It is always tempting to use Balzac's superb novel Lost Illusions as an introduction to the world of French publishing in the early nineteenth century. Christine Haynes, in her own Lost Illusions, does so, and in the past I have fallen for it myself. But he is a dangerous witness, who was no friend of publishers and saw them as mercenary philistines engaged in the parasitical exploitation of creative geniuses like him. He even pushed one or two publishers into bankruptcy by demanding huge advances and then not completing his assignments. For Haynes, the sting is in the tail: only in the 1890s, she argues, did the publishers truly gain the upper hand.

Haynes sets herself two objectives and achieves them convincingly. Firstly, she charts the arrival of the publisher as a professional specialist from about the 1830s onwards. The publisher no longer doubled as printer or bookseller, but established his own distinctive role in the capitalist system as financier, entrepreneur, and director of a stable of authors. Secondly, she charts the progress and the conflicts that shaped the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century France. The originality of her study lies in her use of the archives of the Cercle de la Librairie and its second president, Pagnerre, but no great revelations emerge here.

Haynes frames her story rather like a boxing match. In one corner there are the “corporatists”—those who hoped to preserve some of the protection originally provided by the guild structure of the profession that had been swept away by the French Revolution. They looked to the state to regulate the industry, maintain standards, and limit competition through the government's system of licenses (brevets). In the other corner stand Haynes's “liberals,” the protagonists of a deregulated market, who by 1870 had managed to secure the abolition of the brevet, so that anyone could enter the profession. The “liberals” tended to include new publishers, many of them self-made men, and they tended to be Parisian. The “corporatists” tended to be printers and booksellers, and they were often provincials who resented the Parisians' domination of French literary life and their privileged access to the best authors. The bout reached its climax in the 1860s: As Haynes correctly demonstrates, the Second Empire of Napoleon III was a decisive moment in the development of the book trade and, by extension, in the development of the capitalist economy in France as a whole.

So far so good, but Haynes's framework is too schematic. Problems and contradictions arise from her very slippery definition of what constitutes a “liberal.” French “liberals” were far from consistent in their attitudes towards a free market. For one thing, they believed in state intervention and demanded that the government protect them against publishing piracy across the border in Belgium. In addition, “liberals” campaigned for an extension of author's copyright, and they were successful when legislation in 1866 extended copyright to fifty years after the author's death. This, however, stretches the notion of “liberal” so far that it becomes almost meaningless. In a free market, it could certainly be argued that the extension of copyright is a restraint on the market rather than a liberalizing measure. One of Haynes's liberal publishers was Louis Hachette, who among other achievements pioneered railway bookstalls in France. Hachette was a very successful capitalist, but he was no defender of free competition—his fight to secure retail outlets on railway stations was a fight to preserve his personal monopoly over them.

Haynes's definitions are ultimately troubling when we find the people she calls “liberals” defending monopolies and cartelization. When it came down to it, of course, each group pursued its own interests regardless of economic ideology. It might be more constructive to see this not as a boxing match between traditionalists and progressives, but as the gradual elaboration of a new business model for the book trade. The business model put in place in the nineteenth century managed reasonably to reward all interested parties (authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, and consumers) and endured until the Internet made it obsolete. The model depended on the end of licensing and on a stable copyright system, ably outlined by Haynes. It required some version of royalty payments for authors. It also rested on international recognition of author's copyright and publishers' rights as enshrined in the Bern Convention of 1886.

Haynes argues, echoing Balzac, that by the 1890s this business model was heavily loaded in favor of the publisher. This remains unsubstantiated. Much more detailed and systematic research is necessary into the evolution of publisher-author contracts to make the argument stick. Haynes would be ideally suited to carry it out.