concept of social order that legitimated a new moral regime: “Instead of disappearing from law with the Enlightenment, the concept of Unzucht underwent an astounding differentiation and multiplication.”20 In the German states (of which Austria was one) Kant played an important role in articulating an enlightened basis for the regulation of morality. Kant insisted upon the importance of two principles: autonomy of the individual conscience (and inner freedom) and human dignity; sexual infractions could be imagined as crimes against the integrity and freedom of the individual. Laws regulating sexuality were thus compatible with enlightened insistence on the autonomy of the individual subject; anything that threatened the integrity of the subject’s body was thought to destroy freedom. In this way the censorship of immoral texts was imagined as compatible with the promotion of individual freedom. The 1811 Austrian Criminal Code contained categories for crimes and offenses against freedom, against body and life, and against marriage and family. In the context of early nineteenth-century Prussia, protecting the integrity of the subject’s body (and mind) played an important role in justifying the regulation of “immoral texts.”
A third and final set of moral models emerged out of liberal thought; these originated in the pre-Napoleonic period and gained influence in the 1830s and 1840s. We will have ample opportunity to explore liberal attitudes toward obscene and immoral texts as we move more deeply into the nineteenth century. For now, it is necessary to make only two points. Liberal thinkers were united in their support for freedom of the press; they therefore condemned political censorship. At the same time, liberals stressed the importance of gender difference and the (related) division between public and private spheres; their focus on sexuality and gender difference made them more inclined to support moral censorship, even as they called for free expression in political matters. All three of these moral models were at work in early nineteenth-century attempts to invent and enforce the specific moral infractions of print.
Prussia’s 1788 censorship law reflected the wave of absolutist legal reforms that took place in the German states during the second half of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century legal reform had been shaped by cameralism, a body of thinking about law, statecraft, and the role of the police, and though new legal and moral models had since emerged, the 1788 law remained on the books, and the ideas it embodied thus continued to have currency.21 Cameralist thinkers, who helped to reform legal codes during the second half of the eighteenth century, authorized the extension of broad powers to activist governments and to professional police forces. Cameralism continued to affect legal thought and the self-understanding of the police in the early nineteenth century, even after the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars transformed the political geography of the German states. Napoleon’s wholesale revision of civil and criminal codes, an expression of revolutionary politics, provided new concepts for thinking about the relationship between law and society. The French Code Pénal condemned “tout outrage à la moral publique et religieuse ou aux bonnes moeurs.” (It appears that the original code, issued in 1810, expressed the idea of censorship on moral grounds in general terms, clarifying the language in a law passed in 1819.)22 This definition introduced a new framework for understanding the moral damage done by print: rather than an authoritative state or a fragile individual an abstract notion of “the public” was placed at the center of the law. A shared understanding of public decency provided legitimacy for the reintroduction of censorship in the wake of the revolution’s experiment in freedom of the press. An 1819 Prussian police edict mirrored the language of the French law, ordering provincial authorities to check lending libraries for publications that “offended against religion, morality, decency and civil order [gegen Religion, Sittlichkeit, Anstand und bürgerliche Ordnung verstoßen].” Translated into a German linguistic and cultural context, the abstract “public spirit” evoked in the French Code Pénal became bürgerliche Ordnung, the latter meaning both “civil order” and “middle class (or bourgeois) order.”23
In the German states abstract visions of public order and collective mores were embodied by a civil society that coexisted, often uncomfortably, with absolutist political rule.24 Physicians, lawyers, pedagogues, religious leaders, journalists, and others contributed to a growing body of commentary on topics of concern to a broad public. These new “experts”—many secular, some religious—had much to say on the subject of secular reading and its dangers. Their influence in matters of moral censorship was also surprisingly direct, as local police and governments often combed newspapers and journals, looking for sources of information on the trade in books and images. The police were quick to act on public denunciations of authors, and they were often alerted to the presence of “immoral texts” by newspaper articles or unsolicited denunciations by “interested parties” who kept their eyes open for texts that made it through the censorship process and into peddlers’ boxes, lending libraries, and the shelves of bookstores.
Armed with an initial sense of the patterns of thought and the figures involved in framing notions of obscenity in the early nineteenth century, we can take a closer look at the laws and the ordinances on the books. Friedrich’s 1788 censorship law had established a structure for prepublication censorship by establishing a board of professional censors. Publications were divided into categories: religious-theological, legal, medical-surgical, political-historical, schoolbooks and pedagogical works, political newspapers, and a broad category seemingly designed to catch other kinds of publications, including novels, weekly newspapers of mixed content, plays, and other works that didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories. Censors were considered experts in their fields; some held doctorates, and some were professors at Prussian universities. Whatever authority was conferred on them by academic titles and positions, censors were not considered infallible, nor did they necessarily share the attitudes of the police and local authorities. As a result the police often confiscated and investigated texts that they perceived as obscene even when the publisher’s imprimatur signaled that the censors had read and approved the manuscript. The law also laid out the punishments for publishing or selling books without an official imprimatur, which included fines, the loss of professional concessions, and confiscation and destruction of illegal works.
In keeping with the spirit of persuasion characteristic of enlightened statecraft, the 1788 press law began with a justification for censorship: “The object of censorship is in no way to hinder a respectable, serious-minded, and moderate investigation of the truth, or to otherwise impose any unnecessary or burdensome restraints on writers.” Rather the goal of censorship was “to steer that which is against the broader principles of religion, against the state, as well as that which is against the moral and civil order, or which, through insult to personal honor, is intended to injure the good name of another.”25 In its support for rational inquiry the law expressed the reigning assumption that the state had a responsibility to its subjects to promote population growth, the rational development of trade, scientific agricultural practices, and health and well-being (defined in collective rather than individual terms).26 Though the state was careful to specify support only for “moderate investigation[s] of truth,” this insistence on the importance of “truth” would be used to argue for the value of publications.
The 1788 law posited an innocent (and vulnerable) reader and an unscrupulous writer or publisher with powerful tools (books, pamphlets, images) at his disposal: “These writers create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations; through this they nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—that disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens and offend their regard for the public. This is especially true of so-called Volkschriften, which have been much abused.”27 The law drew a sharp line between useful knowledge that encouraged the well-being of the individual and knowledge that promoted worry, superstition, and the “base instincts.” In this formulation the legitimacy of the state rested on its protection of “inadequately educated souls” who might fall prey to unscrupulous authors. Both justifications for censorship evoked a vision of human nature or, more precisely, of the subject’s
