This is a magisterial work. Impressive in its erudition and scope, La Responsabilité de l’écrivain is a persuasive account of how modern literature came to represent writers’ freedom – and their responsibility. The writer’s commitment to commitment was most famously articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature: “the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject – freedom”. Sapiro’s book turns Sartre’s assertion into a question. How, she asks, did freedom become the writer’s ethic? In her view, the connection is neither obvious nor necessary. Across a series of deeply researched moments in French literary and cultural history, we see how an idea of the “writer’s responsibility” emerged, not progressively, but out of historically embedded and highly pitched battles over how and whether authors should be held accountable for their words. La responsabilité de l’écrivain is conceived as a genealogy not a developmental narrative. It details palpable shifts in how writers imagined their responsibility over more than two centuries, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Revisiting famous legal cases that called attention to the question (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dreyfus, Brasillach), but also less familiar ones, Sapiro reconstructs how literature – and the writer – came to be advocates for human freedom.

For Sapiro, the modern writer’s claim to freedom and responsibility is a historical effect of the broader legal, political, and cultural processes that worked to constitute literature as an “autonomous field”. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Gustave Flaubert as a pivotal figure in this autonomization is, in many ways, a key point of departure for her study. Reaching further backward as well as forwards in time, Sapiro uses the literary trials of famous, infamous, as well as lesser-known writers as her archival anchor and argumentative hinge. These legal contests over authorial responsibility served as crucibles for successive transformations in the writer’s ethical and social role. In juridical disputes and debates in the Restoration, Second Empire, Third Republic, and post-Occupation purges, literary authors (and their lawyers) were forced to respond to legal charges of blasphemy, immorality, and politically dangerous speech. Writers’ counter-discursive strategies worked to make literature independent from the powers that be: religion, the state, and dominant morality. For Gisèle Sapiro, the legal frameworks that held authors responsible for their speech spurred them to elaborate an alternative, oppositional professional ethic.

In highlighting juridical concepts of the author, La Responsabilité de l’écrivain also echoes the linkage between law and literature suggested by Michel Foucault, for whom the other sides of copyright were “the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing” that became “the forceful imperative of literature” (p. 23). Sapiro’s focus is not so much on the material properties of authorship, but rather on its moral properties. Criminal trials against authors of religiously, morally, and politically offensive works became the occasion for the state, on the one hand, and authors, on the other, to spell out to what and to whom literature is responsible.

While the Enlightenment-era philosophe is an important forbearer to Sapiro’s modern writer, the book’s story is essentially post-Revolutionary. Indeed, it makes an important contribution in pointing to the Restoration as a pivotal and paradoxical moment in the elaboration not just of liberalism in France, but of the modern author’s ethic. Part I of the book thus traces the contestations provoked by the press law of 1819. By protecting “freedom of opinion” on the one hand and “public order” on the other, the law became a site of discursive and political struggle. The writings of pamphlétiste Paul-Louis Courier and poet/songwriter Pierre-Jean Bérenger tested these delicately balanced principles. And both authors were put on trial, not only for offending royal dignity and state religion, but also for what, in the language of the new law, was described as “public morality and good morals”. Gisèle Sapiro places these trials in a broader discursive context, including post-Revolutionary political fears, religious concerns over the proliferation of “bad books”, and the influential philosopher Victor Cousin’s assertion of art’s independence from moral strictures. The law subjected literature to political and moral principle. In defending themselves against the state’s criminal charges, writers gained a platform for articulating an alternative ethics. Rather than diminishing Courier and Bérenger’s popularity, their convictions became “a mark of literary glory”. By reinforcing rather than effectively restricting the power of literature, these authors asserted their “independence from temporal and spiritual power, as well as those in power [les puissants du jour]”. They instead “affirmed a new form of legitimacy founded on the public” (p. 90).

Public approbation aided writers like Béranger to take distance from cross and crown in the Restoration. But, the writer’s dependence on this “public” became a burden, especially as readership was democratized and feminized. The post-Romantic generation of writers, exemplified in Sapiro’s story by Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, thus struggled to liberate themselves not only from established powers, but also from “the public”. In order to do so, they fashioned a new ethics of authorial responsibility founded essentially on the aesthetic. By closely reading their trials for offenses to “public morality and good morals”, Part II examines how this new authorial deontology once again emerged in the crucible of legal contests. Sapiro’s focus on the question of “responsibility” brings fresh insight to the analysis of these famous cases. Placing them in a host of broader contexts, from widespread anxieties about autodidacts, female readers, and the rise of “industrial literature”, generational disillusionment with romanticism and political engagement in the wake of 1848, she revisits the question of why these works in particular were targeted by public authorities. After all, as she and others have pointed out, Madame Bovary’s purportedly scandalous subject matter – adultery – was not a novelistic novelty. But, if the scandal did not lie in the book’s scabrous content, then what was so disconcerting about its form? Flaubert’s trial makes new sense as a struggle over authorial autonomy. In refusing to subordinate artistic production to “public” moral standards, Flaubert and Baudelaire assumed “responsibility” for the form of their work, but not the effects on uninitiated and impressionable readers emblematized by Emma Bovary. With their autonomy founded on strategies of distanciation, however, these writers’ authority was restricted to delimited domain of “art”.

In the Third Republic, new legislation and a new political investment in a secular “national morality” transformed the framework in which writers were operating. The press law of 1881 represented a move toward liberalization by eliminating what had been described in previous laws as offenses to religious and “public morality”. But the limit that was left in place – the offense against “good morals” – in turn became a new site of struggle. Contemporary fears about the rise of pornography extended earlier anxieties about a democratized and feminized readership while introducing the problem of how to distinguish between “art” and “pornography”. The newly minted republican regime promoted secular moral probity in an effort to counter the perceived dangers of depopulation and degeneration. Pornography, in this context, symbolized a devirilizing threat to the national body that required ongoing repression. Understood as the perverse effect of press liberalization, the proliferating presence of pornography underwrote the persistence of regulation. The case of the trial against the anti-militarist Lucien Descaves made clear that morals charges can and were mobilized for explicitly political ends.

But the contests in this period were not just between writers and the state, but also among writers. Indeed, for Sapiro, the delimitation of the writer’s penal responsibility in 1881 provoked “a redefinition of the ethic of responsibility” (p. 491). The question of whether writers were obliged to uphold the new national morality preoccupied writers who, like other professional groups at the time, increasingly understood themselves as a corporation. The argument between authors (e.g. Émile Zola) who upheld “autonomy” and those who adhered to a national moral idea (e.g. Paul Bourget) came to a head in the contest between the Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard camps at the end of the century. Conservative authors promoted “heteronomy”. Zola, meanwhile, came to exemplify the writer who upheld “universal values” rather than nationalistic or particular ones (p. 511). But if the modern intellectual was thus born, the question of authorial responsibility remained far from settled.

While Zola continues to symbolize the zenith of the modern French intellectual’s principled engagement, Robert Brasillach represents a nadir. In tackling the case of Brasillach and other collaborationist intellectuals, Gisèle Sapiro returns to terrain that she explored in her previous book on writers in and after the Second World War. Drawing on the archives of the cases against treasonous authors, Part IV reconstructs the way in which arguments for their criminal and authorial responsibility were elaborated. Her focus here is on the apparent paradox posed by these writers’ condemnation for treason. In the Third Republic, critical intellectuals asserted their autonomy from the state and national interest. At the Liberation, by contrast, those who identified with the Resistance appeared as spokespersons of a French national conscience. It was on this basis that they condemned treasonous writers for the murderous effects of their speech. But in so doing, did they not re-subject writers to a national morality? For Sapiro, the brilliance of Sartre’s post-war interventions lay in his ability to work around this apparent paradox. Rather than making the writer responsible to the nation (the basis of Brasillach’s penal condemnation), Sartre grounded his conception of responsibility on his philosophy of liberty. As a result, his idea of “commitment” “reaffirmed the writer’s autonomy with respect to the world of politics, without falling back on a paradigm of irresponsibility” (p. 685). Sartre’s ethic was difficult to execute in practice and contested from the outset. Sapiro nonetheless makes a strong argument for what made his bid for the writer’s autonomy and responsibility admirable and important.

Sartre seemed to make a definitive pronouncement. But, as the book’s wide-ranging epilogue illustrates, the contours and content of the writer’s responsibility continued to provoke debate in the fields of both morals (anxieties about the effects of literature on “youth”) and politics (most notably with respect to anti-colonial struggles and especially the Algerian war). At the same time, Gisèle Sapiro suggests that the relative influence of the writer, when compared to competing categories such as journalists, declined after the highpoint of the Liberation. Was this a paradoxical effect of writers’ success in attaining their autonomy? Once they became recognized for their independence, writers could no longer emblematize critical opposition in quite the same way. They nonetheless, as she suggests in the closing pages, continue to make other visions of the world possible (p. 720).

A brief review cannot fully do justice to a work of such scope. One particularly welcome aspect of the study is its attention to how questions of gender and sexuality subtended debates over the rights and responsibilities of “literature”. The ethic of the modern writer in France appears to have emerged out of conjoined struggles over sex and politics. Following Bourdieusian analytic grids, Sapiro indicates how normative conceptions of gender and sexuality informed writers’ positioning in the literary field. The critical potential of this analysis might have been carried further. What, in the end, are we to make of an ethic that, as in Sartre’s case, grounds the writer’s autonomy and universalist responsibility on “virility”? (p. 688). The question is not original. It was, of course, posed by Simone de Beauvoir at the time. But it nonetheless remains an open one here: how does an implicitly gendered universalism position the woman intellectual and writer?

By weaving impressive erudition into a lucid framework of analysis, this book is a considerable achievement. Structured by a strong argument and thesis, it touches on themes that will be of interest to a broad swath of readers: law and literature; the history of human rights; secularization; and the past – and future – of the public intellectual. In taking legal contestation as a crucial site for the articulation of authorial responsibility, Sapiro has focused on a single – if exemplary – national case. In the spirit of the writers whose ethic it chronicles, this book reaches well beyond that frame.