Le Mercure Galant: Présentation de la première revue féminine d’information et de culture, 1672–1710 (review)

Between 1672 and his death in 1710, the apparently tireless Jean Donneau de Visé was the editor of the Mercure Galant, the first periodical oriented towards the expectations of women readers. He oversaw the publication of some 20,000 articles in almost 500 volumes, and one can only sympathize with his observations on the project of publication: ‘Je n’ai pas de bien et le Mercure ne me donne que de la peine, des amis et de l’honneur.’ Its emphasis was on the galant, a particular kind of modernity, and it included news and reports of current events, the printed music of some 500 airs, discussions of popular science, superstitions and medicine, poetry, social events, obituaries, around 400 novellas, and much else besides. In it, one can find accounts of the embassy to China, the King’s bone-setting of 1683, a ghost conjured up by Père La Chaise, and the poetry of Madame de Salvan de Saliez la Viguière d’Albi. The Mercure stayed afloat by generating continuous encomia in exchange for royal patronage, and by inviting reader participation in the form of discussion fora on particular topics, causing it sometimes to be compared with an early form of discussion list or blog. Monique Vincent has previously produced a subject index to the Mercure, and, in the face of the periodical’s higgledy-piggledy arrangement, she here produces a classification and brief discussions of its contents categorized according to a schema that her 11-page table of contents details. Preliminary chapters include a discussion of the literary and historical context of the Mercure’s genesis, and of Donneau de Visé’s background and prior career as playwright and critic. The result, with its long quoted passages and summary-driven sampling, is a sort of Reader’s Digest-style compilation, and it might be useful in a number of ways. For those with the leisure and inclination to read it straight through, it is a fascinating opening onto the concerns and mentalities of a particular, worldly milieu of the decades around the close of the century. Poor production values are an irritation in a livre de chevet, however, and here one regrets problems with fonts and margins, typographical errors and the reversal of Figure 8b. For those with a subject to research, whether it be provincial women poets, the social weight of the worldly abbé, criminals or comets, this book is a guide to the Mercure’s content, otherwise difficult of access. Vincent’s earlier index would need to be consulted, however, as the present volume includes only an un- or badly-edited index of names in which ‘Racine’ follows ‘Rigoteau’, there are two separate entries for ‘Molière’, and ‘Mortemart’ falls between ‘Robinet’ and ‘Romanet’. The title insists upon the status of the Mercure as a ‘revue féminine’, and this characterization is here the subject not so much of an argument as of a sheer accumulation of instances. We can only look forward to the continuation of the debate as carried on at the highest levels by Vincent, Joan DeJean, and others, about what, exactly, constitutes the feminine in the French seventeenth century.