Abstract Louis-François de Bourbon, prince of Conti, played a central role in French politics during the second half of Louis XV’s reign. An adviser to the king and head of the Secret du roi, he subsequently became one of his principal opponents after 1756. A defender of intermediary bodies within the French monarchy, he used his status as a prince of the blood to protect several writers between 1736 and 1776, as part of a strategy of prestige and political action. He supported heterodox authors or those sympathetic to his political line, such as abbé Antoine-François Prévost, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Louis-Adrien Le Paige and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. This protection enabled them to write more freely, as evidenced by the publication of Morelly’s radical works. Having been warned, some were able to escape arrest. Printed works conveyed Conti’s ideas: political treatises (Morelly), political pamphlets notably against the Jesuits (Le Paige) and factums denouncing the Parlement de Paris (Beaumarchais).
Simon Dagenais (Tue,) studied this question.