“Authorial Poverty” and Transformations in Readership in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Case of Nicolas-Joseph-Florent Gilbert

Abstract

Rebuking Voltaire in a chapter called Misere des auteurs from the Tableau de Paris for bitterly mocking, in Le Pauvre diable, indigent writers, Louis-Sebastien Mercier articulates a stark shift in eighteenth-century representations of poverty. (1) The pitiless images in Voltaire's 1760 lampoon of a hapless litterateur chasing fame and fortune drew on a well-established poete crotte tradition that conceived the of the writer to be the manifestation of a certain cultural order. Pursuing a renown and reward that was far beyond his capacities to achieve, the pauvre diable, like his forebears in the seventeenth-century satires of Mathurin Regnier and Antoine Furetiere, ultimately deserved misfortunes that accurately measured an inability to assess his own talents and to rein in his outsized and incongruous ambitions. The pauvre diable's thus put him in his place, that of a porter, not a great man of letters. By contrast, Mercier's critique of the poor devil motif advances an entirely different view by which poverty, as a title of virtue, affirms moral qualities such as disinterest and tireless commitment. Far from delegitimizing a writer's grandiose ambitions as these confront a world indifferent to them, justifies the author, guaranteeing his or her work as the product of a superior character, and therefore as an effective, reliable source of truth and moral guidance. (2) Highlighting Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notorious embrace of personal austerity earned him a reputation as a latter-day Diogenes, Mercier roots his views in ancient philosophical traditions linking the pursuit of truth with deprivation, as well as in Christian associations of and virtue. (3) This essay, however, explores a more circumscribed framework for an eighteenth-century revaluation of authorial which, by the 1834 triumph of Alfred de Vigny's play Chatterton and its lavish dramatization of the anguish and suicide of a distressed poet, had established the wide decipherability of a trope communicating, via images of hardship, the credibility and profundity of a writer. This framework was defined by evolving media environments characterized at one level by the heatedness of the polemics nurtured within them. It is, in fact, difficult to find evocations of from the period that are not sharply inflected by aggressive dynamics of attack and parry. Specifically, the poverty of eighteenth-century writers was most often conceived through the prism of the polemics that surrounded the philosophes and their program for social and political reform, as the references to both Voltaire and Mercier attest. (4) Yet the newly exalted conception of owed not just to the particular spin that this eighteenth-century context gave to it but, more significantly, to its durability as the Enlightenment-era debates faded and carne to be associated with another, larger context, that of the expansion and, to cite Honore de Balzac, commercial transformation of the cultural sphere. (5) It is in this latter evolution that the Voltairean variant ultimately loses its currency, while the Mercier model acquires, in turn, an expanded bearing, reflecting not just local struggles over control of the institutions of eighteenth-century intellectual life but an overarching cultural and sociological crisis, symptomized by distorted markets that failed to reward important work and meritorious writers while heaping riches, praise, and attention on second-tier hacks and their crowd-pleasing schlock. Moreover, with its characteristic gravity, Chatterton marks the ascendency of a key aspect of the transformation, namely a rejection of the rhetoricity that, in its classic formulations, had always infused authorial with its meanings. Instead, the phenomenon's lived, objective relevance is affirmed. Indeed, Mercier's indignation especially targeted Voltaire's insensitivity to the actual suffering that lay behind what the latter mocked; thus rather than make fun of them, Voltaire would have done better to help [indigent authors] with a part of his own fortune. …