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The French Author and Public Relations

1973; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/utq.43.1.1

1712-5278

R. D. Finch,

French Literature and Criticism

When we think of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French literature, we think of authors. We forget that two literatures existed, one with authors, one without, the latter ranging from almanacs to arithmetics, from works on the care of the horse to penny dreadfuls. Printed on poor stock roughly stitched into blank blue folders, these were sold in immense numbers all over France. No privilege was required, the contents having been always in the public domain. The corporation of printers and publishers valued this authorless literature as chief source of revenue. It had guaranteed their survival through the wars of the sixteenth century; with the coming of peace, its profits restored the printing on good paper of wellbound books, whose covers showed title and author. Damaged colleges and monasteries called for editions of the Church Fathers, erudite commentaries, reprints of the classics. A few of these were in Greek, the rest in Latin which, incidentally, in France was the language of science until 1665 and of diplomacy until 1714. Private homes called for books in French. Of these, the first half of the seventeenth century saw an increasing flow, until, by 1675, Paris, with a population of 300,000, had ninety-two private libraries of more than 4,000 volumes each, a number of which were by living French writers.