The times, they are unchanging

robertdarnton.org/bio

Robert "Darnton saw that the Enlightenment, viewed from the ground-level perspective of the S[ociété ]T[ypographique de ]N[euchâtel, 'one of the Enlightenment's most important publishing houses',] looked very different from the version of the subject then popular in universities.  In the works of highly regarded scholars like Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was in its essence a profound revolution of the mind that liberated critical reason from the shackles of religion and rationalist philosophy.  A reader properly began, and sometimes concluded, its study by following Rousseau and Kant, Hume and Montesquieu along the deepest currents of their thought.  But this 'Enlightenment' was to a large extent a retrospective invention that took the works out of the social settings in which they originally circulated.
     "The STN sold 'philosophical books,' but by 'philosophical' it meant something very different from what we mean today.  One of its catalogs indiscriminately included, under this heading, Rousseau's Social Contract, slander-filled attacks against King Louis XV, and explicit pornography.  In another early article, Darnton drew from this fact an eloquent conclusion:  'A regime that classified its most advanced philosophy with its most debased pornography was a regime that sapped itself, that dug its own underground and that encouraged philosophy to degenerate into libelle.'  Whatever the High Enlightenment may have done to slowly undermine the church and state, the works of slander and pornography savagely scraped away at the reputation and legitimacy of the actual men and women who constituted France's ruling elites."

     David A. Bell, "From readers to revolutionaries," The New York review of books 66, no. 11 (June 27, 2019):  66 (66-67).