The Business of Go-Betweens. Cultural transfers and the commercial public sphere between France and Spain (1770-1790).

This article takes up the canonic subject of cultural transfers between France and Spain in the eighteenth century from the point of view of five “go-betweens”, learned and literate Spaniards, who travelled to Paris in the last two decades of the Ancien Régime to take part in its intellectual life, and who narrated it to their Spanish correspondents. Instead of focusing on the ideas and techniques they discovered, the article studies the material conditions of their participation in the public scholarly sphere. To do so, it relies on William Sewell’s recent work on capitalism and civic equality in eighteenth-century France, which highlights the double dynamic of commercialization and democratization at work in the public scholarly sphere at the end of the 18^th century. It is thus shown that while these travelers were placed in a relatively peripheral position, away from the most prestigious scholarly institutions, they were well integrated into new paid venues of intellectual exchange (such as public courses or “museums”) to which they could access as consumers, irrespective of their social identity. However, the commercial nature of these spaces fuelled doubts about their quality and the intellectual value of the books and news they send to Spain. These doubts eventually invite us to reconsider the reasons for their interest in French culture. Rather than seeing them as brokers of emancipatory ideas and new knowledge, we can characterize them as transnational actors of the Enlightenment, driven by an ambivalent force, curiosity, which feeds on market mechanisms but whose legitimacy remains fragile.