| Further information on refused prints The Record of Prints and Photographs which were Refused Authorization for Publication in France. Prepared for the Image of France 1793-1880 -- at ARTFL. |
| The
censorship of publishing has occurred in the history of every nation.. The
following presentation concerns a particular episode in which French legislators
sought to control the dissemination of prints and photographs by the intrusion
of a procedure of official authorization.
Legislation of 1820, renewed in 1822, 1835 and 1852, required the review and specific approval by the government of every newly created print and photograph prior to its distribution to the French public (see this link for a calendar of related laws). Briefly suspended following the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the requirement of apriori censorship was not definitively abolished until the Loi sur la liberté de la presse of 29 July 1881. The Bureau de l’Imprimerie et de la Librairie administered the procedure alongside the requirement of legal deposit, when copies of new editions of all publications were filed with the government. All kinds of prints and photographs -- textual illustrations as well as single sheets --were subject to apriori approval. There was a considerable penalty for publication without approval; and a notable, incomplete, rarely consulted documentation of the prints and photographs which were refused authorization survives among the bureau’s papers at the Archives nationales de France in Paris. The links from this page are for transcriptions of these listings which were made for the Image of France project by Gervaise Brouwers and Mehdi Korchane during 2005-2006. Performed directly from the surviving registers for refused prints (ANF F* 18 VI 48 and F* 18 VI 133, see this link for further information), they are intended to serve in the place of access to the registers themselves, which are in poor condition and available in one instance only in the form of a scarcely legible microfilm. The transcriptions were made possible by the special assistance of conservateurs of the Section du dix-neuvième Siècle of the Archives nationales and, in particular, with the encouragement of Patrick Laharie, to whose kind memory this presentation is dedicated. The work was funded by a grant of the Andrew Mellon Foundation to Binghamton University. George McKee |
F*18 VI 48 1834
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