The French Book Religion, Absolutism, and Readership: 1585-1715.

Henri-Jean Martin. Trans. Paul and Nadine Saenger. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.38 figs. + xiv + 117 pp. $35 (cl); $13.95 (pap). ISBN 0-8018-5419-9.

This book began as lectures at Johns Hopkins University in 1993, and it retains much of their flavor. Martin is the expert on early modern French printing, and while he considers printing elsewhere, his focus is firmly on France. It is not clear why 1585 is used in the title, as he devotes much attention to developments before then.

Martin introduces his subject with a brief but fascinating description of an early modern print shop and provides several tables on the distribution of book printing in central and western Europe. He then shows how the Church and the French monarchy responded to printing. The Church encouraged the printing of religious books, which always made up a very substantial part of the market, but also it sought to control their content through censorship, a process that led to the Index of Forbidden Books in 1564. Martin investigates in greater depth the attitude of the French kings, calling it a cultural policy. He proposes that Francis I actively supported the use of French in books and provides statistics on the changing proportions of the number of books in Latin and French. This transformed French into a more precise language, capable of replacing Latin in royal decrees and law. According to Martin, the king also pushed the use of Roman type in French books instead of the Gothic as a way of enhancing the distinction between French and Latin. In 1532 the royal printer Robert Estienne produced the first book, a French grammar, with the French diacritical marks (many more than are in use today). The French monarchy continued to follow Francis's policy through the sixteenth century, although the Wars of Religion prevented it from being very successful.

From 1600 on, the French monarchy were more effective in using printing for royal purposes. Richelieu succeeded in establishing royal censorship, not by destroying books already in print but through prepublication censorship: the practice of requiring licenses to print. Richelieu's founding of the Imprimerie Royale and the Academie Francaise allowed the government to dictate to French intellectuals both the content and the style of books printed in France. To gain more control over printing, Colbert reduced the number of printers in Paris to thirty-six and severely limited printing in the provinces. Thus, the author argues, Louis XIV's policy toward printing helped create both "Absolutism and Classicism," the title of his second chapter.

Martin's third chapter deals with the reading public. He gives some attention to the creation of libraries and the types of books collected in them, but the heart of the chapter concerns the records of a bookseller from Grenoble and a Rouennais printer from the mid-1700s. They indicate that despite all the monarchy's efforts at control, foreign, Protestant, and Jansenist books increasingly filtered into the French public by the late 1600s. The last chapter concerns the changing appearance of the books, what Martin calls a revolution in printing. He includes thirty-eight illustrations of book frontispieces and pages to demonstrate this revolution, but certainly the date for Figure 8, Orince Fine's map of France, is 1575, not 1475. In a brief conclusion Martin describes what he sees as the coming agenda in the history of the book, especially comparative studies across national borders.

This nicely translated book reveals its origins as lectures in several ways: few notes and no bibliography, an informal style, and the frequent tossing out of provocative ideas and theses that are left without further exploration. It is far from being simply a summary of his earlier massive books on the history of printing, as Martin presents new ideas that in some cases contradict what he previously has argued. Anyone who seeks the same sort of detailed and documented research on the history of printing that Martin has done before will be disappointed, but this work will serve well as an introduction to a history of early modern French printing.

FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University