News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s "Gazette de Leyde"

310 Pages·1989·9.694 MB·English

by  Jeremy D. Popkin

NEWS AND POLITICS
IN THE AGE OF
REVOLUTION
Jean Luzac's
Gazette de Leyde
JEREMY
D. POPKIN
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
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Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1989 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks. 2015
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-31379
Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information
appears on the last page of the book.
ISBN 978-1-5°17-0071-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
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Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
News and Politics
in the Age of
Revolution
Also by Jeremy D. Popkin:
The Right-Wing Press in France, I792-I800
Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France
(edited with Jack Censer)
To Beate

Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations XIII
[1] News and European Culture in the
Eighteenth Century
[2] The Environments of an
Eighteenth-Century Newspaper 24
[3] The Eighteenth-Century
European Press 46
[4] Making News'in the
Eighteenth Century 68
[5] Producing a Newspaper in
the Eighteenth Century 99
[6] The Gautte de Leyde's
Readership 120
[7] The Gazette de Leyde and
the Crises of the 1770S 137
[8] Engagement and Disillusionment: Jean Luzac
and the Gautte de Leyde from 1782 to 1787 158
[9] The Challenge of the
French Revolution 188
[10] An Old Regime Gazette in
the Revolutionary Maelstrom 215
[11] The Gautte de Leyde, Politics,
and Journalism 249
Sources and Bibliography 267
Index 287
[vii]

Preface
T
his book seeks to establish the importance of the newspaper
press in European life in the decades preceding the French Revolution
and thereby to illuminate some previously neglected aspects of eigh­
teenth-century life and of the history of journalism. The European
newspaper press before 1789 is not a subject that has attracted many
scholars of the period. Peter Gay's two-volume survey, The Enlighten­
ment, for example, contains only two passing references to newspapers;
R. R. Palmer's two-volume work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, has
no index entries for either "newspapers" or "press." And yet there is no
question that the philosophes who populate Gay's study and the politi­
cians who make a new world in Palmer's were regular newspaper read­
ers. Specialized works on the history of the press do discuss the news­
papers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but those surveys
that aim to provide a grand synthesis of the history of journalism, such
as Robert Desmond's four-volume work on news reporting and An­
thony Smith's short book, The Newspaper: An International History, tend to
give the subject short shrift. They acknowledge that the first newspapers
appeared in Germany and the Netherlands soon after 1600, and they
mention the foundation of the Gazette de France in 1631, but for all
practical purposes the continental European press then disappears from
their view until 1789. Historians' neglect of the news journals that
brought the thinkers and doers of the eighteenth century their knowl­
edge of what was happening in the political world obscures a vital part of
the past; journalism scholars' unfamiliarity with the European press
before the French Revolution skews their picture of how the modern
news media came to be.
[ix]