An act of bad taste was more than a faux pas to French philosophers of the Enlightenment. To Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and others, bad taste in the arts could be a sign of the decline of a civilization. These intellectuals, faced with the potential chaos of an expanding literary market, created seals of disapproval in order to shape the literary and cultural heritage of France in their image. In "The Bad Taste of Others" Jennifer Tsien examines the power of ridicule and exclusion to shape the period's aesthetics.

Tsien reveals how the philosophes consecrated themselves as the...