Commentary on Louis d’Héricourt’s memorandum
Résumé
In the 1720s, Louis d'Héricourt became the lawyer to Parisian booksellers confronted by the continuous protests by their provincial counterparts against extended privilege durations, but who also worried about any potential changes in the absolutist policy pertaining to the book trade strengthened by Louis XIV and the Colbertian administration (f_1690s). The political context of the Enlightenment and the succession of Louis XV indeed provided some uncertainty. In this perspective, the memorandum submitted by d’Héricourt to the Keeper of the Seals initiated, in unusual terms, the defence of the exclusive rights of the Parisian corporation, under the legal qualification of a literary property right based upon the “labour” of the author himself. Such a defence, which seemed based on Lockean ideas, had also some effects on the traditional definition of book privileges. For these reasons, the Louis d’Héricourt’s memorandum is one of the most influential writings of the literary property debates of the eighteenth century.