Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | This article revisits several unresolved bibliographical problems concerning eighteenth-century editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It draws on a commercial archive preserved in the Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime (France), consisting mainly of printers’ accounts sent to the Rouen bookseller Pierre Machuel between 1760 and 1782. These documents record in detail the printing of numerous books and provide information on formats, numbers of sheets, typographical practices, and production costs. Combining this archival evidence with methods of material bibliography (foliation, typographic features, ornaments), the article identifies several Rousseau editions produced for Machuel by Rouen printers, including editions of Julie, Émile, Du contrat social, and the Œuvres. This reconstruction sheds new light on Machuel’s role in the clandestine book trade and clarifies the conditions under which Rousseau’s works were produced and disseminated in the decades preceding the French Revolution. |
