Robert Darnton has spent many years nudging us toward an understanding of this reality. Most recently he's instructed us that 18th-century French publishing had a well-known category, libelles, which covered many books that delighted newly literate readers by undermining the authority of the monarchy and the Church.
Libelles helped create the demand for liberty. They were a major factor in the monarchy's collapse. On shaky moral grounds, they founded French press freedom.
In the 18th century, libel was a French industry. The books Darnton explores sometimes told the truth and sometimes spread vicious lies. Still, for decades they provided the only available information on the great public figures of France. Newspapers came late to France, much later than to Germany and Britain, because the monarchy didn't allow them. Paris got its first daily in 1777; Leipzig had one in 1660.
French education was over-producing frustrated writers. To be published lawfully in France a book had to be scrutinized in advance by a team of 200 censors in a government department. (Being French, they objected to failures of style as well as offences against the regime.)
French publishers escaped censorship by moving to foreign cities and smuggling home their rebellious books. London became a busy centre of French writing and publishing, much of it defamatory.
Unsurprisingly, the favourite victim of libellers was Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. She was a foreigner from a traditional enemy, Austria, therefore a suspect in any international plot. She was a spendthrift and a gambler, therefore a burden on the royal treasury. Early in her marriage the king was said to be impotent; the libellers claimed she looked everywhere else for sexual satisfaction.
She received, as Darnton says, far more than her share of calumny: "The avalanche of defamation that overwhelmed her between 1789 and her execution on October 16, 1793, has no parallel in history." In her last years she was the subject of about 150 books, some of them excoriating her "in language so extreme as to defy belief."
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