English-Language Periodicals in Parisian Reading Rooms and the Cross-Channel Transfer of Editorial Innovation (1800–65)

Abstract

In the historical context of the development and modernization of the press, of an increasingly intense transnational circulation of ideas and of editorial styles, this essay sets out to analyze the reasons why reading rooms specialized in the foreign-language press, especially in English—for which the market was narrow—were successful in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century. It examines the consequences of the circulation of the normally difficult to access British periodicals and newspapers, such as the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and the Westminster Review present in these reading rooms, on the transformation of the French media system. In the 1850s and 1860s, the wind started to change direction. By then, on the other side of the Channel, Alexander Macmillan and Mathew Arnold had become fervent admirers of the famous Revue des deux mondes. This turnabout testifies to the complexity of the mechanisms at work behind transnational cultural transfers and media innovation in France and in Britain at the time.