The ERC Consolidator Grant "Pamphlets and Patrons. How Courtiers Shaped the Public Sphere in Ancien Regime France" (PI: Damien Tricoire, Universität Trier), awarded in the 2020 call, launched a database. The database allows to identify actors based on their links with a legal profession (e.g. avocat, procureur), and much more.
Description:
Pamphlets and Patrons: How Courtiers shaped the Public Sphere in Ancien Régime France
Welcome to the Pamphlets and Patrons (PaPa) database! This database was created as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) (2021–2026), carried out at the Department of History of the University of Trier under the direction of Damien Tricoire. We provide data on French intellectual and political elites as well as on eighteenth-century prints.
The project explores how the public sphere, and particularly unauthorised political literature, was shaped by interdependencies and collaborations between aristocrats, authorities, authors and printers in the eighteenth century. It focuses on influential networks, in particular on the patron-client relationships linking members of the court nobility with writers.
Collaboration with the MPCE project (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment)
The PaPa team collaborated intensively with Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University, Australia) and his MPCE project (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment).
This collaboration allowed the PaPa team to build upon the extensive data assembled by Simon Burrows and his team over nearly two decades. As a result, the database contains a large amount of information on printers, booksellers, translators, editors, and authors.
It also includes extensive data on books and their editions, such as information on print runs, inspections, confiscations, licensing applications and decisions, and the type of authorisation granted for publication.
Through this cooperation, Simon Burrows’ database, originally designed to measure the diffusion of prints by examining the book trade and evidence of book circulation created by policing institutions, now also includes data related to networks that influenced print culture. We have placed a special emphasis on entering data about relationships between persons, that is kinship, friendship, patronage, membership in societies, among others.
For a complete list of the sources used by the PaPa database, please consult the Sources section of this website.
For a full list of publications produced by the PaPa project, please see the Publications page of the project website.
For more information about the MPCE (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment) project, please consult Simon Burrows’ project project website.
How to use this database
Persons
You can explore individuals involved in print production, diffusion, and policing, as well as connected with the French court.
Users may browse:
individual persons or groups of persons (societies)
professional groups or economic sectors
types of occupations
Network visualisation tools allow users to explore connections between actors within the court and the world of print. You may combine the networks of different persons.
Works (books and editions)
Users can browse printed works:
by title
by genre
by author
by editor, translator, or other contributors
Book Policy and Policing
The database records actions taken regarding printed works and editions, including:
actions by printers or booksellers (such as print runs or applications for licenses)
actions by French authorities (such as inspections, confiscations and licensing decisions
Patronage and Protection
Users can explore how influential individuals gave resources (e. g. money) to writers, and how they recommended the authors to the authorities.
How to cite this database
Please use the following citation form to quote the database:
Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Pamphlets and Patrons database, 2026, https://heurist.huma-num.fr/MPCE_Mapping_Print_Charting_Enlightenment/web/220687?ver=2, [date accessed].
License
Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial International 4.0 Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Contributors
Such a work would not have been possible without the work of many researchers and research assistants.
We are grateful to the work done by Simon Burrows and his team from Leeds University and then in Western Sydney University, who added data for almost two decades. We are especially thankful to Hamish Graham, who entered data regarding censors as well as permissions tacites.
We would like to aknowledge the work done by researchers and research assistants on the Pamhlets and Patrons database:
- Pamphlets and Patrons team: Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Miranda Kam
- Research assistants who gathered data in the Archives nationales (Paris): Benjamin Alvarez Araujo, Juliette Eyméoud and Julie Özcan
- Student research assistants from the University of Trier who entered data into Heurist: Cassandra Dostert, Ivo Köth, Nils Rath, Luke Ströhla, Tom Strauch, Sarah Wieland, Felix Wójcik and Ian Wolff
We would like to acknowledge the work done by the Heurist team, who helped us in the conception of the database (especially Ian Johnson and Michael Falk), as well as the team members who helped us to conceive the website of our database (especially Ian Johnson and Brandon McKay).
About Heurist
Heurist is a free, flexible, open-source (on gitHub) data management application and website builder specifically designed for researchers in the Humanities. It was developed at the University of Sydney from 2005 - 2015, and since then as a non-profit project, under the direction of Dr Ian Johnson. Its design has been informed by the needs of hundreds of research projects. It is now maintained by the non-profit association , based in Paris.
Heurist is available as free, non-commercial web services available to researchers worldwide. Please visit HeuristNetwork.org to find a service in your region.
Heurist allows researchers to design, build, analyse, visualise, publish (via the web) and archive their own databases without coding or technical support, including the automatic generation of a 'vanilla' website which can be used as-is or customised extensively to fit a specific graphic design. Websites are edited through the Heurist website editor, stored as an integral part of the database and generated directly by the Heurist software. This allows for reliability and sustainability, and for optimal interaction with the data including images, and the use of Heurist's interface components (widgets such as facet searches, result lists, maps, timelines, custom reports and network diagrams) directly in the website.
The development team provides support to all Heurist users, including free email support and bug fixing for unfunded projects and consultancy services for database modelling, database construction, conversion of existing databases and websites, code development, website construction and training. Heurist is entirely non-profit; consultancy work provides the funding required to run the project.
See database here: Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Pamphlets and Patrons database, 2026, https://heurist.huma-num.fr/MPCE_Mapping_Print_Charting_Enlightenment/web/220687?ver=2.
More information on the project on its website.
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