosophes were and what they stood for. Historically, these writers have been valorized as the heroes of change and modernity, yet their choices in the publishing sphere appear at first glance to hearken back to patterns inherited from the polite writers of the seventeenth century. They were neglectful of their intellectual property rights, and, far from trying to maximize their revenues in an effort to live independently of patronage, “by the pen,” they were more concerned to project their honnête disinterest in the manner of the court and salon poets of the Classical age. As a result, their publishing practices tend to present stumbling blocks, and the attempt to characterize the philosophe as a cultural formation confronts them as paradoxical or anomalous phenomena not easy to incorporate into the standard account of the philosophe’s birth as a “modern” figure. Nicole Masson grants that, although a “prototype,” Voltaire nonetheless “does not yet have an idea that one can or should live by the pen.”³ Likewise, Jules Bertaut is stymied by the incongruity of the same writer’s silence on his rights and dues: “It is a curious fact that Voltaire, normally so determined to profit and who knew so well how to defend his own interests in all his endeavors, … did not show the same combativeness when it came to his literary interests.”⁴

      The publishing practices of the philosophes need, in other words, to be rationalized. Either their role must be clarified within the larger philosophical project or they need to be downplayed as extraneous to that project since they reflect not the real thinking of the philosophes but the material and intellectual constraints under which they labored. In the latter sense, Bertaut surmises that payments from publishers were not yet high enough to engage Voltaire in what surely was the lost cause of literary property rights and droits d’auteur: “No doubt, he calculated that the benefit was middling, and that it was not worth the efforts that he would have to apply.”⁵ This is not a ringing endorsement of Voltaire’s choices as a leading author of the Enlightenment, but the statement justifies the writer in light of the underdeveloped state of the publishing industry.⁶ Jacques Douvez, on the other hand, examining Voltaire’s livelihood and seeking to contextualize his publishing strategies with respect to both his fortune and his mission, considers his negligence not just understandable given the state of the book trade, but entirely consistent with a movement that conceived of its objectives largely in the dissemination of new ideas to a public whose reading had always been tightly controlled. Voltaire may well have shown little interest in payments and rights, but, as Douvez reminds us, “his goal was philosophical battle; he thus had to win the favor of booksellers.”⁷

      Still a third alternative, of course, is not to attempt any kind of explanation at all of the ostensibly incongruous publishing activities but to acknowledge, insofar as they were not chiefly oriented toward maximizing the writer’s autonomy from elites, that the practices were compromising. They speak to the collusion of writers like Voltaire and Duclos with the established hierarchy, exposing, in contradiction to their own claims, their choice of status and prestige over any true commitment to equality and fairness. Already in the eighteenth century, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, a disbarred lawyer turned journalist and polemicist, in a response to the book trade reforms of 1777, scathingly