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Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 86 (1971)

Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 86

(1971)– [tijdschrift] Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The role of the Dutch Republic as the intellectual entrepôt of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
G.C. Gibbs

As is well known, the Dutch republic played a crucial role in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and in the first decades of the eighteenth century, in making known to the rest of Europe the literary, philosophical, and scientific achievements of England1.. As is equally well known, in their role as intellectual carriers, the Dutch did not confine their services to the diffusion of English culture. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, indeed, the Dutch republic made itself the unquestioned intellectual entrepôt of Europe2.. The Dutch book trade - then at its apogee - had taken the whole of Europe for its market, and gone beyond Europe. Books printed in the Dutch republic, and especially bibles, atlases, devotional, and professional books, were produced cheaply and in large quantities from numerous printing presses3.. The province of Holland alone in 1675 possessed nearly 200 presses4.. Amsterdam by the middle of the seventeenth century had outdistanced both its Dutch and its European competitors to become, and to remain for the rest of the century, the most important centre for the production of books in Europe, boasting over 270 booksellers and printers in the

period 1675 to 1699, and in the establishment of William Janszoon Blaeu, a specialist in atlases, boasting also what is alleged to have been the most modern, and the best equipped printing house in Europe in the seventeenth century5.. In relation to the degree of dominance achieved in Europe by Dutch books these figures, as has been suggested6., are perhaps striking less for what they say about the size of the Dutch book industry than for what they imply about its efficiency. Nevertheless, even as they stand, the figures are striking, pointing as they do to a degree of concentration in book-making and bookselling which, given the population of the province of Holland, was without equal elsewhere in Europe at the time. In part this ascendancy enjoyed by the Dutch book trade was simply a natural byproduct of overall Dutch economic ascendancy. Thus the cheapness of sea transport in the seventeenth century, certainly sea transport as practised by the Dutch, conferred upon the Dutch book trade advantages similar to those enjoyed by other branches of Dutch trade. The provision of paper for the Dutch book industry in the seventeenth century illustrates the point. Until the last decade or so of the seventeenth century, when a combination of wars, heavy taxes, and the emigration of many Huguenots associated with paper manufacture seriously damaged the French paper-making industry7., an important source of Dutch supplies of the finest white paper, suitable for books and engravings, came from Angoulême, from mills worked by Dutch capital8.. Angoulême paper was available much more cheaply to the Dutch book industry, whence it was brought by a relatively simple river and sea journey, than it was to the French book industry, which, in fact, was obliged in the course of the seventeenth century to renounce its use because of the crushing costs imposed by a combination of complicated internal carriage and a variety of duties9.. At the same time, however, it has to be admitted that dependence upon foreign suppliers had its disadvantages, exposing the Dutch paper industry and the Dutch book industry to the hazards of an irregular and sometimes dilatory traffic, and even occasionally of losing altogether their supplies of raw materials at a time of war, or when foreign governments prohibited exports of raw materials to the republic10.. Yet, as it often does, necessity proved the mother of invention, stimulating the Dutch paper industry, with Huguenot assistance, to manufacture

for itself the finer grades of printing paper formerly imported from France - even to export printing paper to France11., and stimulating the Dutch book industry in the seventeenth century to the development of one of the most striking and influential technical and cultural innovations of the age - the small format book, the seventeenth-century equivalent of a paper-back revolution12..

In larger part, however, the ascendancy of the Dutch book trade derived from the same general factors, and the same combination of general factors, as produced its overall economic ascendancy. The geographical situation of the Dutch republic - its central position at the mouths of three great rivers, at the cross-roads of the principal sea and land routes of Western Europe - conferred advantages which were as readily exploitable for the exchange of ideas and information as they were for the exchange of goods, amongst which, it may be noted, Dutch books were a valuable commodity of exchange13.. Moieover, just as in general terms Dutch economic life profited from an influx of Flemish immigrants, whose capital, expertise, and contacts became available to enrich the newly established republic, so too the Dutch book trade in particular derived profit from the influx first of Flemish, and later of French printers and booksellers, among them the founder of the greatest of Dutch printing houses, Louis Elsevier, the child of Louvain and of Antwerp14..

Nor does the parallel with overall Dutch economic ascendancy end there. Just as in the wider economic sphere the Dutch republic profited from a particular and favourable conjunction of international circumstances, which diverted and diminished the competition of other potentially stronger European states, so too in their role as the intellectual carriers of Europe, the Dutch profited in the seventeenth century from two major changes in the cultural life of Europe. The first was the interruption and subsequent re-orientation of normal cultural relations, and of the usual channels of learned intercourse, between the Latin world and the German world, consequent first, upon the decline of the Venetian book trade, and then, and much more importantly, upon the decline of the German book trade, virtually destroyed by the 30 Years War15.. The second, to which a reference has already been made, was the extraordinary popularity of small format books in the second half of the seventeenth century, whose production was a response not only to the economic necessities of the book trade, which faced in the middle of the

century a crisis situation, but a response also to a changed intellectual climate which expressed itself in a growing demand for quality vernacular literature available in a form that would make knowledge more digestible and more accessible. The small format book met or was intended to meet these needs16.. The Dutch came to specialise in its production and to achieve an unquestioned supremacy in the field. This supremacy, it may be added, owed not a little to their technical ingenuity in developing a special ink which made legible the minute characters necessary for the composition of such books. Not unnaturally the secret was soon coveted by other countries, its acquisition, indeed, forming the object of a special instruction by the French government to its ambassador in the republic in 164017..

 

Whether or not the French ambassador in 1640 succeeded in his mission I am not able to say. It would be wrong to assume, however, that Dutch ascendancy in the production of books in the seventeenth century is to be explained simply in terms of certain general economic and cultural trends, of entrepreneurial skill and drive, and of technical ingenuity. The character of Dutch society also counted for a great deal. It was by the standards of the day a well-educated society, and a society which, it is agreed, enjoyed in the seventeenth century, and had long since previously enjoyed, a relatively high level of literacy18.. In general terms this situation, which of course made for a relatively large reading public, may be regarded as having been the product at once of the republic's character as a highly urbanized commercial nation and of its character as a protestant nation. In referring in this context, however, to the protestantism of the Dutch republic more is involved than an acknowledgement of what has been often described as the essentially literate character of protestantism, and of the need it faced everywhere first to create, and then to nourish, an educated ministry and an educated laity. What lent special force to the educational needs of protestantism in the Dutch republic was perhaps the fact that for so long it was a minority religion - even in 1650 protestantism probably accounted for less than half of the population -, and also perhaps the fact of its contiguity with the Spanish Low Countries, the ideological frontline of the Counter-Reformation in the early seventeenth century, from whose printing

presses poured forth a mass of catholic and anti-protestant literature, which in one way or another had to be countered19..

But the production of books requires authors as well as readers, and here again the character of Dutch society, and of Dutch government, was important. The relative tolerance of Dutch society, and the particularist character of the Dutch state, encouraged, where it did not suffer, a greater liberality in the expression of opinions than existed elsewhere in Europe at the time, and thus attracted to the republic not only technicians and entrepreneurs, whose energies and skills, as has been noted, contributed much to the Dutch book industry, but also many writers. The republic, indeed, became in the seventeenth century, to quote the words of a seventeenth-century writer, ‘the Mecca of authors’20.; a chosen home for scholars seeking peace in which to pursue their work, and an enforced refuge for successive waves of erudite and practised controversialists of all religious and political persuasions, among them, for example, French Jansenists and French Huguenots fleeing from the persecution of Louis XIV, and Swiss Calvinists seeking escape from the straight-jacket of the Consensus Helveticus21.. The republic of letters, it is true, transcended all boundaries, but in the United Provinces it came nearest to achieving a territorial expression. In particular, by fostering and habitually practising a free trade in the circulation of erudition, the United Provinces performed an invaluable service to European scholarship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Dutch booksellers, with agents, contacts, and branches in the rest of Europe, facilitated the exchange of bibliographical information amongst scholars, as well as of books and other materials22.. Following the fashion set by the French Journal des Savants and the English Philosophical Transactions, which, indeed, had inspired a general European upsurge of erudite journalism, Dutch learned journals, like the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, by providing reviews and notices of

books, made available to a wider audience, and as a service to the reading public, what had been previously available only to a small minority of scholars as a private act of courtesy towards customers23.; available, that is, not only to an élite of book producers - thus incidentally relieved of some of the tedium of letter-writing by which hitherto they had attempted to keep themselves informed of developments in the world of scholarship24. -, but also to a growing body of book ‘consumers’, hungry - as in the case of the noblesse d'épée in France, and their wives - for literary and scientific news, but sometimes too busy, or too lazy to read the books themselves25.. Though clearly growing, however, it is arguable that the market for learned journals was not unlimited in the late seventeenth century. Cut-throat rivalry, for example, existed between the Journal des Savants and Bayle's Nouvelles de la République, to the point of prompting the Journal on one occasion deliberately to pass on inaccurate information to the Nouvelles about a conference of numismatists in order to have the pleasure subsequently of condemning its falsity26..

Even more striking, however, than the contribution of the United Provinces to learned journalism in Europe was its contribution to political journalism, and, in the first place, in the shape of newspapers.

To speak with any degree of real authority about the origins and early development of newspapers in the Dutch republic during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is at the moment impossible. Such is the present state of ignorance that in many cases, and for long stretches of time, it is difficult to establish much more, or anything more, than that a newspaper existed or probably existed. Newspapers appear, disappear, and reappear like the Cheshire Cat, and

they appear usually as through a mirror, reflected in the correspondence of a foreign diplomat at The Hague moved to protest at some item contained in a newspaper, or reflected in the resolutions of the States General, the provincial estates, and the towns, acting in consequence of some foreign diplomatic protest. Nor is it likely, given the apparently poor survival of early newspaper files - or at least their apparently poor survival in the Netherlands itself - that we shall ever be able to reconstruct with any degree of fullness and sustained accuracy the early history of individual Dutch newspapers. What is certain, however, is that until the elementary basis for the effective study of such newspapers has been provided - namely, a published catalogue of the holdings of early newspapers - we are not even in a position to know what can be known and what can never be known. The compilation of such a catalogue would without doubt be a mammoth task, which would of necessity take the whole of Europe for its oyster. Files, it seems, might turn up anywhere. They certainly exist in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, and the Bibliothèque Mazarin at Paris27., whilst in recent years the most substantial find, of an extensive and unequalled collection of the earliest Dutch newspapers, has been made in the Royal Library, Stockholm. The collection had at some stage been transferred there from the Royal Record Office, where presumably the papers had been originally enclosed amongst diplomatic or mercantile correspondence, and they remained untouched until their discovery in 1938/9 by Folke Dahl28..

The task of compiling such a catalogue, though immense, however, would be rewarding, and is certainly long overdue. Attention was first drawn to its necessity over a hundred years ago in what is still a pioneering study - recently reprinted - by the French historian, Eugène Hatin, of the French language newspapers of the republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries29.. The hope, he there expressed30., of stimulating some Dutch scholar to do for all Dutch newspapers what he had begun for a section of them, has fallen very largely on deaf ears, and for a people which has made such a substantial contribution to the emergence and flowering of European journalism, Dutch scholars - certainly Dutch historians - have been strangely neglectful of the history of their newspapers, though there are recent and welcome signs of a renaissance of interest, embodied most strikingly in the foundation at Leiden of a periodical, Gazette, devoted exclusively to the

history of the press, that is the press of the world, in which some notable contributions have been recently made relating to the management and circulation of particular Dutch newspapers in the eighteenth century31..

Hatin, however, did inspire one notable Dutch disciple, W.P. Sautijn Kluit. Kluit, a lawyer by training but not by inclination, devoted the last twenty years of his life to elucidating the early history of Dutch newspapers, and left as his literary monument, or as part of it, a book, over 70 articles, and some 270 other minor contributions to newspaper history32.. His work has been characterised as arid and miniscule, ‘microscopisch-bibliographisch’33.. It is certainly not lively, and it is certainly limited, confined very largely to the external history of Dutch newspapers, to establishing their existence and something of their chronology on the basis of an extensive, but not systematic search through the resolutions of the estates and of the towns. Even so, however, he did perform an essential service, correcting and supplementing Hatin at many points. To criticise him, as has been done34., for having failed to consider the social significance of early newspapers is rather like criticising him for having been born too soon, for not being a twentiethcentury historian, and is of course based on the assumption that the newspapers were always there to be read; in many cases they were not. Moreover, notwithstanding the criticism, those few Dutch scholars who have subsequently worked in the field of early newspaper history have done little, until very recently, for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but regurgitate the findings of Kluit and of Hatin, admittedly in a more coherent, more perceptive, and more animated form than Kluit at least found possible35..

This lengthy period of disinterest by Dutch historians in their early newspapers has been regrettable as well as surprising, for newspapers have been, as was observed in 1804 by the German historian, August Ludwig von Schlözer, one of the most important instruments by which ‘we Europeans have become Europeans’36.,

and Dutch newspapers were amongst the earliest, and were certainly the most influential of such instruments. For whether or not in the long run it will be possible to sustain the present view that the Dutch republic was the birth-place of the modern European newspaper - whether or not, that is, Amsterdam will yield pride of place eventually to some Italian or German city37. - there can be no doubt that Dutch newspapers provided Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with much of its printed news of current events and, since the earliest European journalists were essentially and unashamedly pirates - in Bayle's phrase, ‘corsaires de la République des Lettres’ - they provided other European newspapers with much of their copy38..

It should perhaps be mentioned at this point that by Dutch newspapers is meant in this context all newspapers published in the Dutch republic, that is French language newspapers as well as Dutch language newspapers. At least five towns in the province of Holland by the end of the seventeenth century could boast of having, or of having had, a French language newspaper, Amsterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Utrecht, and Rotterdam, the last also possibly contemplating in 1718, if not actually possessing, an English language newspaper39..

These papers were usually directed by French Huguenot refugees whose situation, aptitudes, and needs ideally fitted them for the role of journalists40.. Indeed, it has been asserted, that of all the services performed by French Huguenot refugees in the republic of letters, none equalled the services they performed as journalists41.. Directed by Huguenot refugees, they were also in part addressed to them. The great Huguenot dispersion in Louis XIV's reign created a substantial, international audience of French exiles, scattered throughout Europe and beyond it. Estimates

of the numerical size of this dispersion vary enormously, and can never be very exact. The most recent estimate, which may err on the side of modesty, settles for a figure of c. 200,000 in the period c. 1680 to 1720, out of which an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 are held to have settled permanently in the same period in the Dutch republic42.. The margin of possible error is clearly large, but however that may be, there seems little doubt that the Dutch republic attracted the largest body of permanent Huguenot settlers in Europe43.. An indication of the impact they made upon the life of the republic is the fact that within the space of a mere five years - between 1684 and 1688 - the number of Walloon communities in the United Provinces almost doubled44.. The process, it has been argued, was tantamount almost to a reconstruction of protestant France in the Republic, ‘une seconde France sur la frontière même du royaume, mais une France libre’45.. Amongst these French expatriates, and among French expatriates elsewhere in Europe - or at least among the first generation of them - there existed a sense of community, and a hope of return some day to the land from which they had been separated, which quite naturally inspired among them a desire to be kept informed of what was happening in France, and in Europe generally; and this desire clearly contributed to the development in the Dutch republic of French language newspapers and periodicals.46.

But the audience to which these French language publications were addressed, and which read them, was clearly not confined, nor even largely confined to the Huguenot diaspora. Amongst Netherlanders themselves in the Dutch republic there existed in the seventeenth century a growing public literate in French, stimulated no doubt in their taste for things French by the presence of long-established Walloon communities, which acted as, and which were regarded as, centres radiating French culture47.. French of course had always been the language of the Orangist court - William the Silent, it is avowed, died with a French prayer on his lips - and the Orangist court acquired a pronounced French flavour under the Stadtholder, Frederick Henry48.. The language of most of Dutch scholarship, and

of Dutch education, it is true, remained Latin, but the opportunities to learn French were present in most towns of importance in the province of Holland before the middle of the seventeenth century, and by the end of the century plenty of opportunities to learn French were available at Dutch universities49.. The extent to which French had penetrated the élite of Dutch society by the end of the seventeenth century, indeed, has been strikingly illustrated in the analysis made by S.A. Krijn of the inventories of a hundred private libraries left by a miscellaneous group of Dutch theologians, scholars, jurists, and government officials who died in 1700. Most of their books, or at least most of their valuable books - for inventories may not always have listed the cheaper, small-format books -, were in Latin, but only 12 out of the 100 libraries were entirely without French books50.. The existence in the Republic of large numbers of French refugees, so many of them relatively speaking not only literate, but passionately literate, must surely have accelerated this spread of the French language, but it clearly did not begin or largely explain the process, which reflected above all the growth of French power, and of French cultural dominance in Europe under Louis XIV51..

It was in fact to the reading public of France that the French language newspapers were principally addressed52.. Their popularity in France - above all the popularity in the late seventeenth century of the so-called Amsterdam Gazette, the French language Amsterdam Courant - was unquestionable, even at prices greatly inflated by the costs of transmission53., and defied the persistent efforts of French governments to discipline their activities54.. Neither their popularity nor the failure to destroy it is surprising, when it is realised that profits of up to 300% per

copy were available to French post-masters who handled their distribution55., and that until the late eighteenth century the only competition in France itself came from the Gazette de France, an official publication, as jejeune and insipid as such official publications invariably were, and which in France did not even report the fall of the Bastille in 178956.. Such was the popularity, indeed, of the so-called Leiden Gazette in 1778 that the post director at Rotterdam felt obliged to complain to the compiler of the paper, the great Étienne Luzac, son of a Huguenot refugee, of the excessive weight of packages containing the newspaper, and to exhort him either to reduce the weight of the packages, or to bear the cost of another horse, or to get his newspaper reprinted in France57..

Whether or not his suggestions were accepted, and if so which of his suggestions, is not recorded, but in a sense he was preaching to the converted. French provincial printers seem to have reprinted the ‘gazettes de Hollande’ throughout the eighteenth century58.; nor were they alone in doing so. In the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, for example, the taste for the ‘gazettes de Hollande’, a title, which, it is argued, usually referred after 1672 to the French Amsterdam Courant59., appears to have become firmly established during the War of the Spanish Succession, so firmly established, indeed, that, after enduring a period of counterfeits, the city government of Geneva was led in 1712 to offer to the highest bidder the obviously lucrative monopoly of their sole printing and publishing60.. A similar situation arose in c. 1723 and again in 1737 in Liège where - presumably again for money, since the matter was determined by the chambre des finances - the reprinting of the ‘gazette de Hollande’ was made a recognized private monopoly61.. Later in the eighteenth century, in 1786, it was the proud boast of a Viennese newspaper that it could within six hours of its arrival in Vienna reproduce the Leiden Gazette62..

It was a striking tribute to the reputation which the paper had by then acquired

under the direction of Étienne Luzac of being the best informed newspaper in Europe. But long before 1786 the superiority of Dutch newspapers in Europe had been convincingly acknowledged, and perhaps one of the most convincing illustrations of this fact was the founding at Potsdam in 1744 of the Observateur Hollandois, a paper which had nothing to do with Holland, but which attempted to invest Prussian journalism with something of the reflected glory of Dutch journalism63..

It will be clear, therefore, that the French language newspapers published in the Dutch Republic soon came to command a widespread European audience which transcended confessional, national, and even linguistic boundaries64.. For their contents were not concealed even from those who could not read French. In Spain, for example, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century - that is during a period when it is often asserted that Spain was a closed society - Castilian editions of newspapers, printed, published, and translated in Amsterdam, were, it seems, both widely diffused and highly regarded65.. In Italy too there circulated in the last quarter of the seventeenth century an Italian Courant similarly produced at Amsterdam, as well as, in the eighteenth century, the French language Utrecht and Amsterdam Courants66..

European governments, it is true, commonly reviled Dutch newspapers - in truth they reviled all newspapers - for being scandalous and inaccurate, and newspapers of the day, it is also true, were commonly both. To list the complaints of European governments, even on the basis of the present very inadequate documentation, is, indeed, to compile a gazeteer of Europe. In the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries diplomatic representations prompted by some matter appearing in a Dutch newspaper were made - and often made more than once - by the courts of England, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Poland-Saxony, and Russia, by the Crown-prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Elector Palatine, the Elector of Cologne, the Papacy, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, and the cities of Lubeck, Schaffhausen, and Nuremberg, the last expressing

indignation at the threat to its tourist trade and economic welfare created by a report that a particularly foul pestilence was about to descend upon the city67.. Whether the complaints of governments or of diplomats may be taken to indicate the extent to which Dutch newspapers circulated amongst the reading public of Europe is not easy to determine; they could simply indicate the assiduity with which foreign diplomats at The Hague and elsewhere scanned Dutch newspapers, and subsequently informed their governments of their contents. Even so, however, the complaints are a valuable pointer to the circulation of Dutch newspapers amongst the governments of Europe and of their indispensability to diplomats, and they also provide some measure of the importance which contemporary governments set upon them, for there would seem to be little point in protesting at what was unread or disregarded.

Nor is it easy, in this regard, always to reconcile the public denigration of newspapers by governments with their private efforts to control their contents and to ingratiate themselves with their compilers. In 1775, for instance, Baron von Thulemeyer, the Prussian minister at The Hague, approached Étienne Luzac with a

request not to mention in his paper Prussia's interest in Danzig and Thorn68.. The following year Thulemeyer protested at the inclusion in the Leiden Gazette of a report on the second mission of Prince Henry of Prussia to St. Petersburg, which asserted - not unfairly69. - that he had not been able to fulfil entirely the objects of his mission. To the Baron this was ‘une insolence inconcevable’, and deserved to be punished by the suspension of the paper for six weeks, as

le seul moyen d'en imposer pour l'avenir à cet homme, qui dans son réduit, se croit autorisé à décider en dernier ressort des intérêts des Puissances les plus respectables de l'Europe, autant que de leurs desseins, et de leurs liaisons politiques70..

 

Luzac must have become accustomed eventually to being alternately courted and cursed. In 1770 he was awarded a medal by the king of Poland for his reportage of Polish affairs; in 1774 his paper was ordered by the Polish Diet to be burnt by the common hangman in the four quarters of the city of Warsaw71.. At least he could have found consolation in the fact that whatever form attention took, he could never be ignored.

Luzac, it is true, was a journalist of quite exceptional stature in his day, and the incidents admittedly relate to a period of marked advance in the development of national and relatively independent newspapers in Europe, at least in the wealthier and better educated parts of Europe. But the pressures he experienced, and the problems his activities posed for European governments were far from being new in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. From their beginnings newspapers, especially Dutch newspapers, had been not only reviled, but feared, and often highly prized for the information they purveyed, and not least by governments. Even a ruler with as well-organised an intelligence service - by the standards of the day - as Louis XIV found newspapers, that is Dutch newspapers, a useful supplement, sometimes an unwelcome corrective, to information conveyed by the usual diplomatic channels72.. At times, even for the great powers, even in matters of immediate concern to their fundamental interests, the earliest intimation of important events might come, not from their own diplomats on the spot, but from Dutch newspapers. In 1729, for example, the Habsburg government of Charles VI received its first notice of the conclusion of the Treaty of Seville, which formally

destroyed the Habsburg alliance with Spain cemented at Vienna in 1725, from Dutch newspapers73..

If such services could be provided by newspapers for the established great powers, then it is clear that for the smaller European powers, less well-equipped to secure intelligence via their own diplomatic agents, newspapers must have constituted for some areas of Europe a substitute for the normal diplomatic or commercial representation. Such was undoubtedly the case in Genoa, in Savoy, and in the Prussia of Frederick William I who, indeed, made a regular practice of placing Dutch newspapers upon the Table of his ‘Tobacco parliament’ for the perusal of his ministers74.. The same need to be informed also exercised the foreign ministries of emergent great powers. In the late years of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth century, for example, down to 1718, when it became the College of Foreign Affairs, the Posolskii Prikaz (the Department of Embassies) in Russia appears to have taken in at least seven newspapers published in the Dutch republic, and also employed in scanning foreign newspapers what is alleged to have been the largest body of translators of any foreign ministry in Europe at the time75..

Of course, as the Thulemeyer incident in 1776 illustrates, not all the information purveyed in Dutch newspapers was welcome to governments. Much of the vilification of Dutch newspapers, indeed, many of the diplomatic representations, arose precisely because of disclosures of information concerning current diplomatic negotiations held by the powers concerned to have caused serious embarrassment to the normal diplomatic processes. One such type of disclosure was that made deliberately by a government in an effort to influence the course of a particular negotiation. A good illustration is provided by an episode in Anglo-Dutch relations in 1713, and concerns the disclosure of certain information by the Dutch government to Dutch and English newspapers relating to the peace negotiations then being conducted for the Peace of Utrecht, and it constituted from the English point of view the climax to a succession of such leaks, the final and unendurable example of popular diplomacy. Let Bolingbroke describe the episode and his exasperation in his own words.

The Flying Post of the 31 inst. which goes enclosed, will lett your Lordships see that the factious party here had communication as soon as the Queen of the Resolution of the States.
Since I came thus far I have had The Flying Post of yesterday brought to me, which I send enclosed. In it your Lordships will see that severall articles of the project are printed, with a malicious Translation added to them. It is certain that the Copy did not come from me, and it is as certain that it could not be given by your Lordships and therefore it must have been communicated by the States, as other things have been before. This is such usage as the Queen can by no means submit to. If projects of solemn Treatys under debate, if papers of the highest consequence unsigned must be given out to be published in Libells and scandalous newspapers, these proceedings are not to be endured, and we must break off all correspondence with the Dutch76..

Not all the leakages of diplomatic information which appeared in Dutch newspapers were so deliberate, and so deliberately contrived as this. Frequently the Dutch were victims not manipulators, suffering rather than exploiting the existence of a free or relatively free press, with the States General and the provincial Estates registering their displeasure in words which often precisely echoed the sentiments expressed above by Bolingbroke77.. A certain amount of what might be called natural leakage was inevitable, and came to be accepted as inevitable, in a country whose gazeteers made a habit of maintaining regular, direct correspondence with the personnel of Dutch embassies abroad78.. In 1704, indeed, the problem reached such a peak of vexation that the States General issued an order to all Dutch diplomats abroad requiring them to take an oath to promise and swear that they would not send any information to gazeteers or others, or correspond either directly or indirectly with such persons, or with other persons, about affairs of state without the knowledge and authority of those in whose service they were employed79.. The effort proved unavailing, and further prohibitions followed80.. The fact that in the Dutch Republic itself the constitution gave to every province the right to ask for copies of nearly all secret documents81. exposed the conduct of Dutch foreign policy to an unusually large and uncomfortable degree of publicity. Furthermore, the fact that newspapers were ultimately the responsibility

of the towns in which they were published meant that in the last resort the towns judged and punished offenders.

Both the practice of publishing diplomatic documents, and the difficulties involved in curbing this licence in a republic of sovereign provinces and nearly sovereign towns, are succinctly illustrated in an incident which occurred in 1753 when, it seems, that the Leiden, Hague, and Utrecht Courants carried word for word, only days after its signature, some articles of a treaty of commerce concluded between the King of the Two Sicilies and the United Provinces. The attention of the States General was drawn to the matter by the deputies of Friesland, and the States General instructed the deputies of Holland and Utrecht to pursue the matter, and bring the offenders to punishment. By the time the matter had been raised in the provincial estates, however, the rest of the treaty had also been published82.. Nor was it perhaps always a question of protection being provided by the natural, and sometimes exaggerated slowness of decision-making in the Dutch republic. In the course of time newspapers must have come to be regarded as valuable sources of municipal revenue, since they were licensed monopolies, allowed to operate only upon the payment of a substantial recognition fee, sometimes used to finance the local poor-house83.; and those who petitioned for these licences, it seems, came to include influential local notables84.. In these circumstances newspapers must have become symbols of municipal pride as well as providers of municipal revenue, and for these reasons less susceptible to control from outside. Furthermore, to the protection provided by the particularisms of the Dutch republic had to be added at times a defensive wall of technicalities constructed by the ingenuity of journalists. When in 1691 the States of Holland ordered that no French Courants were to be printed or sold in the province, a prohibition that was shortly after extended to the whole republic, journalists countered by offering publications described as French translations of Dutch Courants85.. In the last resort the inability to maintain secrecy, or at any rate the extreme difficulty frequently experienced in conducting foreign policy secretly, was something the Dutch state had to live with. It was, in the laconic words of the deputies of Amsterdam in 1682 - ‘een foiblesse in de regeringh, daer mede de Republicq was ge-

boren’86.. It was also something other states had to live with. Their pressures might succeed in prevailing upon the authorities in the republic to take action from time to time against particular gazeteers, but the relief obtained always proved short-lived. The Dutch, remarked Pomponne, the French ambassador at The Hague in 1670, on the occasion of an official French representation to the States General against the licence of certain Amsterdam newspapers, would give up almost anything rather than give up their gazettes ‘qui font l'entretient des chariots et des bateaux’87..

It is clear, therefore, that for a variety of reasons Dutch newspapers were compulsory reading for the governments of Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for their officials at home, for their diplomats abroad, and also apparently for those who entertained pretensions to employment in high offices of state88.. But the audience for newspapers was not confined to governments and their higher officials. To merchants also they provided a valuable service in noting the movements of ships and of fleets, and in describing the conditions of countries with which they traded. To English M.P.'s during the parliamentary recess they constituted a vital means of keeping abreast with current events, especially events relating to foreign policy, and, whilst parliament was sitting, they often anticipated or supplemented information provided by the crown and its ministers89..

But newspapers also contributed powerfully to the new vogue for contemporary history characteristic of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, it is difficult to see how contemporary history could have been written without the existence of newspapers. In this connection it is worth noting that The London Magazine in 1733 promulgated a kind of thirty day rule. News, it claimed, was

the return of intelligence by the posts. But all transactions of a month's standing, are, long within that time recorded in the Secretary of State's Office, then, by the Law of Nations, become Memorials and all future Recitals of them, fall under the proper, and only, Denomination of HISTORY90..

A number of contemporary works passed for history under that ruling, often written - not surprisingly - by journalists making use of their access to the raw materials of contemporary history, and their experience in handling them.

The late Professor Mark A. Thomson had some perceptive remarks to make about this new interest in contemporary history in the context of early eighteenthcentury English history, and cited a couple of its early English practitioners91.. But of course the phenomenon was European, not simply English. I cite four examples, not just to make the general point, but to make the particular point about the connection between newspapers and contemporary history. The first three are taken from the United Provinces - all of them concern first or secondgeneration Huguenots - and the fourth is taken from France.

Henri Philippe de Limiers was born in the United Provinces of French Huguenot parents who had fled from France for religious reasons during the reign of Louis XIV. He wrote in 1717 a seven part Histoire du règne de Louis XIV, based, it was alleged by contemporary journalists, almost entirely upon newspapers: ‘M. Limiers pille les gazettes, et, nous autres gazetiers, nous nous pillons les uns et les autres; c'est la mode92.’. Whether or not the allegation is true I am not in a position to judge, but certainly the work could not have been based on much else if, as de Limiers himself claimed, the seven parts took only seven months to write up93.. His own claim at least rings true, for de Limiers was anything but a constipated scholar. Equally true the time was well spent. The work was reprinted within a year in a revised, corrected, and much enlarged edition, and was reprinted again in 1719 and 1720; and it presumably counted as one of the services to contemporary history to which the town of Utrecht referred in 1724 when granting him the exclusive right of printing and publishing a Dutch and a French Utrecht Courant. By that time, however, he had also under his belt a history of Sweden during the reign of Charles XII (1721), a history of the Institut des Sciences et des Arts de Boulogne (1723), and the Annales de la Monarchie Francaise, in three parts (1724). Nor was that all; at his death in 1728 he left in manuscript a six part history of his own times94..

De Limiers' predecessor as compiler and publisher of the Utrecht Courant was another Huguenot journalist who turned contemporary historian, François Michel Janiçon. Janiçon was born near Bordeaux in 1674, the eldest son of François Janiçon, a lawyer and deputy-general of the reformed churches in Guyenne. He fled from France at the age of nine and, after spending five years at Maestricht

studying, found a refuge and eventually a permanent home in the United Provinces, where his uncle, Michel Janiçon, a former Huguenot pastor at Blois, who had fled from France upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes, was a Walloon preacher at Utrecht. His uncle took him under his wing, and assisted his further education at the university of Utrecht. In 1692 he joined one of William III's French regiments, rising to the rank of aide-major in the regiment of de la Melonnière, and in 1699 saw service with his regiment in Ireland. Whilst in Ireland he is said to have studied at the university at Dublin, allegedly at the prompting, amongst others, of Dean Swift. Poverty, however, cut short his studies and forced him, as it forced other poverty-striken Huguenot refugees at the time, to accept a couple of tutorships to the children of unknown Irish families. He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1705 to inherit the estate of his uncle who had died in that year. Like many of his compatriots his aptitudes and experiences had made him a fluent linguist; he acquired a knowledge of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, as well as his native French. As a fluent linguist he was well-equipped to be a journalist, since a capacity to translate was an essential qualification for being a journalist at the time. He worked as a journalist first for the Rotterdam Courant, and was then invited by the magistracy of Utrecht to direct its newspapers. He remained at Utrecht with his wife and two daughters until he fell out with the city's authorities over some piece which he had apparently unwittingly published. He then became agent at The Hague for Charles, Landgrave of Hesse, and in honour of his patron, and to repay the debt he felt he owed to the Dutch Republic for having provided, as he said, ‘l'azile d'une multitude innombrable de Reformez’, he produced in 1729 and 1730 a scholarly and still valuable account of the government and institutions of the republic, its provinces, and the generality lands, entitled, État présent de la République des Provinces-Unies, the third volume of which was apparently nearly complete at his death in 173095..

A more substantial and a more celebrated Huguenot journalist-historian was Rousset de Missy. Born at Laon in 1686 - the year of the founding of the Mercure historique et politique, the highly influential monthly political periodical which he was later in his life to control for over twenty years -, Rousset was the son of indomitably protestant parents, who suffered persecution and, in the case of his

mother, posthumous execution for their steadfastness to their religion96.. At the age of eighteen he fled to the United Provinces and joined the Dutch army, seeing action at Malplaquet, after which he left the service to establish a school for young nobles at The Hague. In 1724 he found his métier as a journalist and contemporary historian. In that year appeared his Histoire d'Alberoni. Its success enabled him to renounce school teaching, and may have contributed to his appointment as compiler of the Mercure historique et politique, in which he was able to continue his fight against France, and French religious intolerance97., until his dismissal in 1749 for an attack upon the French king, Louis XV98.. It was soon after his first association with the Mercure historique, that he began, at the suggestion of Fagel and Slingelandt99., his Recueil historique d'Actes, Négotiations, Mémoires, et Traités, a still invaluable collection of treaties and other acts of state covering the period 1714 to 1748, designed not only as a service to future historians, but also to the contemporary eighteenth century public, which Rousset held had a right - c'est une Loi de l'État - to be instructed about decisions made in their name100.. The Recueil, one of more than twenty works of contemporary history which he wrote, and which contributed to the view that he could write more easily than most people could spit101., began in 1728 and ended in 1748, more or less, therefore, the period of his association with the Mercure historique, and the one, it is clear, must have fed the other, and both fed upon contemporary newspapers102..

Certainly contemporary history and contemporary journalism went hand in hand in the case of Donneau de Visé, the founder of the Mercure Galant, one of the earliest of the monthly periodicals and the longest surviving French periodical of the ancien régime. De Visé's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Louis le Grand, which appeared between 1697 and 1703, was, it has been alleged by his French biographer, a work of sustained self-plagiarism, culled entirely from past Mercures103..

In France, therefore, as well as in England and the United Provinces, the taste for contemporary history, and its practice by contemporary journalists, was clearly well established by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so well established that even professional academics seem to have shown at times a quite unprofessional sympathy towards it. One professor at least, at the university of Halle, offered at the end of the seventeenth century a course of lectures based on extracts from contemporary newspapers104.. But then Halle at the time was a new university.

It may be argued then that newspapers, even where they were not indigenous newspapers, were probably accessible to most business, professional, and public men, at least in Western and Central Europe, by the early eighteenth century, and that their accessibility was not confined always to these groups. In England during the first decades of the eighteenth century the reading habit had become, in the estimation of the Grub Street Journal in 1734, a ‘national insania’, corrupting the nation's morals and its economic welfare105., and the newspaper habit, according to a succession of European visitors to England in the years after the peace of Utrecht, had extended to - and in the estimation of governments had infected -, all ranks of society, even the lowest ranks of society106.. Nor was the popular infection apparently confined to England at the time. In 1676 appeared, very appropriately in Latin, what is claimed to have been the first scholarly published work on the use and misuse of newspapers, written by the German jurist, Ahasverus Fritsch[ius], complaining that the taste for newspapers had seized all groups in society, even peasants who picked it up on visits to the towns, or read out newspapers to their illiterate friends in their own villages107.. The story sounds like a case of over-reaction by the establishment, though even if it is, it remains a fact of some historical importance. But it may at least be argued - it has been argued108. - that the reading of newspapers was common among literate skilled craftsmen at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the degree of literacy among skilled craftsmen, especially among cobblers - members in Professor Le

Roy Ladurie's graphic phrase, of the eternal sansculotterie of history109. - is a phenomenon to which historians are paying increasing attention, and which would make a fascinating full-length study110..

One specific case of popular interest in contemporary affairs in Europe in the late seventeenth century has come my way. In the same way that the English diarist, John Evelyn, made a practice of copying extracts from contemporary newspapers into his diary111., and at about the same time, a much less celebrated diarist, a textile worker at Lille - a town which admittedly boasted a remarkably long tradition of free education. as well as from 1645 a Jesuit college, and which was also situated in an area of France, and of Europe, noted since early modern times, and throughout the ancien regime, for the relative superiority of its educational provision112. - a certain Pierre Chavatte, was also busy transcribing into his diary extracts from current ephemeral publications - separates and canards -, and keeping in touch by means of ‘lettres du passant’, with the siege of Vienna and the war against the Turk113., an episode which undoubtedly constituted one of the great inspirational forces behind the remarkable upsurge of European journalism in the closing decades of the seventeenth century.

Newspapers, however, by their very nature, because they appeared frequently, were somewhat undiscriminating in the information they published. For those

who wanted their news sifted and ordered, and available for subsequent reference, there was the political periodical, usually a monthly publication, devoted largely, usually exclusively, to a resumé of contemporary events. And whatever happens in the long run to the present claim of the United Provinces to be considered the birth-place of the modern European newspaper, there would seem to be no disputing its claim to be considered the birth-place of the monthly political periodical, which achieved in the last decades of the seventeenth century what was to prove to be an essential and enduring place in the intellectual life of Europe.

Regrettably, little is known in detail, or even in some cases in general outline, of the history of these early monthly political periodicals114.; certainly less than might be discovered from a systematic study of the periodicals themselves, and, in the case of periodicals published in the Dutch republic, from a search in the vast, largely unexplored, largely unchartered treasure trove of Dutch notarial and municipal archives. The editors and proprietors of these periodicals remain at the moment shadowy, at times almost invisible figures. On such questions as the sources from which the periodicals acquired their information, the means by which they acquired it, the accuracy, function, character, and impact of their news, the audience to which they were addressed, and which read them, we remain uninformed and ill-informed. The gap is a serious one, because the monthly political periodical not only reflected and fostered that growing spirit of cosmopolitanism, which has become increasingly recognised by historians as one of the distinctive characteristics of European civilisation in the age of Louis XIV115., but embodied that spirit in a particularly clear, compact, and influential form. Nevertheless, even in the present state of ignorance, certain general statements can be made.

The genre flourished in the United Provinces in the years after 1685 and owed much of its inspiration and early success to the efforts of Huguenot refugees who settled in the United Provinces shortly before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes116.. Its popularity was instantaneous, long-lasting, and widespread. Addressed in the first place specifically at ministers of state, ambassadors, deputies

of national and provincial assemblies, and merchants117., the political periodicals soon acquired a wider public. Scholars desired them and in Germany they often compiled them118.. There was, indeed, a European public willing to buy them. In Germany, at least in northern, central and protestant Germany, many imitations appeared, concentrated for the most part - until the middle of the eighteenth century - in the great university towns and centres of the European book trade, like Leipzig, Frankfurt, Halle and Jena, and spreading thereafter rapidly all over Germany, and constituting, it has been estimated, one third of all German periodical publications in the period c. 1670-1730119.. Periodicals published in the Dutch republic, however, enjoyed from the beginning, and long continued to enjoy, a specially revered position. In England, and in Ireland, periodicals existed which were mere compilations drawn from Dutch originals120.. In Spain and Italy, where indigenous political journalism was slow to take root and develop, the Dutch periodical had no rivals during the first half of the eighteenth century. An Italian translation of the Dutch Mercure historique et politique, for example, appeared in Venice from 1718 onwards, a Spanish translation in Madrid from 1738 onwards, modified to meet the requirement of Spanish censorship and, as the century progressed, modified also to include news from other sources121.. In that modified form it seems to have been regularly dispatched to Spanish America around the middle of the eighteenth century - some 60 copies per month -, and in Spain itself possessed about 1000 subscribers, drawn predominantly from rural areas, and consisting largely of the secular clergy, but also including a sprinkling of officials and nobles122.. Even in Germany, where competitors existed, the supremacy of Dutch periodicals appears to have been unassailable, at least in the first half of the

eighteenth century. In Prussia, for example, the import of Dutch periodicals, especially Lettres historiques, created such problems for the Prussian postal services that in 1701, and again in 1712, the government was obliged to prohibit their carriage by courier post123.. Also money was to be made out of them. When, for example, in 1715 Louis and Henry van Dole purchased the copyright of the Mercure historique et politique, they paid 40,000 florins, say £ 10,000 for the privilege124.. Moreover, even when its popularity was on the wane, as it seems to have been by or during the 1760's, when the copyright was sold for half the price it had brought in 1715, its influence continued, even beyond the life-span of the journal125.. Its view of the first Silesian War, for example, is held to have dominated the subsequent historiography of the war until the publication in 1788 of Frederick the Great's Histoire de mon temps126..

By 1788, however, the Mercure had been dead for a decade; its rival, Lettres Historiques, had died some forty years earlier. It was, if not a sign of the times, at least a straw in the wind. Just as Dutch economic decline in the eighteenth century was associated with the passing of a particular set of European conditions which had enabled the republic to achieve economic ascendancy in the previous century, so too its decline as an intellectual entrepôt, specifically its decline as a European news centre, may be associated with the growth of indigenous journalism elsewhere in Europe in the course of the eighteenth century, and especially during its second half. In both the economic and journalistic fields Britain was the immediate beneficiary, and British newspapers came to enjoy in the nineteenth century the kind of primacy in European eyes enjoyed in the seventeenth century, and for much of the eighteenth century, by the Dutch Republic127.. But the decline of the Dutch republic as an intellectual entrepôt is part of another, larger story, that of Dutch cultural decline in the eighteenth century, which still awaits its historian128..


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