English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France

English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary Francejecs_468 1..17

S I M O N M AC D O NA L D

Abstract: This article examines a series of English-language newspaper venturesproduced in revolutionary France and largely aimed at export to Britain. Theseenterprises, chief among which was the Paris Mercury (1792), sought to profit fromheightened British interest in French events by dispatching ready-printed newspapersdirectly from Paris, thus achieving news priority over the domestic British press. NewFrench press freedoms also enabled claims to be made about the superior editorialqualities of such extraterritorial newspapers. This article reconstructs these newspapers’publication history, reviews their contents, discusses their commercial and politicalrationale and their precursors, and offers explanations for their failure.

Keywords: Paris Mercury, newspapers, French Revolution, extraterritorial publishing,liberty of the press, British radicalism, the Revolution debate, Franco–British relations

The French Revolution fostered substantial demand in Britain for reportage aboutdevelopments across the Channel. While few Britons were able to travel to France, manymore received second-hand accounts. Newspapers were a key channel of information:events unfolding in France became major news items in the British press, and reports inprint were quickly followed up in a range of other media and cultural products. With amarket premium on bringing the fullest and freshest accounts from France, a variety ofpublishers and journalists competed to enhance the reports they could offer.

Before the French Revolution, the London papers had not been particularly impressivein covering news from abroad.1 Rather than employing dedicated foreign corres-pondents, they tended to rehash accounts provided in imported foreign gazettes,sometimes supplemented by information from government and other sources.2 Thispattern changed significantly after 1789, with a series of British newspapers enhancingtheir news-gathering arrangements at Paris and beyond, or claiming to have done asmuch.3

In France itself, meanwhile, the Revolution transformed how the press operated. Asthe British ambassador reported shortly after the fall of the Bastille, ‘the liberty of thepress seems at present to have no bounds.’4 The dismantling of government censorshipmade it easier to launch a newspaper, and the costs of starting a press venture seem tohave been relatively low: the press baron Charles-Joseph Panckoucke observed in 1790

that establishing a new journal was more feasible at Paris than in the more settledLondon market.5 With the enormous contemporary increase in newspaper titles there,Paris outstripped London’s primacy among European press centres.6

In this context of continuing demand for news from France among British audiences,coupled with the opening up of press freedoms in France, a series of attempts were madeto bypass the London press, by bringing reports directly from the seat of the Revolution inParis in the form of English-language newspapers printed there but largely intended for

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export to readers in Britain. The outstanding and culminating example among theseenterprises, and the main focus of this article, was the Paris Mercury; and ContinentalChronicle, produced between the spring and autumn of 1792 (fig. I). This year began withFrance still at outward peace, and with its internal political circumstances continuing tooffer some signs of constitutional promise. However, the French political situation thenrapidly degenerated into extremist violence, with the fall of the French monarchy inAugust 1792 and the prison massacres at Paris in September; meanwhile the internationalscene was transformed by the outbreak of war between France and a series of otherEuropean states.

The Paris Mercury had an ambitious cross-Channel strategy. A bi-weekly newspaperof four folio pages, it was printed at Paris and could be purchased there; yet it waslargely intended for circulation in Britain, where most of its stockists were located.Advertisements announcing its launch appeared in April 1792 in various London papers.7

These stated that the Paris Mercury was under the responsibility of ‘several respectableEnglish Gentlemen at Paris’ and promised its contents would be primarily dedicated to ‘thewhole news of the Continent, at this juncture so peculiarly interesting, in a more full andcopious manner than it has hitherto been conveyed to the English Reader’. No Britishnewspaper would have the journalistic resources on the ground in the French capital tomatch the Paris Mercury for the scope and authenticity of its reports.

Moreover, because it was printed in English at Paris, with the finished product sentalong the same postal artery upon which the London press relied for its information,the Paris Mercury would in principle be able to deliver news from the French capitalto readers in Britain fresh from the mail boat, automatically stealing a march on theconventional press in Britain, whose reports from Paris would be outdated and thereforeless saleable. This avowed strategy seemingly dictated the Paris Mercury’s wholeconstruction: post came from France twice weekly; therefore the paper was to bebi-weekly, and it was claimed that it would be circulated to subscribers in Britain ‘thesame day on which the French Mail arrives; they will of course receive intelligence a dayor two sooner than they possibly can through the medium of the London Papers’.

The reportage which could be provided from Paris went beyond the domestic affairsof revolutionary France to embrace a wider purview of the Continent. The earliestadvertisements for the projected Paris Mercury appeared shortly before news arrived inLondon of France’s declaration of war on Austria; when the inaugural issue of thenewspaper appeared, by which point Prussia had also joined the hostilities, the wars of theRevolution were presented as further enhancing its journalistic interest. As an address tothe public in the first issue asked, ‘where, better than at PARIS, the capital of that generouspeople, who are now fighting the battles of freedom, and defending against the conspiracyof despots and slaves the cause of the human race, can a spectator of the grand combatestablish his post of observation?’

More pointedly, beyond trumping its competitors in practical matters relating to speedyreportage from Paris, it was also claimed that the Paris Mercury would be free from thepolitical interference and editorial corruption tainting the London press:

Too long have the hireling abettors of former abuses obscured by their odious arts the risingsun of freedom; too long has the splendid progress of the French Revolution been transmittedfoul and defiled through the channel of English prints. To rescue from the most studiedmisrepresentations the noble efforts of a patriot people, and to furnish our countrymen withan accurate and candid account of the important affairs of France, is the task we undertake– a task which, faithfully fulfilled, cannot fail to merit the encouragement of the Public.8

2 SIMON MACDONALD

© 2012 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

1. Paris Mercury 6 (11-14 June 1792); University of Chicago Library

English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France 3


In this way, the newspaper’s sponsors sought to advance and profit from the rhetoricassociated with the wider revolutionary press in France, to the effect that, with the end ofgovernment censorship, Paris journals represented the vanguard of press freedoms,outmatching and supplanting the previously ascendant products of foreign media centressuch as London. At this juncture, inverting previous patterns, British audiences couldpurportedly be informed by, preached at and capitalised on by a freer press in Paris; whileit remained to be seen how far British newspaper readers would subscribe to thisunflattering narrative, such a prospectus apparently offered a credible enough commercialbasis to interest the Paris Mercury’s backers.

Examining the paper’s history, accordingly, allows a better understanding of thechanging cross-Channel dynamics of the media market at this period, and of the kinds ofrhetorical and business possibilities which these new conditions made conceivable. Moregenerally, this study also forms a contribution to the historiography of British interest inthe French Revolution. A rich literature on this subject has developed in recent years.9 Butrelatively little research has been undertaken into the British presence at the seat ofRevolution in Paris, and such work as does exist tends to have been undertaken by literaryscholars rather than historians.10 It is a notable lacuna that the Paris Mercury, despitebeing noted in passing by the distinguished French historian Albert Mathiez as early as1918, has not yet been the object of any dedicated scholarly attention.11 As will be seen,the production of the various English-language newspaper schemes launched in Parisbetween 1789 and 1792, of which the Paris Mercury was the chief example, was associatedwith an anglophone expatriate milieu; the present article therefore seeks both to flag upand to help remedy the patchy nature of the available historiography.

This article is divided into three parts: the first examines the contents of such copies ofthe Paris Mercury as survive, and reconstructs, as far as possible, its publication historyand antecedents; the second reviews the commercial and political rationale behind theestablishment of an English-language newspaper in revolutionary Paris, referringparticularly to the reverse model offered by the Courier de l’Europe, a major old regimeinternational gazette produced in London; and the third discusses why the Paris Mercuryfailed. It is argued here that, while the concept of an English-language newspaperbringing accounts of events from Paris to London was an ambitious one, there wasnonetheless a potential market for such a product. Even so, if reporting revolutionarynews directly from Paris was the Paris Mercury’s special journalistic currency, thisspeculative business model also made the paper hostage to the shifting fortunes of theRevolution itself. Ultimately, however, irrespective of the level of demand from would-bereaders, the Paris Mercury may have been stymied by underlying structural factors withinthe British news market: above all, collusion between postal officials and newspaperpublishers to exclude foreign-based competitors.

I.

Only a handful of issues of the Paris Mercury have been traced, but these are sufficient toreveal its key features.12 The main focus of column space in extant issues was dedicated toFrench high politics, especially the activities of the Legislative Assembly and its successorbody the National Convention. Information for these reports was declaredly selected withBritish readers in mind.13 In the first issue it was announced that the Paris Mercury wouldbe a ‘thermometer of political opinions’ from Paris. When it came to political progress, thenewspaper’s editorial position was that Britain was now on the back foot:

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Continental intelligence will necessarily fill the greater part of THE PARIS MERCURY: we shallhowever, sometimes have occasion to turn our attention to the affairs of Great Britain. In thatcountry begin to be agitated political questions, which since the days of Charles the First havenot been brought into general discussion. That the abuses of government cry aloud forreform, all the world seem agreed.14

In the same inaugural issue, an indication of the paper’s own political sympathies wasprovided by a substantial congratulatory report on recent proceedings at the Jacobin Club,describing the reception there of an address from the radical Society for ConstitutionalInformation in London.15 A week later, an approving review of publications by AnacharsisCloots allowed discussion of the proposition that the means ‘to establish the liberty andhappiness of the human race on a sure foundation’ was to ‘melt into one homogeneousmass the various national corporations’. More provocatively, Cloots was quoteduncritically to the effect that there would never be ‘any sanguinary dispute with Londonor the Hague, if France extended as far northward from Paris, as from Paris to the frontierson the south’.16

None of the contributions to the Paris Mercury seems to have been signed by name, butthe handiwork of some contemporary British residents at Paris can be identified. A sonnetwhich appeared in one issue of the paper was reprinted several years later under the nameof Benjamin Beresford, an expatriate Anglican clergyman and writer.17 Beresford’sinvolvement with the Paris Mercury is confirmed by a memorandum written for the FrenchDirectory government in c.1796-7: ‘Un Ministre Anglican, nommé Beresford, qui a été lecoopérateur d’une feuille Anglaise qui s’imprimait à Paris en 1792, n’avait pas d’autreexistence, lorsque sa feuille fut tombée, que les bienfaits du Lord Gower et de Mr. Fitz-Gerald.’18 Earl Gower, the British ambassador referred to here, was in fact recalled fromParis prior to the Paris Mercury’s demise. But, even if it exaggerated Beresford and Gower’slinks, this account nevertheless highlights that the Paris Mercury came to the notice ofinterested French observers, and was not unknown to the British embassy.19 The referenceto ‘Fitz-gerald’, apparently the Revolution enthusiast Lord Edward Fitzgerald, gives anindication of Beresford’s wider expatriate milieu at Paris.

Other issues of the Paris Mercury featured extracts from an English translation of Collotd’Herbois’s Almanach de père Gérard. This had been published in London in 1791, but itstranslator, the radical Scottish publicist John Oswald, was based in France around thistime and so may have been involved with the Paris Mercury.20 The paper also featuredexamples of supposedly unsolicited contributions from readers, including articles on the‘Finances of France and Great Britain’ and on ‘Change of National Character in theFrench’.21 Whatever their true authorship, such items served to suggest the existence of acosmopolitan, enlightened and geographically extensive readership, and to sustain theimage of cross-Channel engagement and emulation the paper claimed to foster. The ParisMercury’s title may partly have been chosen for this effect, for Mercury was both theguardian of borders and a symbol of trade and eloquence.22

The Paris Mercury’s cross-Channel marketing can be reconstructed in some detail fromits advertisements and surviving issues. The paper’s editorial and printing operation wasbased at ‘Gillet and Co. No. 1412, Rue Notre Dame des Champs’, and it was published byGueffier at the quai des Augustins. As well as these Paris stockists, the paper was availablein London through T. Gillet in Smithfield, James Ridgway in St James’s, John Owen inPiccadilly and Thomas Axtell at the Royal Exchange. By the sixth issue another stockist,Robert Hall Westley’s ‘Newspaper Office’ in the Strand, was added to this list; in the eighthissue a notice was subjoined stating that the paper could be obtained from ‘all the News-



carriers in Town and Country’.23 Annual subscriptions were available for 2 guineas inLondon and 42 livres in Paris, yet sterling was chosen as the sole currency in which the5-pence cover price was printed, confirming that the expected readership centred more onBritain than France.

This distribution network meant that from its launch the Paris Mercury was connectedto a series of London printers and booksellers, whose activities largely revolved aroundcurrent affairs and political debate; these businesses were located across a range ofprominent sites in the city’s commercial, administrative and fashionable districts, andthey served correspondingly diverse clienteles. Some were particularly known for theirradical politics and their interest in contemporary events in France: Ridgway, notably, wassoon to be imprisoned for selling political libels, including Part Two of Thomas Paine’sRights of Man.24 Westley had been the publisher between late 1790 and early 1791 of theoppositional Morning Chronicle newspaper; Axtell had an established profile as a stockist ofinternational newspapers.25 Owen’s imprint seems to have been only recently established:its subsequent political trajectory was, if anything, conspicuously anti-radical.26

But the key figure in publishing the newspaper was evidently ‘Gillet’. From theseventh issue, a new strap line was added to the front page which emphasised that thepaper was ‘Printed at PARIS by GILLET AND Co.’. The Paris Mercury was apparentlythe earliest product of the Gillet press at Paris: an editorial announcement ascribed thedelayed appearance of the inaugural issue to transport requisitions for ‘the Army underLa Fayette’, which had caused the ‘unforeseen detention of our Types and printingMaterials at Rouen’; this explanation also served to highlight the paper’s topicality andits intimate involvement with revolutionary events.27 Yet if producing the newspaperwas its main activity, the press also had at least a sideline in other printing activities.Copies survive of John Oswald’s Review of the Constitution of Great-Britain, ‘Third edition,with considerable additions’, a sixty-page pamphlet dated 1792 and bearing theendorsement ‘Paris: printed at the English Press by Gillet and Co. rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, No. 1412’.28

It was apparently no coincidence that ‘T. Gillet’ of Smithfield headed the list of thenewspaper’s London stockists, for the Paris operation seems to have been a branch of thisLondon enterprise. Later items of correspondence survive which reveal this printer’s fullname was Thomas Gillet.29 His business in London had been established not long before itscounterpart operation in Paris: it was listed in a trade directory for 1790, and the earliestknown productions with the ‘T. Gillet’ imprint date from 1791.30 Several works printed atthe press during 1792 suggest that it had connections with politically reformist circles oneither side of the Channel: titles included Suppression of the French Nobility Vindicated,written by the Paris-based Anglican clergyman Thomas Archard; and James Mackintosh’sA Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, on his Apostacy from the Cause of ParliamentaryReform.31

While the Gillet operation in 1792 would seem to have been at least nominally cross-Channel in scope, Gillet’s own movements that year remain unclear.32 However, if Gilletwas the key initial figure among the Paris Mercury’s publishers, its editorial directionseems ultimately to have lain in other hands. For, turning away from the public face of thepaper to consider archival evidence, a fuller picture of its operations emerges. In October1792, a man signing himself ‘R. Taylor’ wrote to the French authorities presenting himselfas the director of the Paris Mercury and the English press at Paris with which the paper wasassociated.33 Requesting his letter be brought to the attention of the foreign minister,Taylor declared he had conducted the newspaper on a commercial basis for six months butnow found himself obliged to apply for financial support from the French government;

6 SIMON MACDONALD


indeed, he stated he had already sought assistance on 25 September from the interiorminister, Jean-Marie Roland, but had received no reply. In a move which presumablyreflected the paper’s straitened circumstances, Taylor had decided to relaunch the ParisMercury in a more modest octavo format. This was to be titled the Magazine of Paris, orGazette of the Republic of France. Ci-devant the Paris Mercury; he included a copy of the firstissue with his letter.34

Taylor claimed that the Paris Mercury had concerned itself with presenting the FrenchRevolution in a favourable light to readers across the Channel, correcting what hedescribed as the daily falsities printed in the British press. He held out the prospect that,with French subsidies, he could circulate as many as two thousand copies of his paperweekly in Britain and Ireland; this may have meant one thousand copies for each of thebi-weekly issues. Unaided, it would seem that circulation was below this level.

Whether Taylor’s appeal succeeded is unclear. Certainly, the sample issue he supplied ofthe Magazine of Paris contained nothing offensive to the new French Republican regime.Production evidently continued for some time, for the relaunched venture was still beingpublicised in London during November 1792, with its timetabling unchanged: the ‘PARISMAGAZINE, late the Paris Mercury’, was described as ‘printed in Paris, in English, onMondays and Thursdays, in time for the mails’, reaching London ‘as soon as the Frenchpapers’.35 This advertisement was placed by the bookseller Rieder of Mitre Court, who hadconnections to the French embassy.36 There were suspicions in British government circlesaround this time about French meddling in the London press.37 A scheme of this kindcertainly matched a need identified by French representatives to influence public opinionin still neutral Britain; but evidence from French diplomatic correspondence suggests thatproposals to subsidise newspapers for dissemination in Britain did not go beyond thediscussion stage.38 In any case, whatever the later funding situation was of the Magazine ofParis, Taylor’s petition letter would appear to confirm that the Paris Mercury had beenthroughout its existence a commercial venture rather than paid for by the Frenchgovernment.

This ‘R. Taylor’, who gave his address as the ‘Passage des Carmalites [i.e., Carmelites]’ inthe rue Saint-Jacques at Paris, can be fleshed out from notarial records. These give his fullname as Robert Taylor, describing him as an Irish businessman and manufacturer(‘négociant et fabricant’) who lived in Paris with his wife, Anne Nelligan.39 Furtherinformation about Taylor can be found in the records of the Paris-based wine merchantWilliam Bousie. An entry in Bousie’s ledgers in 1789 notes Taylor was a business partnerto Thomas Marshall, an English merchant in Paris.40 This is significant because that yearMarshall had been the driving force behind a short-lived attempt to produce an English-language newspaper at Paris.41

This venture had taken the form of a dual-language newspaper with the double title TheUnion: or, Journal of Liberty, or L’Union: ou, Journal de la Liberté. According to its prospectus,this scheme traced its origins to ‘the Freedom of the Press’ which the Revolution had‘happily established’ in France. The Union’s proprietors, it was declared, would offerreaders in France distinctively full coverage of international news; readers in Britain,meanwhile, would be supplied with reliable French news: ‘Since the commencement ofthe most glorious Revolution the world has ever witnessed, they have seen, with infiniteregret, the multiplied misrepresentations of the proceedings of the brave inhabitants ofFRANCE, with which many of the English prints have teemed’.42 Launched in November1789, the initial configuration of the Union consisted of two pages in English and two inFrench. This format was swiftly jettisoned: although stockists continued to be listed at bothParis and London, after the first four issues the text was presented only in French.43



Following the failure of the Union in the spring of 1790, Marshall became engaged withanother Paris newspaper venture, the Gazette Générale. This wholly French-languagescheme involved a series of British expatriates: Samuel Meeke, a long-term resident inFrance, arranged for an investor then living at Paris, James Clark, to take a half-share inthe concern. Clark was given to understand that Marshall’s own share would be advancedto him by ‘Mr Boyd’, the leading British banker at Paris.44 These managerial details werekept under wraps, for the paper was presented under editorial incognito, but in late 1790

Meeke was blackballed by the Jacobin Club following allegations of his involvement withthe ‘très-aristocrate’ Gazette Générale; this denunciation came from the radical Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, duc de Chartres, whom Meeke had formerly tutored.45 Whether RobertTaylor was involved with any of Marshall’s newspaper enterprises is unclear, but since thetwo men were business partners around this period he was presumably acquainted withthem.

Between the Union in 1789 and the Paris Mercury in 1792 there had been at least onefurther attempt to launch a cross-Channel anglophone newspaper. This came whenproposals were circulated for a paper to be titled the Universal Patriot, whose first issue wasbilled to appear on 3 May 1790: according to its prospectus, this would be a bi-weekly,providing accurate news from France unobtainable via ‘the venal channel of EnglishNewspapers’, and its editorial direction would be handled by ‘a set of Gentlemen, Britons,by birth, but by sentiment and principle, Universal Patriots’.46 Points of contact forsubscriptions were listed at Paris, Calais and London, and the paper would be printed inFrance: ‘the Editor will not have before his eyes the terror of the Pillory, nor the dread ofthose vexatious prosecutions for libels, engines which the British Ministry have ever readyin their hands.’ The key figure behind the venture seems to have been John Oswald, who,as has been noted, may subsequently have been involved with the Paris Mercury. However,no copies of this newspaper are known, and so it remains uncertain whether it wasactually produced.47

That no further attempts along these lines appear to have been made until the launch ofthe Paris Mercury in the spring of 1792 may partly be explained by the activities in thisinterim of the Morning Chronicle, the main anti-ministerial newspaper of the day inBritain. During 1791 its editor, James Perry, based himself in Paris for around six monthsand reported for the paper from there.48 This made the Morning Chronicle the best-represented British paper at Paris. During a period when dramatic events in France –including the royal family’s flight to Varennes, the Champ de Mars massacre and theking’s acceptance of the constitution – heightened interest among British readers, itsreports gained an edge over its competitors in London; the paper also acquired readers inFrance.49 If Perry’s sojourn in Paris served to demonstrate the commercial potential forcross-Channel journalism during this period, then for the sponsors of the Paris Mercury hisdeparture from Paris may have represented a gap in the market which they might occupy.Certainly, the newsworthiness of events in France had not abated when the Paris Mercurywas launched the following spring.50

Reconstructing its publication history, then, reveals the Paris Mercury was theculmination of a series of endeavours to produce an English-language paper bringingnews direct from revolutionary Paris to audiences across the Channel. Its key features hadmuch in common with the Union and the Universal Patriot, and the template was brieflyextended in the Magazine of Paris. In London these newspapers were linked to a number ofprominent publishers and booksellers, including some with notable radical or reformistsympathies; in Paris the expatriate entrepreneurs behind the papers’ production were insome measure connected.

8 SIMON MACDONALD


These newspaper ventures all shared an editorial line of enthusiasm for the Revolution,promoting a vision of France as the new vanguard of political liberty and press freedom.This rhetoric enabled claims to be advanced about the special licence available to anexpatriate English-language newspaper based in Paris as opposed to the British press. Yet,while the Paris Mercury’s main target audience would seem to have been anglophonereaders who were in broad sympathy with the French Revolution, its claim to achievepriority of news reporting from Paris over its British competitors meant that the paper wasin principle of interest well beyond this core market. Profit rather than propaganda seemsto have been the overriding motive behind the enterprise: the Paris Mercury was notfunded by the French authorities; and, while it was associated with a formative English-language press at Paris, the newspaper was apparently the main output of the press ratherthan a loss-leader for the promotion of its other activities.

II.

The Paris Mercury seems to have been the first sustained attempt to produce anextraterritorial English-language newspaper directed at British audiences. The pre-revolutionary precedents for this had been exiguous. During the Seven Years War ahandful of issues of a dual-language journal titled the Papiers Anglois were produced atParis; conducted under the direction of the French foreign ministry, this had been not averitable newspaper but rather a digest composed of selections taken from Britishnewspapers.51 In the mid-1760s another dual-language venture was launched with thedouble title Magazin Anglois or British Magazine; again, this enterprise seems to have foldedfast.52 In 1788 Thomas Jefferson had lent his support, while serving as American ministerat Paris, to ‘the publisher of an English and American gazette printed here in English oncea week, which begins and deserves to be read’; the fortunes of this initiative areunknown.53 None of these ventures appears to have been aimed at export to Britain.

But if the Paris Mercury format was something of a novelty for anglophone audiences,the extraterritorial publishing model it adopted was one that had long been familiar toContinental readers, and the fortunes of Gillet and Taylor’s newspaper can only beproperly evaluated in this context. From this point of view, the closest precursor for theParis Mercury was the reverse template offered by the London-based Courier de l’Europe,Gazette Anglo-Française, published between 1776 and 1792.54 This had flourishedcommercially in old-regime France by trading on Britain’s much-vaunted press freedoms,presenting these as the basis on which it could offer more reliable news from Britain andfarther afield than was available in the officially controlled domestic French press.

In particular, the Courier de l’Europe’s chief commercial draw was its reporting of Britishparliamentary debates, and the high point of its success came during the American Warof Independence, when London was the key sorting-house for disseminating informationabout the hostilities.55 The Courier de l’Europe was one element within a much widerphenomenon of francophone publishing activities outside France.56 As Simon Burrowshas noted, London, with ‘the most liberal press regime in Europe’, was a major componentof this international trade.57 In 1786 the British embassy official Daniel Hailes noted the‘almost unrestrained introduction of our daily publications’ into France, describing this as‘tolerated indeed by the Government from the conviction of the impossibility of preventingit’; according to Hailes, these imported press products had ‘attracted the attention of thepeople more towards the freedom and advantages of our constitution’.58

An English-language equivalent to the Courier de l’Europe, bringing news from Paris toenlighten British audiences, only became a realistic prospect following the French



Revolution. During the old regime, comparative British press freedoms meant that thenewspaper-reading public in Britain had little cause to look to foreign productions to stayinformed about current events.59 Those who sought the most up-to-date or supposedlyprivileged information from Paris might subscribe to manuscript newsletters.60 In doingaway with Bourbon press controls, the Revolution undermined the establishedextraterritorial newspaper model as far as France was concerned. For readers inrevolutionary France, extraterritorial publication ceased to signify the advantage ofenhanced editorial freedoms, and instead might suggest involvement with counter-Revolution; among the casualties of this shift was the Courier de l’Europe.61 The Revolutionalso created demand among foreign readers for access to the new journalistic products ofthe free presses at Paris.62 Accordingly, the Paris Mercury, by taking and inverting theCourier de l’Europe’s paradigm of publishing in London for audiences in France, symbolisedthe claim that Paris had superseded London both as a place of news interest and as acentre of uninhibited journalistic production.

For some contemporary commentators, indeed, the changing dynamics of pressfreedoms occasioned by the French Revolution represented not simply a new pre-eminence for France but also outright decline in the case of Britain. Robert Pigott, alandowner and eccentric who quit Britain in favour of long-term residence on theContinent and moved to France out of sympathy for the Revolution, compared British andFrench press liberties in a pamphlet published in 1790 which he addressed to the FrenchNational Assembly. According to Pigott, ‘if the liberty of the press has once triumphed inEngland, and to which we owe all our rights, it is no longer the case.’63 Tracing the eclipseof British press freedoms back to the American War of Independence and beyond, Pigottsaw the contemporary conjuncture as fulfilling Montesquieu’s prediction that Britain’sconstitution would inevitably become corrupt.64

Similar critiques were composed within Britain. A series of articles presented under thepseudonym ‘An Englishman’ in The World newspaper in 1790, and subsequently reprintedas a pamphlet, compared the current state of press liberties on either side of the Channel:‘The Press has given freedom to France! [...] In England it is invaded on every side. Whileyou live, will you with indifference see the Liberty of the Press expire?’65 In this account,the liberty of the press in Britain had become a fiction, with libel legislation and stamptaxes forming an armamentarium of ‘laws seemingly made for other purposes’ wherebythe authorities suffocated free speech.66 These concerns were reflected in theestablishment of the Friends of the Freedom of the Liberty of the Press in 1791; thefollowing year Charles James Fox’s Libel Act seemed to bolster press protections, but aroyal proclamation on seditious writings promulgated by the government of William Pittrepresented a step in the opposite direction.67 Meanwhile, claims that the capital of pressfreedom had moved across the Channel drew symbolic endorsement from the transferfrom London to Paris of writers facing official pressure in Britain, including Paine andSampson Perry.68

For many radicals, then, the French Revolution upended the old-regime polarity ofBritish press liberties set against French press constraints. Yet, rhetoric aside, both beforeand after the Revolution, the workaday practice of constructing a viable extraterritorialnewspaper posed numerous challenges, entailing significant editorial compromises. Inthis way, the claims to distinctive journalistic independence with which the old-regimeCourier de l’Europe had been sold to readers did not necessarily bear close examination. Aswith many extraterritorial gazettes which sought to tap markets in France, the Courier del’Europe’s business model in fact obliged it to avoid outright antagonism with the Bourbongovernment, for it relied on official permission and postal privileges to circulate in France.

10 SIMON MACDONALD


Although no evidence has been found of outright subsidy, the paper’s relations with boththe French and British governments were notably ambiguous.69

As John Adams noted in 1783, when serving as an American representative at Paris, theCourier de l’Europe was ‘continually accommodating between the French and EnglishMinistry. If it should offend the English essentially, the Ministry would prevent itspublication; if it should sin against the French unpardonably, the Ministry would instantlystop its circulation.’70 Indeed, during the American War of Independence the Courier del’Europe had contended with interference less from the French than from the Britishgovernment, which sought to hinder its export; the newspaper’s owner, Samuel Swinton,parried this by setting up a reprinting operation at Boulogne. In large measure, as JeremyD. Popkin has urged, the Courier de l’Europe constituted merely the ‘ingenious simulacrumof an independent newspaper’.71

The history of the Courier de l’Europe, then, suggests important caveats to the supposedlyblack-and-white opposition between press constrictions in Bourbon France and pressfreedoms in contemporary Britain. Accordingly, in reversing the Courier de l’Europe model,any English-language paper from Paris was well advised to mimic not just the paper’srhetoric but also its more pragmatic commercial policies. It is unclear how far the ParisMercury managed to meet this challenge when it appropriated and refashioned the Courierde l’Europe’s cross-Channel formula. Even though its editorial positioning highlightedgovernment interference in the British press, its own business model seems to haveassumed its circulation in Britain would be unimpeded. Like the old-regime internationalgazettes, its radical rhetoric was thus undercut by an implicit dependence on the mediasystem it claimed to critique.

From this perspective, indeed, the situation of an English-language expatriate pressventure was more acute than that of the international French-language newspapersunder the old regime. They at least had been able to tap francophone readers acrossEurope, whereas anglophone audiences were largely confined to Britain and Ireland: theParis Mercury’s commercial viability was therefore especially reliant on its ability tocirculate there. Meanwhile, the Paris Mercury was likelier to be an object of Britishgovernment suspicion than were the conventional foreign-language imported papers,because as an English-language publication it had the potential to reach far wider sectionsof the reading population.

III.

How then did the Paris Mercury fare in practice, and what were the circumstances of itsfailure? The patchy survival of individual issues of the paper provides only limited insightinto its performance. But other indications suggest it was not commercially successful:because it contained no advertisements, income could come only from sales; and, asTaylor’s request for assistance from the French authorities indicates, the paper apparentlydid not acquire enough subscribers to cover costs. Records for comparable extraterritorialsubscription newspapers suggest that it was possible to break even with as few as 800 oreven 400 subscribers.72 These figures may therefore indicate the necessary minimumnumber of subscriptions which the Paris Mercury failed to attain.

Altogether, the career of the Paris Mercury and the Magazine of Paris lasted just over sixmonths. They were not, in fact, the final English-language newspapers at Paris bringingaccounts to audiences in Britain. The English-language printing business in Paris operatedby John Hurford Stone and Helen Maria Williams, a venture which in some measurecontinued what Gillet and Taylor had begun, considered sending newspapers from France



into Britain. In December 1793 Stone wrote to his brother in London about thisnewspapers idea, specifying that ‘Gillet knows of such as were fabricated by Taylor andCo.’; Stone was especially concerned about possible liability to the stamp tax.73

This was hardly an auspicious period for such an initiative. War between Britain andrevolutionary France had begun, the Terror was under way, and arrest measures aimed atBritish subjects living in France in October 1793 had led to both Stone and Williams beingimprisoned for some weeks; within Britain, government repression of radical activity hadgathered pace. Nothing seems to have come of Stone’s proposal, and no further suchnewspapers were produced during the following years of Franco–British conflict. It wasnot until 1802, under the very different circumstances of the Napoleonic regime, that anew venture emerged with the brief return of peace, Lewis Goldsmith’s The Argus; or,London Review’d in Paris. This adopted the same strategy previously deployed by the ParisMercury of publication in Paris for dissemination largely in London, and it advanced asimilar editorial claim to be offering content unavailable in the supposedly free press inBritain.74

Although little information exists regarding the Paris Mercury’s readership, someperspective on what this might have been is provided by the better-documented case of TheArgus. Shortly after its launch, notable recipients in England were listed in a report by thePost Office in London.75 Some of these were private purchasers, including reformist andradical figures such as William Petty-Fitzmaurice, 1st marquess of Lansdowne, CharlesStanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, and Sir Francis Burdett. Also listed were several radicalbooksellers, including Ridgway, who were presumably stockists. Other recipients includedcoffee-houses, a mail coach contractor, British newspapers such as the True Briton and theMorning Chronicle, and various bankers, among them Sir Francis Baring. That is, while thisreadership was drawn largely from oppositional and radical milieus, it also embracedwider groups, notably information-hungry businesses: having an interest in receiving anEnglish-language digest of news from Paris did not necessarily entail enthusiasm for thepaper’s politics or uncritical reliance on its contents.

A comparable spectrum of readers for the Paris Mercury in 1792 can be envisaged to thatlater attracted by The Argus, although the parallel should not be exaggerated: Britishradicalism had ebbed considerably since its high-water mark during the early 1790s, andthe Napoleonic press in France was tightly controlled. But unlike The Argus, which wassubsidised by the French authorities, the Paris Mercury was a business concern and couldnot run indefinitely at a loss. To some extent, the Paris Mercury’s commercial failurefollowed from the politically impossible position in which it came to be situated. AlthoughFrance and Britain remained at peace until February 1793, enthusiasm for the principlesof the French Revolution ceased to be respectable for much mainstream British opinionafter violent accounts arrived from Paris first of the fall of the monarchy in August 1792

– which occasioned the withdrawal of the British ambassador – and then of the prisonmassacres in September. As Stone wrote from Paris at this time, ‘I see that the Londonpapers begin to assume another Tone respect[in]g this Revolution.’76

This change of regime in France also meant claims that Paris represented Europe’sleading centre of press freedoms could not be maintained, as London newspapers werequick to trumpet: ‘The Liberty of the Press, in Paris, no longer exists. The Papers friendlyto the cause of the Monarch have been put down.’77 The Paris Mercury/Magazine of Pariscontrived to remain in step with successive radicalising French regimes during thispolitically fraught climate. In avoiding giving offence to the French Republic, however, thepapers would seem to have lost much of their value as a news source for anglophoneaudiences, and so any prospect of carving out a commercially viable readership in Britain.

12 SIMON MACDONALD


Notably, the first issue of the Magazine of Paris contained little commentary on currentFrench events except for bare reports of official proceedings. Instead, the first two itemsprinted in the paper, taking up more than half of its column space, were journalisticallyredundant reprints: a translated chapter taken from Chamfort’s Tableaux historiques de laRévolution française; and a flattering second-hand essay on Charles James Fox.78 Both thesepieces were instalments in ongoing series items carried over from the final issues of theParis Mercury on 4 and 8 October 1792, apparently indicating that the Paris Mercury hadalso become significantly derivative by the time of its demise.

But it may be that the Paris Mercury/Magazine of Paris had also been handicapped bydeeper structural difficulties throughout their existence, and that these would haveapplied irrespective of the level of reader demand. When seeking to obtain Frenchgovernment support in October 1792, Taylor declared that, if circulation of the ParisMercury had been ‘freely permitted’ (‘librement permis’) in Britain, his labours would havebeen amply recompensed.79 This statement may be taken to imply that it had run intosome manner of official obstacles. Evidently, the paper was not subject to any outright ban;rather, Taylor’s remark may have referred to the various controls and taxes levied onnewspapers in Britain, or to the particular distribution difficulties which the Paris Mercuryfaced in the course of transit from Paris to its final recipients.

Postage costs were generally the chief expense involved in running an internationaljournal.80 In the case of Britain, a newspaper arriving from overseas required Post Officefranking to gain exemption from foreign mail charges, and the officials who had theprivilege of franking could be expected to levy a fee. There was also the possibility thatnewspaper deliveries might be held up on arriving at the Post Office in London. This was allthe more likely because Post Office clerks were in some measure invested in the establishedmedia system, which gave them the opportunity to acquire lucrative sideline incomethrough exploiting their control over the flow of newspapers from abroad entering Britain:in this officially tolerated malpractice, the contents of foreign newspapers were previewedin-house at the Post Office by those charged with their handling; summaries of items ofinterest were compiled, and these bulletins were then sold on to a cartel of domesticnewspapers in return for a standing fee.

This mechanism developed considerably in the years after 1789, and attempts tocircumvent it appear to have been largely thwarted.81 In this way, the supposed advantagesof importing news from abroad pre-packaged may have proved illusory, because the postalsystem within Britain was hardly a neutral medium. Its own monopolistic practices weretied up with those of the established London press’s conventional system of foreign newscoverage, and it was precisely this which the Paris Mercury hoped to pre-empt and surpasswith its rival model of direct reporting from the Continent.

These were not purely technical matters devoid of political considerations. As with TheArgus, mechanisms did exist by which the British authorities monitored imported papers,but in the first place this might take the form of routine surveillance at the Post Office,leaving relatively little archival trace. Accordingly, that the Paris Mercury does not seemto have been made subject to official censure in Britain may demonstrate that thestructuring of the newspaper import trade there made any such blatant interventionunnecessary. As the commentator ‘Englishman’ had noted in 1790, the governmentalready had a measure of control over the British press through a battery of ‘lawsseemingly made for other purposes’; similarly, the Post Office constituted anadministrative system by which the authorities placed certain tacit hindrances on thecirculation of imported papers, helping to ensure that these would remain a nicheconcern at best.82



Seen from this aspect, the Paris Mercury/Magazine of Paris can be said to present twomain historical points of interest. The first lies in the combination of circumstances whichmade such an enterprise conceivable, with the paper’s existence marking the outer limitsof the rhetorical and commercial possibilities which were opened up by the changingdynamics of British–French political and editorial circumstances in the early years of theFrench Revolution. But the venture is also remarkable for the nature of its demise and forwhat this reveals about the topography of the news market in Britain. Newspapercirculation in Britain depended on the medium of the postal system, yet postal officials alsooperated what amounted to a foreign-news syndication business, and this alignmentbetween the interests of the postal authorities and domestic newspaper proprietors meantthat Britain was effectively insulated against any serious extraterritorial challenge. Indemonstrating the potency of this established framework, the failure of the Paris Mercury/Magazine of Paris indicates the extent to which the dissemination of international news inthe British press was subject to discreet and semi-official filtering processes. Morespecifically, it elucidates some of the ways in which the range and balance of news coverageavailable to British audiences regarding current events in France were channelled andconstrained; the resulting patterns of news provision, in turn, had a formative role indetermining what kind of British debate about the French Revolution was possible.

NOTESThis article is based on research funded by an Entente Cordiale scholarship and an Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council doctoral award. The author is greatly indebted to assistance from Dr Lawrence E. Klein, DrAlexandra Bamji, Professor Simon Burrows, Dr Melissa Calaresu, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, Professor PeterMandler and Professor Robert Tombs.

1. Jeremy D. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s ‘Gazette de Leyde’ (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1989), p.50.

2. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998), p.25, 36-7, 140; Jeremy Black, ‘La presse britannique et la Révolution française’, inPierre Rétat (ed.), La Révolution du Journal: 1788-1794 (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la RechercheScientifique, 1989), p.316; The History of the Times: ‘The Thunderer’ in the Making (London: The Times, 1935),p.63.

3. ‘The Thunderer’ in the Making, p.42-3, 63; Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press: c.1780-1850 (London:Home and van Thal, 1949), p.69.

4. Oscar Browning (ed.), Despatches from Paris, 1784-1790, 2 vols, Camden 3rd ser., 16, 19 (London: RoyalHistorical Society, 1909-10), vol. II.254.

5. Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799 (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 1990), p.63-4.

6. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Some Paradoxes of the Eighteenth-Century Periodical’, inLüsebrink and Popkin (eds), Enlightenment, Revolution and the Periodical Press (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,2004), p.15; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ‘Horizons médiatiques et ouvertures interculturelles dans la presse audix-huitième siècle’, in Enlightenment, Revolution and the Periodical Press, p.27; Gilles Feyel, ‘La distribution desgazettes et des journaux, de 1740 à 1830’, in Feyel (ed.), La distribution et la diffusion de la presse du XVIIIe siècleau IIIe millénaire (Paris: Editions Panthéon-Assas, 2002), p.23-4.

7. The World (21 April 1792); Morning Chronicle (23 April 1792); The Star (25 April 1792); The World (27 April1792).

8. Paris Mercury (28 June [i.e. May] 1792). The month given in the dateline of the first issue is erroneous.9. See Emma Vincent Macleod, ‘British Attitudes to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal 50:3 (2007),

p.689-709.10. David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790-1793 (Columbia, MO:

University of Missouri Press, 1986); Madeleine B. Stern, ‘John Hurford Stone and the English Press at Paris’, inStudies in the Franco-American Booktrade during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries (London: Pindar Press,1994), p.97-149, 247-51.

11. Albert Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers: cosmopolitisme et défense nationale (Paris: La Renaissance duLivre, 1918), p.32.

12. Three issues of the Paris Mercury are held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France [hereafter BnF],shelfmark FOL-LC2-684: nos 3 (31 May-4 June 1792), 7 (14-18 June 1792) and 8 (18-21 June 1792). Two further

14 SIMON MACDONALD


issues of the paper are held by the University of Chicago Library, call no. fAN165.L8E5: nos 1 (28 June [i.e. May]1792) and 6 (11-14 June 1792).

13. Paris Mercury (14-18 June 1792).14. Paris Mercury (28 June [i.e. May] 1792).15. John Oswald, discussed further below, helped introduce this item for discussion at the Jacobins: see

François-Alphonse Aulard (ed.), La Société des Jacobins: recueil de documents pour l’histoire du club des Jacobins deParis, 6 vols (Paris: Jouaust, Noblet, Quantin, 1889-97), vol. III.618-23.

16. Paris Mercury (31 May-4 June 1792).17. Paris Mercury (11-14 June 1792). This sonnet, with the opening line ‘Full many a conflict hath my breast

essay’d’, was reprinted under Beresford’s name in Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the late Mrs Robinson, Written byHerself, ed. Maria Elizabeth Robinson, 2 vols (London: printed for Richard Phillips by C. Mercier, 1803), vol. II.239.On Beresford, see Phillip Allison Shelley, ‘Benjamin Beresford, Literary Ambassador’, Publications of the ModernLanguage Association of America 51:2 (June 1936), p.476-501; Stern, ‘John Hurford Stone’, p.109-11.

18. ‘An Anglican Minister, named Beresford, who had been the co-operator of an English paper which wasprinted at Paris in 1792, had no other livelihood, when his paper had fallen, than the kindnesses of Lord Gowerand of Mr. Fitz-Gerald’ (Archives Nationales [hereafter AN], AF III/517/227). This memorandum is unsignedbut contains autobiographical references which suggest that the author was Charles Théveneau de Morande.

19. When Elizabeth, countess of Sutherland, the ambassador’s wife, gave birth to a son, the paper reportedthis the following day: Paris Mercury, 31 May-4 June 1792.

20. Paris Mercury (31 May-4 June 1792). See Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, The Spirit of the French Constitution,or the Almanach of Goodman Gérard, for the year 1792, trans. John Oswald (’Sold by Ridgway Bookseller Londonand at the Printing Office of the Social Circle, Paris’, 1791).

21. Paris Mercury (14-18 June 1792).22. Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity in Early 18th-Century

England’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object,Text (London: Routledge, 1995), p.377, n.3.

23. Paris Mercury (11-14 June 1792); Paris Mercury (18-21 June 1792).24. Ian Maxted, The London Book Trade, 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone: Dawson,

1977), p.188. On Ridgway, see Ralph A. Manogue, ‘The Plight of James Ridgway, London Bookseller andPublisher, and the Newgate Radicals 1792-1797’, Wordsworth Circle 27:3 (Summer 1996), p.158-65.

25. Maxted, London Book Trade, p.7, 28, 243; Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics,1792-1814 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2000), p.67.

26. Maxted, London Book Trade, p.167; John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies ofRegicide, 1793-1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.622; F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 2 vols (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998-2006), vol. II.535.

27. Paris Mercury (28 June [i.e. May] 1792). This explanation was repeated in advertisements announcing thepaper’s first issue: see The Star (29 May 1792); Morning Chronicle (29 May 1792).

28. John Oswald, Review of the Constitution of Great-Britain (Paris: printed at the English Press by Gillet andCo. and sold at the Cercle-Social, 1792). A copy of this is held by the BnF, shelfmark 8-NG-41.

29. Jefferson Looney et al. (eds), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 6 vols (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2004-), vol. I.123; Thomas Gillet to Arthur Young, 25 July 1812, London, BritishLibrary [hereafter BL] Add. MS 35,131, fols 381-382.

30. The Universal British Directory of Trade and Commerce (London: printed for the patentees and sold byC. Stalker, and Brideoake and Fell, 1790), p.275.

31. [Thomas Archard], Suppression of the French Nobility Vindicated, in an Essay on their Origin, and Qualities,Moral and Intellectual. To Which is Added, a Comparative View of Dr. Smith’s System of the Wealth of Nations, withRegard to France and England (London: printed by T. Gillet for J. Debrett, 1792; [James Mackintosh], A Letter to theRight Honourable William Pitt, on his Apostacy from the Cause of Parliamentary Reform (London: printed by T. Gilletand sold by H. D. Symonds, 1792). Archard sent articles from Paris to the London press in 1791: see PublicAdvertiser (1, 3, 7 and 11 November 1791). He had substituted for the chaplain to the British ambassador in1789: see ‘A Register of Baptisms’ and ‘A Register of Marriages’, British ambassador’s chapel, Paris, entries for18 and 19 October 1789, National Archives, RG 33/58, fols 17, 24.

32. Establishing Gillet’s biography is hindered by the existence of a contemporary named Thomas SandersGillett, who was also engaged in cross-Channel ventures and who became an object of suspicion to the Britishgovernment. See Thomas Sanders Gillett, The Trial of Mr T. S. Gillett, formerly Merchant, of Bordeaux, Chargedwith Going to France Without a Passport, Contrary to the Third Article of the Traitorous Correspondence Act. With hisAddress to the Public, in Justification of his Conduct (London: printed for J. S. Jordan, 1796).

33. R. Taylor to [unknown], 12 October 1792, Paris, Archives des Affaires Etrangères [hereafter AAE],Correspondance politique [hereafter CP] Angleterre 582, fols 343-344.

34. Magazine of Paris (8-11 October 1792). The relaunched newspaper’s price, periodicity and base ofoperations remained unchanged; the editorial small print gave the production address as ‘the English Printing-office, No. 1412, Rue Notre Dame des Champs’, with no reference made to Gillet or Gueffier or to London stockists.Continuity of publication remained unbroken, with items being carried over from the final two issues of theParis Mercury, dated 4 and 8 October 1792, to the inaugural issue of the Magazine of Paris. This implies that atotal of forty issues of the Paris Mercury were produced.



35. Morning Chronicle (3 November 1792).36. See Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, p.96.37. Charles Popham Miles (ed.), The Correspondence of William Augustus Miles on the French Revolution, 2 vols

(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1890), vol. I.333-4.38. ‘Papier Nouvelle ou Gazette en faveur de l’humanité à Londres’, unsigned memorandum dated 20

September 1792, AAE, CP Angleterre 582, fol. 192.39. Dépot de bail, Antoine Schnetz/Robert Taylor, Paris, AN, Minutier central, ET/XVIII/953, 9 brumaire an

4 [31 October 1795], enclosures dated 2 and 3 ventôse an 3 [20 and 21 February 1795].40. AN, T* 1147/2, fol. 44.41. Journal de la Liberté (12 May 1790), p.1-2. In 1787 Marshall had established his family at Paris, opening a

shop in the rue des Fossés Saint-Germain-des-Prés: see Marshall dossier, AN, F7 4774/36; ‘A Register ofBaptisms’, British ambassador’s chapel, Paris, entry for 21 September 1788, baptism of Ann Marshall, daughterof Thomas and Dorothy Marshall, National Archives, RG 33/58, fol.23.

42. A copy of this prospectus is held by the BnF, shelfmark 8-LC2-277.43. See Pierre Rétat, Les journaux de 1789: bibliographie critique (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la

Recherche Scientifique, 1988), p.263-5.44. James Clark to Samuel Meeke, 26 September 1790, AN, T 779. For Marshall’s subsequent employment by

the banking house Boyd, Ker et Cie, see Marshall dossier, AN, F7 4774/36.45. Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, vol. I.369, 387; Monique Stern, ‘Lettres inédites de madame de Genlis à

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 169 (1977), p.191, 261-2.46. A copy of this prospectus is held in the Daniel Lysons collection at the BL, shelfmark C.191.c.16, vol. II.(I),

fol.86v.47. At the head of the stockists listed in the Universal Patriot’s prospectus had been ‘Oswald’, whose address

was given as the hôtel d’Angleterre in rue Montmartre. A pamphlet written by John Oswald, published in 1792,was presented by its author as a reworking of ‘outlines’ which had ‘appeared first in the month of May 1790

inserted in the UNIVERSAL PATRIOT, an English Paper printed at Paris, which the British Ministry were at somepains to suppress’ (Oswald, Review of the Constitution of Great-Britain, p.3). An earlier iteration of the claim thatthe British authorities had attempted to stifle the Universal Patriot appeared in a report in the Révolutions de Paris(8-15 January 1791), p.32.

48. Ivon Asquith, ‘James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790-1821’, PhD thesis, University of London,1973, p.16-23.

49. On the sale of the Morning Chronicle in revolutionary France, see Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel(9 November 1791); ‘Appercu de la situation de la Caisse des gazettes Etrangeres’, memorandum signed‘Arnaud’, 1 November 1793, AN, F7 4779.

50. Jeremy Black, ‘The Challenge of the Revolution and the British Press’, in Harvey Chisick (ed.), The Pressin the French Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), p.137, 139.

51. Madeleine Fabre, ‘Papiers Anglais (1760)’, in Jean Sgard (ed.), Dictionnaire des journaux: 1600-1789, 2 vols(Paris: Universitas, 1991), vol. II.1101-2; Edmond Dziembowski, Nouveau patriotisme français, 1750-1770: laFrance face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), p.178-82.See also Dziembowski, ‘Le peuple français instruit: Edme-Jacques Genet et la traduction des écrits politiquesbritanniques pendant la guerre de Sept Ans’, in Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows and Edmond Dziembowski,Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), p.175-88.

52. Eugène Hatin, Histoire politique et littéraire de la presse en France: avec une introduction historique sur lesorigines du journal et la bibliographie générale des journaux depuis leur origine, 8 vols (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et deBroise, 1859-61), vol. III.114-5. A prospectus-and-prototype was produced in October 1764; a copy of this isheld by the BnF, shelfmark 16-Z PIECE-1266. Copies of the second and third issues survive: see MarieKuhlmann, Inventaire des périodiques des bibliothèques de Strasbourg (Strasbourg: Bibliothèque nationale etuniversitaire, 1937), p.552.

53. Julian P. Boyd et al. (eds), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1950-), vol. XIII.246-7.

54. See Gunnar von Proschwitz and Mavis von Proschwitz, Beaumarchais et le ‘Courier de l’Europe’: Documentsinédits ou peu connus, 2 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990); Simon Burrows, ‘The Courier de l’Europe as anAgent of Cultural Transfer’, in Thomson et al., Cultural Transfers, p.189-201.

55. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution, p.54.56. Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1982).57. Simon Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London’s French Libellistes, 1758-92 (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2006), p.14-7.58. Browning, Despatches from Paris, vol. I.148.59. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution, p.161.60. François Moureau, Répertoire des nouvelles à la main: dictionnaire de la presse manuscrite clandestine XVIe-

XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), p.433; Paris newsletters addressed to William Eden, 1st BaronAuckland, 1786-1788, BL Add. MS 34,463; Alfred Cobban, ‘British Secret Service in France, 1784-1792’,English Historical Review 69:271 (April 1954), p.243.

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61. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of LouisXIV to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.152; Burrows, French Exile Journalism andEuropean Politics, p.18-9, 80-1.

62. Popkin, ‘Le Paris révolutionnaire dans le système journalistique européen’, in Rétat, La Révolution duJournal, p.111-2.

63. Robert Pigot[t], Liberty of the Press. A Letter addressed to the National Assembly of France, by RobertPigot, Esquire, late of Chetwynd in Shropshire, and published by their order, with notes and supplementafterwards added; and offered to the consideration of every Englishman (Paris [‘Printed for the Booksellersin London’], 1790), p.4-6, 15. A copy of the French-language version of this is held by the Library ofCongress (Thomas Jefferson Collection): Robert Pigot[t], Liberté de la presse ([Paris]: De l’Imprimeriede Veuve Herissant [1790]); the text was also printed in Brissot’s Le Patriote François (10 February1790).

64. Pigot[t], Liberty of the Press, p.15. On Montesquieu’s ‘prophecy’, see Michael Sonenscher, Before theDeluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007), p.44ff.; Keith Michael Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: SomeReflections’, in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley andLos Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p.220-1.

65. The World (6 August 1790); ‘An Englishman’, Letters on the Subject of the Proper Liberty of the Press. FirstPublished in the Paper of the World (London, printed for J. Ridgway, 1790), p.74.

66. ‘Englishman’, Letters, p.69.67. Accounts of the inauguration of the Friends of the Freedom of the Liberty of the Press include: The

Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (4 June 1791); The Oracle (4 June 1791); The Diary or Woodfall’s Register (4 June1791). That the ‘friends of the Liberty of the Press’ should form a ‘Club’ had been mooted as early as 1790: seeThe World (15 July 1790).

68. Martin John Smith, ‘English Radical Newspapers in the French Revolutionary Era, 1790-1803’, PhDthesis, University of London, 1979, p.224-30.

69. Burrows, ‘The Courier de l’Europe’, p.191-2.70. Jared Sparks (ed.), The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, 12 vols (Boston, MA: Nathan

Hale and Gray and Bowen; New York: G. and C. and H. Carvill; and Washington, DC: P. Thompson, 1829-30),vol. VII.159.

71. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution, p.41, 44-5, 49-50, 54-6, 150, 252.72. Mavis von Proschwitz and Gunnar von Proschwitz, ‘Launay, Louis de (?-1782)’, in Jean Sgard (ed.),

Dictionnaire des journalistes: 1600-1789, 2 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), vol. II.586; Harvey Chisick,The Production, Distribution and Readership of a Conservative Journal in the Early French Revolution: The ‘Ami du Roi’of the Abbé Royou (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1992), p.19-20, n.39.

73. The Trial of William Stone, for High Treason, at the Bar of the Court of King’s Bench, on Thursday theTwenty-Eighth, and Friday the Twenty-Ninth of January, 1796. Taken in Short-Hand, by Joseph Gurney (London: soldby Martha Gurney, 1796), p.83.

74. Paul Morande, ‘Un journal napoléonien de propagande: Lewis Goldsmith’, Revue des Deux Mondes(15 August 1938), p.787.

75. Francis Freeling to Thomas Pelham, 2nd Baron Pelham, 20 November 1802, BL Add. MS 33,110,fol. 179-182 (cited in Smith, ‘English Radical Newspapers in the French Revolutionary Era’, p.189).

76. John Hurford Stone to William Stone, 27 August 1792, National Archives, PC 1/19/27.77. The World (21 August 1792).78. Magazine of Paris (8-11 October 1792). The Chamfort extract was taken from the fourteenth chapter of

Tableaux; the piece on Fox had previously appeared in [Samuel Parr], ‘Preface to Bellendus’, in A Free Translationof the Preface to Bellendus, Containing Animated Strictures on the Great Political Characters of the Present Time(London: printed by Stafford and Davenport for T. Payne and Son, L. Davis, and J. Debrett, 1788), p.19-32.

79. Taylor to [unknown], 12 October 1792, AAE, CP Angleterre 582, fols 343-344.80. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution, p.115.81. Herbert Joyce, The History of the Post Office from its Establishment down to 1836 (London: Richard Bentley

and Son, 1893), p.174-5, 343-6; Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p.23-4; ‘The Thunderer’ in the Making, p.96-7.82. ‘Englishman’, Letters, p.69.

simon macdonald recently completed a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and a postdoctoral RomeScholarship at the British School at Rome. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for AdvancedStudies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and is writing a book on British communities in France inthe later eighteenth century.



English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France

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