Ever since publication of Jean-Paul Belin's Le Commerce des livres prohib & eacute;s & agrave; Paris, 1750-1789 (1913), the regulation of the late ancien r & eacute;gime French book trade has been considered largely ineffectual. Widespread smuggling, routine pirating of successful titles, haphazard censorship, an endless flurry of regulations, and the connivance of guild members and book trade officials, all supposedly made regular and consistent enforcement impossible. Yet increasing evidence, drawn from the archives and digital projects on the circulation of books, suggests that this picture is misleading. This article examines that evidence and suggests an alternative picture. It shows that moving or smuggling clandestine books in bulk was difficult, risky and prohibitively expensive, as rights over moving, receiving or trading in books were carefully regulated and jealously guarded. Moreover, new regulations from 1777 onwards gave the inspection regime sharper teeth. The article demonstrates the impact of these regulations through both qualitative and quantitative sources.

The spectre of the émigré conspirator, the most implaccable enemy of the French Revolution, stalked the revolutionary imagination throughout the 1790s and beyond. In many ways this was natural. The émigré conspiracy represented the antithesis of the revolution's transparent, public politics. Nevertheless, the émigré leadership's sponsorship of conspiracy was ultimately based largely on self-delusion and thus proved self-defeating. Reliance on conspiracy, both among the émigré leadership and freelance activists was not due primarily to desperation. The outbreak of war between France and Austria in April 1792 transformed the status of the émigré conspirator. On one level it relegated him to the rank of junior partner in foreign intrigues to overturn the Revolution. On another, it elevated him to the spearhead of a vast international plot headed by France's inveterate enemies Austria and, from January 1793, Britain, with whom the émigrés now became indelibly linked in the revolutionary imagination.

Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of private library catalogues in an attempt to determine what people read during the enlightenment, historians have debated how to identify the best-selling texts in the distant past. Besides library catalogues, scholars of eighteenth-century France have ransacked will inventories, publishers’ archives, print licence registers, book auction records, the titles available in cabinets de lecture, and even the extraordinarily rich records of books stamped in an amnesty for pirated editions in 1777–1781. This article suggests that none of these sources taken in isolation can give us sufficient insight to provide a reliable overview of the book trade and the market for books. Taken together and analysed digitally, however, they give important representative insights into the best-selling texts, genres and authors of the eighteenth century. The article compares and contrasts the findings of several large-scale digital projects to identify and explore the best-selling – or most frequently-encountered-texts across a number of genres including school-books, self-help manuals, popular medical texts, creative literature and religious works. In the process, it will help us to think more critically about what constituted a best-seller in the early modern period. By revealing some broad contours of eighteenth-century print culture, it will also challenge existing narratives of the enlightenment, secularisation, popular literacy and the book trade.

This book attends to the most essential, lucrative, and overlooked business activity of early modern Europe: the trade of paper. Despite the well-known fact that paper was crucial to the success of printing and record-keeping alike, paper remains one of the least studied areas of early modern history. Organised into three sections – ‘Hotspots and Trade Routes’, ‘Usual Dealings’, and ‘Recycling Economies’ – the chapters in this collection shed light on the practices, materials, and networks of the paper trade. Altogether, the collection uncovers the actors involved in the networks of paper production, transportation, purchase, and reuse, between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries and across the central and peripheral papermaking regions of Europe. Contributors: Renaud Adam, Daniel Bellingradt, Frank Birkenholz, Simon Burrows, Orietta Da Rold, Michael Falk, Anna Gialdini, Rachel Hendery, Silvia Hufnagel, Jean-Benoît Krumenacker, Katherine McDonough, Krisztina Rábai, Anna Reynolds, Benito Rial Costas, Tapio Salminen, Helen Smith, Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, Andreas Weber, and Megan Williams.

What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a single publishing house? Would the lessons it teaches be of merely local interest, or can such a case study reveal wider information about the, rhythms, networks and scale of the trade? These are questions we seek to address in this study. In the process we hope to shed fresh light on the practices, materials, and networks of the early modern paper trade in Europe, particularly the mechanisms by which printers and publishers attempted to ensure a regular supply of paper to their workshops. By analyzing the supply and demand for paper from a single company’s business records across a time span of almost two decades, our study illuminates the business practices of paper traders, and the interplay of supply networks and purchasing strategies of major paper buyers in early modern Europe.This chapter grew from of a desire to explore the rich data on professional groups in the award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database, which documents the trade of a large Swiss publisher-wholesaler, the Societe typographique de Neuchâtel (STN). We first describes the database from which the analysis was derived (§1), then describes the methods used to estimate the STN's usage of printing paper (§2.1) and business paper (§2.2) from the available sales and publication records. We use this data to consider demand for paper in Francophone Europe during the Enlightenment. We consider first what the STN's paper usage tells us about the volatility of the paper market in the period (§3.1), and then build on what we know about the STN's installed capacity to re-estimate the total paper usage of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe (§3.2). Finally we turn to the records of STN's business correspondence to determine how they sourced their paper (§4). We conclude with our reflections on how economic, political and cultural forces shaped the publication of Enlightenment texts, and on how digital methods can help us study these forces (§5). Reason, it seems, was not the only driver of the Age of Reason.

This article uses a range of digital historical bibliometric resources to explore how far it is possible to speak of a common reading culture across Western Europe and North America in the later eighteenth century. It looks at the holdings and borrowing records of British and North American libraries and edition count data drawn from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and the English Short Title Catalogue and compares them with French and Swiss evidence drawn from the publishing records of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel, Parisian stock sale and confiscation records, and records of print runs and provincial legalisations of counterfeit stock. From this preliminary survey, the article suggests that there was a strong enough overlap between elite reading of novels, travel literature, and history to suggest that Britain and English-speaking North America shared a common reading culture with much of Western Europe. Further research in coming years is expected to flesh out and clarify this picture.

s On 10 March 1799, the counter-revolutionary journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan published a deeply-meditated response to the abbé Barruel's conspiracy theories of the philosophic and freemasonic origins of the French revolution. This chapter uses Mallet's essay to explore the emergence of two key discourses in conservative thought, and show that the rudiments of an international, cosmopolitan conservatism were coalescing well before the revolutionary maelstrom. One discourse was a surprisingly coherent critique of the advance of 'democratic' forces in reaction to a perceived international revolutionary threat developed by a small cadre of politically influential journalistic commentators. The other was the frequently but not invariably conspiratorial discourse around the existential philosophic threat to religion that emerged particularly in reaction to D'Holbach (which engaged considerably more writers). Often, these conservative critiques were based upon humanitarian concerns and underpinned by prescient forebodings of impending cataclysm, which made the conservative response to revolution all the more powerful. This argument suggests that the revolution was important to the intellectual development of conservatism more for popularizing than developing conservative ideologies. Moreover, key forms of 'radical enlightenment' discourse discussed by cosmopolitan conservatives were more contained or marginalized than much existing literature would suggest. Conversely, the grip of traditional religious forces, and their role in moderating radical enlightenment, have been underestimated.

Abstract The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.

This book, which began as a conference panel, brings together some of the brightest talents across almost three generations of revolutionary historians. It adds to a growing interest in the global significance and influence of the wider world in the French Revolution. Like any collection of essays, its coverage is uneven, particularly from a geographic perspective, and reflects to a certain extent current preoccupations. Nevertheless, the authors manage to strike a certain balance between ‘Origins’ (four chapters), ‘Internal Dynamics’ (three chapters) and ‘Consequences’ (three chapters). The editors provide an interpretative introduction and Pierre Serna offers a final ‘Coda’ entitled ‘Every Revolution is a War of Independence’, a celebration of the revolutionary tradition which was perhaps all the more positive for having been written before it was entirely obvious that most of the promise and energy of the Arab Spring was to be so cruelly dissipated. Faced with such an intellectual feast, I cannot do every contribution justice here.

On November 25, 2016, I noticed something which disturbed me in Professor Robert Darnton’s online essay “Charmet” on his personal website, robertdarnton.org. The article, as published in September 2014, had concerned the Besançon printer-bookseller, Jean-Félix Charmet l’aîné [the elder]. Now it had been re-edited so that its main protagonist was Jean-Félix’s brother, the bookseller Charles-Antoine, who now was also perplexingly styled l’aîné. The only way I could prove this was an amendment, rather than the original text, was due to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It confirmed (see the screenshots reproduced at Fig. 1a and b) that the alteration had been made between March 3 and June 20, 2016.1 Since there is no text note, footnote or endnote to notify readers of the change, this is the only proof I have that the change was ever made.

This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding past cultures and offers a vision for how historical bibliometric research might be conducted on a comparative and global scale. Drawing on conceptual work being undertaken at the Western Sydney University in order to further develop and extend the widely respected ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) database project, it explores how historians might proceed to correlate, map, and analyse multiple spatially referenced data sets pertaining to the creation, publication, dissemination, ownership, consumption, reception, policing, and geographic setting of texts. While the authors recognise the many dangers and limitations inherent in reducing the cultural history of text to a set of statistical data, they observe that historians frequently use the production and circulation of texts as a useful proxy for understanding the circulation of ideas. Hence historical bibliometrics can provide measurable indicators of cultural resonance. The challenge, then, is to meaningfully integrate algorithmic abstractions with qualitative-based humanities research. This paper and the suite of projects it discusses seek to provide a way forward.