De la bibliographie comme discipline ancillaire de l'histoire du livre. Le cas de Pierre Machuel

Pierre III Machuel (1722–1808) was described by R. Darnton as the “greatest bookseller of Rouen” in the eighteenth century. Darnton attributes to him “ten presses,” through which he “published many books himself,” while trading “with all the major houses of the Netherlands and northern France.” However, one is struck by the very limited and late production recorded under his name in the Catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. How, then, did he acquire the fortune attributed to him? Everything becomes clear if we consider that Machuel was in fact the sponsor of counterfeit editions produced by printers in Rouen and distributed for his benefit (see Droixhe https://hdl.handle.net/
2268/336307 [25.03.2026]). To reconstruct the development of this activity, one can highlight certain false leads suggested by the BnF catalogue, for example in the case of L’Anti-financier (see Droixhe https://hdl.handle.net/2268/27716 [25.03.2026]). The decision to reissue certain works is situated within a dual perspective: that of “external contextualization,” determined by fashion, the state of the text’s reproduction, and so on; and that of “internal contextualization,” linked to the publisher’s catalogue. This supports an argument in favor of a more quantitative history of the book, less dependent on the binding of a particular copy or the social status of its owner.