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

Chapter 5. The Word of God in the Age of the Encyclopédie

c h a p t e r 5 The Word of God in the Age of the Encyclopédie Comme on simplifie tout dans ce siècle, qu’on aime tout ce qui est en petit volume, on préfère partout les petites Bibles. (As everything is being simplified in this century, as people love whatever is in a small volume, so also do they prefer everywhere small Bibles.) —Bosset de Luze in Mainz to STN, 24 July 1779 During the Reformation, the Protestant strongholds of western Switzerland had been major centers of religious publishing, producing French Bibles, hymnals , and religious propaganda that reformers transmitted to the scattered communities of the internationale protestante. More than two centuries later, those same Protestant strongholds had become major centers of Enlightenment publishing. But even so, Swiss publishers continued to turn out editions of devotional literature. The STN published two folio editions of a French Bible, translated by an ancestor of Samuel Ostervald, the STN’s principal founder: the first in 1773, shortly after the Company of Pastors in Neuchâtel had condemned the STN for publishing an edition of d’Holbach’s atheistic Système de la nature; the second in 1779, at the same time that the STN’s presses were turning out sheets of its quarto edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Enlightenment and the Word of God were bedfellows in the cozy confines of the STN’s printing shop, and, from there, they spread outward across the European continent. The Word of God in the Age of the Encyclopédie 147 Of course, French Bibles did not spread as widely as did the works of the philosophes. Notwithstanding the prestige of the French language in the era of L’Europe française, French never did attain the status that Latin had once enjoyed as the universal language of the Church: once shattered by the Reformation , the linguistic unity of western Christendom was gone forever. Even those German Protestants who read books in French were very unlikely to read the Bible in French. If they read the Bible at all, most of them read it in German, as Johann Merck, the former editor of Deinet’s Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, explained in a letter to the STN: “In general, there are few readers of the Bible and sermons . . . [but] when we Germans are devout, we are devout in our own language.” The STN’s first edition of the Bible, which had almost sold out within a year of its publication, reached hardly any readers in Germany. Nearly all the copies of that first edition were placed in one of two areas: in French-speaking Switzerland and in France, where the STN managed to sell its Bibles despite a formal prohibition against Protestant Bibles within the French kingdom. And the same geographic distribution also held for the prepublication subscriptions to the second edition. Of 336 prepublication subscriptions for which the customers can be identified, all but 13 came either from French-speaking Switzerland or from France—72 from Switzerland and 252 from France. (See Appendixes B and C.) The public for French Protestant Bibles was confined primarily to French-speaking Protestants. French-speaking Protestants, however, were scattered all across the Protestant states of Europe—above all, in the Low Countries and in Germany, where Huguenot refugees had established colonies following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Surely the descendants of those refugees needed Bibles, the STN reasoned when it went to press with the second edition of its Bible in 1779. Since the number of prepublication subscriptions was far inferior to the pressrun, and, since the Swiss and French markets had already absorbed the lion’s share of the first edition, the STN was wagering that it would be able to sell copies of its second edition to booksellers in Germany. It turned out to be a tough sell. The Huguenots in Germany formed only a small minority of the total population, even where they were most heavily concentrated. They also tended to be poor and to live in remote rural areas, with some noteworthy exceptions , like the wealthy Huguenot merchants of Berlin and Hamburg. For German booksellers, therefore, the Huguenot public was not a lucrative source of demand, as the STN discovered as soon as it tried to market the 148 chapter 5 second edition of its Bible in Germany. It offered...