The Establishment of Periodicals | 57printed in foreign languages which were specifically targeted at neighbouring
countries.
The increasing demand for newspapers simultaneously highlights the
growing desire for political information and thus the politicising of the society.
The German newspaper historian Johannes Weber assumes that daily political
reporting diluted authoritarian dignity, whether it was news on other terri-
tories or the ‘secularisation of political percipience’, since these fragmented
reports undermined the religious legitimacy of power (Weber 1997: 46; and
1999: 43). Above all, newspapers levelled information discrepancies between
the different sections like noblemen or townsmen. English newspapers espe-
cially tended to politicise. In the 1640s Civil War, they led to the formation
of parties, especially with their reports on parliament (Mendle 2001: 57). Ver-
batim reports from the English Parliament, printed regularly from the 1760s
onwards, also changed the role of Parliament, for political addresses now had
to be tailored to a broader public. The English press of the eighteenth century
did not refer to its readers as subjects but rather as ‘the people’, ‘Englishmen’,
or ‘the public’, and this alone already promoted sovereignty of the people.
However, it would take until the 1770s before newspapers in England com-
pletely took over the pamphlets’ commentary function and with it the ability
to impact political decisions by means of campaigns (Barker 2000: 127, 145,
170f.). However, even in France and Austria, where the authorities regulated
the press stringently, newspapers achieved a ‘perforation of the arcane of polit-
ical leadership’ (Arndt 2002: 23).
Since early newspapers reported on war to a large extent, their media effect
was discussed within this context. The historian Johannes Burkhardt consid-
ered that newspapers exerted a very strong media effect and were guilty of
‘warmongering and the prolongation of war’ during the Thirty Years’ War
(Burkhardt 1992: 230). Other authors have tended to ascribe this function
to broadsides (Welke and Wilke 1999: 44). In other countries and con-
flicts, newspapers also almost unanimously called for war (re. England: e.g.
Barker 2000: 139). Yet they did not operate simply as an autonomous patri-
otic authority, but rather in the context of power structures. But even if the
authorities could co-determine newspaper contents, this did not automatically
guarantee the desired media effect. After the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, for
instance, the returning French troops were greeted with derision despite ample
propaganda, because other media and rumours spread by word of mouth had
given different information (Küster 2004: 258). The reason these media wars
had considerable consequences for real wars was that to a certain extent the
outcome of battles was negotiated through the media (Schort 2006: 412–16,
475).
For a long time the most influential approach to explain the social effects
of periodicals and newspapers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was