Item of the month: Satires, censors, and pseudonyms

Les galanteries et les debauches de l’empereur Neron…Par Petrone (Bamburgh I.5.32)

A post by Collections Assistant Caroline Ball, in Cologne

On the title-page of this book, the imprint tells us that it was published in 1694, in Cologne, in the workshop of the printer Pierre Marteau. Sounds plausible? Certainly, until we discover that Pierre Marteau – “Peter the Hammer” – never actually existed.

This mysterious figure made his first appearance around 1660. It’s not certain who first came up with the idea, but it may have been the eminent Elzevir publishing house in Amsterdam. Whoever started it, other publishers quickly joined in, and “Marteau” began to be credited with more and more books. Most of the texts coming out of this imaginary press had two things in common – they were written in French, and they were highly controversial.

By now you’ve probably guessed why reputable publishers began to hide some of their work behind a pseudonym or “false imprint”. France in this period exercised heavy censorship over new printed books. Under the 1566 Edict of Moulins, texts had to be submitted to the Crown for approval, before they could be circulated in public. By claiming that these books had been printed beyond French borders “in Cologne” (probably actually Paris), the writers and thinkers behind Marteau could avoid censorship, and print whatever they wanted to say. After publication, booksellers still had to contend with the book police(!) who could monitor imports, seize contraband, and destroy copies of banned books. In severe cases, the courts could even order those violating censorship laws to be put to death. But by pinning the blame on “Marteau”, these renegade publishers could maintain their anonymity, and continue to circulate books in relative safety while the authorities went on a wild goose chase.

So the Marteau ruse was more than just an amusing charade. Another Marteau book in our collections, the political history La Source Des Malheurs D’Angleterre (SC 10384), published in 1689, has a printed bookseller’s note stuck inside the front cover. It proclaims “…a reward of five thousand louis d’ors [sic] being offered to discover the author and publisher.” The note is undated, so sadly I can’t tell you how many loaves of French bread one could have bought with five thousand louis, but at any exchange rate it’s clearly a serious amount of gold.

Marteau was by no means the only fictitious printer in this period, but his repertoire became one of the largest and most notorious, and over the years, others took up his mantle. More books were supposedly printed by “his widow” and “his son”, as well as various punning colleagues such as “J. de Clou” (The Nail) and “Adrien l’Enclume” (The Anvil). The running joke was taken to its absurdist extreme when a book was eventually claimed to have been printed “in the middle of the sea, at the house of Henry Herring”. I suspect even the censors could guess there was something fishy going on there.

But why was this book, Les galanteries et les debauches de l’empereur Neron, smuggled past the censors? Most of the Marteau publications relate to religious controversies, or dangerous political opinions. But there was a furtive third category – books considered too lewd for the delicate eyes of the public. This is a French edition of Petronius’ Satyricon, originally in Latin. One of the more bizarre Roman texts, it follows the absurd adventures of Encolpius (loosely translatable as “Mr Crotch”), as he and his friends and lovers navigate everything from shipwrecks and cults to the world’s tackiest dinner party, with some wild digressions into cannibalism, modern art, the flaws of the education system, and a story about werewolves along the way. Not to mention a lot of sex. On one level the Satyricon is an interrogation of Roman culture, money, and class, though that probably isn’t why it needed the Marteau cover story. The text is very fragmentary, but what has survived is so notoriously obscene that large sections of it were omitted even in a 1913 version translated into English by Michael Heseltine (the classicist, not the politician). In this 1694 edition, it is not only translated into vernacular French, to be read by anyone, but even the most eyebrow-raising parts have been left unabridged. And if that wasn’t scandalous enough, the title-page also promises that the book has been “enriched with engravings”… No wonder the censors were worried.