may judge from the copious specimens of these epistles which yet
survive, must also not unfrequently have arisen from lack of
official employment, rather than from substantial
provocation. Madame Doublet de Persan, the widow of
Nouvelles à
la main.
a member of the French board of trade, was a conspicuous
purveyor of news of this sort. For nearly
forty years daily meetings were held in her house at which the
gossip and table-talk of the town were systematically (and
literally) registered; and weekly abstracts or epitomes were
sent into the country by post. Piron, Mirabaud, Falconet,
D’Argental and, above all, Bachaumont, were prominent
members of the “society,” and each of them is said to have
had his assigned seat beneath his own portrait. The lady’s
valet-de-chambre appears to have been editor ex officio; and
as he occasionally suffered imprisonment, when offensive newsletters
had been seized by the police, so responsible a duty was
doubtless “considered in the wages.” News and anecdotes
of all kinds—political and literary, grave, gay or merely scandalous—were
all admitted into the Nouvelles à la main; and their
contents, during a long series of years, form the staple of those
Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des
lettres which extend to thirty-six volumes, have been frequently
printed (at first with the false imprint “Londres: John Adamson,
1777–89”), and are usually referred to by French writers
as the Mémoires de Bachaumont.
The journalism of the first Revolution has been the theme
of many bulky volumes, and only a very casual glance at this
part of our subject can be given to it here. When
at least one half of the French people was in a ferment
of hope or of fear at the approaching convocation
of the states-general, most of the existing newspapers
Newspapers of
the Revolution.
were still in a state of torpor. Long paragraphs, for example,
about a terrible “wild beast of the Gevaudan”—whether wolf
or bear, or as yet nondescript, was uncertain—were still current
in the Paris journals at this momentous juncture. Mirabeau
was among the foremost to supply the popular want. His
Lettres à ses commettants began on the 2nd May 1789, and with
the twenty-first number became the Courrier de Provence.
Within a week Maret (afterwards duke of Bassano) followed
with the Bulletin des séances de l’assemblée nationale, and
Lehodey with the Journal des états généraux. In June Brissot
de Warville began his Patriote français. Gorsas published the
first number of his Courrier de Versailles in the following month,
from which also dates the famous periodical of Prudhomme,
Loustalot and Tournon, entitled Révolutions de Paris, with
its characteristic motto—“Les grands ne nous paraissent
grands que parce que nous sommes à genoux; levons nous!”
In August 1789 Baudouin began the Journal des débats (edited
Journal des débats and Moniteur.
in 1792 by Louvet) and Marat the Ami du Peuple
(which at first was called Le Publiciste parisien).
The Moniteur universel (of which we have spoken
already) was first published on the 24th November,
although numbers were afterwards printed bearing date from
the 5th May, the day on which the states-general first assembled.
Camille Desmoulins also commenced his Révolutions de France
et de Brabant in November 1789. The Ami du roi was first
published in June 1790, La Quotidienne in September 1792.
The Moniteur and Débats survived, but most of these papers expired either in the autumn of 1792 or with the fall of the party of the Gironde in September 1793. In some of them the energy for good and for evil of a whole lifetime seems to be compressed into the fugitive writings of a few months. Even the satirical journals which combated the Revolution with shafts of ridicule and wit, keen enough after their kind, but too light to do much damage to men terribly in earnest, abound with matter well deserving the attention of all students desirous of a thorough knowledge of the period.
The consular government began its dealings with the press by reducing the number of political papers to thirteen. At this period the number of daily journals had been nineteen, and their aggregate provincial circulation, apart from the Paris sale, 49,313, an average of 2600 each.
Under Napoleon the Moniteur was the only political paper that was really regarded with an eye of favour. Even as respects the nation at large, the monstrous excesses into which the Revolutionary press had plunged left an enduring stigma on the class. When Bertin acquired the Journal des débats from Baudouin, the printer, for 20,000 francs, he had to vanquish popular indifference on the one hand, as well as imperial mistrust on the other. The men he called to his aid were Geoffroy and Fievée; and by the brilliancy of their talents and the keenness of his own judgment he converted the Débats into a paper having 32,000 subscribers, and producing a profit of 200,000 francs a year. When the imposition of a special censorship was threatened in 1805, at the instance of Fouché, a remarkable correspondence took place between Fievée and Napoleon himself, in the course of which the emperor wrote that the only means of preserving a newspaper from suspension was “to avoid the publication of any news unfavourable to the government, until the truth of it is so well established that the publication becomes needless.” The censorship was avoided, but Fievée had to become the responsible editor, and the title was altered to Journal de l’empire—the imperial critic taking exception to the word Débats as “inconvenient.” The old title was resumed in August 1815. The revolution of July did but enhance the power and the profit of the paper. It has held its course since with uniform dignity, as well as with splendid ability, and may still be said, in the words which Lamartine applied to it in an earlier day, to have “made itself part of French history.”
Shortly before the Journal de l’empire became again the Journal des débats (in 1815), a severance occurred amidst both the writers and subscribers. It led to the foundation of the Constitutionnel, which at first and for a short time bore the title of L’Indépendant. The former became, for a time, the organ of the royalists par excellence, the latter the leader of the opposition. In 1824, however, both were in conflict with the government of the day. At that date, in a secret report addressed to the ministry, the aggregate circulation of the opposition press of Paris was stated at 41,330,[1] while that of the government press amounted only to 14,344.[2]
The rapid rise of the Constitutionnel was due partly to the great ability and influence of Jay, of Étienne, of Béranger and of Saint Albin (who had been secretary to Carnot in his ministry of 1815), all of whom co-operated in its early editorship, and partly to its sympathy with the popular reverence for the memory of Napoleon, as well Constitutionnel. as to the vigorous share it took in the literary quarrel between the classicists and romanticists. Its part in bringing about the revolution of 1830 raised it to the zenith of its fortunes. For a brief period it could boast of 23,000 subscribers at 80 francs a year. But the invasion of cheap newspapers, and that temporary lack of enterprise which so often follows a brilliant success, lowered it with still greater rapidity. When the author of the Mémoires d’un bourgeois, Dr Véron, purchased it, the sale had sunk to 3000. Véron gave 100,000 francs for the Juif errant of Sue, and the Sue fever rewarded him for a while with more than the old circulation. Afterwards the paper passed under the editorship of Césena, Granier de Cassagnac, and La Guéronnière.
The cheap journalism of Paris began in 1836 (1st July) with
the journal of Girardin, La Presse, followed instantly by Le
Siècle, under the management of Dutacq, to whom,
it is said—not incredibly—the original idea was really
due. The first-named journal attained a circulation
of 10,000 copies within three months of its commencement
La Presse and
Le Siècle.
of and soon doubled that number. The Siècle prospered
even more strikingly, and in a few years had reached a circulation
(then without precedent in France) of 38,000 copies.
The rapid growth of the newspaper press of Paris under
