Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France, depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, and: Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France, depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours (review)

The first ever critical edition of the Mémoires secrets, these five volumes represent the beginning of an important publishing project that will be of interest to a wide range of specialists of late eighteenth-century France. Long attributed solely to Louis Petit de Bachaumont, the work was, as the editors here point out, a best-seller in its time, and is a mine of information about the cultural and social scene in Paris from 1762 onwards — all the more interesting in that, having escaped censorship by virtue of being published by Adamson in London, it enjoyed a freedom of expression that was unknown in mainstream, permitted papers. It is also a highly complex textual object, being not only a multi-authored anonymous work, but also one whose print history was complicated by its irregular periodicity, by the provision of a reprint from 1781 onwards, and by the existence of various pirate editions. Specialists accustomed to using the Adamson edition, either in the modern facsimile reprint or on Gallica, will welcome this new critical edition. Authorship is elucidated, including interesting information about Pidansat de Mairobert and Moufle d’Angerville and the circle that gravitated around the salon of Mme Doublet: most of this will already be familiar to specialists via the work of Robert Tate, Tawfik Mekki-Berrada, Jean Sgard, and François Moureau, but it is helpfully summarized here. There is much information in the Introduction concerning the complex relationship between the Mémoires secrets (hereafter MS) and various nouvelles à la main, other manuscript sources, and the printed periodical press: we have, for instance, a discussion of some of the secondhand information in the MS and the way in which it is employed (for instance, Jean Sgard hypothesizes that material from the Mercure was used to plug holes in the MS for ‘empty’ dates). And comparison with certain other texts of Mairobert’s circle reveals the interrelationship of what Christophe Cave here describes as ‘cellules textuelles’, cut and pasted from one work to another. Given both this factor and the interesting discussion of the 1781 republication, the MS are revealed as part of a network of different, unofficial textual enterprises rather than a stable or closed unit. Together, these first five volumes cover the years 1762–75, the period of the MS that appeared in eight volumes in 1777. No synoptic overview of these years is provided (unlike the solution adopted in the ongoing edition of the Correspondance littéraire by the Centre international d’étude du XVIII^e siècle), but instead there is a series of synthetic background notes, each comprising a couple of pages, on important issues for the period studied; these are helpful, if somewhat brief. Sensibly, the editors have chosen not to reproduce the Salons that were part of the MS between 1767 and 1787, given that there is a modern edition by Bernadette Fort and in view of their length, which would have expanded the present text substantially. The brief discussion of the authorship and publication of these texts (I, pp. lviii–lxi) is, however, somewhat frustrating, merely concluding that material bibliography might confirm what for the moment is only...