Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets

By Jeffrey Freedman

Though the field of book history has long been divided into discrete national histories, books have seldom been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them—least of all in the age of Enlightenment when French books reached readers throughout Europe. In this erudite and engagingly written study, Jeffrey Freedman examines one of the most important axes of the transnational book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and the German-speaking lands. Focusing on the critical role of book dealers as cultural intermediaries, he follows French books through each stage of their journey—from the French-language printing shops where they were produced, to the wholesale book fairs in Leipzig, to retail book shops at locations scattered widely throughout Germany. At some of those locations, authorities reacted with alarm to the spread of French books, burning works of the radical French Enlightenment and punishing the booksellers who sold them. But officials had little power to curtail their circulation: the political fragmentation of the German lands made it virtually impossible to police the book trade. Largely unimpeded by censorship, French books circulated more freely in Germany than in the absolutist monarchy of France.

In comparison, the flow of German books into the French market was negligible—an asymmetry that corresponded to the hierarchy of languages in Enlightenment Europe. But publishers in Switzerland produced French translations of German books. By means of title changes, creative editing, and mendacious advertising, the Swiss publishers adapted works of the German Enlightenment for an audience of French-readers that stretched from Dublin to Moscow.

An innovative contribution to both the history of the book and the transnational study of the Enlightenment, Freedman's work tells a story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of texts in an age in which the concept of World Literature had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon already existed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780812206449

Book preview

Books Without Borders

in Enlightenment Europe

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

Roger Chartier

Joseph Farrell

Anthony Grafton

Leah Price

Peter Stallybrass

Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

BOOKS

WITHOUT

BORDERS

IN

ENLIGHTENMENT

EUROPE

French Cosmopolitanism

and German Literary Markets

Jeffrey Freedman

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freedman, Jeffrey.

Books without borders in Enlightenment Europe : French cosmopolitanism and German literary markets / Jeffrey Freedman.

p. cm. (Material texts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8122-4389-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Book industries and trade—France—History—18th century.   2. Book industries and trade—German-speaking countries—History—18th century.   3. Literature publishing—France—History—18th century.   4. French language—German-speaking countries—History—18th century.   5. Enlightenment—Europe.   I. Title.   II. Series: Material texts.

Z305.F74 2012

381'.45002094409033—dc23

2011046058

To the memory of my mother, Njuty Greenberg Freedman

Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise, dans lequel on

n’avait d’abord eu pour objet que d’être utile à la Nation, est

devenu un Livre pour l’Europe. La Politique & le Commerce

ont rendu notre Langue presque aussi nécessaire aux

Etrangers que leur Langue naturelle.

(The Dictionary of the Académie Française, whose first object

was only to serve the Nation, has become a book for Europe.

Politics and commerce have made our language almost as

necessary to foreigners as their natural language.)

—Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise, new edition

(Paris, 1765)

CONTENTS

Note on Terminology and Sources

Introduction

Chapter 1. Rite of Spring: The Leipzig Easter Fair and the Literary Marketplace

Chapter 2. Whom to Trust? Insolvent Booksellers and the Problem of Credit

Chapter 3. French Booksellers in the Reich

Chapter 4. Demand

Chapter 5. The Word of God in the Age of the Encyclopédie

Chapter 6. Against the Current: Translating the Aufklärung

Chapter 7. From Europe Française to Europe Révolutionnaire: The Career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux

Conclusion. What Were French Books Good For?

Appendix A. STN Trade with Booksellers in Germany, 1770–1785

Appendix B. The Folio Bible of 1773: Diffusion

Appendix C. The Folio Bible of 1779: Prepublication Subscriptions

Appendix D. The Bible in Germany: The Neuchâtel Folio of 1779 and the Bienne Octavo

Appendix E. Diffusion of Sebaldus Nothanker in French Translation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND SOURCES

In the eighteenth century, Germany did not exist as a political entity, but contemporaries used the term nevertheless. When I speak of Germany, I am referring to the lands of German-speaking Europe, excluding Switzerland but including the German-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire. The distinction between Germany and the German-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire had its origins in the Prussian-dominated kleindeutsch (small-German) nationalism of the nineteenth century. To project it back onto the eighteenth century would be anachronistic.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the original manuscript sources cited in the notes come from the papers of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), which are housed in the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Neuchâtel. References to letters that the STN sent to its correspondents are to the copies of those letters contained in the chronologically organized folio volumes of the STN’s Copies de lettres; references to letters that the STN received from its correspondents are to the original letters contained in the dossiers of the STN’s correspondents. The notes do not indicate the manuscript call numbers of the individual dossiers, which can easily be located in the Neuchâtel archives from the names of the STN’s correspondents. The notes indicate call numbers only for documents other than letters to and from the STN—shipping records, account books, stock inventories, printers’ logs, and so on. The other archives to which notes refer are the following: Staatsarchiv Hamburg; Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin; Archives Nationales Paris; Préfecture de Police Paris; and Archives de l’État Neuchâtel.

All the original sources cited in the book were written in French or German. The translations into English are my own.

Introduction

This is a study of the transnational French book trade in Enlightenment Europe. As such, it belongs to what is known as the history of the book, a vast field of interdisciplinary research, whose subject matter embraces every aspect of the communications circuit between author and reader.¹ It belongs to that field, and yet it does not fit snugly within it. The field of book history has long been divided into separate, self-contained national histories, from Johann Goldfriedrich’s early twentieth-century classic, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, to the multiauthor, multivolume Histoire de l’édition française published in the 1980s, to the more recent History of the Book in Britain. This study cuts across those divisions. Based on never-before-studied documents from the archive of an eighteenth-century publisher, it presents a challenge to the dominant national model of book history.²

Why challenge that model? In part, because books have not been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them. Even in the age of the wooden hand press, from the mid-fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, when books traveled in horse-drawn wagons along muddy, unpaved highways or in sailing vessels down poorly dredged, unevenly flowing rivers, they traversed great distances, connecting communities of readers across as well as within national borders. The geography of their diffusion cannot be folded neatly into the geography of nations, let alone that of states.

Like the products of the wooden hand press, moreover, the booksellers of early modern Europe moved back and forth across national borders. Many of them would undertake long journeys to visit their customers in foreign lands, or they would travel to the famous fair at Frankfurt on Main, a rendezvous of the Latin book trade, which drew booksellers from beyond the Rhine and across the Alps until its decline during the Thirty Years’ War.³ Some of them established themselves permanently in foreign countries—Germans in Russia, Huguenots in the Low Countries, Frenchmen in London.⁴ And in such linguistic border areas as Switzerland, an important center of early modern printing, the journeymen typographers who tramped from one establishment to another in search of work made the cramped rooms of printing shops resound with the accents of different dialects and languages.⁵ In those noisy shops no less than in the quiet studies of scholars, books belonged to worlds in which cultures met and collided.

Of course, not all the books printed in early modern Europe came from the presses of polyglot printing shops, traveled to international book fairs, and reached readers in distant lands. Some led a much more parochial existence. Books printed in German, for example, were unlikely to reach many readers who were not native speakers, because German occupied one of the lower rungs in the international hierarchy of modern literary languages, at least until the late eighteenth century when it began its rapid ascent. German books were mainly for Germans—a fact that publishers expressed typographically by printing German books in a separate type font, Fraktur rather than the international Roman. Even in Germany, however, indeed especially in Germany, the literary market absorbed books in other languages too—in Latin throughout the early modern period and in French beginning in the eighteenth century.⁶ And to those books in other languages were added during the course of the eighteenth century an increasing number of German translations of French books, so many, in fact, that contemporaries described the publishing houses of Leipzig as translating factories. By the last decades of the century, German translations and German originals, both of them printed in spiky Fraktur, and French books printed in elegantly rounded Roman were jostling for shelf space in bookshops all across the politically fragmented lands of the old Reich.⁷

While international and national typographical styles and French and German literature mingled promiscuously in the bookshops of eighteenth-century Germany, other forms of cohabitation prevailed elsewhere. During the eighteenth century, booksellers in London published French books as well as English ones, but they also imported French books from the Continent, above all from the Low Countries; and booksellers up and down the Italian peninsula from Turin to Naples supplemented their stocks of Italian literature by importing French books from Switzerland.⁸ Bound to one another through commercial exchanges, the booksellers of the eighteenth century sent the products of their presses coursing through the circulatory system of the European book trade, and so gave new life to an old ideal, that of the Republic of Letters, an egalitarian community of authors and readers transcending the divisions of politics, religion, and language.

Admittedly, the reality fell short of the ideal. With the gradual decline of the Latin-reading respublica litterarum, modern literary languages rose to prominence—first in Italy, then in France and England, and finally in Germany—and those languages certainly did not exist on a footing of equality. German, as already noted, enjoyed hardly any international prestige (and even in Germany, it had numerous detractors); Italian as the oldest of the national literary languages and English as the language of Shakespeare and Milton enjoyed somewhat more; but only French was recognized everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe as the language of culture. In its modern incarnation, therefore, the Republic of Letters was francophone, the république des lettres. And yet French did not impose itself on Europeans as a form of national domination. It was, mutatis mutandis, what English is today: not a national tongue so much as a lingua franca. Codified by the grammarians and rhetoricians of the seventeenth century, modeled on the bon usage of the Bourbon court and Parisian salons, and enriched by the works of its classical authors (Corneille, Racine, Molière), it shone with such luster that its adoption as the language of diplomacy, princely courts, and learned academies seemed self-evident. No less than the Web surfers and Internet denizens of the twenty-first century, the book readers of the eighteenth century shared a universal language.⁹

Far from being exclusively French, therefore, the French book trade of the eighteenth century was transnational. The works of such famous authors of the French Enlightenment as Voltaire, Rousseau, Raynal, and Diderot reached readers all across the Continent. So also did the works of foreign authors who wrote in French—the Baron d’Holbach or the Prussian king Frederick the Great. And so too, in some cases, did the French translations of foreign works. True, the publishers of those translations often took great liberties in adapting them to the demands of French taste. Unconstrained by international copyright agreements or any ethical concern to respect the integrity of an author’s creation, they embellished, emended, and abridged as they saw fit. And yet, simply by translating foreign works into French, they endowed them with the authority of the French language—a form of cultural consecration that brought those works to the attention of a European public. When translated into French and circulated through the transnational French book trade, even works of German literature were able to surmount the prejudices and the snobbery of educated Europeans—notably, Goethe’s Werther, which was elevated from national to Weltliteratur thanks in large part to its French translations.¹⁰ Agents of consecration as well as vehicles of diffusion, the French books circulating in Enlightenment Europe were European as much as they were French.

And the same can be said of the booksellers who published French books. With the aid of Huguenot refugees, who had taken up residence in many of the Protestant states of Europe following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French-language publishing firms flourished along the borders of the French kingdom, from Amsterdam to Geneva. Unencumbered by the strict censorship and tight regulations to which their competitors inside the kingdom were subject, the extraterritorial firms multiplied and expanded during the course of the eighteenth century, gaining in importance at the same time that the domestic French publishing industry in the provinces was contracting. By the last decades of the Old Regime, presses located outside of France were turning out roughly 50 percent of all the books printed in French, including nearly all the works of the philosophes.¹¹

And yet, until now, most of the scholarship devoted to the subject of extraterritorial French publishing has focused on the production of French books for the French market. We know a great deal about how pirated and prohibited books were smuggled into the kingdom from shops beyond the French borders, but comparatively little about how those same books spread outward to far-flung markets across Europe. Annexed to the history of the French book trade, the subject of extraterritorial French publishing has shed its European dimension, as if that dimension were merely peripheral.¹² Books Without Borders treats it as central. The first detailed study of the literary traffic between France and the lands of German-speaking Europe, this book tells a story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of ideas in Enlightenment Europe: the story of how booksellers mediated the transmission of literature across the frontiers of language, nation, and culture.¹³

Why German-speaking Europe? Admittedly, Germany was only one of the many foreign markets for French books in the eighteenth century. From the geographic distribution of the foreign booksellers who corresponded with Parisian publishers in the early 1780s one can infer that French books reached readers at a few scattered outposts on the edges of the Continent, in Italy south of Naples, in Scandinavia, and even as far afield as Moscow. The core regions of the transnational French book trade, however, lay in western and central Europe: in London, which was home to a large community of French expatriates; in the Low Countries, which had absorbed many Huguenot refugees and had dominated the extraterritorial French publishing industry until the mid-eighteenth century; in the French-speaking cantons of western Switzerland; in Italy north of Naples; and in the states of Germany—above all in the states of Germany. Nearly a third of the foreign booksellers who corresponded with Parisian publishers in the early 1780s were located in German states (261 booksellers distributed across ninety different cities); and there were more of them in the city of Leipzig alone (twenty-seven) than in any other city with the exception of London, which was by far the most populous city in all of Europe.¹⁴ Just a few decades earlier, moreover, French books had accounted for nearly 10 percent of the German literary market as measured by the Leipzig book-fair catalogues.¹⁵ Thereafter, their share of the market shrank, but only because the market as a whole was expanding: the total number of French books listed in the catalogues remained constant, notwithstanding the vast quantity of German translations of French works—2,678 in the years from 1770 to 1788—that inundated the market.¹⁶ Add together the volume of translations, the figures on French books derived from the Leipzig catalogues, and the number of German booksellers corresponding with Parisian publishers, and only one conclusion seems possible: in Europe during the last decades of the Old Regime, the currents of literary transmission flowed thickest between France and Germany.

It’s no wonder. After all, the most powerful German monarch, Frederick the Great of Prussia, disdained the German language, wrote almost exclusively in French, and maintained a lifelong correspondence with Voltaire. During Frederick’s long reign, which spanned more than four decades from 1740 to 1786, the Prussian Academy in Berlin functioned like a clubhouse for expatriate French philosophes; and, in 1783, it sponsored an essay competition on the question of why French had become the universal language—a competition for which it awarded first prize to a French author, the comte Antoine de Rivarol. Elsewhere in Germany, lesser German princes followed Frederick’s lead by converting their courts into miniature replicas of Versailles—and there were many such courts, so fragmented was Germany politically. In those bastions of aristocratic exclusivity, where some works of German literature were not deemed hoffähig unless translated into French, French books belonged to a culture of representation.¹⁷ Objects of prestige as well as books to be read, they symbolized the elevated social status and lofty cultural aspirations of their owners.

Further down the social hierarchy the situation was somewhat different. Unlike their Francophile princes, middle-class German men of letters were often quite critical of what they regarded as the amorality, frivolity, and superficiality of French culture.¹⁸ But they read French books nevertheless—Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in Düsseldorf, a devoted admirer of Rousseau, who received regular shipments of French books from Rousseau’s Amsterdam publisher, Marc-Michel Rey; Goethe, who during his adolescence in Frankfurt read (and vehemently condemned) d’Holbach’s notorious materialist treatise, Le Système de la nature, and who later, as a courtier in Weimar, translated Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau into German; Kant in Königsberg, a man of impeccably regular habits, who became so engrossed in his reading of Rousseau’s Emile that he forgot to take his daily walk; and even Herder, one of the most outspoken critics of French cultural influence in Germany, whose personal library was filled with French books.¹⁹ In the libraries of bourgeois intellectuals, no less than in those of aristocratic courtiers, French books bulked large.

Of course, the currents of literary transmission between France and Germany have never ceased to flow, not even in the darkest moments of Franco-German rivalry during the twentieth century, when the French and the Germans seemed to view one another as if across a Maginot Line of mutual incomprehension: all borders, even the most heavily fortified ones, connect as well as separate.²⁰ In the long history of the cultural transfer between France and Germany, however, the years of the mid- and late eighteenth century stand out as unique. In no other period did French books make up so large a share of the German literary market as they did during those years.²¹

There are compelling reasons, then, to focus a study of the transnational French book trade in the eighteenth century on the Franco-German axis. The question is what kinds of sources are available for such a study.

One of the chief impediments to the study of the eighteenth-century book trade is the lack of documents from booksellers of that time. But there is one French-language publisher from the eighteenth century whose papers have survived almost intact, a Swiss firm called the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), which conducted a wide-ranging trade as a publisher, printer, and wholesaler during the last two decades of the Old Regime.²² Founded in 1769, in the Prussian principality of Neuchâtel, the STN was one of the many extraterritorial French publishing firms that sprang up along the eastern frontiers of the French kingdom. Unlike Marc-Michel Rey, Rousseau’s publisher in Amsterdam, or the brothers Cramer, Voltaire’s publishers in Geneva, the STN did not publish any original editions of works by the most famous of the philosophes. In fact, it published very few original editions of any kind. It preferred to turn out cheap pirated editions of works that had already proved their worth in the literary market. By saving on the cost of manuscripts, while also trimming what it called typographical luxury, and printing its editions in small formats (octavo or duodecimo), the STN was able to sell its books at a lower wholesale price (roughly one sou per printed sheet) than that of the original publishers. And, in the absence of international copyright agreements, it was free to pirate just about any books it pleased, including irreligious books whose contents seemed offensive to the Calvinist authorities in Neuchâtel. Rather than compromise a lucrative branch of the local economy, the Neuchâtel authorities preferred to look the other way when the STN published irreligious books (unless they were really irreligious), especially as the STN was a wholesaler, whose books were intended for export and were not going to be circulating among the local population in any case. Largely untroubled by censors and unconstrained by copyright, the STN turned out cut-rate editions of works belonging to a wide range of genres. Some of its editions were of works by the philosophes (Voltaire, Rousseau, abbé Raynal, abbé Mably, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Restif de la Bretonne); others were of works that had passed the censorship in France and that had been published inside the kingdom with official royal privileges—everything from sentimental novels, travelogues, and popular medical tracts to works of history and pedagogy. By the time its trade began to decline in the mid-1780s, the STN had made a significant contribution to broadening the circulation of contemporary French literature—above all in France, where it conducted the lion’s share of its trade, but also in other countries of Europe, chief among them Germany. Its papers, therefore, make it possible to retrace the movement of French books as they made their way from the printing shop in Neuchâtel to the book shops of Germany.

All the documents that the historian needs to reconstruct the life cycle of books in the age of the wooden hand press have survived in the Neuchâtel archives—printers’ logs, account books, stock inventories, records of shipments, invoices from shipping agents, copies of the STN’s letters, and, most important, the letters and the book orders of the STN’s customers. For anyone researching the eighteenth-century book trade, the documents in Neuchâtel are a uniquely rich source. Unfortunately, they are also unique. Nothing remotely comparable to them exists anywhere else, and that fact is bound to raise some doubts in the minds of skeptical readers. Granted, the STN was an important publishing house. Still, it was only one of many French-language publishers supplying French books to the German market in the last decades of the Old Regime. French books reached German readers from publishers in a wide range of geographic locations, in the Low Countries, London, France, other cities of western Switzerland apart from Neuchâtel, and Germany itself—notably, Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, and various locations in the Rhineland. How, then, can the papers of the STN alone support general conclusions about the French book trade in Germany?

At bottom, that objection comes down to the question of whether the STN’s trade in Germany was representative of the French book trade in Germany as a whole. I would argue that it was; but to persuade the skeptics, I will need to clarify a few technical points about the wholesale book trade in Germany, retail book selling in Germany, and the general nature of publishing in the eighteenth century.

The Wholesale Book Trade

In the late eighteenth century, there was only one way to market hundreds of copies of a new edition in Germany, and that was to transport them to the Leipzig Easter fair, where booksellers from all over central and eastern Europe gathered every spring. No doubt the STN and the other French-language publishers of western Europe would have preferred to distribute their editions from some other location nearer to them than Leipzig—Frankfurt, for example, which had indeed been a central point of distribution for French books in Germany until the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately for the publishers of western Europe, the Frankfurt book fairs had gone into permanent decline by the 1770s. Despite the inconvenience and the expense of transporting books to Saxony, the foreign suppliers of French books had no choice but to accommodate themselves to the geography and the commercial practices of the wholesale book trade in Germany. It did not matter, therefore, where French books began their journey, whether from Amsterdam, Paris, or Neuchâtel. In the wholesale book trade of late eighteenth-century Germany, all roads led to Leipzig.

Since Leipzig was the main outlet for the dissemination of the STN’s editions in Germany, the Neuchâtel archives contain a great many documents of general significance pertaining to the Leipzig Easter fairs: they reveal the modalities of the wholesale trade in French books, not just the peculiarities of the STN’s trade.

Retail Book Selling

The centrality of Leipzig for the wholesale book trade did not prevent the STN from selling small quantities of books to individual booksellers at scattered sites across Germany—fortunately for the historian since the direct correspondence between the STN and booksellers in Germany provides an opportunity to analyze the precise demand for French books. But what guarantee do we have that the demand was of any more than local significance? The STN made regular shipments to booksellers in five German cities: Mannheim, Hamburg, Cologne, Prague, and Frankfurt. Fine, the skeptics will say—and so what? The STN’s correspondence with those booksellers means relatively little if their orders reflected nothing more than the demand for French books at five isolated points on the map of eighteenth-century Germany. That objection sounds damning—until we understand the nature of retail bookselling in Germany.

With the possible exception of Vienna, there were no cities in Germany large enough to sustain the trade of local booksellers. To survive, booksellers had to supply retail customers at a considerable distance from their shops, and they had to cast their nets all the more widely if they were selling French books, which had a smaller public than did German books. In all likelihood, the STN’s correspondent in Cologne sold French books throughout the region of the lower Rhine, its correspondent in Frankfurt throughout the Rhine-Main region and the states of Hesse, and its correspondent in Prague across Bohemia and the territories of the Habsburg monarchy. We know for a fact that the STN’s correspondent in Mannheim supplied French books to princely courts all across southwestern Germany, from the Palatinate to Bavaria, and that its correspondent in Hamburg sent French books up the Elbe to Saxony and eastward along the Baltic to Prussia, Scandinavia, and Russia. Only a fraction of the retail customers of the STN’s correspondents in Cologne, Frankfurt, Prague, Mannheim, and Hamburg were in those cities—and some of them were not even in Germany, however one defines Germany in an age before Germany as a political entity had come into existence. The STN’s correspondent in Hamburg did not bother about trying to define Germany. To describe the area of his retail trade, he used a geographic designation: the North.²³

The case of the STN’s Hamburg correspondent illustrates one of the difficulties of studying the French book trade in eighteenth-century Germany: the subject is always threatening to overflow its banks and to spill out beyond the frontiers of Germany. In the eighteenth century, Germany was not only a destination for French books, it was also a conduit for them, one link in an international chain of transmission; and so some small fraction of the French books traded in Germany were not for German readers. That was true of the French books ordered by the STN’s correspondent in Hamburg, but it was equally true of the French books traded at the Leipzig fairs, which could have gone from Leipzig to bookshops in Riga or Warsaw, as well as to bookshops in cities of Germany.²⁴

It cannot be claimed, therefore, that the orders the STN received from booksellers in Germany reflected the demand for French books among the German public exclusively. But neither can it be said that their orders were of merely local significance. Because of the nature of the retail French book trade, the orders of the STN’s correspondents in Germany reflected the demand for French books across broad swathes of (mainly German) territory—or so I would argue. The skeptics, however, might still counter with one final objection: how do we know that the orders represent the demand for French books in general, as opposed to the demand for those books the STN happened to have published? To deal with that final objection, we need to turn our attention to the nature of publishing in the eighteenth century.

Publishing in the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, most publishers were also booksellers. Their catalogues therefore contained both books from their own lists (fonds) and those they had obtained from other publishers by means of swapping (assortiment). The STN conducted regular exchanges with other publisher-wholesalers, mainly, though not exclusively, in Switzerland; and, as a result, its stock inventory came to resemble that of other Swiss houses. Of course Switzerland was only one of the centers of French publishing in the late eighteenth century. Piracy, however, was rampant throughout the extraterritorial French publishing industry, in the Low Countries no less than in Switzerland; and popular French books were promptly pirated in such cities as Liège, Bouillon, and Amsterdam as well as Neuchâtel, Lausanne, and Bern. The STN’s correspondents in Germany stressed repeatedly that they could obtain many of the same books from both the Low Countries and Switzerland and that their choice of where to purchase them depended primarily on two factors: price and speed of delivery. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that they would have turned, say, to Liège for one kind of book and to Neuchâtel for another. Because of widespread piracy and the practice of swapping among publishers, the same basic stock of books, though not necessarily the same editions, were available in Switzerland as in the Low Countries.²⁵

In short, once one realizes how the wholesale book trade, retail bookselling, and publishing worked in the late eighteenth century, it seems quite reasonable to treat the STN’s trade in Germany as a representative slice of the French book trade in Germany: representative, however, more in the rhetorical sense of a synecdoche—of a part standing in for the whole—than in the social science sense of typical. Social scientists create types by abstracting from them the elements of human individuality. But one cannot abstract those elements from the STN’s commercial relations in Germany. The STN’s trade in Germany was not some vast impersonal mechanism guided by an invisible hand according to the laws of supply and demand. It involved dozens of middlemen, who played various roles in transmitting French books from Neuchâtel to readers in (and sometimes beyond) Germany. The Neuchâtel archives contain more than 150 dossiers with over 2,500 pieces of correspondence (letters, balance sheets, shipping invoices, legal documents) from correspondents of the STN in more than forty locations in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland, from booksellers, shipping agents, bankers, magistrates, lawyers, Protestant ministers, members of the public, and a few authors, as well as from employees and associates of the STN. And those dossiers reveal some remarkable eighteenth-century characters: a Hamburg bookseller who prided himself on selling expensive editions of French books to princes and high-ranking aristocrats at courts across northern Europe and who hosted the most elegant salon in Hamburg but whose trade collapsed in bankruptcy in 1785 and who turned up six years later as a militant Jacobin in revolutionary Paris; a native-born Parisian and Freemason who performed secret diplomatic missions for Frederick the Great of Prussia before establishing himself as a publisher of French pornography in the German Rhineland; a French Protestant minister in Cassel who volunteered to flog both the STN’s edition of a French Bible and its edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie; an expatriate former French military officer and occasional author who resided at a small princely court near Frankfurt and who volunteered to promote the sales of the STN’s books but who then swindled the STN and fled to Berlin, where he won election to the prestigious Prussian academy; and one of the STN’s own associates, a hard-bitten, unsentimental former textile manufacturer with little patience for idle chitchat, who traveled through the Rhineland in the summer of 1779 inspecting book shops and enduring interminable conversations with loquacious booksellers. The dossiers are endlessly fascinating, but not because they provide information about the typical eighteenth-century bookseller, or French Protestant minister, or expatriate French author, or traveling commercial agent. To do justice to the documentary riches in the Neuchâtel archives, one has to study the STN’s trade in Germany from two perspectives: both as a representative slice of the French book trade in eighteenth-century Germany and as an ensemble of individual life stories.

Throughout this book, I have tried to give equal weight to both of those aspects—the individual as well as the representative—and that applies also to how I have treated the STN itself. On the face of it, it might not seem that there was all that much to distinguish the STN from other French-language publishers of the late eighteenth century—not its location outside of France (dozens of French-language publishers, as already noted, plied their trade along the eastern frontiers of the French kingdom), nor its pirating of original editions (piracy was rampant in the eighteenth century), nor its printing of books in small formats (by the 1780s, contemporaries were speaking of a mania for small formats). And in its commercial correspondence, the STN usually wrote in the first-person plural and signed its letters with the company name, as if to expunge any traces of individuality. Behind the impersonal collective we of the STN’s letters, however, stood the directors of the firm, book dealers whose individual characteristics did, in fact, color the nature of the STN’s trade—especially, and most important for this study, the nature of its trade in Germany.

Before beginning with the story of the STN’s trade in Germany, therefore, it seems important to say just a few words about the directors of the firm and what set them apart from the other French-language publishers who were plying their literary wares in the international marketplace of ideas.

A small group of enterprising Neuchâtelois owned and directed the STN: Frédéric-Samuel Ostervald (1713–95), a high-ranking local magistrate and distinguished man of letters, who was the author of several works on geography; Jean-Elie Bertrand (1737–79), Ostervald’s son-in-law, who was an ordained Protestant minister and professor of belles-lettres at the collège in Neuchâtel; Abraham Bosset de Luze (1731–81), a wealthy textile manufacturer who joined the STN in early 1777; and Samuel Fauche (1732–1803), the only one of the founders of the STN to have performed an apprenticeship as a bookseller but who fell out with his associates in 1772 and then went on to create his own firm specializing in the publication of prohibited books. All the directors of the STN were native French speakers; they were steeped in French culture; and their personal sympathies lay with the philosophes. But they were not French. As Swiss Protestants, they were much closer, both geographically and culturally, to the world of German-speaking Europe than were publishers in France. Neuchâtel was only a few miles away from German-speaking towns and villages in the canton of Bern. The STN’s directors lived, therefore, in a linguistic border area, and one of them, Bertrand, spoke German fluently.

Not that it was really necessary for French-language publishers to know German in order to sell French books in Germany. Many of the French booksellers in Germany were native French speakers (either French, Swiss, or descendants of Huguenot refugees), and those who were native German-speakers usually had at least a smattering of French, enough to conduct a business correspondence. The STN indicated to its German-speaking correspondents that they could write in German if they preferred, and some of them did prefer it; but even those correspondents who wrote to the STN in German were able to read business letters in French. The STN, therefore, did not have to go to the trouble of writing in German; it simply had to decipher the occasional letter in German—a task that it would probably have been able to manage even without Bertrand’s aid. What made Bertrand’s knowledge of German important was not so much that it facilitated the STN’s correspondence with booksellers in Germany as that it allowed the STN to translate German books into French.

The two decades of the STN’s existence coincided with a period of extraordinary creativity in the world of German letters. Less than a century earlier, when Leibniz wrote his Théodicée in French, German had scarcely existed as a literary language. Now, suddenly, it was serving as a vehicle of expression for the boldest and most innovative works in nearly every field of literature. Kant inaugurated the Copernican revolution in philosophy; the theology of the Aufklärung expunged mysteries and miracles from the Word of God; the Göttingen school of historiography laid the foundations of historicism; the Stürmer und Dränger liberated the theater from the straitjacket of classical poetics; and Goethe touched a generation of novel-readers with his Werther. In retrospect, the enormous importance of German literature in the last third of the eighteenth century seems obvious, but, at the time, the French knew almost nothing about it (with the exception of Werther, which was translated into French).²⁶ Shortly after setting itself up in trade, therefore, the STN spotted an opening in the market. Instead of confining itself to the publication of French works, as most of its competitors were doing, it announced an ambitious plan to publish French translations of the best of contemporary German literature. In the end, a combination of factors prevented the STN from realizing that ambitious plan: Bertrand was too busy to devote himself full time to translating; freelance translators demanded more money than the STN could afford to pay; and, in 1779, Bertrand died, still a relatively young man at the age of forty-two, leaving the STN without any in-house translators. Before Bertrand’s death, however, the STN did manage to publish seven translations of German works, including a translation of Friedrich Nicolai’s Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, a major work of the Berlin Aufklärung and one of the most popular and widely disseminated German novels of the entire eighteenth century. In its German editions, Sebaldus Nothanker probably did more than any other work to disseminate the rationalist theology of the Aufklärung among German-speaking readers—but only among German-speaking readers. In the STN’s French translation, by contrast, Nicolai’s novel reached readers all across Europe. Located astride the linguistic border between the French- and German-speaking worlds, the STN performed the role of Helvetia mediatrix, introducing the Aufklärung to a European reading public decades before another one of its compatriots, Madame de Staël, discovered the romantic paradise of poets and thinkers.

Unlike nearly all of its competitors, then, the STN transmitted books in both directions across the Franco-German border—from Germany to France as well as from France to Germany. That was one thing that set it apart. Another was that none of the STN’s directors, with the exception of Fauche, had had any previous experience with printing, publishing, or selling books.²⁷ When Ostervald and Bertrand set up shop in late 1769, they were rank beginners. They knew precious little about the book trade in general and still less about the book trade in Germany—about its seasonal rhythms and its geography, the central role of the Leipzig fairs, and the professional jargon of German booksellers. Even for the most knowledgeable of book dealers, the old Reich was forbidding terrain, what with its political fragmentation, its overlapping and competing jurisdictions, and its innumerable tariff barriers, currencies, and legal systems: it was all the more so for the STN.

Reading through the STN’s correspondence with booksellers in Germany, one often gets the impression that Ostervald and Bertrand were feeling their way in the dark, casting about like explorers in an uncharted land. They took many wrong turns, endured numerous accidents, and became embroiled in bitter disagreements with the native tribes of booksellers, whose language they could usually understand, more or less, but whose ways of doing business seemed strange and exotic to inexperienced publishers from French-speaking Switzerland. Throughout their careers, the STN’s directors were learning as they went, and so the story of their efforts to sell French books in Germany has all the drama of a voyage of discovery. By accompanying them on that voyage, we can begin to map the contours and the topography of what has remained until now a virtual terra incognita: the French book trade of late eighteenth-century Germany.

CHAPTER 1

Rite of Spring

The Leipzig Easter Fair and the Literary Marketplace

Le commerce de l’Allemagne ne peut se faire autrement que par les foires.

(Trade in Germany cannot be conducted otherwise than through the fairs.)

—Société Typographique de Berne to STN,

7 June 1780

In early March 1770, as the STN’s presses were turning out the first of its publications, a puzzling letter arrived at the shop in Neuchâtel. It came from a correspondent in German-speaking Switzerland, a firm called the Société Typographique de Berne, that had ordered a considerable quantity of the STN’s books for sale at the Easter book fairs in Germany. The STN had already dispatched some of those books to Bern but not all; and in their letter of early March, the booksellers in Bern announced that after the middle of the month, it would be too late to transport any more of the STN’s books to the fairs.¹

Why too late? the STN wondered. Without any previous knowledge of the book trade in Germany, the STN was under the impression that its correspondents in Bern intended its books for the fairs at both Frankfurt and Leipzig. The fairs would not start till sometime in the following month, and the STN had observed that textile merchants in Neuchâtel continued to make shipments of printed calicoes to Frankfurt as late as early April. If textiles could still be sent to Frankfurt at that late date, then why not books? the STN asked its correspondents in Bern.² And without waiting for a reply, it proceeded to send a crate of books to Bern on 1 April, followed a week later by a letter in which it expressed the hope that the books had arrived in time to be sent to Frankfurt before the fair.³ In fact, the STN’s correspondents in Bern had never expected to sell more than a handful of its books at the fair in Frankfurt: You are perhaps unaware, Messieurs, that the fair in Frankfurt is of little significance for the book trade—in any case, for us, C. A. Serini, an employee of the Société Typographique de Berne, explained to the STN in a letter of 11 April:

The few booksellers from the surrounding Catholic areas who go there are certainly not worth the trouble of undertaking a journey of 80 leagues. . . . Leipzig, where there is an assembly of five- to six-hundred booksellers from all countries, is the only location suitable for the book trade. . . . Let us suppose, Messieurs, that your crate arrives here on the 14th of this month. . . . They [the books in the crate] could not be in Frankfurt any earlier than 9 or 10 May, from there to Leipzig it will take at least thirteen to fourteen days; thus the crate would arrive after my departure, for I plan to depart from Leipzig on 21 or 22 May.⁴

The letter read as if written by a schoolmaster for his pupils. And, in a sense, the directors of the STN were pupils, neophyte book dealers who had a great to deal to learn about the business of selling books in Germany. Many years would go by before all the mysteries of that business were finally revealed to them. But the spring of 1770 was a decisive moment in their early education. Succinctly and plainly written, Serini’s letter made it clear to the Neuchâtelois that their mental map of the German book trade had been all wrong and that they would have to re-imagine it, Copernicus-like, from an utterly new perspective. The German book trade revolved around Leipzig: that was the main lesson Serini’s letter imparted, and it was a crucial lesson for any foreign publishing firm hoping to sell its books in the German literary market during the last third of the eighteenth century.

Unlike most markets today in the age of global capitalism, the German literary market of the late eighteenth century had not yet broken free of its moorings in time and space. Tightly bound, both temporally and spatially, to the Leipzig Easter fairs, it was still, quite literally, a market place.

For roughly two or three weeks every spring, Leipzig was transformed into a vast book emporium.⁵ Nearly all the major booksellers in Germany transported their new publications to the fairs, and hundreds of them attended the fairs in person, selling their own editions and buying those of others. While the fair lasted, the streets of Saxony’s commercial capital were a whirlwind of activity: book dealers dashed to and fro, account books tucked under their arms, inspecting one another’s stock, doing deals, and settling accounts. Then, once the fair had ended, they packed up what they had purchased and transported it to their shops throughout German-speaking Europe, from Frankfurt to Riga. Some of them might return to Leipzig for the autumn fair, but the volume of trade conducted at the autumn fair was small—too small to justify a second annual trip to Leipzig in the view of the Société Typographique de Berne.⁶ If a publisher wanted to ensure that his new publications would be able to reach readers all across German-speaking Europe, there was only one reliable method—to transport those publications to Leipzig for sale at the Easter fairs.

In no other European country of the late eighteenth century was the book trade so highly centralized as it was in Germany. Not even in France, the country of centralization par excellence, was there a single location where booksellers from every corner of the realm gathered annually. To be sure, all the major French publishers were located in Paris, and so they did not have to go anywhere else to trade with one another directly. But there were also hundreds of French booksellers scattered throughout the provinces. If the STN wished to enter into direct contact with them, it had no choice but to engage the services of a traveling commissioner (commis voyageur). Setting out from Neuchâtel, the traveling commissioner would journey around the kingdom on horseback for months at a time, passing from one province to another as he met with booksellers individually.⁷ In Germany, no such lengthy and arduous journey was necessary or even useful. On one occasion, in early 1776, Barthélemy de Félice, a French-language publisher in the Swiss town of Yverdon, offered to hire Serini as a traveling commissioner for Germany; Serini felt duty bound to turn down that offer: As I know this country and the principal booksellers, he explained in a letter to the STN, I made him [i.e., Félice] realize the senselessness of such a journey, for one can accomplish everything and make all the necessary arrangements during the Leipzig fair.⁸

Since the Leipzig fair had no parallel anywhere else in Europe, it is not surprising that its significance had to be explained to a French-language publisher in Yverdon. The Leipzig fair was like Gothic type or convoluted syntax, a German peculiarity whose meaning foreigners had a hard time deciphering. From the standpoint of German booksellers, however, the fair made perfectly good sense because it provided an institutional corrective to a characteristically German