Les Discours du journal: Rhétorique et médias au XIXe siècle (1836-1885) (review)

Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin's stimulating and original study of the mid-nineteenth-century French press starts out from a simple, and apparently limited, premise: that the period inherited a classical system of rhetoric that was still widely deployed across a range of sites, from the parliamentary tribune and the legal bench to the university auditorium and the church pulpit. The prestige enjoyed by oratory in the first half of the century, she argues, not only shaped the content of the daily paper, with its extensive accounts of parliamentary debates, academic perorations and the like, but also provided a discursive model imitated by the heterogeneous array of writers who contributed to the huge number of journals published in Paris. Perrin traces the complex dialectic between the language of parliamentary politics, highly codified in class terms at a time of limited suffrage, and the ways it was echoed in the press, both through direct reportage and through oratorical emulation in editorial content. She argues that this emulation of parliamentary discourse and a critical distancing from it, which coexist within the daily press, contributed to a gradual erosion of the prestige of classical oratory, increasingly vulnerable to being dismissed as an artificial, self-conscious, and hollow performance. Particularly with the emergence of more accessible journals, such as Émile de Girardin's La Presse, the orotund period or erudite allusion ran the risk of alienating the reader or of being viewed as a hackneyed cliché, drawn from a shopworn stock of rhetorical tricks. By the time a truly mass daily press emerged with the appearance of Le Petit Journal in 1863, the rules of the game, Perrin argues, had changed irrevocably.

The consequences of these changes, as Perrin suggests, are substantial. Her central thesis is that the Second Empire sees the inception of a shift in focus away from the parliamentary chamber to the editorial office, as the press emerges as a more open, compelling, and responsive forum for political exchange than the cosseted environment of the debating floor. This in its turn facilitated the transformation of a largely inchoate and (other than in its insurrectionary moments) typically marginalized "foule" into a more politically empowered "public," for whom the newspaper provided a continually topical perspective on questions directly affecting the material and intellectual tenor of their daily lives. Such a new relationship itself spawned, and was facilitated by, the emergence of new, more complicit languages, closer to vernacular speech than the classical constructions of traditional rhetoric. Eventually, as Perrin shows, the very function of the newspaper was redefined as its language and its public changed: rather than presenting itself as a tribune, sharing the same language, aspirations and ideologies as the moneyed elite represented in parliament, the journal became a more pragmatic and accessible source of information, a clearing house that increasingly found room for everyday "faits divers" as well as the cogitations and debates of the nation's legislators. Arguing that the newspaper became a catalyst for public opinion, rather than forming or reflecting it, Perrin presents the nineteenth-century press as a crucial site of social integration.

Perrin's overall argument is persuasively and carefully presented, and looks beyond the language of the press to consider vital questions such as the loosely-professionalized nature of journalism, and the sources of its recruitment across a broad spectrum from indigent graduates to celebrated politicians and academics. The thesis is somewhat weakened by a tendency to return to a rather limited number of specific examples - Jules Vallès and the liberal Prevost-Paradol make repeated appearances, while Le Figaro serves as the journalistic example of choice. Equally, though she mentions its significance as a redoubt of oratorical excess, Perrin pays only glancing attention to the role of cultural journalism within the overall discursive economy of the French press. Given the importance of figures such as...