Robert Darnton recounts the clandestine printing of the seminal texts of the Enlightenment

If press control was so strict in France, how did Enlightenment authors disseminate their thinking so effectively? Simple, through piracy. The origin of printing for a mass audience through the sale of illegal books printed abroad

Strolling among the bouquinistes along the Seine and among the second-hand bookshops of the Fifth arrondissement, among the Balzacs and the Camus, the Queneaus and the Pennacs, we find for a few euros the paperbacks, often underlined or a little ruined, by Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot. We take them for granted. This Enlightenment bibliography is part of the voluntary or involuntary education of any European citizen. And yet, while these authors were publishing their books in late eighteenth-century France, or immediately after their deaths, it was not automatic to get one’s hands on a copy of the Nuova Eloisa or the Candide. The absolute monarchy of the Louis had a well-established system of censorship, controls and permits on publications. Anything that could annoy high-ranking personalities or threaten public morals and morality, or undermine the basis of absolutism, ça va sans dire, could not go out. Furthermore, the guild of booksellers (who were then also publishers) functioned as a bureaucratized publishing mafia. Most of them lived in the Latin Quarter, having been born in the shadow of the universities, and intermarried, inheriting the privilege of having texts released and sold with the king’s approval. Provincial booksellers hated them because they had a kind of monopoly on the official publishing market. Before the golden age of the novel, which was to arrive shortly thereafter, most of the texts that were printed were on religious or historical subjects, or on science (especially medicine).