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

by Andrew Pettegree

  The relentless definition of female consciousness – the home, manners, social etiquette and love affairs – is often grating. This preoccupation was neatly expressed in the French Journal des dames, launched in 1759 offering its readers a diet of ‘riens délicieux’, delicious nothings. But this was only ever part of the story. It is worth recalling that the Journal des dames soon became something more than an entertainment paper, supporting the agenda of the Enlightenment and vigorously criticising both state-privileged cultural institutions and ministerial policy. The driving force behind this transformation was a sequence of three strong women, who successively managed the journal and gave it its distinctive voice.28 The Journal des dames was suppressed twice by angry ministers, in 1769 and finally in 1776.29

  The changing shape of the Journal des dames is not unusual in the periodical press. New ventures sprung up and often failed to find an audience; a journal could not survive without close attention to its readers’ priorities. These were partly set by women, as readers but also as engaged protagonists in the press. Women had played an active role in the print industry virtually since its beginning, almost certainly a more active role than in any other craft industry.30 Many presses were very effectively managed by the women to whom they were entrusted, sometimes but not always after the death of their husbands. John Dunton's sensibility to his female readers may owe something to the fact that his business prospered mightily when his wife was at the helm, and declined steeply after her death. Countess Alexandrine de Rye, widow of Leonhard II von Taxis, effectively ran the Taxis postal network for eighteen years after her husband's death, and steered the company through the notably turbulent decades of the latter part of the Thirty Years War.31 Among those challenging her authority was the female Hamburg newspaper proprietor, Ilsabe Meyer.32 At the other end of the social spectrum the London press would not have been able to function without the army of ‘Mercury women’ who brought periodicals to their readers and sold them on the streets.33

  The industry also found a place for an entrepreneur like Eliza Haywood, author and proprietor of The Female Spectator.34 Haywood started this periodical after a long and successful career as a novelist, and a less successful turn as a stage actress. She gave herself no airs: the first issue confided that the author ‘never was a beauty, and am very far from being young’. But its witty sequence of essays, on subjects that ranged from the immoderate use of tea to the conduct of military gentlemen (likely to be bad) found a ready audience. After it ceased publication The Female Spectator was several times republished as a collected volume, and translated into both French and Dutch.35 Haywood was even sufficiently confident to satirise the alleged female aversion to political affairs. In reply to a dyspeptic (though almost certainly invented) correspondent, who took her to task for promising more in the way of politics than she had delivered, Haywood defended her editorial choices:

  Armies marching – battles fought – towns destroyed – rivers crossed and the like: I should think it ill became me to take up my own, or reader's time with such accounts as are every day to be found in the public papers.36

  This was the point; there were other places where such matters were exhaustively discussed, and the journals did not have to regurgitate material freely available in the newspapers. Plenty of male readers also found their appetite for battles and sieges much reduced when the society papers provided an alternative diversion. But this was generally not a choice that had to be made. Articulate female readers followed the news closely, even if social convention forbade them from making much reference to this in their correspondence.37 It is significant that when Dorothy Osborne read a news publication in 1653, she could only acknowledge this in an oblique way: ‘I know not how I stumbled upon a news book this week, and for want of something else to do read it.’38 This was in a letter to her suitor, Sir William Temple, and she may have thought he would consider an interest in news unseemly in a potential bride. Married women could take a close interest in politics that impacted on their family with less constraint.39

  Critically the hundred years between Dorothy Osborne's letter and Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator saw a giant leap forward in female literacy. The number of female readers had increased three or fourfold; this was a substantial market that publishers could not afford to ignore. Women as consumers and arbiters of taste were an important economic force and therefore an important driver of the periodical market. The first daily paper in France, the Journal de Paris (1777), was a cultural listing, offering notes on the current theatrical performances and literary gossip. In the second half of the eighteenth century essay journals like The Female Spectator were gradually superseded by a new generation of monthly magazines. The Lady's Magazine (1759) and The Lady's Museum (1760) were part of a general trend away from the single editor-persona towards a substantial periodical offering a collection of features by various hands.40 Both these journals offered a variety of instructional features, including articles on geography, history and popular science, tempered by fiction and poetry. Nor were female readers spared the harsher aspects of contemporary life. In an earlier manifestation of The Lady's Magazine, a fortnightly established in 1749, readers were treated to a monthly account of the trial, confession or execution of some notorious criminal. Sometimes these malefactors were female: ‘an account of three unhappy women executed at Tyburn'; ‘the trial of Mary Blandy for poisoning her late father’.41 The windows of the polite parlour could never entirely shut out the life of the teeming metropolis beyond.

  The Political Journal

  The periodical press did not – could not – ignore politics. Whether it was the whimsical rapier thrusts of the Spectator genre, or the increasingly bold editorialising in some parts of the newspaper industry, this was the age that finally began to achieve the integration of news and commentary that we take for granted in the printed news media today. An important catalyst was the emergence of a new generation of journals of political analysis. These played a particularly important role in parts of Europe where the newspapers remained wedded to a conservative vision of news reporting that left them little scope for political commentary. This was true for both the Low Countries and Germany, where most newspapers remained local monopoly providers, and obsessively careful not to cause offence to local magistrates. An escape from this studied neutrality was provided by Gottlob Benedikt von Shirach's Politische Journal, one of the most successful periodical ventures of the century. Established in 1781, the Politische Journal became the most widely read periodical in the German-speaking world, with an audience transcending the micro-markets of the German city and princely states.42

  By the 1780s Germany had 183 newspapers. With rare exceptions, however, such as the widely circulating Hamburg papers, most served a purely local clientele. Their format and priorities were barely distinguishable from their predecessors a century before. Foreign news predominated, and much of the remaining space was taken up by advertisements and a local court circular, a Lilliputian version of the Paris Gazette’s despatches from Versailles: ‘all the honours and favours dispensed at the court, festivities, voyages, ceremonies, banquets, and the endless list of irrelevancies, rumours, suppositions, contradictions and private affairs’, as von Shirach put it in one of the first issues of the Politische Journal.43 Von Shirach also believed that the newspaper itself – its barrage of fragmentary reports – posed a barrier to understanding. Even with the best-informed paper, the urgent periodicity of a weekly production could hardly provide more than a part of the picture, with little context and no scope for sober analysis. With the Politische Journal von Shirach created a journal that he hoped could combine the traditional analytical function of pamphlets with the contemporaneity of the newspapers. Monthly publication should ensure that the shape of events had become clearer, and eliminate the misleading, false or trivial reports that found their way into the newspapers.

  A true child of the Enlightenment, von Shirach adhered to a clear and rational plan. Each monthly issue con
sisted of three parts. The first presented background information necessary to understand the issues of the day: statistics and excerpts from official documents. There then followed analytical articles written by von Shirach summarising events in various parts of Europe. The final third consisted of letters from the Journal’s correspondents from the self-same capitals, timed to arrive in Hamburg just before he went to press.

  It was an innovative formula and it found a ready public: the readership grew steadily to around 8,000 subscribers. But the Politische Journal also attracted criticism, much of it focused on von Shirach's own editorial style. Von Shirach never understated the potential importance of the events he described: each shift in the balance of European power portended revolution, and he often saw war looming. Von Shirach's views were strongly held, but he sometimes put himself on the wrong side of history, as with his trenchant opposition to both the American and French revolutions. An unfortunate talent for unsuccessful prognostication was revealed early in his reporting of the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibralter in 1782. Subscribers would have received his careful analysis of the strength of the investing forces, and confident predictions of their success, just as the newspapers brought news of the crushing English victory. This was the danger of a monthly publication dealing with fast-moving events. For all that, the Politische Journal was a carefully conceived and ground-breaking publication, not least in the degree of attention it gave to German news. The Politische Journal devoted at least half of its space to news and analysis of events in Germany and Austria: a radical departure from the newspaper tradition with its continuing concentration on foreign news. This, along with the Politische Journal’s wide circulation, played an important role in the growth of pan-German political consciousness.

  In France the publication of political journals was a feature of the general loosening of political controls before the Revolution. The catalyst was a political crisis of a very traditional sort. In 1770 Louis XV, exasperated by a long conflict of attrition with the Paris Parlement, dismissed his veteran chief minister Choiseul and sought more decisive leadership from a triumvirate of determined officials, led by Chancellor Maupeou. The triumvirate in turn sought to out-manoeuvre the opposition of the Parlement by replacing sitting magistrates with a reorganised court system. This flagrant provocation initiated the largest wave of pamphleteering since the Mazarinades more than a century before.44 The outpouring of publications on both sides awakened Paris's normally conservative publishing community to the tremendous public interest in current affairs. Encouraged by the weakening of censorship that always followed from a major political conflict in France, publishers began to issue pamphlets in a quasi-periodical form, with each successive issue consecutively numbered. This shift towards serial publication continued after the initial crisis had subsided, most notably with the Mémoires secrets, a thirty-six volume series of gossip and anecdotes. Other notable ventures included the Observateur anglois, and, most notorious of all, the Annales politiques of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet.

  Linguet had earned his journalistic spurs as an employee of the publisher-entrepreneur Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. Dismissed for intemperate attacks on the philosophes, Linguet withdrew to London, from where he crafted an immediate publishing sensation. The contemporary renown of Linguet's Annales lay in the quality of its writing, for Linguet, already a well-known and distinguished lawyer, revealed himself as a natural exponent of advocacy journalism. More remarkable still was his success, as an independent editor operating outside the country, in securing the printing and distribution of the Annales in France. Somehow Linguet's agent in his home country managed to ensure that circulation of the journal would be tolerated, but its instant celebrity brought new problems in the form of unauthorised reprints, which Linguet was powerless to prevent. Briefly interrupted when Linguet was lured to Paris and imprisoned in the Bastille, the Annales were resumed in 1783. Linguet's adventures provided a vivid illustration of the enduring problem that faced the French political press. Although political periodicals circulated widely, censorship was never formally abandoned. This meant that political journals could never be openly marketed or advertised; circulation required accommodations and private understandings that could always be revoked. This was one reason why the French periodicals did not achieve the same regularity and exact periodicity that characterised similar ventures in other countries. However, they made up for this with a passionate engagement and wit that entranced readers greedy for political debate after the long years of a controlled and subservient press. Linguet's Annales, boosted by the unofficial reprint, maintained an international circulation of as much as twenty thousand copies per issue. Despite his angry denunciations of pirate publishers, Linguet was reported to have made large sums from the Annales, as much as 80,000 livres a year.45

  A Man of Property

  The full potential of this buoyant market for political journalism would ultimately be demonstrated by Linguet's former patron, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. Panckoucke was Europe's first media mogul.46 He had been born into the business of books, the son of a provincial bookseller in Lille. Educated in the philosophe spirit, he considered a career as an academic or military engineer (he was an especially gifted mathematician) before accepting that his fate was to take over the family business.47 In the early 1760s, working in partnership with his two sisters, Panckoucke transferred the bookshop to Paris. Immersing himself in the intellectual culture of the capital, Panckoucke continued to write; among the books he published were a number of his own works. Most important of all, Panckoucke had the gift of friendship. He was close to Voltaire from an early age, and later to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The distinguished naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was a confidant and friend.48

  Moving in these circles Panckoucke conceived the wish to make a substantial contribution to the Encyclopedist movement. In 1769 he approached Diderot with a plan to publish a supplement to the Encyclopédie. Initially rebuffed, he persisted and obtained the necessary permission. A decade later he embarked on what would be his chief monument, the Encyclopédie méthodique, arranged by subject matter rather than alphabetically. Secure in the esteem of France's leading thinkers, Panckoucke might have been expected to be content. But he had other plans. A shrewd reader of markets as well as men, Panckoucke had for some years been contemplating the rich potential of the periodical press. The original transaction through which Panckoucke bought the shop and stock of the Paris bookseller Michel Lambert in 1760 had also brought him Lambert's printing contracts, which included the Année littéraire and the Journal des sçavans; the latter in particular was a prestigious venture, though Panckoucke claimed it was running at a loss when he bought it.49 Profitable or not, this provided the foundation for an expanding portfolio of periodicals. In due course Panckoucke was prepared to try his hand at the political press. Gradually he built up a stable that included the Journal politique de Bruxelles, Journal des dames, Journal des spectacles, Journal des affaires d'Angleterre et d'Amérique and the Gazette des tribunaux. With his Journal politique de Bruxelles and the Journal de Genève, Panckoucke nodded towards the tradition that all political papers apart from the official Gazette should be published outside the country. In fact both periodicals, despite their name, were published in France, an arrangement that had the blessing of the ministry.

  The crucial moment came in 1778 when Panckoucke purchased control of the Mercure de France, the venerable but ailing successor to the Mercure galant. The Mercure had been established in 1672 as a monthly stablemate to the Gazette, but had failed to maintain its position in the proliferating eighteenth-century market for journals. Panckoucke transformed it into a weekly, and in the process built its circulation from 2,000 to 15,000. This coup had been prepared by careful politics. By cultivating a relationship with the Comte de Vergennes, minister of foreign affairs from 1774, Panckoucke received the exclusive privilege to publish political news. That the foreign minister should have dealt such a critical blow to the official G
azette tells us much about the essential frivolity, as well as the brutality, of Ancien Régime politics. Other newspapers now had to pay Panckoucke for the privilege of reprinting his information. Secure in the confidence of both official Paris and the leading figures of the Enlightenment, Panckoucke flourished. By 1788 he had built up an extraordinary business empire, with 800 workmen and employees. His workshops and offices, it was said, were one of the sights of Paris.

  13.4 Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, media mogul and Enlightenment man.

  In 1789 Panckoucke won what would previously have been considered one of the greatest prizes of all: he became publisher of the Gazette. But these were strange times for the reporting of current affairs in France. Events would soon take a turn beyond the imagining of the philosophers of the old order. These events would test to destruction the capacities of the antiquated, prosperous print world of the Ancien Régime; men like Panckoucke, who had done well in its strangely constrained politics but extraordinarily diverse intellectual culture, would face a fight for survival.

  The age of the journal witnessed the emergence of a thoughtful, self-confident industry that facilitated intellectual exchange over a wide spectrum of disciplines. For publishers this offered a welcome field of innovation in new ventures positioned between the established but sometimes complaisant world of book publishing and the turbulent world of pamphlets and ephemeral print. Even for the most established and conservative publishing houses, journals were an attractive economic proposition. They offered a regular and predictable sale thanks to the subscription system. For major new enterprises the compilation of a subscription list provided both valuable advertising and a means of testing the water before printing got underway. The extended friendship and correspondence network of the Republic of Letters provided a natural conduit for such information, and both editors and publishers were happy to move in these circles. The publication of even very substantial intellectual enterprises in numbered sections ensured that there was no risk of the unsold portion of an edition rotting in the warehouse, as had been the case with many overly ambitious scholarly works issued in the first centuries of print.50 With periodicals, customers paid in advance and each issue had a built-in sequel, whereas books were individual events, dangerous and unpredictable in their success. It is no wonder that periodicals became the fastest -growing sector of eighteenth-century publishing.