Policing printers and booksellers before and after 1789: a case study in Bordeaux

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the Bordeaux bookseller and printer Arnaud-Antoine Pallandre’s two censorship trials in 1775 and 1790 to compare state–media relations during the late Bourbon monarchy and the French Revolution. An entourage of protectors kept Pallandre in business even though he flouted pre-revolutionary book trade legislation. After 1789, his printing and bookselling shop became a centre of pamphlet sales and counter-revolutionary gatherings that came under intense scrutiny by patriots in the clubs, the National Guard and the crowds, who pressured the municipal governments to end Pallandre’s trade in counter-revolutionary pamphlets. He eventually went to the guillotine in 1794. This article suggests that members of formerly privileged groups continued to wield considerable influence over printers and booksellers in France after 1789, making them objects of both government and popular censorship. In the struggle to achieve limits on a free press, printers and booksellers came to be regarded as individuals with public (potentially dangerous) political affiliations in a new way, a development that may help explain the high levels of media repression in the French Revolution.