By tracing the travels in Europe of a bookseller, the historian Robert Darnton confirms the role of mediators in the diffusion and production of the Enlightenment. He also shows that the most concrete transactions lend themselves to a material history that makes room for the commerce of men.
For this new work, Robert Darnton follows in the footsteps of Jean-François Favarger, a traveling salesman sent in 1778 by his employers at the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) on the roads of France, meeting provincial booksellers. It thus allows us to approach this complex universe of the book trade in the Age of Enlightenment. And if his work is presented as a vast assessment of a whole section of his research, A literary tour of France is also, in its own discreet and elegant way, a beautiful exercise in writing history.
The synthesis of a career
Drawing on his long-term work in the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, R. Darnton returns to a question that has occupied him since the beginning of his career as a historian: what did the world of books of the Enlightenment look like, in its aspect not intellectual but material? Who lent themselves to all these tasks (manufacturing, transporting, selling…) of the production and distribution of books in Europe of the XVIIIe century ?
For those who follow R. Darnton’s research closely, the analyses and materials presented here may seem like déjà vu. The character of Favarger, the protagonist of this book, has long been a familiar figure in R. Darnton’s publications, as have some of the characters he meets on his journey, such as the fascinating Joseph Duplain, an unscrupulous bookseller from Lyon, or Jean Ranson, a Protestant from La Rochelle who admires Rousseau. A literary tour of France However, it appears to be a work that is both new and important in R. Darnton’s work, firstly because it offers the most accomplished synthesis of his work on the material history of the book. In the concluding chapter in particular (“Neuchâtel: an overview of the demand for literature”), certainly the densest, and probably intended for specialists in the field, R. Darnton takes stock of the state of the art, responds to his critics and engages in a very precise methodological discussion of the conclusions – in particular statistical ones – that he can (or cannot) draw from his investigation of the archives of the STN. He also offers a typology of the different types of books requested by the public. These forty pages certainly constitute the best assessment of his work as a book historian.
But the work as a whole is also – and above all – a historical investigation which takes its point of reference from the great journey in mainly southern France undertaken by the traveling salesman Jean-François Favarger. Charged by his employers with the STN to explore the various possible markets and provide them with all the information useful for their business, the man provides in his correspondence and his travel diary the material which gives the main framework of the work, completed by R. Darnton’s intimate knowledge of the archives and secondary bibliography.
In any case, everything starts with this famous Société Typographique de Neuchâtel. A publishing and trading company for more or less legal books, particularly for the French market, it was active in the thirty years preceding the Revolution. Above all, it left behind an immense collection of archives, certainly the richest known at present concerning a publishing house of the Ancien Régime.
On the relationship between R. Darnton and his archives, which he has been exploring since 1965, the pages of acknowledgements are particularly instructive; they shed light in particular on the concrete conditions of historical research, made up of repeated stays on site, of familiarization with places and people. Perhaps this is what gives this book something very personal – without any form of egotism for all that – and which makes it a tribute in two ways: not only to all these women – R. Darnton underlines in particular the role of booksellers’ widows who take over the businesses of their deceased husbands and often prove to be brilliant businesswomen – and these obscure men who “acted as crucial go-betweens in the dissemination of literature” and whose “one of the objects of this work” is to “bring back to life” (p. 10), but also to this very intimate relationship between a historian and his archives, as well as to all the encounters that made the historical investigation possible.
A material history of the book and the Enlightenment
The book trade as described by R. Darnton is above all an economic activity. Consequently, it involves significant amounts of capital, but above all the very lives of many actors and actresses, at different levels of the process, in a relatively perilous professional world. Firstly, due to the partly illicit nature of the book trade, STN : because it sometimes trades in prohibited books, Swiss society must set up smuggling networks that allow books to cross the border and reach the back rooms of booksellers who will offer them to their customers with more or less discretion. In this respect, this history of the circulation of books is a privileged point of observation of French centralism, in that it illustrates the struggle, throughout the century, of the Parisian bookstore to impose its privileges on the provinces.
Trading a commodity as special as a book thus requires those who take the risk to be inventive and prudent. The risk of unsold items must be limited (for example, by practicing “exchange trade,” a form of bartering with other publishers or booksellers to diversify one’s catalog) while taking care that the competition does not seize market share. Above all, one must always maintain the credibility of one’s signature, and a large part of Favarger’s work consists of evaluating the solidity of one’s interlocutors. Trust is thus “the key term in the book trade (and probably in early capitalism everywhere)” (p. 287).
R. Darnton’s work therefore seeks to correct certain biases that would make the Enlightenment a phenomenon concerning only philosophers or writers. On the contrary, the material dimensions of the book trade play a crucial role. In R. Darnton’s mind, if Favarger is “not an intellectual”, he acts “as an agent of the Enlightenment, simply by accomplishing his task” (p. 24). Similarly, if the spelling of a peddler can raise a smile when he orders books by “jeanjacle rousau” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) (p. 226), it is he who makes it possible for these texts to be read by an ever-increasing audience.
History put into shape
A literary tour of France appears as convincing in substance as in form, which is the object of great attention on the part of the author.
His first concern is to make the bulk of his material available, thanks to the digitization of numerous archive pieces made available to the public on his website. The book thus often refers to them and invites you to deepen the reading experience or to form your own opinion on the proposed analyses. In this, R. Darnton remains faithful to a certain conception – stemming from the Enlightenment – of public debate based on the broadest sharing of knowledge and ideas. And it is always from these principles that he publicly discusses with those who contradict him.
But the reading of the text is above all structured by the composition of the book. Like its cycling equivalent – or that of the companion artisans, or even Asterix! – this Tour de France is made up of a succession of stages where we concentrate on a particular aspect of the book trade. Pontarlier, a border town, provides an opportunity to focus on the establishment of smuggling networks. In Lyon, a traditional hub of printing since the XVIe century, it is rather the publishing piracy companies targeting Parisian monopolies (such as the sale of the Encyclopedia) that are highlighted. The stop in Loudun, a small town without a large urban market, allows us to take an interest in the practice of peddling. A welcome principle of variety, which rebalances the great precision of the investigation in the direction of the pleasure of reading.
The microhistorical strategy of focusing on Favarger’s point of view gives substance to the story that is told, and R. Darnton is never stingy with details about the health of the clerk or his horse – Favarger suffers from mange during his journey, caught from the almost proverbial filth of the French inns of the time. These apparently gratuitous details produce an essential reading effect: the figures encountered by Favarger are not only creatures of the archives, but on certain occasions have an almost romantic depth. It is no coincidence that R. Darnton refers several times to Balzac of Lost Illusions (p. 14, p. 322): with his own means as a historian, who does not, however, ignore the resources of literature, he also seeks to bring to life the world of the bookshop of the Ancien Régime. And if he ends with the idea of ”lived experience of literature – lived literature “, the biggest question that, according to him, the history of the book poses, it seems thatA literary tour of France also asks, in his own way, how we can make history readable today.