J. Merriman & J.
Winters (eds), Europe, 1789-1914: Encyclopdedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, 2006
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
See also Morris, William; Ruskin, John; Symbolism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Bryden, Inga, ed. The Pre-Raphaelites: Writings and
Sources. 4 vols. London, 1998.
Hunt, William Holman, Pre-Raphaelitism and the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2nd rev. ed. London,
1913.
Secondary Sources
Barringer, Tim. Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. New Haven,
Conn., 1999.
Marsh, Jan, and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Pre-Raphaelite
Women Artists. New York, 1997.
Parris, Leslie, ed. The Pre-Raphaelites. London, 1984.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Princeton,
N.J., 2000.
TIM BARRINGER
n
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS. News-
papers, although vital to Europe’s commercial and
political culture well before 1789, underwent pro-
found changes in the long nineteenth century.
Technological, political, social, and communica-
tions revolutions transformed their audiences,
appearance, content, journalistic style, and political
significance. Once a preserve of elites, they were by
1914 a ubiquitous feature of working-class life, and
played an important—if intangible—role in shaping
the political destiny of Europe. A shift in the eco-
nomics of newspaper production was central to
these transformations, as newspapers—that is, reg-
ular, uniformly titled, dated, printed publications
containing miscellaneous recent informational
reports—evolved from small-scale enterprises into
massive capital-intensive industries.
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF NEWSPAPERS
From 1500 to 1814, printing technology changed
little. Press output depended on physical strength,
employed in pulling a lever to press paper onto a
page of set type. The process was labor-intensive,
time consuming, and offered little opportunity for
economies of scale. To increase production above
250 pages per hour required a new press, a new
compositor to set the type, and new print-men. Thus
1866
when the London Times used the König steam press Early steam press
for the first time on 29 November 1814, it began a
printing revolution. Friedrich König’s machine could
print 1,100 impressions per hour, but by 1830
improved machines could produce up to 4,000.
Early steam presses made impressions onto a
flat bed and had significant limitations. They were
costly to maintain and power, and quality of output rotary press &
stereotype
was uneven. These problems were overcome by
process
Richard Hoe’s rotary press, first employed by the
Parisian newspaper La Patrie in 1846. Shortly
thereafter, the stereotype process, introduced by
La Presse in 1852 and The Times in 1858, allowed
multiple copies of the same page to be cast. This
made it possible to imagine a single newspaper
serving audiences of hundreds of thousands or even
millions.
The realization of this dream depended on
other
further developments. Web sheet feeders, pio- technological
neered in the United States, were introduced to developments
Europe by The Times in 1868; cheap paper made
from woodpulp rather than rags followed in the
1880s. The cost and speed of compositing were
revolutionized in the 1860s by keyboard-based
Hattersley machines, and again from the 1880s by
‘‘Linotype’’ machines—which cast new type at each
use. However, the take-up of new printing tech-
nologies was slow, since local markets were often
insufficient to justify purchasing them. In Sweden
and other underpopulated countries, national dai-
lies were produced on hand-presses several decades
after 1814. From the 1830s and 1840s, investment
in steam presses became more attractive. Newly
built railways allowed metropolitan dailies to reach
national audiences, and from the 1840s telegraph
networks revolutionized the speed of news-gathering.
Thereafter national newspapers could compete
with regional rivals for stories from the provinces.
THE APPEARANCE OF NEWSPAPERS
The appearance of newspapers changed dramatically
across the century. Eighteenth-century newspapers
were not visually appealing. A page of newsprint
usually comprised two or more columns of tightly
cramped text, without headlines or illustrations,
except, very occasionally, woodblock prints sup-
plied by advertisers. Most newspapers were only
four or eight pages long, and although many British
papers appeared in folio-size editions, Continental
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4

papers often adopted smaller quarto or octavo for-
mats. Before 1789, most serious Continental news-
papers appeared in the traditional ‘‘gazette’’ format,
reproducing stories verbatim from other sources
under their dateline and place of origin, without
editorial comment or gloss. This was true even of
the Gazette de Leyde, Europe’s most celebrated
paper of the 1770s and 1780s, or the Hamburgische
Unpartheyische Correspondent (Hamburg impartial
correspondent), the continent’s best-selling daily
in the decade after 1800.
By 1900, newspapers were much more eye-
introduction of catching, not least due to innovations pioneered
headlines & clearer by John Walter (1739–1812), founder of The
typeface
Times. Realizing that newspaper readers wished
to inform themselves quickly without wading
through entire blocks of text, he introduced head-
lines so they could pick out stories that interested
them. This innovation spread rapidly, and soon
became universal. Walter also experimented with
print sizes and fonts to develop a clearer typeface,
‘‘Times Roman,’’ to enable readers to scan pages
more rapidly.
Illustrations also began to appear. In the
1830s, the Penny Magazine pioneered the com-
mercial use of Thomas Bewick’s wood engraving
process, and with the foundation of the weekly
Illustrations: wood
engraving process London Illustrated News in 1842, the technology
for producing spread to newspapers. Illustrated newspapers proli-
woodblock prints &
halftone process for ferated rapidly across Europe: Germany’s Leipziger
reproducing Illustrierte Zeitung and France’s L’Illustration were
photographs founded as early as 1843. However, in the 1880s,
the development of the halftone process for
reproducing photographs sounded the death-knell
for these papers. Cheaper and better adapted than
woodblock prints to the demands of daily publi-
cation, halftone technology could illustrate stories
in the quotidian press. By 1900, news photographs
were a vital aspect of news reporting. As editors
realized the emotional power of printed images,
photographs increasingly determined both an item’s
newsworthiness and public reactions to stories.
Not all technical developments improved
the look of newspapers. In particular, the introduc-
tion of wood pulp made for a poorer appearance
and reduced durability. However, the low cost of
wood pulp paper allowed for larger newspapers at a
lesser price, and thereby pleased advertisers and
readers alike.
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
developments
ADVERTISING AND TAXES ON KNOWLEDGE that made
newspapers
Two further developments made late-nineteenth- affordable
century newspapers more affordable. The first was
the demise of ‘‘taxes on knowledge’’ and other (1) stamp duties
provisions designed to prevent the lower orders reduced & finally
abolished in
from acquiring newspapers. In early-nineteenth-
Britain
century Britain, where stamp duty and paper taxes
were most burdensome, they inflated newspaper
prices three or fourfold. At their height, The Times
cost 7 pence per edition, perhaps a sixth of a
London artisan’s daily wage, and half that of a
worker in the provinces. In addition, stamp duty
on advertisements increased advertising costs by
about 50 percent. High prices promoted the devel-
opment of a vigorous, illegal, unstamped radical
working-class press, and a vociferous campaign for
the stamp duty’s abolition, until it was substantially
reduced in 1837, and finally scrapped in 1855.
The paper tax survived until 1860.
An alternative method of pricing papers beyond
(2) newspapers in
working-class pockets—favored in France and France & Russia
Russia—was to insist that subscribers pay in illegally hired out
advance. This was kinder on the pockets of the by booksellers,
made available in
wealthy, while still preventing those without surplus coffeehouses,
cash from buying newspapers. Such measures were libraries, public
never fully effective, as entrepreneurial booksellers reading
by joint
rooms &
hired out newspapers by the hour, often illegally, subscriptions
and newspapers were available in coffee-houses,
libraries, public reading rooms, and by joint sub-
scriptions. Thus, by 1850, most governments had
bowed to the inevitable and tolerated ‘‘boulevard
sales’’ of individual copies of popular newspapers.
Newspaper prices also fell because growing
(3) increase in
commercialization, mass production, and expand- advertising
ing popular markets boosted advertising revenues. revenues due to
Eighteenth-century newspaper advertising targeted commercializatio
n, mass
a small, wealthy elite, but late-nineteenth-century production &
papers marketed cheap, branded goods to the expanding
lower bourgeoisie and wealthier urban workers, markets
who increasingly depended on a market eco-
nomy—rather than household manufacture—for
products like soap, candles, clothes, and foodstuffs.
As prices of manufactured goods fell, newspaper
advertising helped to create a democratized com-
mercial culture based on aspiration and emulation.
Even in the underdeveloped economy of Russia,
the major St. Petersburg and Moscow dailies dedi-
cated around 30 percent of available space to adver-
tising by 1900. By the mid-1840s, newspaper
1867
 PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
advertising was extensive enough to support spe-
advertising agents
& agencies cialized advertising agents in Britain, France, and
the United States. Originally they sold column
space, but from the 1870s American agencies
began writing copy and planning advertising cam-
paigns, and these practices quickly spread. By 1878
even Russia had an advertising agency, L. and M.
Mettsl and Company. The scale of advertising
varied between countries. Britain and France
respectively boasted Europe’s most and least com-
mercialized presses. The Parisian daily Petit Jour-
nal, Europe’s best-selling paper between the 1860s
and 1900, derived only about 20 percent of its
revenues from advertising. Hence French news-
papers were dependent on other forms of finance.
CIRCULATION: THE COMING OF MASS
READERSHIPS
Mass reading literacy was a further precondition
for a mass-circulation press. While this was largely
increase in mass a nineteenth-century development, eighteenth-
reading literacy
century literacy rates should not be underestimated.
In much of England, Scotland, north-eastern
France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia,
the majority of bridegrooms could sign a marriage
register by 1800. In urban areas male signature-
literacy rates often exceeded 80 percent. In con-
trast, signature-literacy was rare in Ireland, the
Mediterranean basin, the Iberian peninsula, and
central and eastern Europe. Moreover, the 1780s
witnessed attempts to establish universal primary
education in Baden, the Habsburg lands, and revo-
lutionary France. The success of these projects was
limited. Although in France, as in Britain, educa-
tional provision rose sharply from the 1830s, uni-
versal primary education was only secured in France
by Jules Ferry’s legislation in the 1880s, and in
Britain by the Education Act of 1870. By the late
nineteenth century even Russia had achieved wide-
spread literacy, primarily by educating military
conscripts. Thus significant increases in both basic
literacy rates and the quality of literacy skills stimu-
lated growth in nineteenth-century newspaper
readerships.
The potential size of popular audiences was
increase in sales demonstrated by the Penny Magazine, launched
in 1832 by the liberal philanthropic Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to educate the
working classes and wean them from radical pub-
lications. Produced weekly, it soon achieved sales
1868
of over 213,000. A German imitator and name-
sake, the Pfennigmagazin, launched in 1833,
reached over 100,000 subscribers. Within decades,
popularly oriented, cheaply priced newspapers were
achieving similar success: by the 1860s, the Petit
Journal, with sales of 250,000, was the most suc-
cessful paper yet seen. By 1900 it had become
Europe’s first million-seller, narrowly outselling
London’s Daily Mail. A decade later, London’s
quotidian press was printing over 4,500,000 copies
daily. Elsewhere in Europe, sales figures for best-
sellers were lower, but still impressive. In 1900,
Italy’s daily La Tribuna sold around 200,000,
while Russia’s Novoe Vremya sold about 60,000.
Russian newspaper audiences expanded exponenti-
ally after the 1905 revolution, and in 1917, stimulated
by war and further revolution, the Moscow-based
Russkoe Slovo achieved sales of 1,000,000.
The extent of sales growth becomes apparent
when these figures are compared with eighteenth-
century circulations. Before 1800, individual editions
seldom sold over 5,000 copies. At its most popular,
during the American Revolution, the Gazette de
Leyde’s sales peaked at 4,200 subscribers, while in
the early 1800s, the Hamburgische Unpartheyische
Correspondent’s print-run of 40,000 was unprece-
dented. Local weeklies with single editor-proprietors
survived on circulations of two to three hundred well
into the nineteenth century.
The rise in readership of individual titles cannot
be attributed to press consolidation, since the
number of periodicals of all sorts proliferated acrossmassive increase
the century, while total readerships grew massively.in total
For example, in France in the early 1780s news-readership: case
of France
paper subscriptions totaled just 45,000, of which
15,000 were for foreign-produced international
gazettes. During the Revolution the market for
political news exploded: between 1789 and 1792
Parisian papers sold perhaps 300,000 copies daily.
Contemporary sources and historians alike estimate
that there were between four and ten readers per
copy, although many readers read more than one
paper. Assuming five readers per copy, the total
audience for French newspapers expanded from
perhaps 225,000 before the revolution to
1,500,000 thereafter, or from under 1 percent to
just over 5 percent of the population. The revival
of censorship, state-orchestrated market consoli-
dation, and suppression of participatory political
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4

culture under Napoleon caused audiences to
decline by 75 percent. Thus, by 1810 newspaper
readership was only marginally higher than under
the Old Regime. In contrast, in 1900 newspapers
reached the majority of French households.
The growth of French newspaper audiences
was probably near the middle of the European
range. In regions with large, well-educated urban
newspaper
readership greater populations, especially northern Germany, the
in areas with large,
well-educated
Netherlands, England, and Scotland, the social
urban populations penetration of newspapers was already considerable
by 1800. Stamp duty records for 1801 show that
London newspapers (daily and otherwise) sold
about 20,000 copies per day and provincial papers,
which were mostly weeklies, a further 180,000 per
week, suggesting total subscriptions numbered
marginally over 200,000 and readership about
1,000,000, or 10 percent of the population. At
the other end of the spectrum lay Russia, where
newspaper readership was initially much lower and
still largely restricted to urban areas prior to 1905.
CENSORSHIP AND PRESS FREEDOM
Early-nineteenth-century rulers were fearful of
newsprint and attempted both to limit newspaper
revolutionary circulation and censor content. The case for tight
press provoked
censorship government supervision appeared to be confirmed
by the French Revolution of 1789, when budding
politicians including Mirabeau; Jacques-Pierre
Brissot de Warville; Camille Desmoulins; Jean-Paul
Marat; and Maximilien Robespierre built power
bases through journalism. Through their news-
papers and new essay-style political journalism,
these self-styled ‘‘tribunes of the people’’ did more
than shape opinion. They also defined the signifi-
cance of events. Thus the fall of the Bastille was
transformed from an attack on a royal powder
depot into the symbolic triumph of liberty over
despotism. Jeremy Popkin has argued that the
revolutionary press actually scripted the revolution,
by promoting the nexus of tensions, suspicions, and
recriminations that shaped popular actions, and
calling for direct action against ‘‘enemies of the
people.’’ The prominence of journalists among
the European revolutionaries of 1830 and 1848
only reinforced elite fears of the press. It is hardly
surprising that Russia, Spain, postrevolutionary
France, and many Italian and German states
employed censorship systems deep into the nine-
teenth century, with mixed success.
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
Late-eighteenth-century Germany, for exam-
ple, comprised a patchwork of states with varying
censorship laws. Some were liberal in practice, if
not theory, while others, such as Frederick II’s
Prussia, had rigorous laws but chaotic enforce-
ment. This left loopholes for enterprising publish-
ers and editors to exploit. However, under the
Napoleonic occupation practices were standardized
and legal or de facto press freedoms extinguished.
After 1807 the only significant paper with any
degree of autonomy was Johann Friedrich Cotta’s
Allegemeine Zeitung, but even it had to source
political news from Napoleon’s official Moniteur.
Meanwhile, the Hamburgische Unpartheyische Cor-
respondent declined rapidly after Napoleon com-
manded it to publish bilingually, thus halving its
news coverage. Following the Vienna Settlement,
hopes of a more liberal regime were scotched for
several decades by the draconian Carlsbad Decrees
of 1819, which exacerbated the damage done by
Napoleon to the German press.
In Russia, the autocratic government main-
tained press controls until 1905. The press statute
of 1865 offered a whiff of liberty, but this was
neutralized by the simultaneous introduction of
an arbitrarily administered system of censorship,
warnings, and bans. A variety of sanctions existed
for papers that displeased the authorities, including
the prohibition of street sales. After three warnings
a paper would be closed down. Despite these
restrictions the Russian press blossomed in the late
imperial period: between 1870 and 1894 some
1,400 periodicals were launched there, almost
three times the total for the previous twenty-five
years. Freedom of expression and an advanced capi-
talist economy were not necessary preconditions
for a flourishing commercial press.
French censorship policy fluctuated wildly.
Before 1789 the French domestic press was tightly
licensed and censored, and political news had to be
sourced from the official Gazette de France.
Imported international gazettes, although freer,
circulated through the post under license and so
operated a rigorous self-censorship. The revolution
of 1789 resulted briefly in a free press, guaranteed
by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Aborted
by the Terror (1793–1794), press liberty was par-
tially revived under the Directorial regime
(1795–1799), despite sporadic clampdowns on
1869
 PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
A Parricide. Cartoon from Le Charivari, 1850. French
statesman Adolphe Thiers, a former journalist, is criticized for
his advocacy of press censorship following the revolutions of
1848. BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, PARIS, FRANCE/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/
ARCHIVES CHARMET
Jacobin and Royalist papers. Press freedom was
extinguished by Napoleon, who closed down most
Parisian newspapers in January 1800 and only per-
mitted publication of political news that had
appeared in the Moniteur. The Constitutional
Charter of 1814 restored a liberal press regime,
but in 1830 infringements of that liberty by the
Polignac ministry precipitated a journalist-led
rebellion and change of dynasty. In the next five
years radical journalism revived both in Paris and
Lyon, where a vibrant workers’ press and proto-
feminist journals prospered. Press liberty was
seriously curtailed again in 1835, reestablished
following the revolution of 1848, and restricted
once more under the Second Empire (1851–
1870). Napoleon III’s press regime liberalized in
the 1860s, but censorship still existed at his fall in
1870 and was not finally abolished until the Press
Law of 1881. The Third Republic was by then ten
years old. Hence press liberty was not a necessary
concomitant of democratic government.
move towards However, democracy and a freer press often
greater freedom
of press from
did go hand in hand, especially in Europe’s newer
2nd half of 19th
century
1870
nation-states, where the press played a role in
nation-building. Liberals also argued for freedom
of expression on pragmatic grounds, insisting that
it would facilitate the generation and dissemination
of socially useful ideas. They also insisted that the
masses must be educated politically if experiments
in representative government were to succeed and
social revolution to be averted. Many contempo-
raries also linked Britain’s commercial success and
political stability to its constitution and free press.
There thus appeared to be strong practical grounds
for experimenting with press liberty. One such
experiment occurred in postunification Italy, where
liberal press freedoms introduced under the 1848
Piedmontese constitution were extended to the
entire peninsula in 1859–1860. Together with
Britain and France, late-nineteenth-century Italy
enjoyed one of Europe’s freest presses. At the same
period, the laws of the newly unified Germany and
of the Austrian Dual Monarchy allowed less
freedom, but were considerably more generous
than earlier in the century. The least free press in
Christian Europe was in Russia, and even there
some gains were made in 1865. In retrospect, the
emergence of a freer press might appear almost
inevitable, but such liberty was precarious and
easily overturned.
THE ‘‘NEW JOURNALISM’’ AND
THE NEW PUBLIC
Press freedom appeared more attractive as fears that
democratization and a cheap popular press would
radicalize the lower orders subsided. Such concerns
declined for two main reasons. First, political
democratization and progressive social legislation
met or undercut radical demands. Simultaneously,
falling newspaper prices promoted the growth of a
cheap, commercially driven, mass-circulation press
aimed at working-class readers, and the concomi-
tant rise of the ‘‘New Journalism.’’
After 1870, this ‘‘New Journalism,’’ developed
in America, was exported to Europe. It catered for
the cultural tastes of a newly literate mass audience,
entertaining them with easily digestible coverage
of sport, grisly crime, human interest stories, and
fiction. This was very different from the sophisti-
cated political and didactic role European liberals
had hoped the press would play. Under the influ-
ence of the ‘‘New Journalism,’’ the popular press
tended to promote stereotypes, racial prejudice (as
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4

demonstrated in much European newspaper com-
ment on the Dreyfus affair), and blinkered, jingoistic
nationalism.
By 1900, the ‘‘New Journalism,’’ industriali-
zation, and commercialization had transformed
successful newspapers into vast capital-intensive
industries controlled by powerful capitalist interest
groups. This process was accompanied by the con-
solidation of the newspaper industry in the hands
of a few powerful individuals or conglomerates. In
1910, two-thirds of British metropolitan morning
daily circulation and over four-fifths of evening
daily sales were controlled by Alfred Charles
William Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe; Pearson; or
the Morning Leader Group. Lord Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Evening News, and The
Times alone sold over 1,500,000.
THE PROFESSIONALIZATION
OF JOURNALISM
Alongside these developments, journalism emerged
as a distinct profession with its own practices,
career progression, established professional prac-
tices, and codes of ethics. This change resulted
partly from an increase in editorial staff numbers
and partly from greater journalistic contributions
to reportage. Eighteenth-century newspapers had
tiny editorial staffs. Often a single editor-proprietor
compiled a newspaper by reproducing extracts
from other papers, official publications, commercial
correspondence, or other communications. Some
international gazettes and enterprising metropo-
litan papers also paid newsmongers in foreign cities
to supply regular newsletters. Comparison of dif-
ferent gazettes suggests that such writers seldom
worked exclusively for one paper, and often wrote
under the supervision of local political authorities.
Thus, especially in continental Europe, many eight-
eenth-century ‘‘gazetteers’’ were compilers rather
than true journalists.
Consequently, newspaper journalism was con-
sidered a lowly form of literary activity. Hence, in
August 1791, the French revolutionary politician
Brissot felt obliged to justify having worked on the
Courier de l’Europe several years earlier:
A career as a gazetteer, submitting to the censor-
ship, was repugnant to my principles; but it would
assure my independence . . . Bayle, I told myself,
had been a teacher . . . Rousseau a lackey, and I
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
was blushing at the thought of being a gazetteer!
I would honor this calling and it would not dis-
honor me.
In contrast, a century later, George Gissing’s
New Grub Street (1891) portrays the editorship of a
newspaper or periodical as the ultimate prize for a
literary hack. While Gissing’s hapless, unworldly
novelist Reardon expires in poverty, his friend and
rival, the odious Jaspar Milvain, embraces the logic
of the marketplace, secures the editorship of a per-
iodical, makes his fortune, and marries Reardon’s
socially ambitious widow. To a large extent this
portrayal mirrored social reality by the 1880s, when
editors of large London dailies commanded salaries
of between one and two thousand pounds and
large staffs of journalists, each with specialized
functions. They would include, for example, for-
eign correspondents. Such correspondents, first
employed sporadically by London papers during
the French revolution, became more common
from the 1840s, as telegraph networks allowed
reports to be lodged in real time. Increasingly,
too, journalists chased stories and wrote their own
copy, even when following up reports from news
agencies like Reuters or national press associations,
such as Agence France Presse (founded 1851) and
the Press Association (founded 1868).
With greater professionalism, better pay, sup-
port from advertising, and mass audiences, journal-
ists began to break free from political subsidy and
articulate a set of professional standards. The later
nineteenth century saw the emergence of journal-
istic ethics based on a set of ideological and moral
claims, above all the assertion that newspapers
‘‘represented’’ (rather than created) ‘‘public opin-
ion’’ and ‘‘the public interest.’’ Ethical, that is reli-
able and hence superior, journalism rested on
‘‘objective’’ reporting and the rejection of political
favor and subsidy. Although ‘‘public opinion,’’
‘‘the public interest,’’ and ‘‘objectivity’’ are ideo-
logical constructs, these ideals developed a power-
ful hold over the Western psyche. In the public
perception, public discourse, and some historical
writing, newspapers became synonymous with
‘‘public opinion’’ throughout the twentieth cen-
tury and beyond, while the appearance of ‘‘objec-
tivity’’ supplied journalists with moral legitimacy,
and a theoretical yardstick for judging reporting.
The practical improvement in journalistic
ethics can be exaggerated. Early historians of
1871
PRESS AND NEWSPAPERS
the British press—some of them journalists them-
selves—offered a narrative in which corrupt, partisan,
party-subsidized eighteenth-century newspapers
evolved into heroic, impartial, organs of mid-nine-
teenth-century liberal public opinion. This Whig-
gish view dominated British historiography as
late as Arthur Aspinall’s monumental survey of
Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850 (1950). This
interpretation exaggerates the importance of poli-
tical subsidy in late-eighteenth-century Britain.
Government subsidies were meager and given
primarily to reward support on individual issues.
By the 1780s newspapers derived the vast bulk of
revenues from advertisers and subscribers, and
hence eschewed taking persistently unpopular
editorial lines. Also, Whiggish newspaper history
was developed before the emergence of the ‘‘New
Journalism’’ and yellow press, whose journalistic
practices fell short of the lofty ethics of the liberal
press.
Moreover, especially in France, political sub-
sidy continued for most of the nineteenth century.
There were also serious financial scandals involving
newspapers in late-nineteenth-century Italy and
France, where papers were bribed not to reveal
the Panama Company’s precarious financial
position. Other corrupt practices, including brib-
ing journalists to puff products, offering induce-
ments for endorsements, and hyping stocks for
personal gain undoubtedly continued, although
frowned on by more respectable papers. In France,
the boulevard press continued time-honored cus-
toms such as blackmailing actresses, political fig-
ures, and minor celebrities, and accepting bribes
from businesses to disparage rivals.
POLITICS AND THE PRESS
Contemporaries believed, and historians concur,
that the political power of the press, increasingly
described as ‘‘the Fourth Estate,’’ grew across the
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, while there are
some spectacular examples of the pressure the press
placed on individuals or governments, above all the
1830 revolution in France, it is more difficult to
discern newspapers’ day-to-day influence in shap-
ing cultural and political life. Yet this influence was
extensive. The press was, for example, undoubtedly
instrumental in evoking ‘‘imagined national com-
munities’’ based on a shared, media-mediated
experience and culture, and in promoting greater
1872
linguistic homogeneity within state borders. More-
over, the yellow press seems to have contributed
significantly to the development of a distinctively
working-class culture, filling the lower orders’ leisure
reading with a diet of sport, scandal, crime, sensa-
tion, and jingoistic nationalism.
Whiggish interpretations of newspaper history
also suggest that the nineteenth-century liberal press
played a key role in the emergence, formation, and
leadership of public debate, although such claims are
contentious. In the most suggestive treatment of the
subject, Jürgen Habermas argues that the golden
debate: whether
age of public debate was in fact the late eighteenth
the 18th-
and early nineteenth centuries. At that stage, an century or the
educated, enlightened middle-class public opinion 19th-century
press played a
participated in genuine constructive rational-critical
key role in
debate over issues of public policy in the print media enhancing the
and sociable institutions such as salons, coffee- quality of
public debate &
houses, clubs, and reading rooms. The pronounce- public sphere
ments of this autonomous limited ‘‘public’’ were
soon invested with considerable moral authority,
and hence able to influence state policy, even in
absolutist states. However, during the nineteenth
century, the twin processes of commercialization
and democratization undermined the quality of
public debate, as the rational and informed judg-
ments of the elite were supplanted by ill-informed
popular prejudice, largely shaped by the yellow
press.
Habermas’s claims have been influential,
although it is unclear whether his account of the
eighteenth-century press was intended as a descrip-
tion of reality or an ideal standard. Moreover,
critics point out that eighteenth-century public
debate was often partisan rather than consensual,
especially after the French Revolution polarized
Europeans ideologically. It was often characterized
by irrationality and appeals to emotion, prejudice, or
religious faith. Also, the audience for eighteenth-
century newspapers was less thoroughly ‘‘bourgeois’’
and the press generally less autonomous of gov-
ernments than Habermas supposed. Nor did
newspapers provide an open forum for debate, or
repository for opinion, save that of governments
or powerful corporate bodies. Lacking much edi-
torial opinion and drawing their information from
official publications and public manifestos, they
provided materials, rather than a forum, for poli-
tical discussion.
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4

Fewer critics have concentrated on Habermas’s
portrayal of the nineteenth-century decline of the
liberal public sphere, which is overpessimistic.
Certainly the hold of powerful commercial interests
over the newspaper press was tightened, giving
them control over the vital agenda-setting function
of the media, by which it determines what subjects
readers contemplate on a daily basis, if not how
they actually think. However, the long nineteenth
century also witnessed counterdevelopments
including, in many countries, the establishment of
constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression;
the spread of editorial content and a combative
journalism of opinion; and the adoption of letters
pages and columns that opened the range of politi-
cal opinions on offer, even in partisan papers. Even
yellow press journalism, which may be decried for
thwarting liberal dreams of a didactic press educat-
ing the working classes, also operated as a valuable
social control, helping to steer them away from
violent social revolution. The press thus helped to
smooth the transition to more representative forms
of government in many states of Europe, even as
it nurtured the militaristic nationalisms that so exa-
cerbated the cataclysm of 1914–1918.
See also Dickens, Charles; Jingoism; Literacy; Photo-
graphy; Popular and Elite Culture; Trade and
Economic Growth; Transportation and Communi-
cations; Zola, Émile.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barker, Hannah. Newspapers, Politics, and English Society,
1695–1855. Harlow, U.K., 2000.
Barker, Hannah, and Simon Burrows, eds. Press, Politics,
and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America,
1760–1820. Cambridge,U.K., 2002. The first attempt
at an international survey of the press during this per-
iod in two hundred years.
Brennan, James. The Reflection of the Dreyfus Affair in the
European Press, 1897–1899. New York, 1998. An
impressively wide-ranging comparative study, offering
useful, if uneven, summary background on the press in
five different states.
Collins, Irene. The Government and the Newspaper Press in
France, 1814–1881. London, 1959. Still useful survey
of French government press policy from the Restora-
tion to the end of censorship under the Third Republic.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge,
Mass., 1989. First published in German in 1962,
E U R O P E 1 7 8 9 TO 1 9 1 4
PRIMITIVISM
Habermas’s comparative treatment of the public
spheres of Germany, France, and Britain ranks among
the most influential doctoral theses of all time and has
an enduring heuristic value.
Lee, Alan J. The Origins of the Popular Press in England,
1855–1914. London, 1976. Still a valuable case study
of the British context.
McReynolds, Louise. The News under Russia’s Old Regime:
The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press. Prince-
ton, N.J., 1991. Impressive scholarly study of the com-
ing of Russia’s mass-circulation press covering 1855–
1917.
O’Boyle, Lenore. ‘‘The Image of the Journalist in France,
Germany and England, 1815–1848.’’ Comparative
Studies in History and Society 10 (1968): 290–317.
Despite dated overemphasis on class issues, this remains
a valuable and unique comparative essay.
Popkin, Jeremy D. Revolutionary News: The Press in France,
1789–1799. Durham, N.C., 1990. A thoughtful and
stimulating treatment of the revolutionary press and its
cultural significance.
Smith, Anthony. The Newspaper: An International History.
London, 1979. Bold and readable attempt at an inter-
national synthesis, although it draws heavily on English
and French examples. Aimed at a nonspecialist reader-
ship.
Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News from the Drum to the
Satellite. New York, 1988. Aimed at a popular audi-
ence, but based on much fascinating material.
SIMON BURROWS
n
PRIMITIVISM. During the first decade of
the twentieth century, primitivism became a cul-
tural rage in Europe and influenced much of the
avant-garde cultural production in the following
decades. Its genealogy goes back to the concept
of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ which saw its first heyday
during the eighteenth century when modernity and
its antithesis evolved simultaneously. The concept
of primitivism evokes the notion of the inferior
primitive and savage, conveying both a sense of
simplicity analogous to primitive lifestyle and tech-
nology as well as a life based on instincts, irration-
ality, and violence. But primitivism as a cultural
construct conjures also the opposite: a belief in
the superiority of the trouble-free and enviable
primitive existence, a polar opposite to that under
the corruption of modernity. It is this latter belief
in the life of the ‘‘noble savage’’ that has made
1873