When I was first pulling together the world of the Unari Empire, one of the character ideas I had was that of an Imperial censor. That character would kind of pop up throughout the story, struggling to hold on as the Empire shattered around them, slowly losing their will to do the job that had defined them. I shelved that particular idea since I didn’t have a good handle on what the day-to-day life of a censor looked like.

If only I’d read Robert Darnton’s Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature back then I might have given it a go.

Darnton explores the nitty gritty of how censors actually did their jobs during three historical periods – pre-Revolutionary France, India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under British rule, and East Germany right around the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a dry work, without a lot of compelling through lines for casual readers, but it does offer some fascinating insights into what it means to be a “censor.”

Primarily, what censors did (or what these censors did) on a daily basis wasn’t squelch explicitly political speech aimed at criticizing the regime for which they worked. In a lot of ways they worked as hyper-powerful literary gatekeepers, helping to shape literature by acting as a kind of quality control. The French censors, many of whom were writers themselves, wanted to ensure the quality of French literature. The British censors in India were hopeful they could guide the Indians into writing great literature (“great” here meaning “what British thinkers consider great,” of course). The East Germans helped literary works get trimmed and massaged to reach an audience.

To an extent, in crafting these portraits, Darnton is trying to humanize the censors. They weren’t faceless thugs grinding ideas into the dirt under their bootheels – they were just people doing a job in which they believed, at least most of the time. This isn’t to say that Darnton comes across as a fan of censorship (he emphatically doesn’t), but it does create a more nuanced picture of what they do most of the time.

Of course, what they were doing all the time was still censoring writers (Darnton focuses almost exclusively on books, with some theater stuff thrown in), even if most of the time their motives were more benign than we might expect. The French censors Darnton talks about who squelched a bawdy insider narrative of life at Versailles might have thought it was low brow trash, but they were also aware that it made fun of the royal court and you can’t have that. That dynamic is even more clear with the British, who developed a real knack for decoding incipient strains of Indian nationalism and independence movements in modern retellings of ancient myths (not for nothing, but if you see rebellion in every work you read, maybe that’s saying something about you?). The East Germans, of course, made no bones that they were making sure new books were ideologically appropriate, regardless of the genre.

One interesting dynamic that plays out across all three eras is that every regime at least pays lip service to the importance of free speech. That is, none of the regimes saw their restriction of particular kinds of speech as any kind of violation. Hell, the East German censors (Darnton interviews two) don’t even think they engaged in censorship! This is true wherever you are, including the United States. The “freedom of speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment is  term of legal art that excludes things like libel and obscenity. The grey areas of those definitions are where the rubber meets the road.

Given that these censors didn’t see their work as being conflict with a commitment to free speech, it’s not surprising that they tended to find objectionable material wherever they looked for it. If Hitchens was right that religion poisons everything then censorship does, too. There is no book or literary work so minor that it can’t be subversive or just not up to quality if you look at it from the right angle.

Which is perhaps the most important takeaway from Darnton’s work. Any censorship scheme is going to be carried out by human beings (or AI programmed by human beings, I suppose). Those human beings will come from different backgrounds, with different philosophies, shaped by whatever flavor of regime is in charge at the time. If you think there’s some kind of speech that should be obviously off limits – say, “hate speech” – it’s worth considering who’s going to decide what that is and what it isn’t. Chances are, they aren’t going to get it “right” all the time (but they’ll think they are).

Which is why I might come back to the idea of using a censor as a character in a story sometime. There’s more going on there than I suspected, even if it’s perhaps not as complicated as the person doing the censoring might want it to be.