The Media and the Road to Modernity | 73Manchester Observer. Many editors from the serious London press attended,
and then reported in horror on the bloody suppression of the gathering, with
fifteen dead and hundreds injured – and especially on the violence against
women (Bush 2005: 30–35). This turned the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, as it was
called by the press, into a similarly iconic object of remembrance as the ‘Boston
Massacre’ had been in the American Revolution. In a similar vein, a year later
in London, radical journalists incited protests in the ‘Queen Caroline Affair’
because the future King George IV had succeeded in divorcing his wife. In the
protests and reforms of the early 1830s, the Radical Press and Unstamped Press
again played a pivotal role (Barker 2000: 11f.). They also succeeded in getting
the hated stamp tax reduced to one penny. In so doing, the Unstamped Press
in effect abolished itself, paving the way for a flourishing, high-circulation
popular press in Great Britain.
Media and the Revolution 1848
This intermeshing of media and revolutions was in evidence all across Europe
in 1848. These uprisings, too, had their origin in Paris, spreading from there
to the rest of the continent (Dowe et al. 1998). Once more the media influ-
enced the course of revolutions and were themselves in turn transformed by
them. In many countries censorship had already been relaxed in the years
preceding 1848, so that the media were able to give voice to liberal and nation-
alist demands and disseminate reports about sundry protest activities. After
1847, liberals in the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piemont flocked around the Turin
newspaper Il Risorgimento, and in the German Federation around the Deut-
sche Zeitung. This upswing corresponded to technical advances, the high-speed
press being used with markedly greater frequency during the 1840s (R. Stöber
2000: 116). Its high purchase price necessitated high, quickly produced print
runs, and these were more difficult for the censors to control. This in turn
made it possible to distribute thousands of leaflets with the ‘Demands of the
People’ that had been formulated at the Offenburg People’s Assembly of 1847
(Siemann 1985: 115).
During the revolution this new technology made possible several print
runs per day, which imparted a new dynamism to protests. Important papers,
like La Presse in Paris – with a circulation of over 70,000 – and the Kölnische
Zeitung, appeared three times daily in 1848 (Reichardt 2008a: 16, 19). In light
of these numbers, their call for the King’s abdication carried special weight. By
contrast, the telegraph played hardly any role at this time, since most Central
European newspapers had been forbidden to use it due to fear of uprisings.
The spread of revolution rather tended to be facilitated by the growth of other
new vehicles of speedy transmission – the railway, for example, that was built