The Court of Versailles, where Louis XVI passed his days according to a timetable first elaborated a century earlier, was Louis XIV’s most spectacular legacy. Nor was its influence confined to France. By the early eighteenth century admiring fellow monarchs were building imitations of the sprawling palace and its lavish ornamental gardens all over Europe. From Tsarskoje Selo outside St Petersburg in the east to Aranjuez near Madrid in the west; from Drottningholm, refuge of Swedish monarchs, in the north to Caserta in the Neapolitan south, rulers built themselves outof-town seats to display their power and flaunt their pleasures. Nor were such piles the only homage paid by foreigners to French cultural prestige in the afterglow of the Sun King. French architecture, French furniture, French fashions dominated continental taste down to the middle of the eighteenth century; and even when, after that, things English came into vogue they made their appearance in a French mirror. Above all, educated Europe adopted the French language. With the exception of England and Spain, it was the preferred tongue of courts everywhere. Recalling court life at Schönbrunn under the Empress Maria Theresia, one of her familiars noted that ‘French was then the language of the upper classes and indeed of cultivated society in general . . . In those days, the greater part of high society in Vienna could say: I speak French like Diderot and German . . . like my nurse.’1 In Frederick II’s Berlin or Catherine II’s St Petersburg monarchs gorged on Parisian culture created an atmosphere in which their courtiers almost completely forgot their native languages from lack of use; but even at lower levels nobody now considered themselves educated without a thorough familiarity with French. By the 1770s a certain backlash was beginning. Writers like Herder in Germany or Alfieri in Italy were raging against their compatriots’ servile deference to an alien culture. But as yet their followers were few. Meanwhile, people of education found themselves unprecedentedly well equipped to follow events in France, form judgements about what was happening there, and absorb the ever-swelling outpourings of French literary life.
The court of Versailles where Lewis I 16th passed his days according to a timetable first elaborated a century earlier was Lewis xiv’s most spectacular Legacy nor was its influence confined to France by the early 18 century admiring fellow monarchs were building imitations of the sprawling Palace and its lavish
Ornamental Gardens all over Europe from Saro C outside St Petersburg in the East to aranz near Madrid in the West from drotning home Refuge of Swedish monarchs in the north to kazera in the Neapolitan South rulers built themselves out of town seats to display their power and flaunt their Pleasures nor were such
Piles the only homage paid by foreigners to French cultural prestige in the Afterglow of the Sun King French architecture French furniture French Fashions dominated Continental taste down to the middle of the 18th century and even when after that things English came into Vogue they made their appearance in a French
Mirror above all educated Europe adopted the French language with the exception of England and Spain it was the preferred tongue of Courts everywhere recalling Court life at shunan under the Empress Maria Teresa one of her familiars noted that French was then the language of the upper classes and indeed
Of cultivated Society in general in those days the greater part of high society in Vienna could say I speak French like deer and German like my nurse in Frederick II’s Berlin or Katherine 2 St Petersburg monarchs gorged on Parisian culture created an atmosphere in which their corders almost completely forgot their native languages
From lack of use but even at lower levels nobody now considered themselves educated without a thorough familiarity with French by the 1770s a certain backlash was beginning writers like herder in Germany or Alfieri in Italy were raging against their compatriots serval deference to an alien culture but as yet
Their followers were few meanwhile people of Education found themselves unprecedentedly well equipped to follow events in France form judgments about what was happening there and absorbed the ever swelling outpourings of French literary life while monarchs willingly subscribed to the correspondence literary issued from Paris by The Expatriate German Baron Grim from 1754
Their subjects at less cost found an expanding range of other journals to keep them well informed the unadventurous could confine themselves to the long-established mercur def France for news of public events or the journal davant for learned ones but both these periodicals were semi-official and subject to closed government
Censorship from mid-century a wide range of more independent journals some specialized and some not became available most had an ephemeral existence and few of those which survived could have done so without the efforts of one or two persistent individuals nevertheless in the 70 years between 1715 and 1785 the number almost
Quadrupled and it was quite beyond the government’s resources to supervise the contents of them all indeed the one it was always keenest to censor the jansenist newel’s Ecclesiastes which from 1728 onwards kept up a regular critical commentary on the management and out look of the established church always eluded attempts to find its
Presses journals identified openly with particular individuals such as the popular conservative Annie literary of frin or the unpredictable annal politi civil CT literar produced from 1777 by lingt were more vulnerable lingt spent the years 1780 to 1782 in the bastile for his journalistic excesses but even then surrogates kept
His for fortn nightly commentary going and the Memoirs he wrote on his release initially appearing in his annals before separate publication became a bests seller with their lurid evocation of the living death suffered by All Those whom the whim of despotism chose to consign to that lowering and mysterious
Fortress henceforth however lingt took the precaution of publishing outside French jurisdiction in the Austrian Netherlands in fact the boldest French language periodicals had always been produced beyond the Frontier oldest and most respectable was The Gazette delay founded in Holland by hugenot refugees in 1677 and still under Protestant Direction it provided its
Readers with detailed and well-informed accounts of French domestic politics and the issues at stake in them with a gentle but persistent bias against Authority almost as popular though less wellknown was the fortnightly cier Deion published from 1733 in that Enclave of papal territory in the South the more conservative but well-informed Courier
Dubas Ren was produced in Prussian clevys while the intellectually radical Journal encyclopedic came out in the tiny independent South Belgian principality of bullan the circulation of such journals was europe-wide and demand for them grew enormously in the news late in 1770s with major political upheavals to report from Scandinavia Russia and Poland not
To mention France itself and greatest of all the American struggle for independence from a few hundred in the 1750s The Gazette delayed was producing around 4,200 copies by 1785 over half of these were sold outside France but inevitably by far the biggest single market for French language journalism was within the kingdom
Itself there local papers also made their appearance Paris had a weekly news and advertising sheet from early in the century Lions had won from 1748 and by the 1780s no self-respecting provincial center was without one the journal to Paris came out daily from 1777 10 years later perhaps 70,000
Copies of newspapers were being regularly sold reaching a readership of around half a million these developments were paralleled by book production in so far as fragmentary evidence allows us to reconstruct it expanding steadily down to the 1770s it leaped dramatically after that and went on at an accelerated rate down
To the revolution though with some spectacular vicissitudes as censorship policies fluctuated technically all books and journals too could only be published if passed or awarded the privilege of being printed as it was technically known by a board of sensors headed by an official known as the Director of the book trade
To win such a privilege they had to contain nothing contrary to religion government and morals the very number of sensors rising from 41 in the 1720s to 178 in 1789 reflects the expanding volume of their work but in practice very few books were banned most of those which the sensors
Felt unable to invest with the Positive approval signified by a privilege were nevertheless granted tacit permission to publish and even more dubious ones could appear on simple tolerance with the mere assurance that the police would not act against them nothing short of a full privilege however could indemnify a book
From independent persecution by either the sorban or a parliament and the government normally stood aside when a sovereign Court condemned a book to be publicly torn up and burned for the subversiveness of its contents everybody except the magistrates realized that there was no better way to give give a bookfree
Publicity but like journals an important proportion of the books sold in France came from abroad from Holland from ainon from Geneva or from nashel another Prussian Enclave whose main export appears to have been books in French most of these Imports were unauthorized and came in by tortuous roots to avoid
The vigilance of Customs men even authorized Imports were sometimes cut to a trickle as in the early 1770s by punitive increases in import duties and in 1783 the whole book trade was plunged into chaos when it was decreed that All Imports would have to be inspected by
The book sellers Guild in Paris before delivery to any destination within France the aim was to weed out pornography sedition and pirated additions but the effect was to make transport costs prohibitive for all books even in the booming Market that had now established itself who bought these ever proliferating journals
Newspapers and and books over a third of Lewis the 16th subjects could read and write and there was a steady market for cheap popular literature such as almanacs and traditional Tales of Wonder sold by traveling Hawkers and known from their covers as the blue library but cost alone restricted the
Sale of more sophisticated books and journals a subscription to The Gazette delayed cost 36 lver a year the Annie liter and the journal encyclopedic were 24 lver each and the cier dean 18 even the most skilled Craftsman would not earn more than 30 lver a week and
Most earned half that or less making even the purchase of an occasional book all but impossible the better off themselves might find the cost of keeping up with literature and current affairs daunting but it was much eased in the course of the century by the appearance of subscription libraries and reading rooms
With membership fees around the cost of a single Journal subscription the first to be recorded appeared in non in 1759 and 30 years later there were five more in the same city housing more than 3,000 volumes between them during that time similar institutions sprang up throughout the provinces devoted like
That established in Bayou in 1770 to finding decent diversion in Reading literary and political news sometimes they had rooms set aside for conversation two but discussion was the main function of a different type of institution which also blossomed over the 18th century the literary Society they two had libraries and subscribed to
Journals but they also held regular public sessions sometimes interspersed with concerts at which their members read their own works or debated questions of the day sometimes too they organized public lectures and Essay competitions open to all but usually with a much higher subscription than the average reading room they often adopted
High sounding names sociate de filth sociate de philosophy ET de Bells letra logop panthy M so patrioti by 1787 noted a Dijon newspaper one sees societies of this sort in almost all the towns of the Kingdom such an agreeable resource for the select class of citizens in all walks of life the most
Select of all such bodies however were theems where membership was by election only numbers were often deliberately limited and the society enjoyed the official recognition of Royal letters patent they too were largely a product of the 18th century in 1700 apart from the great Metropolitan bodies like the
Academy Frances the academy to sciences and the academy to inscriptions Z Bell’s letra only seven provincialis existed by 1789 the number had risen to 35 most had their own premises and libraries and had in fact usually evolved from humbler literary societies but in the end academic exclusivism was
Probably one reason why the latter spread so rapidly only 6,000 Frenchmen secured membership of an academy over the whole century and of these a disproportionate 37% or more were Nobles yet their cultural preeminence was undoubted their rare public sessions commanded unrivaled ATT mention their lists of foreign Associates and correspondents conferred unique Prestige
And their essay competitions attracted literary hopefuls from far and wide and sometimes helped to launch a promising career the most famous case was Jean Jac Russo’s Triumph in the dijan Academy’s competition of 1750 access to literature therefore was not confined to individual buyers of books and journals but there was no
Great social difference between those who bought for themselves and those who relied on instit institutional libraries the reading classes were overwhelmingly made up of Nobles clerics and the professional Bourgeois mostly they lived in towns and uncommercial towns at that merchants and manufacturers were far less interested in the world of ideas than magistrates
Lawyers administrators and army officers I do not expect you will be able to sell any here wrote a book seller in baruk to the Noel Publishers promoting a new Expanded Edition of the famous encyclopedia in 1780 having offered them to everybody here nobody so far has come looking for
A copy they are more AVID for trade than for reading and their education is quite neglected the merchants prefer to teach their children that 5 and four make 9 – 2 equal 7 than in telling them to refine their minds to join the expanding cultivated Elite in fact disposable
Income needed to be spent not only on reading but before that on the right sort of Education when Lewis I 16th came to the throne the French educational system was in turmoil as was that of much of Catholic Europe the cause was the dissolution of the Jesuits who had
Dominated the higher education of Catholic Elites since the late 16th century finally disbanded by the Pope in 1773 they had been expelled from France in 1764 and their 113 colleges had been sequestrated some disappeared some passed into the hands of other regular orders some were taken over by secular priests under Municipal
Supervision in these varying circumstances The Fairly uniform curriculum they had taught dissolved and although there was much public discussion of what to put in its place no action on a kingdom wide scale was taken in 1789 one boy in 52 out of the 8 to 18 age range was attending a college
But the educational experience of them and their predecessors over a generation was much more diverse than that of their fathers and grandfathers many more were now borders two cut off for long periods from their families even so solid grounding in the Latin Classics was still regarded as the essential Foundation of a superior
Education for hours a day of ancient Rome its language and its culture occupied six years of most college courses much of the time remaining was devoted to the inculcation of Catholic Orthodoxy although after 1760 there was time in some courses for a little geography and some French history those
Who went beyond this basic cycle of the humanities however and most of those hoping for professional careers did went on to take a further 2 years conventionally called philosophy where they were introduced to the Natural Sciences here two tradition ostensibly ruled and the authority of Aristotle went formally
Unchallenged but but behind this facade the lessons of the Scientific Revolution of the previous century and the methods and approaches that had brought them about had been widely propagated in the colleges from the 1690s onwards neither ancient Rome nor the Christian religion had played much part in the Triumph of a rational
Experimental approach to Natural phenomena and it was impossible to disguise the fact nevertheless the new principles continued to be taught and by the 1760s Newtonian physics in one form or another were standard fair in most colleges nature was to be evaluated in terms of what could be shown to work and
Achieve useful results it could scarcely be expected that some at least of those who learned this lesson should not have thought about judging human Affairs by the same standards for all the precepts of obedience and Orthodoxy instilled into them in earlier school years that indeed was the object of the
Enlightenment whose writers set the intellectual agenda for this generation of unprecedented literacy it was a movement of criticism whose Advocates believed that nothing was beyond rational Improvement and that nothing was justifiable that could not be shown to be useful to humanity or to promote human happiness they called themselves
Philosophers by which they meant independent thinkers committed to the Practical Improvement of the lot of their fellow men most of them thought the way to achieve it lay in appealing to the educated general public in works of polemic simplification and popularization the Very opposite as their opponents did not fail to point
Out of the traditional detached notion of a philosopher the Supreme example it has always been agreed was voler born in the last years of the 17th century in Jesuit educated by the time he was 30 he had already won a reputation for witty anti-clerical writings and he was to remain a prolific
Poet and playwright all his life but the direction of that life was changed when in 1726 he traveled to England here he saw the benefits of religious pluralism and Toleration discovered the psychology of lock the physics of Newton and the theoretical empiricism of bacon he was overwhelmed and 8 years later conveyed
His discoveries to compatriots largely ignorant of English in his LR philosophes banned and publicly burned by the parliament they nevertheless sold sensationally well making lock and Newton household names in educated French circles voler also wrote works of History indeed he became historiographer Royal and in 1746 was elected to the academy
France but his brushes with authority were as constant as his jibing against the church and finally in 1759 he took up permanent residence at Fernie close to the safety of the Swiss border
1 Comment
Lewis x. I v, That's all I had to hear. There's a lot of AI crap up here on YouTube these days