The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (66 page)

Because de Boer notes so carefully where he obtained his news, we are able to anatomise with some accuracy the news networks to which an engaged but not privileged citizen had access in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. The results are very revealing. In 1748, for instance, de Boer noted the source of 179 news stories that he wrote up in his chronicle. Of these, one-fifth were events he witnessed himself, and a further 40 per cent were stories that he had heard from third parties. Less than 40 per cent of his news came from the reading of printed matter. This was a particularly turbulent year in Amsterdam politics, but even in a year when most of the notable events occurred elsewhere, like the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, fewer than half of his reports emanated from printed sources.
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Even among the printed matter, newspapers were far from the predominant source of news. If we examine the pieces that de Boer inserted into his news chronicle, most came from other types of printed media: pamphlets, government publications, and a few engraved pictures. Despite its heritage as one of the first centres of the newspaper trade in the seventeenth century (at one point, remember, the city had nine competing papers), newspapers played a relatively modest role in the news world of eighteenth-century Amsterdam.

Disgusted of Sneek

Why, for even so devoted a follower of news as Jan de Boer, were newspapers still such an unsatisfactory source of news in the mid-eighteenth century? In the Dutch Republic the exuberant, innovative newspaper world inherited from the seventeenth century had actually become more restrictive. Each city
allowed only one paper. In return for its monopoly the paper paid a considerable fee, and the editors were careful not to compromise their investment by publishing anything of which the magistrates might disapprove. The self-imposed restraints that governed the contents of newspapers were not blown away by the great late century revolutions. In both France and the Low Countries the nineteenth century witnessed a retreat to a familiar, more conservative pattern of reporting. In this respect the contentious political cultures of Britain and America were very much the exception. More typical is this editorial notice in the
Leidsche Courant
, the paper of the leading intellectual centre of the Dutch Republic, published in 1785:

Dutch readers did wish to take part in political debate. But this was largely confined to pamphlets and a new class of political journals. The newspapers, privileged, cautious and profitable, remained inviolate. In the nineteenth century coverage of domestic news would expand, to become the core business of newspapers. But in the eighteenth century this had not been achieved.

Dutch newspapers were resolute in their refusal to publicise local political controversies. A letter of the Frisian patriots in 1786 was published in every Dutch newspaper except Friesland's own newspaper, the
Leeuwarder Courant
. The paper, conscious of its vulnerability to local government disapproval and the removal of its lucrative privileges, contented itself instead with reprinting provincial ordinances: such as a ban on fruit baskets from the town of Sneek (apparently they were smaller than those used in the rest of Friesland, and customers could be given short measure).
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This seems an absurd banality, though the tradition of the mundane and parochial still lives on in many a local newspaper. But it does draw attention to the extent to which governments were still the direct source of a large part of the newspapers’ copy. Even at the end of the eighteenth century official publications remained a crucial conduit of news and information. This was last discussed in this book as an element of the expanding sixteenth-century news market, when governments across Europe began to pump out printed proclamations and ordinances, both as broadsheets and in pamphlet form.
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But this did not end with the arrival of new commercial forms of news publication. From the seventeenth century excerpts and entire texts of official publications were simply absorbed into serial news publications. And governments continued to issue their ordinances in traditional ways, posted up in public places and
cried out on the market square. In an age before universal literacy such verbal publication continued to play an important role in the dissemination of news.

For the new classes of readers newspapers were unsatisfactory in other ways. Right up until the end of the eighteenth century, newspapers were wholly unillustrated. Those who wanted to obtain a visual representation of great events had, like Jan de Boer, to buy engravings or woodcuts as separate sheets. This intermittently vibrant market helped those who followed the news to create a picture of great events.
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But the illustrated sheets had then to be combined with the narrative account in the newspaper or pamphlet by the purchasers themselves. The striking, dramatic juxtaposition of words and pictures artfully deployed in the painting of news stories still lay in the future.

Customers also worried about the accuracy of the newspapers. In 1757 de Boer was trying to keep up with reports of the war between Prussia and Austria. Although he followed the news closely, he was bewildered by contradictory reports: ‘How one is to reconcile all these different reports is quite beyond me, and I shall leave it to those wiser than myself.’
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The real problem was that news from faraway places, which still dominated the newspapers’ pages, was so slow to arrive. In this respect there was no great improvement in the provision of the news from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Groningen papers were actually more up-to-date in their coverage of news stories in 1750 than they would be in 1800.
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The truth was that once the European postal network had been completed in the mid-seventeenth century, nothing much further could be done to speed the news. It would require the major technological innovations of the nineteenth century, the telegraph and the railways, to bring significant change. At that point the results were spectacular. In 1823 foreign news took an average of eighteen days to reach the
Leeuwarder Courant
. Fifty years later this was reduced to four.
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Did this matter? In one sense news is fresh to anyone who hears or reads it for the first time. Its value as a recreational or didactic text is not reduced by the time it takes in transit; if it is an older tale refreshed it does not need to be new at all to make its point. This is true for many of the new consumers of news in this book, but certainly not for opinion formers for whom speed of transmission had always been critical. For them, just as four hundred years previously, access to reliable sources of news was a central attribute of power, and they continued to look beyond the newspapers to procure it.

The Itch Grown a Disease

Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries the number of those who had regular access to news had expanded enormously. The news media were
slow to adapt to this changing public, particularly in their tone and style. It is important to remember that professional news services made their debut in an age when the word ‘client’ described the producer, not the potential purchaser. A news man offered himself to a great nobleman or prince in much the same way that a poet would present his sonnets, or an artist a portrait, in the hope of reward. Even when this service was monetised, the tone in which news writers tendered for custom was very much that of a tradesman plying his wares.
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This tradition of clientage was maintained through to the eighteenth century when paid hands like Daniel Defoe or Samuel Johnson wrote in return for pensions or salaries; or indeed in the long, languid and pampered career of the Paris Gazetteer, his respectful and undemanding hymns to royal prerogatives protected from competition by royal monopoly.

In a similar way the style of newswriting adhered stubbornly to that developed to inform and brief Europe's ruling classes. News evolved from confidential briefings, to commercial newsletters, and then became embedded in the first newspapers, without substantial change in style or organisation. One could argue that the new generations of readers who bought these papers would be flattered to be treated to information that had previously passed only among the secret counsels of the governing classes. Perhaps they were; but they would have been hard put to understand it. Newspaper men recognised no duty to explain. If readers chose to have these reports of foreign politics explained to them, or indeed if they wanted to find out what was going on in areas more relevant to their own lives, they were forced to rely on traditional mechanisms of news distribution, primarily conversation.

So much news and most interpretation and analysis were conveyed by word of mouth. This indifference to the real-life experience of the reader, or construction of an imagined reader, continued into the lofty classical allusions of Jean-Paul Marat in the French Revolution. To the end of our period news men give a distinct impression that they are more concerned to earn the approbation of their social superiors, or their fellow writers, than of their hard-pressed readers. News was writer, rather than public, centred. The reader is obliged to take it or leave it; they must buck up and keep up.

The remarkable thing is that so many of Europe's citizens did choose to enter this esoteric world of printed news. ‘You cannot imagine,’ wrote John Cooper in 1667, ‘to what a disease the itch of news is grown.’ The medical analogy is telling; for many news had become one of the necessities of life.
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That in times of great events they should purchase pamphlets is less surprising. The need for explanations, exhortations or tokens of fidelity provides sufficient explanation of the huge pamphlet surges that accompany all great events in this period. More surprising is the desire to take a regular diet of news even
in times, as the newspapers would sometimes disarmingly confess, when there really was none.

The answer seems to be that newspapers were valued only partly for what they contained, and at least as much for what they represented. They offered readers a glimpse into a world far beyond the experience of the everyday. A glimpse, indeed, into many worlds: of countries they would never visit; battles they would thankfully never fight; of potentates and princes they would never meet, and who would barely spare them a glance if they did. Such worlds they could sample in works of history or travel narratives, but in the newspapers they were brought to them in an unpredictable miscellany, without narrative, and all for the price of a steak pie or a quart of ale. It was possible to be without the newspaper, but once it was there it quickly became an accoutrement of a polite life; a sign that a citizen had reached a certain place in society from which retreat would be painful. Newspapers had entered the lifeblood of European society. There would be no going back.

Conclusion

I
T
is easy to see why, for those engulfed by the tumultuous events at the end of the eighteenth century, it seemed that a decisive moment had been reached in the history of communication. The newspaper had come of age. A French revolutionary journalist, Pierre-Louis Roederer, set out the case with admirable clarity in an essay ‘on the different means of communication of ideas among men in society’. Newspapers, he argued,

News men had endured much in the three centuries since, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, news had first become a commodity. Now they saw the means to achieve not only influence, but dignity. No longer would they be, in their own eyes at least, despised and put-upon tradesmen, but ‘the tribunes of the people’. Here is Camille Desmoulins, writing in
Révolutions de France et de Brabant
: