Weak States and Hard Censorship

This article explores why states with a weak enforcement capacity resort to tough censorship. Drawing on the authority structure in premodern Europe, I argue that threats to political legitimacy inform the degree of censorship. In this period the church-state relations constituted the foundation of legitimacy, which gave the ruler the motive to censor the writings critical of this institution. To examine this argument, I compile a new data set comprised of more than 1,400 banned books distributed in eighteenth-century France. Using nearly 1,700 times of confiscation events as my outcome, I assess whether religion-related attributes easily found on the book cover, such as imprint and title, drive confiscation. The statistical analysis indicates that religion is negatively linked to confiscations. Where the linkage is found, it is conditional on the timing of publication after 1763. My analysis suggests when and how censorship might occur given the tools of control states have.