of a teleology of intellectual liberation in a single figure defined by the process, there is a marked tendency for the history of intellectual autonomization that is the history of authorship to double, in turn, as a history of individualization. This is the case not only in the sense referenced by Foucault in his famous essay “What Is an Author?”—which considered individualization in terms of the focalization of the sources of intellectual authority and coherence in one person9—but also insofar as the writing of the history of authorship has so often been drawn to exceptional figures who stand out in their precociousness and unique insight against the mass of their contemporaries, and whose lonely struggles are then considered singlehandedly to drive the narrative. In a characteristic formulation, Raymond Birn observes that Rousseau, “more than any other writer of the eighteenth century, tried to impose his work on a free cultural market…. In his commercial activities as in his creative life, Rousseau was rooted in criteria of understanding that were original and personal.”10
Conversely, the history of authorship offers a paradoxical or incongruous account as soon as such transcendent cultural icons as Diderot or Beaumarchais are not its protagonists. The literary property debates of the early and mid-eighteenth century were, for instance, engaged not by forward-looking “modern” writers loudly asserting their “natural” rights but by wealthy Parisian libraires who sought to consolidate their privileges and extend their control over the industry. “Ironically,” Carla Hesse remarks, “the argument that ideas were the property of the individual author was first advanced in defense of the monopoly of the Paris Publisher’s Guild on texts whose authors were long since dead.”11 But what makes this “ironic”? Not really the specific circumstances of the literary world in the time, which do not in and of themselves imply that there was anything counterintuitive or strange about the leading role played by the Parisian booksellers and printers in the cause of intellectual property rights, or about the noticeable lack of interest of established gens de lettres in that mobilization. The irony ensues from the prior assumption that a pro-property argument should more fittingly emerge from the struggles and thoughts of a writer claiming those rights in an effort to maximize his or her social autonomy. Only as they are filtered through those thoughts and that heroic struggle do the rise of intellectual property and the birth of the author acquire meaning.
The Precursor’s Silence
One individual through whose consciousness the “birth of the author” is thought to have been refracted is Pierre Corneille. In his long-term study of authorship as a juridical concept from antiquity into the modern age, Bernard Edelman highlights the playwright’s contribution to the “consecration of the author,” which begins with a moment of illumination: “the sudden insight lies in a simple formula: that the genius is free, … and that he owes this freedom only to himself and his own powers.”12 Bringing this insight to bear into the field of public discourse with his 1637 poem “Excuse à Ariste,” Corneille sparked the polemics of the Querelle du Cid in the course of which “a new sovereignty of the author” was outlined. “In these debates,” Edelman continues, “the eighteenth-century is already anticipated.” Underscoring the playwright’s precociousness, he echoes numerous assessments of Corneille’s foresight. Marc Fumaroli describes Corneille’s “concern for the economic foundation of the activities of the writer” as most unusual for the age. He points to a 1643 request for lettres patentes by which the playwright sought official control over the performance of three of his recent tragedies, Cinna, Polyeucte, and La mort de Pompée, construing the administrative appeal as an endeavor to protect his intellectual property rights in a time when, Fumaroli goes on to argue, “the notion itself was practically unknown.”13 Claire Carlin concurs, deeming the petition “a move unheard of at the time.”14
For Viala, too, Corneille is a “precursor” who mobilized to “benefit from the profits that he could draw from his works.”15 To be sure, the appraisal from a 1984 article must be nuanced against Viala’s much larger investigation into the commercial and legal claims of gens de lettres in his well-known 1985 study of the Naissance de l’écrivain. There Viala argues that a concern for money and property rights, especially among playwrights, was more widespread in the mid-seventeenth century than had been assumed. In this respect, Corneille stands out less as an extraordinary case for his “unheard of” claims than as a remarkably salient and illustrative one who advanced more forcefully what others were thinking: “Thus dramatists, and particularly Corneille, were the most active in asserting their property rights.”16 Still, while the tragedian’s singularity is no longer quite so emphasized, it is nonetheless conveyed by the relative dearth of other examples that might more persuasively round out the impression of a broad commitment to property and payments: “Led by dramatic authors, writers acted energetically and persistently to claim their literary property rights, initiating the movement that Beaumarchais would complete in founding the Société des auteurs dramatiques and in obtaining the laws of 1791 and 1793.”17 Viala goes on to conclude, “the affirmation and practice of literary property certainly already existed, therefore, in the Classical age.”18 But as further evidence only Quinault and Racine are mentioned, although neither make as straightforward and direct a case for owning the “rights” to their texts—whether printed or performed—as that suggested by the legal recourse of Corneille’s lettres patentes.19
In truth, the most deliberate, concrete, and widespread indications of a pervasive rise in the commitment among gens de lettres to a proprietary vision of authorship in Viala’s account lie not in anything that writers such as Quinault or Racine said or did, but in the efforts of others to resist the burgeoning sense of economic and legal entitlement. The most compelling evidence is, in other words, negative not positive. Viala describes, for instance, a monarchical backlash “to the demands of authors” in a series of regulations stipulated by the Conseil du Roi between 1618 and the 1660s. Among other things, these rules forbade writers to sell their own books except through the intermediary of a libraire; formally abolished the older and by that time mostly abandoned custom of granting writers general privileges to their entire oeuvre, including to works still to be written; and supported the increasingly common practice of renewing privilèges upon their expiration, which strengthened the position of established publishers who had an incentive to sit on their old stock.20 In each case, Viala argues, the goal of the Conseil was to undermine the claims of writers to payments from the book trade, channeling them instead into the state patronage system to which they were then forced to turn. In the process, of course, the administration would seem to acknowledge the intensification of those claims.21
Perhaps, though, the richest vein of evidence mined by Viala to show that something like a proprietary form of authorship was gaining currency in seventeenth-century France is in the proliferation of pejorative and satirical images of the literary “professional,” which run through a varied cross-section of writings. Viala cites the classic lines from Boileau’s “Art poétique” to exemplify the anticommercial discourse of the Classical era, which depicts publishing for personal gain and commercial reward as the sullying of a noble art.
Mais je ne puis souffrir ces auteurs renommez,
Qui dégoûtez de gloire, et d’argent affamez,
Mettent leur Apollon aux gages d’un Libraire
Et font d’un Art divin un métier mercenaire.22
[I cannot abide these renowned authors
Who tired of glory and starved for money
Pawn their Muse to a bookseller
And make of a divine art a mercenary trade.]
These lines are more typically invoked to illustrate a general disdain for profit within Old Regime literary culture. Viala, though, reinterprets them as an expression of resistance to profound
