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A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.

In 1814, an ending that no one could have anticipated brought back a dynasty swept by the winds of history twenty-five years ago. Returning to France, Louis XVIII restores their titles to the old nobility of the Ancien Régime, but "grants" a Charter which was intended to guarantee the liberal principles inherited from the Revolution. The « Restoration », the name given to the reestablishment on the throne of France of the former Bourbon dynasty, nevertheless raised many questions. What would happen to this new France that had emerged with the Revolution since 1789? Between 1814 and 1820, a period during which a liberal political program was established, the Royalists invoked the Revolution and the threats it put on the monarchy in order to fight it. The Liberals, on the other hand, saw in their royalist adversaries an old and embittered nobility, emerging once more from a distant past, and who badly conceals its secret desire to abolish the Charter and claim her former rights. This master’s thesis will discuss the divide that existed between two elites competing for political and social dominance. In the light of the debates of the time, we will see how Royalists and Liberals, the two major political groups of the period, articulated their speech. One theme appears particularly prominent: the Revolution. After two decades, it divides again. Worse, it was still relevant and its memory never ceased to occupy the political space.

Ce mémoire a pour objectif d’analyser et de répertorier les productions historiographiques sur la race et le racisme dans l’Atlantique français au XVIIIe siècle. À travers nos lectures, nous avons pu constater que l’historiographie sur les colonies françaises, de plus en plus abondante, et l’approche privilégiant l’espace atlantique ont pris beaucoup d’importance depuis les vingt dernières années et cela a grandement influencé notre choix de diviser les productions historiographiques en trois catégories qui seront les trois chapitres de ce mémoire. Dans un premier temps, nous traiterons des travaux portant plus spécifiquement sur la race et le racisme où nous présenterons le débat quant à l’origine temporelle du racisme. Par la suite, nous présenterons certains travaux en histoire de l’esclavage dans l’Atlantique français qui relient le développement de l’esclavage et celui de la pensée raciale. Finalement, nous aborderons la question du racisme dans la métropole française au XVIIIe siècle en analysant les études qui ont été faites sur les questions des minorités noires et juives en France ainsi que les études sur la question coloniale à l’heure de la Révolution française. Par ailleurs, nous allons aussi présenter le désaccord qu’il y a entre les historiens quant à l’authenticité de la croyance des philosophes des Lumières en leur idéologie prônant la tolérance. Avec les nouvelles productions en histoire atlantique, il est évident que la conception de la race en France est le résultat d’une multitude de facteurs : culturels, scientifiques, économiques et politiques.

Historians have tried to determine what francophones read during the long 18th century for over a hundred years. To do so, they have studied library inventories, printing permits, and the archives of printer-editors, but these sources are fragmentary and of uncertain representativeness. This thesis reframes the question by studying, with a combination of computational methods and close reading, large digitized corpora that approximate the entire French-language print market of the long 18th century. Using these vast corpora, the thesis proposes and demonstrates that it is possible to pinpoint ideas to which readers were probably exposed frequently enough that the ideas influenced the readers’ mental maps of the world, regardless of what precise texts were involved in each case. Thus, the thesis shows that digital approaches constitute a major new tool for historians of reading and print, including (under some circumstances) when the only data at their disposal is OCR results plagued with high error rates. As an illustrative case study, the thesis examines imagined geographies, i.e., mental models of the world produced by exposition to print media containing direct or indirect descriptions of territories and their inhabitants. Concepts drawn from psychology, behavioural economics and media studies suggest how readers may have interiorized the messages transmitted by print and used them, consciously or not, to build their own imagined geographies. A study of some 70 000 volumes printed in French between 1700 and 1815, extracted from the Hathi Trust collection, shows that the Europe discussed in print expands eastward with time, that England draws most of the attention, and that discourses regarding most of the European powers are both remarkably stable and centred on war and aristocracy. Studies of major periodicals, cheap popular booklets (the Bibliothèque bleue), geography manuals and Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes corroborate these findings. Examining the 14,547 geography articles published in Diderot’s Encyclopédie reveals a largely urban imagined geography that changes focus during publication, from Diderot’ purely descriptive science to a tool for cultural transmission when Louis de Jaucourt takes over primary writing duties; a parallel study of 6,053 articles drawn from all fields of knowledge shows that the Encyclopédie describes America as a young world rich in resources, primarily botanical, that are ripe for the taking. The way in which the colonial French Atlantic world is portrayed in the Ancien Régime’s main periodicals suggests that they may have played a role in the French public’s notoriously low interest for emigration to the colonies. Travel narratives of expeditions to the Pacific and around the world show tensions between the step-by-step construction of a utilitarian geography and the need to retain readers’ interest by multiplying picturesque or terrifying anecdotes. In all, print media propose to their readers imagined geographies that treat the outside world with distrust.

Ce mémoire explore les modalités culturelles de la participation politique de la salonnière parisienne et célèbre écrivaine Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817), au cours de la Révolution française (1789-1799). Sur le plan des représentations, il souligne chez Germaine de Staël l’appropriation et la reformulation des normes de genre pour élaborer un rôle politique convenable à une femme d’esprit dans le contexte révolutionnaire. Ce rôle se fondait notamment sur une éthique de l’amitié et un idéal de vertu acquise par la sensibilité et la raison. Son projet constitutionnel, à la fois libéral et élitiste, cherchait à intégrer la contribution des femmes au processus politique à travers la sociabilité polie et la production littéraire. Sur le plan des pratiques, ce mémoire montre comment les outils de réseautage et de communication qu’étaient le salon, la correspondance et la publication fonctionnaient ensemble pour permettre à Staël de se positionner dans un espace sociopolitique et d’y déployer une action. Il considère ces forums comme des éléments constitutifs d’une culture politique révolutionnaire dont Staël sut faire un usage créatif et constructif pour promouvoir ses idées et son parti.

This thesis documents, catalogues, and analyses relationships between female authors in France and Italy, and between French women and Italian women, from 1770 to 1840. It results from a study of the correspondence and published works of twelve women authors (Anne-Marie de Beaufort d’Hautpoul, Sophie Gay, Félicité de Genlis, Marie-Émilie de Montanclos, Constance Pipelet Salm, Germaine de Staël, Teresa Bandettini, Elisabetta Caminer, Carolina Lattanzi, Diodata Saluzzo, Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici, and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi) over the course of a period marked by important developments in print culture, the significant involvement of women in the querelle des femmes, and the increased presence of women authors. These transformations, together with the international political upheaval caused by the French Revolution, saw attacks on female authorship pursued with increased vigour. The relationships between women authors within such a context illustrate the challenges faced in implementing a “common action” aimed at defending a female cause (that of female authors) before the advent of the feminist movement. Often described as either “rivals” or “sisters”, this study demonstrates that the nature of relationships between women in this period was in fact far more complex. On the one hand, the community of female authors examined was marked by a certain degree of cohesion. These writers had wide-ranging networks of contacts, and could rely on each other for support in times of crisis. They constructed female literary genealogies and deconstructed the discourse used by others in reference to their community, particularly that relating to the “exceptionality” of and “rivalry” between women authors. On the other hand, significant differences also ran across the membership of these networks, notably in terms of nationality, political opinions, and the position each woman occupied within literary circles. Over and above these social and political divisions, this thesis illustrates the difficulties women faced in reconciling their individual interests (the advancement of their own careers, the divisive impact of their multiple identities with the cohesion of their sex/gender) with those of the collective (legitimizing female authorship). In short, this study examines the ways in which female authors recognized the importance of their community and faced the challenges of maintaining its cohesion, at a time when not only literary activity, but also the political and cultural context in which it was framed, were undergoing great transformation.

This dissertation examines how and why normative issues about public recognition developed in Enlightenment France. It shows that this question gained significance during the transitional period towards modernity as two important phenomena intersected. On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers – who questioned the arbitrary foundations of authority – made glory into a process of recognition based on merit, which, in turn, could engender a harmonious and just society. On the other hand, the century saw the advent of a celebrity culture, which enabled the multiplication of famed individuals, especially emanating from the capital’s arts and literary circles. Instead of distinguishing individuals whose merit and useful accomplishments gave rise to unanimous admiration, as the economy of glory would demand, celebrity built upon things such as controversies, revelations about private lives, and the consumption of entertainment. From its inception, celebrity was perceived as a contributing factor to moral degeneracy and as a sign of cultural decay. This dissertation examines moral, aesthetic, and biographical texts that contributed to the creation, promotion, and critique of the economies of public recognition. An analysis of these texts published over a 150-year period – from the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to the first third of the nineteenth century – sheds light on their arguments with regards to the type of order (literary, social, or political) that they hoped to consolidate or engender. These texts offer a unique view into the particularities of this defining moment shaped by the elimination of traditional hierarchies and the advent of individuals as autonomous moral subjects. This dissertation historicises modern celebrity culture through an examination of its representations and of the conflicts it generated. Although celebrity has been theorized as a media phenomenon that creates a relationship of intimacy between famed individuals and the public, this study shows that, during the period in question, it was largely conceived as a deregulation of glory’s economy of feelings. This economy was based on a theory of moral sentiments that enabled the natural recognition of true merit, and that would, in due course, solve the tension between the subjectivity of opinions and the objectivity of values. To the contrary, celebrity fuelled passions – such as envy, ambition, and greed – which prompted the creation of immediate and undeserved renown. Celebrity was inscribed in a coherent set of aesthetic and sociocultural manifestations – including, fashion, rococo, bel esprit, satire, persiflage, light reading, cabals, and spectacles – while its systematic definition took shape through a critique of elite mores.