in other words, not to the overall low regard in which commercialized literary activities were held but to their rise as “legitimate” practices: “far from signifying that the majority of authors disdained property rights, the satire indicates on the contrary that most pursued them. His discourse is defensive inasmuch as the opposite attitude had enough power to threaten this image [of the noble writer].”23
Focusing less on the anticommercial gestures per se than on their mounting intensity, Viala presents a strong challenge to the assumptions of an earlier scholarship that bought too easily into the “historical myth” of the Classical-era writer’s indifference to literary commerce.24 The forcefulness and consistency of the denunciations brought by Boileau and others suggest in fact that the reality was otherwise: the book trade occupied a central place in the experiences and aspirations of seventeenth-century writers. At another level, though, Viala’s analysis fails to tackle one of the key premises of the older views. For these strongly associate the commercial engagements of writers with their awakening to legal rights and economic dues, considered as a precondition to the ultimate liberation from the domination of Old Regime elites. Viala has certainly rethought the chronology of this process. While Martin’s “prehistory” suggested that the consciousness of literary property in seventeenth-century literary life was present only in an incipient form, significant only as it anticipates an eighteenth-century authorial revolution,25 Viala essentially argues that the revolution had already arrived.
But precisely in this sense his reconsideration of Classical-era attitudes toward commerce is less probing in its account of how the new entrepreneurial consciousness came to transform intellectual practice in the period. Viala holds to a reading of the book trade’s effect as an institution of modernization, the quintessential function of which was to incite and focalize in gens de lettres a desire for freedom from nobility by offering them opportunities to satisfy this desire. But Boileau’s rhetoric does not support such an interpretation. The lines do suggest that commerce was a draw for writers, which, it should be stressed, was not necessarily a bad thing. In his poem, Boileau also offers a positive image of the writer whose book “is surrounded by buyers in the shop of Barbin.” Commerce did present a clear danger, but not by cultivating in writers a desire for independence from aristocracy. Rather, commerce amplified their ethical weaknesses; it was associated with greed and the blindness into which such a lapse would plunge the writer, who would then lose sight of the type of writer he or she should be. In this respect, the “Art poétique” is more a wake-up call than an admonition, warning writers against their worst natural tendencies, which consist in their self-absorption, not in their desire for autonomy.
We should note, moreover, the lack of any positive portrayal of the “literary mercenary” from the time. It is notable that the proliferating negative images of gens de lettres who take their careers into their own hands by selling their works to libraires contrasts markedly with the absence of favorable or even just neutral depictions of the same phenomenon. On occasion, writers voice a wish for remuneration from a publisher, but this is never overtly connected with a longing for economic self-sufficiency, certainly not a self-sufficiency understood narrowly as the ability to support oneself without recourse to aristocratic patronage. In fact, no writer who enjoyed noble support ever wished not to have it. And those who, like Jean de Préchac in his gallant novella, La Noble vénitienne, own up to their venal motives in publishing do so from an entirely different point of view: “The author having lost some money playing bassette found the means to make up for it by publishing a book from which he recovered the best part of what he had lost.”26 Préchac’s explanation hardly projects a repudiation of the dependency of letters on aristocratic society. On the contrary, through the very image of his commercialized activities, meant not to valorize his labors but to downplay the importance of his writing (he turns to the classic pejorative phrase “faire des livres” to refer to publishing), the admission places him squarely in the culture of the court, with its ludic pastimes and high-risk gambling.
In the absence of direct, positive statements associating the book trade and autonomy in the seventeenth century, literary scholars have fixed on administrative or legal records to substantiate the argument that Classical-era gens de lettres sought freedom through commerce. C. E. J. Caldicott explores Molière’s involvement in the publication of his Oeuvres complètes, chronicled in “archived documents that trace the long and sad story of his conflicts with the Booksellers Guild.” Specifically, he focuses on a series of privilèges issued to both libraires and the playwright in the 1660s and early 1670s. Against a tradition emphasizing Molière’s identity as a court poet and a “man of letters too preoccupied with the problems of his art to care about the correction of his proofs,” Caldicott paints a less familiar portrait of the writer as deeply invested in the publication of his works—“anxious about the quality of the edition”—and ready to fight the booksellers for control over the process.27 Moreover, Caldicott asserts that the struggle was not extraneous to Molière’s sense of his authorial identity, despite the typical coyness of his prefaces. Instead, it was engaged as a critical aspect of the playwright’s effort to construct and control his intellectual self: “Driving the combativeness of the author … is a sense of his rights, and therefore an authorial consciousness.”28 This identity was, in turn, increasingly defined for Molière by the weakening of his ties to the king and the court, and by his perception of a “second career, another way of existing, according to which he would be solely in control of the future of his work.” Caldicott continues, “Forged in the crucible of his solitary battles against the institutional interests of the printers, this authorial consciousness gradually assumed a preponderant role in Molière’s career, up to the point where, as he pushed further along this path, he necessarily granted less importance to his relations at Court.” As such, Caldicott concludes, Molière should be placed “in the ranks of the first modern authors.”29
One is struck, though, by Molière’s silence throughout this story, and by the possibility that such an interpretation of privilèges rests more on a series of presuppositions about why authors would be involved in the gritty details of publication than on any specific sign that the desire for “another way of existing” was what Molière’s intervention into the book trade was all about. Similarly, the arguments for Corneille’s modernity, in the absence of any statement from the playwright himself, have focalized around an administrative document, namely, the request for lettres patentes deposed in 1643. Written by a law clerk named Le Roy and corrected by Corneille, the request for the exclusive rights to “have the above-mentioned theatrical plays, named Cinna, Polyeucte, and La mort de Pompée, staged and represented by a theatrical troupe in whatever place in our Kingdom that he sees fit,” was denied.30 The artifact has nonetheless been seized on as evidence of Corneille’s precocious conceptualization of “literary property.” Assumed to reflect a heightened sensitivity to the economic predicament of writers, the request then indicates the tragedian’s strong sense of his autonomy, of which his forays into the commercial publishing sphere led him to become conscious and which then drove his efforts to pursue his interests there. The lettres patentes—“a move unheard of at the time”31—thus stand out as concrete proof of his modernity.
As with Molière’s privilèges, though, Corneille’s reticence should give pause. For one thing, the lettres patentes can be understood in a wholly different framework, that of contemporary theater politics and the intense rivalry between the up and coming Théâtre du Marais, recently founded in 1634 by the actor Montdory, and the more established, quasi-official theater of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which housed the comédiens du roi. Having quarreled with the latter, Corneille famously decided to give his plays to the new troupe, which would perform a series of his works including Le Cid in early 1637. The lettres might then be considered in light of his shifting loyalties insofar as convention dictated that once a play was in print, it was available to be performed by any theatrical company.32 Indeed, editions of Cinna and Polyeucte appeared in 1643.33 And with a print version of La mort de Pompée in press for the following year, Corneille was perhaps
