In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-Century France
  • David Adams
Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-Century France. By Raymond Birn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. xiv + 196 pp.

A number of traditional ideas about the French Enlightenment have gradually been modified, or rejected altogether, in the past few years; yet until quite recently the role of the censor remained largely unexamined. Consequently, some students of the period (such as James M. Byrne in Religion and the Enlightenment from Descartes to Kant (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996)) still suppose that Church and State persistently combined to thwart the efforts of the philosophes in particular by ensuring that the censor rejected their more audacious writings, thus obliging the authors to publish abroad, or else risk prosecution by publishing anonymously, and at a fictitious address. While numerous instances of such repressive censorship can undoubtedly be found, it is a massive oversimplification to regard the situation in these terms alone. As Raymond Birn shows in this welcome study, even in the early days of the censorship system under Louis XIV, the censors approved nearly nine out of ten [End Page 105] books submitted for their approval. In the latter part of the century, when the number of works examined had increased considerably, the censors made frequent use of permissions tacites and unofficial tolérances in reporting on works that the state could not be seen to approve yet did not seek to ban. Again, it was not unusual for censors to disagree among themselves on the merits or otherwise of a submission; and often, out of a concern for literary standards rather than for ideological reasons, they rejected manuscripts that they considered to be badly written or poorly organized. In fact, as Birn observes, they became ‘critics as opposed to serving as dictators of taste and belief systems’ (p. 117). While many censors were ecclesiastics, the Catholic Church as an institution exerted relatively little influence on the censorship process in comparison with the Direction de la Librairie, which was under the control of the crown. The Parlements constantly sought to assert their own authority by condemning works written by Jesuits, and in some cases (the Encyclopédie and De l’esprit, for instance) by the philosophes; yet they were not widely involved in the assessment of literary, geographical, or scientific works. The reality of censorship was thus far more complex and nuanced than has often been supposed, and this study, which makes excellent use of the censors’ original reports in the Bibliothèque nationale de France archives, is useful in correcting a number of misconceptions. At the same time, it says little about the period between 1715 and 1750, when censorship was evolving in a number of ways, and it spends too much time on the reports of one man, Cadet de Saineville, who, on Birn’s own admission, cannot have been typical of censors in general. In all, though, this is a careful, if sometimes oddly focused, study.

David Adams
University of Manchester
...

pdf

Share