Malesherbes: Mémoires sur la librairie et sur la liberté de la presse

This work is a valuable addition to understanding issues of the press and censorship in France. Rodmell’s introduction emphasizes publication problems faced by writers in eighteenth- century France. This edition includes Malesherbes’s first and second Mémoire, to which Rodmell adds seventeen pages of notes. In his Mémoire, Malesherbes suggests changes to the book trade and condemns censorship’s arbitrary nature. Rodmell’s introductory analysis proposes that Malesherbes wanted to make censorship a tool for liberalism.