Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Early History of Printers in Provincial France, 1470–1660
2. The Vicissitudes of a Royal Decree: Enforcing the October 1667 Order in Council Regulating Printers in the Provinces
3. The Royal Council Takes Control: The 1701 Inquiry and the Bureau de la Librairie
4. The Purges: The Enforcement of Printer Quotas in the Provinces After 1704
5. Arguments Offered by Printers in Petitions for Licenses, 1667–1789
6. Patronage and Bureaucracy Intersect: Five Case Studies in the Reign of Louis XVI
7 . Behind the Rhetoric: The Social Position and Politics of Provincial Printers, 1750–1789
Conclusion
Appendix A: Printers’ Wealth in the Eighteenth Century
Appendix B: Some Licensed Provincial Printers Involved in the Clandestine Book Trade, 1750–89, by Town
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Jane McLeod is Associate Professor of History at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.
“Beautifully written, elegantly argued, and extensively documented
from archives all over France, Jane McLeod's investigation of how
provincial printers were licensed and supervised between the reign
of Louis XIV and the French Revolution adds a whole new dimension
to our understanding of how the old regime worked. She shows how
inadequate it has been to form a view of the world of print from
evidence only about Paris and from illicit works produced beyond
the kingdom's borders. Her book will now be essential to a fuller
understanding of the prerevolutionary public sphere.”—William
Doyle,University of Bristol
“Jane McLeod’s detailed research helps us see how interest groups
like provincial printers helped construct the Old Regime’s
regulatory mechanisms. Deeply enmeshed in local and national
networks of patronage, these men—often members of family
dynasties—had little reason to favor either free economic
competition or subversive new ideas. Challenging widespread
assumptions about the role of print media in subverting the
monarchy, McLeod shows that the Revolution of 1789 would be a
challenge as much for printers as for the officials charged with
supervising them.”—Jeremy D. Popkin,University of Kentucky
“This incisive treatment of provincial printing houses’ relations
with the royal government explains how the French monarchy
successfully worked with provincial printers to determine
publishing policy and control print media throughout France. Jane
McLeod challenges conventional views of the ties between the royal
state and printers, showing how the state’s policy of issuing a
limited number of licenses, traditionally considered a repressive
measure, came to find widespread support among the established
printer elite. Along with highly useful local monopolies and
lucrative government printing contracts, licenses conferred on
these fortunate men and women a new, unexpected identity: in
addition to their older roles as professionals, guildsmen, and
clients of local bishops and judicial officials, they increasingly
became lobbyists and supporters of royal ministers, endorsing their
policies of state controls on the printing trade and on the flow of
ideas. McLeod demonstrates how it was only chance and circumstance
that occasionally transformed them into champions of free thought,
an identity which in retrospect we too easily and often confer on
them, and how thoroughly the provincial printers gradually turned
into creatures of the king and his ministers, sharing the ambiguous
and contradictory loyalties, interests, and identities so
characteristic of eighteenth-century elites.”—T. J. A. Le Goff,York
University
“Through carefully constructed case studies drawn from printing
centers large and small, McLeod reveals the stakes that locals
believed they had in the [licensing] process and how its
implementation undercut local authorities. . . .Her close
examination of individual printers and family fortunes reveals
shrewdness and ruthlessness, discipline and patience—qualities
essential to advancing social ambitions over generations. McLeod
has exhaustively mined Parisian and provincial archives to compose
this meticulous account.”—April G. Shelford American Historical
Review
“Licensing Loyalty will be of great value for those interested in
publishing, in guilds and in the growing bureaucratic state. McLeod
offers a fresh analysis of printing as a profession by focusing on
printers’ routine activities over a century, rather than their
exceptional moments of controversy, and she adds substantively to
our understanding of both the emerging bureaucratic state and one
of the central venues of Enlightenment culture.”—David Kammerling
Smith Social History (U.K.)
“[Licensing Loyalty] provides a detailed picture of the interests,
discourses, actions, and relationships of printers throughout
France under the Old Regime. This picture furthers our
understanding not just of the book trade but of the state-building
process in the century and a half between the end of the Wars of
Religion and the beginning of the French Revolution. It is thus
relevant to scholars of print culture, absolutism, and
Enlightenment in early modern Europe.”—Christine Haynes Journal of
Modern History
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