This is a study of the transnational French book trade in Enlightenment Europe. As such, it belongs to what is known as the history of the book, a vast field of interdisciplinary research, whose subject matter embraces every aspect of the “communications circuit” between author and reader.¹ It belongs to that field, and yet it does not fit snugly within it. The field of book history has long been divided into separate, self-contained national histories, from Johann Goldfriedrich’s early twentieth-century classic, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, to the multiauthor, multivolume Histoire de l’édition française published in the 1980s, to the more...

In early March 1770, as the STN’s presses were turning out the first of its publications, a puzzling letter arrived at the shop in Neuchâtel. It came from a correspondent in German-speaking Switzerland, a firm called the Société Typographique de Berne, that had ordered a considerable quantity of the STN’s books for sale at the Easter book fairs in Germany. The STN had already dispatched some of those books to Bern but not all; and in their letter of early March, the booksellers in Bern announced that after the middle of the month, it would be too late to transport...

The booksellers who traveled to Germany’s literary marketplace had the opportunity to forge personal as well as commercial relations with one another. The STN’s directors, however, seldom had the benefit of knowing their correspondents in Germany personally. Having elected not to trade directly at the Leipzig fairs, they had to assess the creditworthiness of booksellers whom they had never met, in far-off German cities where none of them had ever been. When they entered into trade with those booksellers, they were making a leap in the dark. It is no wonder they often landed in the wrong company, dealing with...

Most of the STN’s principal correspondents in Germany plied their trade in the territories closest to Switzerland, areas that contemporaries described, a little ambiguously, as the “Reich.” Strictly speaking, the Reich (Heiliges römisches Reich deutscher Nation) extended deep into central Europe and encompassed most of the Prussian monarchy and all of Saxony. In the eighteenth century, however, the term was commonly used in a more restricted sense: as a synecdoche to designate the areas of southern and western Germany.¹ Those were the most politically fragmented areas of the Reich, the ones in which the imperial constitution retained its significance as...

For all of their many differences—of temperament, commercial strategy, professional background, and educational level—the French booksellers of the Reich faced a common challenge: to make their supply of French books coincide with the demand of the public. Of course, all booksellers everywhere strove to harmonize supply and demand. The French booksellers of the Reich, however, were seldom in a position to order their supplies in response to the specific requests of their customers. Their customers were so widely scattered and commercial shipping in the Reich so painstakingly slow that the resulting delays would have been much too long:...

During the Reformation, the Protestant strongholds of western Switzerland had been major centers of religious publishing, producing French Bibles, hymnals, and religious propaganda that reformers transmitted to the scattered communities of the internationale protestante.¹ More than two centuries later, those same Protestant strongholds had become major centers of Enlightenment publishing. But even so, Swiss publishers continued to turn out editions of devotional literature. The STN published two folio editions of a French Bible, translated by an ancestor of Samuel Ostervald, the STN’s principal founder: the first in 1773, shortly after the Company of Pastors in Neuchâtel had condemned the STN...

At this point, after having followed French books on so many different journeys across Germany—into the Hessian hinterland in the company of a Huguenot pastor, past the vigilant inspectors of the Bohemian censorship commission to Gerle’s bookshop in Prague, from Cassel to the courtiers at the baths of Hofgeismar, down the toll-clogged Rhine to just outside the city walls of Cologne, from Fauche’s entrepôt in Hanau to the narrow alleyways of the Frankfurt ghetto, from Fontaine’s shop in Mannheim to the Bavarian court in Munich, and from Bern and Basel to the bookstalls of the Leipzig fair: at this...

While the fictional hero of Nicolai’s novel was regaling readers from Paris to Petersburg, real-life Europeans were traveling too. Aristocrats on their Grand Tours, expatriate philosophes in search of patrons, insolvent debtors in flight from their creditors, fortune hunters, adventurers, and a great many other footloose Europeans journeyed across the continent, and they did so, moreover, without having to carry a passport. For anyone traveling or living abroad in the eighteenth century, the most important thing to have at the ready was a strong command of French, which functioned like a passe-partout, opening the doors of polite society at all...

The revolutionary war that Virchaux had called for in the Jacobin club finally broke out in April 1792; and it raged, with brief interruptions, for more than two decades, inaugurating “a new era of world history,” to quote Goethe’s memorable words following the battle of Valmy.¹ After that decisive battle, French troops poured out beyond the frontiers of the newly proclaimed republic, occupying and, in many cases, annexing the lands that had been home to the extraterritorial French publishing firms. Most of those firms, already badly battered by the pre-revolutionary crisis in the French book trade, went out of business...