Bibliothèque Bleue, La. The ancestor of the livre de poche. Early in the 17th c. publishers began to produce small books wrapped in blue sugar paper which were sold throughout France by pedlars (colporteurs). The trade was centred on Troyes, where the Oudot family occupied a dominating position, but other bookseller-publishers followed suit in Paris, Rouen, and elsewhere. The booklets were very cheap (as little as 1 sou), and they sold in massive numbers (about 1 million annually in the early 18th c.). Like almanacs and other related material, they were aimed at the non-book-buying classes of town and country. In some cases they were read aloud to the partly illiterate public at village veillées—evening gatherings where craft-work was combined with story-telling and similar entertainment.
Although some of the books are reprints of works by classic authors such as Corneille, the majority were composed by literary journeymen, who drew on a varied and for the most part highly traditional repertoire. Religious writings, in particular lives of saints, works of popular devotion, and cantiques, were in great demand. The new thought of the Enlightenment was slow to make an impact, but there were many handbooks of astrology, folk-medicine, letter-writing, and elementary civility. As far as ‘belles-lettres’ is concerned, two dominant elements are tall stories and burlesque comedy. There are many editions of popular old tales, including recyclings of the Charlemagne legends, the adventures of Robert le Diable and Geneviève de Brabant, and the stories of Gargantua which Rabelais had promoted to the ranks of high literature. The story Le Bonhomme Misère is probably the most famous item in the collection, which includes upwards of 4, 000 titles, including reprints.
Under the ancien régime, the Bibliothèque Bleue was predominantly conformist in tone—indeed, it has been seen as a mechanism of social control. The Revolution saw spasmodic attempts to harness it to popular instruction, but it was in the 19th c. that it acquired a real political role, and came to be considered subversive and morally suspect. As part of the resulting attempt to control it under the Second Empire, Nisard produced the first study of the phenomenon, his Histoire des livres populaires ou de la littérature de colportage (1864). His work is a mine of information, but his view of the blue books is patronizing and severe.
In recent years they have been more sympathetically studied, and sometimes this has led to a romantic image of them as a product of ‘popular culture’. In fact, the relations between popular and learned culture are far from ones of simple opposition. The frontier between littérature de colportage and more prestigious productions was uncertain, and there was movement in both directions. The blue books reused the stories and ideas of learned literature (with a time-lag of a century or more), while fashionable readers and writers were interested in the pedlars' wares. Perrault is a case in point: his verse tale Griselidis is indebted to the Bibliothèque Bleue, but his own Contes appeared before long between blue covers.
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- G. Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue: la littérature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siècles (1971)
- L. Andries, La Bibliothèque bleue au dix-huitième siè-cle, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 270 (1989)
