What Killed Théodore Rilliet de Saussure? Censorship and the Old Regime in France, 1769–1789

This chapter uses the remarkable case of the publication of the works of Theodore Rilliet de Saussure by the Societe typographique de Neuchâtel in the 1780s to examine how censorship functioned and how ‘illegality’ was constructed across the various regions of francophone Europe in the pre-Revolutionary period. Where previous studies have largely concentrated upon the size of the underground, this chapter shifts the focus to the multiple layers of the underground book market and, especially, the extent to which its operations were widely tolerated. The chapter argues that the limits of the true underground were not imposed from above but instead emerged through the interactions of all book trade actors, from lowly shipping agents to printers and authors.