Some fifty years ago, the historian of intellectual life Robert Darnton, after finishing his doctoral work at Oxford, was researching the writer and Girondin leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot.
Very much a man of his time, Brissot had composed various political tracts in the 1780s as well as a spicy libel about the Queen of France, called Passe-temps d’Antoinette— Antoinette’s Pastimes (the coyness of the genre’s titles has little changed over the centuries)—earning him a spell in the Bastille. Years later, as a member of the Convention and naively believing that France’s Revolutionary atmosphere was less threatening, he found himself on the wrong side of Maximilien Robespierre, a mistake that earned him a more permanent spell in the grounds of the Chapelle expiatoire after a brief stop at the Place de la Concorde. In happier days, though, Brissot published through the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (stn), a publisher and bookseller located in Switzerland, a few miles east of the French border.
The stn dealt in clandestine literature. Not only was it in the pirated-edition business, it also published so-called livres philosophiques, a euphemism covering seditious books like Mercier’s utopian L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (In the Year 2440) and Voltaire’s Questions sur L’Encyclopédie, political slanders (libelles) like Brissot’s own Passe-temps d’Antoinette and Pidansat de Mairobert’s Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, pornographically anticlerical (Thérèse philosophe) and irreligious works, books on freemasonry and the occult,
