66 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Of course the French Revolution bestowed only a brief flowering on the
free media market. As early as 1792, a new censorship policy was instituted
which suppressed the monarchic press. Furthermore, the Jacobins now gave
financial support to their own newspapers, as the monarchists had once done.
During the following year, ‘counter-revolutionary’ writings were declared
capital crimes, and numerous editors and journalists fell victim to the guil-
lotine. After Robespierre’s execution there was a return to greater freedom
of the press, which allowed the political right to maintain some public pres-
ence. With the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte, however, there was again a
gradual return to censorship. Newspapers once more had to be licensed, and
this licensing was supervised by a ‘bureau de la presse’ subject to the Minister
of Police. Moreover, after 1799 the official government organ, Le Moniteur,
dictated which texts could be published by the few remaining newspapers that
were still permitted: four government-funded papers for Paris and only one
newspaper for each départment (Gough 1988: 229). This fact also illustrates
the limited power of the newly media-hungry public: faced with the guillotine
and the troops it proved defenceless.
The French Revolution did not change the media landscape in France only.
On the contrary, numerous other European countries experienced a similar
tension between modernisation and restoration. These effects of the Revolu-
tion led to much greater partisanship and political polarisation of newspapers
in neighbouring countries, where detailed daily news reports led to a dramatic
rise in circulation. This race for news had the effect of promoting a certain
degree of professionalism, with the English Times in particular gaining in pres-
tige because it had its own journalists working in Paris.
News reports about the American War of Independence had already led to
an initial polarisation of the West European populace during the 1770s and
1780s. Thus the ‘patriotic revolt’ of 1786/87 in the Netherlands was associated
with incendiary newspaper articles. Later reports about the French Revolu-
tion are thought to have provided the impetus for the Netherlands’ version of
the French Revolution in the Batavian Republic in 1795 (Broersma, in idem
2005: 233–55). In the years between 1796 and 1799 the effects of the French
Revolution in the Italian states were an easing of censorship and marked news-
paper expansion, with the media expressing widespread sympathy for the rev-
olutionaries (Hibberd 2008: 17f.). Even in England and Germany, the press at
first welcomed the revolutionary coup in France before a conservative journal-
istic counter movement was launched, with only a few papers that supported
the Reign of Terror managing to survive after 1793 (Barker 2000: 176–78).
In consequence of reports about the French Revolution, Germany experi-
enced an increase in local protest movements that adopted symbols popular-
ised by the media – for example, the cockade or the liberty tree (cf. Berding,
in Böning 1992: 5–10). Often the daily press simply translated articles from