Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982
'Why analyze literary underground'? Since a great deal of literature has been forbidden throughout the course of history, the underground was especially important, “when censorship, the police, and a monopolistic guild of booksellers attempted to contain the printed word within limits set by the official orthodoxies… Historians know very little about the way legal literature was written, printed, distributed and read under the Old Regime. They know still less about prohibited books” (v-vi).
We need to go beyond the books and “confront a new set of questions: How did writers pursue careers in the Republic of Letters? Did their economic and social condition have much effect on their writing? How did publishers and booksellers operate? Did their ways of doing business influence the literary fare that reached their customers? What as that literature? Who were its readers? And how did they read?”(viii-ix). 
Thesis: “The intellectual origins of the Revolution and the character of its policies may be understood better if one descends from the level of the Encyclopédie and reenters Grub Street, where men like Brissot produced the newspapers and pamphlets, the posters and cartoons, the songs, rumors and libelles that transformed personal quarrels and factional rivalries into an ideological struggle over the destiny of France” (70). 
Sources: Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, Switzerland (“one of the largest of the many publishing houses that grew up around France’s borders in order to supply the demand for pirated and prohibited books within the kingdom” containing 50,000 letters [vi]), archives of the police, the Bastille, and the booksellers’ guild.
Organization of Book: 6 Chapters, 5 of which were published separately (1968-1977), presented as case studies (“pictured more effectively by a set of sketches than by a grand tableau”):
1. Introductory chapter, “The Low-Life of Literature”: le monde vs. Grub Street, salons vs. cafés
2. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, “A Spy in Grub Street” 
3. The abbé Le Senne, “A Pamphleteer on the Run”: He “illustrates one of the most elusive aspects of literature under the Old Regime: the process by which unorthodox ideas passed from the speculations of the philosophers and into the hands of the readers” (71). 
4. A bookseller from Troyes, Mauvelain, “A Clandestine Bookseller in the Provinces”
5. Barthélemy Spineax’s wage books, and Nicolas Contat’s Anecdotes typographoques, A Printing Shop Across the Border” 
Methodology: Intellectual history + social history + subaltern studies
“[This work] attempts to argue for a broadening of intellectual history and to suggest that a mixed genre, the social history of ideas, could contribute to the fresh assessment of the age of the Enlightenment” (viii). “Perhaps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century. One way to bring the Enlightenment down to earth is to see it from the viewpoint of eighteenth century authors” (2). 
Main Points and Quotes:
“Duclos had proclaimed it triumphantly in his Considé'rations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1750). Writing had become a new ‘profession,’ which conferred a distinguished ‘estate’ upon men of great talent but modest birth...Such writers became integrated into a society of courtiers and wealthy patrons, and everyone benefited from the process: the gens du monde gained amusement and instruction, and the gens de lettres acquired polish and standing” (12). 
France had “a surplus population of overeducated and underemployed littérateurs and lawyers... [I]t seems that the attractiveness of the new career celebrated by Duclos and the new church proclaimed by Voltaire resulted in a record crop of potential philosophes, far more than could be absorbed under the archaic system of protections...But there is no need for a complete census of eighteenth-century writers in order to make sense of the tension between the men of Grub Street and the men of le monde on the eve of the Revolution” (19). 
“[Those of Grub Street] survived by doing the dirty work of society―spying for the police and peddling pornography; and they filled their writings with imprecations against the monde that humiliated and corrupted them. The prerevolutionary works of men like Marat, Brissot, and Carra do not express some vague, ‘anti-Establishment’ feeling; they seethe with hatred of the literary ‘aristocrats’ who had taken over the egalitarian ‘republic of letters’ and made it into a ‘despotism.’ It was in the depths of the intellectual underworld that these men became revolutionaries and that the Jacobinical determination to wipe out the aristocracy of the mind was born” (20-21). 
“The Revolution turned the cultural world upside down. It destroyed the academies, scattered the salons, retracted the pensions, abolished the privileges, and obliterated the agencies and vested interests that had strangled the book trade before 1789” (38). 
“The crude pamphleteering of Grub Street was revolutionary in feeling as well as in message. It expressed the passion of men who hated the Old Regime in their guts, who arched with hatred of it. It was from such visceral hatred, not from the refined abstractions of the contented cultural elite, that the extreme Jacobin revolution found its authentic voice” (40). 
“The political tracts worked a dozen variations on a single theme: the monarchy had degenerated into despotism. They did not call for revolution or foresee 1789 or even provide much discussion of the deeper social and political issues that were to make the destruction of the monarchy possible. Inadvertently, however, they prepared for that event by desanctifying the symbols and deflating the myths that had made the monarchy appear legitimate in the eyes of its subjects” (147). 
“The very way in which these works were produced helped reduce them to the common denominator of irreligious, immorality, and uncivility. The foreigners who printed them felt no loyalty to France, the Bourbons, or, often, the Catholic Church. The dealers who distributed them operated in an underworld of ‘bandits without morals and shame.’ Ant the authors who wrote them had often sunk into a Grub Street life of quasi-criminality… When [philosophy] turned against courtiers, churchmen, and kings, it committed itself to turning the world upside down. In their own language, the livres philosophiques called for undermining and overthrowing. The counterculture called for a cultural revolution―and was reading to answer the call of 1789” (207-208). 
Other Reviews:
“By the late eighteenth century, as the Enlightenment had become respectable and the philosophes domesticated, Grubb Street was glutted with disappointed philosophes manqués who could find neither position, patron, or market and so turned from politely irreverent philosophy to political libel, scurrilous gossip, and pornography with a vengeance. More than the Enlightenment, it was Parisian Grubb Street which eroded the prestige and exploded the status of the governors of the Old Regime. For the frustrated young men who inhabited this literary nether-world, the Revolution meant revenge, liberation, and opportunity. Their revolution was social and cultural as much as it was political: Grubb Street created its own Republic of Letters…Moreover, the battles which this underground fought to survive were battles fought across the board in the later eighteenth century: the struggle against caprice and arbitrariness, corporate privilege and monopoly, government regulation and control” (120).
---Review by: Michael T. Ryan, The Library Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 119-121.
“These essays on the literary underground in pre-revolutionary France extend the study of the Enlightenment and the ideological origins of the French Revolution to the social history of ideas: how did books come about, why did writers write what they did, what books circulated and why, and who read the books? Each essay argues for or demonstrates the extension of intellectual history downward from the philosophical treatises to the archives, the books actually distributed, and the daily lives of the eighteenth-century” (432).
 ---Review by: Joyce Duncan Falk, The Journal of Library History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 432-434.
Category:Enlightenment
Category:History of the Book