The Literary Market - Geoffrey Turnovsky Material Texts

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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, one of whom, Charles-Alexandre Salley, having managed to peruse the manuscript in the print shop, warned the current director of the book trade in late June of the “peculiarity [singularité] of the work.”16 Charged with overseeing all the aspects of the commercial publishing industry in France, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes was in fact a famous friend of the philosophes. He was mostly sympathetic with their agenda and remained a long-time advocate for restraint in censorship. He was, though, also a conscientious administrator concerned for the integrity of his office, and no doubt believed that little was to be gained either by the philosophes themselves or more generally by writers and booksellers from any kind of controversy. He therefore ordered the printing of De l’Esprit stopped and took the unusual measure of having the work reexamined by a second censor who proposed a series of suppressions involving passages too transparently critical of the Church. Helvétius readily complied with these cuts, and the printing was resumed.17

      De l’Esprit became available on July 27, provoking an instant outcry beginning in the camp of dévots at court, gathered around the queen. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard recalls in his Mémoires being in the antechamber of the dauphin soon after the work was published, when the latter burst out of his apartment with a copy of the book, exclaiming that he was going to show the queen what Helvétius, a maître d’hôtel in her retinue, was printing.18 The outrage spread to the Parlement, the Jesuits, and the Sorbonne. Malesherbes at once ordered Durand to suspend sales of the book, and under mounting pressure, he had the privilège revoked by an arrêt du Conseil hastily signed by the king on August 11.19 Helvétius was forced to make a series of retractions, as demanded first by the queen, to whom he was personally attached through his family and court post;20 then by the Jesuits who deemed the first retraction to be insufficiently repentant and far too self-justifying;21 and finally by the Paris Parlement whose firebrand avocat général, Jean-Omer Joly de Fleury, had made a mission of curtailing the proliferation of “encyclopedic” writing. The philosophe was dismissed from his position in the queen’s household. And while some contemporaries were actually surprised by the leniency with which he was treated—for instance, he was saved from imprisonment or exile by the intervention of powerful court allies such as Madame de Pompadour and the duc de Choiseul— Helvétius was shaken enough by the episode never again to publish; De l’Homme appeared posthumously in 1772.

      Two significant aspects of the affair can be retained, each allowing it to be interpreted in a markedly divergent way. First and no doubt more familiarly, the episode has come across as an emblematic and powerful illustration of the plight of the philosophes in their struggles against reactionary forces in the Old Regime. Indeed, if the event has passed into literary history, it is above all as it has been integrated into a broader story about the increasing repressiveness of the 1750s and early 1760s, when various factions were beginning to perceive and denounce the dangers that an emerging group of writers appeared to pose, articulating in the process the group’s cohesiveness as a rising movement, party, or “sect.” The attacks were underway in 1752 when the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie were suppressed following the scandal unleashed by the heterodox Sorbonne thesis of the abbé de Prades, who was a contributor to the edition. In the years to come, opposition to the “encyclopedists” would take hold in numerous venues including among the dévots at court, among the Jesuits at the Journal de Trévoux, in Parlement where Jansenist sympathies always ran strong, and in “anti-philosophical” journalism and pamphleteering, where writers such as Fréron and Palissot found a platform. From as early as Duvernet’s 1786 biography of Voltaire, the retelling of this mounting hostility has accorded a central place to the mobilization against Helvétius and De l’Esprit, proffered as evidence of the darkening climate.22 Indeed, the affair often stands as a “critical date” or a threshold opening onto a whole sequence of markedly repressive responses.23

      In this view, the affair plays into a conventional understanding of the philosophes that construes their intellectual lives as a function, first and foremost, of censorship. That is, philosophes by definition said what was not supposed to be said, and thus for them writing and publication were in essence direct clashes with the authorities enforcing the limits of what was permissible to say. In this sense, their prison stints, arrests, burned books, and years on the run mark their ascendency just as surely as their bestsellers, academic seats, and theatrical triumphs.24 Belin considers Helvétius a martyr to the encyclopedic cause for having borne the brunt of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to muffle dissent.25 David Smith’s account of the affaire is subtitled “A Study in Persecution,” which underscores a heroic dimension of the philosophical enterprise by portraying Helvétius as a writer who, for the modernity of his ideas, suffers the antagonism of the conservative institutional interests entrenched at court, in the Parlement, and in the Church. Of course, Helvétius was also a retired fermier général, sitting on an immense personal fortune that had allowed him to withdraw to his country estate. His family attachments to the queen provided him with the coveted position of maître d’hôtel ordinaire, and thus credibility and access at the court. This is not to minimize his “persecution” throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1758–59. The pursuit was indeed relentless, continuing far beyond several points at which it might have been abandoned, say, at the moment of the revocation of the privilège in August or of the initial public retraction soon afterward. And it is clear from his correspondence that, in particular, the possibility of exile was

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