Print, Politics and Trade in the French Atlantic : The Labottière Family as Eighteenth-Century Cultural Brokers (Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World)

McLeod, Jane

The Boydell Press（2024/07発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 362 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781837650866
• DDC分類 686.20944714409033

Full Description

The epic histories of the French Revolution, Enlightenment, and colonialism in the West Indies, told through the history of one family.

The Labottières were the largest printing and bookselling dynasty in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. From the 1680s to the sale of their business in 1794 three generations of this family acted as major cultural brokers in this booming Atlantic port, serving the rapidly expanding commercial and legal sectors with books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

The lives and businesses of this family are heavily entwined with the histories of the Enlightenment, French colonialism in the West Indies, and the French Revolution. We find the final generation, welcoming the Revolution, printing a pro-revolutionary newspaper that framed the revolts in Haiti and Martinique in pro-revolutionary terms. They would come to establish their shop as a Jacobin centre and, along with their workers and journalists, navigated the forces of popular censorship and state control. However, despite these activities, the Labottière printing and bookselling enterprise would, eventually, be destroyed by the very Revolution it had supported.

Through this lively microhistory of the Labottières, Jane McLeod presents the important role played by the flourishing Atlantic port economy in supporting the expansion of printing and bookselling. Furthermore, from McLeod's extensive archival research into over thirty members of the Labottière family, emerges a new understanding of the role played by printers and booksellers in the spreading of the ideas and concerns that underpinned some of the landmark social, cultural and political changes of the eighteenth century.

Contents

Introduction
1 Building a Printing and Bookselling Dynasty in an Atlantic Port
2 Shipping Books from Paris and Abroad: The Labottière Bookselling Businesses
3 The Labottière Printing House: An Information Hub
4 Labottières as Agents of the French State
5 From Policemen to Policed: Labottières as Victims of Repression
6 Beyond Books: Textiles, Sugar and the Martinique Connection
7 Framing the French Revolution in Martinique and Saint Domingue in the Journal de Bordeaux, 1790-1793
8 Promoting the French Revolution in Bordeaux
9 Crisis and the Collapse of the Labottière Firm
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index