The Demand for Literature in France, 1769–1789, and the Launching of a Digital Archive

How did literature contribute to the collapse of the ancien régime in France? Alexis de Tocqueville raised this question in 1856. Daniel Mornet made it the key consideration in his account of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution in 1910, and historians have debated it ever since. One line of argument turns on the effort to calculate the production and diffusion of books. It may seem misplaced today, because quantitative history has given way to the study of political discourse and a broad range of cultural questions. No one, not even Mornet, would defend a linear view of causality, which leads from publishing to book sales, reading, collective attitudes, the formation of public opinion, and the overthrow of a political order. Yet the demand for literature remains relevant to the understanding of discourse and culture, including the cultural explosion of 1789. Exactly how it is relevant may be endlessly debated, but the debate will not get far without some solid data about the market for books on the eve of the Revolution. This article is an attempt to provide that information. It also has a second purpose: to introduce a digital archive that will make available a great deal of information about literary demand and the way the book trade functioned under the ancien régime. Demand can be measured by compiling statistics from the orders of booksellers, but statistical evidence from eighteenth-century sources can easily be misinterpreted. When booksellers ordered books, they conformed to conditions, practices, attitudes, and folkways that no longer exist. In order to avoid anachronism and other errors of interpretation, it is important to study the texts of the booksellers’ letters while tabulating data from them. The archive— www://robertdarnton.org—includes hundreds of these letters as well as statistical tables and a great deal of other material ðfig. 1Þ. It is arranged in layers so that readers can drill down and search across bands of information, pursuing interests