A Literary Tour de France by Robert Darnton

Author:Robert Darnton [Darnton, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190678005
Published: 2019-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

10

Loudun

Peddling and the Capillary System

Favarger made it easily from poitiers to loudun (twenty-five miles) in less than a day. He was happy with his new horse, which made much better time than the old one. Yet Loudun, on the face of it, hardly merited a half day’s stop. It had nothing to recommend itself as a market for books, or indeed for anything else. Its population remained stagnant at a low level, about four thousand. Its economy depended on local farming supplemented by some small-scale production of woolens and leather goods. It had no important educational and administrative institutions—nothing more than the office of an intendant’s unpaid subdélégué, a minor court, and a small college. Its connections with commercial routes amounted to little more than a few small roads leading to Tours in the northeast and Poitiers in the southeast. And it had no booksellers or printers.

Between 1770 and 1786, however, Loudun became the hub of an extensive business that linked Swiss publisher-wholesalers with French peddlers or marchands forains, who sold books throughout the Loire Valley and the surrounding provinces. Its out-of-the-way location was actually an advantage for this sort of trade, because the French authorities did not trouble themselves with overseeing commerce in such an unimportant town. Loudun therefore provides an ideal site for studying the capillary system of the book trade.

The entrepreneur at the heart of this network was Jean-François Malherbe l’aîné. He had no right to deal in books, as he had no connection with a chambre syndicale and no brevet de libraire. Officially, Malherbe was a commissionnaire, one who dealt in all sorts of goods. He was listed in a trade almanac in 1779 as an expediter, especially of agricultural products and also “diverse works of literature,” for a 2 percent commission.1 Strictly speaking, therefore, he did not hide his ancillary trade in books, although he appeared only fleetingly in the almanac as a dispatcher rather than a bookseller.

References scattered through the first letters in Malherbe’s dossier indicate that he was a Huguenot who had relatives in Switzerland and knew all four of the STN’s founding partners. He probably had studied in Neuchâtel, boarding with Samuel Fauche, at a time when Ostervald, Bertrand, and Berthoud ran the local college. His first letter, written to Fauche on March 10, 1770, includes many intimate details, suggesting close relations with the entire Fauche family. Among other things—greetings to the children and mutual friends—he asked Fauche to sell a watch that he had left behind after a visit to Neuchâtel. By then, Malherbe had made a first attempt to set up business as a commissionnaire, but it had not gone well, and he needed money badly. In fact, he sent the letter from a secret address in Saint Maixent, where he was hiding in order to escape debtors’ prison after going bankrupt in 1767.

While his lawyer tried to negotiate a settlement with his creditors, Malherbe toyed with starting some kind of business with a friend in Cadix or perhaps in

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