A World Without Newspapers

What Would that Look Like?

I've spent my whole life reading newspapers, but recently I've found myself moving away from that daily habit. I definitely miss them, but perhaps it would be better to say I didn't leave them. They left me, or are in the process of doing so.

There are different kinds of newspapers, of course. The ones I'm talking about dealt in facts and opinion, and the facts were worth knowing. But I think that newspapers like this - bureaucratic newspapers, if you will, with staffs that included copy editors, fact-checkers, and proofreaders - will soon be a thing of the past. 

(True story. A fact-checker for a magazine - not me - asks a writer, "Is this what he actually said?" Writer responds, "Well, it's what he would have said if I'd asked him.")

What will our world look like without the bureaucratic newspapers? Well, it turns out that newspapers haven't been around that long, so I thought it might be interesting to have a look at what things were like before newspapers. Maybe that old world can tell us something about the world after newspapers.

France Before the Revolution

Years ago I read Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre (1984). I think it's my favorite book about France in the years before the Revolution, which are sometimes called the Old Regime. The title essay of this book is about a printing shop in Paris, so I should not have been surprised to learn that Professor Darnton had also written a whole book about the publishing industry in France before 1789: The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982). 

And here was a world without newspapers. What did it look like? It is a world that is less foreign than I care to admit.

France at that time was a large, powerful bureaucratic state ruled by a very powerful king who did, from time to time, have to take into account the concerns and wishes of the church and the nobility, and occasionally even the common folk.

As for newspapers, Darnton tells us: "... 'news' as we know it did not exist in the Old Regime. At that time the French had no 'news' papers, only journals that circulated by virtue of royal privileges, which were restricted by censors to nonpolitical subjects, and which therefore could not afford to mention anything that would give offense in Versailles." (Darnton, Literary Underground, p. 143.) 

This situation contrasts dramatically with what happened as the French Revolution got into gear in 1789: "At least 250 genuine newspapers were founded in the last six months of 1789, and at least 350 circulated in 1790." (Darnton, p. 221, footnote 89.) 

How did that happen? The newly legal newspapers built on a vibrant history of illegal underground publishing. Darnton explains how this worked: "The French got their uncensored news or nouvelles from rumor. Specialists called nouvellistes gathered in certain parts of Paris - under the 'tree of Cracow' in the gardens of the Palais Royal, for example - to communicate nouvelles. When they consigned their gossip to writing, they produced nouvelles a la main. And when these manuscript gazettes were printed, they became chroniques scandaleuses - a genre that stands halfway in the process by which archaic rumor-mongering developed into popular journalism." Nouvellistes who continued to spread their news the old-fashioned way - by word of mouth - were called nouvellistes de bouche. Think Rush Limbaugh. (Darnton, pp. 143, 203.) 

And then there were the libels, or libelles. "These were violent attacks on individuals who commanded positions of prestige and power as ministers, courtiers, or members of the royal family. They resembled chroniques scandaleuses in their emphasis on scandal, but they also had political 'bite.' They probed the sensitive area where private decadence became a public issue, and by slandering eminent individuals, they desecrated the whole regime." (Darnton, p. 145.) 

In the France of the Old Regime, the people in the street (including, perhaps, a younger Madame Defarge) did not participate in politics, an activity that was reserved for the royal court and the king. So they got to watch the politics of the court as a kind of spectator sport. And court politics were themselves primarily about personalities and not policy, so there was a steady stream of slander emanating from the court, which made good copy for the scandal sheets. (Darnton, pp. 144, 202-204.) 

And then came the Revolution, and the scandal sheets became legal.

Are We Heading Backward?

After reading a whole book about slime, I come away grateful that, at least during most of my lifetime, I had access to newspapers that cared about facts and dealt with policy as well as personality.

It strikes me that we are in the process of sliding back to a world that, with a few major differences, looks a lot like France before the Revolution. The slime today is legal, but it serves the same purpose, and it is effective.

Of course, what is under attack is not a fading monarchy, but the very idea of democracy. There is an irony here - tools used to help bring democracy to France are now being used to destroy democracy in the United States, and really wherever democracy still exists.

One of the bulwarks of democracy has been a free press, but it is clear that the press is rapidly becoming unfree. Without a free press, where do we go to talk about ways not to slide back into the primordial slime? 

The nice thing about oligarchies is that they are unstable - the egos of the oligarchs prevent them from agreeing with one another on things like "Who is the fairest one of all?" I think that chink in their armor may give us just enough space to use the internet as our Tree of Cracow. (And, yes, nobody seems to know why it was called the Tree of Cracow, although speculation abounds. I find this somehow appropriate.) 

The internet - like the printing press - is a neutral medium, or tool. It can be used for good as well as for evil. Substack and Bluesky give me hope that I may be right. 

But it's not enough just to chat online. To paraphrase Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize!" 

If you want to know a lot more about the developing pre-revolutionary situation in France in the eighteenth century, have a look at Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (2024). 

See also I Found a Picture on a Wall, Unleashing the Oligarchs, A World in Ruins, Campaign Poster Number Four, The Face of Fascism, Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat, As the Tide Goes Out, Submerged Narratives, Where Have All the Grownups Gone?