La Civilisation du journal: histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française auxix esiècle by Dominique Kalifa Philippe Régnier, Marie-ève Thérenty et Alain Vaillant (review)

Nothing summarizes the rapidity of the newspaper’s rise more succinctly than Judith Lyon-Caen’s brilliant evocation of the life of Victor Hugo in the first essay of La Civilisation du journal. In the year of Hugo’s birth (1802), the most widely circulated newspaper, the Journal des débats, had ten thousand subscribers. By the time of his death in 1885, Le Petit Journal claimed a readership of around six hundred thousand; priced at a single sou, it was transported to the provinces by rail. La Civilisation du journal traces such radical transformation. Indeed, this vast compendium of essays marks a further stage in the development of a recent strand of French studies concerned with mapping the inexorable rise of the mass press, interrogating the myriad connections between literature and journalism, and, more generally, outlining the ways in which the press shaped nineteenth-century French culture. In recent years, invaluable work has been undertaken by literary scholars, not least Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, alongside cultural historians, such as Dominique Kalifa, in a bid to reassess the role of the media in the period. Vast in scope, this volume brings together the research of over sixty scholars and represents a crucial contribution to these critical endeavours. Charting such diverse phenomena as the history of censorship (Vincent Robert) and the technological advances in the printing press (Gilles Feyel), La Civilisation du journal also offers an encyclopedic analysis of the multiplicity of genres associated with the nineteenth-century périodique (le quotidien, la presse départementale, la presse féminine, among many others), its principal forms (l’article de tête, le feuilleton, les faits divers), and critical figures (as varied as George Sand, Léo Lespès alias Timothée Trimm, Émile Zola). Despite such scope, however, the project is united by common concerns: at its heart lies the goal of producing a cultural history of the nineteenth-century press in contrast to those studies concerned above all with the relationship between the media and politics. Referencing Lucien Febvre’s notion of the ‘civilisation du livre’ in their title, the editors aim to invert Georges Weill’s attempts to gauge the impact of civilization on the emerging press, foregrounding instead the implications of the rise of the press for ‘la marche de la société’ itself (p. 7): ‘Un des enjeux majeurs d’une histoire culturelle de la presse consiste donc à évaluer le rôle des périodiques et de leur appropriation dans l’émergence des identités sociales, professionnelles, génériques, politiques, etc., dont le siècle accouche’ (p. 13). This objective provokes a number of interrelated lines of enquiry: how did nineteenth-century French society, in all its diversity, comprehend its encounter with the press? How, furthermore, did such social diversity itself come to be defined by the press? Coherent and wide-ranging, sensitive to the imbrication of literature and journalism, and, finally, detailed in its analysis of the rapid transformation of the press alongside the culture that emerged in its wake, La Civilisation du journal will prove an essential resource for students of the nineteenth-century press.