"Laissez écrire". The Call for a Free Trade of Ideas in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes: a Long Enlightenment Belief.

RAYNAL, abbe (Guillaume-Thomas-Francois), 1713-1796; DIDEROT, Denis, 1713-1784

According to Luc Boltanski, the belief in a "natural mechanism" that allows the selection between dangerous and reasonable opinions is a constiment part of liberalism ideology. This article proposes an enquiry on the intellectual origins of this representation of freedom of speech. It focuses on "laissez écrire" ("Let them write"), a formula, visibly inspired by Gournay's "laissez faire", created by Diderot for the third edition (1780) of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. "Laissez écrire" became, in the late eighteenth century France, a political slogan for an unlimited freedom of the press and speech. The goal of our study is double: to put this claim in the context of transformations of French censorship system; to historicize the liberal dogma of "the marketplace of ideas". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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