But in emphasizing these ties as a shortcoming—as a failure to “challenge the social order”—Darnton ultimately reveals his own beholden-ness to the very same ideal of the philosophe as a fundamentally independent figure.
The examination of the publishing practices of the philosophes in light of a predetermined conception of who these writers were, claimed to be, or indeed failed to be has, however, produced only limited insights into the logic of these practices. It can hardly be said to have generated a clear understanding of what publishing books meant to them. This is an arresting blind spot, though, given the importance that the writers themselves accorded to the activity. When in his 1787 discours de réception to the Académie, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, a man imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, marked the “general revolution … in letters and morals [moeurs],” he did so with a recitation of those moments when the great leaders of the movement broke through, around 1750, as the authors of major works thought to have had a profound effect on a readership whose eyes were then opened onto new ways of thinking; Montesquieu with L’Esprit de lois; Buffon with his Histoire naturelle; and Voltaire with plays and early writings on the English philosophers. Rulhière’s brief history stands in stark contrast to the inclinations of those recording intellectual progress in the Classical era, who as we have seen were more likely to emphasize as turning points the creation of a salon or the cultivation of certain urbane ethos at court. The publication of a book was in the seventeenth century not seriously recognized as a significant moment, either for the culture as a whole or for the individual seeking renown as an homme d’esprit within that culture. By contrast, the philosophes were decidedly authors, and their history is, as Rulhière told it, the story of their publications.
At the same time, though, the philosophical embrace of book publication cannot be adequately explained by juxtaposing the choices and activities of Voltaire or d’Alembert against the Classical-era paradigm of the disinterested court poet, despite the fact that the rejection of the leisured amateur of letters would be incorporated as a central element in the philosophes’ self-presentation. The story is more complicated, for as Darnton shows, the philosophes did not reject the social dimension of writing, or its capacity to integrate individuals into aristocratic networks. They undertook those gestures that remain challenging to modern sensibilities for their apparent subordination of the intellectual objectives of authorship to the “traditional” imperatives of politeness and bienséance. Refusing profits and intellectual property, the philosophes circulated their works in fine editions as gifts to social and political luminaries. Rousseau and his followers would turn to writing as a pointedly nonsocial or even antisocial act by which one gave voice to an “authentic” self defined against a corrupt “civilized” self that had been disfigured by the compromises of life in le monde. Yet for the philosophes, what was at stake was not the integrity of an inner nature, but a distinctly social preeminence constructed within—not outside—the established, albeit evolving hierarchy of the Old Regime.
In fact, this is really the anomaly unearthed by the publishing practices of the philosophes. They bear witness to the rising importance of writing and publishing for a claim to authority that, in its critical inclination, was firmly rooted in an image of the writer’s independence from social and political elites. But for all that, they do not mark a patent shift from elite sociability as the dominant mode of intellectual activity toward a new paradigm that, whether in a professional or proto-romantic vein, was in any case starkly opposed to the ethos of aristocratic sociability. To the contrary, they speak to the philosophes’ persistent elite orientation. But if their publishing practices muddy the conventional image of the philosophes as “autonomous,” a more direct focus on these activities, rather than less attention, is essential to clarifying the problem, I would argue. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a new approach to the matter, which inverts the traditional perspective on philosophical publishing. Rather than examine its paradoxes in light of a fixed notion of who the philosophes thought they were and what they thought they were doing, it instead revisits the very concept of the philosophe as a specific model of literary identity in light of the underlying logic of their activities in the book trade. In so doing, it draws on Christian Jouhaud’s and Alain Viala’s argument to “take seriously” the very concept of “publication” as a salient point of access allowing for “ANOTHER historical perspective” on the central concepts and categories of early modern literary history.14 The sticking point here involves one such concept: that of autonomy, which is what seems to be problematized by the publishing activities of the philosophes. However, instead of either ignoring these practices or writing off the philosophes themselves for their hypocrisy, a more nuanced study of their engagement with “publication” may show that the lack of clarity actually lies in our understanding of the position that they sought to occupy vis-à-vis monarchs and nobles, and thus of the “autonomy” to which they lay claim, and on which they sought to construct themselves. After all, in the cultural field of the Old Regime, as we have seen, “autonomy” was a complicated, ambiguous notion. It is, above all, one that should not be identified with its modern connotation of a radical severing of the writer’s social, political, and economic ties to the powerful and the privileged.
Indeed, as their writings consistently attest, the philosophes never imagined themselves outside of their interactions with social and political elites. Their vision of themselves as independent and critical writers was rooted in a reconceptualization of these relations, rather than in a repudiation of them. Specifically, philosophical selfhood lay in an inversion, according to which the writers of the Enlightenment no longer worked for the entertainment of royalty and aristocracy in their idle hours. It was instead a reinvented elite, won over to les lumières and wholeheartedly devoted to the triumph of reason and good governance, that mobilized their power and prestige not for their own ends but to serve disinterestedly the philosophes and their campaign. The publishing practices of the latter find their logic in this reimagining of the cultural field. They function as mechanisms of the social inversion in and through which the philosophes set out to define themselves as the advisors and friends of princes. As such, they are integral rather than antithetical to the “autonomy” on which they alleged their identities as writers to be based. In this respect, far from signaling a rejection of the sociability of the seventeenth-century homme de lettres, the autonomy of the philosophe can be considered, in a way, as an even stronger claim to the social integration and ascendance which underlay the transformation of the writer in the courts and salons of the Classical era.
Helvétius’s Privilège
One curious, ostensibly opaque, yet potentially illuminating sequence in the history of Enlightenment publishing occurred in 1757–58, when Claude-Adrien Helvétius did something quite unexpected. Having retired from a lucrative post as a tax farmer and moved to his chateau at Voré, he composed, under the influence of Voltaire and the British sensationalism the latter had made fashionable, a philosophical treatise. Helvétius would certainly have known his work to fall within the purview of a new kind of critical inquiry that sought to challenge metaphysical orthodoxies and moral conventions against considerable resistance. The patterns of publication for such writings were, moreover, long established, with recourse to foreign libraires or clandestine printing in France being the two clear options. Nonetheless, Helvétius took the most unusual step of submitting his manuscript to a censor as a first step in applying for an official privilège from the Direction de la librairie. It was an astonishing move, matched only by the equally extraordinary outcome: the censor gave the green light, issuing his approbation on March 27, which opened the door for the privilège to be granted on May 12.
This marks the beginning of what would blow up as a major scandal in the cultural history of the Enlightenment.15 Once the privilège was obtained, Helvétius arranged for the work to be published by Laurent Durand, who was an officer in the Paris Guild and an associate of the Encyclopédie publishers. The printing of De l’Esprit began in the summer of 1758. Word soon got out, though, that the book might pose difficulties. The print industry was closely monitored by inspectors,
