Censorship During The French Revolution

It is too simple to examine the French Revolution as a single revolution. Instead it must be seen as a multitude of different revolutions, each happening simultaneously or one-after-another. These revolutions were both real, tangible actions, such as the storming of the bastille or the coup d'état de fructidor, or they can be revolutions of ideas, drastic changes in the way people thought. One such revolution of was revolution in the perception of the responsibility of the state that occurred because of and during the French Revolution. If one examines the censorship under the different regimes and states of the French Revolution, this transformation becomes clear. The changes in censorship under the different regimes of the French Revolution

It was a shady industry with little government involvement, making it the perfect avenue for the progressive ideas of the philosophes to be spread. Many of their ideas were bound up by official censorship, but they were allowed to flourish in the underground market for pornography. Despite the strict censorship, their ideas were still somewhat able to be spread. In some cases, these ideas were even spread in official, uncensored works. In 1782, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, what is considered to be his magnum opus. In the novel, he attacks the excesses of the aristocracy, and his words are tinged with revolutionary sentiment. However, his book was not censored by the government. In fact, Marie Antoinette was quite fond of it. This reveals the arbitrary of the ancien regime’s censorship policies. Books that attacked and showed blatant revolutionary sentiment could be allowed if those in high places enjoyed the novels. Considered alongside the aforementioned “dirty book” loophole, it may seem that censorship under the ancien regime was actually rather lax , but this was not the case--it was incredibly strict, but seemingly random works were allowed to slip through. In this way, censorship was very much affected with the convolution and ineffectiveness that plagued many of the other facets

You took the sword in your hand, great and noble girl, to shame the gods, to make good their crime, when they gave the features of a man to that