group that the successful writer will overcome. The sociability of the legitimized writer contrasts sharply with a writer whose non-integration is indicated by an involvement in the commercial publication of his or her works.
In this process, the book trade was transformed—not as an “objective” artisanal sphere, though its real expansion is not irrelevant to our story. But more saliently it was transformed as a cultural field to the extent that it was envisioned by writers who now looked to their contacts with it as factors and conduits for their social identities as gens de lettres. Investing the transactions, exchanges, and outcomes defining their commercial publishing activities with a potent meaning for their lives as intellectuals, and appropriating the self-presentational spaces that were offered through the printed media, writers reconceptualized “le commerce des livres” as what Viala calls an “institution of literary life,” that is, as a social, cultural, and political framework in which the plausibility and legitimacy of their “literary” identities, and of their identifies as “socialized” gens de lettres, would be affirmed and correlatively contested and undermined. Those writers who mobilized a commercial rhetoric as a decisive element in their intellectual self-presentation, even in a strongly negative way, could be said to have invented literary commerce. For they endowed this particular mode of intellectual practice with the coherence and meaning that it ultimately continues to have for us today.
Chapter 1 focuses on the seventeenth-century case of Corneille. The tragedian has often been highlighted as a precursor of the modern author for what seems a strong interest in the commercialization of his writings, reflected in his tendency to publish plays quickly and in his pursuit through administrative channels of the right to control their performance. Both moves are commonly interpreted as expressions of his aspiration for a “modern,” which is to say here an anti-aristocratic, economically articulated independence. Yet it is not in the writings of Corneille that the image of his commercial savvy is to be found, but in those of his detractors who sought to discredit the popular playwright at the apex of his success. The chapter contends that in the course of the 1637 Querelle that exploded after the triumph of his play, Le Cid, Corneille became a screen onto which the anxieties of gens de lettres were projected as they sought to understand and define a specific category of activity—writing and publishing books—that had to be adapted to what Viala calls the first literary field. These anxieties were not so much reactions to Corneille or the doctrinal infidelities of his play. Rather, they were symptoms of a defining quandary that seventeenth-century gens de lettres faced, which lay in the following paradox: the rise in the status of leisure-oriented writing in elite culture allowed individuals with “literary” talent to claim a more enhanced social identity. But they could do so only so long as that identity adhered to the values of aristocratic sociability, which prescribed that, out of modesty and deference to the group, one downplay one’s writing and publishing activities. As such, only by belittling their literary pursuits could gens de lettres benefit from the social transformation that these pursuits, valorized nonetheless by the same society that demanded their belittlement, made possible.
Chapter 2 follows the evolution of this fraught, ambivalent “anticommercial” ideal into the Enlightenment era, when it continued to impose itself as a prevailing vision while undergoing a substantial transformation at the hands of the philosophes. The chapter focuses on what can be called “philosophical” publishing, that is, the role of publication in the literary lives of those who constructed themselves according to the model of Voltaire. A central paradox has been noted both by eighteenth-century contemporaries and historians and critics of the period: whereas the philosophes are easily considered modern in their relationship to the political and religious authorities of their time, when it came to their intellectual property rights they refused to innovate, hearkening in their activities as writers to established Classical-era tactics of modesty, coy denial, and anonymity. But while these strategies situated the philosophes in a decidedly elite cultural milieu that was far closer to the literary field of Viala than to the commercial field of Bourdieu, they played a different role from similar strategies in the lives of seventeenth-century gens de lettres, by upholding a new formulation of autonomy. Repudiating the “douce liberté” of the leisured aristocrat as well as the uncouth self-sufficiency of a Corneille, the autonomy of the philosophes was defined in a complex negotiation by which writers positioned themselves between a broad public and a network of patrons. In gesturing to an abstract enlightened audience, they projected an autonomy from elites that would ground their authority as critics. These affirmations, however, drew their power as symbolic projections from the philosophes’ proximity to well-recognized and powerful protectors who, through their support of what was becoming known as a “movement,” sanctioned the grandiose selfimages that such writers as Voltaire and d’Alembert presented. “Philosophical” publication was both an effect and the undertaking of this negotiation between an abstract, idealized public and a more concrete readership of elites, in the course of which the philosophes had to adopt contradictory and equivocal postures, or at least postures that necessarily seem as such to us.
More than a century separates Chapter 2 from Chapter 1. This is not meant at all to downplay the significance of changes that took place over the course of those years but to underscore the importance and durability of the honnête framework, which defined and oriented those changes, including not only the rise of the philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century but earlier developments as well: the novella, moralist writing, and the proto-Enlightenment scientific popularizations of Fontenelle and Bayle. I have focused on an early seventeenth-century debate—the Querelle du Cid—in which the evolving parameters and the polemical nature of this framework become especially clear. And by jumping ahead to the philosophes, I am not suggesting that nothing happens between Corneille and Voltaire, but that the figuration of the “literary market” must be understood as a direct and pointed response to the self-presentational rhetoric of a Voltaire or a d’Alembert; and that the latter cannot be understood without understanding its relation to the seventeenth-century discourse of authorial honnêteté, which stands both as a foil to the philosophes’ image of themselves as socially independent critics, and as the condition out of which their assertions of independence could carry any weight.17
1
Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnête Publication
THE INVESTIGATION INTO WRITERS and the book trade in the early modern period has traditionally presented an exercise in the excavation of origins, driven by the effort to unearth “primitive” instances of what would later develop as standard behavior for writers in the commercial publishing sphere. In his survey of the economic, social, and political realities defined by the printed book in seventeenth-century Paris, Henri-Jean Martin suddenly describes a “prehistory” as soon as he turns to the question of “la condition d’auteur.” The focus on authorship instantly calls up the most underdeveloped aspects of a broad phenomenon that until then had seemed remarkable for its profuseness and penetration, as well as for the complexity of its mechanisms and networks.1 Why the pervading sense of incipience when the writer makes an appearance? One reason for such an impression, it seems to me, not only in Martin’s account but in others as well, is the marked tendency to conflate a general history of writers and publication with what is really a more specific history, that of writers’ moral and legal claims to compensation from libraires to whom they cede the rights to print and sell their works. Indeed, Martin’s incorporation of the Author into his study transforms it not just into a “prehistory” but more exactly into a “prehistory of droit d’auteur.” Referring to the payment that a writer received for the sale of his or her works, the latter term indicates not a generic but
