Pierre Marteau

Pierre Marteau (French for Peter Hammer) was the imprint of a supposed publishing house. Allegedly located in Cologne from the 17th century onward, contemporaries were well-aware that such a publishing house never actually existed. Instead, the imprint was a fiction under which publishers and printers — in the Netherlands, France and Germany — evaded the open identification with books they published.

The first French-language Marteau books appeared in the 1660s and were immediately identified as not actually being published by a man named Pierre Marteau residing in Cologne. The name would have been that of a Frenchman who had opened his shop outside France yet close to the French border. Cologne's geographical location smelled of political freedom — Marteau would avoid France's censorship by publishing outside France; Cologne promised access to the European market and the chance to get a good deal of the production smuggled back into France where it would sell on the black market for ten times the price.

French publishers, political dissidents and Huguenots who had suffered political persecution under Louis XIV had opened their shops in Amsterdam and they would soon open new shops at The Hague, Rotterdam and Geneva. The Dutch Republic (a.k.a. the United Provinces) and Switzerland protected Europe's Protestants of the reformed churches, the minority among the three European confessions. These were the privileged countries French refugees tended to go.

Germany, a political entity of hundreds of little territories, half of them "Orthodox" Lutheran Protestant half of them Catholic, which all together hardly ever united under the rule of the Roman Catholic Emperor, was only a third option. 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. Germany was a choice with disadvantages. Cologne, however, was of all the options Germany granted the worst, which was to become apparent at the beginning of the 18th century when most of Germany's territories joined the Dutch Republic and Great Britain against France in the Great Alliance of the War of the Spanish Succession. The two Wittelsbach-ruled countries — Cologne and Bavaria — were the only important western European territories that supported Louis XIV.

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Wikipedia