Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France

Front Cover
Penn State Press, 2011 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 302 pages

In Licensing Loyalty, historian Jane McLeod explores the evolution of the idea that the royal government of eighteenth-century France had much to fear from the rise of print culture. She argues that early modern French printers helped foster this view as they struggled to negotiate a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the French state. Printers in the provinces and in Paris relentlessly lobbied the government, hoping to convince authorities that printing done by their commercial rivals posed a serious threat to both monarchy and morality. By examining the French state&’s policy of licensing printers and the mutually influential relationships between officials and printers, McLeod sheds light on our understanding of the limits of French absolutism and the uses of print culture in the political life of provincial France.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
The Early History of Printers in Provincial France 14701660
10
The Vicissitudes of a Royal Decree
37
The Royal Council Takes Control
68
The Purges
97
Arguments Offered by Printers in Petitions for Licenses 16671789
125
Patronage and Bureaucracy Intersect
147
Behind the Rhetoric
179
Conclusion
211
Appendix A
217
Appendix B
227
Notes
233
Bibliography
275
Index
293
Back Cover
303
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2011)

Jane McLeod is Associate Professor of History at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.

Bibliographic information