Press [see also Periodicals]. French historians of the periodical press nowadays understand the term to include any printed publication appearing at regular intervals that claimed to report the news. The history of the press and of publishing in France is riven with polemics: for example, Strasbourg and Mainz continue to feud over their importance in the career of Gutenberg, the symbolical father-figure of European printing techniques. The successive phases in the history of the press are often portrayed as adjuncts to France's political history. Technology and finance, and the identification of different markets and networks of printed communication, receive, however, growing recognition as formative influences. Form, format, and frequency of publication influenced the style and content of what was published as much as the censor's pen and self-censorship.
I. Beginnings to 1830
Some claim that the first publication printed regularly was Cy est le Compost et Kalendrier des Bergiers, published in Paris in 1491, shortly after the rector of the Sorbonne invited German printers within the College precinct. Almanacs and calendars formed the main body of regularly produced publications between the 1490s and the 1630s. To these may be added one-off publications—tracts, pamphlets, libelles, and occasionnels—some of which ran to the odd, irregular series. From the occasionnels arose the canards. Often adorned by lurid illustrations that would ‘speak’ to the illiterate—as did frescos and sculptures in churches throughout the land—the canards exploited the fantastic and supernatural in a colourful prose which, generations later, would be echoed by popular daily newspapers such as Le Petit Journal. Pandering to the emotions, canards related apparently inexplicable and unclassifiable events (faits divers). They prefigured the use of the human-interest story and the roman-feuilleton by press magnates set on thrilling and entertaining a mass public.
The first lastingly successful weekly (La Gazette) was published in 1631; the first daily—containing the rudiments of today's general-interest newspaper—in 1777 (75 years later than in Britain). From 1631 to (at least) 1789 most periodical publications resembled the printed book, in presentation, layout, and typography. Many weekly or monthly journals were compilations whose issues were bound together at the end of the year—La Gazette and Le Journal des savants, for instance. During the Revolution there were probably more bi- and tri-weekly publications than dailies.
Speed in the collection of copy and in the printing and distribution of copies assumed growing urgency: the Revolution, during which journalists won the battle to report parliamentary proceedings, also saw concerted efforts to promote newspapers for informative, educational, and propaganda purposes among les classes laborieuses. Yet, for all the legend of journalistic terror symbolized by Marat's L'Ami du peuple, a daily pamphlet of changing fortunes, the weekly La Feuille villageoise (founded in 1790) better illustrates the pace at which the broadening of the newspaper-reading public was proceeding: it had some 250, 000 readers.
The cadence of the collation of news, comment, and opinion reflected an epistolary style of journalism for much of the 17th and 18th c. The quickening tempo of public life in pre-Revolutionary years was already reflected in the press, however: political news gradually assumed more importance than the arts, the sciences, or religious and philosophical debate. In the century spanning the period from the end of the Fronde (1653) to the 1750s (when Malesherbes was in name, as Directeur de la Librairie, chief censor), the reverse had been the case: La Gazette was alone authorized to publish official news.
La Gazette's founder, Théophraste Renaudot, was the first of the many hybrid entrepreneurial and journalistic figures who fashioned the history of the French press. La Gazette itself was a government-inspired publication; finding himself obliged as a journalist to serve many masters, Renaudot commented, on launching his paper in 1631, that some wanted their news unadorned, while others demanded flowery language. He opted for sobriety, a choice some regretted. Writing to Louvois in 1674, Vauban stressed that nothing need prevent a journalist from exaggerating a good piece of news and minimizing the bad. Both in the ancien régime and after 1789 news-management skills were studied by journalists and their masters alike.
Calculations concerning the number of French-language periodicals (world-wide) suggest a steady but accelerating growth throughout the 18th c.: 40 in 1700; 76 in 1730; 137 in 1750; 188 in 1770; and 277 in 1780. Among the most influential of those not already mentioned were the Mercure galant, the Mémoires de Trévoux, Fréron's L'Année littéraire, and Linguet's Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires. The launch of the first daily, the Journal de Paris, in 1777, and the struggle for the freedom of the press (nurtured by Diderot and other philosophes) indicated the growing political and social importance of the press.
Article 2 of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme affirmed, inter alia, the freedom of the press; it is probable that more periodicals and newspapers were founded in France in 1789 alone than in the previous century and a half. Some Revolutionary governments of the nascent republic none the less curbed press freedom. Skilled in news-management and attentive to the influence of the press over public opinion, Napoleon suppressed many political newspapers: in 1811 only four Parisian dailies survived— Le Moniteur, La Gazette de France, Le Journal de l'Empire, and Le Journal de Paris. Thereafter, their numbers, and circulation, slowly grew, some of the most important newcomers being Le Constitutionnel, Le Globe, La Le Revue de Paris, and La Revue des deux mondes. The struggle for the freedom of the press remained entwined with that for other democratic freedoms: the downfall of Charles X in 1830 was prompted, in part, by a revolution led by journalists. The freedom of the press from state control was finally—and, with brief exceptions, lastingly—established by the Third Republic, in the law of 29 July 1881.
2. 1830 to the Present
In 1830 Thiers's Le National, which played a prominent role in ‘the journalists' revolution’, only had about 2, 000 subscribers. In 1836 Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq launched dailies (La Presse and Le Siècle) with subscription rates and sale-prices significantly lower than those of the established titles. Circulations rose: within 18 months Girardin's La Presse had 20, 000 subscribers. Improvements in printing technology contributed to the democratization of the press: the printer Hippolyte Marinoni developed the steam press and rotary-action presses for magnates of the popular press, such as Girardin and Moïse Millaud. In January 1870 Millaud's Petit Journal printed 495, 000 copies of an issue reporting the execution of a murderer, whose crimes, arrest, and trial it had amply covered.
Dailies rarely ran to more than four pages before the turn of the century. On the other hand, it appears that by 1914 over 300 dailies were published in France (major titles included La Croix,
World War II and the Occupation exacerbated these trends. Titles published in Paris and the northern zone were not distributed in the unoccupied zone and vice versa. Paper was rationed and pagination reduced. The propaganda of collaborationist, pro-German, pro-Vichy (and anti-Third-Republic, anti-Gaullist) publications encountered increasing disbelief, if not opprobrium. Local papers fared somewhat better: they published useful information (details of ration-cards, lists of prisoners, etc.). Resistance figures, some of whom founded underground newspapers, wanted, in 1944, to reform the press, root and branch.
Only 28 of the 206 dailies published in 1939 were allowed to resume publication in 1944: they included L'Humanité and Le Figaro (and, from February 1945, La Croix). The abundance of daily newspapers, and of newspaper copies, published in 1944-6 proved short-lived. The circulation of daily newspapers fell from 15 million in 1946 to 9.6 million in 1952; the number of Parisian dailies fell from 28 to 14 and of provincial dailies from 175 to 117 during the same period. Some of the new titles, like Le Monde, survived and grew in prestige; more often, like Camus's Combat, they experienced a slow decline after an initial success; very rarely, a title born of the Resistance died a slow death only to rise again—Libération expired in 1964, was resurrected in the wake of the May 1968 events, and, having assumed many different guises, is the one signal success in the recent history of the daily press. In 1992 the French press boasted 86 daily newspapers, of which a handful were general-interest titles, published in Paris and commanding a national audience. In addition to the supplements or review sections of dailies, cultural and intellectual life was covered amply in the general and special-interest magazines and reviews [see Express; Nouvel Observateur; Elle].
3. Political and Economic Control of the Press
Controls on publishing preceded the advent of the periodical press. In 1547 Henri II sought to prevent the propagation of Protestant books. In the struggle for freedom of expression, Protestants were to the fore: Richelieu's protégé, Renaudot, was himself a Protestant convert, and the gazettes smuggled in from Holland, under Louis XIV and later, were an early form of subversive press. In the early 16th c. the authorities had begun the award of licenses, authorizing the holder to print an account of a recent event. From 1651 the licence system constituted, indeed, the main form of state control of the press. La Gazette was the sole newspaper authorized to publish official news (a task that Napoleon and Napoleon III assigned to Le Moniteur) and to act as the mouthpiece of French policy abroad (a role that many persisted, later, in ascribing to Le Temps and some, even today, to Le Monde). The state also sponsored and controlled the first scientific and cultural review: in 1663, the year when Colbert founded the Académie des Sciences, the licence awarded to publish the Journal des savants declared that sciences and the arts, no less than military prowess, illustrated the genius of the French nation.
Curbs on the press stimulated the pen while causing anguish to printers and publishers. This is one reason why press history is often indistinguishable from political history. Publications that discussed public affairs took greater or lesser account of what the authorities permitted, of rules and regulations, legislation, censorship, fiscal controls, etc. During the Fronde as during the Enlightenment, and whenever authority was sapped as France moved towards a régime d'opinion, skirmishing with the power of the day and testing the limits of what was tolerated proved an exercise that produced some of France's finest political journalism— Voltaire and Beaumarchais, but also Prévost-Paradol and Rochefort. An epigram speaks of ‘le (bon) mot qui tue’; under Louis-Napoléon as under le roi soleil, controls on the political press led some of France's most skilful writers to deploy their irony, satire, and mastery of allusion in the literary press and la presse légère, from the Mercure galant to Le Figaro.
Censorship was one of many tools used in attempts to contain the questioning of authority, be it temporal or spiritual. The comptroller of publishing had 82 censors at his disposal in 1751 and 121 in 1763. Pressure for freedom of the press formed part of the wider demand, in Enlightenment circles, for freedom of expression. In a period when literary criticism and cultural cosmopolitanism nourished intellectual debate, the advocates of press freedom found it might prove a double-edged sword. For example, Fréron of L'Année littéraire was a master of irony who—according to Jules Janin of Le Journal des débats—founded criticism as a literary form. Voltaire feared the bite of his pen: although often a champion of press freedom, he pressed the comptroller of publishing, Malesherbes, to act against Fréron.
The Revolution swept away the crumbling edifice of press controls, although successive governments attempted to retain them. The July 1881 press law, as noted, still underpins press legislation today. Technology and newspaper finance—especially the latter—assumed increasing importance, in the 19th c., in French writing about the press.
There was considerable stability between the end of the 15th c. and the 1820s in printing technology—manually set type and manually operated press—but rapid change subsequently: in the 1980s electronic publishing transformed journalistic practice, as had the steam and rotary-presses, the electric telegraph, and the linotype in the 19th c. The transformation of the press into an industry was portrayed, and often pilloried, by Balzac, Maupassant, Zola, Barrès, and countless others. Balzac depicted some lasting traits of French journalism: although embittered by his own failures in journal publishing (La Revue parisienne, etc.), his critique of the press ( Illusions perdues; Monographie de la presse parisienne) was married to investigative skills—e.g. in his exposure of the role of the Havas news agency. Girardin's La Presse in 1836 (which published Balzac's La Vieille Fille) and Millaud's Le Petit Journal in 1863 (publisher of Ponson du Terrail and countless other highly paid roman-feuilletonistes) signified the advent of the popular daily and the industrialization of the press. Substantial capital resources were needed; press groups emerged seeking, in today's parlance, a dominant market share (of advertising, as well as sales, revenue). Girardin and Millaud followed in the steps trodden earlier by Panckoucke, publisher in 1789 of La Gazette, Le Mercure, Le Moniteur, and other titles: newspaper publishers became press magnates, attentive to economies of scale and to maximizing advertising revenue (often of dubious provenance). Few holds were barred: duels—by the sword, as well as the pen—were frequent.
The relative lack of commercial-advertising revenue led many papers to depend over-much on financial (i.e. stock-market) advertising, especially during periods of intense speculation (see Zola, L' Argent; Barrès, Les Déracinés). During the 1920s, however, commercial advertisers increasingly invested in the press, and specialist or thematic advertising developed in dailies, magazines, and reviews, which accordingly grew in size. But the print media no longer enjoyed a monopoly: cinema, radio, and later television diverted creative talent and advertising revenue from the press.
None the less, economic censorship—symbolized by Lammenais's ‘silence aux pauvres’—never totally stifled nonconformist views, any more than did political controls. Literary journals like Le Magazine littéraire survived on a hand-to-mouth basis, and just as the anarchist Le Père Peinard mocked authority in the 1890s and Le Canard enchaîné opposed brain-washing for most of the 20th c., so successive incarnations of Jean-Edern Hallier's L'Idiot international played the king's fool from the late 1960s onwards [see also Charliehebdo].
[Michael Palmer]
Bibliography
- C. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 5 vols. (1969-76)
- J. Sgard, Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600-1789, 2 vols. (1991)
