Historians of censorship have rarely attempted to investigate the actual impact of the French and Roman institutions of censorship on a given set of existing libraries. They have tended to concentrate on records of special razzie and inquisitorial police seizures of forbidden books from printers or on the deliberations and decisions of the Congregation of the Index, the Inquisition, or the French censorship institutions. A comparison of the French libraries in the Levant and in India with the lists of censored books reveals some influence of censorship, in that almost all of them tend to betray a conservative character—in India obviously and on average more conservative than the British. Little or no influence of Jansenism, Bayle, or Voltaire, to say nothing of more radical forms of the Enlightenment, can be discerned. Almost none of Darnton’s famous forbidden bestsellers can be found in the Levant or French India. On the other hand, some representatives of Tacitism, of the polite form of training in “dissimulation and espionage” or their Romanesque narrative equivalents, and even some novels and rare Jansenist books, were not absent in Patras or Puducherry, titles by Courtilz de Sandras, Pascal, Bayle, Grotius, translations from English (Richardson)—all of them far from “radical.” In late-eighteenth-century French India, the situation was slightly more open than in the Mediterranean. All in all, there is some “tacit” influence of censorship—more through the self-censorship of select book owners than through active acts of confiscation, of which there is no trace in the sources. In fact, many French Levantine merchants, and even more so many members of the Brittany-centered Compagnie des Indes, were probably themselves of quite conservative royalist bent, so there was little need of active censorship.