La censure négociée: Le contrôle du livre a Genève 1560–1625 (review)

This is a meticulous and thoughtful study of censorship in Geneva between 1560 and 1625, when the city was at the height of its influence as a center of Reformed Protestantism. Printing was, of course, of fundamental importance in spreading Protestant ideas and practices, and Geneva had become one of the largest centers for the production of Protestant books in the years following the establishment there of John Calvin as its most prominent religious leader. Geneva’s authorities insisted in principle on censorship in advance of every book published in Geneva, but there were two sets of authorities, governmental and ecclesiastical, and they were not always in agreement on what should be censored. The ecclesiastical authorities wanted to prevent the publication of books containing religious ideas or practices they deemed to be false or heretical. The governmental authorities wanted to prevent the publication of books that would embarrass the city in its relations with its French and Swiss neighbors. And the printers and publishers wanted to make money. Neither set of authorities was efficient enough to censor everything, so in point of fact only about thirty percent of the manuscripts published were submitted in advance for censorship. And decisions often varied considerably from case to case. Jostock thus concludes that censorship became a process, a result of negotiation among the interested parties, rather than an arbitrary imposition of one party’s view.

She divides her analysis into three chronological periods: a first, from 1560 to 1580, is a golden age, when Geneva was riding high as the most important center of publishing books for Protestants using the French language; a second, from 1570 to 1600, is a period of considerable dissension between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, in which the Geneva government tried either to suppress or disguise a number of incendiary pamphlets, including ones by pastors like Theodore Beza, attacking the French royal government for sponsoring the St. Bartholomew’s massacres, going so far as to attack the very form of government it represented; a third, from 1600 to 1620, marks Geneva’s emergence as a major international leader of orthodox Reformed theology, but recognizes the rising tide of Reformed Catholicism by a growing publication of standard Catholic works, like the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and the Corpus Iuris Canonici, often on contract from publishers in centers of Catholic publication like Lyon, against opposition from Geneva’s church leaders.

The entire analysis is based on intensive archival research, most of it in Geneva, and close consultation with experts in the field. It is documented by three extremely useful appendices: one of the texts of laws on printing in Geneva; a second containing records of one particularly revealing case study of a printer named Vincent Brès convicted of publishing and a reader for children containing typographical errors so serious they introduced heresy; and a third listing all the books censored, either in whole or in part, in Geneva during this period. This book makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the history of printing and of censorship in Geneva, and should also be of interest to students of these phenomena in other parts of Europe.