Early French and German Defenses of Freedom of the Press: Elie Luzac's Essay on Freedom of Expression (1749) and Carl Friedrich Bahrdt's On Fredom of the Press and its Limits (1787) in English Translation

While during the Reformation period, and then again during the English Civil Wars, freedom of the press was de facto in existence because the publishing of newspapers, libels and books could not be controlled efficiently by the authorities, theories both about freedom of expression and about freedom of the press developed only later. John Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, was one of the first writings that claimed freedom of the press within England. Yet, it has to be noted that Milton excepted Catholics and atheists from the freedom of the press. While, thus, in the seventeenth century, claims for freedom of the press still defined the latter as a privilege to certain religious or political groups, eighteenth-century authors enlarged the spectrum of people who should be able to take advantage of the absence of rigid censorship. Both the third-generation Huguenot immigrant Elie Luzac, publisher of the Gazette de Leyde, and the German theologian Carl Friedrich Bahrdt went further than Milton and other predecessors. John Christian Laursen’s and Johan van der Zande’s volume presents translations of Elie Luzac’s Essai sur la liberté de produire ses sentiments, first published in the Netherlands in 1749, and Carl Friedrich Bahrdt’s Über Pressefreyheit und deren Gränzen: Zur Beherzigung für Regenten, Censoren und Schriftsteller, first published in Germany in 1787.

The volume offers a brief introduction by the editors sketching the history of freedom of the press from the 1450s up to the eighteenth century. Elie Luzac’s essay in its English translation (by John Paul McDonald of UNC—Asheville) is introduced by Wyger R.E. Velema (University of Amsterdam). Velema’s introduction to Luzac’s defense of freedom of expression is an excellent overview of the actual existence of censorship within the Dutch Republic and the Dutch publishing industry’s efforts to enlarge freedom of expression in the course of the eighteenth century. The English translation of Bahrdt’s essay, following an introduction to Bahrdt’s work by Laursen and van der Zande, is based on the partial English translation in James Schmidt (ed.) What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley 1996, 97-113), which for this volume has been substantially revised and completed by the two editors.

Luzac and Bahrdt defended the “freedom of the press as a human right within the framework of a system of natural law” (13), a right excluding the “rabble” (6) but including all scholars, whether Protestants, Catholics, radicals or even atheists. Elie Luzac ran into difficulties with censorship in 1747 when he published Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Homme machine. Even though he strongly opposed La Mettrie’s theories, Luzac was convinced that he had to publish this oeuvre as “true religion (…) was immune to attempts to undermine it by argument” and because “any attempt to suppress anti-religious arguments would in fact strengthen the position of the unbelief” (15). The Walloon Consistory of Leiden, opposing this argument, tried to force Luzac to prevent any further circulation of La Mettrie’s oeuvre with the effect that Luzac strengthened his argument—already expressed in the introduction to L’Homme machine—in his Essai sur la liberté de produire ses sentiments.

Carl Friedrich Bahrdt’s difficulties with Prussian censorship made him become a martyr. Imprisoned for a year because of his Edict of Religion: A Comedy, published in 1788, he died in 1792. Yet, even though qualified to be a cynic, “a radical, a Jacobin and indeed sometimes a socialist” (104-105), Bahrdt’s ideas on freedom of expression and freedom of the press are—as much as Luzac’s—deeply rooted in eighteenth-century convictions that the right to freedom of the press was a right of humanity but that this right had to be limited if it had negative impacts on the stability of state and society.

Laursen and van der Zande not only make Luzac’s and Bahrdt’s essays available to a public that reads English rather than French or German, but emphasize that discussions of freedom of expression and freedom of the press are often too Anglo-centric. In other words, these discussions frequently ignore the fact that, in many European countries, these freedoms were already being debated decades before freedom of expression was declared in Denmark in 1770, in the Virginia Declaration of 1776, in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1792. Luzac’s and Bahrdt’s essays thus represent two important non-English eighteenth-century writings (out of many) that claimed freedom of expression and freedom of the press on the European Continent. The volume may thus re-animate the discussion about the emergence of freedom of expression and freedom of the press and will contribute to a less national and more cross-cultural and global approach to the history of ideas.