The Press and the French Revolution after Two Hundred Years

Abstract

As one contemplates the number of conferences and publications inspired by the bicentennial of the events of 1789, it is difficult to believe that only twenty years ago the study of the Revolution was a somnolent field, whose leading practitioners themselves believed that the main outlines of the revolutionary story were so well established that little of interest remained to be learned about it. The outpouring of new scholarly ideas inspired by the bicentennial has renewed practically every subspecialty in the domain of French revolutionary studies, and the history of the revolutionary press has been among those most affected. Long treated as a modest supplement to the political history of the Revolution, the study of the revolutionary press now appears as a critical bridge between the culture of the Revolution, one of the branches of revolutionary studies that has grown the most in the hothouse of bicentennial celebration, and the realm of high politics. New publications have extended our base of factual knowledge, synthesized the findings of twenty years of recent research, and in the case of Claude Labrosse and Pierre Retat's Naissance du journal re'volutionnaire, offered a bold new interpretation of the press's role in the Revolution. Of the modern subspecialties in the history of the French Revolu-