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Carla Hesse, Raymond Birn. Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-Century France., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1610–1611, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1610
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Historians typically divide the French Enlightenment into three periods—early (1690s-1730s), middle (1730s-1770s) and late (1770s-1790s)—and into three social strata—high, middle, and low. Raymond Birn's masterful new work focuses on the early-middle periods and on the middle-high social world of eighteenth century letters. As such, it is a useful corrective and counterbalance to several decades of scholarly emphasis on subversive literature, cultural scandal, and the moral unraveling of the Old Regime. Expanding upon a series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France and published in French in 2007, this short, elegant, book is the best overview of the prerevolutionary system of French censorship available in any language. It will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of the Enlightenment and of the history of censorship more generally.
The book begins by charting the origins and expansion of what Birn rightly characterizes as a system of “enlightened censorship,” which came into being in the age of absolutism. Royal censorship began being exercised on a regular basis in France in the 1620s. At the end of the seventeenth century the monarchy launched a full-blown campaign to regulate the French book trade and to consolidate the monopoly of royal authorities on pre-publication censorship by wresting control from both the church and the judges of parlements. Motivated as much by economic interest (a kind of cultural mercantilism) as by theological or political concerns, a royal “Administration of the Book Trade” came to control all aspects of the book trade from printing and publishing to selling and distributing printed matter. By 1700 all new works legally printed or distributed in France had to be be submitted for pre-publication censorship by royally appointed censors and printed and distributed by royally licensed members of the Book Guild.
