Financial Support for French Literary Authors and Pamphleteers in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: A Dataset of Pensions from Royal, Ecclesiastical, and Aristocratic Sources

This dataset contains transcriptions and structured data collected from manuscript and printed sources relating to pensions, gratifications, and other forms of financial support granted to writers, pamphleteers, and intellectual actors in eighteenth-century France. The documents concern requests for pensions, recommendations by patrons or ministers, the attribution of financial rewards by the Crown or other institutions, and the broader economic networks linking writers to political and social elites. The dataset aims to facilitate research on the economic foundations of literary production, patronage networks, and the institutional regulation of the literary field in the late Ancien Régime. This transcription was created in the realm 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 Trier Universität in Germany.