5. Las nuevas generaciones: los nativos digitales
11.5. Etapa de desarrollo
11.7.1. Evaluación de la unidad
408 For more on those eighteenth-century anxieties see Ibid., 14–37.
409 Alexandre Nicholas Pigoreau, Cinquième supplément à la Petite bibliographie biographico- romancière, ou, Dictionnaire des romanciers: contenant le catalogue des romans qui ont paru depuis sa publication (Paris: Pigoreau, 1823), iii–iv.
410 Ibid., iv. “Il faut des romans populaires, si j’ose m’exprimer ainsi, puisque le peuple veut lire des romans: il en faut pour l’artisan dans sa boutique, pour la petite couturière dans son humble mansarde, pour la ravaudeuse dans son tonneau; il en faut pour les petits esprits, comme il faut des éditions de nos philosophes pour la petite propriété.”
411 Ibid., v. “Si l'on est effrayé avec raison du débordement de ces mauvaises ouvrages qui ménacent d'engloutir le bon sens et la moralité, on doit se rassurer, en considérant que l'on en
and demand side for books allowed for a greater diversity of reading material. Or as Stendhal put it, while all women read novels, they did not all have the same level of education, so booksellers distinguished between novels for “bedroom women” (femmes de chambre) and salon novels (roman de salon). Stendhal noted that these novels varied not just by their content, but also by their authors, format, price, and publisher, suggesting, as Anthony Glinoer has argued, that “it is the literary field as a whole that must adapt to the new reality.”412
Literary journals contributed to the commercialization, popularization, and perceived decadence of literature, not only because they were themselves commercial products, but also through their advertisements for books. All book reviews in Restoration periodicals were fundamentally promotional; they publicized the books they reviewed to their readers, even if no one paid for them to do so. Reviews always included information about where the books being reviewed were sold and usually also their price. Periodicals would also sometimes include brief notices announcing the publication of books without any critique of their content, which functioned as advertising regardless of whether or not they were paid for. In daily papers these tended to appear on the fourth page amidst other random announcements and brief editorial commentary.
Advertising and the push toward profitability through increased subscriptions were both potentially in tension with literary journals’ moral imperative regarding criticism. The amount of literary criticism in the newspaper press decreased somewhat in the July Monarchy, as the serialized novel began to take up increasing space in the feuilleton section of newspapers.413 In French these were called romans-feuilleton. This move to serialized novels was closely tied to the phenomenon of increased reliance on advertising revenue for periodicals. As Alfred Nettement explained it in his 1854 Histoire de la littérature française sous le Gouvernement de Juillet, in 1836 Emile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, founders of laPresse and le Siècle, respectively,
voit encore un certain nombre de marqués au coin du bon goût, de la véritable gaîté, de la
décence et de la délicatesse.”
412 Anthony Glinoer, “Classes de textes et littérature industrielle dans la première moitié du xixe siècle,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, Varia, May 26, 2009,
https://contextes.revues.org/4325 (accessed 16 June 2016). “C’est le champ littéraire dans son ensemble qui doit s’adapter à la nouvelle donne.”
413 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 762–63.
decided to drastically reduce the subscription price of their papers and to make up the difference with paid advertisements.414 But, Nettement continued, to get enough advertisements to pay for the paper they had to have sufficient subscribers so the advertisers would be willing to pay for space on the fourth page of their papers. To encourage enough subscribers they needed to attract readers of all stripes, regardless of political partisanship, and so, Nettement concludes, the roman-feuilleton was born.415 Nettement argues then that the rise of advertising reduced both the amount of literary criticism and the amount of political partisanship in newspapers. This move toward an advertising rather than subscription funded system further commercialized the literary press. And the development and proliferation of the serialized novel further tied periodicals to the increased commercialization of books.416
The Éditeur
Along with advertising, the early nineteenth century saw an increase in the
commercialization of print more broadly. One important development of commercial literature in the nineteenth was the rise of the éditeur (publisher). An éditeur, in the nineteenth century, was a bookseller who published books at his or her own expense.417The éditeur was not exactly like a modern publisher, because he or she operated as both publisher and printer-bookseller, and focused on the acquisition and sale of books. These éditeurs opposed the regulation of printing and argued that print should be treated like any other industry, and so called for freedom of the press. Their protectionist opponents, who were often traditional printer-booksellers, believed print was a special commodity and so required regulation.418 As Pascal Durand and Anthony Glinoer argue, it is not as though printer-booksellers in the eighteenth century did not also acquire and sell books. They did, but they were not called éditeurs. They suggest that the rise of “éditeur” as a term indicates a growing differentiation between printers, booksellers and publishers, and a
414 Alfred Nettement, Histoire de la littérature française sous le gouvernement de juillet, vol. 1 (Paris: J. Lecoffre, 1854), 301, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4978c.
415 Ibid., 1:302.
416 For more on serialized literature in the July Monarchy and throughout the nineteenth century, see Lise Queffélec, Le roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989).
417 Haynes, Lost Illusions, 16–17. 418 Ibid., 1–3.
decrease in their overlap. Éditeur was not just a new word for printer-bookseller, but instead marked a real change in the book trade. They compare it to the rise of the term auteur over homme de lettres, which occurred concurrently with the rise of éditeur. There is clear overlap between an author and a man of letters, but they are also decidedly not the same.419
Historians have often attributed the rise of the éditeur to changes in printing technologies and commercial practices. Historians have especially connected the éditeur with the increased production of illustrated books – a phenomenon that not only required the technological advances of the nineteenth century that made illustrated volumes more economical, particularly lithography, but also an entrepreneur interested in bringing together writers, illustrators, and different kinds of printers to produce a single product.420 And of course, the éditeur did emerge at a time when new technologies and new practices all contributed to an increased commercialization of print and the book trade, including increased literacy, lithography, stereotypography, systems of credit,
advances in papermaking and mechanical printing. But, as Christine Haynes argues, it would be a mistake to see the éditeur as the result of commercial practices that he was actively pursuing and developing. The éditeur was therefore a cause of commercialization in print, rather than the result of it. She notes that éditeurs’ importance in the 1810s and 1820s, before printing was fully industrialized and before France could be fully called a ‘consumer’ society, suggests their role in promoting both those processes.421
As with advertising, and other evidence of the commercialization of literature, the rise of the publisher met significant protest. In March 1830 Honoré de Balzac wrote “Sur l’état actuel de la librairie” in his new journal Le Feuilleton des journaux politiques, a weekly he founded with Emile de Girardin to promote a new company that sold discounted books.422 In it he said that bookselling was one of the most decried professions, whereas at the invention of printing it had
419 Durand and Glinoer, Naissance de l’éditeur, 22. 420 Haynes, Lost Illusions, 24–25.
421 Ibid., 25.
422 Bruce Tolley, “Balzac and the ‘Feuilleton Des Journaux Politiques,’” The Modern Language Review 57, no. 4 (October 1962): 504.
been highly respected.423 In Balzac’s version of events, the rise of the éditeur played a significant role in the decline of the prestige of bookselling. Balzac contended that the increased
consumption of books, which he attributed to both educational and technological developments, multiplied the importance of commerce for bookselling by ten. Where in the past, Balzac
lamented, authors would live by patronage, they now lived by sales.424 It used to be that printers and booksellers were one and the same, but now, Balzac wrote, booksellers paid printers the way a baker pays the mill.425 This new distinction between bookseller and printer, Balzac contended, was made even worse by the divisions among booksellers. The first kind of booksellers – the libraire-éditeur produced books and sold them to the second kind the libraire-commissionaire, and the third kind of bookseller sold books to the public. Balzac argued that this divided-labor system where the printer, publisher, distributor and seller were four different people only meant that the public had to pay four times the mark-up.426 This proliferation of intermediaries, Balzac insisted, had to be reversed in order to fix the book trade (librairie). But, in Balzac’s estimation the printing and book trade suffered from moral failures and not just structural ones. He summed up the printing trade: “a ream of white paper is worth fifteen francs; blackened, it can sell for one
hundred sous or one hundred francs; one hundred francs if the work succeeds, one hundred sous if it fails.”427 This drive toward profits and success over all else, Balzac insisted, was the cause of publishing’s downfall. Booksellers, he contended, now believed they need not read the
manuscripts they buy, that books only need a good title in order to sell, that they should conceive of and commission books, and that they know the public’s needs.428 Balzac clearly believed that its connection with commerce, marked by the proliferation of personages involved in print, including the éditeur, was corrupting the book trade. (Balzac’s own involvement in both bookselling and journal production might then be read as an attempt to take control of his own
423 Honoré de Balzac, Critique Littéraire (Paris: Albert Messein, 1912), 27, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4648791.
424 Ibid., 28–29. 425 Ibid., 31. 426 Ibid., 34.
427 Ibid., 31–32. “Une rame de papier blanc vaut 15 francs, noircie, elle se vend 100 sous ou 100 francs ; 100 francs si l’ouvrage réussit, 100 sous s’il tombe.”
writing and protect it from the influence of the print industry.) Moreover, while Balzac presents this commercialization of print as a moral failing of the industry, it was actually the direct result of legislation: the 1810 press law limited the number of printing licenses given in Paris, but not the number of bookselling licenses, so the majority of booksellers were going to have to rely on outside printers.
“Les éditeurs,” an article in the July 1835 edition of Revue de Paris, written by Frédéric Soulié, signed S., like Balzac, distinguished between a libraire-commissionaire and a libraire- éditeur. According to Soulié, a libraire-commissionaire purchased books on speculation and sold them on credit, and sold good books in high-quality printings. The libraire-commissionaires, Soulié argued, were much more common in years past, before the book trade had reached its current state of torpor. Soulié criticized éditeurs for their emphasis on their own profits and their lack of taste, but specified that this was an issue with what he called l’éditeur littéraire and not with l’éditeur classique. L’éditeur-classique, Soulié wrote, published dead writers, lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and married well. Soulié further subdivided classique into classique noble, and below this classique vulgaire, and even further below classique bourgeois, and noted that there were very few éditeurs classiques in Paris.429L’éditeur littéraire, itself a subdivision of éditeurs of new books and living authors, which would also include publishers of scientific, medical, legal or historical texts, was the real subject of the article. L’éditeur littéraire, Soulié wrote, would buy a 150 000 franc castle and then tell one of his hommes de lettres that he cannot afford to give him the 500 francs he needs to live. The most remarkable fact about the éditeur littéraire, S. claimed, was that he does not read, not even part of any of the books he
publishes.430 Moreover, S. wrote, the éditeur littéraire pays his authors in favors and gifts instead of money, uses all tricks available to him to sell books, and squeeze everything he possible can from the author: “advertising, la réclame, prospectuses, fly, run, resound,” and a publisher turns one work into many “published in collections, in series, in large and small format, with or without engravings, deluxe editions, standard editions, paperback editions, abridged editions,” and turns
429 S., “Les éditeurs,” Revue de Paris 19 (July 1835), 131. 430 Ibid., 132.
his author into the genius of the era, but all for the publisher’s own profit.431 The publisher takes the property of the homme de lettre and renders it “used, sucked dry, depleted, and so he thrives (engraisser – grows fat) in mild idleness, while the writer still diminishes (maigrit – grows thinner) at work.”432 Soulié argued that the publisher’s role serves to cheapen the value of literature, and then the actual price, such that: “You can find all the spry and picturesque literature of the era you could want for 5 sous, and with more left over. The high and strong literature of the school
[classicism] you will not see; those works have been put on the scrap heap: we could not even sell them for paper.”433
Soulié associated the rise of the editor with romantic literature. As romanticism grew in prominence and popularity, France also saw the rise of the éditeur, increased newspaper advertising, and other indicators of increasing commercialization of print. Even though we know romanticism would not be the dominant literary form until the 1830s,434 there was an impression – particularly among classicist critics – that it was taking over. In 1825, the journal L’Oriflamme in a two-part series on romanticism lamented that only a few souls, still possessing sense and reason, continued to recognize the perfection of French letters. The articles complained that romantic literature was invading and taking over French classicism.435 They, like other classicists, argued that romanticism’s lack of classicist-style literary rules – its very vagueness – made it particularly dangerous. Because romanticism “wanders . . . in the depths of chaos” it was indefinable and
431 Ibid., 135. “L’annonce, la réclame, le prospectus, volent, courent, retentissent…”; “..publié en collections, en livraisons, grand et petit format, avec ou sans gravures, édition de luxe, édition populaire, édition de poche, édition compacte…”
432 Ibid. “..rend a l’homme de lettres sa propriété usée, sucée, épuisée, puis il va s’engraisser dans une douce oisiveté, tandis que l’écrivain maigrit encore au travail.”
433 Ibid. “Vous y avez passé tous, littérature fringante et pittoresque de l’époque, à 5 sous tant qu’on en veut, et il en rest encore. Littérature haute et forte de l’école, vous n’y êtes point passés; vos oeuvres ont été mises au pilon: on ne pouvait pas même vendre le papier.”
434 Allen, Popular French Romanticism, 65. James Smith Allen calculated that in 1827 16.7% of the books he sampled reflected romantic influence, while by 1834 that number reached 36.7%. Smith Allen takes a different methodological approach to defining works as ‘romantic’ than I do – he looks for a defined set of romantic characteristics in literature – but the numbers he offers suggest a trend
435 “Le Romantisme (premier article),” L’Oriflamme, Journal de littérature, De sciences et arts, d’histoire, et de doctrines Religieuses et Monarchiques. Par J. B. Salgues et plusieurs hommes de lettres 3 (1825): 353.
therefore were it to enter all of literature, all literature would be embroiled and lost.436
Romanticism, l’Oriflamme insisted, appealed to the base and the vulgar – the common worker. It flattered their pride, and so made its way all the way to the boutiques and the shops and therefore presumably to financial success and into the hands of more readers.437 The imagined commercial success of romanticism, the fear that a foreign style of literature was taking over French letters only strengthened, and was strengthened by, classicist anxieties about the commercialization of literature in general.
Romanticism, as James Smith Allen has thoroughly demonstrated, was becoming increasingly profitable by the mid-1820s.438 Moreover, romantic literature was highly associated with the rise of the éditeur in the person of Pierre-François (Charles) Ladvocat, and later Eugène Renduel. Ladvocat, a libraire-éditeur in the galerie des bois at the Palais Royal was the romantic publisher of the Restoration. He began his career publishing small pamphlets of poetry, to great success, and his first major book was Messéniennes by Casimir Delavigne, the most successful playwright of the Restoration. Ladvocat later published Hugo’s poems, translations of Byron, Shakespeare and Schiller, and works of all the young romantics, including Alfred de Vigny and Sainte-Beuve. He was known for his excellent skills at publicity and réclame, his good
relationships with journals and the success he brought his authors. Many of the authors he published went on to become members of the Academies, government ministers, and other high profile members of society. Edouard Thierry, rédacteur of the Moniteur universel, once noted that at a time when the fourth page of a newspaper was not yet relegated entirely to advertisements, Ladvocat successfully used réclame because he had “at his disposition all the best writers of the press.”439 Ladvocat was immortalized in at least two Restoration plays, as inspiration for the character of Satiné in l’Imprimeur sans caractère, and that of Fortuné in Roman à vendre, who is
436 “Le Romantisme (deuxième article),” L’Oriflamme, Journal de littérature, De sciences et arts, d’histoire, et de doctrines Religieuses et Monarchiques. Par J. B. Salgues et plusieurs hommes de lettres 3 (1825): 402. “erre . . . dans la nuit du chaos”
437 Ibid., 401.
438 Allen, Popular French Romanticism, 7.
439 Ferdinand Hoefer, ed., Nouvelle biographie générale : depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 28 (Paris: Firmin-Didot frères, 1854), 650,
presented as both highly successful and well-connected.440 Balzac used Ladvocat as the basis for the character Dauriat in Balzac Illusions Perdues.441In the obituary he wrote for the Journal des débats, Jules Janin argued that the young writers of his generation owed their success to Ladvocat, who gave voice to a group of people who were not otherwise being heard.442 Another Restoration-era éditeur, Edmond Werdet, who was an early publisher of Honoré de Balzac, wrote in 1859 that Ladvocat was a modern bookseller who worked tirelessly to promote new literature, while others, like Jean-Jacques Lefèvre, found success by printing books that were already