Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France

Chapter One: The Early History of Printers in Provincial France, 1470-1660

1 the early history of printers in provincial france, 1470–1660 Many stories have been told about the origins of printing in French provincial towns. Some of the first storytellers were members of prominent eighteenthcentury printing dynasties who sought to link their ancestors to the glories associated with the early history of printing.1 The printing history of Rouen presents one of these stories: the first members of the noble Lallemant family, a dominant force in Rouen printing,sent a number of young men to Germany to learn the new art. Another version of this story is that the generous Lallemant family paid a man to travel to Germany and Paris to learn the art of printing before he set up the first printing house in Rouen in 1483–84. Only more recent assessments remove the Lallemant family from any association with the advent of print in Rouen and point instead to other names quite unknown in the subsequent history of printing.One of these studies attributes the first printing initiatives to two men who,after having been to Paris to train as printers, set up business in Rouen in 1487 with two booksellers, introducing printing to Rouen some seventeen years after it was introduced to Paris. Another places the advent of printing in Rouen in 1485, the year a Norman printed a description of the ceremonies honoring the king’s visit. This was long before the Lallemant family—who began printing in Rouen in the later sixteenth century—could have had any role. The story of how the Lallemant family brought printing to Rouen resembles many claims by French nobles that their nobility dated from the mists of time: lovely stories, but more selfserving myths than fact. The First Printers in the Provinces The real story of the advent of print in the French provinces was not especially glorious, and the principal players were not ancestors of the early modern dynasties who fabricated lineages.2 Two fellows of the Sorbonne established the first printing house in France in 1470 by bringing three German printers to Paris to print humanist texts. Lyon was the second town in France to see printing,followed by Albi and then Toulouse.Between 1470 and 1650,printers were established—at least temporarily—in more than a hundred French towns. The spread was rapid but uneven, because printing houses were often difficult to maintain. The first printers struggled financially, and much of the early spread of printing took the form of itinerant printers stopping in towns to print one or two items, usually the locally approved missal, and then moving on. By the end of the fifteenth century, printers had worked for at least some period of time in forty-seven locations within the current borders of France, and permanently established printers lived in Paris,Lyon,Caen,Rouen,Angoul ême, Poitiers, Angers, and Tours. Educational and commercial forces shaped the work of the early printers, as did the demands of the judicial world in the French provincial towns. Schools and universities supported some of the earliest permanent printing establishments in Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Angers, Caen, Grenoble,Valence, Poitiers, Nantes, and Bourges. The connection with the universities in particular had considerable long-term influence over printers’ identity or sense of place in their towns, because they gloried in the dignity it offered their art. Printers and booksellers vaunted this connection in repeated claims over the first three centuries of printing.It brought prestige along with numerous privileges and exemptions from municipal laws and taxes. In the major publishing centers of provincial France—Rouen and Lyon—where there were no universities , the merchants played an important role in expanding the printing and publishing industries. The first printing press in Lyon was set up in a Lyonnais merchant’s son’s house. Soon afterwards, Lyon merchant circles began investing heavily in the new art and were able to put up the capital needed to take advantage of the town’s fairs and its commercial ties inside France and with Italian, German, and Spanish towns. The first publishers in Lyon bought paper from nearby paper mills and hired German printers; they were able to engage Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian monks as well as legal experts and doctors to translate the texts that were in wide demand. By the end of the The Early History of Printers 11 fifteenth century,a number of large publishers sustained...