Book Illustration, Taxes and Propaganda: the Fermiers-Généraux edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers of 1762 (review)

The 1762 edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers, published in two volumes by the Compagnie des Fermiers-Généraux, is among the most magnificent examples of eighteenth-century French illustrated publishing, and has long been acknowledged as one of the supreme bibliographical achievements of the ancien régime. Its glory lies in the eighty or so copper-plate illustrations designed by Charles Eisen and engraved by the best craftsmen of the day, and its interest is further enhanced by the fact that it was financed and published by Louis XV's tax gatherers. Astonishingly, this remarkable edition has received only patchy, often ill-informed, attention from modern scholars. The record has now been set straight with impressive scholarly authority by David Adams, whose distinguished research on text and image is already widely recognized. This outstanding study of the historical and bibliographical evidence, together with Adams's luminous interpretative study of the plates themselves (in effect, interpretations of interpretations), opens new windows into the place of the edition in the history of eighteenth-century illustrative publishing, into the world of the fermiers, their attitudes and values, their relationship to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and not least into the wider significance of the edition as a mirror of contemporary cultural and aesthetic trends. Preceded by an informative, copiously documented introduction offering a comprehensive account of relevant background issues relating to the tax-gatherers, the history of the Contes et nouvelles prior to 1762, the genesis of the illustrations and associated questions of interpretation and historical perspective, the main part of this substantial book is devoted to a well-grounded, informative, and on the whole persuasive, analysis of the illustrations on which the reputation of the 1762 edition rests. Adams lists 178 illustrations relating to sixty-nine contes. Of these, ninety-seven (including second versions) are by Eisen, and were printed in the 1762 edition. The list also includes sixty-nine illustrations by Romeyn de Hooghe, designed for the 1732 Amsterdam edition of La Fontaines's text, and twelve illustrations by Charles Nicolas Cochin, designed for the 1745 Amsterdam edition. All have been reproduced in this volume with admirable clarity by the Voltaire Foundation. Thus, in the case of each conte, the Eisen illustrations can be viewed in the light of contrasting visual interpretations of the same scene represented in the Cochin and de Hooghe plates printed in the two earlier editions. This book will be welcomed by generalists and specialists alike for its insights, not just into the historical and bibliographical technicalities of a bibliographical curiosity, but also into unexpected aspects of the aesthetic, moral, political and social mentality of mid-eighteeth-century France which the tax-gatherers' monumental edition of La Fontaine's tales and poems illuminates so vividly.