The Establishment of Periodicals | 61Secondly, one of the most important breeding grounds of self-organised
civil society emerged from the collective media use practised within reading
clubs: creating a charter, making joint decisions and electing officers on the
basis of equal votes were ways for club members to practise democratic pro-
cedures. Reading societies experimented with methods of self-administration,
equality, and democratic negotiations and have thus been considered as a
pre-stage of democracy. Thirdly, the social exclusivity of reading societies was
important in the light of the cultural and communicative development of the
bourgeoisie, in spite of the fact that some members were aristocrats (Puschner,
in Sösemann 2002: 202). In a sense, reading societies represented a ‘personi-
fied enlightenment’ and personified bourgeoisie. The lower classes were either
excluded from the outset by the charters or the imposition of membership fees.
The same initially applied to women, who were considered to interfere with
free rational-critical thinking. Hence, reading societies for women emerged
as substitutes. In addition, lending libraries gave them access to newspapers,
periodicals and books, and from the nineteenth century onwards reading clubs
also offered media access to women more frequently.
Although Habermas’s book has been refuted on many levels, the produc-
tive discussion on his model of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ has shown what
power the media could possess in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to
shape the social and cultural realms of the time. It has also become clear that
it was not only those literary periodicals and books beloved of literary critics
that were of great importance, nor the pamphlet journalism preferred by his-
torians. It was also to a much greater degree the newspapers that defined the
two centuries preceding the French Revolution.