74 | Mass Media and Historical Change
up in Germany after 1835, or the regular use of carrier pigeons, that had long
been employed for this purpose by newspapers and news agencies.
After the outbreak of the revolution, freedom of the press and of expres-
sion were pivotal demands briefly realised in many countries, even in conser-
vative Austria. Under the influence of events in France, in 1848 the German
Bundestag granted each member state the option of establishing freedom of
the press (Greiling 2003: 507). Article IV of the constitution passed in 1849
contained the pioneering words: ‘Each German has the right to freely express
his opinion in word, print and pictorial representation’. Freedom of the press
enabled the media to expand throughout Europe with lightning speed. In
Paris alone, 450 new, albeit mostly short-lived, periodicals appeared in July
1848 (Reichardt 2008b: 242). In Austria the number of newspapers trebled
to 215, while in Germany the number grew to an estimated 1,700 (Siemann
1985: 117). Street sales moreover accorded them a new presence, but the
line between pamphlets and short-lived periodicals was often blurred. Seen
in this light, we should not associate the revolution of 1848 simply with
barricades or new parliaments. Newspaper-reading citizens who debated
and discussed issues characterised it to a much greater degree. The revolu-
tion moreover abruptly changed the profiles of newspapers and magazines.
Semi-official state-financed papers like the Österreichische Beobachter in
Vienna and the Rheinische Beobachter in Bonn disappeared. Other period-
icals sought to mark their transformation by eliminating determiners like
‘official’ or ‘privileged’. It was above all in the provinces that new political
papers were born, with hitherto ‘neutral’ newspapers adopting a political
position that they emphasised by using attributes like ‘Volk’, ‘German’, ‘free’
and ‘citizen’ (Koszyk 1966: 110; Greiling 2003: 506, 514). In France, the
names of newspapers often harked back to the slogans of the French Revolu-
tion: La Liberté, for example.
The year 1848 also saw the unfolding of the partisan press in Central
Europe. As had been the case in earlier uprisings in North America and
France, newspapers and magazines were not established as mere mouth-
pieces of existing parties, but both coexisted in a mutual formative process.
It was at this time that the four movements that continued to define politics
in many countries up to the twentieth century (Conservative, Liberal, Cath-
olic and Socialist) emerged with their own press. Publicists gradually discov-
ered their place in the political landscape during the course of the debate.
Newspapers negotiated the policy objectives of their respective party lines on
the basis of unfolding current events. In the provinces, too, pub gatherings,
the formation of political associations, and the political alignment of local
newspapers were intermeshed (Beine 1999).
The leading organ of the constitutional liberals was the Deutsche Zeitung
(1847–1850) that addressed itself to the bourgeoisie (Hirschhausen 1998);