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 the self-presentational rhetoric of writers engaged in the decisive battles over legitimacy comprise an equally important development for the evolution of intellectual practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Though influenced by changing conditions in the publishing sphere, this development was not a direct translation of them. Instead, it was defined by two related aspects: first, an investment of meaning in economically themed images that then clearly conveyed the writer’s authority and preeminence— thus the writer’s refusal to accept income from a publisher stood as an instantly recognized sign of his or her aristocratic quality, and second, the inevitable noncorrespondence of these images to the “objective” reality of the writer’s commercial dealings with publishers and patrons, inasmuch as the images sought not a “realistic” account but a conceptual transformation of the cultural sphere as a space in which the writer’s transcendent status would be readable and widely accepted.
The “literary market” is an illuminating concept by which this process can be accessed in all its nuances. It has of course played a familiar and prominent role in much scholarship on the evolution of authorship in the Old Regime as one of the principal institutions allowing writers to make a transition out of the patronage system and into modernity. Such accounts, though, have not always adequately described the complexity of the passage, and thus of the market’s function. Nor have they appreciated the capacity of the market, as a model, to figure the constitutive ambiguity of writers’ engagements with money and commerce in the period, a fact that is suggested by a consistent inability to reconcile the contradictory articulations of the market’s role in this process as an institution of liberation and economic self-reliance for writers, on one hand, and as a newly oppressive system subjecting gens de lettres to its mercantile logic, on the other. This is due, I would argue, to a tendency associated with the overriding focus on “objective” circumstances to identify the market too directly with the publishing industry or the book trade, and thereby to consider it primarily as another facet of the “true lives” of writers. But the “literary market” is a qualitatively different type of configuration, which finds its conceptual coherence not in the economic reality of the book trade but in the convergence of the book trade’s “objectivity” with the evolving expectations of those who aspire to a literary identity.
Thus we can envision a publishing sector without writers, or more exactly without living writers with something at stake—whether income or esteem—in a particular print job. Explaining why property rights for the earliest works were nonexistent, Diderot described the Renaissance book trade as an authorless industry: “the first privileges had for their object only ancient works.”7 By contrast, we can hardly envision the literary market without living writers bringing into their contacts with the book trade an urgent investment in its outcomes, and engaging publication through an array of ambitions, anxieties, and frustrations which, in turn, clearly characterize for us the figure of the “modern author.” This is because the literary market is the product of their investments and anxieties. For while it is not the book trade per se, the market is the perception and representation of the book trade by writers who turn to it and conceptualize it, through their aspirations and fears, as a system whose fundamental purpose is not making and selling books, but transforming manuscripts into Great Works, and identifying individuals, on the basis of these works, as esteemed and independent Authors. Its currency is legitimacy, autonomy, and prestige. Money has value to the extent that, by its abundance or its dearth, it can be converted.
A reconsideration of the market can therefore probe much more than changes in the publishing sphere. It also offers an entry into the shifting mentalities of writers and into their evolving ideals of legitimacy as they struggle, in the framework of an established cultural order whose standards and conventions were nonetheless a target of incessant debate, to lay claim to valorized identities. To push matters farther, the market is not just a specific image of the publishing sphere but also the effort to impose this image as a faithful representation both of an artisanal sector—the print industry— that really was about intellectual identities and values, and of a cultural field whose outlines were precisely those of the book trade. It is, as such, necessarily a rhetorical or a polemical construct, the pertinence of which lies in the degree to which its claim to being a faithful depiction of things is accepted, believed, or more subtly and accurately perhaps, indulged—by readers who do not so much wholeheartedly “believe” in the authors’ biased view of the publishing world, as grasp the importance, for the realization of literary value and hence for their own self-esteem as consumers of Literature, of sustaining the illusion. Thus, they go along, for instance, with received ideas about the poverty of a writer in order to uphold a collective belief in his ennobling struggle, which then grounds the value of his work and the symbolic payoff of reading it. In this fashion, the literary market takes form as an “instrument … of the struggle for the definition of reality,” to adapt the terms of Pierre Bourdieu.8
To be sure, Bourdieu’s work, particularly his model of the “field,” is paramount for my study, which argues, in a sense, that the market’s emergence is concomitant less with the development of the book trade per se than with its conceptualization as a field of authorship. Formulated as a “literary” or “cultural” field, or as a “field of cultural production,” the concept seeks to define, beneath these variances, the logic of the literary and artistic world with reference to a specifically modern vision of intellectual autonomy, traced to the late nineteenth century and defined in light of at least two key variables.9 The first is the colonization of the cultural world by the bourgeois industrial economy of the Second Empire, with its “exaltation of money” and utilitarian ethic.10 The field in this scenario defines the autonomy of writers in terms of a free space that they carve out for themselves where “artistic,” not “economic,” values predominate, and in which they can then ignore the demands of the industry and the conventional tastes of a large readership in order to act as their own public and judges, according to the “pure aesthetic” values of l’art pour l’art.11 The second is the decisive role played by “cultural intermediaries,” such as art dealers, agents, publishers, critics, and others who mediate the relation between artists and publics, shaping the perception of the former by the latter. Here the theory of the field stands in opposition to a sublimated, Romantic notion of artistic value as the pure emanation of the genius and travails of a singular individual by emphasizing the extended network of actors who collectively contribute—either supportively or antagonistically—to what Bourdieu called “the production of belief” in the value of the work and in the brilliance of the artist. Ultimately, the model problematizes rather than defines autonomy.12
This second conceptualization of the field is crucial for my analysis, which assumes literary value to be an object of mediation or, to recall Greenblatt, of negotiation between a diverse array of agents bringing heterogeneous interests—intellectual, social, political, economic—into the process.13 Indeed, the battle is not simply about the amount of value or whether it is negative or positive, but over its quality and meaning:
