Return to the listings of refused prints Further information on the documentation of prints and photographs which were refused authorization for publication. Prepared for the Image of France 1795-1880 -- at ARTFL. |
The papers of the Bureau de l’Imprimerie at the Archives nationales de France contain three systematic listings of prints and photographs which were refused authorization for publication before 1870:
The register F* 18 VI 133 also contains a listing entitled "Enregistrement des estampes autorisées par ordre du conseiller" (lfs. 161-62), which has also been transcribed for the Image of France project and is available alongside the other three listings. The official guide to the bureau’s papers (Etat sommaire des versements…, 1933) makes similar reference to an additional source in the register F* 18 VI 49. However, the true purpose of this register is not clear. It consists of an untitled, chronological enumeration of brief titles of prints and photographs which were subject to examination and reporting between 10 mars 1854 and 30 avril 1860. In some cases, the title information is much too brief to identify the work in question, which is not otherwise referenced. A column labeled “résultat du rapport” carries one of two indications for each entry: “Réfusé” or “Bon”. The vast majority are noted “bon”. Many of the examples noted “réfusé” from the years 1859 and 1860 cannot be verified in the corresponding listings of the "Enregistrement des planches non autorisées sans texte" (1859-1864), F* 18 VI 133, lfs. 2-21. Also, many of these examples, noted “refusé”, appear to have been announced for publication shortly thereafter in the journal La Bibliographie de la France. Until more is known of the function of the register, it has seemed inappropriate to extract listings from it for presentation with the Image of France. In fact, very little evidence has surfaced concerning the management of information about censored prints. Ceretainly, it would not be justified to generalize throughout the entire period (1820-1880) from M.P. Driskell’s exemplary study (“Singing the Marsaillaise in 1840: the case of Charlet’s censored prints,” Art Bulletin, 69 [1987], p. 604-625”). The surviving record of the activity of apriori review during the 1820’s appears to be little more than a statistic of refused prints periodically prepared for the Minister of the Interior. The annual statistic of prosecutions of unauthorized prints beginning in 1827 is notewothy, but its totals would include cases in which prints were never even submitted for approval or legal deposit in the first place (see G.D.McKee, “La Surveillance officielle de l’Estampe entre 1810 et 1830,” Nouvelles de l’Estampe, no. 188 [2003], pp. 23-35 and no. 189 [2003], p. 69). During the 1870’s, on the other hand, the registers of legal deposit for prints and photographs carry the regular annotation “sans autorisation,” often abbreviated “S. A.”, which suggests that copies of refused prints were being accepted on deposit and forwarded to the national library. This was probably the case of the many examples of listings in these registers which were annotated “sans étalage” – i.e., approved for publication on condition that they not be publicly displayed. Despite the expressed concerns of curators at the national library to obtain copies of works which were subject to prosecution, as a matter of historical record, it is not evident that the government retained copies of prints which it did not authorize for publication before 1848 (cf. above references and also E. de Conihout, Recherches sur l’administration de la librairie, 1815-1848, thesis, Ecole nat. des Chartres, 1980, p. 453) – not, at least, until they were modified and eventually approved. The administration of censorship clearly permitted a work's resubmission with modifications, which explains why some of the listings of refused prints presented here, as a part of the Image of France project, appear at later dates in the announcements of the Bibliographie de la France ( Driskell’s article, above, discusses examples of the resubmission of works in the career of the artist Charlet). Further information on these subjects may be found in R. J. Goldstein's Censorship of Political caricature in nineteenth-century France (1989) and in the article "Managing the Image of France" at the Image of France website. GM |