High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 629
Canning’s Anti- Jacobin, which nicknamed him Père du Chène, “the name assumed
by the Atheist Hébert, the friend and confidant”—so Canning claimed—“of
Robespierre.”^40
In France the press was very active under the Directory. There were journals of
royalist tone, but normally the government was most apprehensive about those of
the most advanced democrats. When it closed them down they appeared under
new titles, so that a fitful liberty was in fact enjoyed. Between 1792 and 1800, for
example, there were half a dozen successive titles for the paper most commonly
known as the Journal des hommes libres de tous les pays. This title alone suggests one
ground for the Directors’ concern, the affinity between the French militant demo-
crats and “world revolution.”
For the rest of the Continent—or more exactly, for Holland, Belgium, the
Rhineland, Switzerland, and Italy—Jacques Godechot, in a remarkable survey,
cites about a hundred newspapers by name for these years of revolution. The
Dutch press was quite free under the Batavian Republic, even after the demo-
cratic coup d’état of January 1798, when opposition in other ways was silenced.
On the Left Bank of the Rhine, which had not shared in the journalistic develop-
ment of the rest of Germany in preceding years, there was a great outburst of
newspapers during the French occupation. The Belgians, now “departmentalized”
within the French Republic, had more newspapers than they had had in the
Austrian Netherlands. The Swiss cantons had been very inhospitable to newspa-
per editors, and Bern had even forbidden the importation of the Moniteur, so that
the Helvetic Republic brought about a journalistic as well as a political revolu-
tion. The famous educator, Pestalozzi, in September 1798 began publication of
Das Helvetische Volksblatt under the sponsorship of the new government. In Italy,
except in Venice after its transfer to Austria, the story was the same; each new
republic had its variety of political journals; and even in Piedmont and Tuscany,
which were not republicanized, the spring of 1799 saw a Repubblicano piemontese
at Turin, and Il Democratico at Florence. Journals edited in French at Malta and
in Egypt, during the French occupation, began the transmission of new ideas to
the Arab world. It is said also that the first newspaper to be printed in Arabic
appeared in Egypt at this time.
It is evident that this eruption of journalistic activity, partisan though it was and
limited in number of readers, carried with it a revolution in political consciousness,
until repressed in the various compromises which the Napoleonic order, and the
opposition to it, imposed upon most of Europe.
The Republican Constitutions
Ten constitutions were written for the Sister Republics between the end of 1796
and the spring of 1799. In a survey of their provisions one may consider also the
constitution drafted by Rhigas Velestinlis for a Hellenic Republic, and some of the
demands of democrats in Britain, Ireland, and the United States belonged within
40 Anti- Jacobin, June 11, 1798, II, 471, and passim.