The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France

1. Too Many Books

14 c h a p t e r on e Too Many Books According to one commonly held view of the eighteenth century, the printing press spread Enlightenment to the masses and made democracy more possible than ever before. This was an idea promoted by writers of the Revolutionary era such as Condorcet and Benjamin Franklin, and it is an idea that appeals to our present-day sensibilities. But if generalized literacy was so beneficial, what should we make of the number of authors of the eighteenth century who warned against the deluge of unworthy people, writers and readers, who supposedly overcrowded the literary world? As I will demonstrate, the growing literary public was, in fact, the object of much scorn in France during the eighteenth century. Rather than rejoice over the widening frontiers of the book market, a number of writers made the case for restraining the numbers of books, readers, and authors to enhance their own role as producers of material and judges of quality. According to acerbic satires from Voltaire to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the access to books drove the majority of the reading public insane, and in the worst cases, it drove them to believe they could become writers themselves. In these critics’ view, this state of affairs could only lead to the corruption of taste in the Republic of Letters. They identified their enemy behind the anarchic growth of the book market as the spirit of bad taste, also known as mauvais goût or faux goût. This evil force could be countered with two weapons: treatises on taste in which they laid down the rules of good writing—yet coming just short of making formulas one could Too Many Books 15 follow because the crucial quality, taste, was ultimately indefinable— and satire, in which bad examples of literature were punished. This chapter will examine what imaginary excesses the spread of literature produced. I will focus first on the figure of the bad reader : the gullible and overly enthusiastic consumer who values books for everything but their intellectual content. I will then examine the deplorable follies that bad readers supposedly committed, especially that of attempting to become writers. Finally, I will situate the complaints of excessive numbers of books within the debates about the progress or decadence of civilization occasioned by the printing press. on bibliomania If one is to believe certain writers of the era, the eighteenth century was threatened by a serious plague, that of bibliomania: regular people ruined themselves collecting whole libraries full of rare books, old books, any kind of book, but in many cases neglecting to actually read them. According to these writers, the line between bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs was a blurry one, for love could easily turn into insanity. The problem is mentioned by a number of authors, but one of the most extensive texts devoted exclusively to this subject is the essay De la bibliomanie by Louis Bollioud-Mermet of the Acad émie de Lyon. First published in 1761, the essay warns the public: “Never have there been so many books of all kinds, in all forms, and never have there been so few readers whose true aim is serious study and solid instruction.”1 He deplores at once the excessive numbers of books and the ignorance of those who buy them. Looking at the problem of bibliomania transhistorically, Bernhard Metz writes in “Bibliomania and the Folly of Reading”2 that the first French usage of the term bibliomanie appears in a 1654 letter by Guy Patin. Even when the term bibliomanie is not used, however, according to Metz, authors from antiquity to the present day have mocked people who are obsessed with amassing books without understanding their content. To support his claim, Metz cites passages from, among others, Seneca, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Gustave Flaubert , and Robert Musil, as well as the authors that will concern us in this section, Bollioud-Mermet and d’Alembert. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that the term bibliomanie came into usage in the mid-seventeenth century, since scholars tend to see this period and the Too Many Books 16 eighteenth century as important stages in the developing book market , especially the commerce of luxury books.3 In regard to Bollioud-Mermet, Metz particularly notices the medical language that permeates his essay. While it is difficult to believe that De la bibliomanie can claim any true medical...