From Literary Criticism to Systems Theory in Early Modern Journalism History Author(s): Brendan Dooley Reviewed work(s): Source:

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1990), pp. 461-486 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709625 . Accessed: 06/08/2012 15:50
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas.

http://www.jstor.org

From

Literary Theory

Criticism
in

to

Systems
Modern

Early History

Journalism

BrendanDooley

Benedetto Croce spoke for many early twentieth-century historians when he condemned the information press of all times as "writings without any originality or profundity," produced by "superficial minds" and entirely inferior to other genres. "Thejournalist creates an improvised philosophy, an improvised history," he claimed, "and all improvisations require men with few mental scruples and almost no aesthetic sensibility."' Early modernjournalism, that mass of periodical and semiperiodical genres including broadsheets and pamphlets by which readers kept informed about the latest events in politics, social behavior, letters, and science before the advent of specialized scientific publications and the mass media, has only recently won its place as a chief source for the history of ideas. The reason for this success is the discovery that journalism must be studied not only from the point of view of style but also from that of its interaction with a historical context where it contributed to the creation of networks of communication. In spite of this success, there is considerable disagreement about how such a study should be undertaken. Journalism history presents a unique problem of historical evidence, since the researcher rarely has at his disposal much more than the text itself; only after the mid-eighteenth century is he likely to have any scraps of information about readers'reactions to journalism, since that was when newspapers and journals began publishing letters to the editor. If he wishes to say something about the role of journalism, then, he must rely on a convincing mixture of suggestion, analogy, and theory or else be taken to task for the inadequacy of his sources. Fortunately, a voluminous literature on communications offers a potential source for new working hypotheses and a potential inspiration for interdisciplinarycollaboration. An analysis of the extent to which journalism historians have combined new theories with new methods to overcome chronic problems of evidence and gone on to modify traditional views about journalism history in a few select recent publications will permit an evaluation of their success in solving some of the most enticing puzzles in social history, such as the relationship between ideas and action and between the written word
' Benedetto Croce, "II giornalismo e la storia della letteratura," idem, Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell'estetica in Italia (Bari, 1910), 128.

461 Copyright 1990 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.

462

Brendan Dooley

and public opinion. The following selection of examples is by no means exhaustive, but it does try to include representatives of the three main trajectories in current journalism historiography: the Liberal, the Marxist, and the General Systems theses. The Liberal Thesis Put together by pioneers in journalism scholarship Denis Frangois Camusat, Jeremy Bentham, and Nicolas-Antoine Condorcet in the eighteenth century and, in the nineteenth, Ugo Foscolo and Emile Hatin, the Liberal thesis might seem a bit outdated. Journalism, this thesis says, in all times served to increase the quantity of specialized knowledge and provide the basis for technological improvements. It diffused knowledge about intellectual achievements that enervated bigotry and intolerance, and it initiated political discussions that increased awareness of human rights. In so doing, it established an enlightened public opinion as a tribunal for the judgment of the actions of governments, destroying the foundations of absolutist hegemony and laying down those of republicanism. It perpetuated this process when it allowed knowledge to provide a solvent upon censorship policies, and once wholly freed, it permitted the intelligent exercise of political prerogatives under a wide suffrage.2 One advantage of the Liberal thesis is that it allowed the first professional journalism historians in the twentieth century to turn their attention almost entirely away from the actual content of journalism, assumed to be intolerably tedious, and toward the political, social, and intellectual events surrounding it. This is how Betty T. Morgan managed to write an entire history of the editorship of the mid-seventeenth-centuryJournal des sgavans,the first literary and scientific journal, as a heroic fight between enlightenment and obscurantism without offering any explanation of what its contents had to do with France's rise to a key position in European science.3 The main tenets of the Liberal thesis have received some interdisciplinary support from 1950s structural-functionalistsociologists and communications theorists. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton claim that, along with the other institutions built into the structure of modem liberal democracy, journalism functions to provide necessary support for the survival of the system. All fears of the negative effects of journalism, these theorists insist, are misplaced. True, it could presumably be manipulated by power groups for purposes of social
2 Denis Francois Camusat, Histoire critique desjournaux (2 vols.; Amsterdam, 1734); Emile Hatin, Histoirepolitique et litterairede la presse en France (8 vols.; Paris, 1859-61); Ugo Foscolo, "Italian Periodical Literature,"Edizione nazionale delle operedi UgoFoscolo, vol. 11 pt. 2, ed. C. Foligno (Florence, 1958), 338. I include Bentham and Condorcet mainly for their references to the role of journalism in the formation of public opinion. Jeremy Bentham, The Worksof Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 183843), II, 310-11; Condorcet, Oeuvres,ed. A. Condorcet-O'Connor and F. Arago (12 vols.; Paris, 1847-49), XII, 605. Many theorists could be added. For example, another from the eighteenth century, Jacques Peuchet, quoted in Keith Michael Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections," Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (eds.), Press and Politics in Pre-RevolutionaryFrance (Berkeley, 1987), 244. 3 Betty T. Morgan, Histoire du "Journaldes sqavans"depuis 1665 jusqu'en 1701 (Paris, 1929).

Journalism History

463

control, but successful monopolization is prohibitively expensive and impractical. Even in Nazi Germany, it "played an ancilliary role" in a programthat proceeded mainly by "organized violence."4At worst, it narcotizes the public by inundation with information and with opposing opinions that cancel each other out. At its most indifferent, it produces product preferences which may stimulate a free competitive economy. And at best, it reinforces democracy. It upholds social norms by condemning crimes of public figures and private citizens. It increases public order by legitimizing, through continuous repetition of their names, important authorities and institutions in society. And to the extent that it brings the attention frame of the "lower social classes" slightly closer to that of the enlightened upper classes and industrialists who "have access to a ... more comprehensive picture of... developments," notes Harold Lasswell, it serves to produce the "enlightened public opinion" upon which "the success of a democracy depends." These views are still enshrined in many journalism textbooks.5 But the Liberal thesis has so thoroughly penetratedhistoriographicalcommon sense that those historians who support it find little need to appeal to the theoretical literature,preferringto fit their monographic researchinto the broadercategories that it provided, without any reference to the comparative study of societies and civilizations encouraged by the theorists. In the characteristic words of Richmond P. Bond, journalism contributes to "rational processes, tolerance, universality, progress, scientific search, individual freedom, and practical enterprise," giving "Englishmen and their kinsmen over the globe an armament for man's mastery of his world"-although his study is limited to the Augustan periodicals.6 Some historians openly deride social theory on the assurance that the common-sense Liberal view needs no apology. "Sociologists are not interested in the singularity of historical situations," proclaim Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, and their team in the Histoire generale de la pressefranqaise. "They seek, in the examples that they get from reading journals, to discern what have been the 'characteristics of the phenomena of opinion.' " Historians, by contrast, are interested in "historical criticism." In this vast multi-volume collection it is sometimes difficult to find any thesis at all in the midst of a huge mass of details about every known sixteenth-century handbill that had served as a predecessor to Renaudot's early seventeenth-century Gazette.The authors seem more concerned with observing "qualities of sincerity, of spontaneity, of the picturesque" present in journal articles than with explaining the ultimate role of journalism.7But after the first 401 pages, when they finally get down to explaining the role ofjournalism, it is exclusively and uncritically the one elucidated in the Liberal thesis.
4 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," Lyman Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas (New York, 1948), 116. 5 An exemplary textbook: William Rivers, The Mass Media (New York, 1975). The preceding quote is from Harold D. Lasswell, "Attention Structure and Social Structure," Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas (New York, 1948), 247-48. 6 Richmond P. Bond, "Introduction," Studies in the Early English Periodical (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), 6. 7 Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, et al., Histoire generale de la pressefranqaise (5 vols.; Paris, 1969), I, vii, xv, 38.

464

Brendan Dooley

Where the contents of journalism is analyzed at all, it is usually in order to show how the press of the past foreshadowed the press of today in the continuous evolution prescribedby the Whig thesis. Contributorsto the Newslettersto Newspapers conference compare the standards of accuracy then and now. "Today, [certain] items would be classified as opinion or editorial rather than news," they claim, because of the obvious intrusion of "[the journalist's] own convictions or interest." They compare the quantity of hyperboles to show that the mentality of past journalists was not yet strongly characterized by the moder love for truth.8 They compare formats to show that Ben Franklin prefigured Art Buchwald and that Richard Steele prefiguredDear Abby, Russell Baker, and Bernard McFadden.9 They reassert the main role of the press according to the Liberal thesis by digging up a few contemporary testimonies and pieces of circumstantial evidence to show how it "influenc[ed] political opinion and action."10And they reassert the other half of the Liberal role of the press by calling for a return to at least one idea of the eighteenth century, sadly neglected in the 1942 Supreme Court ruling on Valentine v Chrestensen-that of including commercial advertising among the rights to be protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which the Founding Fathers had wisely viewed as part of their support for a free enterprise system.1 Otherwise, historians have simply taken journals as a patent reflection of public opinion on the verge of its emergence as a political force. The most powerful proponent of this approach is Franco Venturi who in volumes three and four of his Settecento riformatoreconcerns himself with one of the key theses of his entire work, namely, the increasingly diffused awareness of the political environment due to the circulation of information. This circulation provided an impetus for the reforms and projects characteristic of the Italian Enlightenment that he describes in volume five. Assuming a direct correlation between what appeared in the journals and what, for example, the typical "Florentine reader ... wanted to know," he sets out to show, in the most exhaustive fashion possible, exactly what appeared in the Italian late eighteenth-centuryjournals concerning the most disturbing events of the time in Europe. Often citing long passages, he reconstructs the "bare facts," as recounted in the journals, of "the first crisis of the Old Regime" from the Pugacev Revolt to the dismissal of Turgot and "the fall of the Old Regime" from the American to the French revolutions.12 He leaves it to others to imagine just how these "bare facts" were inserted by the readers
8 Louis T. Milic, "Tone in Steele's Tatler," Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod (eds.), Newslettersto Newspapers:Eighteenth-CenturyJournalism (Morgantown, W.V., 1977), 36. 9 Calhoun Winton, "Richard Steele, Journalist-and Journalism,"Newslettersto Newspapers, 21-32; Milic, "Tone in Steele's Tatler," 44. 10John Kern, "Boston Press Coverage of Anglo-Massachusetts Militancy, 1733-1741," Newsletters to Newspapers,57. " Kent R. Middleton, "Commercial Speech in the Eighteenth Century," Newsletters to Newspapers,284. 12 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 3: La prima crisi dell'Antico Regime (1768-76) (Turin, 1979), xvi; vol. 4: La caduta dell'AnticoRegime (1776-89) (Turin, 1984); vol. 5: L'Italia dei lumi (1764-90), part 1: La rivoluzione di Corsica. Le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta. La Lombardia delle riforme (Turin, 1987).

Journalism History

465

of the time into their own particular ways of thinking and how thought was subsequently transformed into action. Yet in presenting a tableau of past public views about the present it is almost inevitable that he ends up presenting his own synthesis, based on journalistic documents, of the events of the eighteenth century; and indeed, this reading of Venturi's work has already been suggested.13 Much recent work has been devoted to expanding the horizons of the Liberal thesis without substantially modifying it. Richard Cust tries to bring early seventeenth-century British periodicals out of the shadows-not by looking about for journalism's roles outside politics but by insisting that a genuine politics of contestation, on the model usually identified after 1640, really existed there. The dissolution of Parliament, forced loans, and the excesses of the Duke of Buckingham all provoked lively debates in an information press comprising ballads, verses, and news sheets. Jeremy Popkin and Carroll Joynes have shown that serious political journalism existed outside of more-familiar Britain. Long before the calling of the Estates General, they claim, the Dutch Gazettede Leyde, widely diffused in France, began to introduce a politics of contestation between king and parlements. Already by 1752, the Gazette began to "create and inform public opinion" toward a more favorable view of opposition to the king and ministers. And by the 1770s it had won the role of "giving the elite the information it required in order to assert itself in politics."14Although interdisciplinary in their approach and innovative in their conclusions, all these studies share the same Liberal faith in the connection between printed journalism, audience, and action-just the connection that communications theorists have attempted to make problematical. One group of historians appears to accept at least some of the terminology of the other social sciences in their attempts to explain the possible negative effects of what they call "propaganda."In reality the propagandahistorians' new terminology adds confusion rather than clarity. They remain isolated from social theory, and they do not view their insights as a cause for modifying the main outlines of the Liberal thesis. George Nobbe, for instance, uses his analysis of John Wilkes's late eighteenthcentury English broadsheet The North Briton, regarded as a Liberal classic, to show that opinion journalism was capable of contributing to the triumph of reason as long as it was in the right hands. Following social sciences usage, he refers to "political propaganda"instead of"journalism" and to the use of "crowd psychology" instead of "rhetoric." Yet the features he identifies to bear out his statements are little more than figures of speech and strategies that could as easily have been found in Cicero's orations: namely, "stock phrases and reasoning" to increase intelligibility without "'talking down' to [the] audience," "semifalsehoods" and "the art of insinuation"to get the polemical point across; "variety
Giuseppe Ricuperati, "La storiografiaitaliana sul Settecento nell'ultimo ventennio," Studi storici, 27 (1986), 776. 14Jeremy D. Popkin, "The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics Under Louis XVI," and Carroll Joynes, "The Gazette de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics, 1750-1757," Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, where the quotes are from pp. 88, 168. In addition, Richard Cust, "News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present, no. 112 (1986), 60-90.
13

466

Brendan Dooley

of contents" as a "matter of policy" to keep readers' attention "lest the old material become too odious" through constant repetition.15 More recently, James Alan Downie simply uses "propaganda"as a brush for tarring the productions of the doomed opponents to reason and enlightenment. In the early eighteenth century, he claims, Queen Anne's minister Robert Harley managed to put together and subsidize a vast "propagandamachine" employing a bevy of hack writers including journalists Daniel Defoe on the Review and Jonathan Swift on the Examiner. So effective was his manipulation of popular support in the campaigns for discrediting the Godolphin ministry and bringing about the Peace of Utrecht, says Downie, that he convinced Parliament to accept a free press once and for all as an effective weapon in the new game of party politics. Downie is cautious in his explanation of how this came about. "Propaganda was designed to influence electoral opinion," he states. "We may call it public opinion. On occasion it really was public opinion." For example, "readers ... genuinely believed that the Whigs were the embodiment of republican, atheistical doctrines."16 Indeed, Downie is right in pointing out that the extraordinarilybroad English franchise guaranteed a real potential for politics to be influenced by popular views. Yet his explanation of that connection, via the concept of "propaganda," is not always convincing. "Englishmen craved political information," he notes; "It was not, of course, given impartially. Information meant propaganda." This definition does not promise to be of much help in deciding what features, by their unique aim of producing immediate action, can be viewed as genuine propaganda. Those few features he lists are far from unique to propaganda. "Symbols," he says, "are crucial." Even if this is true, the "symbols" he mentions, such as atheism and popery, appear in all literature of the time. And without a more specific characterization of propaganda, it is misleading to compare, as Downie does, Swift with Josef Goebbels.'7 A partial exception is Joseph Klaits, who takes some account of the theory of propaganda,but only to prevent it from doing any harm to the Liberal thesis. The most insidious effects of propagandacould only occur, he asserts, where men are believed to be "creaturesof their conditioning" responding to "the application of suitable stimuli" by the exploitation of "the mythic and irrational" as in modem mass communications. The view of man's psychology prevalent in the seventeenth century, he says, precluded the propagandists of the time from even coming close to achieving successful attitude change. "Man was defined ... by his innately unchanging nature."18Therefore, Louis XIV's ministers' efforts to create a "psychology of authority"by the use of "printedpropaganda"in journals such as Le clef du cabinet des princes de l'Europe for influencing public opinion in early modem French politics were doomed from the start. Only after the advent of Locke's environmentalism did anyone begin to believe that the propa15George Nobbe, The North Briton: A Study in Political Propaganda (New York, 19662;orig. ed. 1939), 35, 42-43, 46, 73, 111, 152. 16 James Alan Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979), 5. 17 Downie, Robert Harley, 8. On Goebbels, 193. 18 Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV. Absolute Monarch and Public Opinion (Princeton, 1976), 9, 11.

Journalism History

467

gandist could do anything but bring out a few ideas men already had. But by the time Locke's ideas began to be diffused, the progress of reason and enlightenment had already fatally undermined the foundations of absolutism. Yet the Liberal thesis may not be as well-protected from the theory of propaganda as Klaits makes out. Conditioning and attitude change were not a sinister discovery of the black arts of moder media manipulators. Seventeenth-century theorists like Paolo Sarpi were far from primitive observers of the attitudechanging effects of the press. They did not uniformly posit a substantialist notion of human psychology, which was inimical to both Christian and humanist beliefs in the possibility of man's improvement-in spite of the views of a few hardline Platonists. If this had been a serious impediment, recognizably moder propaganda techniques could be expected to have emerged full-blown with the diffusion of Locke's environmentalism. Instead, the most serious impediment lay in the absence, before the French Revolution, of sophisticated industrial techniques like the moder mass media. This impediment may have lain in the way not only of the potential enemies but also of the potential friends of reason and enlightenment. One problem which the propaganda historians share with other journalism historians is their lack of evidence to support their contentions about the power of the press to move minds. According to Nobbe, the North Briton won a "struggle to capture public opinion" in favor of "basic points of democratic policy."19Yet only Downie offers much more evidence of these effects than the texts of the newspapers he analyzes, and even he, in the absence of testimonies of readers and subscription lists, is forced to rely on evidence about the elite group of the Members of Parliament themselves. As Swift remarked in a letter to Stella about the peace debates, "those who spoke drew all their arguments from my book, and their votes confirm all I write."20Moreover, these historians seem to provide evidence showing other forces at work for producing the results supposedly due to the press alone. Downie shows that Harley won his case by having twelve new peers created. And Klaits illustrates what may have been the most serious impediment to all attempts to control or predict changes in public opinion: the inability to pay attention to all the possible influences on it, which may have been particularly manifold in early moder society: "Whenever the King wins a battle," noted a late seventeenth-century Frenchman, "we light bonfires."21 Until better evidence can be found, a long line of communications theorists provide a valid argument against Liberal thesis historians by pointing out that the connection between word and mind cannot be taken for granted. Some have claimed that too little is known about how public opinion is formed to permit any pronouncements. This is because, say others, the human psyche's reactions to stimuli are too complex and unpredictable for a definite connection to be established between the press, opinion, and the development of political institutions.22Some theorists have pointed out that the concept of public opinion itself
19Nobbe, The North Briton, vii. Downie, Robert Harley, 143. 21 Klaits, Printed Propaganda, 18, quoting from Les soupirsde la France esclave (1690). 22 Leonard Doob, Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (New York, 1935). In addition, Paul A. Palmer, "Public Opinion in Political Theory," Essays in History and Political Theory in Honor of Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).
20

468

Brendan Dooley

is practically meaningless except as a shorthand reference to the worldwide human process of socialization and consensus-formation. The press, they maintain, is only one of many agents in this process in society and is indeed surpassed in importance by habits of economic exchange and family relations. Efforts of individuals and the collective force of society to form opinions inevitably cancel each other out or else produce a great confusion.23Those who believe a summary can be constructed of opinions expressed publicly suggest that such opinions change only in accordance to what people think everyone else believes. Modem governments are no models for the guidance of society by an enlightened public opinion, say still other theorists, inasmuch as skepticism about opinions has driven even the democracies into practices of secrecy so carefully guarded that they differ from old regime governments only in degree.24 At least one historical study has taken the opportunity presented by this analysis to show the ineffectiveness of the press to change fundamental attitudes. Limiting himself to the single subject of French views of Spain in the eighteenth century, Daniel-Henri Pageaux suggests a study not only of newspapers and broadsheets but also of diaries, memoirs, letters, engravings, poetry and theater. He shows that in spite of a wide variety of information sources, French opinion failed to come to grips with the new Spain of enlightened absolutism and remained rooted in centuries-old cultural archetypes and caricatures. Deeper mass psychological and anthropological causes, he suggests, must have been at work-perhaps those suggested by the communications theorists.25 A final weakness of the Liberal thesis is that it is not applicable to most of journalism. It concerns only the fraction of the contents of journalism devoted to political developments with some importance for the development of recognizably moder political institutions and those scientific developments that contributed to the emergence of a recognizably modern science. Forms of journalism that contained little of this type of information it usually sets aside, branding them as "pre-" or "protojouralism," by definition, "monotonous."26 One possible response to the critique of the Liberal thesis that finds a way to incorporateother aspects of early moder information besides politics and science is to shift attention to a field like feminist journalism, where the entire social view of a group was at stake-not just its political convictions. This Nina Rattner Gelbart has done in her study of the Paris Journal des dames. Supposing the letters to the editor printed with each issue of this periodical actually reflected reader response and were not fabricated by the editors, her conclusions about the effects of the journal's views about drama, family, and women's rights are unassailable. "Over its twenty years many women shared their anxieties and
Jacques Ellul, Propagandes(Paris, 1962); Eng. tr. by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York, 1973). In addition, Ferdinand Tonnies, Kritik der bffentlichen Meinung (Aalen, 19812;orig. ed. Heidelberg, 1922), 136. 24 Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, Die Schweigespirale (Munich, 1980), Eng. tr., The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin (Chicago, 1984); Terence H. Qualiter, Opinion Control in the Democracies (New York, 1985). 25Daniel-Henri Pageaux, "La diffusion de l'information en province: l'Espagne et l'opinion provinciale au dix-huitieme siecle," Actes du 105e congres des societes savantes. Caen, 1980: histoire moderne, vol. 1 (Paris, 1983), 143-60. 26 Joynes, "The Gazette de Leyde," 134.
23

Journalism History

469

hopes with the paper," she asserts, "delighted to finally have an arena in which to voice their grievances."27However, when she then widens her discussion of the journal's effects to fit it into the context of all journalism in opposition to the crown, she falls into the same trap as the propaganda historians. Like them, she adopts the language of communication theory, in this case, a non-Marxian variant of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. For her, ideology is simply a cluster of ideas without a class reference. And without Mannheim's class struggle, her explanation for the political role of journalism ends up as a variation on the Liberal theme. As the journalists gradually became less ideological and more utopian in their opposition to the French crown because of the tormented story of their effort to express their ideas, she claims, their potential for challenging the existing order increased. At the utopian stage, the journalists inevitably moved their readers to attack the existing order-for a reason that communications theorists have hotly debated: because ideas and actions are essentially one. The Marxist Thesis The Marxist thesis of journalism history emerged full-blown in the work of German sociologist Ernst Manheim.28In a study of the early eighteenth-century such as the Patriot and German "moral weeklies" (moralische Wochenschriften) the Discourse der Mahlern, he demonstrated a constant insistence on an ethic combined from mercantile, Stoic, and Christian values no matter what issue the papers happened to be talking about. In this way, they contributed to the same kind of socialization and creation of consensus identified in much sociology as the main role of journalism. Yet in doing so, they challenged the institutions traditionally responsible for exercising these function-namely, the Church, the school, and the chancery. They thus helped reinforce the independent identity of the new mercantile bourgeoisie outside of these institutions. So successful was their publicizing effort, indeed, that by the late eighteenth century, Masonic societies and the Enlightenment press had begun to identify the same bourgeois values with those of all "humanity" and governments began to enact reforms in accordance with them. More ambitious, more influential, and more recent is Frankfurt School social theorist Jiirgen Habermas's attempt to fit journalism into a broadly Marxist framework for the development of political consciousness in the West.29From its origins, popular political consciousness was characterized by the celebration and "representation"of the glory of the prince; and one of its contexts was the first journalism. Habermas calls this environment the "representational public space." Finally, with the creation of a self-conscious commercial class in seven27Nina Gelbart, Feminine OppositionJournalism in Old Regime France: "Le Journal des Dames" (Berkeley, 1987), where I quote from p. 292. The role of women's history in expanding traditional explanatory models is explored by Joan Scott, "Women in History: the Modem Period," Past and Present (1983), 152. 28 Ernst Manheim, Aufklairungund bffentliche Meinung ed. Norbert Schindler (Stuttgart, 1979; orig. ed. Leipzig, 1933). 29 Jurgen Habermas, Strukturwandelder Offentlichkeit(Neuwied, 1962), which I cite from the English translation by Thomas Burger (with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence), The Structural Transformationof the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

470

Brendan Dooley

teenth-century England, he believes, a new type of political consciousness began to emerge-the so-called "bourgeois public space." As the members of this bourgeoisie found their interests to be more and more affected by the exercise of power, they began to concern themselves with public problems that formerly had been the exclusive preserve of the official "public space" of governments, and to differentiate these from the intimate concerns of their family "private space." This "bourgeois public space" of "men making public use of their own reason" was institutionalized in the London coffee and tea houses and later in the journalism of Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele; and it became directly concerned with political matters in the Restoration, when it set up a constant debate with the government. It emerged in France after 1750, but in the absence of its embodiment in effective institutions, it remained limited to the philosophes and their noble audience until it was forced upon the government by Necker's Compte rendu, the Cahiersdes doleances, and the calling of the Estates General. It emerged in Germany only with the establishment of provincial representative assemblies following the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Yet less than a century after it reached its apogee in Europe, it began to decline. Late nineteenth-century governments reduced its distinctiveness by making private life a matter of public concern through far-reachingeconomic regulatorylegislation. Businesses reduced its polemical force by providing the social services that it had once pressured governments to improve. Meanwhile, the mass media took away its organs of expression by selling themselves over to commercial gain. And within the new "social space" thus created between it and the private space, a kind of politics, bearing the mark of secrecy characteristic of the pre-bourgeois public space, was taken up by the various sub-political groups, unions, and associations into which the bourgeoisie had become fragmented in a final refeudalization of moder society. And so real politics was once again abandoned to the tiny privileged groups closest to the exercise of power. Once the inevitability of structuralchanges in the public space was recognized, they could be put off by once again "engaging" the bourgeoisie in its use. The analyses of Manheim and Habermas both offer several advantages. They call for bringing a far greater percentage of the contents of journalism under the purview of the historian than is possible within the Liberal thesis. After all, many different kinds of subject matter besides the political, literary, and scientific, could potentially contribute to the formation of a bourgeois perspective. Furthermore, they direct attention to more complex and long-term social processes than the Liberal view. They promise to take at least some account of communications theories that criticized the Liberal thesis's assumptions about the positive guiding function of the press. And at least Habermas, by rejecting Lenin's notion that somewhere beneath every bourgeois hegemony a proletarian or popular culture lay waiting to be freed by the dialectic, overcame a few of the objections to Marxist theory in general. Instead, he points out, bourgeois hegemony was not part of a larger process; it "cannot be abstracted from the unique developmental history" that had produced it and it showed no signs of containing the elements for a proletarian takeover.30Whether we like it or not, the bourgeois "public space" is the best one we will ever get.
30L Espacepublic, 9

Journalism History

471

However, both views are intended mainly as theoretical sketches and lack the evidence necessary for full acceptance as historical accounts. Like some Liberalthesis formulations, neither of them goes far beyond citing a few texts. Thus, current Marxist views of journalism occasionally refer to them but most of the time they provide an eclectic assortment of different approaches. Typical of a historical approach loosely based on Marxist categories is Marino Berengo's study of eighteenth-century journalism in the Venetian Republic. In his view of early eighteenth-century journalism as primitive and repressed he owes more to the Liberal thesis than to Habermas and Manheim, who view early journalism as the fully-developed product of a particular type of social organization. But his social categories correspond exactly to the Marxist thesis. In a Venetian society entirely under the hegemonical control of a feudalized nobility, bourgeois journalists inevitably failed to develop a coherent class consciousness. They ignored all forms of political criticism, and in their literary and cultural criticism they avoided attacking the literary interests of the academic and salon culture dominated by the nobility. They accordingly found the genre of erudite and literary journalism particularly congenial; and all of their most successful examples, from the early eighteenth-century Giornalede' letterati d'Italia to the Memorie per servire alla storia letteraria at mid-century were of this type.31In the last decades of the century still other journalists began to confront the major economic problem of the Venetian state: the inefficiency of agricultural production. Even here Francesco Griselini and his collaborators on the Giornale d'Italia ignored the main cause-namely, the neofeudal exploitation of sharecroppers and the reduction of small farmers to day laborers-and instead affirmed their incipient bourgeois class consciousness by blaming everything on the preindustrial equivalent of the proletariat:the peasants. Giuseppe Ricuperati finds Habermas'sthesis adaptableto a non-Marxist class analysis approach. A "middle class" [ceto medio] with a definite identity-a thinly disguised Marxist "bourgeoisie"-emerged all over Early Moder Europe, he suggests; and it emerged in Italy due to its use of "professional competence as an instrument of social reinforcement and advancement." It attempted to set itself apart from the others through the development of a "new culture"-an equivalent of Marxist "class consciousness"-based on "the new science and philosophical rationalism." He agrees with Habermas, moreover, that the development of this "new culture" outside of England was beset with difficulties. The "ruling classes, especially the Jesuits" tried to continue their hegemonical control throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They defused the middle class "new culture," by "insert[ing] it, sterilizing it at the same time, in their schools" and in the first important Italian journal, the Giornalede' letterati of Rome, founded in 1668 on the model of the Journal des sqavans.The middle class thereupon establishedits own journals to create its own hegemony-journals such as the Giornale de' letterati of Venice (1710-40)-by diffusing the new culture to wider and wider circles of recruits. And once its journalists finally began to recognize their "responsibility to the public," it began to emancipate

31 Berengo (ed.),

Giornali veneziani del Settecento (Milan, 1962), x.

472

Brendan Dooley

itself from the other classes and forge ahead into a new political era.32The only characteristic that differentiates Ricuperati's from Habermas's approach is his acceptance of "middle class" culture as a positive development and his belief that the "new culture" was simply the chance product of eighteenth-centuryhistorical circumstances and not the necessary effect of a law connecting culture and economy. In favor of Ricuperati and Berengo it should be said that their statements about the effects of journalism draw heavily on their own previous work on eighteenth-century society.33However, they are both vulnerable to criticisms of the Marxist class analysis method. Roland Mousnier's once "isolated" view that economically defined social classes existed before the industrial revolution has now become commonplace, as more exclusively empirical approaches to social history gain acceptance.34Even a Marxist like R. S. Neale asserts that "as a class in itself, it is ... unlikely that [the bourgeoisie] ever existed." And several alternative schemes for early moder social stratification have been successfully proposed.35 Some historians manage to avoid the hazards of class analysis by adapting Habermas's thesis to less rigidly defined social categories. Hans Mattauch, for example, agrees that the most famous French journals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, journals such as the Memoires de Trevoux and the Journal des sqavans, corresponded to the representativetype of public space in Habermas'sformulation, where authors were nothing but the patronized creatures of the nobility and the journal was nothing but a place where their status He shows that a profoundly different pattern of criticism began was recognized.36 to emerge in the late seventeenth-centuryemigre journalism particularly of Bayle
32 Giuseppe Ricuperati, "Giornali e societa nell'Italia dell'ancien regime (1668-1789)," Valerio Castronovo and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds.), Storia della stampa italiana, vol. 1: La stampa italiana dal Cinquecentoall'Ottocento (Bari, 1976; 2nd ed., 1980), 74, 75, 78. He has repeated this thesis in such later articles as "Periodici eruditi, riviste e giornali di varia umanita dalle origini a meta Ottocento," La letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1:I letteratoe ilpotere (Turin, 1982), 923-43. Habermas'sinfluence in Italy is analyzed by Ricuperati, "Giornali italiani del diciottesimo secolo. Studi e ipotesi," Studi storici, 25 (1984), 279-92; Leonardo Ceppa, "Giornalismo e pubblica opinione: il modello di Habermas," ibid., 341-50. 33 Marino Berengo, La civilti veneziana nel Settecento (Florence, 1960); Ricuperati, L'esperienzacivile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan, 1970). 34 Mousnier expressed his view in Fureurspaysannes, les paysans dans les revoltesdu XVIIeme siecle (France, Russie, Chine) (Paris, 1967); Carlo Pazzagli called it "isolated" in "Classi sociale e ricerca storica: a proposito del Saggio di Sylos Labini," Studi storici, 16 (1975), 713. I compared Sandra Gasparo's report on the conference, held in Prato in 1980, devoted to "Gerarchie economiche e gerarchie sociali," Studi storici, 21 (1980), 866. 35R. S. Neale, WritingMarxist History (London, 1985), p. 74. Just two recent AngloAmerican works aimed largely at offering empirical evidence to substitute explanatory schemes like class analysis are Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Abridged Edition, Oxford, 1986); Ellery Schalk, From Valorto Pedigree:Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and SeventeenthCenturies(Princeton, 1986). 36 Mattauch. Die literarischeKritik der fruhen franzbsischen Zeitschriften, 1665-1748 (Munich, 1968).

Journalism History

473

and Le Clerc. Instead of aiming their writing at the authors as a public, they took on the public at large, using ideas that it seemed to have and thus putting into public view the reasoning of the people. Yet he believes that the new publicity and the form of journalism appropriateto it came about not because Frenchmen were beginning to develop a class consciousness more like that of the English bourgeoisie, but because of free exchange in the marketplace of ideas and literary products. Wolfgang Martens notes that the development of a "public space" had equally little to do with class consciousness in Germany. The emerging merchant groups of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not possess any consciousness of their distinctiveness as a class or of their disenfranchisement under princely absolutism. They shared most of their values with at least some elements of the aristocracy. And their development of a characteristic public space was not a direct consequence of their political maturity as a class.37The new journalists got the first idea for taking advantage of this potential merchant public on a large scale directly from the English papers such as the Tatler and the Spectator, which they openly imitated even in their titles-for example, Hamburg's "Der Verniinfftler."They could easily ensure their printers that their journals would not lose in competition with the journals of neighboring printers since each principate constituted an independent center of book circulation. They made their projects even more attractive by taking advantage of innovations in the printing industry such as one-year contracts to guarantee a regular product, and the collection of a circle of subscriptions to guarantee a regular demand. They attracted readers by establishing a more personal connection to them than any previous publications via the printing of readers' letters. And with this direct connection established between readershipsand journalists, readers often became journalists themselves and built upon the discussions of values initiated by their predecessors, contributing to the ever widening circle of publicity. By the 1720s the new journalists had set themselves up in almost every small center in Germany and their weeklies had become one of the most characteristic publications of the time. Lively polemics caused their discussions to spill over into daily conversation. Yet even Martens and Mattauch suffer from yet another difficulty with Habermas's thesis: namely, lack of evidence. The obvious antidote would be to find out, by examining memoirs and correspondence, whether certain urban dwellers actually read the newspapers and journals and, if they did, to determine whether they modified their conduct as a result. So far, historians using the Habermas model usually talk about the public of journalism without ever actually coming into contact with it. They take the supposed characteristics of a bourgeoisie as axiomatic and simply pull out passages from various journals that seem to correspond. They then hold the journals to be at least partly responsible for this or that well-known set of events occurring around the same time. An example is Jean-Michel Gardair's study of the Giornale de' letterati of Rome, in which the original research is almost entirely based on the text of the journal itself and letters by the journalists explaining what they thought they were doing.38
37 Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklarung im Spiegel der deutschen moralischen Wochenschriften(Stuttgart, 1968), 383. 38 Jean-Michel Gardair, Le "Giornale de' letterati" de Rome (1668-81) (Florence, 1984).

474

Brendan Dooley

Keith Baker, in a study not devoted to journalism per se, has been able to draw some interesting conclusions about the notion of public opinion without surveying the views of any large social groups.39At least in France, he notes, the beginning of an appeal to an outside source of legitimacy-namely, an imaginary "public"-by crown supporters and their opponents was far more important than any real public opinion for opening up politics to public view in the sense understood by Habermas. Once the crown began to lose its monopoly on political legitimacy, a real politics of confrontation and contestation was possible between both sides. It emerged in France long before Habermas suggests: some time in the reign of Louis XIV. Its variance with the model of, say, Britain, may be due less to differences in the position of each culture along a linear development than to national differences arising from disparate cultural and political types. And it can be studied by exclusive reference to the discourse of the participants in the debate. However, with Habermas's deterministic scheme discredited and the mission removed, little remains of his revolutionary appeal. New Methods The problem of getting a grip on the many hypotheses possible outside the convenient, ready-made Whig and Marxist theses of early modern journalism historiography has long been aggravated by the embarrassingvoluminousness of the evidence of journalism itself. Newspapers came out twice or three times a week in four to eight pages, amounting to a hefty tome every year (not all of equal quality!). Literaryjournals were less frequent but fatter-the Italian Giornalede' letterati d'Italia published over four hundred pages quarterly. A few historians have suggested a remedy: computer-assisted quantitative content analyses to speed up comparisons across periods and geographical areas. They hope for several advantages. First of all, they can pool the resources of groups of researchers. They can put the machine between researcherand subject matter, guaranteeing the greatest possible objectivity. Furthermore, they can account for a far greater portion of the various subject matters of journals than either of the standard theses. Quantitativemethods have been introduced in several forms, the first of which might be describedas empirical subject analysis. Its proponents are Jacques Roger and Jean Ehrard, part of Francois Furet's team at the University of Paris in the 1960s. Drawing some inspiration from earlier work by Daniel Mornet and on the methods Furet used for analyzing books, they call for dividing the contents of journalistic productions by category and quantifying the results.4 They direct their attention to the two main book-review journals of the eighteenth century, the Journal des sqavans and the Memoires de Trevoux. They divide the possible subjects of eighteenth-century books according to categories used at the time39 Keith Michael Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime." 40Jacques Roger and Jean Ehrard, "Deux periodiques franqaises du dix-huitieme siecle: Le Journal des sqavanset les Memoires de Trevoux,"Genevieve Bolleme et al., Livre et societe dans la France du dix-huitieme siecle, (Paris, 1965), I, 33-64. Furet's contribution was "La 'librairie' du royaume de France au dix-huitieme siecle," ibid., 3-32. He has recently reprinted this article in L'atelier de l'histoire(Paris, 1982), 129-64 (translated by Johnathan Mandelbaum, In the Workshopof History [Chicago, 1984], 99-114).

Journalism History

475

belles lettres, droit, etc., to avoid anachronism. And they propose to use their contents as a sample for the average tastes of educated French readers. They then break down, according to these categories, the entire contents of the journals for several key five-year periods. As the first scholars to use empirical subject analysis on early modem journalism, Roger and Ehrard do not regard their conclusions as complete research results. Rather, they aim many of their questions at showing how the method confirms, with arithmetical accuracy, conclusions already reached by other methods-such as the fall of interest in theology in the "siecle mondain." On other occasions, they use their data not as an end in itself but as an example of possible areas for further research using more traditional methods-for example, ups and downs in the production of books on law. They admit that categories such as belles lettres and science were misleading both because of the amount of disparate material they contained (romances and history books in the first) and because moder understanding of the categories has changed-for example, science is now compartmentalized into many subdisciplines. The new method has encountered severe criticism from the outset, and a good way to examine the criticism might be to turn to Jacques Wagner'srecent rebuttal. He attempts to silence all critics by his own quantitative subject analysis of the Mercure de France, a journal published in Paris from 1725 through 1791. To those who see single articles or even pages as inaccurate units of measurement, he responded by counting lines instead. And to those who point out that a journal cannot evidence the dominant episteme of a period unless its readers could be identified, Wagner responds by setting the question of dominant episteme and public entirely aside. Instead, he claims, he will simply try to explain the Mercure's puzzling editorial history. His main problem is to delineate the "personalities" of the various editors in spite of the complications caused by the fact, recognized in all journalism theory, that journalism products reflect not only their editors but their publics. His solution: assume that the subjects discussed in the original articles reflected readers' points of view and those discussed in book reviews reflected the editors' contribution. Thus, the variations in the relative weight within the category of law of the special subcategory of practical jurisprudence between 70.12% for book reviews and 71.52% for articles in the period from 1725 to 1750 indicated that the "favor for the utilitarian aspects of law comes from the readers" and that, by contrast, "the journalist is much more tempted by the theoretical aspects." 41 By comparing the categories in the entire period from 1758 to 1761 to those in the smaller period from 1758 to 1760 corresponding to Marmontel's directorship, he attempts to show, accurate to the hundredth decimal place, the profound differences with the other editors that may have made Marmontel such an outstanding success. Yet in spite of these refinements, Wagner does not escape the basic problems of the subject analysis method. The categorization of eighteenth century books or book reviews raises almost infinite problems. Where ought Voltaire's plays to be placed-under politics or under literature? Should Montesquieu's Lettres
Jacques Wagner, Marmonteljournalisteet le "Mercurede France" (Grenoble, 1975), 59. Just two examples of the critique: Furio Diaz, "Le stanchezze di Clio," Rivista storica italiana, 84 (1972), 683-745; Adriana Lay, "Libroe societa negli stati sardi nel Settecento," Quaderni storici, 23 (1973), 439-69.
41

476

Brendan Dooley

Persanes be placed under travel literature or under some kind of social criticism? A good knowledge of eighteenth-century literature can help answer most questions about the best-known works. But what about obscure ones and those that are now impossible to find? In such cases, the reading of the articles in question is indispensable;although most of the time the proponents of the subject analysis method do not show evidence of that. Worse yet, the absence of mail in a particular period or the emission of a volume dedicated to a certain subject may at times be more likely causes for statistical variations than the intellectual and social ones usually alleged. Thus, figures may hide a margin of error really very much greater than the one indicated by the number of decimal places; and unless we know what the margin is we are condemned to compound the error in comparisons of any two calculations. To these problems Wagner adds a few of his own. Editors' solicitation of reviews from the authors of their own books and of articles on predetermined subjects, two common practices, may make it impossible to calculate a difference between the journalists' point of view and that of the readers. Far more correspondence between journalists, readers, and contributors would have to be scoured to remove these objections. Finally, after casting about for a larger context into which to situate his discussion about editorial personalities, Wagner settles on the unsatisfactory Liberal thesis. Passing uncritically from editorial intention to editorial function, he pronounces on Marmontel's actual role in the development of the modern institutions of the press. "Too submissive to royal censure, Marmontel... limited himself to teaching that it is good and even necessary to reflect upon law, morality, social life, and politics," he notes. "By this means, man was to leave behind the obscurity of his errors to emerge one day in the clarity of his certitudes." 42Yet, like most Liberal-thesis historians, he alleges no other evidence than the text itself. The disappointing results of quantitative subject analysis are perhaps the reason why the most recent subject analyses have abandoned the quantitative part entirely. For example, Hans Bots includes a dry listing by subject, without comment, of all articles in Henri Basnage de Beauval's late seventeenth-century Dutch Histoire des ouvrages des savants, thus inviting interested researchers to undertake the analysis themselves.43 The second new method for the study of journalism has been computerassisted quantitative content analysis. First explored in the United States by political scientist Harold Lasswell and his collaborators in the 1950s, the method was applied for a time exclusively to the mass media.44Jean Sgard and his team
42 Wagner, Marmonteljournaliste,247. To be fair, Wagner admits that "the conclusions are obviously based on calculations that are far too global to be posed as really significant facts" (95). 43 Hans Bots and Lenie Van Lieshout, Henri Basnage de Beauval et ' "Histoire des ouvragesdes savants," 1687-1709 (3 vols.; Amsterdam, 1976-84), vol. 3: Henri Basnage de a proposde l' "Histoiredes ouvragesdes savants".The analysis, Beauval etsa correspondence based on the categories used in the index to the Journal des sqavans, is on pp. 185-321. 44 H. D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Ithiel de Sola Pool, The ComparativeStudy of Symbols (Stanford, 1952). The most authoritative exponent of the approach in American political science is Richard L. Merritt, who describes it in "Perspectives on History in Divided Germany," Public Opinionand Historians:InterdisciplinaryPerspectives,ed. Melvin Small (Detroit, 1970), 139-69. In this volume it is criticized by historian John Higham, 178-79.

Journalism History

477

at the University of Lyon have adapted it to early modem journalism history, using a program prepared by the Institut Blaise Pascal. They call for putting together a list of key themes, secondary themes, and important proper names as long as possibilities of computer analysis would permit (at that time, about one thousand), searchingjournals for the appearanceof these words as major categories of social, cultural, and political expression, and tabulating the information on cards. In this way they hope not only to reduce the margin for error present in the relatively limited set of subjects used in the subject analysis approach but to compile a dictionary of brief contexts in which these words appeared.45 In spite of his significant subsequent contributions to the bibliography and prosopographyofjournalism, Sgard's results in this early quantitative work have not been significant enough to excite the same interest as Roger and Ehrard's. In his study of Jacques Prevost's Le pour et contre (1732-40) he never even refers in his analysis to the elaborate tables of frequency and locations of terms in the journal that he listed in his appendices meticulously from the outputs of the equipe's computer-such terms as "Atheisme," "Histoire," "Guerre civile," "Genie," and "Gran-Bretagne." He uses the new method mainly for locating quotations to be analyzed according to literary-critical concepts such as "style," "method," and "domain." His evidence having furnished him with no new thesis about journalism history, Sgard simply situates the results of his research in the pre-existing Liberal one, making all its weaknesses his own. He comments on Prevost's effort to propagate to the widest audience possible the ideas of freedom and liberty whose effects he had experienced in the English cafes in spite of repeated brushes with powerful political and ecclesiastical authorities. He explains how he managed to keep his audience for the extraordinaryperiod of eight years in spite of the failures of similar examples of the new genre of the single-author opinion periodical in terms of the emergence of a new audience, "more worldly, less specialized, and much larger" than that of the Journal des sqavansand its imitators, animated by "the taste for criticism" and the "movement of ideas" begun in the uneasy Regency period after the death of Louis XIV. The function of the journal, then, was to express the interests of this audience and bring its ideas to fruition.46 Without any evidence about the mechanisms of production and distribution, he cannot comment on what may have been a far more powerful influence on the journal's unusual success-namely, the technique of subscription publishing, which Prevost himself noted was "new" in France.47 Stephen Botein, Jack R. Censer, and Harriet Ritvo have recently found the content analysis method lends itself better to a broad comparison of the journalistic traditions of different areas than to an examination of a single periodical. Drawing upon a representative sample of periodicals from the 1750s and 1760s, they show that French journalism was far less concerned with explaining the
45 The project was announced in Jean Sgard (ed.), Depouillement des periodiques du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siecle. Recherche cooperativesur programme nr. 49. Instructions. (Lyon, 1967). 46 Jean Sgard, Le "Pour et contre" de Prevost. Introduction, tables et index (Paris, 1967), 38, 236. 47 Jean Sgard makes up somewhat for this omission in "La multiplication des periodiques," in Histoire de ledition franqaise (2 vols.; Paris, 1983-84), II, 204, citing Prevost's Manuel lexique (1750).

478

Brendan Dooley

mechanisms of commerce than was English journalism, which appeared to be obsessed with the subject. French journalism showed a generally higher social position in the subjects of obituaries, paid greater deference to the nobility, and gave far less attention to news about crime than English journalism. French journalism ridiculed the social aspirations of the lowly, whereas English journalism insisted on self-improvement.Frenchjournalism was far more somber in tone, compared to its sensationalist and iconoclastic English counterpart.Furthermore, they suggest that these features of the journalism of the two countries were due not to the eccentric attitudes of particularjournalists nor to changes over time but to cultural differences. In French society, journal readers were far less likely to be active merchants than financiers. They were usually higher placed and came from older families; and printers in France were more accustomed to holding readers' attention by obtaining privileges and monopolies for the purveying of news than by vivid and attractive stories. Based on these features, these scholars maintain, it ought to be possible to determine what function journalism may have played in early modern society-namely, to reinforce the very features of the societies that were reflected in it. In France, journalism reinforced the traditional institutions of a stratified society; in Britain, it encouraged social mobility. Botein, Censer and Ritvo disclaim all affiliations with modern communications theory-"unfortunately, the theory of communications ... projects the characteristic features of the twentieth century"-but in the end they find they cannot do without it. Their work depends on the two key propositions that journalism reflects its readership and that journalism brings about social action. Since, as this article has shown, evidence for both these propositions is lacking for the early modern period, the only way to defend these propositions is to rely on modelling from the studies of modern communications that have found evidence abundant. Finally, their work seems to contain an element of circularity: the characteristic features of the societies in question were responsible for the types ofjournalism that emerged, and journalism itself was responsiblefor continuing the features of the societies in question. The best defense of all for this apparent circularity might come from a field like systems theory, although these scholars do not make this suggestion.48 Meanwhile, back in France, members of a new Lyon team (occasionally including collaborators from Grenoble) have taken up where the original Sgard team left off, refining their method to permit a broader comparative approach than ever before. They have settled on twelve separate variables to analyze in every journal article, including date of appearance, length, nature (original contribution, excerpt from a work, news, book review, etc.), title, authors, proper names and works cited, and so forth. They reduced the length of their key word dictionary from 1000 to a more practical 456-still enough, they believe, to obviate the effects produced by the subjectivechoices of the historian. They called upon scholars in every field to propose questions to which the data could respond. They have suggested several types of jobs, giving examples of each one-from "mass"jobs involving the analysis of a single variable throughout the entire data
Stephen Botein, Jack R. Censer, and Harriet Ritvo, "La presse periodique et la societe anglaise et franqaise au dix-huitieme siecle: une approche comparative," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 32 (1985), 209-36. Their reservations about social theory are on p. 214.
48

Journalism History

479

bank, such as the use of the word "atheism" in Le pour et contre to "complex" ones calling for the identification of conjunctions of two or more given variablessuch as the name Remond, the title Reflexions sur la poesie, and the concepts of decadence, poetry, and taste. The new approach, Sgard admiringly exclaimed, will guarantee the achievement, for the first time, of a real "total history." 49And they have set about to do so by taking on no less than 500 journals of the ancien regime. To these innovations, at least some members of the Lyon-Grenoble team have added yet another:a heavy use of general systems theory; and their results deserve detailed analysis. But since this theory criticizes the basic assumptions underlying much historiography, it might be well to explain its main tenets before showing its role in journalism historiography in particular. Systems Theory General systems theory, first adopted in the social sciences in the 1940s, seeks to explore new models for understandingthe behavior of large collectivities based on theories of information and cybernetics. It directs attention to networks of relations operating at two levels:joining individuals to one another in society and joining the society itself to its past and future. Political institutions and other formal associations, it contends, are merely instances, changeable and impermanent, of larger and more fundamental networks for which no convenient name has yet been found. Indeed, an institution-centered view gives preferential treatment to whatever happens to be the dominant kind of behavior or the authoritative groups in a particular place and time. By looking beyond them, systems theory claims to penetrate deeper into social reality than any previous approach. It rejects the simple machines of biological organisms used in much social science language (such as when we talk about a society "maintaining equilibrium"by a balance of essential elements50).If such analogies worked, the violent transformations and the discardingof apparentlywell-entrenchedinstitutions that sometimes occurs-for example, all over Europe in the Second World War-ought to cause societies to fall apart or cease working, as do machines or organisms when deprived of essential parts. Since this does not happen, systems theory suggests alternative analogies for society based on moder electronic devices capable of continuously modifying responses to stimuli on the basis of the input of new information-the so-called "black boxes." It claims furthermore to replace the simplistic societal goal-seeking proposed in functionalist sociology, which seemed to view moder democratic society as the only possible endpoint, with a new open49The first finished product of this new research was Rtat and Sgard (eds.), Presse et histoire au 18e siecle: I'annee 1734 (Paris, 1978). Before its completion, the new project was analyzed in Michel Duchet, "L'informatiqueau service de l'analyse des textes," Revue d'histoirelitterairede la France, 70 (1970), 799; and again, with the Braudellianexpression, by Jean Sgard in "Camusat et l'Histoire critiquedesjournaux," Marianne Couperus (ed.), L'etude des periodiques anciens, Colloque d'Utrecht (Paris, 1972), 51. 50This is just one of many possible examples, and it comes from Jean-ClaudeWaquet, De la corruption(Paris, 1984). A good guide to early systems theorists' critique of social theory is Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967).

480

Brendan Dooley

ended kind of goal-seeking, more like a movement toward increasing structural complexity, based on the abstract and shifting endpoints produced by the social networks for themselves during the course of their self-reproductionand incorporation of new information-the so-called "feedback loops." And at least a few of its proponents believe that in this way all the behavior of collectivities-rational and irrational-can be examined equivalently, without the hazards to objectivity involved in labelling the irrational as deviant.5 It is easy to see how journalism, as one of the main tools of communication which modern society absorbs new information, might win an important place by in systems theory, and the first theorist to study it in detail from this point of view has been Edgar Morin. With the 1960s student rebellion furnishing his ideal case, he suggests that such a study would provide a better understanding of "the so-called irrational factors" in the behavior of social groups, usually "rejected" by functionalist sociologists as mere deviations from an accepted norm. Furthermore, it would rebut the Marxists by proving that such disturbances were not symptoms of defects in economic structures. Finally, it would permit a resolution of the crisis itself. Once the "permanently pathological condition of disequilibrium" in society had been exposed, these phenomena could be safely "apprehended" and catalogued as "the hysterical structures of anthropological man," as tolerable concomitants of our social group. In the most recent instance, he insists, the events surrounding the student riots did not demonstrate dialectical tensions. They simply "synchronized and stimulated certain competitive, quasisporting tendencies [or isomorphisms] present or latent in various categories of adolescent" while "the corresponding heteromorphisms entered on a period of
latency."
52

Indeed, systems theory offers several notable advantages over previous theoretical components of journalism historiography. First of all, it promises to find a place for far more of the contents of early journalism than any other theory, since virtually anything could be conceived as providing the social process with the basis for new reactions to environmental stimuli. Furthermore, it treats all kinds of information in the same way, as playing the same role, so it promises to avoid socioculturally-determined preferences for a particular type of science of literature or a particular type of political discourse. The theory suggests that societies undergo a dynamic and continuous process of development, wherein crime and insanity and cultural institutions are all interconnected but liable to disappear at any moment. The theory thus discourages arguments that posit the

recently, Niklaus Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (1984), on which I followed the critique by Danilo Zolo, "L'ultimo Luhmann: la sociologia come teoria generaledei sistemi autoreferenziali,"Rassegna italiana di sociologia (1986), 533-50. An exception was pioneer systems theorist Talcott Parsons, who regarded the irrational as deviant and therefore not as strictly connected with the dominant system, in The Social System (New York, 1951). 52 Edgar Morin, Rumour in Orleans (New York, 1971; orig. publ. Paris, 1969), 26971. Morin published his own analysis of contemporary events in the collective volume Mai 1968: la breche (Paris, 1968), pp. 15-31. Morin has since produced a kind of summa of systems theory in relation to communications in three volumes: La methode (Paris, 1977-80).

51 Most

Journalism History

481

social organization of our own time and place as the desired end or purpose to which past journalism inevitably leads. The Lyon-Grenoble collaborators are the first to have applied systems theory to journalism historiography on a broad scale. They find their project for a computer-assisted "total history" lends itself particularly well to the theory. Perhaps the best testimony to their enthusiasm is a few almost lyrical passages from one of their collective volumes, replete with references to cyberneticsinfluenced sociologists and biologists. In this example, Claude Labrosse uses a biological metaphor, but his living cell is really the biological equivalent of a moder information processing device. From the blue algae to the polyp, from bacteria to Man, in the multiplicity of its living forms, the cellular theory allows us to examine "chemical machinery essentially the same both in its structures and in its function." The chemical constants of the living cell are the "logical equivalent of an alphabet" which can "write all the diversity of structures and all the performancesthat the biosphere contains," and we know that after three billion years the stability of the species is assured by the work of "powerfulcybernetic molecular networks." The biological evolution of Man and the development of the social ecosystem have permitted the creation of a "living machine" whose epicenter, the brain, will become the nucleus of a process of "multidimensional complexification" capable of selforganization and self-reproduction. Creator of information and generator of structure, the human organism will learn to assimilate the environmental stimuli and mark out the environmental world as a field of experiment which he will form by his ability to construct bundles of relations.53 Like the systems theorists, Labrosse pursues his microanalysis down to the level of tiny cells. Like them, moreover, he uses his metaphor in order to describe the communication system of mankind: ... In the midst of the circulation of messages that constitute our "memory of the world," [there exists] the mechanism of a "socio-culturalcycle" which selects, controls and diffuses, within the micro-milieux of the social field, information and ideas capable of being taken up and bit by bit transformed in their turn by other operators.54 And like the theorists, in describing the relationship of the means of communication to a society, Labrosse refers to continuing processes rather than to single structures. For journalism history, that means concentrating attention on the "periodical method of distribution" rather than on the editorial history of single papers. Information cannot be described adequately by simply freezing it in time through a detailed analysis of the ideas in a single journal any more than social processes can be appreciated by an analysis of the social structures present in a given moment. Instead, the constantly changing nature of the flow of information
53 Claude Labrosse, "Introduction,"Labrosse,Pierre Retat and Henri Duranton, L'instrument periodique: la fonction de la presse au 18e siecle (Lyon, 1985), 10. Interpolated texts are from Jacques Monod, Le hasard et la necessite (Paris, 1960), Edgar Morin, Le paradigmeperdu: la nature humaine (Paris, 1973); Henri Laborit, La nouvellegrille (Paris, 1974). 54Ibid., 11. Here the interpolation is from Abraham Moles, Sociodynamique de la culture (Paris, 1967).

482

Brendan Dooley

must be studied by detecting the many nuances within single groups of concepts over several decades. For Labrosse, that information represents the "social rites" [rites sociales], the "genetic memory," and what might be called the collective knowledge of a culture. Similar premises have drawn members of the Lyon-Grenoble team to propose some hypotheses about journalism that differ substantially from previous research. Beforejournalism emerges in a culture, they suggest, collective knowledge evolves according to the erratic rhythm of day-to-day events like wars, disasters, and inventions, and their occasional incorporation into accounts or demonstrations. When the volume of information about such events exceeds the capacity of existing means of communication, journalism quickly becomes widespread because it provides an attractive and uniform product with superior organizing capabilities. Each example ofjournalism selects and fits the information available in a particular period into prearrangedcategories, and many examples over time cause such impromptu categories to pass into the culture as definite conceptual tools for organizing experience. Within the "marketplace" of cultural objects, journalism helps produce the continuous exchange leading to decisions. These decisions in turn produce further events, which journalism helps the culture assimilate as collective knowledge, so that the process may begin again and continue in an endless upward spiral of ever more developed social technique.5 Members of the Lyon-Grenoble team have published their results in various series of studies, one of which calls for broad surveys of single years ofjournalism. In their first such project, Presse et histoire: I'annee 1734, they use quantitative content analysis to arrangethirty-fourrepresentativeperiodicals along a spectrum of types from those they identify as being mainly concerned with the sphere of human action (the Mercure historiqueet politique) to those they view as mainly concerned with the sphere of thought (the Memoires de Trevoux) with a few in between concerned with both spheres (the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques).Here and in subsequent publications they compare data showing these journals' speed in responding to events of all kinds (fastest: the Journal des sqavans), per-page density of insertion of such events into the cultural network (densest:Memoiresde Trevoux)and total presence in the network, gauged by the number of characters published per month (most: Gazette de France). And in so doing they provide a computer-assisted cross-section of the various receptacles available for the organization of information in the old regime and a diagram of the increasingly regular flow of information from month to month.56 L'Attentat de Damiens exemplifies another series of the team's studies, this one devoted to showing how the press helped to incorporate a single political event into the common knowledge of the time.57As if by common agreement
Pierre Retat, "Introduction," Presse et histoire au 18e siecle, 25. Robert Favre, Jean Sgard, and Frangoise Weil, "Le fait divers," Retat and Sgard (eds.), Presse et histoire au 18e siecle: I'annee 1734, 211; Pierre Retat, "Rhetorique de l'article de journal. Les Memoiresde Trevoux, 1734"; this article was published separately from the rest, in Etudes sur la presse au dix-huitieme siecle, Centre d'Etudes du dixhuitieme siecle de l'Universite de Lyon II, no. 3 (1978), 81-98. 57 L'attentat de Damiens: discours sur l'evenement au 18e siecle, Centre d'Etudes du Dix-huitieme Siecle, Universite de Lyon II (Lyon, 1979). Authors are: Jean-Claude Bonnet, Henri Duranton, Robert Favre, Pierre Ferrand, Claude Labrosse, Anne Machet, and Pierre Retat.
55 Jean Sgard and
56

Journalism History

483

between the journalists, the team claims, the French press avoided saying anything about the wound inflicted on King Louis XV by would-be assassin Robert Francois Damiens. Instead, it devoted most space to Damiens's torture and execution and, with a hunger for the real story that has direct parallels in moder journalism, pursued his actual words on the scaffold unremittingly for months. Again, as if by common agreement, the press avoided situating the event in that which recent historians have considered to be the most logical place: the atmosphere of tension between the king and the parlements after the Maupeau "revolution." Instead, it ignored the event's political significance entirely-that, for example, was the approach of the Mercurepolitique et historique. Or else it categorized the event as yet another in a long line of Jesuit regicides begun by Chatel in 1594-that was the interpretation shared by the pro-Parlement Nouvelles eccelsiastiquesand the Gazetted'Utrecht. Yet, in making these choices, says the Lyon-Grenoble team, the press did not directly respond to political pressure. If pressure had been latent, the crown-patronized Gazettede France would surely have commented on or refuted the anti-Jesuit interpretationof the crown's adversaries. They conclude, then, that the press merely sought to insist upon the aspects of the story representing reparation, expiation, and the restoration of "injured sovereignty" in order to carry out its role of turning the event into information as painlessly as possible. The final series of studies by members of the Lyon-Grenoble team is exemplified by L 'instrumentperiodique, an analysis of the assimilation of predominantly literary and artistic events. Here, they find that press categorization of novels evolved over time as the real meaning of particular works began to sink in. For example, it categorized the Lettrespersanes along with the Espion turc as simple news until a special category evolved that permitted it to be discussed in the context of social criticism like Giovanni Paolo Marana's Espion du grand seigneur. Most of the time, however, the press reflected permanent characteristics in reporting on culture. It always presupposed the same uniform set of social values and rhetorical principles. And just like its coverage of natural disasters, its coverage of culture corresponded to definite seasons.58Its effect, according to the Lyon-Grenoble team, was two-edged, at least as far as the crisis of the old regime was concerned; it helped rub the rough edges off some of the most scandalous texts of the time; but at the same time it encouraged a new more organized and less haphazard form of reading. In these studies, members of the Lyon-Grenoble team have gained several advantages over previous work. They avoid the risk of error in quantifying cultural materials since their quantitative method was aimed at obtaining some rough proportions in order to investigate some previously unexplored questions rather than at adding precision to previous research. They avoid the danger run by Ehrard and Roger of equating particularjournals with the epistemes of entire periods by accepting journals as single and possibly eccentric elements in a vast multifaceted communications network. And they avoid the risk of anachronism by demonstrating that the coherent reporting and analysis of events was entirely abandoned to the historians before the advent of moder mass media in the nineteenth century permitted rapid and significant modifications in readers'views
58 Pierre Retat and Henri Duranton, "La lecture du roman dans les periodiqueslitteraires," L 'Instrumentperiodique, 90.

484

Brendan Dooley

through the immediate transmission of gradually emerging elements. Finally, they provide a conduit for a real interdisciplinary collaboration through their systems theory. For example, the long episode of press publicity for the torture and execution of Damiens can now be viewed in the light of what Michel Foucault says about the influence of the torture scene itself in helping restore the government's "injured sovereignty." 59 However, the systems approach does not always provide the members of the Lyon-Grenoble team with sufficient explanations. Areas of long-term development, like medicine, philosophy, law, and music, do not seem to lend themselves to the single year cross-section approach; and the team can conclude only that in a given year they demonstrated an "honest mediocrity." 60 The apparent eighteenth-century obsession with comparing present personages to the great personages of the past they can only attribute to the presence of Plutarch in contemporary education programs.61Where the systems approach provides no convenient organizing principle for their data, they fall back on more familiar organizing principles. For example, they view the frequent contraposition of nobility versus bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century accounts as a reflection of the class struggle.62Not surprisingly, they sometimes give up analyzing altogether and let the computer spew out all its data. Their volume on the year 1768 commences with a 70-page chapter giving the frequency of all the most important words.63 Moreover, when the Lyon-Grenoble team's members pose the traditional questions they often repeat the traditional answers. In attempting to explain the political role of the Memoires de Trevoux,for example, they assume a consistent Jesuit "ideology" and a consistent journalistic "ideology" and take for granted that the two were identical instead of using their approach for proving scientifically the validity of these assumptions. They seek to analyze this "ideology" by looking at references to religion, science, and the monarchy. Their conclusion is hardly surprising-the Jesuits supported a view of the social and intellectual order that closely resembled the existing one. And they strike a compromise between A. R. Desautel's thesis that the journal showed the Jesuits' desire to reinforce Catholic propaganda by bringing themselves up to date with moder science and J. Pappas's thesis that it was the friend of the crown and the sworn enemy of the philosophes and progress.64Since their definition of "ideology"
59Foucault's analysis of the function of torture is Surveilleretpunir (Paris, 1975); Eng. trans., Discipline and Punish (New York, 1978). 60Frangois Moreau, "Theatre et musique en 1734," Presse et histoire, 288. 61 Gerard Luciani, "Histoire vecu et histoire ecrite: l'annee 1734," Presse et histoire, 231. 62 Michel Gilot, Marie-Frangoise Luna, "L'evenement," Presse et histoire, 188. 63 Jean Varloot et al., L'annee 1768 a travers la presse traitee par ordinateur (Paris, 1778 traitee et L'annee ordinateur idem al., (Paris, 1982). par 1981); also, 64The two theses are in A.-R. Desautels, les "Memoiresde Trevoux"et le mouvement des idees au 18e siecle, 1701-34 (Rome, 1956) and J. Pappas, "Bertheir's Journal de Trkvouxand the Philosophes," Studies on Voltaireand the Eighteenth Century, 3 (1957), mentioned in the bibliographyto Robert Favre, Claude Labrosse, and Pierre Rtat, "Bilan et perspectives de recherche sur les Mkmoires de Trevoux," Dix-huitieme siecle (1976), 237-55, which is, in turn, a resume of work published in the practically inaccessible Etudes sur la presse au 18e siecle: les "Memoiresde Trevoux, 2 vols.

Journalism History

485

compels them to view the journal's reporting as a closed system in opposition to other cultural trends, they neglect the resemblancesbetween the journal's reporting and that of everyone else. And in doing so they miss what may have been the most significant aspect of the activity of the Trevouxjournalists-that it too was simply a small part of a much vaster public opinion. Finally, the theory of journalism in complex systems shared by some members of the Lyon-Grenoble group may well be nothing but the Liberalthesis in disguise. Like structural-functionalistsociologists Lazarsfeld and Merton, they view journalism primarily as serving to reinforce the existing society by helping it achieve a level of equilibrium. And like them, they condemn impediments on journalism or on any other aspect of free exchange within the intellectual and commercial marketplace as inimical to progress. Systems theory, until more convincing approaches emerge for implementing it, systems theory may not be the solution to all of journalism history's problems. It is hardly surprising then that the team's work has so far had little impact. When Jean Sgard was invited to the 1982 conference on journalism history at S. Margherita Ligure, he was asked to talk not about the content analysis method but about his imminent Bibliographie de la presse classique.65Indeed, the most recent Italian attempt at content analysis, a history of all the learned journals of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Emilia and Romagna, provides a list of all articles with a synopsis of the content of each, leaving to the next researcher the task of drawing some general conclusions.66And the team itself has disbanded, with its own members expressing serious reservations about its accomplishments.67 No doubt, the subdiscipline of the history of journalism has not arrived at an important conjoncture.At least some of its recent products may well be, for their adherence to outdated theses and methods, "something of an embarassment,"as one authoritative practitioner has claimed.68Still, over the last twenty years it has registered important successes. It has demonstrated that journalism is a special kind of literary product whose real text is the collectivity at large. It has abolished the misleading distinction between the supposed "popular"newspapers and the supposed "elite" literary magazines. It has turned to both as sources for
65 Jean Sgard, "Le Dictionnaire des journaux (1600-1789), Problemes de methode," Periodiciitaliani d'antico regime, Materiali della Societa Italiana di Studi sul Secolo XVIII, Incontro per lo studio e l'inventario dei periodici italiani del Settecento, S. Margherita Ligure, 16-18 giugno, 1983 (Rome, 1986), 94-99. Giuseppe Ricuperati, "La storiografia italiana," 766, expresses his reservations about all French projects except the bibliographical ones. Sequel to Sgard's 1976 Dictionnaire desjournalistes, the Bibliographiede la presse classique (Geneva, 1984) is indeed a useful research tool, with 1138 titles to Hatin's 350. The first attempt at a similar bibliography for Italy is in Periodici italiani, pp. 101-61, although without explanatory notes. 66 Martino Capucci, Renzo Cremante, and Giovanna Gronda (eds.), La biblioteca periodica. Repertorio dei giornali letterari del Sei-Settecento in Emilia e in Romagna (2 vols.; Bologna, 1985-87). 67 Pierre Retat, review of L'annee 1778 a traversla presse traiteepar ordinateur (Paris, 1982), Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, 83 (1983), 644-45. 68 James W. Carey, "The Problem of Journalism History," Journalism History, 1 (1974), 1, noted that the view was "redundant." He reiterated this criticism in "Putting the World at Peril: A Conversation with James W. Carey," ibid., 12 (1985), 47.

486

Brendan Dooley

discovering the role of information of all kinds in the early modem period. And in seeking the means to do so it has introduced an interdisciplinary crossfertilization from which other historical subdisciplines might well learn. As the subdiscipline becomes more and more detached from earlier traditions, the only danger now may be that it can no longer serve as the custodian of a utopian model whose discrediting may have enormous consequences;that of a democratic society based on the guidance of an enlightened public opinion.69 Institute for Advanced Study.

69

draft. My thanksto JeremyPopkinfor helpfulcriticismof a preliminary