Licensing Loyalty

Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France

By: Jane McLeod

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eBook | 21 December 2015

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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.

Industry Reviews

“Through carefully constructed case studies drawn from printing centers large and small, McLeod reveals the stakes that locals believed they had in the [licensing] process and how its implementation undercut local authorities. . . .Her close examination of individual printers and family fortunes reveals shrewdness and ruthlessness, discipline and patience—qualities essential to advancing social ambitions over generations. McLeod has exhaustively mined Parisian and provincial archives to compose this meticulous account.”
—April G. Shelford, American Historical Review