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

by Andrew Pettegree

  The beguilingly easy triumph of the Stamp Act revolt would in one respect prove misleading. Never again would colonial opinion speak with such apparent unity. The long, slow descent to confrontation left the colonies badly divided. Harassed news men found it difficult to satisfy readers often fundamentally at odds on the issues of the day. Happily newspapers were not left to bear alone the burden of shaping the political agenda during these years. The most significant and influential political statements were all published as pamphlets. The most successful, such as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, sold in huge numbers (a reputed 120,000 copies). A brilliant exposition of the case for independence, which cut through the legalistic prose in which the debate had to this point been largely conducted, Common Sense was printed in twenty-five editions in thirteen American cities.27 This was only the most notable example of a surge of pamphlet publication that reached a first climax with the Stamp Act, and a second with the commencement of hostilities in 1775–6.28 Thereafter, both news men and pamphleteers found this intensity hard to sustain. Fighting disrupted distribution networks and forced many printers to shift location. Resources had to be redeployed to military purposes; sensitive information on troop movements could obviously not be widely reported.

  This was a very slow-moving revolution. Between the battle of Concord and the Treaty of Paris the war lasted eight years (1755–83). A full twenty-four years elapsed between the Stamp Act and the inauguration of the first president, George Washington. The ardent young men of the 1760s had grown old before the United States emerged as an independent nation. The dramatic moments of crisis were interspersed with long periods of relative inactivity. The shift to outright rebellion was characterised by repeated hesitancy, as proposals, loyal addresses and pained remonstrances passed back and forth across the great expanse of the Atlantic. Even after the fighting was concluded, the various legislative and constitutive bodies moved with agonising slowness.

  The rebellious provinces presented a very particular context for the distribution of news, as settlements with quite separate heritages attempted to forge a common cause across great expanses of coast and barely tamed interior. Reading the successive issues of the newspapers can present an unexpected impression of tranquillity, of societies going about their business into which great events only intermittently intrude. The Virginia Gazette of 1775 was a weekly four-page folio in three columns, with supplements issued as necessary. The issue of 28 April opened with news from Constantinople.29 The Parliamentary debate from London of 2 February featured a long speech from Lord Chatham in the House of Lords. The advertisements, starting in the middle column of the second page and consuming the rest of the paper, feature horses for stud and appeals for the return of runaway slaves. The first news of the battles of Lexington and Concord is included with an extra half sheet, dated from Philadelphia on 24 April (five days after the engagement). Often it is the advertisements that give a hint of the growing turbulence in a community, as in the announcement of sales of goods of those leaving the colony. But life goes on. The Virginia Gazette, ‘Always for Liberty and the Public Good’, continued to run its advertisement for the recovery of fugitive servants and slaves, and its occasional tantalising hint of domestic discord:

  Whereas my wife Frances has behaved in a very uncommon manner to me of late, this is to forewarn all persons from having any dealings with her on my account, as I will not be answerable for any debts of her contracting after this date.30

  It can indeed plausibly be argued that the Revolution encouraged newspapers to take themselves too seriously. In the densely settled port towns – precisely the place of publication of most newspapers – residents had access, through overlapping networks of family, workplace and commercial connections, to a great deal of news far fresher and more pertinent than much of what they read in their newspapers.31 Most newspapers still only published once, or at most twice a week. Months-old news from distant parts might be of limited interest, and commercial notices placed in the advertisement columns were of little use to rural subscribers. During the war years in particular word of mouth, communications from travellers, ships’ captains and returning soldiers, played a vital part in keeping people abreast of uncertain events.

  Irrespective of what the press did for the Revolution, the Revolution certainly had a profound impact on the press. The number of papers published doubled between 1763 and 1775, and again by 1790. In that year the American states supported ninety-nine newspapers in some sixty-two separate locations. Newspaper publication was now one of the most significant props of the American publishing industry.32 In an era when substantial volumes of literature, history and scholarship were still by and large imported, it was almost necessary for a printer to have a newspaper to stay in business.

  In this way it was not just patriotism but economic interest that tied the press to the cause of the emerging nation. The same tone of patriotic commitment enunciated during the revolutionary agitation continued after the British defeat and through the subsequent constitutional debates. The press was overwhelmingly Federalist; a commitment all the more notable given that one of the first acts of the Federal Convention was to resolve to keep its debates secret. The intention was to insulate delegates from public pressure, but it also deprived the newspapers of a constant supply of good copy during its protracted deliberations. A few years later the French revolutionaries would adopt a conspicuously contrary view, encouraging journalists to attend and report the debates of the successive legislative bodies. The press came into its own during the campaign for ratification, which was far from a foregone conclusion. Only when Virginia came reluctantly into line, and the presumed Anti-Federalist majority in New York was narrowly defeated, could the new constitution be put into effect.

  The zealous commitment of the press to the establishment of the new nation did not go unrewarded. When James Madison was entrusted with preparing the Bill of Rights in 1790, the first amendment to the constitution guaranteed that Congress would ‘make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’. But these freedoms would still be forced to run the test of prevailing morality, social convention and partisan politics. Contemporary opinion saw no contradiction between the assertion in Virginia's Bill of Rights ‘that the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments’ and the state's 1792 ‘Act against divulgers of false news’.33 The unacknowledged tensions set the scene for an exuberant, rancorous and highly partisan culture of public debate that was both the adornment and curse of politics in the new nation.

  The Empty Prison

  On 14 July 1789 a crowd of around nine hundred local people gathered outside the Bastille, the old prison building of Paris that now served mostly as an armoury. Very little remained of the old autocratic system of lettres de cachet that had incarcerated prisoners without trial; nevertheless, the building still constituted a potent symbol and the crowd were determined to liberate, if not its few remaining prisoners, then at least its stock of gunpowder. The morning was consumed in nervous negotiations between the insurgents and the marquis de Launay, commander of the small garrison. These achieved little, and by afternoon, in an increasingly chaotic melee, shots were exchanged. The arrival of more revolutionary forces, including trained soldiers, compelled the garrison's surrender. Launay and some of his soldiers were hauled out and butchered; the rest were escorted away as the crowd took possession of the artillery.34

  In such a turbulent and politically momentous season, there was little in these events to suggest why this should become such an iconic day in French history: since 1880, indeed, the nation's primary day of national celebration. The haul of liberated prisoners, seven, was meagre. This included four convicted forgers and two who had to be reincarcerated in mental institutions; hardly the political detainees of the Bastille's fearsome legend. The immediate response of the established periodical press, both at home and abroad, was restrained. The Gazette de France, naturally, ignored the
disturbance altogether. The foreign press reported it as an incident of riotous disorder, rather than suggesting any wider significance. In real political terms it scarcely merited being privileged ahead of the calling of the Estates General, the Tennis Court Oath, or the subsequent forced return of the king from Versailles. As a revolutionary event, the 1788 insurrection in Grenoble was a far more potent challenge to the ancien régime, though it scarcely now registers in the revolutionary canon.

  It was the newly emboldened pressmen of Paris who ensured that the storming of the Bastille did not suffer the same fate. A rush of celebratory pamphlets and illustrated broadsheets proclaimed the fall of the empty prison as the symbolic awakening of an oppressed people.35 The same themes were rapidly taken up in the developing newspaper press. Yesterday, wrote Antoine-Louis Gordas in his Courier de Versailles à Paris, ‘will be forever remembered in the records of our history: it opens the way for the greatest and perhaps the most fortunate of revolutions.’36

  The extraordinary events that unfolded in France between 1789 and 1794 were accompanied by a torrent of newsprint in every media: pamphlets, journals, broadsheet images and political song.37 The pre-revolutionary political crisis and the calling of the Estates General had stimulated a steadily rising drum roll of political pamphlets: around 1,500 different titles in 1788 and at least 2,600 during the elections to the Estates in the first four months of 1789: a stratospheric rise compared to the four hundred or so published in the twelve years before 1787.38 The carefully constructed edifice of press control established during the ancien régime, and sustained for over 150 years, now simply evaporated. While the National Assembly engaged in long and earnest debates over press freedom, events and the book trade moved on.

  In the years after 1789 the pampered and privileged members of the Paris Book Guild saw their world turned upside down.39 For the previous two centuries it had been the conscious policy of the French monarchy to concentrate the printing industry in the capital, and to favour a small number of large firms. An effective monopoly on book production for a large and prosperous population was a predictable disincentive to innovation. Faced with the Parisian presses’ outdated stock of worthy reproductions of the seventeenth-century canon, readers looked elsewhere, cultivating a lively market in semi-tolerated illicit imports from abroad.40 Now, under the pressure of unprecedented events, the market of the established printing magnates simply melted away. Despite Crown efforts to support allies in the press with substantial covert subsidies, between 1789 and 1793 many of the giants of Parisian printing filed for bankruptcy. Their place was taken by an entirely new generation, many of them booksellers, who had detected the hunger for contemporary political works. To feed this demand they now set up their own presses.

  From 1789 these news publishers/booksellers also began to convert their pamphlet output into periodical series. This was neither immediately nor universally successful. Only one of the pamphlets celebrating the fall of the Bastille was announced as part of a serial. Many of the newly established titles disappeared equally rapidly. But during the course of 1789 and 1790 the journal – a daily, tri-weekly or weekly newspaper – would establish itself as the characteristic organ of revolutionary debate.

  For a country deliberately starved of choice in the periodical press during the ancien régime, this was a momentous change. The pamphlet surge of the revolutionary period was in some respects quite traditional: the previous collapse of royal authority during the Fronde in the mid-seventeenth century had been accompanied by a similar deluge of pamphlet literature.41 But the explosion of journal publication in Paris during these years was on a scale not witnessed anywhere in Europe. From four journals published in the capital in 1788, the number skyrocketed to 184 in 1789 and 335 in 1790. During the height of the revolutionary agitation, as many as 300,000 copies a day of these various publications would have been available on the streets.42 Paris was suddenly awash with a flood of exuberant, passionate, committed news-sheets. Soon they had come to dominate the political agenda.

  Most of these new serials were, it must be admitted, rather unprepossessing little booklets, scarcely distinguishable from the grubby cheap pamphlets with which their printers and readers were already familiar. Without the fifty years of steady growth and evolution that had characterised the development of the newspapers in England, the printers of this sudden rush of new titles had little time or resources for questions of design. Most of the first news serials kept close to the familiar pamphlet format: published in the customary small octavo of the established genre, they generally consisted of eight closely written pages of political advocacy. The experienced Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, skilfully surfing the wave of political change, could envisage his Moniteur imitating the three-column folio format of the London press.43 But this was very much the exception. Most of the revolutionary papers were the product of less well-established printing houses. The urgency of the moment called for quick work rather than sophistication.

  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 n
ot 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.