请将“、This structural development changed the conditions for the exercise of rule. The French crown dealt with this situation in three particular ways: by repres-sion, censorship and integration.
The authors and publishers of libelles, those secretly produced scandalous writings and caricatures directed against authority, could only expect repres-sion. At the end of the seventeenth century, their distribution reached a level that had not been seen since the Fronde. Censorship operated in a similar way to repression, but went rather beyond this, in an attempt to regulate the production of books, papers and periodicals. Like many other things, censor-ship was newly regulated by Colbert, and in a particularly comprehensive fashion. His decree of 1686 was followed by governments in the next century. It aimed at restricting the number of printing presses. Printers were forced to join guilds, and the large printing presses were given privileges which ruined the small ones. The number of apprentices was also limited, and the number of journeymen subjected to special permission. Two copies of each book had to be supplied to the public library. While book production in Paris could be more or less controlled, in the provinces the censorship measures proved a failure. During the war years of the early eighteenth century, a complete ban on pamphlets and flyers was imposed on many occasions, but after a short while it always had to be revoked. The government acted differently towards the French-speaking newspapers that started to be imported from the Netherlands and Switzerland in the second half of the seventeenth century. It initially banned their import. But if a newspaper had established itself and proved to be not basically unfriendly towards the French government, it was officially tolerated - against payment of compensation to the Gazette de France (see below). Censorship made publication risky, but not impossible. The long history of ineffective censorship measures ended with the attempt to proscribe the Encyclopédie. Distribution of the first two volumes was still banned on the grounds that, in the words of the royal council of 7 February 1752, ‘several maxims are contained that could serve to undermine royal authority and establish a spirit of independence and revolt, while obscure and unclear notions offer foundations for confusion, the corruption of the state, the decline of religion and unbelief'.197 Subsequently, however, the authorities granted official permission for the volumes of the Encyclopédie to be printed over the Alsatian border, and each new volume was awaited by four thousand subscribers.
From the seventeenth century, the integration of cultural forms of the educated classes proceeded via measures of repression and regulation. The centrepiece of this strategy was the institutionalising of académies that had ini-tially arisen as private foundations. Since Richelieu's time, as we have already mentioned, these received royal privileges and were regulated. There were also cultural forms of the educated classes that remained immune to regulation: the Masonic lodges, the sociability of the salons, the reading associations that were established in a large number of towns in the eighteenth century after the English model, as well as cafés in which newspapers were available. Private discussion circles were also established continually. Until the mid-eighteenth century, participants in serious discussion groups still had to expect difficulties. The events that d'Argenson recounts in his memoirs illustrate how this was not only a problem for people outside the court and the ‘administration'. In 1731, some 23 men (whom d'Argenson names) came together for regular discussion of important developments and scientific dis-coveries. Each of the 23 was allocated a particular subject on which he was to keep regularly informed. It was expected that he would read the most important topics in domestic and foreign publications, and correspond with scholars abroad. At regular intervals, the other members would then be sup-plied with a résumé of the field in question, for example public law or the art of government. Rumours of these gatherings of the Entresol, as the circle called itself, reached the court, and ‘it was said that we are ruling the state, and mixing in things that are not our concern'.198 Though d'Argenson had no actual office in the 1730s, he had from 1720 to 1725 been intendant in Hainaut and Cambrai, while another member of the circle was preceptor to the royal princes, and most of the rest occupied high positions in the church or the royal ‘administration'. The chief minister however imposed a more or less explicit ban. Fleury's reasoning, as shown in a letter to the Abbé Saint-Pierre of 11 April 1731, has an interest beyond this particular matter:
I take it from your letter of yesterday that you intend to discuss political matters in your assemblies. But since such questions generally lead to other things that were not foreseen, they are not an appropriate subject. There are enough others that are equally worthy of your consideration, without their having the same consequences. If you are determined to continue your assemblies, I request you therefore not to discuss anything that might give cause for complaint . . .199
After indiscreet members of the circle had been shed, the meetings continued, necessarily in secret. Vexations at court, however, along with the awareness of being under observation and career considerations, soon brought an end to this unauthorised eighteenth-century académie.
Thirty years later there were many circles of this kind, and they were now tolerated. The same went for the transformation of their reports into periodicals. As Jack R. Censer has shown for the example of the Gazette de France, which was founded in 1632 as the organ of the royal administration, the Courrier d'Avignon, a paper for France that was produced in the papal enclave, and the Gazette de Leyde, of which for example 2,650 copies were imported in 1778, the tenor of reports in all three papers had changed since the mid-century. Alongside reports of the royal family and the court, there was now reference to social tensions, to differing views among government officials, and to the mistakes of foreign (!) monarchs.200
Under Louis XVI the crown's strategy towards the media and the organ-isational forms of educated opinion underwent a change. The government did not abandon the principle of its claim to regulate public opinion, but it allowed an expanded room for manoeuvre in both thought and action. This permitted Jansenist and Protestant practice, private discussion circles and critical publications. This relaxation did not effect any large-scale opening of literary opinion. As Stephen Botein, Jack R. Censer and Harriet Ritvo have shown in a comparison of periodical literature at this time in England and France, the themes of French publications restricted the potential readership circle to a relatively small social stratum. Their producers continued to use their privileges as a means of making profit, rather than seeking to expand their markets.201
Even under Louis XVI, of whom J.F. Bosher says he was brought up as a Christian nobleman of the siècle des lumières and was indeed a kind of liberal,202 there were limits to toleration. While many critical publications of the nobility were able to appear unmolested, Beaumarchais, whose play The Marriage of Figaro the king had tried right from the start to ban, was locked up in the reformatory for young offenders in Saint-Lazare. The right to chastise his subjects was still enforced even by the most enlightened of French kings.
The cultural forms of the educated classes were structural features of the developed ancien régime, not a fundamental opposition to it. It is true that these forms could contain attitudes that questioned traditional self-conceptions, especially those of the authority of the clergy and the privileges of the nobility. Reforms were also demanded in many fields of society. These reforms claimed as their yardstick of legitimacy the new criterion of social utility. Though the public of the educated classes remained restricted, it did ensure that the standpoint of social utility came to prevail among the bearing groups of generalised rule in the course of the eighteenth century. The rule of God and king was not contested - even among the lumières there were only a few atheists, and not all were republicans -, but the commandments made in their name had to be legitimised by a new instance. This rulership claim stood in contradiction to a practice of order the central content of which was the prevention of civil war and the implementation of a unitary religious practice, but it did not stand in principled contradiction to personal rule, rather offering this, on the contrary, new opportunities of legitimisation. At first sight, the political terrain presents a contradictory picture: on the one hand the crown's renunciation of traditional practices of public order, on the other hand a con-tinuing claim of regulation. But these were two sides of a unitary process. If good order was previously demanded so as to obstruct changes in an estab-lished practice of rule, in the course of the eighteenth century a notion of rule developed that was oriented towards governing society in such a way that social problems - and to this extent also social changes - would be managed. ”翻译为中文