Corneille’s interventions into the book trade, played up in the polemical writings of his enemies, designate a “prehistory” against which the court elites and salon poets of midcentury would articulate a sense of their own progressiveness.
What is more, this alternative narrative inverts the causal relation between commerce and modernity that is normally posited by the account of the heroic precursor asserting rights. In a standard telling, the expansion of literary commerce induces modernity by offering gens de lettres the material conditions for their social liberation. Commerce in this view operates as an external force that bends and alters the “traditional” practices, attitudes, and institutions of Old Regime literary life according to its own logic. In the confrontation between patronage and the book trade, it is almost always assumed that the latter, in opening up the space of the “literary market,” undermines the former as the opportunities extended by commercial print draw writers away from their rich and powerful sponsors, toward new liberated modes of authorship.
But the story that seventeenth-century writers tell of their own transformation suggests a different sequence, according to which commercialization is not a cause but an effect. As it erupts into the Querelle, for instance, “commerce” is not an objective driving force of change, but a subjective valuation reflecting the social and intellectual evolution that is the institutionalization of the first literary field. In this respect, “commercialization” is not the result of the mounting interest of writers in commercial payments and property rights, as Viala argued.126 Rather, it is the expression of a new kind of social judgment of gens de lettres, articulated in the diffusion of images of writers according a disproportionate place to their concrete, motivated involvement in publication. Tallement rehearses in detail the terms of a contract that Jean Chapelain received from the bookseller Courbé for La Pucelle—3,000 livres plus 150 copies including “several which, because of the paper and the binding, cost 10 écus and more.” Commerce surges into the world of letters in this portrait, but not because Chapelain was in fact more involved than other writers in the sale of his works to publishers, or involved in a way that others had never been. Rather, it bursts in as a transparent and powerful signifier of negativity, invoked to complete what is already a critical portrait of an individual whose stature and reputation Tallement wants to undermine.127
Finally, it is worth spelling out what is implicit in this analysis, since it will be central to what follows in the next chapters. Literary commerce is not only the effect of a social judgment; it is also, by this same token, the invention of that in the name of which the judgment is pronounced: namely, the cultural ethic of mondanité. And in this respect “literary commerce” does not refer to a natural, instinctive, or primal phenomenon. The tendency, though, in studying the historic role of publication in the evolution of literary practices has been to construe “commercialized” gestures—the demand for direct payment in exchange for works or the claim to property rights— as the manifestations of “true” desires expressive of the fundamental nature of the Author. By contrast, “anticommercial” moves—refusing payment or neglecting rights—are considered to be affected and constrained gestures reflecting incidental desires, such as those for recognition from social and political benefactors, desires assumed to be functions more of the contingent circumstances in which the writer operates than of anything essential to the nature of writing and Authorship. As a result, writers “automatically” move into the market of their own free will once they have the chance, but they enter into patronage relations only because they have to, for lack of an alternative. Commerce is then associated with “liberation” inasmuch as it is considered to furnish writers with just such a possibility, thereby allowing them to act on those defining drives, which had been repressed and disfigured by a symbolic order imposing on literary life a decorum seen as “artificial” since it reflects “nonliterary,” heterogeneous ideals and values.
In the discourses of seventeenth-century literary selfhood, however, the opposition of “true” to accidental desires is exactly inverted. Here, “literary commerce” points to a disfiguration, not of the author, to be sure, but of the social function of the homme de lettres as imagined within the cultural configuration of le monde. And the desire for property rights and droits d’auteur are neither “true” nor “natural” but are the constructs of this symbolic order. Rather than discovered, they are invented as possible modes of writing and literary selfhood, which, driven by authorial self-interest and impoliteness, will offer a counterpoint to legitimacy. This symbolic constitution of “literary commerce” will be critical for gens de lettres of the eighteenth century, for as we will see, they turn to la librairie less for the economic and legal conditions of a social liberation that they will hardly find, but to position themselves vis-à-vis elite society, either within it following patterns inherited from the Classical age or outside of it, according to newer ideals that will root the legitimacy of writers in their sincerity, seriousness, and devotion to truth. It is the argument of this book that the “literary market” as a cultural field grows as much out of the seventeenth-century investment of the “commerce of letters” with meaning for the identity and authority of the intellectual, as out of the economic development of the publishing industry.
2
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
