Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 6]
Of course, some information reached the reading public through journals and gazettes, but it was not supposed to deal with the inside story of politics or with politics at all, except in the form of official pronouncements on court life. All printed matter had to be cleared through a baroque bureaucracy that included nearly 200 censors, and the censors' decisions were enforced by a special branch of the police, the inspectors of the book trade. The inspectors did not merely repress heresy and sedition; they also protected privileges. Official journals—notably the Gazette de France, Mercure, and Journal des savants—possessed royal privileges for the coverage of certain subjects, and no new periodical could be established without paying them for a share in their turf. When the revolutionaries looked back at the history of the press, they saw nothing but newslessness before 1789. Thus Pierre Manuel on the Gazette de France:
A people that wants to be informed cannot be satisfied with the Gazette de France. Why should it care if the king has performed the ritual of foot-washing for some poor folk whose feet weren't even dirty? Or if the queen celebrated Easter in company with the comte d'Artois? Or if Monsieur deigned to accept the dedication of a book that he may never read? Or if the Parlement, dressed in ceremonial attire, harangued the baby dauphin, who was dressed in swaddling clothes? The people want to know everything that is actually done and said in the court—why and for whom the cardinal de Rohan should have taken it into his head to play games with a pearl necklace; if it is true that the comtesse Diane appoints the generals of the army and the comtesse Jule the bishops; how many Saint Louis medals the minister of war allotted to his mistress for distribution as New Year's presents. It was the sharp-witted authors of clandestine gazettes [nouvelles à la main] who spread the word about this kind of scandal.9
These remarks, written at the height of the excitement over a newly freed press, exaggerate the servility of journalism under the Old Regime. Many periodicals existed, many of them printed in French outside France, and they sometimes provided information about political events, especially during the relatively liberal reign of Louis XVI (1774-1792). But if any ventured criticism of the government, they could easily be snuffed out by the police—not simply by raids on bookshops and arrests of peddlers, which frequently occurred, but by being excluded from the mail. Distribution through the mail left their supply lines very vulnerable, as the Gazette de Leyde learned when it tried and failed to cover the most important political story of Louis XV's reign, the destruction of the parlements from 1771 to 1774.
So newspapers of a sort existed, but they had little news—and the reading public had little faith in them, not even in the French journals that arrived from Holland. The general skepticism was expressed clearly in a report from a police spy in 1746:
It is openly said that France pays 2,000 livres [a year] to Sieur du Breuil, author of the Gazette d'Amsterdam, which is vetted by the French representative at The Hague. Besides that, France gives 12,000 to 15,000 livres to Mme. Limiers, who does the Gazette d'Utrecht. This money comes from the revenue of the gazettes, which the postal service sells for 17 sous 6 deniers [per copy] to David, its distributor in Paris, and which he sells to the public for 20
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