The Media and the Road to Modernity | 77Politics and Society in the Age of Magazines and the Popular Press
Many things have been attributed to the waning nineteenth century. It is con-
sidered the beginning of ‘classical modernity’, the ‘political mass market’ or
else the fin de siècle, vacillating between euphoric awakening and future angst.
The influence of the media on society now played a central role and for this
reason the decades following the 1880s have been described as the beginning
of a Sattelzeit (period of transition) for the mass media, as a way of describing
the process of mutual transformation that took place in the media and society
(Knoch and Morat 2003: 19f.). New electronic communication (telegraph,
telephone), new reproduction media (popular press, magazines) and new tech-
nical forms of reprography (photograph, phonograph, and finally film) were
the building blocks of this ensemble. The traditional forms of newspapers and
periodicals also experienced dynamic changes during this Golden Age of the
press. Circulation numbers, variety and frequency of publication rose sharply.
In several Western countries circulation numbers of daily papers and period-
icals hit six digits or even the million mark, like the Parisian Petit Journal in
- In a small country like the Netherlands sales rose from ninety thou-
sand in 1865 to approximately one million copies before the First World War.
Beginning in the 1860s a significant press market rapidly emerged, even in
Russia and Japan.
This boom in newspapers and periodicals went hand in hand with mul-
tifarious societal upheavals. A primary precondition for this was nearly uni-
versal literacy, the fruit of compulsory schooling first established in Germany,
and afterwards also in France and England. Its introduction firstly created
an expectation among publishers that they would be able to produce simple
mass-circulation papers for millions of new media consumers (Brown 1985:
30; Curran 1978: 57). Secondly, media expansion was closely tied to urbanisa-
tion, as large cities were the guarantors of both news topics and sales markets.
Thirdly, the reduction of economic restrictions by the state promoted a sudden
press boom. For this reason, the discontinuation of stamp taxes (1853–1861)
in Great Britain is seen as a central turning point in media history, as it
reduced the price of newspapers and thus generated a rapid rise in circulation.
This allowed the provincial press to flourish, and Liberal papers like the Daily
Telegraph were able to break the ascendancy of the Conservative press and
the pro-government Times (Lee 1976: 69). At the same time the abolition of
taxes was based on the belief that financial competition would provide more
effective protection from the radical media (Hampton 2004: 33). A similar
newspaper expansion followed upon the discontinuation of economic restric-
tions in the Netherlands in 1869 and in the German Empire after the passing
of the Reichspressegesetz (Imperial Press Law) of 1874 (Wetzel 1975: 61, 291;