| This dissertation explores the world of booksellers and printers in eighteenth-century France. Unlike previous studies, which have all focused on Paris or on particular cities, regions, or individuals, it draws a general overview of the provincial book trade.;This study is built around the vast survey that the royal administration undertook in 1764 to detail the situation of printing and bookselling in each provincial city. Responses to the inquiry reveal the structures governing the provincial trades and, put in perspective with other survey results and archival sources, they document the transformations that reconfigured printing, publishing and bookselling during the eighteenth century, particularly in its second half.;The interplay of royal policies, market forces and actions by local institutions and individuals caused profound changes. If the central administration seized control over provincial printing, which it concentrated into fewer shops in fewer cities, it adopted a liberal policy on bookselling, while it had to leave enforcement to local police officers and guilds, where they existed. Meanwhile, a growing demand expanded print markets beyond the three traditional pillars---books of religion, for colleges and law---favoring works that targeted broad, general rather than institutional publics best reached by a fast-growing population of new retail booksellers. As a result, publishing, printing and bookselling saw their geography reshaped and their internal structure transformed. Booksellers became retailers, while printers focused on jobbing and publishing works of regional interest for local institutions. More ambitious publishing required specializing in market niches or in pirating.;This study approaches survey responses not merely as data for statistical analysis, but as both a series of texts and the product of a complex process made of numerous interactions between the central administration, provincial intendants and local subdelegates who replied, individual booksellers and printers or their guilds who provided information, and various local institutions in charge of policing the trades. Survey responses therefore reflected local situations, while they participated in the dynamic interplay that shaped royal policy, structured the provincial book trade and determined its policing, testifying to the transformations it underwent in the eighteenth century. |
