Underground Books and the Literary Black Market

Many of the most-read books in pre-revolutionary France were illegal. Publishers in Switzerland, the Netherlands and other border regions printed forbidden works and smuggled them into France, where booksellers sold them as 'philosophical books'. Historian Robert Darnton studied the archives of one such publisher, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, founded in 1769, to reconstruct what French readers actually bought.

He found that this underground trade mixed serious philosophy by Voltaire and d'Holbach with scandalous gossip about the royal court, utopian fantasies and pornography. Darnton argued that such libels may have done more than philosophy to erode respect for the monarchy, by making the king and queen seem corrupt and ridiculous. Other historians question how much reading actually changed readers' political loyalties. The black market shows that Enlightenment ideas spread through commerce and risk-taking smugglers as well as through salons and academies.