The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.

By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012

Contents — I. Introduction:  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels — IV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?

I.  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period

 This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction.  Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession.  Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been.  But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy.  We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives.  If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.

Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America.  With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18^th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy.  Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it.  And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”

It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society.  In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18^th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy.  What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook?  What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all?  How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime?  What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?

II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?

The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences.  In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it.  This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.”  Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre.  In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:

At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic.  It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live.  …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority.  But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy.  Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.

Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce.  Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy.  By the late 18^th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status.  Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state.  The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy.  Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.”  But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts.  Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:  

The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]…  The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it.  But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.

Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.”  This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest.  But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were.  Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate.  And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it.  While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.

What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution.  The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution.  Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity.  So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.” 

“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.”  Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.

Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society:  The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008.  Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France.  Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18^th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer.  Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption.   Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill.  In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm.  The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people.  The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!

Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this: 

The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution.  If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them.  If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.

What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media.  Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.

III.  The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels

With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution.  Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.

Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:

There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas….  The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors.  Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly.  After publication, control was further applied by police. 

Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word.  They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.

Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective.  The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism.  This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire).  The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade.  The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state.  Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality.  One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759.  Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy.  But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions.   So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.  

After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press.  With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception.  Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.”  What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public.  Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature.  In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.

Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France.  What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print.  The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.”  After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures.  Chisick writes:

The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue.  Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion.  Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.  

Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light.  Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes.  With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite.  But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost.  In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people.  For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and  Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population.  Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.”  Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today.  However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive.  It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution.  It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”

So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy.  Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.”  In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.

Here, I would like to take one more step back.  By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe.  Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution?  Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information.  Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest.  In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone.  What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.

Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them.  The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media.  But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people.  Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience.  Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions.  Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it.  It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.

IV.  Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance? 

What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous.  Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication.  R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945.  No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France…  The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”  

Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment.  “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note.  “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago.  The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”

What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion.  Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it.  That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America.  Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.

© 2012 by Antarah Crawley