In the eighteenth century, the pamphlet was ubiquitous in western Europe and in the British colonies of North America. As brief, topical publications, pamphlets ranged in length from a few pages to well over one hundred; their print runs were as low as a few hundred copies or as high as several thousand. Once printed and published, they were sold at modest prices or distributed free (gratis). This favored form of publication offered authors a means of expressing themselves openly, anonymously, and relatively inexpensively. In countries with severe publication restrictions, individuals were able to produce illegal brochures and usually avoided detection or arrest because neither the authors nor the printers were readily identifiable. Even in locales like England, with no overt government censorship, the anonymous pamphlet allowed its author to speak boldly, with little fear of running afoul of the libel laws.

Pamphlets remained the principal polemical instrument for most of the eighteenth century. Opinion could rapidly follow events, and authors could respond quickly to the arguments of their opponents. Long pamphlet wars on specific topics were frequent. Pamphlets provided the perfect instrument for personal attacks on individuals. Known as libelles in France, they targeted important persons, sparing no one, including Louis XV and his mistresses, as well as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, his wife. The ideal medium of persuasion, pamphlets were the preferred instrument of argument in every area of eighteenth-century contestation. Authors wrote on all subjects, no matter how sensitive, in an effort to persuade the public of the truth of their particular viewpoints. Thus, pamphlets played an important role in the development of public opinion.

Distinguished authors The literature of the Enlightenment, which had its fair share of contested issues, frequently appeared in pamphlet form. The great philosophes often wrote as pamphleteers even when their publications expanded beyond the limits of the typical pamphlet. For example, from 1757 to 1765, the character and political structure of Geneva (Switzerland), the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and for a time the residence of Voltaire, proved to be a subject of considerable philosophic dispute and pamphlet debate. While opposing the oligarchic structure of Geneva’s government, Rousseau argued for maintaining the city’s ban on theaters to prevent the development of aristocratic artificiality. Defending enlightened culture, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Voltaire opposed the ban on theaters, but Voltaire undercut the local aristocracy by favoring political reform of the city. Another dispute, the Querelle des Bouffons, which was initiated in Paris in 1753, concerned the relative merits of French opera versus Italian opera. Eventually involving d’Alembert, Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, this pamphlet debate ultimately centered on the quality of Rameau’s French operas. A similar querelle (“quarrel”) emerged in the 1770s in Paris between defenders of the operas of Christoph Willibald von Gluck and the advocates of his rival Niccolò Piccinni, which resulted in the appearance of scores of philosophic pamphlets. In Italy, a considerable pamphlet war began in 1749 between enlightened writers, who attacked superstitious belief in witchcraft and magic, and Christian authors, who feared that denying the supernatural would undermine the very basis of religious truth. Voltaire, perhaps the Enlightenment’s premier philosophe-pamphleteer, waged his best-known pamphlet campaign against the religious fanaticism and judicial improprieties of the Calas Affair, which involved the Parlement of Toulouse’s notorious decision in 1762 to condemn and execute, on very weak evidence, Jean Calas, a Huguenot, for the murder of his son. Although Calas was executed, Voltaire’s publications played an important role in persuading Louis XV to reverse the Parlement’s judgment. In the end, the enterprise of the Enlightenment became the subject of a polemical debate; it was initiated by authors who attacked the entire philosophic establishment and its work.

Most eighteenth-century pamphlets were not written by the great literary figures of the Enlightenment. Anyone with an opinion and the resources to pay for its publication could produce a pamphlet. In France, for example, pamphlets on such diverse subjects as economics, agricultural practices, relations with Great Britain, royal finances, and the private life of the king were written and published by clergy, nobility, and members of the urban middle classes. Mémoires judiciares, pamphletlike legal briefs of civil cases that could be legally published and circulated in huge numbers, allowed barristers to bring numerous social, moral, and even political issues before the public in the guise of discussing their cases before the courts. Important personages, lacking the talent or inclination to write their own pamphlets, could always engage writers willing to undertake the task for them. Much of the eighteenth-century political pamphlet literature in England and France was sponsored by patrons. Some of their writers were great literary figures, like Daniel Defoe, who served both Tory and Whig ministries in England in the early 1700s, but others were Grub Street hacks, hoping to acquire literary reputations while earning meager livings. Both the English and French governments employed writers to justify ministerial policies to the public. In contrast, American pamphleteers tended to be individuals—clergymen, merchants, lawyers, or planters—who wanted to express their views publicly.

Although all pamphlets were intended to influence and shape public opinion, the overtly political pamphlets had the greatest impact on society. During the 1700s, as politics moved increasingly into the public sphere in much of western Europe and in Britain’s American colonies, pamphlets provided a basic medium for political discussion. Some well-developed political newspapers and journals existed in both Britain and its American colonies, but the traditional pamphlet with its unique characteristics and potential of complete anonymity remained a vital part of all political discussion. Many of the journals were little more than periodical pamphlets.

Lively political-pamphlet debate occurred, as well, in the 1700s in Switzerland, the United Provinces (Low Countries) and the Austrian Netherlands. Perhaps most significant was the body of French pamphlet literature, which grew in both volume and intensity during that century. Such pamphlets helped transform France—where the government was committed to the maintenance of the sovereign authority of the monarch and the prevention of public discussion of matters of state—into a society in which all parties entered the public sphere and sovereign authority was ultimately transferred to the citizenry.

Eighteenth-century political pamphlets developed the language of patriotism, which, in the context of the era, implied the restoration of ancient constitutional rights that had been usurped by monarchical government. In England, this was the language of the Country Party, which expressed deep distrust of the ministry, its placemen (members of the House of Commons on the ministerial payroll), a standing army, British involvement on the European continent, modern public finance, and government bureaucracy. Country ideology, which had its origins in seventeenth-century English republicanism [see Republicanism], called for Parliament’s reform and a return to the ancient constitution of England. The Country Party argued that the independent landowners of the kingdom, rather than the ministers, should control Parliament, thereby restoring the traditional balance between the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. American colonists, some of whom fought the British attempts to tax them in the 1760s and 1770s, utilized these Country arguments in pamphlets that expressed opposition to ministerial policies. In France, patriot ideology emerged from the attempts of the Parlement of Paris to undermine royal support for Unigenitus, a papal bull (pronouncement) of 1713, which condemned as a heresy the Roman Catholic sect of Jansenism. In the 1750s, Jansenist barristers, writing in support of the activities of Jansenist magistrates in the Parlement, developed theories that were based on the ancient constitutional structure of France, which established firm limits on royal authority. These theories formed the ideological basis of much of the French patriot pamphlet literature of the 1770s, which attacked the despotism of Chancellor René-Nicholas de Maupeou in his attempt to destroy the Parlement of Paris and, necessarily, the French constitution. Patriots in the United Provinces (Low Countries) wrote pamphlets condemning the monarchical pretensions of the House of Orange and demanded a return to the pure republican system of the seventeenth century. Similar arguments appeared in the Austrian Netherlands in an attempt to counter the authority of the Austrian emperor, Joseph II. Only in republican Geneva (Switzerland) did opposition-pamphlet literature not posit arguments calling for the reestablishment of traditional constitutional forms.

The political debate in England became explosive during the John Wilkes affair. Wilkes had not only suffered from ministerial despotism (when arrested in 1763 for publishing a libelous attack on King George III in the North Briton) but had also been denied a seat in Parliament after being duly elected three times in 1769. Wilkes then became the focus of a political battle fought through pamphlets, newspapers, and popular agitation. Although this agitation did not lead to revolution, popular participation in the Wilkes affair offered a serious threat to the political practices of the kingdom.

After 1763, every act of the British Parliament that affected the Thirteen Colonies in America met a hostile response in American pamphlets and newspapers. Political writers, well acquainted with the Country Party’s ideology, believed that Parliament under the domination of corrupt ministers was despotic and that every new law undermined the British constitution, thereby threatening liberty in America. After a decade of such warnings, the implementation in 1774 of Britain’s Coercive Acts, which severely limited the authority of the colonial assembly of Massachusetts, made the despotic intentions of the ministry clear to Americans. Soon, the arguments for independence from England became increasingly compelling. In early 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the most startling pamphlet to appear during that crisis, helped Americans to recognize the necessity of independence from Britain; it advocated a republicanism that decisively rejected the arguments in favor of the balance of the ancient English constitution. Still, the traditions of Country ideology remained strong as evidenced by the publications battling the proposed constitutional changes put forward by the Philadelphia convention of 1787.

Meanwhile, the impending bankruptcy of the French monarchy, the Parlement of Paris’s continued obstruction of ministerial financial reforms, and the decision to recall the Estates General (the ancient representative body of France) to solve those problems led to the publication of thousands of pamphlets in 1788 and early 1789. Initially, the debate was between the ministry, determined to control the Estates General through a reorganization that would weaken the political influence of the nobility, and the Parlement of Paris, the official voice of the Patriot Party determined to maintain the traditional constitution in the face of ministerial despotism. The debate quickly expanded to include a third element, the National Party, which sought the maintenance of the constitution through an alliance of the nobility and the third estate against the ministry. Jansenist ideology and the theories of the eighteenth-century political philosopher Montesquieu continued to inform the language of political publications. Increasingly, however, National Party pamphleteers also relied on Rousseau’s concept of the general will in constructing their arguments. In January 1789, Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s powerful contribution to this literature, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?, provided the most original adaptation of Rousseau to the issue of the proper representation of the French nation. Nevertheless, more traditional political arguments continued to dominate both the pamphlet literature and the thinking of the public until well after the establishment of the National Assembly in June 1789.

Pamphlets had an important function during the Enlightenment era. At a time when many polities did not permit the sanctioned free expression of thought, that form of publication provided the means for writers to air issues of public concern and to expose both the hidden secrets of governments and those of prominent individuals, opening society to wider scrutiny and public influence. Such literature also provided a route for misinformation, innuendo, and slander to pass easily into the public sphere. Nevertheless, pamphlets did help disseminate enlightened thought, expand knowledge, promote understanding of a wide variety of ideological and political arguments, and increase participation in eighteenth-century public affairs.

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