FRANCE,] NEWSPAPERS 425 prietor, gave too favourable a leverage to the republican wits not to be turned to good account. Camille Desmoulins depicted him as Janus, one face radiant at the blessings of coming liberty, the other plunged in grief for the epoch that was rapidly disappearing. Mercure When resumed, after a very brief interval, the Mercure Fran- Francais became again Mercure de France, its political importance diminished, whilst its literary worth was enhanced. During the later days of the Revolution, and under the imperial rule, its roll of contributors included the names of Geoffroy, Ginguene , Morellet, Lacretelle, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand. The statesman last named brought upon the Mercure another temporary suppression in June 1807 (at which date he was its sole proprietor), by words in true unison with the noblest deed of his chequered career his retirement, namely, from the imperial service on the day that the news of the execution of the duke of Enghien reached him, being the day after he had been appointed by Napoleon a minister plenipotentiary. Thus it chanced that alike under the brilliant despotism of Napoleon and under the crapulous malversation of Louis XV. the management of the Mercure was revolutionized for protests which conferred honour upon the journal no less than upon the individual writers who made them. Resumed by other hands, the Mercure continued to appear until January 1820, when it was again suspended. In the following year it reappeared as Le Mercure de France, au dix-neuvieme siecle, and in February 1853 it finally ceased. A complete set extends to no fewer than 1611 volumes. Journal The only other newspaper of a date anterior to the fa Paris. Revolution which needs to be noticed here is the Journal de Paris, which was commenced on New Year s Day of 1777. It had but a feeble infancy, yet lived for half a century. Its early volumes appear so insipid to a 19th- century reader that he wonders what can have been the cause of its occasional bickerings with the police. Its tameness, however, did not save it from sharing in the " suspensions " of its predecessors. After the Revolution such men as Garat, Condorcet, and Regnaud de St Jean d Angely appear amongst its contributors, but those of earlier date were obscure. Its period of highest prosperity may be dated about 1792, when its circulation is said to have exceeded 20,000. Nouvelles The police adventures of the writers of the MS. news- la , letters, or Nouvelles a la Main, were still more numerous,
- arid, if we may judge from the copious specimens of these
epistles which yet survive, must also not unfrequently have arisen from lack of official employment, rather than from substantial provocation. Madame Doublet de Persan, the widow of a member of the French board of trade, was a conspicuous purveyor of news of this sort. For nearly forty years daily meetings were held in her house at which the gossip and table-talk of the town were systematically (and literally) registered; and weekly abstracts or epitomes were sent into the country by post. Piron, Mirabaud, Falconet, D Argental, and, above all, Bachaumont, were prominent members of the " society," and each of them is said to have had his assigned seat beneath his own portrait. The lady s valet-de-chambre appears to have been editor ex officio ; and as he occasionally suffered imprisonment, when offensive news-letters had been seized by the police, so responsible a duty was doubtless " considered in the wages." News and anecdotes of all kinds political and literary, grave, gay, or merely scandalous were all admitted into the Nouvelles a la Main ; and their contents, during a long series of years, form the staple of those Memoires Secrets pour servir a VHistoire de la Republique des Lettres which extend to thirty-six volumes, have been frequently printed (at first with the false imprint "Londres : John Adamson, 1777-89 "), and are usually referred to by French writers as the Memoires de Bachaumont. The journalism of the first Revolution has been the News- theme of many bulky volumes, and their number is still P a P ers of on the increase. The recital of the mere titles of the newspapers which then appeared throughout France fills more than forty pages of larger dimensions than those which the reader has now before him. It is obvious, therefore, that a very casual glance at this part of our subject is all that can be given to it here. When at least one half of the French people was in a ferment of hope or of fear at the approaching convocation of the states-general, most of the existing newspapers were still in a state of torpor. Long paragraphs, for example, about a terrible " wild beast of the Gevaudan " whether wolf or bear, or as yet nondescript, was uncertain were still current in the Paris journals at this momentous juncture. Mirabeau was among the foremost to supply the popular want. His Lettres a ses Commettants began on the 2d May 1789, and with the twenty-first number became the Courrier de Provence. Within a week Maret (after wards duke of Bassano) followed with the Bulletin des Seances de VAssemblee Nationale, and Lehodey with the Journal des Etats Generaux. In June Brissot de Warville began his Patriote Francais. Gorsas published the first number of his Courrier de Versailles in the following month, from which also dates the famous periodical of Prudhomme, Loustalot, and Tournon, entitled Revolutions de Paris, with its characteristic motto, " Les grands ne nous paraissent grands que parce que nous sommes a genoux ; levons nous ! " In August 1789 Baudouin began the Journal des Debats (edited in 1792 by Lou vet) and Journal Marat the Ami du Peuple (which at first was called Le ^s Debats Publiciste Parisien). The Moniteur Universel (of which we ^ have spoken already) was first published on the 24th November, although numbers were afterwards printed bearing date from the 5th May, the day on which the states-general first assembled. Camille Desmoulins also commenced his Revolutions de France et de Brabant in November 1789. The Ami du Roi was first published in June 1790, La Q^lotidienne in September 1792. Of all these prominent journals the Moniteur and the Debats alone have survived until now. A few of them lasted until 1794 or 1795 ; one continued until recently; but most of them expired either in the autumn of 1792 or with the fall of the party of the Gironde in September 1793. In some of these papers the energy for good and for evil of a whole lifetime seems to be compressed into the fugitive writings of a few months. Even the satirical journals which combated the Revolution with shafts of ridicule and wit, keen enough after their kind, but too light to do much damage to men terribly in earnest, abound with matter well deserving the attention of all students desirous of a thorough knowledge of the period. 1 The consular Government began its dealings with the press by reducing the number of political papers to thirteen. At this period the number of daily journals had been nineteen, and their aggregate provincial circulation, apart from the Paris sale, 49,313, an average of 2600 each. Under Napoleon the M&niteur was the only political paper that was really regarded with an eye of favour. Even as respects the nation at large, the monstrous excesses into which the Revolutionary press had plunged left an enduring stigma on the class. Vhen Bertin acquired the Journal des Debats from Baudouin, the printer, for 20,000 francs, he had to vanquish popular indifference on 1 We make these remarks after an actual examination volume by volume of many hundreds of these ephemeral productions, reckoning those of all kinds, belonging to the Revolutionary period. XVTT. 54
