Read The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Online
Authors: Andrew Pettegree
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (52 page)
Armies marching – battles fought – towns destroyed – rivers crossed and the like: I should think it ill became me to take up my own, or reader's time with such accounts as are every day to be found in the public papers.
36
This was the point; there were other places where such matters were exhaustively discussed, and the journals did not have to regurgitate material freely available in the newspapers. Plenty of male readers also found their appetite for battles and sieges much reduced when the society papers provided an alternative diversion. But this was generally not a choice that had to be made. Articulate female readers followed the news closely, even if social convention forbade them from making much reference to this in their correspondence.
37
It is significant that when Dorothy Osborne read a news publication in 1653, she could only acknowledge this in an oblique way: ‘I know not how I stumbled upon a news book this week, and for want of something else to do read it.’
38
This was in a letter to her suitor, Sir William Temple, and she may have thought he would consider an interest in news unseemly in a potential bride.
Married women could take a close interest in politics that impacted on their family with less constraint.
39
Critically the hundred years between Dorothy Osborne's letter and Eliza Haywood's
Female Spectator
saw a giant leap forward in female literacy. The number of female readers had increased three or fourfold; this was a substantial market that publishers could not afford to ignore. Women as consumers and arbiters of taste were an important economic force and therefore an important driver of the periodical market. The first daily paper in France, the
Journal de Paris
(1777), was a cultural listing, offering notes on the current theatrical performances and literary gossip. In the second half of the eighteenth century essay journals like
The Female Spectator
were gradually superseded by a new generation of monthly magazines.
The Lady's Magazine
(1759) and
The Lady's Museum
(1760) were part of a general trend away from the single editor-persona towards a substantial periodical offering a collection of features by various hands.
40
Both these journals offered a variety of instructional features, including articles on geography, history and popular science, tempered by fiction and poetry. Nor were female readers spared the harsher aspects of contemporary life. In an earlier manifestation of
The Lady's Magazine
, a fortnightly established in 1749, readers were treated to a monthly account of the trial, confession or execution of some notorious criminal. Sometimes these malefactors were female: ‘an account of three unhappy women executed at Tyburn'; ‘the trial of Mary Blandy for poisoning her late father’.
41
The windows of the polite parlour could never entirely shut out the life of the teeming metropolis beyond.
The Political Journal
The periodical press did not – could not – ignore politics. Whether it was the whimsical rapier thrusts of the Spectator genre, or the increasingly bold editorialising in some parts of the newspaper industry, this was the age that finally began to achieve the integration of news and commentary that we take for granted in the printed news media today. An important catalyst was the emergence of a new generation of journals of political analysis. These played a particularly important role in parts of Europe where the newspapers remained wedded to a conservative vision of news reporting that left them little scope for political commentary. This was true for both the Low Countries and Germany, where most newspapers remained local monopoly providers, and obsessively careful not to cause offence to local magistrates. An escape from this studied neutrality was provided by Gottlob Benedikt von Shirach's
Politische Journal
, one of the most successful periodical ventures of the century. Established in
1781, the
Politische Journal
became the most widely read periodical in the German-speaking world, with an audience transcending the micro-markets of the German city and princely states.
42
By the 1780s Germany had 183 newspapers. With rare exceptions, however, such as the widely circulating Hamburg papers, most served a purely local clientele. Their format and priorities were barely distinguishable from their predecessors a century before. Foreign news predominated, and much of the remaining space was taken up by advertisements and a local court circular, a Lilliputian version of the Paris
Gazette
’s despatches from Versailles: ‘all the honours and favours dispensed at the court, festivities, voyages, ceremonies, banquets, and the endless list of irrelevancies, rumours, suppositions, contradictions and private affairs’, as von Shirach put it in one of the first issues of the
Politische Journal.
43
Von Shirach also believed that the newspaper itself – its barrage of fragmentary reports – posed a barrier to understanding. Even with the best-informed paper, the urgent periodicity of a weekly production could hardly provide more than a part of the picture, with little context and no scope for sober analysis. With the
Politische Journal
von Shirach created a journal that he hoped could combine the traditional analytical function of pamphlets with the contemporaneity of the newspapers. Monthly publication should ensure that the shape of events had become clearer, and eliminate the misleading, false or trivial reports that found their way into the newspapers.
A true child of the Enlightenment, von Shirach adhered to a clear and rational plan. Each monthly issue consisted of three parts. The first presented background information necessary to understand the issues of the day: statistics and excerpts from official documents. There then followed analytical articles written by von Shirach summarising events in various parts of Europe. The final third consisted of letters from the
Journal
’s correspondents from the self-same capitals, timed to arrive in Hamburg just before he went to press.
It was an innovative formula and it found a ready public: the readership grew steadily to around 8,000 subscribers. But the
Politische Journal
also attracted criticism, much of it focused on von Shirach's own editorial style. Von Shirach never understated the potential importance of the events he described: each shift in the balance of European power portended revolution, and he often saw war looming. Von Shirach's views were strongly held, but he sometimes put himself on the wrong side of history, as with his trenchant opposition to both the American and French revolutions. An unfortunate talent for unsuccessful prognostication was revealed early in his reporting of the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibralter in 1782. Subscribers would have received his careful analysis of the strength of the investing forces, and confident predictions of their success, just as the newspapers brought news of the
crushing English victory. This was the danger of a monthly publication dealing with fast-moving events. For all that, the
Politische Journal
was a carefully conceived and ground-breaking publication, not least in the degree of attention it gave to German news. The
Politische Journal
devoted at least half of its space to news and analysis of events in Germany and Austria: a radical departure from the newspaper tradition with its continuing concentration on foreign news. This, along with the
Politische Journal
’s wide circulation, played an important role in the growth of pan-German political consciousness.
In France the publication of political journals was a feature of the general loosening of political controls before the Revolution. The catalyst was a political crisis of a very traditional sort. In 1770 Louis XV, exasperated by a long conflict of attrition with the Paris Parlement, dismissed his veteran chief minister Choiseul and sought more decisive leadership from a triumvirate of determined officials, led by Chancellor Maupeou. The triumvirate in turn sought to out-manoeuvre the opposition of the Parlement by replacing sitting magistrates with a reorganised court system. This flagrant provocation initiated the largest wave of pamphleteering since the
Mazarinades
more than a century before.
44
The outpouring of publications on both sides awakened Paris's normally conservative publishing community to the tremendous public interest in current affairs. Encouraged by the weakening of censorship that always followed from a major political conflict in France, publishers began to issue pamphlets in a quasi-periodical form, with each successive issue consecutively numbered. This shift towards serial publication continued after the initial crisis had subsided, most notably with the
Mémoires secrets
, a thirty-six volume series of gossip and anecdotes. Other notable ventures included the
Observateur anglois
, and, most notorious of all, the
Annales politiques
of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet.
Linguet had earned his journalistic spurs as an employee of the publisher-entrepreneur Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. Dismissed for intemperate attacks on the
philosophes
, Linguet withdrew to London, from where he crafted an immediate publishing sensation. The contemporary renown of Linguet's
Annales
lay in the quality of its writing, for Linguet, already a well-known and distinguished lawyer, revealed himself as a natural exponent of advocacy journalism. More remarkable still was his success, as an independent editor operating outside the country, in securing the printing and distribution of the
Annales
in France. Somehow Linguet's agent in his home country managed to ensure that circulation of the journal would be tolerated, but its instant celebrity brought new problems in the form of unauthorised reprints, which Linguet was powerless to prevent. Briefly interrupted when Linguet was lured to Paris and imprisoned in the Bastille, the
Annales
were resumed in 1783. Linguet's adventures provided a vivid illustration of the enduring problem that faced the French
political press. Although political periodicals circulated widely, censorship was never formally abandoned. This meant that political journals could never be openly marketed or advertised; circulation required accommodations and private understandings that could always be revoked. This was one reason why the French periodicals did not achieve the same regularity and exact periodicity that characterised similar ventures in other countries. However, they made up for this with a passionate engagement and wit that entranced readers greedy for political debate after the long years of a controlled and subservient press. Linguet's
Annales
, boosted by the unofficial reprint, maintained an international circulation of as much as twenty thousand copies per issue. Despite his angry denunciations of pirate publishers, Linguet was reported to have made large sums from the
Annales
, as much as 80,000
livres
a year.
45
A Man of Property
The full potential of this buoyant market for political journalism would ultimately be demonstrated by Linguet's former patron, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. Panckoucke was Europe's first media mogul.
46
He had been born into the business of books, the son of a provincial bookseller in Lille. Educated in the
philosophe
spirit, he considered a career as an academic or military engineer (he was an especially gifted mathematician) before accepting that his fate was to take over the family business.
47
In the early 1760s, working in partnership with his two sisters, Panckoucke transferred the bookshop to Paris. Immersing himself in the intellectual culture of the capital, Panckoucke continued to write; among the books he published were a number of his own works. Most important of all, Panckoucke had the gift of friendship. He was close to Voltaire from an early age, and later to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The distinguished naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was a confidant and friend.
48
Moving in these circles Panckoucke conceived the wish to make a substantial contribution to the Encyclopedist movement. In 1769 he approached Diderot with a plan to publish a supplement to the
Encyclopédie
. Initially rebuffed, he persisted and obtained the necessary permission. A decade later he embarked on what would be his chief monument, the
Encyclopédie méthodique
, arranged by subject matter rather than alphabetically. Secure in the esteem of France's leading thinkers, Panckoucke might have been expected to be content. But he had other plans. A shrewd reader of markets as well as men, Panckoucke had for some years been contemplating the rich potential of the periodical press. The original transaction through which Panckoucke bought the shop and stock of the Paris bookseller Michel Lambert in 1760 had also brought him Lambert's printing contracts, which included the
Année littéraire
and the
Journal des sçavans
; the latter in particular was a prestigious venture, though Panckoucke claimed it was running at a loss when he bought it.
49
Profitable or not, this provided the foundation for an expanding portfolio of periodicals. In due course Panckoucke was prepared to try his hand at the political press. Gradually he built up a stable that included the
Journal politique de Bruxelles, Journal des dames, Journal des spectacles, Journal des affaires d'Angleterre et d'Amérique
and the
Gazette des tribunaux
. With his
Journal politique de Bruxelles
and the
Journal de Genève
, Panckoucke nodded towards the tradition that all political papers apart from the official
Gazette
should be published outside the country. In fact both periodicals, despite their name, were published in France, an arrangement that had the blessing of the ministry.
