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

Chapter 3. French Booksellers in the Reich

c h a p t e r 3 French Booksellers in the Reich La lecture française est toujours goûtée des grands seigneurs. (Great lords always relish reading French books.) —Nouvelle Librairie de la Cour in Mannheim to the STN, 23 October 1788 Most of the STN’s principal correspondents in Germany plied their trade in the territories closest to Switzerland, areas that contemporaries described, a little ambiguously, as the “Reich.” Strictly speaking, the Reich (Heiliges römisches Reich deutscher Nation) extended deep into central Europe and encompassed most of the Prussian monarchy and all of Saxony. In the eighteenth century, however, the term was commonly used in a more restricted sense: as a synecdoche to designate the areas of southern and western Germany. Those were the most politically fragmented areas of the Reich, the ones in which the imperial constitution retained its significance as a bulwark against central authority . They harbored a bewildering assortment of sovereign, semi-sovereign, and quasi-sovereign political entities—ecclesiastical states and free imperial cities alongside landgraviates, electorates, duodecimo principalities, and territorial enclaves. And they were home to a multitude of small princely courts, miniature replicas of Versailles whose cultural aspirations stood in inverse relation to the power of their princes. In the absence of any central political authority or cultural capital, the book trade in the Reich had its own peculiar characteristics. There was no single large city whose reading public set the cultural tone and dominated the retail trade. Nor was there a booksellers’ guild or uniform body of legislation regulating access to masterships. Nor, most important, was there any single French Booksellers in the Reich 63 institution with the authority to ban books and to police the book trade: the same book could be simultaneously prohibited in one locality of the Reich and perfectly legal in a neighboring one. Subject to different political authorities, drawn from a variety of professional backgrounds, and catering to widely scattered customers, the STN’s correspondents in the Reich were a diverse group. They cannot therefore be studied in the same way as the wholesale trade at the Leipzig fairs, which we were able to survey at a single glance, from a bird’s-eye perspective, as it were. The only way to do justice to the diversity of the retail trade in the Reich is to adopt a worm’s-eye perspective, to proceed piecemeal through a series of case studies devoted to the STN’s most important correspondents in that region of Germany: the booksellers Louis-François Mettra near Cologne, Charles and Matthias Fontaine in Mannheim, Jean-Frédéric Hemmerde in Cassel, and Johann Conrad Deinet in Frankfurt. Purveyors of a cosmopolitan literary culture, all of those booksellers were nonetheless local businessmen. Their dossiers in the Neuchâtel archive thus reveal a process of crucial importance to the diffusion of ideas in Enlightenment Europe: the process by which the transnational French book trade became embedded in distinct local settings. * * * Of all the STN’s correspondents in the Reich, none was more cosmopolitan, or more strangely out of place in a provincial German setting, than LouisFran çois Mettra. A native Parisian and Freemason, Mettra had worked in the late 1760s as a kind of unofficial diplomat, shuttling between Paris and Berlin on missions for the Prussian and French governments. After that, he had worked in Paris as a commercial agent of Frederick II, arranging purchases of artworks; and he had been a shareholder in a Parisian bank. In the 1770s, however, his affairs in Paris collapsed. First, he fell out with Frederick, then he fell into bankruptcy, and, by the late 1770s, he had fallen on such hard times that he was ready to get out of Paris. So he moved to the electorate of Cologne and exchanged the shadowy, cloak-and-dagger world of high-stakes international diplomacy for the daily grind of tallying credits and debits behind the comptoir of a bookshop. As if to compensate for the lack of drama in his new career, he developed a sideline as a radical journalist, publishing a scandal-mongering manuscript news gazette that he cobbled together from anecdotes sent to him by secret informants in Versailles and London. And he made some of the most incendiary books of contemporary French literature 64 chapter 3 into his stock-in-trade—irreligious, obscene, and seditious books of...