Book Trade [see also Libraries; Literacy; Manuscripts; Printing in France until 1600]
1. An Unchanging Regime
The organization of the French book industry changed little between the age of Gutenberg and the early 19th c. Until the changes wrought by the Revolution and its aftermath, books were manufactured by artisans, traditionally grouped in small workshops in the capital, around the university, the law courts, and Notre-Dame. When the Imprimerie Royale was set up in 1640, with seven presses under one roof, it was an exceptionally large establishment for its time. Printers carried out several different functions at once, acting as booksellers and publishers. Before 1750 the French book industry produced fewer than 500 titles annually. This did not mean that nothing at all had changed in book production since the 16th c.: the proportion of books produced in Latin, for example, was already a minority by the mid-16th c., and it fell to less than 20 per cent of total production from the 1660s onwards. Nevertheless, the description of provincial printing offered by Balzac in Illusions perdues would probably have looked familiar to a printer of the 16th or 17th c.
The Revolution dealt a decisive below to the guild system and to monarchical control, and by the 1830s the introduction of mechanization and of capitalist methods began to transform the typographical ancien régime. Overall, however, the book trade was still characterized by centralized government control (see Section 2 below), and the domination of Paris.
2. Organization and Control before 1789 [see also Censorship]
Printing and publishing in ancien régime France was governed from the beginning of the 16th c. by the grant of a royal privilège. A privilège conferred fiscal rights, for books were tax-free, and in principle guaranteed a protected home market. A privilège was thus an authority to publish a given book, which conferred a virtual monopoly on the successful publisher. It might be limited to 20, 10, or just a few years: enough to allow the publisher to produce not just one edition, but the repeated editions which alone could make a book profitable. Until 1777, a privilège was renewable.
Printers before the Revolution thus worked within a protected system of temporary monopolies, and the book trade was at the mercy of the royal pleasure. Royal favour played an important additional role in the disbursement of patronage. A wide range of pensions and sinecures was available to support writers and artists. In these different ways, the ancien régime monarchy policed, supervised, and repressed the book trade. The mechanisms of control were installed as the bureaucracy of royal absolutism expanded in the late 17th c.; the abbé Bignon's term as Directeur de la Librairie (1699-1714) is usually identified as a crucial period in this process.
In practice, the privilège system was very centralized. Parisian publishers, in close contact with both authors and bureaucrats, seized the lion's share of lucrative privilèges. Provincial publishers complained bitterly that they were left only the crumbs discarded by their larger Parisian colleagues. These complaints were partly justified. In Lyon, for example, far less was printed in the 18th than in the 17th c. The city had 30 printers in 1701, but only 12 were active there by 1777. The domination of Parisian publishing drove the Lyon book trade to rely on resale and distribution, buying in Holland and Germany and reselling in Spain. Similar stagnation set in in Languedoc, except perhaps in Toulouse, where the parlement, clergy, and university kept local printers in work for at least two-thirds of the year. Provincial publishers were often forced to wait for Parisian privilèges to expire, and the works concerned to become public property, but they were frustrated by the frequent renewal of privilèges. As a result, provincial centres like Rouen were driven into a close reliance on illegal and contraband works.
Illicit literature was smuggled into France from abroad, chiefly from Holland and Switzerland, through various underground networks in the 18th c. Illegal books might be hidden among other goods, their passage facilitated by bribing customs officials, or carriers might exchange their freight clandestinely, before it arrived ‘under seal’ at the nearest chambre syndicale (see Section 4 below) to the French border. Rouen was an important distribution point for contraband from Holland; and Avignon, as a superbly situated Papal enclave, and a tax haven, was a paradise for publishers of books banned in France. Avignon publishers could produce best-sellers with no privilèges to infringe, and without paying authors a fee. They could undercut their French competitors by between 25 and 50 per cent.
It required a vast network of corruption to organize regular shipments and distribution of prohibited books. It could also be very expensive. Contraband passed through so many hands on its devious route from Switzerland to such places as Versailles, that its price was thereby increased by at least 25 per cent. There was nevertheless a considerable market for pornography, satires on religion and the court, and a few extremist works of Englightenment philosophy.
The domination by Paris of the book trade in the Midi was part of a more general European pattern in which, by the 18th c., the north of Europe supplied the south and east. In the decade of the 1780s, three-quarters of all books published in Paris but reissued in the provinces were produced north of a line between Avranches and Besançon. Outside the area north of this imaginary line, only Toulouse and Lyon showed any vitality as book publishers.
The Avranches-Besançon (or Saint-Malo-Geneva) line coincides with the division often made between the literate north-east of France and the relatively illiterate west, centre, and Midi. It is also echoed in the distribution of printing-shops. In 1777 the network of printing-shops was densest in the north-east, with the usual exceptions of Toulouse and Bordeaux. In the centre of France there was only one printing-shop for a quarter of a million inhabitants. Between 1701 and 1777 the number of provincial printers declined by almost 30 per cent. There were very few booksellers anywhere in the vicinity of the capital, which drew all such activity like a magnet to the Quartier Latin. There were hardly any in port cities, but many around provincial parlements. Studies of book-purchasing habits conducted in the 1940s suggest that this north-east/centre-west division has remained a permanent feature of French cultural space.
3. Authors and Publishers
Until the position of the author became fully professionalized in the 19th c., writers under the ancien régime enjoyed little legal protection, since their property rights were not fully recognized. Authors sold their manuscript once and for all to a publisher, and were not entitled to the benefits of anything resembling a royalty system. Rousseau received no payment for the hundreds of articles on music he contributed to the Encyclopédie, and the Amsterdam publisher Rey paid him only 1, 000 livres for the Contrat social. Writing for the theatre could be more lucrative, because fees rose in proportion to box-office receipts, as long as the latter covered the theatre's expenses. Only a few writers were able to earn large sums by their pen in the ancien régime: Buffon was one, and Restif de la Bretonne another. It was more common for authors to be treated like amateurs, and to be satisfied with an offer of several luxury-bound copies of their own work in payment.
The Revolution, however, redefined the nature of private property in literary works as in everything else. On 19 July 1793 the Convention gave authors, painters, and composers the right to dispose of their own works during their own lifetime, and the same right was to be enjoyed by their heirs up to ten years after the author's death. The Revolution ended the system of royal privilèges, and invented a primitive form of copyright.
4. The Printing Trade
The Revolution also suppressed the corporate organization of the entire printing industry. Under the ancien régime, a mass of detailed legislation controlled entry into the book trade, the recruitment of workers, and access to the coveted maîtrise. Apprentices had to be of the Catholic faith, and were required to have a knowledge of Greek and Latin. The number of apprentices was limited, to protect existing practitioners from too much competition. The government tried to reduce the number of printers to make policing easier, and the monarchy found ready accomplices within the trade itself.
The printers' community had an exclusive membership, its own autonomous structure and social life, electing its own officials on the feast of St John the Evangelist, the patron saint of printers. The guild also had its own local chambre syndicale, where corporation officials checked imported books to eliminate contraband and illegal competition. Opening the trade to unrestricted competition would, it was argued, lead to serious deterioration of the typographer's art. Not only did the corporation stand in the way of free competition and the progress of book production along capitalist lines, but the guild was also a willing instrument of the monarchy's police apparatus. Its exclusive policies helped to isolate a number of aspiring authors and publishers, who formed a growing intellectual proletariat in Paris in the dying years of the ancien régime.
For the apprentices and journeymen who produced the literary masterpieces of the ancien régime, the working environment was noisy, the hours long, but the pay probably good. The labour market was very insecure; printers joined other compagnons on their Tour de France in search of work, experience, and the occasional bout of drunken fighting in defence of their lodge, or ‘Devoir’. They lived from job to job, travelling wherever work was offered. Inside the printing-shops workers were paid by the task, or by the thousand impressions. Work rhythms varied erratically, with periods of intense activity alternating with periods of total rest or redundancy. In Neuchâtel, for instance, workers took holidays exactly as they wished, and worked at their own pace. They were craft-workers whose working life was not subject to the regularity and discipline which industrial capitalism was later to demand.
Before the technical innovations of the 19th c., printing used technology inherited from the 16th c. Ink was sold by the pint, in a container made of boiled leather. It was usually made from a mixture of walnut, turpentine, and resin, and just one barrel might cost as much as a second-hand printing press. Until rubber was introduced as an eraser in the reign of Louis XVI, bread was a normal correcting medium. Paper itself was manufactured from cloth, supplied by a host of rag-pickers all over the country. The material had to be soaked in unpolluted water, left to ferment, and then pounded into pulp. The pulp was then spread out in thin layers, squeezed, hung up to dry, smoothed, and polished with stone.
The cost of paper was normally the largest item on the budget of an 18th-c. publisher. In a production budget for a work in octavo or in duodecimo, on ordinary paper, with a normal print-run of 1, 200 or 1, 500, the publisher expected paper to absorb between 60 and 75 per cent of expenses. In this era of the hand-made book, buyers paid great attention to the thickness and smoothness of the paper, and the care observed by the printer. Subscribers might threaten to cancel their subscription if a book appeared with too many misprints or an excess of fingermarks in the margin.
The technology of printing on the eve of the French Revolution therefore bore a striking resemblance to the state of the art in the age of Gutenberg. Books were printed by hand-operated wooden presses, operated by a pre-industrial workforce. Only in the first half of the 19th c. did mechanization, industrial concentration, and professional specialization change the industry. Until then, the total annual production of books in France only exceeded 1, 000 titles per year in the 1780s, while the average print-run remained at well under 2, 000 copies per title.
5. The Nineteenth Century
In the early 19th c. a series of inventions began to transform the printing industry. After the Napoleonic wars, Ambroise-Firmin Didot bought one of the new Stanhope presses in London, and French manufacturers started to copy it. The Stanhope was the first all-metal press, with a platen large enough to print a complete folio at one pull. In 1811 Koenig invented a cylindrical press, driven by steam, capable of producing 1, 000 copies per hour. At first only large-circulation newspapers found the investment in such machines worthwhile [see Press]. In 1833 there were only 67 mechanically operated presses in Paris: only 7 per cent of the total. In 1830, however, the year of Revolution, printing-workers smashed the mechanical presses in the Imprimerie Royale—one indication of an industry in the throes of an important growth period. By the 1840s about one Parisian press in six was mechanically operated, although small printing workshops with a small number of employees were still the norm.
In the 19th c. the book became an object of everyday consumption. The publisher emerged as a specialist profession for the first time, and a few became household names. When the French first began to order books by the names of their publishers, rather than by their titles or authors, it was a Hachette or a Larousse they were demanding. Charpentier produced the single-volume, small-format novel (in octodecimo) which led eventually to the production of cheap, mass-produced fiction. Books were sold in new ways: not by subscription, but through new retail outlets, like the station bookstalls which made a fortune for Hachette in the 1850s and 1860s. Authors, too, eventually benefited from the rapid commercialization of book production. A royalty system developed, and in 1838 they organized themselves into the Société des Gens de Lettres to defend their interests. Legislation of 1854 confirmed the author's copyright, and that of his or her heirs, and reciprocal international copyright agreements were put into place.
The trade was still regulated by Napoleonic legislation, enacted between 1811 and 1814. A printer or bookseller needed a brevet. To obtain the brevet, it was necessary to swear an oath of allegiance and submit trade references and a certificate of good morality. All printers were strictly policed, and a decree of 1811 fixed the maximum number allowed to operate in Paris at 80. In 1870 the printer's brevet was at last abolished.
Large-scale publishing enterprises demanded large injections of capital, which were usually beyond the resources of individual publishers. The arrival of the modern capitalist publisher is clearly demonstrated in the career of Michel and Calmann Lévy. By the Second Empire, the Lévy brothers had established a successful business on the basis of their theartical publishing. In 1856 Lévy launched a new collection of novels and poetry, the Collection Michel Lévy, in the octodecimo format (the old ‘format Charpentier’), at the price of only 1 france per volume. This series, and its rock-bottom price, were the foundation of the Lévy empire. Their diverse investments included interests in French and Italian railways, the Marseille Gas Company, Algeria, and Bordeaux vineyards. The profits they made from Renan's Vie de Jésus alone paid for their new building in the rue Auber—publishing was moving away from the Quartier Latin and the Palais-Royal to the brash world of the boulevards.
In the early years of the 19th c. novels were rarely produced in print-runs of more than 1, 000 or 1, 500 copies. By the 1840s editions of 5, 000 copies were more common, while in the 1870s the cheapest editions of Jules Verne appeared in editions of 30, 000. New categories of reader had joined the reading public: children, for instance, with the expansion of literacy and primary education (which became free, compulsory, and secular in the 1880s). Schools, as Hachette realized, were an increasingly important part of the market. The new readers of the 19th c. also included the lower middle classes, especially the white-collar workers and clerks who devoured cheap magazines and romans-feuilletons. The reading public had also undergone a process of feminizaton in the 19th c., and many publishers and writers identified women as the true and natural novel-reading audience of their time.
6. The Twentieth Century
In the 20th c. print culture has continued to thrive, in spite of competition from the electronic media and from new commercialized leisure pursuits. Book production, stagnant earlier in the century, has expanded since 1945, and a survey by the Syndicat National de l'Édition of 1966-7 showed that television owners bought more books than non-owners. The screen and the book are not necessarily incompatible.
The paperback revolution has transformed the book and the nature of reading. In 1970 61 per cent of all books produced in France were paperbacks. Nevertheless, according to a SOFRES poll for Le Figaro in 1972, only one Frenchman in four reads more than one book per month. In 1990 the French still spent more on cigarettes than they did on books, and perhaps 40 per cent of the population are not generally buyers or readers of books. The livre de poche has not opened up new markets, but has better served the readership which already existed.
Methods of distribution have changed: only one-third of French readers buy their books in bookshops. Other outlets are increasingly important for the trade, such as newsagents, book clubs, and large stores.
Industrial concentration has accelerated in the 20th c. In 1970 17 publishing houses were responsible for about one-half of the turnover of books in France. Today, however, the field is dominated by just three giant corporations—Hachette, Les Presses de la Cité, and Larousse-Nathan. These firms control 80 per cent of turnover, and are themselves controlled by international companies, for whom French books are a secondary financial activity.
The internationalization of the French book trade is perhaps inevitable. Less than 5 per cent of the world's reading public is French-speaking, and although this is not a measure of the language's international importance, the growing power of English in the world is undeniable. Since 1970 France's book imports have been more significant than her book exports, which have been sold in France's traditional, but limited, export market of Belgium, Canada [see Quebec], and Switzerland. For French publishers, it is increasingly important to handle translations, both into and out of English, and to invest in publishing concerns in the English-speaking world.
— Martyn Lyons
Bibliography
- J. Cain et al., Le Livre français: hier, aujourd'hui, demain (1972)
- R. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (1979)
- J.-Y. Mollier, Michel et Calmann-Lévy ou la Naissance de l'édition moderne, 1836-1891 (1984); H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier (eds.), Histoire de l'édition française, 4 vols. (1983-6)
- M. Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre: histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siècle (1987)
