| Archives Nationales and Hachette and Company's private archives. The former provided government records including documents on censorship, colportage, public works, and education; railroad company records including correspondence and contracts for the railroad bookstores; and some accounting and inventory data for the network. The latter furnished contracts with railroads, authors, other publishers, and other booksellers; correspondence; inventory lists; annual reports for the network containing data on sales and operating expenses as well as detailed narratives on the network's operation; newsletters; advertisements and prospectuses for various publications; and personal memoirs.;The Bibliotheque des Chemins de Fer transformed Hachette and Company from an educational publisher to a diversified firm engaged in the production and distribution of all types of literature and periodicals. The railroad bookstores thus helped modernize French publishing by dramatically increasing the number of retail book outlets in France and encouraging trends in the development of inexpensive books and newspapers. The network was also the first publishing enterprise to employ women on a large scale. Finally, the railroad bookstores enabled the Company to decisively shape one sector of the public sphere. The Company's practice of censorship may have limited the flow of rational-critical debate in the public sphere, yet its commitment to selling liberal newspapers during the early Third Republic and especially during the crucial Seize-mai crisis of 1877 was instrumental to the electoral success of liberal politicians and helped stabilize the fragile regime. The history of the railroad bookstore network reveals that, in practice, the nature of the public sphere in nineteenth-century France was profoundly affected by power relations and market forces. |
