frequently issued, and individual writers were conspicuously punished—Hatin gives an account of the punishment by whipping on the Pont-Neuf of a man who had suspended from his neck a placard reading “gazetier à la main.” Although sending the writers to the Bastille by the dozen " had not made them wiser," they flourished for a time and the Prince of Condé wrote, “the evil is without a remedy,” but in the end they disappeared.[1]
Contemporaneously in England it was the coffee-houses through which news circulated and that became in London the chief organ of public opinion. They had been started in London in 1652 and speedily acquired such influence that the Earl of Danby attempted to suppress them in 1676 on the ground that they were centers of political agitation and the resort of disaffected persons "who devised and spread abroad divers false, malicious and scandalous reports, to the defamation of His Majesty's government, and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the nation.” But they were too firmly entrenched in public life to make it wise to prosecute them and efforts against them were abandoned. Since English judges decided in 1679 that the temporary suspension of the licensing act did not cover the newspaper press, the coffee-houses were given a still greater impetus and "every man of the upper or middle class went daily to his coffee-house to learn the news and to discuss it," and "every rank and profession, and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own headquarters.”[2]
What the coffee-house was to the metropolis the news-letter was to the provinces. It was the only means through which persons living at a distance could be regularly informed in regard to affairs in the capital[3] and thus “ To prepare such letters became
- ↑ An important and interesting account of the gazettes à la main is given by Hatin in Les Gazettes de Hollande et la presse clandestine aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Copies of these gazettes that have been preserved show that they contained analyses of dramatic pieces, reports of literary meetings, notices of new books,—especially of clandestine and prohibited books,—unpublished poems, anecdotes and bon mots, and social items.
Funck-Brentano gives several reproductions of the gazettes à la main, as well as an exhaustive account of them.—Figaro et ses devanciers.
- ↑ T. B . Macaulay, History of England, I, chap. III.
- ↑ An exceptionally interesting collection of news-letters illustrating this point is found in the manuscripts of S. H. Le Fleming of Rydal Hall, Westmoreland. They date from 1667 to 1691 and were in part supplied by friends
