‘Poor devils’: the hopeful scribblers of the French Revolution

In 1778, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, dramatist and author of the early science fiction novel L’an 2440, claimed that only a small minority of writers in ancien régime France lived by their pens: ‘One exclaims everywhere that the number of authors is enormous… But in fact, there are not more than 30 writers in France who make writing a career.’ The rest needed patrons, protectors, pensions, privileges and sinecures to scrape a subsistence, or else were reduced to peddling libels and pornography, or spying for the police. In the absence of copyright or royalties there was plenty of piracy, and without a network to depend on – an aristocrat, a royal mistress, an influential salon member – a writer could easily sink to what the American historian Robert Darnton calls ‘the bottom of the literary world’. This was France’s version of Grub Street, populated by Voltaire’s pauvres diables (poor devils) and les Rousseau du ruisseau (Rousseaus of the gutter). 

Who could call themselves a writer in France before the Revolution of 1789 upended literary culture along with almost everything else? In The Writer’s Lot, Darnton adopts the criterion of La France littéraire, ‘a guide to writers and writing that was published at regular intervals throughout the second half of the 18th century’: anyone who had published at least one book was considered a writer. But ‘book’ was not tightly defined, and La France littéraire included ‘some works that would be considered rather ephemeral today’, such as sermons, medical tracts and academic discourses. Darnton calculates that in 1757 there were 1,187 known writers in France and that by 1784 this number had more than doubled to 2,819. The deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire within two months of each other in 1778 ‘touched off a new wave of enthusiasm for the cult of the philosophe’, and encouraged the next generation of scribbling hopefuls to dream of living by their pens.