Censorship in the Ancien Régime

Under the French Ancien Régime, royal censorship was the task of censors appointed by the chancellor to judge the editorial legitimacy of a manuscript and to authorize its publication by an approval they signed. At the same time, a privilege in the form of letters patent granted in the King's Council, most often to the bookseller, guaranteed not the content, but the property of the publication against the counterfeiters.

Source: Wikipedia — Censorship in the Ancien Régime (CC BY-SA 4.0)