Scholars have long fashioned the printing press as an ‘agent of change’ to disseminate new ideas, new knowledges, and new habits of mind.Footnote 1 Whether addressing the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or the rise of rights-bearing citizenship ideals, the printing press figures prominently in the master narratives of modernization.Footnote 2 For such historians as Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton, the book trade set the ancien régime in ferment; the high and low roads of the Enlightenment shook the stability of absolutist governance.Footnote 3 Jürgen Habermas similarly deployed the public sphere as an ideal type to explain the printed word’s transformative impact on modern selfhood. The reading of imaginative and periodical literature enabled propertied burghers to reflect on affairs as a ‘reasoning public’. For Habermas, the new mental interiority gained through fiction and literary debate developed in turn political deliberation; journals, gazettes, newssheets, and fliers called into life an Öffentlichkeit that redefined political order and the rules for sustaining it. Equally crucial, the dynamic interaction between oral and print culture during the Age of Revolution widened the remit of participatory politics, introducing alternative political viewpoints into the print matter of non-elite classes.Footnote 4 Without recourse to print culture and its circuits of communication, the Age of Revolution and its emergent forms of citizenship are virtually impossible to interpret.Footnote 5

But the self-evident centrality of print for modern political behaviour often obscures the social history of reading and, in particular, the book trade, an economy stamped from earlier centuries. Whereas histories of publishing generally feature innovation and change, this essay takes a reverse tack to examine how the continuities and customs of a pre-modern industry abetted modern participatory politics.Footnote 6 For a volume of essays that examines how existing political practices, local civic habits, and other ‘residual powers’ shaped and promoted sociopolitical change during the Age of Revolution,Footnote 7 publishers constitute an intriguing case study of a merchant class. Overcoming distance, political borders, and a host of commercial obstacles, they promoted a ‘second print revolution’ that featured the reform impulses of the eighteenth century.Footnote 8 ‘Without the book dealer’, writes one historian of publishing, ‘the Enlightenment is inconceivable’.Footnote 9 But book merchants and their credo of open knowledge became increasingly implicated in matters of social stability during the late Enlightenment. Various fields of knowledge bled into state affairs. The control of political commentary reached its apex in 1806 when Napoleon ordered the execution of Johann Philipp Palm, a Nuremberg book dealer, for selling a denunciatory pamphlet against French rule. Yet booksellers pushed back against heightened forms of censorship, and their success largely derived from the practices of their trade. To illuminate this collective behaviour, this essay focuses on three political dimensions of their profession: the strategies of previous generations to mitigate censorship; the role of decentralized print markets for circulating forbidden print; and, finally, the instrumentality of bookstores for shaping civic practices. The actors and practices that fostered a print culture of dissent tell us much about how the era’s new citizenship ideals penetrated Central Europe and beyond. Indeed, the Age of Revolution’s relationship to Central Europe remains under-researched. Although the transoceanic transfer of goods and ideas in the Atlantic basin remains a hallmark of the age, the epoch’s print circuits also extended eastward, recasting political culture in Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote 10 How print markets in Germany and the Habsburg territories both promoted and impeded the circulation of political knowledge tells us much about the dissemination of the age’s intellectual impulses and its infrastructure of opinion formation.

Censorship and the Repertoire of Circumvention

The incursions of the Karlsbad Decrees (1819) against the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly mark well the Restoration Era’s reactionary strains. But book merchants confronted modern censorship regimes with a determined pragmatism, for censorship had long been a fact of life.Footnote 11 In fact, their resolute opposition to modern censorship constitutes a key form of cultural patrimony from the ancien régime. In the early modern period, generations of printers regularly sold forbidden books in semi-legal ways. As Christine Haug has noted, ‘in the German-speaking territories – in comparison to France – the trade with forbidden reading material was not concealed and hidden but, rather, took place in semi-public spaces, a peculiarity that derived from numerous individual states and their political frontiers whose porosity should not be underestimated’.Footnote 12 German federalism invited publishers to develop a formidable repertoire of tricks, which included counterfeit imprints, phony invoices, commissioned printings, prepublication subscriptions, shrewd middlemen at book fairs, reliable smuggling routes, clever packing techniques, and flat-out bribery. This repertoire enabled publishers and book dealers to publish, commission, and distribute forbidden material with a calculability that promised profit. Because publishing enjoyed a semi-autonomous economic status, the manufacture and transport of printed sheets in oversized barrels and crates permitted publishers to move contraband with relative ease. Over the course of the eighteenth century, such circumventions of censorship eroded cultural insulation and reconfigured print circuits for the new century.Footnote 13 The transnational flow of information quickened after 1760, producing new incentives for translating forbidden foreign texts. With even more demand for Western European texts in the early nineteenth century, printers drew on generations of experience to contest supervision. They accommodated their inherited repertoire of circumvention under new political circumstances and continued to smuggle and print illegal tracts with surprising boldness.Footnote 14 This transnational legacy of the eighteenth-century book trade, especially when viewed at the local level, proved invaluable for oppositional political cultures of post-Napoleonic Europe.

The strategies and practices of publishers in Central Europe reflect a broader European experience. If the political fragmentation of Italy offers parallels to Germany’s publishing landscape, especially with its range of censorship regimes, larger patterns of censorship in the eighteenth century also emerge. Research on France, Spain, Germany, and Austria reveals a European trend of censors pursuing a modus operandi of negotiation, more than outright proscription, with authors and publishers.Footnote 15 Domenico Bruni’s study of Tuscan censors illuminates the common dilemma of regulatory principles clashing with free-market policies. On the one hand, censors guarded state laws and church morals in a collaborative manner that swung between coercion and consent; on the other, the Tuscan government promoted the expansion of print markets, whose wider range of publications necessitated additional policing.Footnote 16 In 1840, a contemporary noted that Italian censorship ‘presses heavily on all sorts of publications, much more so than in Germany’.Footnote 17 Unauthorized reprinting was also rampant throughout Western and Central Europe, but publishers in Dublin and Philadelphia similarly flouted copyright laws to reprint the Scottish Enlightenment in the anglophone Atlantic basin.Footnote 18 As the ‘bookshop of the world’, early modern Dutch publishers were the consummate experts in trading books and newsprint across borders, banned or otherwise, which particularly aroused criticism in France and England.Footnote 19 Presses in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, and The Hague rolled out books that French authorities had banned; ‘livres de Hollande’ included Jansenist literature, court chronicles, and erotic political satires, and these books also provoked worry in Central Europe.Footnote 20 In fact, the cultural transfer between the Netherlands and the middling regions of Germany during the Dutch golden age helped launch the Jena-Weimar area as a print centre.Footnote 21 The fictitious publishing house of ‘Pierre Marteau, Cologne’ also typifies the genius of Dutch publishers for using a counterfeit imprint to circulate hundreds of French-language polemics and seditious treatises throughout Western and Central Europe.Footnote 22 During the last half of the eighteenth century, Habsburg censorship lists ranked Marteau as the leading imprint of banned literature.Footnote 23 Although known mostly for French-language materials, the false imprint also served German-language publishers and readers, producing hundreds of titles between 1680 and 1860. During the nineteenth century, ‘Peter Hammer, Köln’ continued the tradition as an impressum for drama, travelogues, and grammars but also for critical commentaries on post-revolutionary politics.Footnote 24 Counterfeit imprints pervaded the early modern era and provided modern publishers with an essential prototype.Footnote 25 After 1814, the legal confusion about copyright, reprinting, and the degrees of press freedom prevented effective policing in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, thereby pushing the tradition into the new era. King Willem’s use of premiums to promote the export of unauthorized reprints only exacerbated the international tension.Footnote 26

That hundreds of booksellers participated in an extensive network of forbidden commerce also speaks to an attitude of liberality inherited from the early modern period. In this context, the term does not denote a fixed ideological doctrine, which would emerge after 1812 or so, but rather an eighteenth-century disposition of tolerance, open-mindedness, and a pervasive belief in reason and knowledge.Footnote 27 Just as eighteenth-century Britons deployed ‘liberal’ as an adjective for high-minded gentry inclined to moral reform and community service, leading German publishers increasingly fashioned themselves as cultural agents effecting moral good. After all, they undertook the necessary financial risks to create a national literature that served as the bedrock of Germany’s Kulturnation.Footnote 28 The shift in identity from commercial merchant to cultural broker took place sometime after the 1760s.Footnote 29 The memoirs and manifestos of publishers stressed their education, probity, and business acumen to champion knowledge and reason.Footnote 30 Pervading this self-identity, too, was the noble sentiment that the printed word enlightened and liberated. ‘Never has a statesman’, wrote a Frankfurt book merchant in 1792, ‘had such direct influence on the welfare and misery of humanity as do book dealers’.Footnote 31 In fashioning themselves as brokers of information and promoters of progress, publishers espoused the unfettered circulation of letters. Whether or not they endorsed the viewpoints of Locke, Volney, Rousseau, or Thomas Paine, they defended their right to be read. Subsequent generations reflexively replicated the argument. And because the cachet of ‘forbidden’ lured readers, the argument came easy.

The Enlightenment’s mindset of liberality stamped many publishers. For Julius and August Campe, the German Aufklärung ran directly through their uncle, Joachim Heinrich Campe, the renowned pedagogue, publicist, and dictionary maker; and his legacy extended to the Vieweg and Brockhaus firms through marriage. Friedrich Nicolai, a lion of North German publishing, was a central figure of the Berlin Enlightenment, but many other eighteenth-century firms (e.g., Weidmann, Unger, Cotta, Voss, Vieweg) promoted the translation of English and French belles lettres and philosophy that enriched Germany’s late Enlightenment. The aspirations of a constitutional nation state during the Napoleonic Wars furthermore stamped the engagement of Georg Andreas Reimer in Berlin, F. A. Brockhaus in Leipzig, Heinrich Campe in Nürnberg, Carl Gerold in Austria, and Heinrich August Pierer in Altenburg. A subsequent generation advanced the constitutional revival of the 1830s in Western Europe, Germany, Poland, and Hungary. At economic and personal risk, the firms of Otto Wigand, Philipp Reclam, Gustav Heckenast, C. F. Leske, and Heinrich Hoff promoted liberal and democratic constitutional arguments. It is fascinating to observe how otherwise lawful-minded burghers so consistently flouted the law. Here the ‘sanction of precedent’ held sway.Footnote 32 Booksellers had traded illegal books for generations and continued to do so.

The political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire aided the circulation of forbidden literature. The empire’s complex of territories produced porous borders along with a bewildering array of censorship laws that ranged from lax to severe. In 1814, Friedrich Perthes, with a good dose of hyperbole, underscored the tradition of a free press because of the empire’s legacy of limited power, which devolved far-ranging juridical independence on its principalities, duchies, counties, bishoprics, and free imperial cities. ‘Germany always had the most complete freedom of the press’, he wrote, ‘in fact and in deed, because anything that was banned in Prussia could be printed in Württemberg, anything that was banned in Hamburg could be printed ten steps away in Altona. No book remains unprinted and undistributed’.Footnote 33 Perthes ignores much harm rendered by censorship, but it remains true that the German Confederation (1815–1866) never imposed a coherent uniform system. Twenty-one years later, a commentator ratified Perthes’s observation: ‘What can’t be printed in Saxony, passes the grade in Prussia; what doesn’t get an imprimatur in north Germany receives it with ease in southern Germany’.Footnote 34 It is this enduring fact that made post-publication bans (usually imposed by Prussia or Austria through the Diet of the German Confederation) highly ineffective. As Franz Hugo Hesse, a Prussian jurist and state councillor, remarked in 1843, ‘every book dealer’s daily experience confirms the fact that bans on sales of individual books are illusory and serve more to increase circulation than to prevent it’.Footnote 35 Many small-scale publishers similarly found ways to foil governmental claims on control. Prussia, for example, coerced the Baden government to try Heinrich Hoff, a Mannheim publisher, for treason in 1847 because of explicit anti-monarchical lyrics in a songbook. Not only did a jury acquit Hoff, but the notoriety also helped bookshops in Magdeburg, Breslau, Coblenz, Posen, and Münster sell the song collection.Footnote 36 The lack of coordination among states, compounded by sympathetic courts and juries, raised the confidence of publishers to smuggle.

Such success might have diminished censorship’s impact, but it certainly did not nullify it. Joseph Graf von Sedlnitzky, Vienna’s police president and chief censor, expressed one vein of conservatism when stating that ‘a people educating themselves’ marked ‘the first stage of revolution’.Footnote 37 In this spirit, officials in Central Europe surveilled book dealers, imprisoned publishers, banned authors, and, in some cases, brutally mistreated them. Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, co-author of the Der Hessische Landbote, underwent months of mental and physical abuse by Hessian officials following his arrest. When Weidig was found dead in his cell in February 1837, contemporaries regarded the tragedy alternately as suicide or murder. His mistreatment endured as a cause célèbre for liberal-democratic critiques of the Restoration’s injustice.Footnote 38 Less fatal, but no less dramatic, were the fines, confiscations, and prison sentences that hounded authors and publishers. The eleven-year confinement (1836–1847) of Gottfried Eisenmann, the liberal Würzburg editor, for advocating constitutional liberalism and press freedom was severe by any measure. Julius Campe, the Hamburg publisher, surveyed more typical fates of his colleagues in a letter to Heinrich Heine in 1833:

... in Württemberg, Seybold got six months in the clink and his publisher got three; in Frankfurt the book dealer Carl Körner also got six weeks, because he merely sold a couple of brochures on the side. The printer Volkhart in Augsburg received a nine-year jail sentence, because he published two pieces from Grosse, even though he pleaded under oath that he neither read nor intuited their contents. And so many other examples that are at hand that I dare not recount.Footnote 39

Such prison sentences remind us of censorship’s oppression. Between 1750 and 1850, the Habsburg state censored over 50,000 books, a number that conceals stories of privation, imprisonment, exile, isolation, and cultural stagnancy.Footnote 40

Against this forbidding background, the confidence of book merchants to move contraband is all the more remarkable. Their fortitude is partially explained by another long-standing practice: the custom to negotiate with officials. Publishers and censors knew one another, often frequented the same social circles and clubs, and therefore mostly conducted the business of redaction with civility. Leipzig’s leading publishers, for example, participated in the city’s Censorship Collegium, the principal body that superintended censorship procedures, which advocated a light supervisory hand to sustain the city’s status as a printing metropole.Footnote 41 Censors were also authors. Jakob Grimm (Hessen), Aloys Blumauer (Austria), and Friedrich Bülau (Saxony) doubled as civil servants who handled manuscripts with care and respect. With such men, printers negotiated revisions to mitigate damage. State files are replete with instances of ministers rebuking censors because of their laxity, enabling a surprising degree of political criticism to pass through government filters.Footnote 42 Saxon files reveal instances when censors worked more with publishers than against them to convey the author’s intended political message.Footnote 43

The social status of publishers also brought benefits when entering urban courts. Municipal judges and juries were often sympathetic with publishers when state officials impounded books, especially when confiscation amounted to financial loss.Footnote 44 In this juridical space, one notes the persistence of local power to negotiate its interests over regional and national concerns. But state judges, too, reversed the orders of ministers, including the Prussian judiciary, which checked arbitrary police action well into the 1860s.Footnote 45 Where juries existed, as was the case in Western Germany and in many municipal courts, publishers had excellent chances of either winning their case outright or reducing the sentence to a tolerable fine.Footnote 46 Because Rhenish states still used the Napoleonic Code, numerous editors and publishers resettled in the Palatinate or in Baden to take advantage of juried trials. Of course, harsh censors also made the lives of editors and publishers miserable—think of Marx’s tirades against his Cologne censorsFootnote 47—but the cliché of draconian gatekeepers obscures the more frequent pattern of open-ended exchanges between state officials and publishers who brought varying degrees of dissent to market.Footnote 48 Austria reveals a similar trend. In spite of increasing numbers of censored works over the first half of the nineteenth century, the percentage of books in the fully banned category (damnatur) declined over time, from 85 per cent in the 1790s to 33 per cent in 1841–1845. Applying milder forms of censorship to increasing numbers of texts was ‘a desperate attempt to rescue what could still be rescued’.Footnote 49

When publishers didn’t get their way in their home city, they sought the censor’s stamp in other towns. Georg Andreas Reimer, the Berlin publisher who was denied the right to publish the second edition of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation, went so far as to buy the Weidmann firm in Leipzig to escape Prussia’s full control over his publishing list. Altenburg, a small duchy not far from Leipzig, was the favourite option for publishers (e.g., Brockhaus, Wigand, Reclam, Campe) who didn’t get their way with local censors. Other postage-stamp duchies like Sachsen-Meiningen and Sachsen-Thüringen cultivated mild censorship practices to draw business and thereby secure bread-winning occupations. Such mid-size states as Braunschweig, Württemberg, and Bavaria’s Palatinate also promoted printing industries, condoning copyright piracy and permitting liberal periodicals and lexica to draw entrepreneurs. The cameralism of small German states offered benefits to publishers looking for loopholes. Carl Joseph Meyer struck a deal with his duke in Sachsen-Meiningen to convert a monastery into a printing factory. With the promise of employing local workers throughout the year, the Saxon duchy permitted Meyer to print a vast list of literature and non-fiction.Footnote 50 Prussia and Austria banned his newspapers and other books, but a post-publication ban rarely stopped a book from crossing borders into bookshops. Julius Campe quipped that books in Austria cost approximately 25 per cent more because of bribery, but neither customs officials nor the police ever prevented Austrian readers from gaining access to forbidden literature.Footnote 51 Franz Grillparzer, the noted Austrian author, confirmed the point. The circulation of forbidden literature, he noted in his autobiography, ‘was never so common as in Austria’, remarking that cabbies openly read banned pamphlets atop their hackneys.Footnote 52

Regardless of how scholars may gauge and interpret censorship’s degrees of repression, the subversive power of markets merits notice.Footnote 53 Preventive censorship could not keep in step with print markets. In the 1840s, the censorship regimes of Prussia, Austria, and the Confederation buckled under the unrelenting consumer demand for political information and through the savoir faire of printers to meet it.Footnote 54 The information order of the Restoration, designed to serve authoritarian government and constrain participatory politics, proved untenable. The reasons for this failure are numerous, but among them loom certain customary practices of the book trade: an attitude of liberality that viewed banned texts as an essential part of its profession; an inherited repertoire of circumvention that enabled publishers to exploit loopholes; the bonds of trust among book merchants to make, swap, and sell illegal print wares; and, not least, the widespread network of publishing that rendered political frontiers ineffective. The latter point merits our attention.

A Decentralized Publishing Landscape

The success of book dealers to circumvent state regulation derived greatly from the Holy Roman Empire’s federalist political character, which lent the industry its polycentric character. Unlike the centralizing and consolidating trends in French and British publishing, where Paris, London, and Edinburgh dominated all rivals, German publishers settled in most regions of Central Europe and doubled in number over the first decades of the century, from 339 in 1805 to 519 in 1820 to 1340 by 1840.Footnote 55 As Friedrich Schiller noted in 1797, ‘No capital and no one court exercises tyrannical influence over German taste’. Footnote 56 To take the Thuringian region around Weimar and Jena as one example of a decentralized media centre, over 230 publishers established themselves in 30 towns between 1800 and 1830.Footnote 57 A list of publishing sites confirms the vast expanse of Central European printing (Table 6.1).Footnote 58

Table 6.1 Leading Print Centres, 1765–1805 and 1837–1846 (number of printed works)
Full size table

Because the book trade exchanged print matter in kind until the 1760s, every bookstore was also a print shop, which necessitated that a book dealer swap books with other dealers. (The first exclusive retail bookshop arrived in 1796 with Friedrich Perthes’s store in Hamburg.Footnote 59) The typical Verlagsbuchhandlung combined retail with modest print operations and humble publishing lists. They cooperated with hundreds of other book merchants who accepted each other’s books on both credit and commission to stock their stores with more titles to attract sales. Transhipment centres in Leipzig, Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Stuttgart, and Vienna facilitated this process, providing hubs to distribute print material throughout the German Confederation, the Habsburg Empire, and beyond. The spread of printing operations signalled a robust industry, but such vigour should not disguise the modest scale of most printers, who achieved middle-class sustenance by combining their own print wares with other imported goods to attract customers. Calendars, almanacs, popular science, how-to literature, devotional tracts, maps, and fiction were typical stock in trade—but flyers, broadsides, local gazettes, and political pamphlets also joined lists.

With Germany’s polycentric publishing trade, the dual function of production and sale had political import. In dozens of small towns, hand presses disseminated viewpoints on local political matters. Because mass newsprint emerged in Germany later than in England and France, Germany’s fragmented news industry generally receives poor marks from historians.Footnote 60 But one should not necessarily infer political complacency or immaturity from the persistence of gazettes and Intelligenzblätter. Not only did they connect regions with a national public, as Holger Böning has argued; they also framed local affairs as sites of significant political activity.Footnote 61 Responding to demand, hundreds of local newssheets spawned political awareness that, in turn, whetted appetites for dissenting pamphlets and newssheets. In Württemberg, for example, ‘a flood of publications inundated the public sphere’ between 1815 and 1819 to debate the king’s attempt to promulgate a constitution.Footnote 62 By 1830, Württemberg listed 148 papers, 90 of which stood under censorship because of their right to convey political news.Footnote 63 These papers were often no more than four-page octavo weeklies, but they provided outlets for critical voices and nurtured a market for additional pamphlets about local elections and transregional affairs.Footnote 64 Such brochures as Voices of the Württemberg People, Spoken by their Newly Elected Deputies (1832), Constitutional Catechism: Conversation of a State Official and an Elector about Württemberg’s Parliament, (1833), and A Historical Sketch of the Sixty-Four-Day-Dissolved Parliament in Württemberg (1833) show the willingness of local printer-booksellers to issue small runs of political pamphlets to turn a profit.Footnote 65 Invaluable for the eighteenth century, the pamphlet further retained its communicative role in the Napoleonic Era and during the Restoration, when the stringent censorship of periodical literature necessitated one-time commentaries, chronicles, and polemics, which often escaped rigorous preventive review. Entwining local and national reportage enabled printers to mediate dissent in various scales. By vernacularizing broader impulses of political rupture (revolutions, constitutions, popular sovereignty), tracts about local politics domesticated and familiarized the language and literacy of citizenship. Connecting one public realm with another, readers synchronized local experiences with broader political movements.

Hessen’s print culture of dissent in the Vomärz period follows this pattern. On the one hand, printers from Marburg, Hanau, Frankfurt, Mainz, and Offenbach published books, papers, and pamphlets that responded to the dramatic events of the early 1830s: the July Revolution, Belgian independence, the Polish insurgency of 1831, and the Hambach Festival of 1832, Germany’s first modern mass political demonstration.Footnote 66 Through the clever appropriation of such genres as juvenilia, lexica, and almanacs, publications critiqued Germany’s insipid constitutionalism.Footnote 67 Along with other forbidden flysheets, book dealers also circulated censored manifestos from J.G.A. Wirth, Franz Stromeyer, and Jakob Siebenpfeiffer, which heralded the Hambach Festival’s demands for constitutional unity and press freedom.Footnote 68 Two additional festivals in Wilhelmsbad and Bergen following the Hambach demonstration affirmed the region’s bond to the liberal-democratic cause, and the Hanau publisher Friedrich König published song booklets for the events.Footnote 69 Yet flysheets and pamphlets also focused on local Hessian conditions. Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, a pastor with deep democratic sensibilities, penned Lamps and Lamplighters for Hessen, or the Hessian Emergency Militia, five serialized flysheets that agitated for local reform through parliamentary activism.Footnote 70 Heinrich Christian Flick’s To the Hessian Electors and To the Hessian Estates also exhorted local reform, just as the satirical songsheet, Mr. Thil with the Iron Brow, mocked the Hessian minister for the unlawful assault that accompanied his house searches.Footnote 71

Carl Preller, the co-owner of the Brede’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung in Offenbach, joined this circuit, printing local flysheets, a banned newspaper, and, in particular, The Hessian Country Messenger (Der Hessische Landbote). This eight-page political pamphlet by Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, mentioned above, and Georg Büchner, the polymath medical student, playwright, and Jacobin, radicalized local grievances in trenchant rhetoric. Two editions in July and November 1834 redirected plebeian anger towards revolt and democratic government. The brochure manifests influences of Thomas Paine, August Blanqui, St. Simon, Gracchus Babeuf, Hugues-Félicité Lamennais, and other Western radicals, thereby marking a watershed transfer of Western democratic thought, but the pamphlet also tapped the region’s own residual radicalism to mobilize farmers, artisans, and labourers.Footnote 72 Weidig’s biblical language and Reformational allusions invoked traditions of righteous revolt and ratified the logic of popular sovereignty.Footnote 73 Hence when Weidig convened liberals and democrats in July 1834 and called for a ‘society of the underground press’ to distribute political flysheets, he not only tapped the liberal-democratic impulses of the Hambach Festival but also sharpened its radical implications. Equally important was the readiness of artisans (a printer in Offenbach and a typesetter in Marburg) to print two editions. Alongside its intended local audience, the pamphlet achieved a wider readership through underhanded circulation via bookstores throughout western and southwestern Germany.Footnote 74 Here and elsewhere, small-scale printers nurtured a culture of local protest that might or might not connect to broader political issues. Put in business terms, a saleable pamphlet aimed at local consumption attracted printers still using hand presses, whose small print-runs yielded profits. Although mechanized printing arrived in 1814, most printers adopted the technology only in the 1840s and 1850s. Resembling an ancien-régime workshop more than a modern manufactory, the Verlagsbuchhandlung in the Age of Revolution made possible local oppositional tracts. The irony of local liberties and markets serving broader needs should not go unnoticed. Booksellers typically embraced the aspiration of a national market and were quick to point out the economic defects of Germany’s federalist legacy. Indeed, the term ‘particularism’ gained currency among certain liberals in the early nineteenth century as a pejorative term, while others recognized the democratic potential that inhered in cultural and political forms of federalism.Footnote 75 Be that as it may, the Confederation’s decentralized cultural landscape provided them with an undeniably positive feature: a multi-layered public sphere that accommodated small print-runs and voices in many registers. Provincial printers and their local reading communities played a critical role in shaping an oppositional political culture in the modern era. ‘Provincial modernity’ may appear to many as a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, but not for Central European booksellers in the Age of Revolution.Footnote 76

Bookshops and Local Civic Practice

The practice of circulating political dissent should not figure as an abstraction. In thinking about the various steps of authorship, production, transport, distribution, sale, and consumption, the physical locale of the bookstore looms as the ground zero of oppositional politics. Although there were other outlets in town and countryside, the bookstore stands out as the primary site where readers found access to forbidden literature. Indeed, certain forms of illicit material could be found only in bookstores.Footnote 77 Whether printed in house or conveyed into bookstores by carters of trusted publishing houses, banned literature found its way into bookstores. While town squares, cafés, taverns, casinos, and associational life nurtured political deliberation, access to oppositional print often began in bookstores.

Unfortunately, we know too little about the culture of bookshops and their underhand sales. Such book dealers as Kanter in Königsberg, Campe in Hamburg, Reclam in Leipzig, Hartknoch in Riga, Reimer in Berlin, or Heckenast in Pest were well known for having shops that served as cultural centres. Kanter’s store and lending library in Köngisberg became an open salon for Baltic luminaries (e.g., J.G. Hammann, I. Kant, J. G. Herder) to discuss the newest literature amidst university students and customers. Kanter encouraged distinguished patrons to use his premises as a ‘museum’, or a reading society, where they could write their letters and inspect the papers. Towards this end, he decorated his comptoir room with busts of Pindar, Tacitus, Caesar, and Plutarch, interspersed with portraits of King Frederick II and such contemporary Prussian luminaries as Kant, Mendelssohn, and Hippel. Kanter’s open embrace of freemasonry coloured discussions on philosophy, literature, and art, but politics were avoided.Footnote 78 Georg Reimer’s residence in central Berlin, which also served as shop and press, attracted a liberal clientele. He counted Schleiermacher and Fichte as frequent guests, and Friedrich Dahlmann spent a month at Reimer’s residence after his dismissal from the University of Göttingen in 1837.Footnote 79 Reclam’s ‘Literary Museum’ in Leipzig, founded in 1828, served as a meeting place to read and discuss politics. The library’s reading room nurtured political debate, as confirmed by a travel guide in 1835: ‘The most varied political views and opinions are announced there, and one gathers that the juste milieu has taken firm root in the Museum’.Footnote 80

But less prominent bookstores also doubled as meeting places and centres of political activity. Johann Heinrich Meidinger in Frankfurt, for example, took donations for Sylvester Jordan’s trial in 1830, set out petitions to sign, acted as liaison for such émigré authors as Jacob Venedey and, not least, published illegal flysheets for particular customers.Footnote 81 Ferdinand Hirt, a bookseller in Breslau, served as a liaison between Polish exiles and oppositional figures in Warsaw, and he further procured for them the works of Proudhon, the French socialist. Hirt came into close contact with Polish intellectuals as an apprentice at the Korn bookshop in Breslau, which also served as a meeting point for the Polish cause.Footnote 82 Bookshops as make-shift salons were not uncommon. Carl Friedrich Kunz’s store in Bamberg served as a meeting place for E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Karl Friedrich Wetzel, and other Romantic authors, and he himself published parodies under the penname of Zacharias Funck.Footnote 83 August Stülpnagel's bookstore in Berlin similarly became the meeting place of such intellectuals as Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Adolf Stahr, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm, Bettina von Arnim, Wilhelm Raabe, and other university professors.Footnote 84 For centuries, argues Siegfred Taubert, bookshops were a site of conversation about printed ideas, and these bookshops were no exception.Footnote 85

Philipp Christmann in Neustadt, Georg Ritter in Zweibrücken, and Johann Georg August Wirth in Homburg printed the literature of the Hambach Festival and its Press Association, but their premises also became meeting places for distribution and discussion of oppositional political thought. In 1831, after the government forbade the editors of the Deutsche Tribune to mail issues to subscribers, the newspaper instructed readers to buy copies at their local bookstores. Georg Ritter’s Zweibrücken bookshop acted as the distribution centre, but readers in Munich were directed to Schäffer’s store in the Perusagasse.Footnote 86 When residents of Homburg demonstrated outside Wirth’s press to protest the state’s closure of his Verlagsbuchhandlung in 1831, their protests also signalled a broader allegiance to constitutional politics.Footnote 87 The Frankfurt bookshop of Bernhard Körner and his son Karl also nurtured a community of liberal patrons. The bookstore vended such banned material as Vorrede zu Heinrich Heines Französische Zustände (1833) and J.G.A.Wirth's Volkshalle (1840), which, according to police reports, attracted ‘republican-minded men of the lower classes’.Footnote 88 In 1836, Karl Körner flagrantly displayed banned texts of Heine in his windows, and when the court sentenced him to four weeks in jail, he refused to go. Remarkably, the government altered the sentence to a monetary fine for fear of public demonstration.Footnote 89 The anxiety over public outcry not only suggests the political character of local support but also illuminates how state officials tolerated and accommodated local political will. The tacit recognition of potential unruliness in urban publics reflects how officials anticipated and muted local demonstrations of protest. The decision to cede ground to local interests calls attention to the residual power of urban institutions and commercial enterprises to make claims for civic liberties.

Police reports from Stuttgart in 1837 also complained of unruly readers who believed that ‘bookstores are free’ and stood outside of government control. Stuttgart was ‘paved with bookstores’, which formed ‘an interconnected society’. Police spies emphasized the presence of ‘shoemakers and tailors’ under the sway of ‘Württemberg's opposition’, patrons who encouraged the sale of ‘irresponsible reportage’. In regard to the rash of new bookstores and their atmosphere, ‘one thinks that they are more of an association than a bookshop’.Footnote 90 The ringleader was a typesetter ‘who is going for broke, for he has nothing to lose’ and his ‘not-fully-informed clientele want to win’. Working-class readers and their ‘malicious spirit’ found sanctuary in the region's small ‘corner establishments’.Footnote 91 Print shops as redoubts of oppositional talk were hardly unique to Stuttgart. Although we associate Robert Blum, Karl Biedermann, Friedrich Bassermann, Karl Mathy, and Edgar and Bruno Bauer as authors, politicians, and intellectuals, they also ran bookstores in Leipzig, Mannheim, and Berlin. Such commercial spaces clearly served other functions.

These examples point to the importance of urban communities to explain how a reconstituted civil society unfolded in Central Europe. Such forms of local agency nullify the persistent cliché of Restoration readers as too somnolent to absorb the age’s impulses or too timid to contest the passive political roles imposed upon them by the Congress of Vienna and the German Confederation. The examples from Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Leipzig and numerous other locations of bookstores explain how the tradition of Stadtluft macht frei (‘city life sets us free’) served the creative energies of a newer brand of oppositional politics. To be sure, the process was gradual and uneven. The slow erosion of the early modern ideals of ‘classless civil society’ and the ‘hometown Bürger’ over the course of the early nineteenth century still provided ground for bourgeois enclaves to defend corporatist customs and its accompanying forms of political and cultural exclusion. But state initiatives (freedoms of movement, occupation, and residency) and economic transformation (attrition of guilds and hometown restrictions) since the Napoleonic era inexorably recast urban culture, which reconfigured the traditional civic rights of earlier urban communities.Footnote 92 Their spheres of commerce, justice, and municipal governance now strengthened the demands of readers for a free press and the right to form opinions at variance with higher authorities. The era’s widening public sphere drew on an existing cultural infrastructure whose print ecology enabled ideological dissent to challenge and undermine Restoration authority. Civic virtue (Bürgertugend), which traditionally stressed communal harmony (Eintracht) and the commonweal (Gemeinwohl), now nurtured newer forms of civic engagement, which included the freedom to disagree. Local agency, whether in small provincial towns or major urban centres, is critical to this story. What is more, the constitutional setbacks at the national level belie the vibrant activity in towns and cities. Echoing Oliver Zimmer’s insight about local communities in the late nineteenth century, town life ran on tracks different from those at the national level. The former was not a microcosm of the latter.Footnote 93 The official information order of Germany and Austria fails to capture the cultural pulses of town life, whose inherited practices of communal liberties accommodated political opposition in a new key. Here one observes a noteworthy cultural continuity in the Age of Revolutions. The wayward behaviour of booksellers and readers infused German-language print circuits with a pervasive discourse about rights-bearing citizenship ideals, but grafting those revolutionary claims of universal freedom onto the inherited practices of early modern mercantile and communal liberties remained a decades-long cultural process.

Conclusion

Dispersed widely in hundreds of towns throughout Central Europe, booksellers constituted critical nodal points of a network of political communication that promoted the freedom of the press. Exploiting the legal freedoms of a commercial enterprise, book dealers tested the boundaries of censorship, vended forbidden literature sous main, and cultivated clientele for oppositional politics. A tacit ‘sanction of precedent’ justified such transgressions. Long-established conventions condoned illegal manoeuvres, as did the Enlightenment’s credo of transparency and tolerance: let readers judge for themselves. In plying their trade in a new era, publishers deployed older strategies and mindsets to great effect.

During the Restoration Era, codes of communication evolved. Discourses on rights-bearing citizenship ideals tinted print markets with ideological hues, altering the consequences of time-honoured practices. Although banned literature in the early eighteenth century carried a penalty, the punishment for illegal political print became more severe after Napoleon. Despite fines and prison sentences, many book dealers combined principle with profit to pursue subversive publishing programmes that nettled governments well into the nineteenth century. When the Kaiserreich’s antisocialist laws once again banned newspapers between 1878 and 1890, Der Sozialdemokrat, printed in Höttingen-Zürich, reached tens of thousands of readers through tactics and smuggling routes inherited from an earlier era.Footnote 94 When complaining to Friedrich Engels in April 1884 about police raids on the newspaper, August Bebel nonetheless noted that ‘the smuggling paths are so certain, that they don’t catch us when crossing the border’.Footnote 95 The clandestine reading culture of socialists owes its success in part to an older infrastructure of print markets addressed in this essay.

The persistence of ancien-régime publishing networks had, then, certain advantages. To be sure, most printers advocated a unified national state that would obviate unnecessary tariffs, literary piracy, and myriad currencies. Their good business sense embraced an ideological opposition to state interference, just as their aspiration of constitutional nationhood accorded with the tenet of free expression. In this light, the ideal of an unfettered national market of ideas is logical and framed the programmes of liberals and radicals alike. Yet, ideals aside, they also recognized the equally important reality that print shops dispersed throughout the German-speaking lands ensured that no one state controlled the public sphere. The vast archipelago of printers in dozens of states prevented any regional print monopoly, especially when publishers drew on their venerable repertoire of circumvention to circulate contraband print. This sanctioned precedent buttresses an overarching argument of this volume: inherited customs are not necessarily conservative, nor are they inimical to innovation. Older business practices proved adaptive and flexible to contest newer claims of governmental regulation. Of particular importance is the broader cultural infrastructure that sustained this repertoire. Buttressing the civic courage and profit motive of booksellers was a dense complex web of affiliations that made possible clandestine networks: book commissioners, print-shop workers, warehouse employees, book-fair staff, carters, teamsters, customs officials, border guards, censors, judges, jury members, and, not least, customers. In one form or another, all were complicit in undermining state authority. More than a physical site, bookshops constituted a cultural institution that not only provided access to forbidden texts but also allowed readers to practice the democratic tenet of independent judgement.Footnote 96 Emboldened by cultural precedent, individuals sought access to the critical margins of the public sphere that recast citizenship ideals. In sum, the hybrid book- and print shop (Verlagsbuchhandlung) stands among the cultural traditions that promoted modern political participation, and its achievements are grounded in the mentalities and practices of the early modern book trade. ‘Societies are held together and partially constituted by fragile networks of accumulated practices and institutions’, write Mark Salber Phillips and Gorden Schochet.Footnote 97 The observation captures the essence of Germany’s print culture. The power of inherited practices, the force of markets, and the civic patronage of publishers helped launch constitutional citizenship, a hallmark feature of the Age of Revolution.