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Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.3 (2004) 483-486



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The Eighteenth-Century French Periodical Press

University of Kentucky

Karin Angelike. Louis-François Mettra: Ein französischer Zeitungsverleger in Köln, 1770-1800 (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 2002). Pp. xii + 492. €59.00.
Pierre Rétat, dir. La Gazette d'Amsterdam: Miroir de l'Europe au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001). Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2001 (6). Pp. vii + 295.

Since 1980, eighteenth-century scholars have rediscovered a major aspect of the period's culture that had long been forgotten: the network of international French-language news publications that constituted the most sophisticated facet of Europe's political information system. As a result of this research, we now know that readers across the continent had access to well-informed, reliable newspapers that were largely uncensored, and we also know that the supposedly absolutist rulers of most European states in fact tolerated and sometimes encouraged the press. The two monographs under review here, testimony to the international and collaborative character of research in this field, add some significant new details to this now well-established picture. Pierre Rétat and his collaborators make a major contribution by showing that international gazettes were already important in the first half of the eighteenth century, earlier than the mid-century date which most scholars have taken as the start of the rise of an informed public opinion. Karin Angelike, for her part, looks at the last decade of this press system through a study of Louis-François Mettra, one of the important entrepreneurs who made it function.

For more than twenty years, Pierre Rétat has played a leading role in promoting scholarship on the role of the periodical news press in eighteenth-century French culture. This volume on the Gazette d'Amsterdam, a collaborative effort under his direction by a team of French, Dutch and Swiss scholars, most of them veterans of previous research efforts in the field, provides a "global history" of one of the period's major international French-language gazettes, from its origins in the period of the Huguenot exodus under Louis XIV to its demise during the revolutionary period a century later. A CD-ROM reprint of the full run of the Gazette d'Amsterdam, produced in conjunction with this volume, is an important new resource for research on the period. The Rétat team's monograph joins earlier works on other major eighteenth-century newspapers, such as the Gazette de Leyde, the Courrier d'Avignon, and the Courier du Bas-Rhin. This volume does not just fill in another gap in scholarship, however. Previous studies have concentrated on the second half of the eighteenth century; La Gazette d'Amsterdam concerns a paper whose era of greatest importance came in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Rétat and his collaborators show that the division of labor between the officially authorized Gazette de France and the foreign-based press, often interpreted as a response to the growing independence of public opinion after 1750, actually took shape during the reign of Louis XIV, with the active encouragement of the French government, and they demonstrate the importance of the Dutch gazettes in French politics and international affairs throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. [End Page 483]

The earliest known French-language newspaper published in Amsterdam appeared in 1620, eleven years before the foundation of Renaudot's Gazette in Paris, but the enterprise that would be known throughout Europe as the Gazette d'Amsterdam was only founded in 1691, after a period in which the Dutch authorities had tried to suppress such publications to avoid provoking Louis XIV. Descendants of the paper's founder, Jean Tronchin Dubreuil, a French-speaking Protestant born in Geneva who had spent many years in France, continued to own the paper until 1794, assuring its institutional continuity; its longevity was only surpassed by that of the Gazette de Leyde, founded in 1677. Although Tronchin Dubreuil had once been imprisoned in France, the paper he founded in Amsterdam was not...

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