and in order to emphasize his changing allegiances.34
The examples of Molière and Corneille illustrate how central administrative records have been to arguments about the modernization of Old Regime authorship. Both highlight, too, the tendency, in making such arguments, to read certain motives and desires into things like lettres patentes and privilèges that are in reality not so self-evidently manifest in what exist ultimately as no more than signs of the writer’s involvement—sometimes indirect—in the publication process. It is assumed that such documents give expression to a desire on the part of the writer for autonomy, defined specifically as freedom from dependence on aristocracy or monarchy. It is also assumed that this desire for autonomy is a natural one, which the writer had ignored or repressed in patronage relations, but which, in making the legal and economic claims the privilège puts forth, he or she now recognizes and embraces. Finally, it is assumed that once the natural desire for autonomy is given free rein, it will eat away at the foundations of the older order, and ultimately bring it down in order to open up a “new system” or a “new reality.” Herein lies a crux of the modernization argument; the very gesture of taking out a privilège represents a pointed threat to the established order, and a turn to a new one.
But I would argue that such assumptions, grounded less in the peculiarities of the cases than in the logic of a prewritten “history of authorship,” hide as much as they reveal about the role of the book trade in Classical-era literary life. Viala’s emphasis on disparaging images of the “commercial writer” correctly calls attention to a broad awareness of the book trade in the seventeenth century that had been insufficiently valorized in earlier accounts. But when he reads those representations as purely negative reactions to a wider trend toward professionalization, Viala dismisses them as retrograde defensiveness before inevitable progress. On its own merits, the anticommercial rhetoric of writers like Boileau becomes insignificant, functioning merely as a sign of what it represses. A closer look, however, opens up an alternative interpretation, particularly when a key albeit underaccentuated factor is brought out: namely, our sense today that the anticommercial rhetoric is archaic jars strikingly with seventeenth-century perceptions that the attack on literary commerce was a “modern” cause. The pejorative view of the “professional” did indeed articulate an innovation for Classical-era observers. But the innovation was not the entrepreneurial, independent writer. It was a new cultural ideal defined against the self-interest and vulgarity of the commercial writer, and which lay in the “refinement” of letters through integration into court and noble society, and in the “socialization” of gens de lettres as adept participants in le monde.
In such a light, we might reconsider the role played by commercial publication in the lives of seventeenth-century writers in a way that better reconciles the growing centrality of the phenomenon with the apparent deepening of writers’ hostility to it. For it was as it opened up opportunities for intellectuals to establish and project their associations with the privileged and powerful that the vocabulary of literary commerce entered into the discourse of literary selfhood in seventeenth-century France. And accordingly, the book trade burst into the Classical-era field not as the result of a growing desire among writers for liberation from their patrons, nor due to its objective expansion, but as it came to circumscribe a recognizable space in which writers’ ties to elite society would be solidified rather than weakened. In this respect, the book trade became an institution of literary life with implications for the legitimacy of writers. Of course, it did so as a negative field. If a language of commerce was invested with significance for the self-presentation of gens de lettres, it was as this language conveyed the writer’s distance from the “market,” and as it meaningfully expressed, in the terms of reluctance, anonymity, and a refusal to profit, the writer’s lack of contact with its agents and procedures. The language nonetheless became meaningful, and through it, the book trade could be envisioned as an authorial field in which literary identities could be constructed.
The Case of Corneille
The case of Corneille illustrates the transformation. The playwright was widely known—and attacked—in his own time for the attention he paid to the commercialization of his plays: “In truth, he is greedier than he is ambitious,” observes Tallement des Réaux, “and so long as he makes money, he does not torment himself about the rest.”35 La Bruyère paints a similar picture: “he only judges the quality of his play by the money that it earns him.”36 Present from the earliest days of his career, such taunts established what would become an enduring image of the playwright’s abiding interest in profit.37 They also provide a backdrop of “traditional” viewpoints against which Corneille’s foresight is contrasted, underscoring his philosophical and material resistance to the entrenched thinking of his age.38 But a closer look at the anti-Corneille invective in its rhetorical context reveals a more complex situation. While the satirical images have been seized by literary history as direct reflections of a reality in which Corneille was more dedicated than others to the commercialization of his works, they can also be read as effects of a willful effort on the part of those generating them to shape—and fit into—a very different cultural reality, one defined not by growing participation in the “literary market” but by the integration of writers into an aristocratic society that for its part was becoming more intellectual and literate. Central to the articulation of this socialization process were images of exclusion from le monde, tendered not as proof of anything that was happening out in the world but as negative paradigms against which writers could affirm their adeptness for elegant society. Active involvement in the commerce of one’s works emerged as an especially clear figuration of social isolation; and by extension, the refusal of commerce became a powerful signal of the writer’s inclusion.
In fact, the most consistent theme in the attacks against Corneille was a critique of what his detractors perceived to be the playwright’s strong sense of his self-sufficiency, manifest in an arrogant willingness to endow on himself the praise that he should have hoped would come from others. The abbé d’Aubignac, a persistent antagonist, castigates the playwright for his tendency to self-consecration: “this title of Great Man that Monsieur Corneille has given himself,” he writes in the third of four dissertations written against the playwright in the 1660s.39 Literary historians have long pointed out that the quarrel erupting after the performance of Le Cid in early 1637, which is generally viewed as a debate over dramaturgical doctrine, was actually triggered not by Corneille’s failure to respect Aristotelian principles of tragic composition, but by his lack of modesty. Specifically, the Querelle was initiated by a poem Corneille circulated in the months following the success of the play, called “Excuse à Ariste,” in which he celebrates his triumph, depicting it as the sole effect of his own talent. He had, in other words, no support or cabal pushing for him, but only his own merit to thank:
Mon travail sans appui monte sur le Théâtre,
Chacun en liberté l’y blâme ou l’idolâtre,
Là sans que mes amis prêchent leurs sentiments
J’arrache quelque fois trop d’applaudissements,
Là content du succès que le mérite donne
Par d’illustres avis je n’éblouis personne,
Je satisfais ensemble et peuple et courtisans,
Et mes vers en tous lieux sont mes seuls partisans.
[My work without support is staged
And each in liberty can attack or idolize it,
There, without my friends preaching their own feelings
I come away sometimes with much applause,
There, happy with the success which merit brings
I
