The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself
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It was in these most vicious months that the Revolution finally abandoned the vision of press freedom that had animated many of the early debates in the National Assembly.51 Robespierre, a consistent advocate of the principle from 1789 to 1793, now recognised the error of his ways. On 16 June he invited the Committee of Public Safety to punish ‘treacherous journalists who are the most dangerous enemies of liberty’.52 Shortly before concluding his ascent to power, Robespierre had sketched an extraordinary political catechism. This demonstrates the extent to which he now saw unlicensed freedom as the heart of the discord that had engulfed the revolutionary movement:
What is our aim? It is the use of the Constitution for the benefit of the people.
Who is likely to oppose us? The rich and the corrupt.
What methods will they employ? Slander and hypocrisy.
What factors will encourage the use of such means? The ignorance of the sans-culottes.
The people must therefore be instructed.
What are the obstacles to their enlightenment? The paid journalists who mislead the people every day by shameless distortions.
What conclusion follows? That we ought to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country, and to circulate an abundance of good literature.53
In the early, hopeful days of revolution, Mirabeau and Brissot had believed that the press would unify public opinion. In this at least they were to be disappointed. The coup that toppled Robespierre was accompanied by stringent measures to rein in the press. Both the Directory and the subsequent Napoleonic regime recognised the corrosive danger of unbridled political criticism. Of the eighty Parisian printing houses chosen to be retained under the Napoleonic system of press control, only nineteen specialised in journals and periodicals.54
At the height of the revolutionary agitation the interested reader could choose between as many as one hundred serial publications. The scale of the transformation from the staid, controlled world of the ancien régime is obvious, though this is not to say that the newspapers exercised all the influence attributed to them by the revolutionary leadership. Serial publication vied for influence with other traditional forms of persuasive literature, not least non-serial political pamphlets which were also published in huge numbers.55 While Paris was a highly literate society (with high levels of male and female literacy), the combined readership of newspapers probably never exceeded 3 million, out of a total national population of 28 million. Although provincial cities like Lyon and Toulouse also experienced a rapid expansion of a newly established provincial press, the disjunction between the political melting pot of the capital and provincial society was still stark.56 In Paris itself, much political activism was face to face and word of mouth, in the Jacobin clubs and, among delegates to the successive national assemblies, in private drawing rooms or on the floor of the debating chamber itself. Among the wider population most citizens, called to action regardless of social station, would have been roused to arms by speeches or conversation in impromptu street gatherings and taverns. The French Revolution was an extraordinarily fertile period for the composition of political song, of which the Marseillaise was only the most famous and enduring example.57
Periodicals, for all their eloquent advocacy of universal enfranchisement, still spoke in the voice of the educated elite. Marat's tirades of denunciation could be couched in a severely classical vocabulary. He made no attempt whatsoever to address the common people in their own patterns of speech; rather there was a conscious sense of distance. Several times a week his Ami du peuple would conclude with an ‘Address to the Citizenry’, where in the exasperated tones of an Old Testament prophet he offered a foreboding vision of the future that would unfold should his readers ignore his injunctions.
At least in these revolutionary papers the Paris readership would have a clear sense of the context of events discussed: there was far less of the baffling recitation of foreign diplomatic and military events that had made up the stock in trade of European newspapers for the past two centuries. And in the newspapers published under the title of the Père Duchêne we witness a radical and imaginative attempt to adopt the personality, and patterns of speech, of the less well-educated foot-soldiers of the revolutionary era. Père Duchêne was a lusty old salt; vulgar, forthright and not afraid to stand up to his social betters. Although Hébert was the best known and most successful, a dozen or more different writers at some point adopted this persona – an eloquent testimony to the difficulties faced by political activists who recognised the need to mobilise a mass movement but realised these citizens did not yet have the political vocabulary to articulate shared political goals. It is also a reminder that the market for revolutionary newspapers, though very large, was also highly competitive. New ventures shamelessly poached the titles of successful rivals, or shifted their own clothes as the political wind turned. Many vanished as easily as they had appeared. At a time when many other European nations had established papers of many years standing (and some with centuries of continuous publication ahead of them), most revolutionary papers lasted three or four years at most.
With the perspective of hindsight, the revolutionary papers can be seen as a relatively brief interlude in France between two stable eras of controlled, cautious news-making. For all that they nevertheless represent a true milestone in the history of European journalism. The French Revolution was arguably the first European event to which a periodical press was truly indispensable. For the first time newspapers became, albeit fleetingly, the dominant medium of printed text, displacing their more aristocratic progenitor, the book, and even the characteristic carrier of political discussion, the pamphlet. France was in this respect ahead of its time. In other parts of Europe, for instance Ireland, the political pamphlet was still the dominant medium for political agitation – as it was indeed during the American Revolution.58 In France, and to a lesser extent in the other cases studied in this chapter, we see the first instances of a fundamental realignment in the European culture of news. From henceforth the periodical rhythms of regular news publication would come to characterise the public perceptions of the shape of current events. Domestic news was suddenly the most urgent order of business. The great age of the daily newspaper was at hand.
CHAPTER 17
How Samuel Sewall Read his Paper
ON 24 April 1704 Samuel Sewall, citizen of Boston, travelled across the Charles River to Cambridge, carrying with him the first issue of John Campbell's weekly news-sheet, The Boston News-Letter. Sewall was on his way to present a copy to his friend Reverend Samuel Willard, Vice-President of Harvard College; Willard was delighted to receive it, and promptly shared it with the other Fellows. Samuel Sewall was at this point one of the leading citizens of the largest city in the American colonies. For the best part of fifty years he was at the heart of its commerce and government, named to the Governor's Council in 1691 and re-elected annually until his retirement in 1725. As a magistrate, father and neighbour, Sewall was a model citizen of this potent emerging society.
Sewall also kept a diary. That, for our purposes, puts him in a special category beyond all his other accomplishments. For Sewall recorded, on a regular basis, his daily round: his work, his conversations, the sermons he attended, and how he heard the news.1
This evidence is, for a student of news, very precious. Over the course of this narrative we have witnessed a real transformation in the supply and availability of news. By the eighteenth century the number of those who had access to news on a regular basis was vastly increased. Newspapers were an established part of life; in some places a daily newspaper was becoming if not the norm, then increasingly available. But whereas we can chart easily enough the history of news from the production side, it is far more difficult to experience at first hand what readers made of this. The articulate reader, who went on to record how he experienced day-to-day news culture, is comparatively rare.
Sometimes, indeed, the available sources tell us more about the relatively inarti
culate consumer of news. This is certainly true of one precious source of which we have made intermittent use in this book, court records and judicial proceedings. These provide a detailed record of occasions when the discussion of public affairs was deemed by Europe's rulers to be injurious to the public good. What is particularly striking is the extent to which this regulation of opinion concentrated not on print, but on the spoken word: what the city council of Augsburg described as ‘dangerous and idle talk’.2 For news respected no boundaries. What was printed in one city could be sold and read in another; once news was in the public domain it was extremely difficult to arrest its flow. News moved easily from manuscript to print and from print to speech.
This subtle understanding of the interconnectedness of different media is exhibited in a very revealing edict published by the time of the Catalan revolt in 1640:
Let nobody own, read or hear any book or paper, be it printed or handwritten, which justifies, warns, counsels and encourages the uprising in this principality and the continuance of the war; and be it forbidden that anyone who knows by heart any part of those books or papers should relate them or that anyone should hear them.3
Scholars tend to privilege the printed word because it has provided the vast bulk of surviving evidence of past events. But hard-pressed magistrates never underestimated the potency of speech (or, as this Spanish example makes clear, of memory). Reading their Bible they knew that ‘death and life are in the power of the tongue’. They also knew that ‘the wicked is snared by the transgression of his lips'; indeed, they counted upon it.4 In Europe's teeming cities, where living conditions were cramped, privacy virtually unknown, and strong drink ubiquitous, rumours spread like wildfire. When the city authorities cornered someone who had uttered seditious words, they always took the greatest pains to reconstruct how these miscreants had first heard the rumour, and who they had spoken to afterwards.
The new world was emerging, but the old world was not banished. The multi-media world of news exchange, the subtle chain of interactions between those who brought the news and those who heard it, did not dissolve in the face of the on-rushing periodical press. Court transcripts provide some of the best evidence of how news spread in the pre-modern era: they reveal a turbulent, combustible world of shouting, insult, rumour and song. Song, in particular, was a particularly potent vector of criticism throughout the period under study: the Parisian police authorities were still greatly concerned at the circulation of satirical verses on the eve of the French Revolution, and with good reason.5 In this rich and diverse world of information exchange, it is clear that despite the proliferation of commercial news-sheets in various shapes and varieties, many citizens would still have got all the news they wanted for free.
Those who bought the news are already in some senses in a special category; those who record their reflections on current events are even more rare. So it will be helpful to spend a little time with three men who did keep track of their thoughts in their own way. They are a varied bunch: an English workman, a Dutch clerk and the North American magistrate Samuel Sewall. All were in some respects unusual, and not just in their meticulous diary keeping. But time in their company does tell us a great deal about the multi-media world we have traversed in this book. Despite the increased sophistication of the available news media, much had remained surprisingly unchanged.
Turning the Tables
Nehemiah Wallington was a modest and self-effacing man. The son of a London wood-turner, he spent his whole life practising his father's trade, living in a house close to the place where he was born, a few yards north of London Bridge. Wallington did not aspire to a life in public affairs; but he lived in troubled times, and it is as a chronicler of these times that he has latterly found fame.6 For Wallington was a quite exceptional man. In 1618, shortly before he was admitted to the Turners’ Company as an independent master, Wallington began to write in the first of many notebooks, which he would fill with his religious reflections, notes on current events, letters and transcribed portions of printed news-books.7 By the time he decided to desist in 1654 he had compiled fifty volumes containing at least twenty thousand closely written pages, and earned his place as one of the premier artisan chroniclers of his day.
Wallington, an intensely introspective character, sometimes wondered whether this obsessive concern to record the everyday experiences of his spiritual journey was rather unhealthy. Despite the intermittent money worries that afflicted all tradesmen, Wallington spent heavily on books. During the dramatic early years of the Civil Wars he bought hundreds of news pamphlets. Ruefully contemplating the piles heaped up around his house, he recognised in 1642 that these had been an extravagance: ‘these little pamphlets of weekly news … were so many thieves that had stolen away my money before I was aware of them’.8
Wallington is an especially valuable witness because he wrote in a period when the news environment was changing very rapidly. In the 1620s and 1630s, when Wallington was first compiling his journals, the publication of news serials in England was intermittently banned, and always closely controlled. But as a citizen of London, and as an ardent puritan, Wallington was an impassioned observer, and occasional actor, in the turbulent political events played out in the capital. In 1638 Nehemiah was questioned by the Star Chamber about the distribution of seditious books. Given the savage punishment meted out to their author, William Prynne, he was understandably alarmed.9 Three years later he was among the reputed fifteen thousand Londoners who descended on Westminster to persuade the House of Lords to condemn the hated Earl of Strafford. ‘I never did see so many together in all my life,’ Wallington reflected, ‘and when they did see any Lord coming, they all cried with one voice, Justice! Justice!’10
Wallington was very conscious of living at the hub of events, all of which he interpreted through the prism of his deeply held religious beliefs. Almost all of the news events he records were seen as evidence of divine purpose: to punish the sinful, or test the faith of the Lord's children. One whole volume of his chronicles is devoted to the evil consequences that befell those who profaned the Sabbath, instances all too frequent in the teeming metropolis. In 1632 he recorded the salutary tale of two young men larking in the rigging of a ship at Whitechapel on a Sunday, when one fell to his death.11 Wallington had this from the chastened survivor, and many of these stories – of a child who fell into the fire while their mother was doing the monthly wash, or a house burned down when the family was gadding forth on the Sabbath – came to him in this way, by word of mouth. Once the Civil War fighting was underway Wallington was equally meticulous in collecting instances of sudden calamity that had fallen upon the king's troops when they spoke contemptuously of the Godly as Roundheads. Wallington's God was not slow to indicate through such signs his partiality towards those who held to the straight and narrow path. A fine example is his wonderfully idiosyncratic account of the battle of Edgehill: ‘The wonderful work of God in the guidance of bullets.’12
17.1 Nehemiah Wallington's writing books.
In searching out evidence of the workings of God's Providence, Wallington noted without scepticism many strange and threatening portents: a fearful storm in 1626, the sighting of a meteor in Berkshire in 1628. Seventy years later to the sophisticated London newsmen such reports would be an implicit comment on the credulity of country folk, but Wallington's generation had no such doubts.13 A terrible tempest near Norwich in 1643, resulting in the death of 111 rooks and jackdaws, inspired an ingenious explanation: ‘we may conjecture that it may mean God's judgement upon the plundering and pillaging cavalier rebels, who, like rooks and daws, live now raucously by the sweat of honest men's brows’.14
Wallington's meticulous record-keeping provides eloquent witness to the emerging power of the urban population to influence great events. Some years before Nehemiah was born Sir Thomas Smith had laid down with lofty precision the division of the English Commonwealth between those ‘that bear office, the other of them that bear none’. Artisans and tr
adesmen belong to the latter sort, and ‘have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth’.15 Wallington was of the generation that subverted these comfortable assumptions. Although he spent freely on news publications when these became available, most of his news came to him through friends, casual acquaintance, and the closely knit network of his fellow believers. Some great events, like the burning of London Bridge, he could record as an eyewitness. Others, like his account of the comet that had so alarmed King James in 1618, he copied from a pamphlet.16
In what ways did the news serials of the 1640s, which he bought so recklessly, impact on this developed news consciousness? Wallington certainly did acquire a sophisticated sense of the wider strategic issues that would determine the outcome of the conflict. He saw that Ireland, where he had family, would play a key role, and lamented the cleavage that emerged between the Godly congregations of England and Scotland in the latter stages of the conflict. An insightful letter to his friend James Cole in New England analyses the various phases of the wars, which he defines as the ‘prelatical war’ of 1639–40, the ‘profane war’ of 1642, and the ‘hypocritical war’ of 1648. Historians have varied the judgemental titles, but hardly improved on the chronology.17 Nor was Wallington's interest confined to the British wars. In 1638 a book came into his hands that laid bare the miserable estate of the Christian peoples in Germany, and he mourned the fate of the Huguenot congregation in La Rochelle in 1628.18