The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

“the property of their creations. All the while they bow at the feet of the most contemptible people in order to obtain puny pensions.”⁸ Linguet, about whom much more will be said in the course of this investigation, had already positioned himself as a fierce adversary of the “encyclopédistes,” and was especially hostile toward d’Alembert who, he felt, had denied him a seat in the Académie française in 1764, effectively blocking his entry into the inner circles of Enlightenment-era literary life and frustrating his ambitions. This view would, however, be taken up by a series of twentieth-century scholars with no personal axe to grind, yet who would call for a comparable reassessment of the conventionally heroic image of the philosophes in light of an attachment to elite culture that, among other ways, was manifest in their choice to disregard their intellectual property rights and authorial dues in favor of “traditional” forms of income and support, including patronage and court sinecures. Darnton is perhaps the most famous and ruthless in his reevaluation of the philosophes as “mandarins fatten[ing] themselves on pensions,” arguing that “Duclos, Voltaire, and d’Alembert urged their ‘brethren’ to profit from the mobility available to them in order to join the elite. Rather than challenge the social order, they offered a prop to it.”⁹ But he is not the only historian to postulate that the philosophes were far more rooted in the traditional values and practices of the Old Regime than has generally been admitted.¹⁰

      Articulating conflicting judgments on the place that should be accorded to the philosophes’ publishing activities in the larger scheme of their intellectual project, these three options nonetheless share a common assumption that the activities presented stark inconsistencies with the project, as well as with a fixed ideal of intellectual selfhood that the philosophes are broadly considered to have forged. Standard to most histories of eighteenth-century literature, the ideal is predicated on two moves: first, writers of the period became philosophes in their pursuit of an agenda driven by a critique of conventional ideas and established institutions in the name of a pragmatic and humanitarian rationalism; second, in undertaking the critique, these philosophes lay claim, through a series of characteristic gestures—rejecting patronage, increasing their mobility across Europe, and resorting to strategies of subterfuge in the publication of their writings—to autonomy from the social, political, and religious authorities under whose tutelage writers had long labored. In his early twentieth-century study of Enlightenment-era hommes de lettres, Maurice Pellisson highlights the processes by which the latter became “more and more independent,” and in the process became “more capable of directing the public [l’esprit public].”¹¹ Masson renders the move toward autonomy as a similarly defining aspect of the new intellectual paradigm embodied by Voltaire, whose career can be read, she argues, “as the conquest of independence for the man of letters.”¹² Darnton, of course, counters such rhetoric with a more sober assessment of the philosophes’ indebtedness to social elites, apparent in their reliance on connections and patronage rather than “sales of books.”¹³ But in emphasizing these ties as a shortcoming—as a failure to “challenge the social order”—Darnton ultimately reveals his own beholden-ness to the very same ideal of the philosophe as a fundamentally independent figure.

      The examination of the publishing practices of the philosophes in light of a predetermined conception of who these writers were, claimed to be, or indeed failed to be has, however, produced only limited insights into the logic of these practices. It can hardly be said to have generated a clear understanding of what publishing books meant to them. This is an arresting blind spot, though, given the importance that the writers themselves accorded to the activity. When in his 1787 discours de réception to the Académie, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, a man imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, marked the “general revolution … in letters and morals [moeurs],” he did so with a recitation of those moments when the great leaders of the movement broke through, around 1750, as the authors of major works thought to have had a profound effect on a readership whose eyes were then opened onto new ways of thinking; Montesquieu with L’Esprit de lois; Buffon with his Histoire naturelle; and Voltaire with plays and early writings on the English philosophers. Rulhière’s brief history stands in stark contrast to the inclinations of those recording intellectual progress in the Classical era, who as we have seen were more likely to emphasize as turning points the creation of a salon or the cultivation of certain urbane ethos at court. The publication of a book was in the seventeenth century not seriously recognized as a significant moment, either for the culture as a whole or for the individual seeking renown as an homme d’esprit within that culture. By contrast, the philosophes were decidedly authors, and their history is, as Rulhière told it, the story of their publications.

      At the same time, though, the philosophical embrace of book publication cannot be adequately explained by juxtaposing the choices and activities of Voltaire or d’Alembert against the Classical-era paradigm of the disinterested court poet, despite the fact that the rejection of the leisured amateur of letters would be incorporated as a central element in the philosophes’ self-presentation. The story is more complicated, for as Darnton shows, the philosophes did not reject the social dimension of writing, or its capacity to integrate individuals into aristocratic networks. They undertook those gestures that remain challenging to modern sensibilities for their apparent subordination of the intellectual objectives of authorship to the “traditional” imperatives of politeness and bienséance. Refusing profits and intellectual property, the philosophes circulated their works in fine editions as gifts to social and political luminaries. Rousseau and his followers would turn to writing as a pointedly nonsocial or even antisocial act by which one gave voice to an “authentic” self defined against a corrupt “civilized” self that had been disfigured by the compromises of life in le monde. Yet for the philosophes, what was at stake was not the integrity of an inner nature, but a distinctly social preeminence constructed within—not outside—the established, albeit evolving hierarchy of the Old Regime.

      In fact, this is really the anomaly unearthed by the publishing practices of the philosophes. They bear witness to the rising importance of writing and publishing for a claim to authority that, in its critical inclination, was firmly rooted in an image of the writer’s independence from social and political elites. But for all that, they do not mark a patent shift from elite sociability as the dominant mode of intellectual activity toward a new paradigm that, whether in a professional or proto-romantic vein, was in any case starkly opposed to the ethos of aristocratic sociability. To the contrary, they speak to the philosophes’ persistent elite orientation. But if their publishing practices muddy the conventional image of the philosophes as “autonomous,” a more direct focus on these activities, rather than less attention, is essential to clarifying the problem, I would argue. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a new approach to the matter, which inverts the traditional perspective on philosophical publishing. Rather than examine its paradoxes in light of a fixed notion of who the philosophes thought they were and what they thought they were doing, it instead revisits the very concept of the philosophe as a specific model of literary identity in light of the underlying logic of their activities in the book trade. In so doing, it draws on Christian Jouhaud’s and Alain Viala’s argument to “take seriously” the very concept of “publication” as a salient point of access allowing for “ANOTHER historical perspective” on the central concepts and categories of early modern literary history.¹⁴ The sticking point here involves one such concept: that of autonomy, which is what seems to be problematized by the publishing activities of the philosophes. However, instead of either ignoring these practices or writing off the philosophes themselves for their hypocrisy, a more nuanced study of their engagement with “publication” may show that the lack of clarity actually lies in our understanding of the position that they sought to occupy vis-à-vis monarchs and nobles, and thus of the “autonomy” to which they lay claim, and on which they sought to construct themselves. After all, in the cultural field of the Old Regime, as we have seen, “autonomy” was a complicated, ambiguous notion. It is, above all, one that should not be identified with its modern connotation of a radical severing of the writer’s social, political, and economic ties to the powerful and the privileged.

      Indeed, as their writings consistently attest, the philosophes