them paper and carbons that they might by sketches make their news the clearer . They frequented all public places in Paris,—the gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal, Pont-Neuf, convent cloisters and cafés,—and pressed into their service all who would gather news for them.
The professional newsmonger known to Paris has disappeared from modern society and his place is taken by the daily newspaper, but, sighs Funck-Brentano, “quelle n'était pas son importance sous l'ancien régime!”[1] Yet to Montesquieu he had seemed to have his origin in an idle curiosity to which nothing was sacred and to find his end in an overweening self-confidence that led him in advance of Providence to anticipate the future of mankind. Montesquieu can not help adding that during fifty years the influence of the nouvelliste had really been no greater than a silence equally long would have been.[2]
But origins are everywhere somewhat similar. The news was at first cried aloud in France, but later the most important items were written out by hand and copies were circulated in Paris. Each circle had its editorial bureau , its correspondence in the provinces, and the manuscript gazettes had many subscribers. It is natural to think that they would disappear with the coming of printed journals , but both in France and in England the nouvelles à la main and the news-letters circulated contemporaneously with the printed news-sheet and it was long before they were entirely supplanted by it. What made their fortune in France was not so much their greater freedom , as was the explanation in England, but their satiric character and their dissemination of scandals that really were of libellous nature. But this ultimately led to their undoing. The secret gazettes were constantly persecuted by the police , decrees against them were
- ↑ For a full and authoritative account of this part of the subject see F.
Funck-Brentano, Les Nouvellistes, 1905, and Figaro et ses devanciers, 1909.
Important contemporaneous material is found in De Bachaumont, Mémoires, 18 vols., and in the selection from them edited by A. Van Bever under the title Mémoires secrets de Bachaumont, 2 vols. This gives “La Jeunesse de Bachaumont,” an autobiographical fragment, II, 219–288, and
specimens of nouvelles à la main, II, 289–318.An earlier famous nouvelliste was “le bon homme Métra,” of whom Funck -Brentano gives an extended account, Les Nouvellistes, pp. 185–194.
- ↑ Lettres Persanes, Lettre CXXX.
