The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  This was a political crisis fought out on the streets and in print: but the relevant print medium was the political pamphlet rather than the newspapers. There were several reasons for this, and this case study, like those above, serves as a sobering verdict on the early newspapers’ real impact on public affairs. Firstly, fifty years after their first introduction, newspapers were still not geared to the production of domestic news. This was partly due to the heavy weight of tradition with its roots in the manuscript news service, but this was not always the case: the news-sheets re-established in England in the 1640s played a noisy and partisan role in the political debates of the Civil War and Interregnum. The real reasons newspapers played such a modest role in domestic political debate on the Continent were largely structural. The fixity of form gave little flexibility to respond adequately to great events. The unvarying sequence of reports from abroad left little room for commentary. This suited both producers and regulating authorities for a number of reasons. Foreign news provided sufficient copy to satisfy their customers and fill their pages. It also minimised risk. The publishers of newspapers were naturally inclined to caution and stylistic conservatism, partly because those in authority were their best customers, partly because any overbold diversion into commentary could lead to retribution. The publisher of a serial had always to think of the next number. He could be sure his text would be carefully read, given the nature of the client base. If he caused offence, he was a sitting target. The only safe strategy was a position of strict political neutrality. That way, when the storm abated, the newsman hoped still to be cranking out his weekly digest, safe from the fear of retribution.

  For all of these reasons a pamphleteer could be far more adventurous than a newspaper proprietor. A pamphleteer could take risks, could be funny, abusive and outspoken, and cash in on the public mood. If things changed – if he had misread the political runes or boldly swum against the tide – he could move on. Many political pamphlets were in any case published anonymously, whereas a newspaper, frequently sold out of the printer's shop, had to be published with an address, so that potential purchasers could find it and subscribers knew where to send their payments.

  By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, newspapers had established an important role in the political education of a diverse readership. But they were always likely to be overwhelmed by truly extraordinary events, such as those in the Dutch Republic in 1672. Quick-moving events could not necessarily be accommodated by the fixed weekly schedule of publication, and raised passions that demanded wordy advocacy, of the sort that could not easily fit within the confines of a subscription news-sheet. In much the same way the weekly news-sheets played little part in the Fronde, the enormous upheaval of revolt and political protest that swept away the press regime constructed by Richelieu, and, temporarily, his newspaper instrument, the Gazette. As in the Netherlands, during the Fronde it was pamphlets – the notorious Mazarinades – that bore the major burden of articulating the ideology of protest.65 Only in England had the Civil War pointed the way towards a more active political role for the serial press. And it would be here, in the succeeding half century, that the newspaper would take its most giant strides towards the centre of the political stage.

  CHAPTER 11

  Storm in a Coffee Cup

  SO we return to Daniel Defoe, whom we left many pages ago scribbling away at his Review. After many failed ventures and several public humiliations – including bankruptcy and a spell in the pillory – this was make or break for Defoe. So he wrote and wrote, for anyone who would pay; and in the febrile period between the deposition of James II in 1688 and the contested Hanoverian succession there were plenty who would. In 1707 he spent a whole year in Scotland seeking to persuade the Scots that the abolition of their Parliament would bring nothing but good.1 Journalism and advocacy were becoming inextricably blurred.

  These were turbulent times and in the latter half of the twentieth century they would pique the interest of a distinguished German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas.2 Habermas fixed his gaze on Defoe's London, and in particular its coffee shops. Coffee had been introduced into Europe very recently, and nowhere with greater éclat than in England, where coffee drinking became all the rage. Within a very few years there were scores of coffee houses, where the reasonably prosperous came to be seen, to converse, gossip and exchange news.3 Observing these seething, cheerful houses of commerce and communication, Habermas discerned a new type of popular engagement, something he described as a public sphere: an articulate, engaged political class with the freedom and leisure to participate in political debate. Defoe, as we have seen, thought much the same. For him, too, this was a crucial moment in the birth of political opinion.

  Seen in the longer perspective the claim to an entirely new form of participatory politics seems less plausible. We have uncovered plentiful evidence of the thirst for news in the centuries before coffee, and the birth of a lively market to slake this thirst. Defoe was of course also performing the salesman's eternal trick, of spicing the dish for new customers. But even setting this aside, was he perhaps right? Was there something genuinely new incubated in the coffee culture of the late seventeenth century that amounts to a step change in the history of news?

  Creatures of the Sun

  At this point it is worth remembering that London, though a growing metropolis, still occupied a somewhat peripheral role in Europe's news networks. We need to find out whether the new news environment envisaged in England can also be discerned elsewhere. What, for instance, of France, Europe's largest state and greatest military power? Here, in contrast, we observe the persistence of a remarkably controlled and supine press. The Fronde, the great rebellion of mid-century, had only briefly banished the carefully constructed news apparatus of Richelieu and Mazarin. The rebels had failed to find common cause, and their demands proved too amorphous and confused. Gradually, painfully, royal authority was restored, and by 1652 Mazarin had returned, ruling now on behalf of an adolescent who aspired to greatness, Louis XIV.

  11.1 A coffee house.

  The age of the Sun King would not be a great age of the newspaper. The restoration of order required a restoration of Renaudot's monopoly; the Gazette resumed publication.4 As the young king grew to adulthood, the kingdom would gradually be trained to accept a new type of royal self-image. In 1654, Louis, now fifteen, formally entered into his majority with a solemn coronation at Reims. When Mazarin died seven years later, Louis made clear that he would now rule without a first minister. In the cult of monarchy that was now constructed around Louis, the power and majesty of the king were proclaimed by a systematic exploitation of a wide range of cultural resources.5 The galaxy of talented artists, writers and playwrights assembled by Nicolas Fouquet, Mazarin's right-hand man, was transferred to the service of the king. Louis's praises were sung in prose and verse, in French and Latin. The theatre celebrated a new Alexander, and sermons encouraged comparison with the sainted founder of the French monarchy, St Louis. At Fontainebleau, and later at his new palace of Versailles, Louis lived at the centre of an increasingly ornate and carefully choreographed ceremonial, where access to the king's presence was the climax of an ascending hierarchy of privilege.

  The culture of Versailles fascinated contemporaries, and it has shaped the image of the Sun King then and since. But only a tiny proportion of the population would attend the king at court, see his portrait, or enjoy the sycophantic outpourings of court poets and theatrical performances. Carrying the king's image out into the provinces – where, despite the cultural supremacy of Paris, 95 per cent of the population still lived – was a more difficult task, and one to which the regime gave only fitful attention.

  In the early years of the king's maturity, when Louis's armies carried all before them, victories became the occasion for national celebration. Royal officials were mobilised to sponsor spectacles, feasts and public events that echoed those occurring in the capital. But there would not always be victories; the first flush
of success had already faded when Louis's ministers gave instructions for a large equestrian statue of the king to be placed in the public square of all France's main cities. This attempt to bring some of the grand architectural majesty of the new kingship to the furthest reaches of the kingdom met with a mixed response. Several less than grateful communities successfully combined loud protestations of dutiful obedience with ingenious procrastination to delay erection of the statues for many years.6

  Cities like Bordeaux, Toulouse and Lyon were sophisticated communities in their own right. If they were to be fully engaged in the cult of the king, this could only be achieved through the medium of print. In the second half of Louis's reign a conscious effort was made to bring an ever larger number of France's provincial cities into the orbit of the national press. The system developed by Renaudot under Richelieu, franchising reprints of the Gazette for local production, was greatly expanded. In addition to the established local editions at Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux and Tours, a further sixteen cities published editions of the Gazette between 1683 and 1699; the War of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and 1714 brought a dozen more into the network.7 In each case a copy of the Parisian edition was carried down the postal routes to the licensed local bookseller; the day of publication depended on the efficiency of the post. Thus the Gazette published each Saturday in Paris could appear on Sunday in parts of the Paris basin, but only on the following Thursday in Bordeaux, Lyon and La Rochelle.8

  This remarkable system was unique in Europe. In no other state was a monopoly preserved for a single official paper published and reproduced in up to thirty different locations. Through all of this time the Gazette remained a faithful mouthpiece of official policy. The heirs of Renaudot (the privilege would remain in the family until long into the eighteenth century) were not about to risk their valuable franchise by courting official displeasure. So the dry, factual tone of the foreign despatches, which continued to occupy much of their column centimetres, would be varied only to laud the king and all his doings. In the sensitive years after Mazarin's death the Gazette took pains to call attention to the king's diligence in the performance of his duties. Even when Louis went hunting, this was presented as a well-earned respite from a life of ceaseless toil: ‘the care which his majesty takes always with affairs of state, with a marvellous assiduousness’. When Louis led his armies in the field, the Gazette’s admiration reached a new crescendo. ‘See how victory and glory take pleasure to load their crowns on the head of our magnanimous king’ was the Gazette’s triumphant reaction to the campaign in Holland in 1672.9 Louis took with him on campaign not only his court ladies, but artists and writers who could, in their different ways, do justice to the greatness of his deeds. The dramatist Jean Racine, Louis's historiographer royal, was one who doubled as a war reporter, sending back despatches from the siege of Namur in 1687. The tone of the despatches that resulted can be judged by this extract from the Gazette, reporting the siege of Maastricht in 1673:

  Continue to follow in the footsteps of the greatest monarch in the world! See the wisdom with which he gives his orders, the energy with which he goes to where his presence is necessary, the indefatigability with which he works day and night and the steadfastness of soul with which he confronts dangers. Enter, with his majesty, into the trenches and follow him in his most martial actions where the most self-assured tremble before his intrepidness.

  The editors prided themselves that such a lifelike description might even stimulate anxiety in some of their more imaginative readers, as if they were on the field of battle with their king. They were to be reassured: ‘Have no fear you will not be any less safe from peril than you were previously and you will not witness all these objects of everlasting admiration elsewhere than in the present continuation of the journal of this famous siege.’10

  The Gazette was a remarkable initiative, but its success in moulding French opinion was probably quite limited. Only a relatively small number would have read these effusions. Figures for print runs are, as ever, elusive, but it is thought that the four provincial editions in 1670 comprised in total only 2,500 weekly copies. By 1700 the twenty-two editions, serving smaller areas, published together around 7,000 copies. Taking into account the larger Paris edition, this suggests a total output of around 4,000 weekly copies in 1670, and around 9,000 at the later date: and this was the sole newspaper serving a large population of around 20 million inhabitants.11 The contrast with the more diverse news markets of England, Holland and Germany is instructive.

  The Gazette’s role as a willing mouthpiece for Crown policy made for testing times during the latter years of Louis's reign, when the tide of warfare turned inexorably against the king. In the War of the Spanish Succession a brutal series of defeats from Blenheim (1704) to Malplaquet (1709) shattered the aura of Europe's most professional army. Little of this appeared in the Gazette. By this time the various branches of the French bureaucracy were monitoring the paper with some care. In 1708 the editors were rebuked for describing the campaigns in the Caribbean in too much detail. In times of war, they were bluntly informed, ‘it is not good that the public should be so well informed’.12 But public interest, and anxiety, could not be quelled by silence. The gap was inevitably filled by the ubiquitous manuscript newsletters: as the Gazette became more reticent, these became the single most important source of military and diplomatic news.13 Supplied with reliable intelligence by the clerks of the royal postal service and circulated around the coffee houses, these newsletters were almost impossible to control. The government's irritation found expression in an ordinance of 1705 prohibiting the writing and distribution of such newsletters, an order renewed on an annual basis for several years; a sure sign that the prohibition, although given ‘by express order of the king’, was having no effect.14 The arrest and interrogation of several novellistes in 1706 turned the spotlight on the clerks of the Paris post office, thirty of whom were taken into custody. Their testimony revealed that the news writers had a well-developed system of information exchange between the Paris and Lyon post offices, and a client list that included some of the most powerful in the land.

  The royal monopoly of news was also challenged by French-language news-papers published abroad. This was a problem entirely of the government's own making. In addition to upholding the Gazette monopoly, royal officials had also consistently favoured the major Paris publishing houses when awarding permission to publish books. This was especially disastrous for the well-established provincial publishing industries in Rouen and Lyon, which contracted sharply.15 The result was inevitably to alienate publishers and booksellers in these crucial cities. With nothing to lose, Rouen developed considerable notoriety as a centre of production of disrespectful libels; Lyon, meanwhile, became a major distribution centre for the foreign gazettes.

  The best known of the foreign papers was the Gazette de Leyde.16 Established in 1677, the Gazette was one of a dozen French-language newspapers published in Leiden, Amsterdam and The Hague during the reign of Louis XIV. In the eighteenth century the Leiden paper would become the European paper of record, read by statesmen throughout the Continent.17 But in its earliest incarnation its purpose was more partisan, to bring to a French-reading audience an alternative view of Louis as a power-hungry despot who would only be satisfied when Europe's kingdoms lay prostrate at his feet. Where Dutch armies had so conspicuously failed in 1672, now printed propaganda, alongside diplomacy, played a critical role in the creation of a European alliance to contain and, ultimately, humiliate the French king.

  French ministers did their best to turn the tide. But it would have escaped no one's notice that the victories for which the king would order a Te Deum were often no more than minor skirmishes, whereas the defeats passed over in silence were utterly calamitous. Louis's enemies scented blood. When peace talks were opened in 1709 (ignored by the Paris Gazette) the allies would only bring hostilities to a close if Louis joined them in armed action to depose his grandson, Philip, from the throne of Spain. Lou
is would be forced to choose between his dynastic honour and peace for his shattered country. In these desperate times the king's ministers reluctantly conceded that the insistent attacks from abroad required an answer. When French armies had commanded the field, foreign minister Simon Arnauld de Pomponne could dismiss ‘the million screaming tracts’ that had roused France's enemies abroad as of no account.18 Now it fell to Torcy, nephew of the illustrious Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to answer them. Torcy had cut his teeth with a series of pamphlets published secretly in Paris under the collective title Lettres d'un Suisse à un François. Purportedly the work of a politically engaged but neutral Swiss, these essays were in fact the work of Torcy's client Jean de La Chapelle. Their purpose was to drive a wedge into the allied alliance by warning the German states of the dangers of placing themselves in the protective embrace of the Habsburg Empire.