Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 4]
house to house asking, in the name of his mistress, 'What's new?'"5 The servant wrote the first entries for each day's news on the registers; the "parishioners" read through them, adding whatever other information they had gathered; and, after a general vetting, the reports were copied and sent to select friends of Mme. Doublet. One of them, J.-G. Bosc du Bouchet, comtesse d'Argental, had a lackey named Gillet, who organized another copying service. When he began to make money by selling the copies—provincial subscribers gladly paid six livres a month to keep up with the latest news from Paris—some of his copyists set up shops of their own; and those shops spawned other shops, so that by 1750 multiple editions of Mme. Doublet's newsletter were flying around Paris and the provinces. The copying operations—an efficient means of diffusion long after Gutenberg and long before Xerox—had turned into a minor industry, a news service providing subscribers with manuscript gazettes, or nouvelles à la main. (See Figure 2.) In 1777, publishers began putting these nouvelles into print, and they circulated as the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la république des lettres en France, a bestseller in the underground book trade.6
Anecdotal as they are, these examples show that news (nouvelles) circulated through several media and by different modes—oral, manuscript, and print. In each case, moreover, it remained outside the law. So we also should consider the political constraints on the news.
This is a rich and complicated subject, because research during the last twenty years has transformed the history of early modern journalism.7 Simplifying radically, I would insist on a basic point: information about the inner workings of the power system was not supposed to circulate under the Old Regime in France. Politics was the king's business, "le secret du roi"— a notion derived from a late medieval and Renaissance view, which treated statecraft as "arcana imperii," a secret art restricted to sovereigns and their advisers.8
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