How news spread during the French Revolution
So much has been written and published about the French Revolution that you would think it would be easy to research for a historical fiction set in that era. But as we’ve seen with my previous blog posts on medieval Italy, its the little things that make a story, not the big picture events. Its how they lived, what they wore, what they ate, when they ate, how they got their news…
The majority of writings about the French Revolutionary period are predominantly centred around Paris. After all many of the critical events occurred there. However, the era (which spans 10 years from 1789 to 1799) was called the French Revolution, not the Paris Revolution. So how was news disseminated to other parts of the country?
This is a more complex question than it sounds. When the revolutionary Parisians stormed the Bastille on 14th July 1789, the king – Louis XVI – still had absolute power over the country, which included control of the news channels. By the early 1790s, revolutionary free press had taken hold. But what about those early months. How, for example did the rest of the country outside Paris learn about what was going on in their capital?
The Estates General
To answer that question, we need to go back a little in time. In May 1789, 1200 representatives from all three groups of French nationals, known as Estates (The First Estate consisting of nobility, the Second, clergy, and the Third, everyone else) had been summoned to the 1st meeting of the Estates General since 1614. This, then, was a melting pot of people from all around the country, assembled together in Paris who could freely exchange views on, among other things, the absolute monarchy and the current political structure.
When it was discovered that each Estate would receive one vote per Estate, as opposed to one vote per head, the Third Estate realised that, even with the concession of double votes for their group, they would still hold no power against the two votes of the First and Second Estates combined. They thus formed their own legislature, known as The National Assembly.
The Tennis Court Oath
They met together on a tennis court near the palace of Versailles in June 1789, where, under oath, they swore not to disband until France had become a constitution. This became known as the Tennis Court Oath. Ultimately it led to the king agreeing to take votes based on head count, not Estate power. In the immediate aftermath, it would have led to a huge movement of information and ideas being disseminated all around the country by its members.
Following the Tennis Court Oath, a group of people from Brittany (who were unique in that there were no representatives from the First Estate at the Estates General) formed a social group known as the Breton Club. This met in secret at a coffee shop in Versailles. Members from other constituencies soon joined and by November 1789 they had moved their meetings to Paris, in line with the movement of the National Assembly. They were redubbed the Jacobin Club, on account of their meeting at the Rue Saint-Jacques. In January 1790 they renamed themselves The Society of the Friends of the Constitution to include all those members who were not Bretons, but the name Jacobins had already stuck!
Coffee Shop Culture Spread News
All this is to say that people from around the country were already meeting in secret coffee shop assemblies in the capital and would have therefore been able to transmit the crux of these meetings, the events of Paris and Versailles, and their opinions on such, either via letter or in person on their return to their own towns and villages. Add to this the fact that newsletters were already circulating Europe by the sixteenth century (and possibly earlier). These were popular among merchants who read about news and other business topics such as exchange rates and taxes, in them.
At the beginning of the revolution in France, members of these early political clubs would have written their own newsletters which would have been distributed by hand or via the postal service. These took the form of pamphlets – pieces of handwritten, or printed, paper folded over once (folio), twice (quarto) or three times (octavo). During the course of the French Revolution there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of these pamphlets circulating the country. In May 1789, alone, there were over 100 pamphlets, rising to 300 by June. One of the most well-known of these earliest pamphlets was the famous revolutionary, Marat’s L’Ami du Peuple, first published as Le Publiciste Parisien, in September 1789.
Although the French Revolution allowed for the circulation of a “free press”, these became clandestine publications during the Reign of Terror after 1793 and the papers frequently had to change their names to avoid detection which would lead to censorship or outright banning. Many journalists ultimately became victims of the guillotine.