French State Control of the Book Trade in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: A Dataset of Censors, Permissions tacites, and Ministerial Interventions in Printing Authorisations

This dataset documents manuscript sources relating to the administrative procedures for granting permissions tacites in the French book trade during the eighteenth century. The material concerns the regulation of print culture under the Ancien Régime, including the submission of works for approval, the appointment and recommendations of censors, and the registration of authorisations by state authorities and professional bodies. The dataset aims to facilitate research on censorship practices, the circulation of printed works, and institutional control of publishing. The sources were identified and organised following the typology established by Robert Estivals (1965), which reconstructs the successive stages of the permission tacite procedure. These data have been incorporated into the Pamphlets and Patrons database, which is accessible at: https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/PaPa/ This transcription was created within the framework of the ERC project (2021-2026) Pamphlets and Patrons: How Courtiers shaped the Public Sphere in Ancien Régime France. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 101001197). The project was conducted under the supervision of Damien Tricoire at the Universität Trier in Germany.