Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets

Chapter 7. From Europe Française to Europe Révolutionnaire: The Career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux

c h a p t e r 7 From Europe Française to Europe Révolutionnaire The Career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux Nos ennemis avaient fait de la langue française la langue des cours; ils l’avaient avilie. C’est à nous d’en faire la langue des peuples, et elle sera honorée. (Our enemies had made the French language into the language of courts; they had debased it. It is up to us to make it into the language of peoples, and it will be held in honor.) —Bertrand Barère, report on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, 8 pluviôse l’an II While the fictional hero of Nicolai’s novel was regaling readers from Paris to Petersburg, real-life Europeans were traveling too. Aristocrats on their Grand Tours, expatriate philosophes in search of patrons, insolvent debtors in flight from their creditors, fortune hunters, adventurers, and a great many other footloose Europeans journeyed across the continent, and they did so, moreover , without having to carry a passport. For anyone traveling or living abroad in the eighteenth century, the most important thing to have at the ready was a strong command of French, which functioned like a passe-partout, opening the doors of polite society at all of the many scattered outposts of L’Europe française. Like Nicolai’s novel in its French incarnations, Europeans who spoke elegant and stylish French were able to move across the frontiers of nations and reinvent themselves in foreign lands. The Career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux 221 Consider, for example, the Hamburg bookseller Jean-Guillaume Virchaux , the STN’s most important trading partner in Germany. Born in 1739 in Saint Blaise, a village belonging to the principality of Neuchâtel, Virchaux settled at the age of thirty-two in the free imperial city of Hamburg, where he supported himself first as a private tutor of French, then as a bookseller and printer. For a while, everything seemed to be going swimmingly for him in his adopted home. He married a native Hamburg woman, who bore him several children, and he and his wife cut an attractive figure in Hamburg society—so attractive that their house in the Grosse Beckerstrasse became a magnet for the Hamburg elite: “a rendezvous for all that the city of Hamburg possessed in the way of men with talent and distinguished persons from all walks of life,” to quote one contemporary observer. In 1785, however, Virchaux ’s trade collapsed in bankruptcy, and soon after, he came under suspicion of having published some libels against the king of Prussia. Forced to abandon his home in Hamburg, he spent the next several years wandering across the northern tier of the European continent, visiting friends, hawking books and manuscripts, and confronting delinquent debtors. He voyaged eastward along the Baltic littoral to Königsberg and Saint Petersburg, then westward across the North Sea to London. Eventually, he landed in Paris, and there he took his life in a completely new direction by hurling himself into revolutionary politics. In July 1791, he was among the republican demonstrators on the Champ de Mars fired on by the troops of Lafayette; he was arrested and imprisoned for over a month in the roundup of left-wing agitators that followed the massacre of the Champ de Mars; and, after his release in September of that year, he frequented the Paris Jacobin club, where he fell foul of Robespierre by openly proclaiming his support for war against the foreign enemies of the Revolution. It was a remarkably variegated life. Virchaux traversed the European continent from one end to the other, and he rubbed shoulders with members of many different social classes. But wherever he went, he seems to have demonstrated the cultural equivalent of perfect pitch, striking just the right tone in his letters and his social interactions so that he was able to win either the confidence or the admiration or the loyalty of a truly astonishing range of historical figures: the revolutionary leader Jean-Pierre Brissot, whose works Virchaux printed when Brissot was an obscure Grub Street philosophe living in London, and whom he later supported against Robespierre in the Jacobin Club in Paris; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the most famous poet in all of Germany, who was a frequent guest at Virchaux’s home in Hamburg; the 222 chapter 7 mystic anti-rationalist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, “the...