and outdated system.
But while of interest to critical contemporaries, it is striking that the authorial field as envisioned by the philosophes in their contacts with the book trade has remained something of a non-topic in literary histories of the Enlightenment. Conversely, the history of writers and publishing in this period has focused much more on obviously nonphilosophical figures, that is, individuals who, by their own positioning or by the maneuverings of others, have come to be identified against the group of writers recognized at the time and still celebrated today as the philosophes. Rousseau, of course, presents a clear example; as do the “hacks” who inhabited the “literary underground,” so influentially described by Robert Darnton. Indeed, it seems that those down and out types are specifically defined by the two attributes: their exclusion from the intellectual circles of the philosophes, for one, and their dependence, as an outcome of their cultural and social isolation, on commercial publishing activities, for another. We might add Diderot to this list, for he stands as an especially notable protagonist in the history of writers and the book trade in the Enlightenment. To be sure, Diderot was much better integrated into the world of the philosophes than either Rousseau or the pauvres diables of the literary underworld. Yet his role in this history is normally granted in spite of this inclusion. He is pivotal not as a philosophe but to the extent that he was never quite wholly able to assume that identity, constrained as he was both by the memory of his early years writing in relative obscurity for profiteering libraires rather than rich and powerful patrons, and by his continued close involvement with bookselling milieus as the general editor of the encyclopédie. Diderot thus plays a leading role in this history to the extent that, as Darnton observes, he “never fully extricated himself from Grub Street.”2
There is a compelling reason for why the book trade as perceived through the eyes of the philosophes has remained an elusive object of study. Their publishing practices do not present a familiar image of that field but seem to jar with established notions about who the philosophes were and what they stood for. Historically, these writers have been valorized as the heroes of change and modernity, yet their choices in the publishing sphere appear at first glance to hearken back to patterns inherited from the polite writers of the seventeenth century. They were neglectful of their intellectual property rights, and, far from trying to maximize their revenues in an effort to live independently of patronage, “by the pen,” they were more concerned to project their honnête disinterest in the manner of the court and salon poets of the Classical age. As a result, their publishing practices tend to present stumbling blocks, and the attempt to characterize the philosophe as a cultural formation confronts them as paradoxical or anomalous phenomena not easy to incorporate into the standard account of the philosophe’s birth as a “modern” figure. Nicole Masson grants that, although a “prototype,” Voltaire nonetheless “does not yet have an idea that one can or should live by the pen.”3 Likewise, Jules Bertaut is stymied by the incongruity of the same writer’s silence on his rights and dues: “It is a curious fact that Voltaire, normally so determined to profit and who knew so well how to defend his own interests in all his endeavors, … did not show the same combativeness when it came to his literary interests.”4
The publishing practices of the philosophes need, in other words, to be rationalized. Either their role must be clarified within the larger philosophical project or they need to be downplayed as extraneous to that project since they reflect not the real thinking of the philosophes but the material and intellectual constraints under which they labored. In the latter sense, Bertaut surmises that payments from publishers were not yet high enough to engage Voltaire in what surely was the lost cause of literary property rights and droits d’auteur: “No doubt, he calculated that the benefit was middling, and that it was not worth the efforts that he would have to apply.”5 This is not a ringing endorsement of Voltaire’s choices as a leading author of the Enlightenment, but the statement justifies the writer in light of the underdeveloped state of the publishing industry.6 Jacques Douvez, on the other hand, examining Voltaire’s livelihood and seeking to contextualize his publishing strategies with respect to both his fortune and his mission, considers his negligence not just understandable given the state of the book trade, but entirely consistent with a movement that conceived of its objectives largely in the dissemination of new ideas to a public whose reading had always been tightly controlled. Voltaire may well have shown little interest in payments and rights, but, as Douvez reminds us, “his goal was philosophical battle; he thus had to win the favor of booksellers.”7
Still a third alternative, of course, is not to attempt any kind of explanation at all of the ostensibly incongruous publishing activities but to acknowledge, insofar as they were not chiefly oriented toward maximizing the writer’s autonomy from elites, that the practices were compromising. They speak to the collusion of writers like Voltaire and Duclos with the established hierarchy, exposing, in contradiction to their own claims, their choice of status and prestige over any true commitment to equality and fairness. Already in the eighteenth century, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, a disbarred lawyer turned journalist and polemicist, in a response to the book trade reforms of 1777, scathingly attacked the “so-called philosophes”—he refers specifically to d’Alembert and Marmontel—for ignoring the debate and neglecting “the property of their creations. All the while they bow at the feet of the most contemptible people in order to obtain puny pensions.”8 Linguet, about whom much more will be said in the course of this investigation, had already positioned himself as a fierce adversary of the “encyclopédistes,” and was especially hostile toward d’Alembert who, he felt, had denied him a seat in the Académie française in 1764, effectively blocking his entry into the inner circles of Enlightenment-era literary life and frustrating his ambitions. This view would, however, be taken up by a series of twentieth-century scholars with no personal axe to grind, yet who would call for a comparable reassessment of the conventionally heroic image of the philosophes in light of an attachment to elite culture that, among other ways, was manifest in their choice to disregard their intellectual property rights and authorial dues in favor of “traditional” forms of income and support, including patronage and court sinecures. Darnton is perhaps the most famous and ruthless in his reevaluation of the philosophes as “mandarins fatten[ing] themselves on pensions,” arguing that “Duclos, Voltaire, and d’Alembert urged their ‘brethren’ to profit from the mobility available to them in order to join the elite. Rather than challenge the social order, they offered a prop to it.”9 But he is not the only historian to postulate that the philosophes were far more rooted in the traditional values and practices of the Old Regime than has generally been admitted.10
Articulating conflicting judgments on the place that should be accorded to the philosophes’ publishing activities in the larger scheme of their intellectual project, these three options nonetheless share a common assumption that the activities presented stark inconsistencies with the project, as well as with a fixed ideal of intellectual selfhood that the philosophes are broadly considered to have forged. Standard to most histories of eighteenth-century literature, the ideal is predicated on two moves: first, writers of the period became philosophes in their pursuit of an agenda driven by a critique of conventional ideas and established institutions in the name of a pragmatic and humanitarian rationalism; second, in undertaking the critique, these philosophes lay claim, through a series of characteristic gestures—rejecting patronage, increasing their mobility across Europe, and resorting to strategies of subterfuge in the publication of their writings—to autonomy from the social, political, and religious authorities under whose tutelage writers had long labored. In his early twentieth-century study of Enlightenment-era hommes de lettres, Maurice Pellisson highlights the processes by which the latter became “more and more independent,” and in the process became “more capable of directing the public [l’esprit public].”11 Masson renders the move toward autonomy as a similarly defining aspect of the new intellectual paradigm embodied by Voltaire, whose career can be read, she argues, “as the conquest of independence for the man of letters.”12 Darnton, of course, counters such rhetoric with a more sober assessment of the philosophes’ indebtedness
