Book description
Though the field of book history has long been divided into discrete
national histories, books have seldom been as respectful of national
borders as the historians who study them-least of all in the age of
Enlightenment when French books reached readers throughout Europe. In
this erudite and engagingly written study, Jeffrey Freedman examines
one of the most important axes of the transnational book trade in
Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France
and the German-speaking lands. Focusing on the critical role of book
dealers as cultural intermediaries, he follows French books through
each stage of their journey-from the French-language printing shops
where they were produced, to the wholesale book fairs in Leipzig, to
retail book shops at locations scattered widely throughout Germany. At
some of those locations, authorities reacted with alarm to the spread
of French books, burning works of the radical French Enlightenment and
punishing the booksellers who sold them. But officials had little
power to curtail their circulation: the political fragmentation of the
German lands made it virtually impossible to police the book trade.
Largely unimpeded by censorship, French books circulated more freely
in Germany than in the absolutist monarchy of France.
In comparison, the flow of German books into the French market
was negligible-an asymmetry that corresponded to the hierarchy of
languages in Enlightenment Europe. But publishers in Switzerland
produced French translations of German books. By means of title
changes, creative editing, and mendacious advertising, the Swiss
publishers adapted works of the German Enlightenment for an audience
of French-readers that stretched from Dublin to Moscow.
An innovative contribution to both the history of the book and
the transnational study of the Enlightenment, Freedman's work tells a
story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of texts
in an age in which the concept of World Literature had not yet been
invented, but the phenomenon already existed.
"Anyone with any knowledge about eighteenth-century literary
and cultural history will recognize the importance of this book. A
study of this sort has long been needed not simply to extend our
understanding of the French book in Germany but also to counterbalance
and revise various national 'history of the book' series which focus
on the national unit and precisely miss the importance of books as
livres sans frontières."-James Raven, University of Essex
Jeffrey Freedman is Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva
University and the author of A Poisoned Chalice.
