The enlightenment literary market: Rousseau, authorship, and the book trade

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 387-410

  Turnovsky, Geoffrey ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 49649124472     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2003.0036     Document Type: Review

References (122)

1. John Lough, Writer and Public in France: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 209
2. and Lough, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century France (London: Longmans, 1960), 231.
3. Roger Charrier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 77. These references could be multiplied. Early studies of Enlightenment authorship by Georges d'Avenel and Maurice Pellisson recognized the importance of commercial publishing in the modern transformation of gens de lettres into liberated creators.
4. See d'Avenel, "Les Riches depuis sept cents ans. VIII, Honoraires des Gens de Lettres," Revue des deux mondes 48 (1908): 335-67
5. and Pellisson, Les Hommes de lettres au XVIIIe siècle [1911] (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 64-75. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, more recent scholarship has made the links between intellectual autonomy and the book trade more complex and more explicitly linked with a concept of the literary market.
6. See Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), 113-38;
7. Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48;
8. Éric Walter, "Les Auteurs et le champ littéraire, " Histoire de l'édition française, 4 vols. Le Livre triomphant 1660-1830, eds. Roger Charrier and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 2:499-518;
9. and Caria Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777-1793," Representations 30 (1990): 112. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own, including translations of Rousseau's correspondence.
10. Other works by Rousseau will be cited from Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, 8 vols. (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1990-2000), hereafter CW.
11. See Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 27, 198
12. and Darnton, "The Life of a 'Poor Devil' in the Republic of Letters," Essays on the Age of Enlightenment in Honor of Ira O. Wade, ed. Jean Macary (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 39-92.
13. Daniel Roche employs a similarly proto-capitalist terminology to discuss the social alienation of gens de lettres in Les Républicains des lettres: gens de culture et lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 254.
14. Discussing authorship and commerce in eighteenth-century Germany, Hans Erich Bödeker refers to the "contradictions that have come about with the establishment of the literary market," one of which being dualistic views of "the writer as an independent man of property, as a man of the enlightenment and an 'educator of his people' and, at the same time, as an undernourished writer guided by fashions and money." See H. E. Bödeker, "'The Invisible Commerce of Hearts and Minds': Authors, the Literary Market, and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Germany," Le Livre et l'historien: études offertes en l'honneur du professeur Henri-Jean Martin, ed. Frédéric Barbier et al., Histoire et civilisation du livre VI (Geneva: Droz), 24 (1997):596.
15. Roche, Les Républicains des lettres, 255;
16. and Martin, Histoire de l'édition française, 2:496, 496.
17. Benoít Mély, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: un intellectuel en rupture (Paris: Minerve, 1985), 34.
18. Darnton refers to d'Alembert's essay in these terms in "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France," Past and Present 51 (1971): 91, though he also notes d'Alembert's attachment to an aristocratic social order.
19. Michel Gaulin discusses d'Alembert's rejection of patronage in Le Concept d'homme de lettres en France à l'époque de l'Encyclopédie (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 44-62.
20. Other scholars have instead underscored more traditional aspects of d'Alembert's reflections on authorship. See, for instance, Mély, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 35-6;
21. and Rémy Saisselin, The Literary Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century Prance (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979), 164.
22. Jean le Rond d'Alembert, "Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, sur la réputation, sur les mécènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires" [1752], Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 4:340. "Leur mérite est, sinon plus connu, au moins plus célébré."
23. Charles Duclos, "Sur les gens de lettres," Considé rations sur les moeurs de ce siecle, ed. F.C. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1946), 135-47. Like d'Alembert, Duclos is preoccupied with the problem of defining the place of writers within the field of elite society.
24. From the Mémoires et souvenirs of Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, and cited in Lough, The Writer and Public, 242. "Les titres littéraires avaient même, en beaucoup d'occasions, la préférence sur les titres de noblesse."
25. D'Alembert, "Essai sur les gens de lettres," in Oeuvres complètes, 4:341, 366, 359: "les protecteurs les plus réels de la littérature; ce sont eux qui cherchent à contribuer au progrès des sciences et des arts par leurs bienfaits." Jean-Claude Bonnet, "Le Culte des grands hommes en France au XVIIIe siècle ou la défaite de la monarchie," MLN 116 (2001): 689-704, discusses the eclipse of the traditional ideal of the aristocratic hero - " superhuman" and "bellicose" - by that of the "moderate" and intellectual grand homme.
26. Charrier, Les Origines culturelles, 188-96, explores the philosophical valorization of equality within, and not outside, elite society.
27. Dena Goodman discusses the central role of the salonnière in promoting and maintaining this social equality in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 90-135.
28. See also Roche's discussion of "the economic models of patronage" in Les Républicains des lettres, 254-62. Walter, "Les Auteurs et le champ littéraire," 515, argues that established philosophes such as d'Alembert, Grimm and Voltaire, "did not conceive of intellectual work outside of a system of state patronage," and certainly not in a commercial context, as compensated labor.
29. Saisselin (The Literary Enterprise, 150)
30. It might also be added that Diderot hardly pursued such a strategy in his own career, as Bonnet ("Le Culte des grands hommes," 699) points out, underscoring Diderot's choice "to undertake, essentially, a posthumous oeuvre,'" rather than selling his manuscripts. Diderot's reputation as a pioneer of professionalism is generally based on his activities as an editor. Yet, it does seem important to distinguish this form of professional activity from that of writers who actually commercialized their own creative output.
31. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie [1763], Oeuvres complètes, eds. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères), 18 (1876):11-12.
32. For a complete account of the privilège debates, which culminated in the 1777 arrêts that partially recognized literary property in France, see Raymond Birn, "The Profits of Ideas: Privilèges en librairie in Eighteenth-Century France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1970-71): 131-68;
33. and Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology," 109-37, who extends the analysis of emerging literary property law into the Revolutionary period. On Diderot's involvement in these debates, see Lucien Brunei, "Observations critiques et littéraires sur un opuscule de Diderot," Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France 10 (1903): 1-24;
34. Jacques Proust, "Pour servir à une édition critique de la Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie," Diderot Studies 3 (1961): 321-46, as well as Proust's introduction to his own edition of Diderot'sz Lettre, provocatively retitled Sur la liberté de la presse, texte partiel établi, présenté et annoté
35. par Jacques Proust (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1964).
36. See Jocelyn Benoist's introduction to Qu'est-ce qu'un livre? Textes de Kant et de Fichte, ed. and trans. Benoist (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1995), 56. Benoist's extended introduction to short journalistic writings by Kant and Fichte includes a discussion of Diderot, considered as a precursor to the more groundbreaking German theorists of intellectual property.
37. The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. and trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 88, Ernst Cassirer referred to the "new epoch which Rousseau was opening in the history of the European spirit" with La Nouvelle Héloïse.
38. Georges d'Avenel, "Les Riches depuis sept cents ans," 357.
39. Raymond Birn, "Rousseau et ses éditeurs," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 40 (1993): 122.
40. Julia Simon, "The Public Sphere, Alienation, and Commodification: Rousseau's Autobiographical Writings," chap. 3 in Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995), 72-84.
41. Peter France, "The Commerce of the Self," in Comparative Criticism: Representations of the Self, ed. E.S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 48.
42. Jean-Paul Belin, Le Mouvement philosophique de 1748 à 1789: étude sur la diffusion des idées des philosophes à Paris d'après les documents concernant l'histoire de la librairie [1913] (New York: Burt Franklin, 1962), 179.
43. Lough (An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century France, 237-48) discusses payments to Diderot, Destouches, Voltaire, Crébillon, Graffigny, Marmontel, La Harpe, Rivarol, Suard, and Rousseau.
44. and Alain Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain: sociologie de la littérature à l'âge classique (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1985), 107-14.
45. In his Naissance de l'écrivain, 104, Viala offers a critique of the "mythe historique" of the early modern author who spurns the book trade and the notion of living "by selling one's works" out of a "noble attitude [attitude nobiliaire]."
46. Nicole Masson, "La Condition de l'auteur en France au XVIIIe siècle: le cas de Voltaire," in Barbier, ed., Le Livre et l'historien, 554.
47. Walter, "Les Auteurs et le champ littéraire," 511, 515.
48. Jacques Douvez summarizes Voltaire's view of the book trade as a means for diffusing la philosophie rather than a source of livelihood: "On the whole, Voltaire was able to win over the publishers to the cause of the philosophical movement by giving them the greatest share of his literary profits. His true interest was to be printed in order to disseminate his ideas, not to earn a few hundred extra livres," in De quoi vivait Voltaire (Paris: Éditions des deux rives, 1949), 127.
49. See, for example, Albert Schinz, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le libraire-imprimeur Marc-Michel Rey," Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 10 (1914-15): 74, who cites d'Avenel, "Les Riches," 357. "Rousseau obstinately wants to 'draw from his own mind his meager earnings,' something that no other writer of the period was doing."
50. Birn, Forging Rousseau: Print, Commerce and Cultural Manipulation, SVEC 2001:08 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001): 9-49. Birn's recent study explores, in part, how Rousseau "asserted his authorial uniqueness by challenging the claims of legitimate publishers and book pirates alike to ownership of his printed texts," 1. Birn observes that "Rousseau rejected the commercial operations of the Old Regime and laid claim to what Michel Foucault would call the author's property rights to knowledge [les droits de propriété de l'auteur au savoir|," 124.
51. Rousseau to Marc-Michel Rey, 24 October 1758, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva and Oxford: Institut Voltaire and the Voltaire Foundation, 1965-98), 5:186-7 (herafter cited as CC). Rousseau asked for 60 louis (1440 livres) for a 4-5 volume "'recueil général."
52. Rey to Rousseau, 31 October 1758, CC, 5:199. "Mais mon Cher Rousseau, pour quoi vous aige payé? n'est ce pas pour acquerir le droit que vous y aviez? Vous ne voulez pas vendre 2 fois le meme ouvrage?"
53. Rousseau to Deluc, 9 February 1759, CC, 6:23. "[Rey] prétend . . . qu'ayant une fois acheté ma copie il en est l'unique propriétaire pour toutes les éditions à venir sans que j'aye désormais aucun droit sur mes propres ouvrages."
54. Birn, "Rousseau et ses éditeurs," 127. Birn's focus on Rousseau's strong proprietary claims in his correspondance with Rey and Malesherbes ultimately calls attention to the author's consistent unwillingness to pursue those claims in practice, a hesitancy to which I will return in the conclusion. See Forging Rousseau, 10, 17, 20.
55. Rousseau to Rey, 14 March 1759, CC, 6:44. "Vous avez raison de ne vouloir pas payer deux fois les mêmes ouvrages; mais moi je n'ai pas tort de ne vouloir pas vous faire présent de deux ans de mon tems."
56. D'Avenel, "Les Riches," 357.
57. Rousseau to Rey, 9 March 1758 and Rey to Rousseau, 24 May 1758, CC, 5:51,79. "Vous me donnerez trente Loüis de mon Manuscrit." "aujourd'huy je reçois votre MN que je payerai demain sans faute en une Lettre de Change sur Paris de 720 livres argent de Frce, ce qui fait 30 Louis, suivant votre demande, Dieu vous en fasse jouîr."
58. Rousseau to Rey, 18 February 1761, CC, 8:128. "j'aurai toujours deux mille francs et même cent loüis quand il me plaira."
59. Schinz ("Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le libraire-éditeur Marc-Michel Rey," 12) refers to the "incontestable honesty [incontestable honnêteté]" that Rousseau perceived in Rey. In his nineteenthcentury preface to the correspondance between author and publisher, J. Bosscha highlights Rey's "generous manners," to which Rousseau was especially receptive. J. Bosscha, ed., preface to Lettres inédites de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Marc-Michel Rey (Amsterdam: Frederick Muller, 1858).
60. Karl Gallas describes Rey as "good and of service" in "Autour de Marc-Michel Rey et de Rousseau," Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 17 (1926): 83.
61. More recently, Elizabeth Eisenstein, "The Libraire-Philosophe: Four Sketches of a Group Portrait," in Barbier, ed., Le Livre et l'historien, 545, has underscored Rousseau's own estimation of Rey as "honest and generous."
62. My translations. Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts [1751], Oeuvres complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-1995), 3:21 (hereafter cited as OC).
63. Rousseau, Lettre à M. d'Alembert sur son article "Genève" [1758], OC, 5:34. Viala discusses galanterie as a central cultural and aesthetic category in classical-era France, as well as Rousseau's subsequent rejection of it, "Les Signes galants: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie," trans. Daryl Lee, Yale French Studies 92 (1997): 11-29.
64. Robert Ellrich describes Rousseau's hostility to the neo-classical principle of plaire in Rousseau and his Reader: The Rhetorical Situation of the Major Works, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press), 83 (1969): 41.
65. Roche, Républicains des lettres, 219. James Swenson considers "homme de lettres" the "key term of social consecration in the Enlightenment," qualifying it as "primarily a social category."
66. On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 12.
67. See also Gregory S. Brown's discussion of the term in "Gens de lettres, Literary Institutions, and Court Culture in the Age of the French Enlightenment," in his introduction to A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press/EPIC, 2002). Electronic resource available from www.gutenberg-e.org.
68. Rousseau, Confessions, CW, 5:308 and OC, 1:367. "Le sucçès de mes premiers Ecrits m'avoit mis à la mode . . . Ma chambre ne desemplissoit pas de gens qui sous divers pretextes venoient s'emparer de mon tems."
69. Rousseau to Malesherbes, 4 January 1762, CW, 5:573 and CC, 10:6. "les moindres devoirs de la vie civile . . . Sont insupportables. Un mot à dire, une Lettre à écrire, une visitte a faire, dès qu'il Le faut, Sont pour moi des Suplices." Malesherbes was director of the official agency in charge of the book trade between 1750-63. Dated 4, 12, 26, and 28 January 1762, the four letters were a response to Malesherbes's concerns about Rousseau's isolation, which the administrator thought responsible for the author's melancholy. Mély (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 81 ) offers a detailed study of Rousseau's withdrawal between 1756 and 1762 from Parisian society and of his effort to "extricate literary creation from the constraints inherent to the social status of Enlightenment author." According to Mély, Rousseau's refusal to adhere to the norms of elite literary society challenged the very values by which that society distinguished gens de lettres, earning him the wrath of those writers who sought such a distinction.
70. Rousseau to Malesherbes, 12 January 1762, CC, 10:26 and CW, 5:576. "Une vive persuasion m'a toujours tenu Lieu d'Eloquence, et j'ai toujours ecrit Lachement et mal quand je n'ai pas eté fortement persuadé," "passionement attaché à La vérité."
71. Rousseau, CW, 5:430 and OC, 1:53. "je ne sus jamais écrire que par passion. Ce n'étoit assurément pas là ce qu'il falloit au Journal des Savans."
72. Rousseau to Malesherbes, 4 January 1762, CW, 5:573 and CC, 10:6. "En un mot L'espece de bonheur qu'il me faut N'est pas tant de faire ce que je veux que de ne pas faire ce que je ne veux pas."
73. Rousseau to Élisabeth-Sophie-Françoise Lalive de Bellegarde, comtesse d'Houdetot, 17 December 1757, CC, 4:393. "Enfin je suis libre; je puis reprendre le caractère de franchise et d'indépendance que m'a donné la nature."
74. In his Encyclopédie article, "Gens de lettres," Voltaire writes: "there are many gens de lettres who are not authors, and these are probably the happiest." Diderot and d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 36 vols. (Lausanne and Bern: Sociétés typographiques de Lausanne et Berne), 15 (1780):973.
75. In a more critical vein, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 2:319, satirized the inessential nature of publishing for the successful homme de lettre: "it is known that as soon as an author is an académicien, he thinks he is at the pinnacle of literary glory [au terme de la gloire littéraire]; he no longer does anything other than mingle in society. He is more often at the dinner table, than at his desk . . . For whom is the academic chair appropriate? For any man who no longer wants to write."
76. By Vivienne Mylne's account, a mere 134 out of 946 novels published between 1700 and 1750 named the author. The Eighteenth-Century Novel: Techniques of Illusion (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1965), 15.
77. Tronchin's Lettres écrites de la campagne is cited in Rousseau's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-95), 3:1648, n.2. "Ces livres annoncés dés long-tems pour être de Mr. Rousseau, paraissoient sous son nom, sous le même format, que ses autres ouvrages, imprimés par le même Libraire . . . Mr. Rousseau . . . se plaignoit de la persécution, mais il ne désavouoit pas cet ouvrage: En pareilles circonstances, ne pas le désavouer, n'étoit-ce pas l'avouer hautement."
78. Rousseau, CW, 9:219 and OC, 3:792. "d'avouer [leurs] Livres pour s'en faire honneur, et de les renier pour se mettre à couvert," "sans difficulté, sans scrupule," "un Auteur qui connoit son devoir, qui le veut remplir, se croit obligé de ne rien dire au public qu'il ne l'avoue, qu'il ne se nomme, qu'il ne se montre pour en répondre."
79. See also the entry for "Ouvrage," Encyclopédie, 24:205.
80. Also known as Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, this is Rousseau's least accessible text. Nonetheless, Christopher Kelly and Roger Masters consider it to be the work "in which Rousseau undertakes his most comprehensive reflection on the relations between himself as an author, his books, and his audience." They characterize it as "a sort of training manual for readers of the Confessions, or indeed for any of Rousseau's works." See Kelly and Masters, "Rousseau on Reading 'Jean-Jacques': The Dialogues," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (1989-90): 239-53.
81. Swenson (On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 116-35) offers an illuminating analysis of reading in the Dialogues, which emphasizes "the concordance between the author and his works." In Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988),
82. Peggy Kamuf focuses on the Dialogues as a key to understanding Rousseau's modern conception of authorship. Kamuf, too, underscores Rousseau's project of instructing his readers how to "see" the author: "The Dialogues . . . would undertake to show nothing more or less than sight,'" 100-1.
83. Rousseau, CW, 1:30 and OC, 1:697. "lisez vous-même les livres dont il s'agit et sur les dispositions où vous laissera leur lecture jugez de celle où étoit l'Auteur en les écrivant." Analyzing Rousseau's moral philosophy and its links with political economy, Pierre Force argues that Rousseau was the first author both to use the term "identification" in its modern sense and to identify the psychological concept. See Force, "Self-Love, Identification, and the Origin of Political Economy," Yale French Studies 92 (1997): 46-64.
84. Rousseau, CW, 1:52 and OC, 1:727-8. "J'y puisois des sentimens si conformes à ceux qui m'étoient naturels, j'y sentois tant de rapport avec mes propres dispositions que seul parmi tous les auteurs que j'ai lus il étoit pour moi le peintre de la nature et l'historien du coeur humain. Je reconnoissois dans ses écrits l'homme que je retrouvois en moi."
85. Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 120. Ellrich (Rousseau and his Reader, 75, 41) contrasts a premodern concept of the literary creation as an "object" for the reader to accept, the acceptance of which integrates the reader into a clearly defined social group, with a modern view of the work as a "lens" by which the author brings an individual reader around to a specific point of view.
86. Along similar lines, Darnton describes Rousseau's view of reading as the opening up of "a new channel of communication between two lonely beings." The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 231.
87. Rousseau, CW, 1:28-9 and OC, 1:695. "lisez tous ces passages dans le sens qu'ils presentent naturellement à l'esprit du lecteur et qu'ils avoient dans celui de l'auteur en les écrivant, lisez-les à leur place avec ce qui précéde et ce qui suit, consultez la disposition de coeur où ces lectures vous mettent; c'est cette disposition qui vous éclairera sur leur véritable sens."
88. Rousseau, CW, 1:212 and OC, 1:933-4. "J'y ai trouvé des maniéres de sentir et de voir qui le distinguent aisement de tous les écrivains de son tems et de la plus part de ceux qui l'ont précédé."
89. Rousseau to Rey, 10 August 1758, CC, 5:126. "Car s'il est jamais permis de toucher au texte d'un Auteur contre son gré, il faut au moins que ce ne soit que pour faire parfaitement bien."
90. Woodmansee begins her essay, "The Genius and the Copyright," with a citation from Georg Heinrich Zinck's 1753 Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon, in which "book" is defined as the product of a multiplicity of artisans, each of whose input into the final product was conceived according to no obvious hierarchy other than that set by the production process: "Many people work on the ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book...The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book binder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of commerce," 425. A similar economic-benefits view of the book trade can be found in Voltaire's "Lettre à un premier commis," dated 20 June 1733, which also equalized the diverse agents involved in the publication of books, including the author: "this novel supports the author who wrote it as well as the bookseller who sells it, and the type founder, and the printer, and the papermaker, and the binder, and the peddler, and the seller of bad wine, to whom each of the former brings his money." Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al. , 135 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968-), 9:320.
91. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1:363-4. "Quand un livre réussit, c'est le libraire qui met l'argent dans sa poche."
92. Jules Bertaut, La Vie littéraire en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Jules Tallendier, 1954), 350.
93. Proust, in his introduction to Sur la liberté de la presse, 11, asks why Diderot would have elected to defend the interest of the Parisian libraires in the Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie. Bertaut (La Vie littéraire, 352) offers a similar image of Diderot's relation with his publishers: "We have seen how badly he was paid for his crushing work on the Encyclopédie."
94. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 15 August 1762, Lettres à Sophie Volland, ed. André Babelon, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 2:126. "Ne dites point de mal de mes libraires, ils font tout ce que j'ai exigé."
95. Diderot, Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie, (Oeuvres complètes, 18:47) "on acquerrait de l'aisance si ces sommes n'étaient pas répandues sur un grand nombre d'années, ne s'évanouissaient pas à mesure qu'on les perçoit et n'étaient pas dissipées lorsque les années sont venues, les besoins accrus, les yeux éteints et l'esprit usé."
96. Rey to Rousseau, 4 September 1758, CC, 5:140. "si mes envoys arrivent en meme tems à Paris, Lyon, Geneve, j'aurai fait une bonne afaire, ou pour parler plus exactement, j'y aurai un profit bien gracieux."
97. Rey to Rousseau, 7 December 1761, CC, 9:299. "J'ay gagné Sur la Nouvelle Héloïse 10.000 livres."
98. Rousseau to Rey, 5 November 1760, CC, 7:300. "en recevoir aucune Sorte de bénéfice, en repos de conscience." Malesherbes agreed to this edition because, since privileges had no legal bearing across international borders, he had no basis upon which to deny the publication of a work that had been originally printed outside France. To help ease Rousseau's conscience, Malesherbes pointed out that Rey was aware of this and no doubt expected it, thus Rousseau should not feel that he was betraying Rey by endorsing the Parisian edition with his agreement to be paid. This was, of course, the case. Ultimately, Rousseau was persuaded to accept 1000 francs from the bookseller Robin, of which he offered, although never actually gave, 500 francs to Rey. See the letters from Malesherbes to Rousseau of 29 October and 13 November 1760, CC, 7:269-70, 312-3.
99. For a very complete account of the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse, see Jo-Ann McEachern's introduction to her Bibliography of the Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 1800: I. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 13-142.
100. In a different vein, Jean Starobinski, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le péril de la réflexion," L'Oeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 95-6, has discussed Rousseau's aggressive defensiveness: "From then on, Rousseau's gestures were less initiatives than counterstrikes, challenges to his accusers, subtle and violent denials, retorts and justifications before the suspecting vigilance by which he believes himself to be pursued."
101. Rousseau to Rey, 29 May 1755, CC, 3:129-30. "Au bout de huit mois cet ouvrage qui devoit être prêt en Six semaines est encore à paroitre . . . [J]e vous previens que si vôtre édition n'est publique à Amsterdam avant le pr Juillet vous en verrez paroitre une à Londres le pr d'Aoust, car il n'y a point d'imprimeur qui ne fasse aisément en quatre semaines ce que vous n'aurez pu faire en huit mois."
102. Rousseau took an especially harsh stance against counterfeiting, which he articulated in a number of public statements, most notably an open letter submitted by Rey to the Gazette d'Amsterdam in 1763 and a Déclaration relative à différentes réimpressions de ses ouvrages, which Rousseau circulated in 1774. The first text is cited in Schinz, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le libraire-imprimeur Marc Michel Rey," 56-57; the second is included in Rousseau, OC, 1:1187. Rousseau staked out a quite specific position against counterfeiting by representing it principally as an attack on his authorial integrity. More orthodox perspectives for the time, articulated by writers such as Malesherbes and Diderot, tended to see literary piracy as a more legal or commercial problem, that is, as a violation of intellectual property rights and, therefore, as a form of theft.
103. Rousseau to Duchesne, 30 October 1761, CC, 9:214. "Ne vous en prenez donc pas à d'autres si les contrefacteurs vous épient, et si vos lenteurs leurs donnent tout le tems de dresser leurs bateries pour vous surprendre."
104. Malesherbes to Rousseau, 7 December 1761, CC, 9:214. "je vous diray que je n'ay jamais vu de libraire a qui les auteurs pour qui ils impriment ne fissent ce reproche."
105. Malesherbes to Rousseau, 25 December 1761, CC, 9:355. "Monsieur, je vous diray avec toute la franchise qui vous est due que j'ay vu dans tous vos procedés une extreme sensibilité, un grand fond de melancholie et beaucoup de disposition à voir les objets du coté le plus noir."
106. Rousseau to Rey, 31 May 1758, CC, 5:85. "L'attente et l'incertitude sont les fléaux de ma vie, la pauvreté n'est rien auprès des peines de l'ame et j'aimerois beaucoup mieux que vous eussiez été moins exact à me payer et un peu plus à m'écrire." Rousseau here is exasperated at the publisher's slowness in responding to his offer of the Lettre à d'Alembert manuscript.
107. Rousseau to Rey, 31 May 1758, CC, 5:85. "La correction de l'ouvrage que vous allez imprimer m'importe et m'inquiete plus que je ne saurois vous dire. Il m'est impossible quant à présent d'aller y veiller; mais il ne l'est pas que vous me fassiez parvenir les épreuves."
108. Rousseau to Rey, 9 June 1764, CC, 20:169. "Je ne cesserai de trembler sur l'exécution jusqu'à ce que la dernière bonne feuille me soit parvenue."
109. Rousseau to Rey, 9 June 1764, CC, 20:169. "une faute, un contresens un qui pro quo sont capables de tout gâter."
110. Rousseau to Rey, 28 June 1758, CC, 5:102. "les fautes vont en augmentant et si ce progrés continue, la fin de l'ouvrage ne sera pas reconoissable."
111. Rousseau to Rey, 28 June 1758, CC, 5:102. The other errors include printing "plus" for "point"; "Les pourquoi" for "Tes pourquoi"'; "est coupable, est dépravée" for "est coupable et dépravée"; and "qui ne sont" for "qui ne sent." Rousseau's corrections were interspersed with oblique statements that urgently conveyed but pointedly did not explain the seriousness of the changes. "This correction is indispensable for many reasons that I do not have the time to detail," he writes about the first error. Regarding the last one: "this mistake is intolerable."
112. Rousseau to Rey, 14 March 1759, CC, 6:44. "On suivra exactement mon manuscrit, l'orthographe, la ponctuation, même les fautes, sans se mêler d'y rien corriger."
113. Rousseau to Rey, 25 May 1760, CC, 7:107. "j'aime mieux que vous laissiez mes fautes, que de faire des corrections qui ne soient pas sur le MS. parce qu'il vous est impossible de distinguer surement les fautes qui m'échappent de celles que je veux laisser."
114. Rousseau to Rey, 10 August 1758, CC, 5:126. "Il n'y a dans cette phrase aucune espéce d'Hiatus."
115. Rousseau to Rey, 21 June 1758, CC, 5:96. "Je vous en remercierais de meilleur coeur encore si je ne craignois de vous encourager à en faire d'autres. Pour Dieu, laissez plustôt ce qui est mal dans le Manuscrit, car vous pourriez y substituer quelque mieux qui me desolerait." It should, of course, be remembered that, in the case of the Nouvelle Héloïse, deliberate errors were a strategic part of the rendering of Julie's unsophisticated, "natural" writing, errors that, as Rousseau explained in the second preface, "are more worthy than the knowledge of Sages" (CW, 6:11 and OC, 2:16). The same gesture in the context of the publication of the Lettre à d'Alembert does suggest, however, that Rousseau's opposition to editorial correction was also representative of a more general anxiety about the role of book trade intermediaries in the communication of a literary work to a reader.
116. Kamuf, Signature Pieces, 112.
117. Rousseau's most extraordinary account of this "complot" can be found in the first of the three Dialogues that comprise Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. See CW, 1:39-47 and OC, 1:705-717.
118. See, for example, the Déclaration relative à différentes réimpressions de ses ouvrages, OC, 1:1187.
119. Rousseau to Paul-Claude Moultou, 28 March 1770, CC, 37:350 and OC, 1:1187. "les réimpressions de Rey contiennent exactement les mêmes altérations, suppressions, falsifications que celles de France, et que les unes et les autres ont été faites sur le même modèle et sous les mêmes directions."
120. Both Schinz and Bernard Gagnebin have tried to unravel the series of events that led to Rousseau's public repudiation of Rey. It seems that in 1773 Rousseau had asked Rey for a copy of the Nouvelle Héloïse, the only one of his works that he had any desire to reread in those days. Expecting Rey's original edition, Rousseau was surprised to get "a very different edition." This led him to the conclusion of the Déclaration, namely that Rey was circulating the same falsified copies of his works as everyone else. Schinz and Gagnebin have, however, struggled to determine what was so objectionable about the edition of the Nouvelle Héloïse that Rey had sent, both suggesting that Rousseau had simply failed to recall certain changes that he had authorized, rather than detecting anything surreptitious or dishonest on the part of Rey. See Schinz, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau," 115-30 and Gagnebin's note 3 to the Déclaration in Rousseau, OC, 1:1186.
121. See also Rousseau's letter to Rey of 16 December 1773, CC, 39:212, in which Rousseau first confronts Rey. Unfortunately, as Schinz points out, the exact details of the rupture have remained elusive in part because Rey's responses to Rousseau have been lost.
122. Bosscha ed., Lettres inédites, v-vi. deems the relationship to be "more intimate than is ordinarily that of an author and his/her publisher." Critics invariably underscore the extent to which the relationship went beyond the parameters of more conventional book trade transactions. See, for instance, Schinz, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le libraire," 12 and Birn ("Rousseau et ses éditeurs," 121 and Forging Rousseau, 20), who discusses the "affinity between the hypersensitive author and his plodding bookseller." Eisenstein ("The Libraire-Philosophe," 545) emphasizes the basic instability of the relationship and Rousseau's "ambivalent fluctuation between gratitude and hostility."