The Newspaper Press in French Political Thought, 1789–99

Abstract

The Newspaper Press in French Political Thought, 1789-99 JEREMY D. POPKIN The outbreak of the revolution in 1789 brought with it the real birth of a national political newspaper press in France. Before the convo­ cation of the Estates-General, the government-authorized Journal de Paris had been the only daily paper, but within a few months after the deputies assembled in Versailles, dozens of new journals sprang up. They quickly established themselves as the most significant form of political literature in France, and, as a result, political writers of many different outlooks found themselves forced to think about the effects of such publications. The revolutionary period thus saw a number of attempts to analyze the workings of the newspaper press, its relationship to society and its impact on politics. Although the writers of the period differed widely in their attitudes toward the daily press, their clashing observations identified many of the social and political problems that the existence of the newspaper press has continued to pose for liberal and democratic societies ever since. The French newspaper press had developed slowly before 1789, and there was little theoretical writing on the subject to guide observ­ ers during the Revolution. The Encyclopedie devoted only a few para­ graphs to newspapers, giving far more attention to learned periodi­ cals like the Journal des Savants.1 Lamoignon de Malesherbes, in his unpublished memoranda on censorship policy, took a remarkably broadminded position—he even recommended against prosecution of journalists who printed diplomatic secrets, on the ground that it 113 114 / POPKIN was up to the government to prevent news leaks—but this recom­ mendation for relaxed press controls was not fully implemented.2 Such discussion of newspapers as did appear took the form of reports on the press in other countries, especially England. Delolme's influ­ ential Constitution de I'Angleterre called the newspapers a basic pillar of English liberty. In his extremely idealized description, Delolme made a special point of the English newspapers' ability to bring the whole population into the political process. The electoral system might not be democratic, but the press compensated for this by re­ flecting the views of the most remote areas and the lowest social classes: "Each individual is informed daily of the state of the nation, from one end to the other; and the communication is such, that the three kingdoms seem to be but one city."3 The English example, and, to some extent, the American experi­ ence strongly influenced the early revolutionary discussions of news­ papers in France after 1789. To be sure, the newspapers were not a central topic of concern in the revolutionary debates; even the vast majority of pamphlets and speeches on freedom of the press lumped newspapers together with books, pamphlets, and magazines. Two significant exceptions, however, were the writings of two French journalists who had some direct experience with newspaper publish­ ing in the Anglo-Saxon world, J. P. Brissot and Charles Panckoucke. Brissot's Memoire aux Etats-Generaux: Sur la necessity de rendre des ce moment la presse libre, et surtout pour les journaux politiques, published to justify his own projected paper, was a complex and insightful anal­ ysis of the role newspapers could and should play in a democratic society. Brissot's main argument was that newspapers alone could resolve the classic problem of how to establish a democratic polity in a large country. The press would allow the continuous transmission of the public's opinions to their elected representatives, and would also allow the country's intellectual leaders to enlighten that public: ". . .one can teach the same truth at the same moment to millions of men; through the Press, they can discuss it without tumult, decide calmly and give their opinion."4 Books were obviously too expensive and slow to serve such a function, and the general public could not keep up with the flood of pamphlets: "It has neither the time, nor the means. But a newspaper arrives everywhere at the same instant, is read everywhere; it is read by even the poorest individuals. A hundred thousand people will have read a newspaper, when barely a hundred will have read a pamphlet."5 This democratically...