Censorship, a Comparative View: France, 1789-East Germany, 1989

Abstract

THE TROUBLE the history of censorship is that it looks so simple: it pits the children of light against the children of darkness; it suffers from Manichaeism-and understandably so, because who can take a sympathetic view of someone who defaces a text a blue pencil or a film scissors? For my part, I would not want to impugn the tradition that leads from Milton and Locke to the Bill of Rights. But we need to understand censorship, not merely to deplore it; and to understand it we need to put it perspective. In this essay I examine censorship from a comparative perspective, watching it work under two old regimes: first a regime that ended two centuries ago France; then a regime that ended only yesterday, East Germany. I will limit my discussion to the censorship of books and begin by considering an ordinary, quite typical book from eighteenth-century France, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amerique by Jean Baptiste Labat.' For clues about the character of publishing under the authoritarian system established by Louis XIV, one can begin its title page (fig. 1). It goes on and on, more like a dust jacket than a title page of a modern book. In fact, its function was similar to that of dust-jacket copy: it summarized and advertised the contents of the book for anyone who might be interested reading it. The missing element, least for the modern reader, is equally striking: the name of the author. It simply does not appear. Not that the author tried to hide his identity: his name shows up the front matter. But the person who really had to answer for the book, the man who carried the legal and financial responsibility for it, stands out prominently the bottom of the page, along his address: in Paris, the rue Saint Jacques, the shop of Pierre-Fran~ois Giffart, near the rue des Mathurins, the image of Saint Theresa.2 Since 1275, booksellers had been subjected to the authority of the university and therefore had to keep shop the Latin Quarter. They especially congregated the rue Saint Jacques, where their wrought-iron signs (hence at the image of Saint Theresa) swung through the air like the branches of a forest. The brotherhood of printers and booksellers, dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist, met the church of the Mathurin Fathers the rue des Mathurins near the Sorbonne. So this book's address placed it the heart of the official trade, and its superlegal status was clear any case from the formula printed the bottom: with approbation and privilege of the king.