authorial modernity not in terms of a decisive break with an old culture of honnête intellectual activity, but as “modernity” took root and developed within early modern culture. Thus, one of my assumptions is that the key principles of honnête publication— and in particular, the construal of autonomy as a function of legitimacy rather than legitimacy as a function of a specific ideal of autonomy—remain at the heart of modern literary life and identity, even though the latter, oriented around ideals of sincerity and selfless dedication, are presumed to be in fierce opposition to the ritualized codes of honnêteté (the duplicity— another notion advanced by Viala—is critical to my account). Moreover, to the degree that literary honnêteté, as it evolved in the seventeenth century and into the Enlightenment, was predicated on assertions of its own innovativeness and progress with respect to previous intellectual traditions and strategies, depicted as more constrained and primitive, we might add that the literary field, to the extent that it is always in some measure a field of honnête publication, is by the same token always a “first literary field.”
Finally, this book is both about Old Regime France and not about it. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France presents a rich historical context in which to explore how these issues play out. And inevitably they do so, as the term itself of honnête publication implies, in ways that are specific to the time and place. My study seeks, of course, to identify and elucidate these particularities. My hope, however, is that this study will also broach, and propose some answers to, broader questions regarding the engagement of writers with commerce, and the ways in which commerce in turn shapes and is shaped by writers’ battles over legitimacy and its definitions, not just in France or under the Old Regime, but anywhere and anytime that money enters into the literary enterprise.
PART ONE
WRITING, PUBLISHING, AND LITERARY IDENTITY IN THE “PREHISTORY OF DROIT D’AUTEUR”
The Story of a Transition: When and How Did Writers Become “Modern”?
The “literary market” has been a key concept in accounts of cultural and literary practices in Old Regime France, particularly for studies of the author as a “modern” principle of intellectual coherence and legitimacy. In these accounts, the birth of the author is predicated on the writer’s growing independence from early modern political, social, and cultural institutions, which for their part are presumed to inhibit the sincere, personal expression that will be at the core of the claim to distinction and credibility conveyed by the emerging ideal. This independence has been interpreted in no small measure as a function of the new possibilities extended to gens de lettres by a book trade whose expansion becomes, in turn, a measure of the growing ability of writers, by selling their works to publishers, to extricate themselves from the networks of Old Regime literary life in order to address a broader public, and in so doing claim a new kind of authority.
In the effort to map out this process, scholars have been drawn to identify the first writer “to live by the pen.” Both Alain-René Le Sage and the abbé Prévost have been presented as inaugurators of such an independence for gens de lettres in eighteenth-century France, not for anything that either said on the topic, it should be stressed, but due to the fact that direct earnings from publishing seem to have played a relatively more important role in their overall trajectories than in those of other writers of the time.1 Still, as Wallace Kirsop points out, “it is not easy—even in the eighteenth century—to discover someone who lives exclusively by the pen.”2 Whatever place publishing income occupied in their lives, potential candidates invariably turn out, on closer examination, to have also been deeply implicated in the traditional patronage system, ultimately relying on noncommercial forms of support as much as or more than earnings from manuscript sales. Dubious of the received wisdom about Le Sage and Prévost, John Lough calls attention to their non-market income, including for the former a 600–livre pension from the son of Louis XIV’s foreign minister and for the latter a remunerative priory.3
More fundamentally, though, the search itself is flawed, since it presupposes that writers had already discerned and internalized an essential, qualitative distinction between commercial and noncommercial pay, and that they therefore considered any move on their part toward market-based compensation as, in and of itself, a gesture of repudiation of noble protection in the name of “autonomy.” In early eighteenth-century France, it is not clear that even money-making authors such as Le Sage or Prévost perceived what they earned in the book trade as representing such a choice. Payment from libraires was scarcely destined to replace traditional revenue sources, but to supplement them when the pensions and sinecures proved inadequate to support the livelihood of the writer. In this sense, Prévost wrote for the commercial press not in order to free himself from the protection of the prince de Conti, whose almoner he became in 1735, but because this position, while offering protection and credibility, did not furnish income. It would therefore be more accurate to say that Prévost wrote for the book trade not to escape Conti’s household but to uphold his place within it, and to continue to reap the benefits that such a position brought him.
As a result, more persuasive contributions to the debate have instead focused not on the first economically self-sufficient writers, but on those who initially imagined such independence, even if they were not able to live it out. Rather than identify the “first writers to live by the pen,” these studies seek out those who first postulated the idea, highlighting the conditions in which “living by the pen” initially became thinkable: “at least [a] possibility,” writes Lough.4 “In the course of the eighteenth century … we see progressively emerge, if not payment to authors as we understand it, at least the principle of a specific monetary remuneration for literary activity,” observes Henri-Jean Martin.5 Jules Bertaut’s 1950s study of Enlightenment-era “literary life” similarly emphasizes an emerging psychological landscape—the rising hope of autonomy through publishing—which anticipates but is not identifiable with actual self-sufficiency: “around 1770, the situation slowly modifies: writers have learned to defend themselves…. On the eve of the Revolution, they foresee that one day—perhaps—they will be able to live by their pens.”6 Among those considered to have glimpsed this day early on, Diderot tends to count as a prescient advocate of “professionalism” for writers.7 So does Rousseau, if in a different kind of mode, given that he mobilized not for writing as a “métier” but for the legal and commercial recognition of the inviolable connection between a writer and a work.8
Yet while they are surely more convincing as descriptions of the hybrid conditions under which writers of the Enlightenment operated, such studies are probably no less idealistic in their characterization of the historical transition that these pioneering writers invoked. The implication is that, even if they themselves did not benefit from its fruits, nonetheless, through their foresight and keen anticipation, these writers represented a transformation in the lives of gens de lettres that was no less real for being deferred into the future. But it is well worth interrogating the nature of the change signaled by this new expectation. Writers envisaged a day when they would be fairly paid for their labors. We presume their visions to be meaningful to the degree that they prefigure an actual evolution. But what if they did not? And what if the development was in fact something quite different?
Describing the late twentieth-century literary field, Robert Escarpit noted that a young novelist bringing a manuscript to a publisher with the hope of receiving a modest income of 10,000 francs for his work “has a lower chance of reaching his goal than if he had bought a lottery ticket.”9 Less provocatively, Michèle Vessillier-Ressi nonetheless confirms the view that only a fraction of writers in the contemporary period derive enough from the sale of their writings to publishers to support themselves. The majority—two-thirds, according to the data she has compiled—rely instead on an “accumulation of jobs.” That is, they must hold down secondary employment that not only “pays the bills,”
