The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France

"The French Revolution was driven by ideas, and once you start trying to trace ideas you have to consider the print in which ideas were carried. As a young man, Darnton discovered in Switzerland the archive of an offshore publishing firm that smuggled books into France before the French Revolution. It had all the records about the paper, the production, even on the mules that carried banned books across the Alps. Darnton is interested not just in publishing history, but in trying to get at effects. Before Darnton, a favourite historical question might be: What were the causes of the French Revolution? People could write about the oppression of the peasantry and so on and that’s valuable history. But a more precise question is: Why, when the revolution started, did so few came out in support of the ancien regime ? The question then becomes something to do with the minds of the people and the fact that legitimacy had been lost. And that might lead you to suggest that the reason that many groups didn’t support the monarchical-ecclesiastical state was because they had been reading Voltaire and Rousseau and came to the conclusion that it all was a magnificent tissue of bluff that no reasonable person could assent to. But then Darnton asks: Where then are the books of Voltaire and Rousseau that we should be finding in France? And, in fact, there aren’t that many. Instead, what he finds are huge amounts of books which are now forgotten, many of which were pornographic and libellous of the royal family. That’s right. They make an extraordinary genre. Some are mainly descriptions of sex, without pretence of emotion, let alone of romantic love, and then the characters pause for a minute and discuss the philosophical principles of government, before going back to the pornography. It was, at least in part, these banned books that helped to undermine the legitimacy of the regime and that the regime was too proud to defend itself against. That’s right. The book industry in 18th century France, as in England, was a cartel – an association of producers that combined to keep prices artificially high by restricting supply. The book industry, in alliance with the state, practised a high degree of self-censorship, which is much more effective than censorship. As Darnton has written elsewhere, using examples from India and modern Germany as well as France, attempts to ban particular works by some kind of individual licensing has historically been less effective, from the point of view of the governments and churches and others who have feared the power of reading, than vague general laws that put the onus for conforming on the author, publisher, printer and bookseller."