Political control of the media in eighteenth-century France: printers, royal bureaucracy and aristocratic patrons

Abstract While historians have investigated many aspects of late eighteenth-century Bourbon censorship, they have not explored the evolving practice—well underway by the reign of Louis XV—of fining, suspending or banning printers and booksellers from the trade for censorship infractions and pirating. This article plots chronologically and examines 158 arrêts du conseil issued by the conseil d’état from 1703 to 1788 ordering France’s licensed printers and booksellers to be fined, suspended, or banned from the printing and bookselling trades, and documents how matters of printer and bookseller discipline were removed from the regular courts and transferred to the conseil d’état, which handled printers and booksellers very strategically. In almost every case, delinquent printers saw their original punishments softened following the intervention of printers’ patrons. Multiple voices and much negotiation among varied stakeholders governed state–media relations in the Bourbon monarchy, where an emerging bureaucracy tangled with the traditional influence of powerful patronage networks.