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The term "Grub Street" refers to a street in London, England where a high number of struggling writers lived in the 18th century. Eventually, the term became a metonym for hack writers. Although the term was used in the 18th century to refer to English hacks, in the 20th century the term was expanded to refer to hack writers in other parts of Europe. This article focuses on Grub Street in France. ==Hacks== Robert Darnton's ''The Literary Underground of the Old Regime'' offers the most complete analysis of French hack writers. According to Darnton, hacks constitute a group of struggling writers (a “literary proletariat”) who cobbled together a living by engaging in a range of practices: underground journalism, pamphlet-writing, education, spying on other intellectuals for the police, etc. They were generally excluded from the prestigious institutions of the day (namely, the academies) because of their low social position within the Old Regime. These individuals lived difficult lives and could not escape the psychology of failure that surrounded them. This alienation bred an active hatred of the hierarchies of the Old Regime, and fueled the radicalism of the French Revolution (since many hacks wound up in power after 1789).〔Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature," in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 1-40〕 The common French word for hack literature is "libelle," and a hack writer is a "libelliste." Examples of French hacks include Pidansat de Mairobert, Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Jean-Paul Marat, and Nicolas-Joseph-Florent Gilbert. Hacks typically wrote radical, salacious, or subversive literature, such as plays, novels, and pamphlets about controversial subjects. This literature (called libelles) constituted a large portion of the works that circulated in the illegal book trade.〔Robert Darnton, "A Clandestine Bookseller in the Provinces," in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 122-147〕 Political libel was a popular mode of writing in order to directly attack those in power. They charged the monarchy with being morally corrupt, incompetent, and impotent. During the High Enlightenment, hacks in France shared with hacks in England a difficult existence. The hacks in England were satirized by Alexander Pope in ''The Dunciad'' and William Hogarth in paintings that depicted the poor and deplorable state of the hack writer. In France, Voltaire satirized the literary underground, calling them below the level of prostitutes. He sought to warn the youth away from the hack lifestyle. Both Voltaire and Diderot made the hack writer into an object of ridicule, an intellectual Pantaloon, and then cast their enemies into this role. These views reflected the wider views of the established ''philosophes'' (French for philosophers) in this period. The deaths of the most famous ''philosophes'' in the 1770s and 1780s signaled the end of the High Enlightenment. A new, more radical, less established generation of philosophers emerged in this period, filling the void in public discourse left by the ''philosophes''. Darnton also argues that hacks were mainly individuals who could not make it as ''philosophes'' and thus could only “sustain their miserable lives by doing whatever odd jobs fell their way.” 〔Robert Darnton, "A Pamphleteer on the Run," in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 109〕 Darnton states that most hacks lived in general obscurity, making it relatively difficult to conduct research on them. Since these hacks often held radical ideas, they were frequently placed under surveillance by the police, who spied on them at cafes. Many became spies to avoid jail time or earn extra money. Hacks generally did any kind of work for hire whether that be the smuggling and selling of illegal books or compiling anthologies. Darnton states that ''libelles'' tended to communicate a revolutionary point of view that showed social rot was consuming French society, eating its way downward from the top.〔Robert Darnton, "Reading, Writing, and Publishing," in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 167-208.〕 Grub Street hacks tended to advocate for a democratic social contract—that is, the idea of popular sovereignty and social revolution. This was a radical ideology in divine right France. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Grub Street in France」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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