The Establishment of Periodicals | 45not transpire until the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. War reporting did
not merely serve to satisfy curiosity but could be essential for survival because
it enabled citizens to plan possible means of escape. By the same token, the
English periodical press did not establish itself until the events of the Irish
Rebellion and the Civil War in 1641/42 (Raymond 1999: 13–26).
Economic news, on the other hand, only played a marginal role. In West
European newspapers it only accounted for a small percentage of the total
number of articles, and revolved mainly around incoming ships’ cargoes and
the economic consequences of natural disasters (Schultheiß-Heinz 2004:
151f.; Wilke 1984: 125, 130). However, seventeenth-century newspapers
already contained advertisements, albeit only a few. The first advertising
agency in Paris can be traced back to the 1630s and supplied the semi-offi-
cial Gazette (Saada, in Welke and Wilke 2008: 187). While on the Continent
advertisements had begun by primarily promoting books, a flourishing market
for advertising developed in England. In addition to book and job adverts,
from the 1670s onwards the semi-official London Gazette also reported on the
establishment of businesses and lost articles (Winkler, in ibid.: 143). Moreover,
advertisers such as the City Mercury and the Weekly Advertiser were launched at
an early stage in England, thus also establishing the medium of the newspaper
as an instance of local communication.
Newspaper reports were overwhelmingly non-partisan and at most adopted
the judgements of their correspondents (Weber 1999: 29, 36; Schröder 1995:
334; very pointedly: Schönhagen 1998: 291). More recent research on reports
about the Thirty Years’ War, however, has revealed that comments, assessments
and biased reporting were more frequent than had previously been assumed
(Adrians 1999: 185f.; Behringer 2003: 369f.). A study on war reporting in
four Western countries has also shown that not only semi-official papers such
as the French Gazette, but newspapers in general often gave patriotic praise
to the positions taken by their own territories (Schultheiß-Heinz 2004: 217,
236–56, 273). Even Dutch newspapers, which were hardly subject to political
monitoring, had a patriotic tone to them (Morineau 1995: 39), and in 1703 in
Austria the Post-tägliche Mercurius emerged as a newspaper which took a clear
stand on topics such as the War of the Spanish Succession (Duchkowitsch
2009: 312).
The most intensive partisanship of newspapers was to be found in
England. In the context of the 1640s Civil War, newspapers emerged which
either aggressively supported the monarch (e.g. Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius
Pragmaticus) or militantly supported Parliament and the republican idea (e.g.
Mercurius Politicus, The Moderate) (Raymond 2003: 26–79; Mendle 2001:
61). So although the dawn of editorialised newspapers must be dated back
further than is generally accepted, fiery political and religious discussions were
left to the pamphleteers. This once again illustrates that early newspapers must