The protests that some Booksellers of Paris are constantly pouring out at the feet
of the Courts and in the vicinity of the Administration, the unfavourable
prejudices that they endeavour to infiltrate among the Magistrates, have finally
caused alarm in the Book Trade of the Provinces. Had the plan perhaps been made to
annihilate it? The trade by which we have served our Fellow Citizens, following the
example of our Predecessors, and under the protection of the Minister and the Laws,
is it not but a reckless brigandage to which we are all equally complicit? In this
odious assumption, the sacrifice of our fortunes, and the removal of our shops,
would not be able to assuage the avid pretensions of our adversaries.
When private interest, always prone to exclusive enjoyments, imagined the art
of the Privilege, this new kind of servitude imposed upon the whole Society, which
has no existence at all in Natural Right, it was very necessary to establish a
positive Jurisprudence to reconcile them, as much as it would be possible, with this
Right. What was this Jurisprudence? Wisdom and equity were the basis of it and
directed the Rules of it; their aim was, not only to secure the enjoyment of these
ideas for those who would have had them, but far much more to limit the term of one
and to restrict the effects of it. The Sovereign, persuaded that similar favours
would be an attack on general abilities, on rights and on communal benefits, limited
his prerogative himself, and did not want Privileges to be indeterminate, nor granted
arbitrarily and without motive.
The Privileges of the Book Trade, which appear to have been the origin of these
acts of Sovereignty, at least in the form in common use nowadays, were first of all
subjected to these wise rules. It was forbidden, under penalty of nullity, to obtain
one for ancient Works, and to have continuations granted beyond the term fixed in the
Privilege, once it had been obtained; because, the Privilege can only be granted
equitably by way of real merit and, as a result, it should carry with it the complete
reward.
In those happy times for our Book Trade, when these good laws were in force, a vast
domain was opening up in France to activity and industry. All the works of the Ancients,
without exception, and all the writings of the Moderns, which were not under the
guarantee and in the term of a Privilege, once it had been obtained, used to be part of
the communal enjoyment, to the great benefit of the Book Trade and public Instruction.
For, until the grievous epoch of the surprise Patent Letters in 1701, made by the
Booksellers of Paris, it was sufficient for the Booksellers of the Provinces to certify
the expiry of a Privilege before the Local Judges, in order to obtain from them the legal
Permission to print the Books which were the subject of it, and it can be seen from the
considerable number of Printing Houses which used to exist at that time, whether in the
Provinces, or in Paris, how much the Book Trade of the Kingdom used to flourish in those
days.
In the Patent Letters of 1701, nothing was changed in the beneficiary Laws which
limited exclusive cupidity; but, through the devices of our enemies, it was forbidden in
them for the Royal Judges to grant permissions, from then on, to print any work exceeding
two pages; so that Permissions du Sceau* had to be substituted for Permissions from these
Judges.
From then on the Booksellers of Paris, who had become masters of the territory, no
longer exercised any restraint towards the provinces; they inducted the Magistrates into
the Book Trade and their
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*) Permissions awarded by the keeper of the seals.