as teachers or critics of literature.10 But “multiple job holding” undermines the autonomy projected in the utopian image of “living by the pen,” and challenges its central association of the social identity of the writer with the fundamental link tying an individual to his or her works, expressed in the defining labor of “faire des livres.”11 Leaving aside the often very visible but statistically outlying exceptions,12 it must be acknowledged that no writer today can really be said, without some qualification, to “live by the pen,” not according to the meaning that this phrase has acquired in the historiography of early modern literary practices. And in this respect, “modern authorship” is perhaps not a whole lot different from the eclectic and, in the language of Pierre Bourdieu, “heteronomous” array of cultural, institutional, and social exchanges that defined an individual as an homme or femme de lettres in the Old Regime.13 As Vessillier-Ressi writes, “we might ask ourselves if the amateurism which was the rule in the economy of creation of the distant past is not still a prevalent phenomenon today in the majority of cases.”14
If not an “objective” socioeconomic regime in which writers could live by the sale of the products of their creative labors, then what do such writers as Diderot and Rousseau prefigure? What transition—if any at all—do they mark in reimagining literary practice in and through the commercial opportunities and legal rights of book publishing? The elusiveness of the shift is manifest, it seems to me, in a tendency to advance the history of authorship by always pushing the pivotal moment of authorial awakening back in time, with studies at least partly driven by the goal of establishing that the growing attention of writers to their “interests” and “rights” occurred earlier than was thought, say, in the first half of the eighteenth century rather than the second, or in the seventeenth century or earlier.15 Such research has produced crucial insights into the interactions between writers and the publishing industry in periods overlooked by an older scholarship that figured the early exchanges with booksellers to be devoid of meaning for the lives of writers. What is less clear, though, is how persuasive they can be as accounts of “modernization” in the cultural sphere, for the risk is to assume what ultimately undermines the notion of the author as a construct of modernity: that authorship consists in a timeless potential for self-realization, merely waiting for the right individuals to stumble on the insight. The emphasis on finding an earlier originary moment might presuppose that the desire to “live by the pen” and to write “autonomously” in the sense of writing without any need for aristocratic protection is a universal ahistorical one, which only required writers sufficiently lucid and self-aware to give expression to it. The crux of the matter is then whether such clear-headed writers—as opposed to the ideal of the “author” itself— existed in a particular time, with the underlying thrust often being that prior generations of scholars, who had situated the emergence of “modern authorship” at a later historical juncture, simply lacked the knowledge and appreciation of the earlier age to see how savvy and insightful its best intellectuals really were.
There is a great deal of validity to the point. The effort to find the “first modern author” has certainly been fueled by incomplete knowledge of what comes before. One result is the ridiculous notion that early writers were indifferent to the benefits of print publication, including that of economic gain.16 At the same time, however, observing that these gens de lettres had extensive and deliberate contacts with the world of the commercial press earlier than had been thought, even in the dawn of print, does not by itself demonstrate their modernity because “modern authorship” does not consist in these contacts per se, no matter how motivated, interested, or proprietary they might have been. On their own, they do not make writers modern. The causality, in fact, goes in the reverse direction; it is writers who transform their contacts with the book trade into powerful signifiers of their modernity. They do so as part of a rearticulation of their legitimacy in terms of a new but contingent vision of their social autonomy from patrons, based on an idealization of themselves as “producers” with “rights” to a livelihood from the income earned on the products of their “artistic” labors—we shall see that other ideals of the freedom of intellectuals were current, even dominant. The book trade and intellectual modernity can be linked to the extent that the new claim to legitimacy conveys an assertion of its progressiveness with respect to the “traditional” ideals that it seeks to replace, and that contacts with the book trade become the privileged testimonials to the liberation on which this legitimacy is based.
The “modernity” of the author who turns to commercial print inheres, then, in the strategic appropriation of an identity defined by this concept of independence, which projects simultaneously the claim to remuneration for the fruits of creative “toil” and the will to pursue a literary life outside of the old networks of royal and noble patronage. Indeed, modern authorship consists in the collapse of the two objectives into one unified motive according to which the expression of desire to be liberated from subordination to protectors becomes at the same time a demand to be compensated for literary labors, while conversely—and herein lies one of the central arguments of this study—the demand for compensation from a libraire, however it may be formulated and regardless of its positive or negative end result, instantly conveys a repudiation in the name of the writer’s dedication and authenticity of all the personal compromises required by participation in an overindulged hierarchical leisure society.
Such a motive, and the claim to a modern intellectual self to which it gives rise, is not the reflection of a timeless longing for freedom of thought or creative control; nor does it ensue from any “natural” sense that one should be paid for the products of one’s labors, whether these are physical or intellectual. The following two chapters instead locate the roots of the new vision in the evolution of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural field, and particularly in a development that might appear unrelated to the narrative of authorial modernization, namely the convergence of “letters”— identified retrospectively as “literature”—with the activities and values of a self-consciously new social elite, which appropriated “literary” writing forms—along with their writers—in assertions of its cohesiveness, brilliance, and, indeed, its modernity. Out of this intellectual and social fusion emerge familiar images of the writer as a “salon” or “court poet,” who far from representing autonomy from elites will come to symbolize the subjugation of literature to “nonliterary” priorities in the Old Regime. Yet the articulation of a new cultural value in the language of elite sociability produces other images of the writer as well, almost as by-products, including most pertinently a view of the writer as too interested in commercial profit and too ready to pursue gain in the book trade. The image, of course, stands as a sharply devalorized view. But this should not lead us to underestimate its importance for the rising culture of honnêteté, in which it functions as a negative foil defining and accentuating legitimate motives and behaviors, such as aristocratic disinterest, leisure and a commitment to upholding the elegant dynamic of the group over one’s own individual brilliance.
For it was to the degree that writing for economic gain in the publishing sector indicated with clarity and self-evidence the intellectual’s exteriority with respect to elite social circles and his or her refusal or inability to abide by their ethical norms that rejections of commercial benefit and “professionalism” could manifest with equal transparency the personal qualities that they evoked. Part I argues that, as an institution of authorial modernization, the “literary market” has its origins here rather than in the “objective” growth of the book trade or the awakening of a long-dormant desire among gens de lettres for independence. We begin, in other words, with the elite socialization of writing, unfolding as a reciprocal process by which, on one hand, intellectual legitimacy was redefined to reflect the values of aristocratic sociability, with writers and their works increasingly esteemed for their refinement, polish, and ability to please in hours of leisure, while on the other hand, aristocratic sociability was reconfigured along intellectual, linguistic, and even “literary” lines. Polite conversation, wit, and belles-lettres prevailed over cruder, physical forms of interaction. Out of this dynamic, an image of the writer’s autonomy gains currency. Formulated in
