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«Je suis à la troisième édition de Bélisaire.» Une contrefaçon du Bélisaire de Marmontel par le Liégeois Jean-François Bassompierre (1767)

par Collart, Muriel ;Droixhe, Daniel ;Piette, Alice
Référence Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 98, page (185-198)
Publication Publié, 2023-07-01

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

As it is well-known, Liège was one of the most important printing centres for pirated editions of best-sellers in the Enlightenment. In Liège in 1767 Jean-François Marmontel met Jean-François Bassompierre, the main counterfeiter in the city, as he accompanied Madame Filleul, who was in poor health en route from the spa town of Aachen to Paris. He relates in his memoirs that Bassompierre reminded him that he printed his works, which sold in large numbers throughout Germany; that he had already printed four large editions of his ‘Contes moraux’, and that he was printing the third edition of Bélisaire. Bassompierre argued that the privileges granted in France ‘do not extend here’ and the prince-bishopdom was a free country where ‘everything which is good’ is published. To identify one of these editions of ‘Bélisaire’, we used three types of sources: copies reproduced on the internet from national or university libraries, those sold by boosellers, and those coming from private collections. The typefaces of the books are compared. The frontispieces and the plates of two types of editions allow us to attribute them to Bassompierre as they are signed by the printer’s son, Dieudonné-François Bassompierre. We ask why one of these plates, which shows Antonine, Bélisaire’s wife, naked, is covered with black ink in the copy in the New York Public Library. The attribution to Bassompierre is also based on three types of ornaments collected in his official or counterfeited editions: woodcuts (see the database Môriåne on https://www.swedhs.org/); composite head- and tail-pieces made up of typographical ‘flowers’; ornamental capitals. The place occupied by the Bassompierre editions in the general table of counterfeited reproductions of Bélisaire is considered. We finally ask why the printer disguises the origin of his Bélisaire while he publishes at the same time with his address Marmontel’s ' ‘Nouveaux contes moraux’. A question remains open, due to the fact that some French counterfeiters borrowed Bassompierre’s address from him, complicating a book-market that will be discussed in other studies by the Groupe liégeois d’histoire du livre (Société wallonne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle).