The Establishment of Periodicals | 43involved Cardinal Richelieu, remained the only official newspaper in France
until the mid-eighteenth century (Klaits 1976; Saada, in Welke and Wilke
2008: 181). The governmental censorship commission Maître de la Librairie
gained importance in the seventeenth century vis-à-vis previous censorship
authorities such as the Church, university and parliament. Similarly, only one
official newspaper existed in Sweden until 1731, which was entitled Ordinari
Post Tijdender and issued by a government delegate (Ries 2001: 240). The
Viennese Wiennerische Diarium of 1703 established itself in like manner as
the sole German newspaper for the next sixty years, during which it was also
classified as the semi-official mouthpiece of the Habsburg Emperor (Duch-
kowitsch 1978; Gestrich, in Daniel 2006: 25). At the same time, the interna-
tional press market was also able to evade such news surveillance, if there was
sufficient demand. Thus numerous French newspapers from the Republic of
the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation were in
circulation as early as the seventeenth century. Various newspapers emerged,
particularly in border regions, in order to take advantage of the dissimilar cen-
sorship practices in places like Altona, which was next to Hamburg then, but
under Danish administration (Böning 2002: 53).
A large variety of newspapers were available in parts of the Holy Roman
Empire and the Netherlands thanks to their greater freedom of press. In the
Netherlands many censorship decrees did in fact exist, but they were scarcely
implemented, except perhaps in cases where foreign authorities felt slighted by
news reports (Haks, in Koopmans 2005: 173). In the Holy Roman Empire,
the pre-censorship rules for printing practices, namely the Wormser Edikt
of 1521, also applied to newspaper publishing. But a number of territories
again facilitated unrestricted news exchange, for sovereigns assigned censor-
ship to local authorities who displayed varying levels of severity. Control of
news distribution chiefly took the form of printing patents in the Empire
and less in the shape of text editing, let alone the threat of imprisonment.
In seventeenth-century England there were phases when either method was
applied. On the one hand the London Gazette came into being as a semi-of-
ficial royalist newspaper based on a French model, and its monopoly lasted
three decades. Yet apart from this period, freedom of the press evolved much
earlier in England than in any other European country. During the 1640s
English Civil War, a huge number of critical newspapers competed against
each other, which explains why the British press was considered the most pow-
erful in all of Europe (Mendle, in Dooley and Baron 2001: 61). After a period
of severe censorship in the second half of the seventeenth century, which had
led to a deterioration of the press, the abolition of the ‘Licensing Act’ of 1695
brought about the first freedom from censorship worldwide. This immediately
fostered a boom in the press market and a considerable increase in political
news reports (Sommerville 1996: 120).