Print, Politics and Trade in the French Atlantic - (Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World) by Jane McLeod (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The epic histories of the French Revolution, Enlightenment, and colonialism in the West Indies, told through the history of one family.

The Labottières were the largest printing and bookselling dynasty in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. From the 1680s to the sale of their business in 1794 three generations of this family acted as major cultural brokers in this booming Atlantic port, serving the rapidly expanding commercial and legal sectors with books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

The lives and businesses of this family are heavily entwined with the histories of the Enlightenment, French colonialism in the West Indies, and the French Revolution. We find the final generation, welcoming the Revolution, printing a pro-revolutionary newspaper that framed the revolts in Haiti and Martinique in pro-revolutionary terms. They would come to establish their shop as a Jacobin centre and, along with their workers and journalists, navigated the forces of popular censorship and state control. However, despite these activities, the Labottière printing and bookselling enterprise would, eventually, be destroyed by the very Revolution it had supported.

Through this lively microhistory of the Labottières, Jane McLeod presents the important role played by the flourishing Atlantic port economy in supporting the expansion of printing and bookselling. Furthermore, from McLeod's extensive archival research into over thirty members of the Labottière family, emerges a new understanding of the role played by printers and booksellers in the spreading of the ideas and concerns that underpinned some of the landmark social, cultural and political changes of the eighteenth century.

Review Quotes

This important book confirms that we must definitively reject the traditional view according to which the French provincial presses would have known only a long period of crisis during the 18th century, crushed by Parisian and foreign competition, even if it must be admitted that the success of the Labottières was quite exceptional, and that they were above all great booksellers and businessmen, and modest printers.

Ce grand livre confirme qu'il faut définitivement rejeter la vision traditionnelle selon laquelle les presses provinciales françaises n'auraient connu qu'une longue période de crise au cours du xviiie siècle, écrasées par la concurrence parisienne et étrangère, même s'il faut avouer que la réussite des Labottière fut tout fait exceptionnelle, et qu'ils furent avant tout de grands libraires et des hommes d'affaires, et de modestes imprimeurs.-- "LUMIÈRES"

In spite of the wealth of details about the various Labottière family members and the content of the works they printed and imported for sale, the book is easy to read because McLeod carefully articulates the goal of each chapter. Her interpretive work on how the Labottières, their editors, and printers navigated printing and selling the ideas of the Enlightenment and the changing politics of the French revolutionaries is fine and detailed.-- "SHARP NEWS"