The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  His Eminence's unequalled eloquence, and the perfect knowledge he had of this material made the discourse so easy for him, that he spoke for nearly an hour. During which time one had never seen such attention, with the eyes of the entire assembly steadily fixed upon him, their ears set upon every word, and their bodies immobile, these were certain signs: as their unanimous applause was so far from any suspicion of flattery, it was their state of rapture which made him so able to gain the hearts of the entire audience.55

  Beyond these oblations to power, and assured of the Cardinal's trust, Renaudot also found room in the Gazette for a wide variety of reports from abroad. After 1635 despatches from Germany took up increasing space, and Renaudot also kept his readers fully acquainted with the developing crisis in the English monarchy. The contrast with the stability of the French Crown was implicit, but helpful.

  In such turbulent times the desire to be informed extended well beyond the metropolitan elite of Paris, and the Gazette was soon being pirated in provincial markets: in Rouen from 1631 and from 1633 in Aix-en-Provence. Rather than engage in costly litigation, or supply the market himself from Paris, Renaudot found a novel solution: he franchised the text of the Gazette to licensed provincial printers.56 In return for a fee they published their own editions. Thus regional editions of the Gazette were established in Rouen, Lyon and Bordeaux. From these places copies could reach every corner of the kingdom. The accounts of a Grenoble bookseller, for instance, record him sending copies to clients in Die, Valence, Gap, Nîmes and Besançon. The voice of the court was heard throughout the kingdom.

  This was shrewd as well as lucrative. By this system Renaudot ensured that none of the printers in the south of France, far removed from the close supervision possible in Paris, would be willing to chance their arm with their own newspapers. Thus it came to pass that a kingdom of close to 20 million inhabitants, with more than thirty established centres of printing, subsisted on a single weekly newspaper. So it would remain until the great rebellion of mid-century, the Fronde, temporarily suspended royal authority, and provoked a new storm of public debate.

  The Fronde was, in essence, a shriek of pain by two groups who resented their exclusion from power during the minority of Louis XIV: the nobility and the Paris legal establishment. They focused their discontents on the minister who had smoothly adopted the mantle of Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin. The campaign against him was conducted very largely in print, in a deluge of pamphlets; as many as 5,000 in the three years of the conflict, including 3,000 in the year 1649 alone.57 No wonder one of these titles offered ironic thanks to Mazarin for making so much work for printers: ‘Your life is an inexhaustible subject for authors, and indefatigable for printers …. Half of Paris is either printing or selling these books, the other half is writing them.’58 These pamphlets had everything: wit, oratory, passion, even a talking horse.59 Yet even while, in this moment of crisis, printers reached for the pamphlet, the traditional safety valve of major news events, they were still keen to appropriate for these works the new nomenclature of the periodical press. Thus there was a flurry of pamphlet Couriers and Journals, the odd Mercury, and even one optimistically titled Disinterested Gazetteer.60 Small hope of that. Like all the rest, this title was an excoriating denunciation of Mazarin and all his works:

  Aristotle tells us that some are good by nature, some by doctrine, and some by custom. Cardinal Mazarin demonstrates that he is of a fourth type, since he could only be good by a miracle.61

  9.6 The Courier françois, which flourished briefly during Renaudot's exile from Paris.

  Amongst this pamphlet fury there was one attempt to establish a genuine serial to replace the suspended Gazette. Renaudot, no doubt with some reluctance, had been forced to follow the king to St Germain, leaving an opportunity for some enterprising Parisian printer to fill this gap in the market. The result was the Courier françois, which went through twelve issues in 1649, and several reprints.62 It was once thought that this was the work of Renaudot's two sons, left behind in Paris by the gazetteer to continue his business. This seems unlikely. Even in the slippery world of news publishing it is improbable that a man who had benefited so freely from royal patronage would have attempted to serve both the king and his opponents simultaneously.63 In any case as soon as Paris was restored to royal control Renaudot moved to suppress the new rival. This tussle also found its echo in the pamphlet literature, in a piquant booklet entitled The commerce of news re-established, or the Courier suppressed by the Gazette.64 Not everyone in the Paris trade was pleased; but Renaudot retained the king's confidence, and that was decisive. The Gazette re-emerged, with its monopoly intact, to chronicle the foreign triumphs of France's armies in the reign of Louis XIV.65

  The logic of monopoly seems also to have attracted another powerful mind, Paolo Sarpi in Venice. In the early years of the seventeenth century Sarpi had built a reputation as a gifted writer, notably as a defender of the city against Cardinal Bellarmine in the Interdict Controversy of 1606–7.66 Reflecting on these events a decade later, and aware of the growing market for printed news in other parts of Europe, Sarpi at first believed that Venice should grasp the nettle and make its own case to an informed public. The best strategy, he argued, was to create one's own narrative of events, and thus crowd out false or unhelpful intelligence. But this raised the danger that any information in the hands of the subject could lead them to develop their own opinions on political affairs. When the subject becomes politically informed,

  He gradually begins to judge the prince's actions; he becomes so accustomed to this communication that he believes it is due him, and when it is not given, he sees a false significance or else perceives an affront and conceives hatred.67

  All in all, this was best avoided. ‘Everyone confesses,’ was Sarpi's reluctant conclusion, ‘that the true way of ruling the subject is to keep him ignorant of and reverent towards public affairs.’68

  Sarpi was remarkably frank, but the sentiments he expresses here seem to have been the prevailing view in Italy's largest cities. Neither Rome nor Venice, the two great centres of European news publication, produced newspapers. The first experiments in serial publication were in much smaller places and started remarkably late. Newspapers were established in the 1640s in Genoa, Naples, Bologna and Florence. As was the case in Germany, they were often the work of men who ran an existing manuscript news service, or of printers whose output included news pamphlets. None seems to have achieved great success. The early Italian newspapers have none of the typographical boldness and clarity we associate with early Italian printing. The first Bologna paper offered a cramped digest of news on a single folded sheet of cheap paper. As late as 1689 the newspaper of Mantua had a print run of only 200 copies, and, even so, ‘there are always some left over that are not sold, but instead are given gratis to the chancery, to the ministers, and to others’.69

  Why did the Italians not embrace the newspaper more warmly? The answer lies partly in the continuing success of existing news media. Crises in the peninsula, such as the Interdict Controversy and the revolt in Naples, could stir up a storm: Italian printers could certainly respond to great events. But for the everyday of political life and court intrigue the manuscript newsletters retained the loyalty of their subscribers. In Rome and Venice, communities that lived on gossip and private intelligence, a confidential news service remained an absolute necessity. The manuscript newsletter possessed a subtlety and flexibility lost in a public printed document. Throughout the seventeenth century Italian newsletter writers retained the distinction between their normal manuscript service and ‘secret’ sheets they would provide to especially favoured customers. These offered comment on prominent public figures with a frank and brutal disregard for the reputations of the great that would have landed any printer in prison, or worse. It was also relevant that both Rome and Venice were magnets for ambitious young men of talent and education. This created a pool of cheap scribal labour that allowed news writers to build workshops of consi
derable size. If these writers were well informed, the profits to be made from a confidential news service outran that possible from a printed newspaper many times over.70

  The sheer triviality of these breathless reports was occasionally remarked upon. ‘You who after silly tales are lusting, anxious to hear rumours and reports, quickly, run and look at the gazettes, and see if the news is good, fine or disgusting’: so wrote one jaundiced Paduan pamphleteer.71 But whatever the protestations of the fastidious, gossip remained the lifeblood of Italian politics, and news not fit to print was the most valuable of all. Then, as now, those in the thick of it took these tiny hints of shifting power with deadly seriousness. Who was up, who was down, who had snubbed whom; was the Cardinal's leaving Rome to take the waters a genuine sign of ill health, or a pretext to hide his disgrace? Of such was political life in Machiavelli's homeland. Perhaps, for those who cared, it disguised the unpalatable fact that real power had shifted to elsewhere in Europe.

  The first age of the newspaper was a period of profound but constrained experimentation. The new invention flourished in a comparatively small part of the European land mass and, even here, the dry and rather routine reporting of faraway events does little to quicken the blood of a modern reader. We can find some interest in the different solutions to the design and practical problems of serial publication, but, this apart, what had been achieved by the first tentative steps in the creation of a regular printed news service? Here, examining the short, often rather grubby surviving issues, it is easy to be too dismissive. Contemporaries certainly valued them very highly. We should not belittle the English squire, or the citizen of Amsterdam or Dresden, poring over their paper, trying to make sense of the shifting kaleidoscope of faraway events. No doubt perusal of the weekly newspaper required frequent recourse to an atlas, another increasingly necessary adornment of a well-stocked library. Undoubtedly it was by no means easy to determine whether the clipped reports of campaigns and manoeuvres brought news that was good, bad, or even very interesting. But if much news was ill-digested, there is no doubt that by placing it in so many hands the newspapers of the seventeenth century achieved a double broadening of political consciousness: they increased the numbers of the politically aware, and they expanded their worldview. Newspapers also began to build in their readers a habit of news. Great events would still unleash a storm of pamphlets, full of engaged advocacy, but in quieter times readers came to value the steady miscellany of information that arrived with the newspaper. For many in the seventeenth century, and for the price of two pence a week, it was an affordable habit. In the years ahead, it would increasingly become an addiction.

  CHAPTER 10

  War and Rebellion

  IN 1618 the edgy, brooding truce that had kept the peace in central Europe for over seventy years stood on the brink of collapse. A resurgent Catholic activism had caused Protestants to fear that the liberties guaranteed by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 would not be long maintained. The prospect that the Emperor Matthias would be succeeded by his much more militant cousin Ferdinand stirred anxiety in the Habsburg lands, particularly in Bohemia where Protestants were a long-standing majority. The crisis came to a head in Prague on 23 May 1618, when Protestant deputies from the Czech Estates confronted loyal imperial regents. After angry exchanges two prominent imperial officials were hustled to a high window of the castle and hurled through it. Their unfortunate secretary was tossed after them.

  Miraculously, all three survived the sixty-foot drop. The victims landed on a pile of refuse and were able to stagger away, largely uninjured. For the Protestants of Bohemia this unexpected denouement was an ominous portent of ill-fortune. For the Emperor's supporters, on the other hand, the survival of the defenestrated officials offered a remarkable propaganda coup. News of their escape circulated swiftly around Europe, though presumably not everyone believed the excited accounts of reported bystanders who claimed that they had seen the Virgin Mary intervene to cushion the fall.1 The victims themselves were grateful enough for the providential dung-heap.

  The defenestration of Prague would usher in thirty years of warfare that in due course drew in almost all of Europe's major powers. It was immensely destructive for Germany, and led to permanent shifts in the European power structure. It was also the first European conflict to be fought in the full glare of the new news media. The Thirty Years War erupted only a few years after the introduction of the new postal routes linking northern Europe to the imperial system, and the establishment of the first newspapers. It would be a remarkable test for the capacity of the new communications network to provide news and analysis to Europe's anxious and suffering peoples. These developments, of course, were not confined to Germany. By the time Protestant and Catholic powers were finally brought to the negotiating table, new conflicts, the Fronde in France and the British Civil Wars, were testing the capacities of the new media to incubate opposition and marshal opinion. This was an age in which news media sought a wider public, and where a wider public was desperate for news. The impact would be profound and long-lasting.

  From Prague

  In the years after 1618 those waiting anxiously in Europe's capital cities for news of events in Germany would have many occasions to praise the industry of Johann von den Birghden, the imperial postmaster of the newly established station at Frankfurt. For it was von den Birghden who had personally ridden to Prague to see to the placement of the postal stations that connected the imperial capital to the German postal network and thus linked up the rest of Europe, through Frankfurt, to the tumultuous events in Bohemia.2 With the defenestration of Prague the Bohemian Revolt had passed the point of no return. By throwing off Habsburg allegiance and electing the Protestant Frederick of the Palatinate as King of Bohemia in place of the deceased Matthias (August 1619), the Protestant Estates ensured that only military conflict would settle the issue. These extraordinary events provoked the customary rash of celebratory or disapproving pamphlets: many offered a remarkably serious and measured response to the constitutional crisis in the Empire, which had now entered uncharted waters.3 The war was also the first test of the new weekly newspapers. Since 1605 the printed news-sheets had been set up in at least half a dozen towns, and this would double in the first years of the struggle.

  One of the first reports of the defenestration of Prague appeared in the Frankfurter Postzeitung. Citing a despatch from Prague dated 29 May (six days after the event), the paper accurately reported that all three victims had survived, but was mistaken as to their names.4 The next issue of this paper does not survive, so we cannot tell whether it published a correction. Although mistaken in some of the particulars, the sober tone of the reporting is utterly characteristic. Correspondents wrote as they would for their fellow diplomats and officials. They made no concessions to the fact that these reports might, through the newspapers, reach a wider public: they felt no duty to explain, to sketch the background, or introduce the persons named. The journalistic instinct to popularise and enliven reports of current events that we have witnessed in the sixteenth-century pamphlet literature is entirely absent.

  The German newspapers of these years also carried reports from both sides of the developing conflict, with little attempt to differentiate or slant them towards the likely allegiances of their readers. In the circumstances of an increasingly bitter and bloody conflict such an unpartisan spirit could not endure. In 1620 readers in Hamburg, Frankfurt or Berlin could read reports from Prague and Vienna that would, in the case of the Bohemian despatches, speak of ‘our King Frederick’ or ‘the enemy’, whereas the Viennese despatches in the same issue offered a loyally imperial perspective.5 An even more clearly differentiated market emerged with the establishment in 1622 and 1623 of newspapers in the confessional citadels of Vienna and Zurich. The first generation of German newspapers had all been established in the cities of north and central Germany. Thanks to the efficiency of the new postal routes, news entrepreneurs in these cities had access to a full range of reports from all
the main stations of European politics. In contrast Matthias Formica, the founder of the first newspaper in Vienna, had no correspondents in Protestant areas: he would hardly have been able to print in the Habsburg capital their eager accounts of the usurpation of the Bohemian Crown in any case.6 The Zurich newspaper also developed into a highly partisan organ on the Protestant side. But even that paper could do little to disguise the scale of the calamity that was unfolding. Disappointed in his hopes of support from other major Protestant powers, the newly elected King of Bohemia, Frederick of the Palatinate, was swiftly deposed by one Catholic army, while another laid waste to his Rhineland territories.

  Faced by this rampant Catholic power, publications elsewhere in Germany also began to choose their words more carefully. This was not, it should be said, the result of any aggressive action by their own local rulers. In 1628 the city council of Berlin examined the printer of its own local paper after some grumbling from Vienna about the nature of its reporting. The printer protested that he simply published incoming reports as he received them, without altering a single word. This statement of general practice was accepted as reasonable, and no further action was taken.7

  Merely to keep abreast of the extraordinary events of these years was a sufficient challenge for the first printed news-sheets, which seldom, even with the most dramatic news from the battle-front, deviated from the established format of four or eight closely written pages of sequential reports from the leading news centres. As the Catholic forces moved to consolidate their battlefield victories, with the deposition of Frederick and the investiture of Maximilian of Bavaria with his former Electoral title, even the pamphlet literature struggled to find an adequate response. Anxious commentary on the constitutional implications of the erosion of liberties guaranteed by the Confession of Augsburg did little to deter the Emperor from pressing home his advantage. For a true expression of the passion and confessional fury of these years we need to turn to another news medium: the resurgent trade in illustrated broadsheets.8