.
the terms on which he might agree to this:
I am eager, Monsieur, to respond to the kind solicitation that you addressed to me yesterday.
I have never sold a manuscript, however thin it might be, for less than 500 francs.
But I have, on occasion, given them away, and I could do it again.
If you are interested in the fragment for which you do me the honor of asking, you could have it for 500 francs (or for nothing). Choose. Whatever your choice, I will agree with pleasure.4
At one level, both exchanges highlight attitudes and views that seem appropriate for their times. Colletet’s desire to please his patron appears as fitting for the seventeenth century as Hugo’s aggressive response to the commercial journal editor for the nineteenth. At another level, however, both convey these attitudes and views in an unexpected way, in the evocation of a transaction through which the writer gained a specified sum of money. We really anticipate the opposite; we expect instead that the core values in question for both the Classical and the Romantic writers would be communicated through a repudiation, sublimation, or “euphemization” of monetary payment, whether in the pseudo-aristocratic indifference to gain of the court playwright or in the Romantic poet’s grandiose rejection of commerce in the name of Art, Beauty, and Humanity. In these two stories, though, money is not only unconcealed, it is highlighted.
It is emphasized both to the degree that it is quantified—which in itself calls attention to its prominence—and inasmuch as it is incorporated into the heart of a representation that intends to valorize the writer on the receiving end of the payment. What is more, the money indicates more or less precisely what we would assume a rejection of money to signal; not the crass and unseemly commercialization of art and literature, but the fundamental incommensurability of the writer and his works with an economy presumed to measure only the ordinary and the mediocre. The fifty pistoles Richelieu hands to Colletet do not assess the base economic value of the verse and, in establishing such an equivalency, demean its true artistic worth. They gauge instead the inestimable beauty of the monologue insofar as the fifty pistoles express the minister’s inability to compensate the lines and establish any fair equivalency, even with the king’s fortune at his disposal. Likewise, the choice that Hugo presents to Véron between zero and what is clearly offered by the poet, with his reference to a “thin” work and emphasis on “no less than,” as an extravagant price intended to challenge the commercial sensibility of the editor aims to put the writer off the scale, and in the process articulate the transcendent quality of his writing by summoning an image of the impossibility of its valuation by a middling market price.5
It is important to add as well that both images of money have what can be characterized as a tenuous, nontransparent relation to the “real” economic contexts to which they allude. Richelieu’s praise—“the King was not rich enough to pay for the rest”—did not represent with any accuracy at all either the king’s finances or the economic relationship between the monarch and Colletet, who, we can safely assume, would have felt that the king did have the funds to compensate him. Hugo’s case is more complex due to the fact that his rhetoric is less hyperbolic than that of Richelieu, and conveys in this respect a more “realistic” image of the writer/publisher transaction. Five hundred livres was a lofty figure for Véron, who proposed a lower sum in response. This surely felt like a normal business negotiation to the editor. But the counter-offer, which was soundly rejected by Hugo who opted to give his text to the editor for nothing, speaks to the degree to which the poet’s “500 livres” did not fully correspond to the “500 livres” that had entered into the economic calculus of Véron. Five hundred livres did not, for Hugo, open the door to a back and forth over the price of the text, but affirmed the opposite: his refusal or inability to negotiate his literary insight or talent. In this respect, the same sum carried two substantially different significations.
We are accustomed, of course, to considering hard numbers as privileged points of access into an undisputed reality. In their “quantitativeness,” they conjure up the rawness, materiality, and noneuphemized nature of this reality, and thus its “objectivity.” Yet here the numbers take us in a completely different direction. They lead us not toward but away from the “objective lives” of writers, and into a highly stylized symbolic universe whose logic is not the need to “make a living” or the maximization of economic profit, but the complex and polemicized dynamics of intellectual, literary, and artistic legitimacy as these play out in shaping the strategies of self-presentation through which writers seek to establish their credibility and authority.
The symbolic appropriations and transformations of commercial and economic images in the efforts of defining and articulating intellectual value are the subject of this book. Influenced by work on “self-fashioning” and the “presentation of self,” the chapters that follow set out, in highlighting such efforts, to shed light on the evolution of intellectual identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to enhance our understanding of their “modernization,” particularly to the extent that the latter process has so often been figured in the economically coded terms of a passage from an archaic, constraining patronage system into the realm of the market6 Accounts of this transition tend to view it as a self-evident move from the perspective of the author, who is assumed “naturally” to want to be free from any dependence on noble patrons, and thus to pounce on the chance to do so once the opportunities present themselves. The only question, then, is the availability of these opportunities in an underdeveloped Old Regime publishing industry, and accordingly, much attention has been given to tracing the evolution of the objective circumstances that made the transition seem inescapable, with an emphasis on rising payments to writers and the legislation of intellectual property law. But in truth writers had a far more complex relationship with the commercial publishing system. The latter did exist “objectively,” of course, and established real conditions that would positively and negatively affect the attitudes and choices of writers. These conditions evolved throughout the period in question, and this evolution—consisting broadly in an expansion of the book trade as well as in a moderation of censorship, if not in any radical changes to the official regulations or to the underlying technology of the publishing industry—is an essential factor for understanding, in turn, how authorial practices developed into the modern era.
However, it is a central contention of this book that accounting for these conditions is not sufficient for explaining the modernization of intellectual identities. More exactly, it is not sufficient for explaining the particular “modernization” that has become the standard narrative in the history of authorship, and which identifies modernity with the specific vision of an autonomy from traditional political and social elites articulated in commercialized images of the writer following two distinct and contrary patterns: the writer is viewed as either economically self-reliant and “earning an independent living” or subject to the exploitation of cruel publishers. We shall see that these contrasting figurations of the writer in the “literary market” are ultimately two sides of the same coin. For now, though, it is enough to point out that the modernization process signaled by the idea of a transition from patronage to market has its roots not just in the “objective” expansion of the print trade. For they lie as well in the successive battles that were waged, from the Querelle du Cid in 1637 to debates over philosophical identity in the eighteenth century, over what constitutes legitimacy in the intellectual field and over who can lay claim to the exalted and authoritative designation of being an homme de lettres or an author. “Modernity” was not in these battles a self-evident or unambiguous state. Construed as an essential dimension of the prestige to which writers aspired, it was an upshot of the polemical claims of writers to authority and influence. It was, in other words, an assertion of legitimacy. “Commerce,” in turn, conceived not in terms of writers' actual transactions with, say, agents of the publishing industry, but as a series of topoi projecting stylized images of their experiences in the book trade as central to their claims to legitimacy—in other words, conceived as “commerce” existed in the language of the writers themselves—emerged as a powerful signifier of this modernity; indeed, perhaps as the most powerful signifier of it.
This book describes, in a way, how that came to pass. It argues that the integration and elevation of images of commercial literary activity within