Pierre Marteau

Some of the more liberal places like Hamburg (Altona harboured sectarians and clandestine bookshops) and the university cities Halle, Leipzig and Jena offered freedoms to critical intellectuals, yet only a few states like Brandenburg-Prussia openly sympathised with the reformed branch of Protestantism to which France's Huguenots belonged.

Unlike the usual obvious pseudonyms like "Jacques le Sincere", the name "Pierre Marteau" sounded real.

Unlike other pseudonyms which appeared on only one title page, Marteau was to have a career that could be made only by a good joke and a complete lack of intellectual property rights.

Only certain books attracted the imprint: French yet anti-French political satire, pirated editions, sexually explicit titles.

Whilst France protected the deposed Stuart Pretender, William was particularly keen to move both the Netherlands and his newly acquired Britain into an anti-French alliance on Germany's behalf — Louis XIV had just attacked the Palatinate; the Nine Years' War began —, the first phase of the Great Alliance, a period German intellectuals would soon praise as the beginning of a thoroughly European age.

All of a sudden, one could be a German patriot and openly embrace French culture — if only one stressed the fact that France's intellectuals were by now mostly critical of their own country's political repression and ambition.

Marteau was the publisher of the Great Alliance and the new modern Europe fighting France, the hegemonic power striving for a "universal monarchy" over all its neighbours.

The beginning of the Great Alliance in 1689, its renewal on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701, its end in a Tory victory in London 1709/10 and the succeeding peace negotiations at Utrecht, kept Marteau's political authors busy.

The peculiar Memoires pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe appeared at one of Marteau's rivals in Cologne: Jacques le Pacifique published their first volume in 1712 (Immanuel Kant would refer to the outline of a union of European states at the end of the century in his famous treatise on a permanent world peace).

Political novels like La Guerre d'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707) were extremely influential — the book mixed fact and fiction, sections of newspaper history with personal adventures of its hero, a virtual James Bond in the services of Louis XIV.

The mixing of fact and fiction, information and entertainment, intellectual theft and scandal — the only possible answer to the censorship laws flourishing all over Europe — marked the Marteau production between 1660 and 1721.

Marteau's German production became pro-German and potentially anti-French, finding its peaks in the years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.