In prerevolutionary, eighteenth-century France, the Low Enlightenment of popular media – anti-monarchist essays, materialist philosophical treatises, social and cultural criticism, religious satire, utopian visions, pornographic novels – produced works that were not unequivocally progressive or necessarily skillful masterpieces.2 Their authors – “the men who wrote the bestsellers of prerevolutionary France, yet … have disappeared from literary history”3 – have been described as the Rousseaus du ruisseau (Rousseaus of the gutter).4 Low Enlightenment works, though at times smutty or libelous, were mass consumed and often explicitly or implicitly spread worthy ideals.5 Robert Darnton states, “The men of Grub Street [Low Enlightenment authors] believed in the message of the philosophes.”6