The Media and the Road to Modernity | 71Despite or rather because of repressions there was a revival of protest
movements in Western Europe around 1830, and these were often partly
initiated by newspapers. The outbreak of the July Revolution in France was
mainly due to the ‘July Ordinances’ issued by King Charles X, which further
restricted freedom of the press and the voting census. Journalists initiated a
resolution against the Ordinances, and the protest paper posted by forty-four
editors from twelve newspapers on 27 July 1830 mobilised the street against
the government (Charle 2004: 37–41; Reichardt 2008b: 241). In particular,
the newspaper Le National, founded in 1830, was one of the most important
germinal cells of protest (Church 1983: 74). The paper collected signatures
against the Ordinances, and its editor Adolphe Thiers was one of the main
activists of this revolution, which indeed succeeded in driving out the royal
family and placing the liberal ‘Bourgeois King’ Louis Philippe on the throne.
In the 1830s, Thiers became Minister and Minister President, and in 1871
advanced to become the first President of the Third Republic.
A similar link between the media and revolution was evident in Belgium,
which now emerged as an independent state for the first time. After the King
of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands reacted autocratically to demands
for reform, the Flemish and Walloons in the Catholic south, influenced by
the Parisian July Revolution, rebelled in 1830 against the mainly Protestant
north. A chief advocate of their reform demands was the newspaper Courier
des Pays-Bas and its editor Louis de Potter. An anti-clerical journalist, he called
for an alliance between the Liberals and the Catholics, who now used nation-
alistic arguments to protest against the government (Church 1983: 83). The
struggle for freedom of the press was another important reason for protests.
At least seventy thousand people signed a petition demanding it, while prose-
cuting journalists like Potter made them martyrs. Both the official publishing
house that printed the royalist paper Le National and the private residence of
its publisher were targets of the first violent protests in 1830. Here, too, the
revolution caused many journalists to join the new government.
Of course there were no revolutions in Great Britain, Italy or the German
Federation in 1830; nevertheless they too experienced protest movements
supported by journalists and the media. Illegal nationalist papers were pub-
lished in the Italian regions; since the late 1820s Guiseppe Mazzini and
others, operating from Marseille, had established programmatic papers sup-
porting his movement ‘Young Italy’ (Gernert 1990: 51f.; Hibberd 2008:
18f.). In Germany the Paris Revolution revived the nationalist movement
and led to turbulent public gatherings in some states. ‘Freedom of the press’
developed into a key idea of these protests (Koch, in Grampp 2008: 286).
The climax of this political activity was the famous Hambacher Fest in
- The key figures involved in its preparation were also journalists – most
prominently Philipp Siebenpfeiffer, who changed the name of his paper