Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 7]

sous. When the gazettes did not appear as usual yesterday, it was said that the minister had had them stopped.¹⁰

In short, the press was far from free; and it was also underdeveloped, if you compare it with the press in Holland, England, and Germany. The first French daily newspaper, Le journal de Paris, did not appear until 1777. The first German daily appeared more than a century earlier, in Leipzig in 1660. Yet a substantial reading public had existed in France since the seventeenth century; and it expanded enormously in the eighteenth century, especially in cities and in northern France, where nearly half of all adult males could read by 1789. This public was curious about public affairs and conscious of itself as a new force in politics—that is, as public opinion—even though it had no voice in the conduct of the government.¹¹

So a basic contradiction existed—between the public with its hunger for news on the one side and the state with its absolutist forms of power on the other. To understand how this contradiction played itself out, we need to take a closer look at the media that transmitted news and the messages they conveyed. What were the media in eighteenth-century Paris?

e tend to think of them by way of contrast to the all-pervasive media of today. So we imagine the Old Regime as a simple, tranquil, media-free world-we-have-lost, a society with no telephones, no television, no e-mail, Internet, and all the rest. In fact, however, it was not a simple world at all. It was merely different. It had a dense communication network made up of media and genres that have been forgotten—so thoroughly forgotten that even their names are unknown today and cannot be translated into English equivalents: mauvais propos, bruit public, on-dit, pasquinade, pont-neuf, canard, feuille volante, factum, libelle, chronique scandaleuse. There were so many modes of communication, and they intersected and overlapped so intensively that we can hardly picture their operation. I have tried to make a picture, nonetheless—a schematic diagram, which illustrates how messages traveled through different media and milieus. (See Figure 3.)

Now, this model may look so complicated as to be absurd—more like a diagram for wiring a radio than the flow of information through a social system. Instead of elaborating on it, let me give you an example of the transmission process, something you might liken to a modern news flash. I quote from Anecdotes sur Mme. la comtesse du Barry, a top bestseller on the eve of the French Revolution (about which, more later):

We find in the manuscript gazette that has often guided us in assembling the materials for our history, an anecdote [about Mme. du Barry] that illustrates the general opinion of the

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