Printing in France until 1600
[For book production before printing, see Manuscripts; for later periods and for such issues as state control and guild organization, see Book Trade.] The printing-press came to France in 1470, over 20 years after Gutenberg's invention. The first press, set up in the Sorbonne by Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlin produced several classical texts, modern humanist works such as Valla's Elegantiae and Fichet's Rhetoric, and scholastic writers like Scotus, turning to religious and popular works after 1472. Other presses were soon established in Paris (around the rue Saint-Jacques), in 1473 in Lyon, and by 1500 in 40 other French towns. For the first century and more, traditional works, classical and medieval, were printed, almost half of these of religious interest. The dominant language was Latin [see Latinity]; gradually the medieval Latin of the schools and ecclesiastical debate gave way to purer humanist Latin, which became the language of serious international discourse. Although the first book to be published in French, Bonhomme's Croniques de France, dates from 1476, and although publishers like Antoine Vérard, celebrated for his splendid Books of Hours, did bring out court poetry, mystery plays, and chivalric romances at the end of the 15 c., it is not until the middle of the 16th that printing can be said to have encouraged writing in the vernacular.
France soon began to surpass both Germany and Italy in the quality of its typography and book production [for the physical manufacture of books see Book Trade]. The gothic type, based on medieval manuscripts, and used for religious, medical, and legal works, and also for vernacular writing until the 1520s, was replaced by a Roman type based on a humanist hand which became common after Galliot du Pré's Roman de la Rose, and his Chartier and Villon of around 1530. Then Claude Garamond, invented a new Roman type which became the standard for several centuries, a non-Aldine italic type, and also the beautiful ‘grecs du roi’ after the handwriting of the Cretan scholar Angelo Vergetio. This attention to visual presentation is typical of the high standards of French publishers at the time. In Paris, Jean Petit, an academic publisher who produced over 100 editions, and his associate Josse Bade, the publisher of Erasmus, together with Geoffroy Tory (Champ fleury, 1529; royal printer from 1530) and Galliot du Pré, with his translations of the classics and editions of contemporary writers such as Clément Marot, all helped to establish the tradition of fine printing and to favour the move to a more humanist and more imaginative production.
The following period, from about 1530 to 1560, was the high point of French publishing, when printing was at the service of both humanist scholarship and vernacular literature. The Estienne dynasty (Henri I, Robert I, Henri II) was famous for scholarly editions of classical and biblical texts, and for works of lexicography; among other energetic publishers mention should be made of Turnèbe, Wechel, Vascosan, and Morel, all closely associated with the Pléiade. In Lyon, following the early success of Trechsel, and later of Dolet, in the golden age of French printing we find Sébastien Gryphe, friend of Marot, Scève, and Rabelais, who produced dozens of high-quality small schoolbooks, usually in Latin, and Jean de Tournes, publisher of Scève, Labé, and other Lyonnais vernacular writers, as well as of classical and technical works. A feature of de Tournes's books is the art typography and illustration, the work of Bernard Salomon, whose elegant woodcuts in the style of Fontainebleau typify this period.
The second half of the century saw a decline in book-publishing in France, because of the disorders of the civil and religious wars and their disastrous economic effects. This is reflected in the poor quality of the paper, and in the inferior or worn type and woodcut blocks. France's leading role then passed to the Low Countries, first to Antwerp, where the Frenchman Christophe Plantin and his son-in-law Moretus had their presses, and later to Amsterdam.
The history of printing is not only closely linked with the history of writing and of literature, but also reflects and affects broader social and cultural changes [see Literacy]. Initially directed at a relatively well-off élite (with print-runs ranging from 200 to 1, 000) it nevertheless encouraged people to learn to read and facilitated the diffusion of texts, since they could be reproduced more quickly and more cheaply than manuscripts. Eventually printing brought about the standardization of spelling, and also of grammar and syntax, imposing one acceptable form on regional linguistic variations. However, its position was ambivalent since it could be used both to preserve the old order (cultural, political, or religious) and to undermine it, accelerating the dissemination of new ideas and producing intellectual ferment, which in turn invited Censorship. Printing helped to communicate humanist ideas, for example, which undermined the previously prevailing order, but by the end of the century it was used by Montaigne and Bacon for the sceptical rejection of classical authority. In a similar way, after the systematic publication of all the available scientific texts of antiquity, a new approach to scientific discovery, itself a by-product of the way knowledge was now classified and presented on the printed page, subverted received ideas and led to new discoveries. In religion printing was used by traditionalists to strengthen piety and maintain orthodoxy, and by Evangelicals (Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus) and Reformers (Luther and Calvin) to promulgate their ideas and encourage a scholarly and critical reading of the Bible. As a result of all these tensions the practice of reading spread, the use of the vernacular increased, and imaginative literature prospered.
[Peter Sharratt]
Bibliography
- L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L'Apparition du livre (1958)
- A. Parent, Les Métiers du livre à Paris au XVIe siècle (1974)
- E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979)
- H.-J. Martin et al (eds.), Histoire de l'édition française, vol. 1, Le Livre conquérant (1982)
