The ARTFL Project

La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique was a cultural newsletter distributed between 1753 and 1790. Written and produced most famously by Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm, the newsletter also included contributions from Denis Diderot and Madame d’Épinay. Grimm wrote the newsletter on a biweekly basis until 1773, when he ceded responsibility for its contents to his successor, Jacques-Henri Meister. The newsletter, copied by hand outside of France in order to avoid French censorship, was confidential, and Grimm’s very small subscriber base included a number of European nobles, among them Catherine the Great of Russia.

Grimm’s newsletter gives readers a window on a broad range of Parisian cultural affairs and includes occassionally biting criticism of contemporary literature, art, and theater that likely would not have seen publication in a more prominent journal. The Correspondance littéraire was, notably, where Diderot first published his essays of art criticism, the Salons.

This digital edition is based on the 16-volume edition of the Correspondance littéraire edited by Taschereau and Chaudé and published by Furne in 1829. All credit for page image scanning and OCR text generation goes to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. We have carried out an automatic TEI conversion of the BnF’s .txt files in order to add a minimal level of structure to the text and identify plausible section headings. While the quality of the OCR text is extremely high, the usual caveats apply: characters may have been misidentified and the original structure of the documents may not have been respected. We suggest searching the text with “Word similarity search” enabled.

As mentioned above, we have attempted to identify document divisions automatically. These divisions, generally marked by the presence of a dateline, may not account for every section demarcated in the original text. Additionally, we were not able to identify textual footnotes, many of which are printed over multiple pages. Finally, while we are able to provide links from the digital text to the page images, we are not able to provide the printed page numbers. Our “page image numbers” correspond to the page numbers of the digital editions produced by the BnF. Users seeking a modern critical edition of the text should refer to the project currently undertaken at the Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle.