The instruction of the people—I mean here of the adult people—was in the Middle Ages the work of the clergy. Since then the newspapers have assumed this function; but through the securities a newspaper must give, and still more through the stamp tax which is laid in our country, as in France and elsewhere, on newspapers, a daily newspaper has become a very expensive institution, which cannot be established without very considerable capital, with the result that, for this very reason, even the opportunity to mold public opinion, instruct it, and guide it has become the privilege of the capitalist class.
Were this not the case, you would have much different and very much better papers. It is interesting to see how early this attempt of the bourgeoisie to make the press a privilege of capital appears, and in what frank and undisguised form. On July 24, 1789, a few days after the capture of the Bastille, during the first days after the middle class obtained political supremacy, the representatives of the city of Paris passed a resolution by which they declared printers responsible if they published pamphlets or sheets by writers sans existence connue (without visible means of support). The newly won freedom of the press, then, was to exist only for writers who had visible means of support. Property thus appears as the condition of the freedom of the press, indeed of the morality of the writer. The straightforwardness of the first days of citizen sovereignty only expresses in a childishly frank manner what is today artfully obtained by bonding and stamp taxes. With these main characteristic facts corresponding to our consideration of the Middle Ages we shall have to be satisfied here.
What we have seen so far are two historical periods, each of which stands for the controlling idea of a distinct class, which impresses its own principle upon all institutions of the time.
First, the idea of the nobility, or land ownership, which
