The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (63 page)

These papers, then, had none of the elegance and balance of the established press in other parts of Europe; nor the variety of content and subject matter. The Paris papers of the Revolution were devoted wholly and passionately to politics. Here they had the advantage of an almost inexhaustible supply of subject matter. With the National Assembly and its successor bodies in almost continuous session, the debates and speeches became the staple diet of many papers, sometimes excessively so. Those high-minded papers that attempted to provide verbatim reports of debates, down to the last cough and heckled interjection, found within a few months that this was a most unsatisfactory form of journalism, likely to leave their readers baffled rather than enlightened. But the commitment to accurate reporting was impressive. All the major events of the revolutionary years, even such brutal spasms as the prison massacres of September 1792, were fully and relatively accurately reported and interpreted.

Experiments in exhaustive factual reporting aside, it was with advocacy journalism that the French revolutionary newspapers found their characteristic voice. All the major figures of the revolutionary era, including Marat, Danton and Robespierre, were at some point journalists.
⁴⁴
Many, including Marat, Camille Desmoulins and George Hébert, established their political profile almost entirely through their writing. Marat was here the pivotal figure: his intemperate prose and open advocacy of violence created a darker palette for revolutionary rhetoric, foreshadowing the horrific violence of the Terror, when the Revolution consumed its own. Hébert, speaking as the witty and scabrous representative of the
sans-culottes
, the Père Duchêne, was also not for the weaker constitution, with his eager embrace of the cruelty of revolutionary justice. But most of all, revolutionary journalists needed to be able to turn out copy at speed, and to a deadline. ‘The necessity of writing every day,’ according to Benjamin Constant, ‘is the tomb of talent.’
⁴⁵
Many journalists would agree; the most successful and best-known newspapers of the
Revolution were generally weekly or thrice-weekly publications. For all that the most successful journalists of the Revolution maintained, sometimes over a sustained period, a remarkable output. Madame Roland acknowledged that the great success of her friend Jacques-Pierre Brissot was that he ‘worked very easily, and he composed a treatise the way someone else would copy a song’.
⁴⁶
This left little space for profound reflection, but that was hardly necessary: the potency of revolutionary journalism lay in the constant regurgitation of political advocacy. ‘How does it happen that this petty individual does so much harm to the public welfare,’ asked one of Brissot's Jacobin enemies in 1792. ‘It is because he has a newspaper …. It is because Brissot and his friends have all the trumpets of renown at their disposal.’
⁴⁷

The trumpets of renown could also be very lucrative. Demand for the news was enormous, and there was plenty of room for competing ventures. The most successful papers swiftly built a substantial readership. The
Journal du soir
employed five presses and sixty workmen, and needed two hundred street vendors to distribute its 10,000 daily copies.
⁴⁸
But it did not require an operation on this industrial scale to make money. A single press could crank out around 3,000 copies of a simple news pamphlet in a day, more than enough to make money: the break-even point for such publications was probably as low as four hundred copies per issue. The printers protected their investment by operating an informal price cartel. Although they would furiously denounce their competitors’ opinions, publishers never attempted to undercut rivals by lowering their price. Almost all set their subscription rates close to the customary rate for the pre-revolutionary imported newspapers, around 36
livres
a year. Given the extraordinary political events they record, this industry conservatism seems rather quaint; but it served the printers well, allowing them to ride out the political turbulence and compensating them for the undoubted risk of this form of publication. The only significant technical innovation introduced by the revolutionary papers was the provision, in the opinion papers, of short summaries of the contents or argument at the top of the first sheet, under the title. This was intended to assist the hawkers, crying out the papers on the streets.
⁴⁹

For the leading journalists of the Revolution, as well as their printers, the market for news also brought considerable financial rewards. Brissot was paid 6,000
livres
a year to edit his newspaper (the same salary as a minister in the government) and his was not a unique case.
⁵⁰
In truth, for the principal actors this was undoubtedly a subsidiary concern: journalism, for them, was a weapon of revolution, a means to shape fast-moving events. With influence came hazard. This was, to a quite unprecedented extent, a deadly trade. The Terror would claim the lives of at least one-sixth of the journalists writing in
the first full years of the Revolution (1790–1), including most of the major journalist-politicians. Marat was assassinated in his bath; Brissot fell with the Girondins and died with Danton. Hébert, whose Père Duchêne had gleefully recorded the last moments of so many victims of the guillotine, attracted a large crowd when he, in turn, went to his death. Camille Desmoulins was one of the last victims of Robespierre, the godfather of his young son.

It was in these most vicious months that the Revolution finally abandoned the vision of press freedom that had animated many of the early debates in the National Assembly.
⁵¹
Robespierre, a consistent advocate of the principle from 1789 to 1793, now recognised the error of his ways. On 16 June he invited the Committee of Public Safety to punish ‘treacherous journalists who are the most dangerous enemies of liberty’.
⁵²
Shortly before concluding his ascent to power, Robespierre had sketched an extraordinary political catechism. This demonstrates the extent to which he now saw unlicensed freedom as the heart of the discord that had engulfed the revolutionary movement:

In the early, hopeful days of revolution, Mirabeau and Brissot had believed that the press would unify public opinion. In this at least they were to be disappointed. The coup that toppled Robespierre was accompanied by stringent measures to rein in the press. Both the Directory and the subsequent Napoleonic regime recognised the corrosive danger of unbridled political criticism. Of the eighty Parisian printing houses chosen to be retained under the Napoleonic system of press control, only nineteen specialised in journals and periodicals.
⁵⁴

At the height of the revolutionary agitation the interested reader could choose between as many as one hundred serial publications. The scale of the transformation from the staid, controlled world of the
ancien régime
is
obvious, though this is not to say that the newspapers exercised all the influence attributed to them by the revolutionary leadership. Serial publication vied for influence with other traditional forms of persuasive literature, not least non-serial political pamphlets which were also published in huge numbers.
⁵⁵
While Paris was a highly literate society (with high levels of male and female literacy), the combined readership of newspapers probably never exceeded 3 million, out of a total national population of 28 million. Although provincial cities like Lyon and Toulouse also experienced a rapid expansion of a newly established provincial press, the disjunction between the political melting pot of the capital and provincial society was still stark.
⁵⁶
In Paris itself, much political activism was face to face and word of mouth, in the Jacobin clubs and, among delegates to the successive national assemblies, in private drawing rooms or on the floor of the debating chamber itself. Among the wider population most citizens, called to action regardless of social station, would have been roused to arms by speeches or conversation in impromptu street gatherings and taverns. The French Revolution was an extraordinarily fertile period for the composition of political song, of which the Marseillaise was only the most famous and enduring example.
⁵⁷

Periodicals, for all their eloquent advocacy of universal enfranchisement, still spoke in the voice of the educated elite. Marat's tirades of denunciation could be couched in a severely classical vocabulary. He made no attempt whatsoever to address the common people in their own patterns of speech; rather there was a conscious sense of distance. Several times a week his
Ami du peuple
would conclude with an ‘Address to the Citizenry’, where in the exasperated tones of an Old Testament prophet he offered a foreboding vision of the future that would unfold should his readers ignore his injunctions.

At least in these revolutionary papers the Paris readership would have a clear sense of the context of events discussed: there was far less of the baffling recitation of foreign diplomatic and military events that had made up the stock in trade of European newspapers for the past two centuries. And in the newspapers published under the title of the
Père Duchêne
we witness a radical and imaginative attempt to adopt the personality, and patterns of speech, of the less well-educated foot-soldiers of the revolutionary era. Père Duchêne was a lusty old salt; vulgar, forthright and not afraid to stand up to his social betters. Although Hébert was the best known and most successful, a dozen or more different writers at some point adopted this persona – an eloquent testimony to the difficulties faced by political activists who recognised the need to mobilise a mass movement but realised these citizens did not yet have the political vocabulary to articulate shared political goals. It is also a reminder that the market for revolutionary newspapers, though very large, was also highly competitive. New
ventures shamelessly poached the titles of successful rivals, or shifted their own clothes as the political wind turned. Many vanished as easily as they had appeared. At a time when many other European nations had established papers of many years standing (and some with centuries of continuous publication ahead of them), most revolutionary papers lasted three or four years at most.

With the perspective of hindsight, the revolutionary papers can be seen as a relatively brief interlude in France between two stable eras of controlled, cautious news-making. For all that they nevertheless represent a true milestone in the history of European journalism. The French Revolution was arguably the first European event to which a periodical press was truly indispensable. For the first time newspapers became, albeit fleetingly, the dominant medium of printed text, displacing their more aristocratic progenitor, the book, and even the characteristic carrier of political discussion, the pamphlet. France was in this respect ahead of its time. In other parts of Europe, for instance Ireland, the political pamphlet was still the dominant medium for political agitation – as it was indeed during the American Revolution.
⁵⁸
In France, and to a lesser extent in the other cases studied in this chapter, we see the first instances of a fundamental realignment in the European culture of news. From henceforth the periodical rhythms of regular news publication would come to characterise the public perceptions of the shape of current events. Domestic news was suddenly the most urgent order of business. The great age of the daily newspaper was at hand.

CHAPTER 17

How Samuel Sewall Read his Paper

O
N
24 April 1704 Samuel Sewall, citizen of Boston, travelled across the Charles River to Cambridge, carrying with him the first issue of John Campbell's weekly news-sheet,
The Boston News-Letter
. Sewall was on his way to present a copy to his friend Reverend Samuel Willard, Vice-President of Harvard College; Willard was delighted to receive it, and promptly shared it with the other Fellows. Samuel Sewall was at this point one of the leading citizens of the largest city in the American colonies. For the best part of fifty years he was at the heart of its commerce and government, named to the Governor's Council in 1691 and re-elected annually until his retirement in 1725. As a magistrate, father and neighbour, Sewall was a model citizen of this potent emerging society.