Review

Reviewed Work(s):
The Business of Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie,
1775-1800
by Robert Darnton
Review by: M. S. Anderson
Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 380 (Jul., 1981), pp. 658-659
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/568955
Accessed: 11-04-2019 15:49 UTC

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 658 SHORT NOTICES July

Jacob M. Price is currently one of the most notable contributors to the

history of Anglo-American commerce, especially the tobacco trade, in the
period leading up to the American Revolution. In Joshua Johnson's Letter-
book, 1771-1774. Letters from a Merchant in London to his Partners in Maryland
(London: London Record Society, 1979), he has edited the surviving side
of an extremely interesting business correspondence. Johnson had a ready
pen and an insatiable appetite for relevant commercial information, and
his need to provide explanations to his partners at Annapolis led him to
set down on paper much interesting detail on the way colonial commerce
was handled in London in general, and on the circumstances surrounding
his conduct of his firm's business in particular. There are numerous refer-
ences to various London merchants engaged in the American trade; notes
of ships' arrivals and departures and other miscellaneous snippets of com-
mercial information; comment on the effects of the great financial crash of
1772, which for a time placed Johnson himself in considerable difficulties;
and a few references to the political tensions of 1774. Although Johnson
noted the alarm aroused at the prospect of another colonial commercial
boycott, he also provides further evidence of the indifference or hostility
of the London commercial world to the colonial defiance of British
imperial authority in the spring of 1774.
University College London IAN R. CHRISTIE

Robert Darnton has found, in the archives of the Societe typographique

de NeuchAtel preserved in the Bibliotheque de la vile de NeuchAtel, a
source of information on the history of publishing in the eighteenth
century which is both remarkably rich and almost completely unexploited.
The 5 o,ooo letters which they contain by people of all kinds who lived by
producing and selling books in the period 1769-89 provide most of the
raw material for his impressive and often fascinating The Business of
Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Engylopddie, I77r-I8oo (Cam-
bridge, Mass./London: Belknap Press of Harvard U.P., 1979. ?C3). The
major part of the book is a detailed study of the production, marketing
and distribution of the quarto edition of the Engylopddie, in 1777-9, by a
syndicate of which the main members were the Societe typographique,
Joseph Duplain, a Lyonnais bookseller remarkable even by the standards
of his age and calling for avarice and duplicity, and the great Charles
Panckoucke, 'l'Atlas de la librairie francaise'. This is followed by a study,
inevitably less detailed since it is based almost entirely upon printed
materials, of the last and most grandiose expression of the Encyclopedist
movement in the Encyglopddie mdthodique which Panckoucke (the hero of
the book insofar as it has one) got under way in the early 1780s and which
was not completed until half a century later. Sometimes the detail becomes
a little excessive. Professor Darnton has a weakness for quoting at un-
necessary length; and for most readers the appendices will add little of
use to what is provided in the text. Nevertheless this is a book of great
and varied interest. It drives home by repeated examples the ruthless and
brutally dishonest nature of much eighteenth-century publishing. Its
account of the physical production of the quarto edition is particularly

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 I98I SHORT NOTICES 659

fascinating; the pages on the recruitment of the workforce which manned

the presses of the Societe typographique contain much of human and
individual interest, and also much detailed information about wage-rates
and labour-productivity of a kind hard to find for many industries in this
period. There is also much of interest on the diffusion and readership of
the quarto edition (which provided about three-fifths of all the copies of
the Enyelop6die in France before 1789). Dr Darnton is able to show con-
vincingly that its readership was one of officers, officials, clerics and pro-
fessional men, not one provided by a new commercial or industrial middJe
class. Throughout he shows an enviable combination of detailed know-
ledge with an awareness of the wider implications of his subject. The book
is intended as the first of a series, based on the archives of the Societe
typographique, which will study books, intellectuals and public opinion
in the age of the Enlightenment. If this ambitious project is completed
as it has been begun, Dr Darnton will have made a contribution of
fundamental importance to our knowledge of ancien regime Europe.

London School of Economics & Political Science M. S. ANDERSON

The study of French administrative history proceeds apace and in

L'Etat et sa police en France (78,9-1914) (Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A.,
1979. n.p.) twelve authors make valuable contributions to one of its more
controversial, complex, and obscure branches - controversial because, as
a distinguished contributor to Le Monde wrote in 1975, what characterizes
both the relations of Frenchmen to their police and of their policemen to
citizens is ambiguity, complex because there is no single force but a multi-
plicity of sometimes rival corps, obscure because the relations between
these different bodies are often far from clear and because sooner or later
the historian must try and penetrate the shadowy world of secret agents
and of 'agents provocateurs'. The papers in this book, originally commun-
icated to a colloquium, range from M. Michel Eude's opening study of the
Convention's Committee of General Security to Professor Goyard's com-
ments on Inspector-General Plytas's documents (here printed for the first
time) on the role of the Scurete Generale in the Stavisky affair. Thus, since
Professor Marcel Le Clere's paper on the political police under the Third
Republic also goes well beyond 19I4, the terminal date in the title of the
book is misleading. But the other contributions are within the stated
limits. M. Jean Tulard suggests that Fouche's imperial police, with their
mania for paper, were less efficient than is generally supposed. M. Pierre
Riberette bravely tackles the problems presented by rival police and
secret agents under the Restoration and asserts that the political police
became the preserve of a faction. Professor Tudesq approaches the July
Monarchy's police from the angle of information, but argues that the
existence of a political police, informed by dubious means, ran counter to
the regime's liberal principles and had an undermining effect. Professor
Vincent Wright looks at the four Prefects of Police of the Second Empire
and finds that, despite their prestige and very wide powers, they were
hampered by divisions and anomalies which attempts at reform never

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