Licensing Loyalty

Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France

Jane McLeod

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780271037684
• eBook ISBN: 9780271056722
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In Licensing Loyalty, historian Jane McLeod explores the evolution of the idea that the royal government of eighteenth-century France had much to fear from the rise of print culture. She argues that early modern French printers helped foster this view as they struggled to negotiate a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the French state. Printers in the provinces and in Paris relentlessly lobbied the government, hoping to convince authorities that printing done by their commercial rivals posed a serious threat to both monarchy and morality. By examining the French state's policy of licensing printers and the mutually influential relationships between officials and printers, McLeod sheds light on our understanding of the limits of French absolutism and the uses of print culture in the political life of provincial France.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Early History of Printers in Provincial France, 1470-1660
• Chapter Two: The Vicissitudes of a Royal Decree
• Chapter Three: The Royal Council Takes Control
• Chapter Four: The Purges
• Chapter Five: Arguments Offered by Printers in Petitions for Licenses, 1667-1789
• Chapter Six: Patronage and Bureaucracy Intersect
• Chapter Seven: Behind the Rhetoric
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover