To Promote the Publication of Catholic Counter-Reformation Literature, Kings Granted Copyrights (Privilèges), Cementing Relations between Monarchs and Printers

In the early years of the Reformation Calvinism spread quickly through France, encouraging some printers to set up in provincial towns either to meet the new demand or to compensate for the shortages of imported books provoked by the religious wars that developed. The Reformation also inspired an enormous Catholic publishing response that was to last for the next two centuries. In order to offset the influence of Calvin, Catholic apologists wrote many devotional works, all of which required printing in large quantities. In their desire to promote the publication of Catholic Counter Reformation literature, kings granted copyrights (privilèges), which helped cement relations between monarchs and printers.

The regulation of printing became an important part of the campaign for control. The Affair of the Placards—the simultaneous publication, on 17 October 1534, of broadsheets against the Catholic Eucharist in Paris and other French towns—constituted a turning point in the persecution of Protestantism in France by firmly linking heresy and sedition in the minds of royal officials. At least twelve men were arrested and convicted in this affair, and nine were burned at the stake. Henceforth, printers were increasingly persecuted. The celebrated Lyonnais scholar-printer Étienne Dolet was sentenced by the Parlement of Paris to be burned at the stake for blasphemy, sedition, and the selling of banned books. A man of fiery and volatile personality who had been arrested previously for trading in banned books, Dolet was hanged as a repeat offender and then burned. Dolet, not a Calvinist but a classically trained scholar and an accomplished humanist, was one of those scholar printers of the era who participated in the cosmopolitan republic of letters created by the advent of print. His persecution underlines how the Reformation made governments focus on shielding the faithful from corrupting influences.

--Jane McLeod, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France, The Penn State Series in the History of the Book (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 23-24.