L'Année Littéraire

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L'Année Littéraire
Parcere personis, dicere de vitiis[1]
Title page of L'Année Littéraire.jpg
Title page of the first edition of The Literary Year (1754)
Founder(s) Élie Catherine Fréron
Founded 3 February 1754
Language French
Headquarters Paris
Country France

The Literary Year (French: L'Année littéraire) was a French literary periodical created in Paris on February 3, 1754 by Élie Fréron.

History

Fréron had began his career under the Abbé Desfontaines. Attached to this famous critic with whom he wrote the Observations and the Judgments, he remained until the end his most courageous and devoted lieutenant and remained faithful and grateful to his memory: "I have lost a benefactor, a guide, and more than all that, a friend. [...] Our century has as many obligations to the Abbé Desfontaines as our fathers had to Boileau."[2]

However, either he was impatient to fly of his own wings, or he gave in to another consideration, Fréron undertook, on September 1, 1745, the publication of his own journal entitled Lettres de Madame la Comtesse de ***. Moderate as they were, these letters, in which he criticized the literature of his time by applying to it the models of the previous century, nevertheless wounded the self-esteem of a number of literati, among whom, first of all, Voltaire. Fréron returned to the arena of letters in 1749 with Lettres sur quelques Écrits de ce temps.

On February 3, 1754, the Lettres sur quelques Écrits de ce temps became the Année littéraire with this epigraph from Martial: "to spare the person, but to censure the vice". At the beginning, Fréron's paper in which he fought against the philosophes in the name of religion and monarchy were, according to his enemies, welcomed with the greatest favor. The periodicals were then quite rare in France. There were only three other magazines at that time, the Mémoires de Trévoux, organ house of the Society of Jesus, the Mercure de France which was content to praise everything while the Journal des sçavans was made for very few readers. L'Année littéraire, which was published in booklets every ten days, had a prodigious flow. This great success allowed Fréron to earn a very good living, but also some stints in prison.

Fréron's favorite weapon was a courteous irony which he never lost. Even when Voltaire wrote against him Le Café ou l'Écossaise, in which he was portrayed as the vile literator "Wasp",[3] Fréron went, accompanied by his wife, to the performance of the play and, pretending to take it seriously, wrote a review of it in the following issue of the Année littéraire, contenting himself with analyzing the virtues of the play in order to point out its defects, playing the role of a scholar in order to revoke the supposed authorship of Hume of this supposedly English play, but also to dismiss the idea that it could be by Voltaire: "What appearance, indeed, that so mediocre a production should have come from so fine a pen? [...] I conclude that it is not M. de Voltaire who made this drama. [...] M. de Voltaire knows too well what he owes to himself and what he owes to others."

Fréron's enemies, seeing him unshakeable in this way, resorted, in order to destroy him, to a means which one would have difficulty believing, if the public revelation which the victim made had not remained without reply. It is not possible to revoke in doubt this curious event which Fréron told himself in the Année littéraire of 1772 (Vol. I, pp. 3–10), because he did it in front of the "unofficial mediator" that he mentions and with the authorization of the censor:

The philosophes, M. de Voltaire at their head, cry ceaselessly about persecution, and it is themselves who persecuted me with all their fury and all their skill. I do not speak to you any more about the abominable libels which they published against me, of their relentlessness to decry these unhappy sheets..., of their efforts to make me hateful to the government, of their satisfaction when they were able to make it prohibit my work, and sometimes even to deprive me of my personal freedom. Unfortunately, in the moment that they flattered themselves to be delivered from an inconvenient Aristarch, I reappeared on the arena with the ardor of the athlete of which some wounds that cowards made to him in treason revived the courage instead of bringing it down.

The ultimate goal they had in mind was the extinction of a journal where I have as little respect for their detestable doctrine as for their emphatic style, where, as a weak reed, I have the insolence not to bend before these majestic cedars. Desperate to have these sheets removed, they formed the project to make them fall, and you will agree, when you will be informed, that they did it very skilfully to crown this design of a happy execution. The details of this anecdote will not bore you.

A censor, named by the head of justice, has always put the seal of his approval on my works. The late Abbé Trublet was in charge of examining them for a long time; but, tired of the importunate complaints of the authors, who constantly reproached him for my criticisms, he announced to me that his rest did not allow him to review them any more. I asked for another censor, and, to protect him from the criticisms of the writers' crowd, I asked the magistrate who was then presiding over the bookstore to give me one who would remain anonymous. The magistrate liked this expedient; but he added that I should not know the name of the censor myself, so that, when he thought he had to cross out a few lines, he would be inaccessible to my efforts to make him do so. It was thus regulated that the censor would be known only by the magistrate and another person whom I would know, to whom I would give my articles, who would be charged to give them to the censor and to withdraw them from his hands when he would have approved them.

I had reason to applaud this arrangement for several years, but the unofficial mediator having resigned from this job, another one whom I still knew took his place. I did not know that he was a friend of my enemies. They informed him of a new and admirable means that they had imagined to disgust the public of my work: it was to send me back all my articles that were a bit salient, without letting the censor see them, by marking me that the latter refused his approval.

This happy idea was wonderfully fulfilled. Whenever, in my excerpts, I ventured to make fun of some great or small philosophes, the new letter carrier gave them back to me, and did not fail to tell me with a touched air that the censor did not want to hear about them.

The critic was obliged to redo these articles or to compose others, which were necessarily affected by the haste he was obliged to put into them so that his leaves would appear on the appointed day. "This cruel merry-go-round, continues Fréron, lasted nearly four years. Finally I suspected some mystery in it; it did not seem natural to me that there was in France a censor unreasonable enough to condemn criticisms sometimes a little lively, to be sure, but always confined within the prescribed limits. I entrusted my thoughts to the wise, honest, honest and enlightened magistrate who, under the orders of the chancellor, watches over the department of the bookshop today. He deigned to listen to me with interest, and promised to do me justice. I left him all the articles that had been mercilessly proscribed. He passed them to my censor, accompanied by a letter in which he asked him why he had not approved them. The next day the censor brought the articles back to the magistrate, protesting to him that they had never been sent to him, that it was for the first time that he had read them, and that he could find nothing in them that would seem to prevent their printing. I seized this circumstance to request that I be allowed to know my approver and to address my works to him myself; this was granted."

Until the end the Année littéraire remained a real power; the success was not always equal during its long existence because, however great was the courage of Fréron, his role was not always easy. If he brought some vivacity into the discussion, he was accused by detractors of "supporting himself only by scandal". Outrages, insults, and persecutions could not make Fréron give in, and he held on and did not give up. Only one day did he lack courage and strength. L'Année littéraire had entered its 23rd year, its 29th if one adds the Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps, of which it was only a continuation under another title, when one day, while he was suffering from a violent attack of gout, he was informed that his enemies had finally won, and that the Keeper of the Seals had just cancelled the privilege of his journal under the pretext that he was not paying the pensions with which it had been burdened. During the last seven or eight years of his life, his sheets, which were worth only six to seven thousand livres, and which were loaded with four thousand livres of pensions, could no longer suffice for his subsistence. At this news, Fréron, disarmed, admitted, for the first time, that he was defeated. However he felt neither indignation nor anger. "It is there," he said, "a particular misfortune, which must not divert anyone from the defense of the monarchy; the salvation of all is attached to his own." Saying these words, he bowed his head and died, overwhelmed with fatigue and trouble, at the age of about 55 years.

Fréron's collaborators were the Abbé de La Porte who, after a quarrel with him, founded the Observations littéraires, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Grosier, the Abbé Thomas-Marie Royou, the Abbé Duport de Tertre, Baculard d'Arnaud, Palissot, Dorat, Dudoyer de Gastels, Sautreau de Marsy, Daillant de La Touche, Jourdain, etc. Fréron had, moreover, many unofficial or anonymous collaborators, among whom great characters like the Marquis d'Argenson.

Fréron's bankruptcy did not prevent his succession from being ardently coveted. His son Stanislas, who had already tried his hand at a few tales to which the Almanach des Muses had given indulgent hospitality, took over the direction of the Année littéraire, but he was barely twenty years old and was not up to such a task. Abbé Grosier, assisted by Le Bret and Clément, took over the direction in chief of the Année littéraire. Among the collaborators of Fréron fils, we must also mention Geoffroy, who was later to make almost as much noise as the founder of L'Année littéraire.

The same hatreds which had pursued Fréron attached themselves to his successor, and they triumphed for a moment. L'Année littéraire having forgotten, in the course of 1781, to apply the epithet of ventriloquist to a comedian, its enemies did so well that it was suspended under this pretext, and the publisher Panckoucke set out, at the instigation and with the support of the encyclopedic party, to have it suppressed and annexed to his Mercure. This intrigue was only half successful, the Année littéraire obtained permission to reappear, but the privilege was taken away from Fréron, whose name it ceased to bear, and transferred to his mother-in-law, without any stipulation in favor of the former owner, who thus remained at the mercy of the latter, who had only been recommended to give him the financial help that his benevolence and the success of the journal could allow. He was, moreover, forbidden to use the too biting pen of Salaun and Clément, as well as that of his son.

The Année littéraire was continued until 1790, when it was published every six days. In 1800, Geoffroy and the abbot Jean-Baptiste Grosier tried to resurrect it, but only 45 issues in 7 volumes were published.

The collection of the Année Littéraire, from 1754 to 1790, forms 292 volumes in-12. The Lettres sur quelques écrits form 12 complete volumes, plus 2 issues. The form and the conditions are the same for the two publications: they appeared every ten days, by issues of 3 sheets or 72 pages, at the cost of 12 sous per issue, or 16 sous by mail.

Notes

  1. ↑ Latin aphorism by Martial, meaning "to spare the person, but to censure the vice."
  2. ↑ Letter written to Lefranc de Pompignan a few days after the death of Desfontaines.
  3. ↑ The name "Wasp" was supposed to designate, by analogy with "frelon" ("hornet"), Fréron himself, but he, with a deadpan seriousness, plays the lexicologist in the review of Voltaire's comedy, to explain that in English, "Wasp" means "guêpe".

References

External links

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