Cambridge.University.Press.Press.Politics.and.the.Public.Sphere.in.Europe.and.North.America.1760-182

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Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe

and North America, –

Newspapers are a vital component of print and political cultures, and

as such they informed as well as documented the social and political

upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, despite

the huge influence attributed to them by both contemporary observers

and historians, our knowledge of the nature and function of the news￾paper press itself remains scant. Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in

Europe and North America, – aims to fill this gap by examining

aspects of the press in several European countries and America, both

individually and comparatively, during this particularly turbulent and

important period. Contributors explore the relationship between news￾papers and social change, specifically in the context of the part played

by the press in the political upheavals of the time. The collection ex￾amines the relationship between newspapers and public opinion, and

attempts to define their place in the emergence of a ‘public sphere’.

  is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of

Manchester. She is the author of Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion

in Late Eighteenth-Century England (), Newspapers, Politics and

English Society, – () and editor, with David Vincent, of

Language, Print and Electoral Politics – ().

  is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of

Leeds. He is the author of French Exile Journalism and European Politics,

– (), and has published articles in a variety of journals,

including the International History Review, French History, the Journal of

European Studies and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Press, Politics and the Public

Sphere in Europe and

North America, –

Edited by

Hannah Barker

University of Manchester

and

Simon Burrows

University of Leeds

         

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

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http://www.cambridge.org

First published in printed format

ISBN 0-521-66207-9 hardback

ISBN 0-511-03366-4 eBook

Cambridge University Press 2004

2002

(Adobe Reader)

©

Contents

Notes on contributors page vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 

    

 The cosmopolitan press, – 

 

 The Netherlands, – 

  

 Germany, – 

    

 England, – 

 

 Ireland, – 

 

 America, – 

 

 France, – 

 

 The French revolutionary press 

 

 Italy, – 

 

 Russia, – 

  

Index 

v

Notes on the contributors

  is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of

Manchester. She is author of Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion

in Late Eighteenth-Century England () and Newspapers, Politics and

English Society, – (). She is also co-editor of Gender in

Eighteenth-Century England (), with Elaine Chalus, and Language,

Print and Electoral Politics, – (), with David Vincent.

  is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of

Leeds. He has published several articles on the London-based French

press between  and , as well as French Exile Journalism and

European Politics, – ().

  is Professor of History at George Mason University. He

is author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolu￾tion (with Lynn Hunt), The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment

() and Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, – (),

and has written numerous articles on the historiography of the French

Revolution. He has also edited three books: Press and Politics in Pre￾Revolutionary France (), French Revolution and Intellectual History

() and Visions and Revisions in Eighteenth-Century France ().

  is the A. J. Fletcher Professor of Communications

at Elon University. He is the author of Colonial American Newspapers:

Character and Content () and Debating the Issues in Colonial News￾papers (), as well as several articles on the press in eighteenth￾century colonial America.

  is professor of history at University College, Dublin. He

has published many works on both French and Irish history, including

The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (), Ireland and the

French Revolution () and The Terror in the French Revolution ().

  is Professor of History at the University of

Munich. He works on both German and English history, and amongst

vii

viii Notes on the contributors

his publications are Natural Law and Bureaucratic Perspectives: Studies in

Prussian Intellectual and Social History in the Eighteenth Century (),

and Liberty and Licentiousness: The Discourse on the Liberty of the Press in

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (). He has also edited

The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late

Eighteenth Century () and Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth￾Century State in Britain and Germany (), with John Brewer.

  works in Brussels, where he conducts independent

research. His publications include ‘“Una scienza dell’amor patrio”:

public economy, freedom and civilisation in Giuseppe Pecchio’s works

(–)’, Journal for Modern Italian Studies () and ‘Italian

exiles and British politics before and after ’, in Rudolf Muhs

and Sabine Freitag, (eds.), Flotsam of Revolution. European Exiles in

Mid-Victorian England (Oxford, ). He is currently working on a

biography of the Lombard exiled economist and journalist, Giuseppe

Pecchio.

  is Lecturer in Modern History at the University

of Munich. He has published Bayerns Presspolitik und die Neuordnung

Deutschlands nach den Befreiungskriegen (), as well as a number of

articles on press, propaganda and censorship in nineteenth-century

Germany. He is also editor of Das . Jahrhundert. Ein Lesebuch zur

deutschen Geschichte – ().

   is Professor of Russian and Central

European Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she also co￾ordinates the library’s Russian and central European collections. She

has written a number of articles on print culture in pre-revolutionary

Russia, especially the early nineteenth century, and is editor of Books

in Russia and the Soviet Union: Past and Present ().

  is Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, New

Zealand. He is currently writing a bookon the Ultra-Tories and has

produced several articles on the influential Dublin University Magazine

and on the BrunswickClubs.

   is Professor of Modern History at the University

of Amsterdam. He is the author of Onze Natuurlijkste Bondgenoot.

Nederland, Engeland en Europa,–() and Talen van het vader￾land. Over patriottisme en nationalisme(). He has edited a number of

books, including one on the concept of Fatherland in the Netherlands

from early modern times till World War II and one on Dutch lieux￾de-m´emoire.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following, for their generous help in compiling this

volume: Rodney Barker, Joe Bergin, Jeremy Black, Oliver Bleskie, Carlo

Capra, Elaine Chalus, Malcolm Crook, Simon Dixon, Paul Hoftijzer,

Ann Hughes, Michael John, Colin Jones, Otto Lanckhorst, Gary Marker,

MonicaMcLean, LouiseMcReynolds, James Raven, Raymond Richards,

Cynthia Whittaker, and our anonymous readers.

ix

Introduction

Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows

As a vital component of print culture, newspapers feature prominently in

most recent accounts of social and political change in the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries. This is as true for historians exploring the

new ‘cultural interpretation’ of the French Revolution as it is for those

studying Europe’s emergent middle classes or the commercialisation of

Western culture. Yet despite the priority both historians and contempo￾raries have attributed to the influence of the newspaper press, its role is

poorly integrated into most narrative accounts, and not enough is known

about the press itself, especially in terms of national comparison. This

is particularly problematic given the central role that many historians

attribute to newspapers in the formation of ‘public opinion’ and a pan￾European ‘public sphere’ independent of government but critical of the

actions of authority.

This bookseeks to address this need by offering a number of nationally

based case studies, assessing their common features and divergences and

exploring the role of the newspaper in political and social change. The

choice of ‘national boundaries’ as organising categories serves an essential

purpose here, because the political and legal frameworks which defined

the parameters and possibilities of the press, as well as the broad con￾tours of societies and economies, were to a high degree co-extensive with

national borders, even in ancien regime Europe. Furthermore, the extent

and processes by which nationhood was defined from the s to the

s rankamong the most problematic and pressing issues confronting

historians of the period, and accounts of the processes of nation-building

and defining national identity often privilege the press. Within our pre￾dominantly ‘national’ framework, chapters covering communities lacking

statehood (Ireland and pre-revolutionary America), geographic units in￾corporating many states (Germany and Italy) and a chapter on the cosmo￾politan press offer varied perspectives on links between the press and

shifting senses of community and national identity.

Many recent press studies have stressed the extent to which news￾papers and the political and print cultures in which they arise help to



 Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows

define one another. Thus, the study of the press cannot be isolated from

the broader contexts in which it operates. Different contexts can lead to

considerable divergences, even at a single historical moment. In con￾sidering a representative range of national press cultures, contributors to

this volume take a variety of approaches. They examine the structure of

the press; the methods used to control it by political authorities and their

effectiveness; the journalistic texts themselves; and the political role of

newspapers within the public sphere, however defined. They investigate

who owned the papers, who wrote for them, how they were distributed

and who read them, and attempt to assess how far audience composition

and the social backgrounds of journalists, editors and proprietors deter￾mined the nature of the messages the press contained. They also investi￾gate how far newspaper circulations, regularity of publication, audience

size, price, marketing methods and availability determined the social and

geographic penetration of newspapers, their level of independence from

patronage and their political roles. Moreover, they describe the journal￾istic texts, their presentation and format, the topics they covered, the

way issues were presented and the messages, overt and implicit, that they

contained. Such a comprehensive approach to the comparative role of na￾tional newspaper presses reveals important differences. Divergent press

traditions helped to shape radically different national political cultures,

calling many generalisations about the role of the press into question.

Our approach also recognises that different national presses developed

according to national political chronologies, and thus allowed our con￾tributors a certain flexibility about end-dates. In particular, we felt that

abrupt changes in political circumstances during the revolutionary period

so altered press regimes in several countries that it made no sense to offer

a unitary coverage of the whole period –. Thus, there are sepa￾rate chapters on pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France, and discus￾sion of those states where the vestiges of press liberty were extinguished

by Napoleonic expansion – the Netherlands and Italy – ends around

. However, the subsequent experience of these states from  until

the restoration fits within the broader narrative outlined in the chapter

on the cosmopolitan press. Despite these divergences of experience, as

European and American national presses grew from common origins,

and common analytical frameworks have influenced the academic study

of their development, it is possible to raise common themes here.

When newspapers began to emerge in the early seventeenth century,

they were the product of a relatively mature print culture, which accor￾ding to Marshall McLuhan, was already shaping the entire experience

of Western civilisation. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines, McLuhan

suggested that the impact of the invention of movable type printing

Introduction 

(as developed by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century) was not limi￾ted to its technological advantages: by restructuring modes of commu￾nication it also restructured social and cultural practices, intellectual

habits and cognition itself. Building on McLuhan’s approach, Elizabeth

Eisenstein attempts to identify, define and explore the precise nature of

the shift from oral and manuscript culture to print. Eisenstein argues that

as print increased dissemination exponentially, it amplified messages and

made standardisation possible. It led to the reorganisation of texts and

reference guides, promoting rationalisation, codification and cataloguing

of information and new processes of data collection. Whereas continual

copying of manuscripts in scribal culture led to the cumulative corruption

of texts, print culture allowed for processes of feedback, correction and

improved editions. Printing also greatly improved the preservation of

data, fixing the knowledge base, and reinforcing messages and stereo￾types through amplification and repetition. Access to this knowledge base

was through the ever-improving world of the printed text. There, solitary

practices of reading and research replaced the shared oral knowledge

of the past, promoting the retreat into increasingly ‘private worlds’ that

historians have detected in the early modern period. The development

of habits of critical thought through comparison and criticism of mul￾tiple texts promoted intellectual and religious fragmentation as critical

analysis of texts considered authoritative in the Middle Ages called their

authority into question. When combined with the propaganda poten￾tial of the printing press to disseminate such findings, printing became

a major force behind the success of the Reformation and the secularisa￾tion of European society. Printing also appeared to be a prerequisite of

the evolution of new forms of political and social organisation, especially

nation states predicated on the twin pillars of bureaucratic administra￾tion and political consent founded upon a national community of identity

expressed primarily through the medium of print.

Although Eisenstein’s approach has been criticised, not least by Adrian

Johns, as being too deterministic and overplaying print’s fixity and claims

to authority, the implications of the influence of multiple texts remain

vital, especially with regard to the spread of news. Yet, sadly, as Mitchell

Stephens has pointed out, Eisenstein almost ignores the journalistic uses

of print. However, following lines suggested by Eisenstein’s analysis,

other historians have explored the historical implications of serial pro￾duction. As some of the first disposable, mass-produced products, news

publications have been implicated in the development of new modes of

production. They were also the most important forum for the develop￾ment of modern advertising. Serial publications offered a regular point of

contact between producers and their potential clients and made possible