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The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe

James Melton’s lucid and accessible study examines the rise of ‘the
public’ in eighteenth-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis
focussing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this
is the first book-length, critical reassessment of what Habermas termed
the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. During the Enlightenment the public as-
sumed a new significance as governments came to recognize the power
of public opinion in political life; the expansion of print culture cre-
ated new reading publics and transformed how and what people read;
authors and authorship acquired new status, while the growth of com-
mercialized theatres transferred monopoly over the stage from the court
to the audience; and salons, coffeehouses, taverns, and Masonic lodges
fostered new practices of sociability. Spanning a variety of disciplines,
this important addition to New Approaches in European History will
be of great interest to students of social and political history, literary
studies, political theory, and the history of women.

J A M E S V A N H O R N M E L T O N is Chair of the Department

of History at Emory University. He is author of Absolutism and the
Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria
(Cambridge, 1988), co-translator (with Howard Kaminsky) of Otto
Brunner’s Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval
Austria (Philadelphia, 1992), and co-editor (with Hartmut Lehmann)
of Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to
the 1950s (Cambridge, 1994).
NEW APPROACHES TO EUROPEAN HISTORY

Series editors
W I L L I A M B E I K Emory University
T . C . W . B L A N N I N G Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

New Approaches to European History is an important textbook series,

which provides concise but authoritative surveys of major themes and
problems in European history since the Renaissance. Written at a level
and length accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates,
each book in the series addresses topics or themes that students of
European history encounter daily: the series embraces both some of
the more ‘traditional’ subjects of study, and those cultural and social
issues to which increasing numbers of school and college courses are
devoted. A particular effort is made to consider the wider international
implications of the subject under scrutiny.
To aid the student reader scholarly apparatus and annotation is light,
but each work has full supplementary bibliographies and notes for fur-
ther reading: where appropriate chronologies, maps, diagrams and other
illustrative material are also provided.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.
The Rise of the Public in
Enlightenment Europe

James Van Horn Melton

Emory University
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© James Van Horn Melton 2004

First published in printed format 2001

ISBN 0-511-03776-7 eBook (Adobe Reader)

ISBN 0-521-46573-7 hardback
ISBN 0-521-46969-4 paperback
To Barbara, Sarah, and Peter
 Contents

List of tables page xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: What is the public sphere? 1

Part I Politics and the rise of “public opinion”: the cases

of England and France 17
1 The peculiarities of the English 19
Foundations of English exceptionalism 19
Politics and the press 27
Radicalism and extraparliamentary politics after 1760 33
Ambiguities of the political public sphere 39

2 Opacity and transparency: French political culture in the

eighteenth century 45
Jansenism and the emergence of an oppositional public sphere 48
The politics of publicity 55
Secrecy and its discontents 61

Part II Readers, writers, and spectators 79

3 Reading publics: transformations of the literary public sphere 81
Literacy in the eighteenth century 81
The reading revolution 86
Periodicals, novels, and the literary public sphere 92
The rise of the lending library 104
The public and its problems 110

4 Writing publics: eighteenth-century authorship 123

The status of the author in England, France, and Germany 124
Authorship as property: the rise of copyright 137
Women and authorship 148

ix
x Contents

5 From courts to consumers: theater publics 160

The stage legitimated 162
The theater and the court 166
London 171
Paris 177
Vienna 183

Part III Being sociable 195

6 Women in public: enlightenment salons 197
The rise of the salon 199
Women and sociability in Enlightenment thought 202
Salon culture in eighteenth-century Paris 205
The salon in eighteenth-century England 211
Salons of Vienna and Berlin 215

7 Drinking in public: taverns and coffeehouses 226

Alcohol and sociability 227
Taverns and politics: the case of London 229
Paris: from cabaret to café 235
The political culture of coffee 240
Coffee, capitalism, and the world of learning 244
Coffeehouse sociability 247

8 Freemasonry: toward civil society 252

The rise of freemasonry 254
Inclusion and exclusion 257
Freemasonry and politics 262

Conclusion 273

Index 277
 List of tables

1 London newspapers, 1746–1790 29

2 Vernacular and Latin books in Germany, 1673–1800 89
3 Freemasonry in England, 1721–1775 255

xi
 Acknowledgments

It is a special pleasure to acknowledge my debt to the Max-Planck-Institut

für Geschichte in Göttingen, where I completed much of the research for
this book as a visiting fellow during the summers of 1993, 1995, and 1997.
I am grateful to Gerhard Oexle and especially to Jürgen Schlumbohm
for serving as sponsors during my terms at the Institute. Hans Erich
Bödecker and Rudolf Vierhaus also gave generously of their time and
ideas, and I hope that Hartmut Lehmann, the Institute’s director, knows
how much his friendship and support have meant to me over the years. I
would also like to thank my fellow participants in the seminar on Women
and Political Thought in Tudor-Stuart England, led by Barbara Harris at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in the fall semester of 1994, where some
of the ideas in this book germinated.
A grant from the University Research Council of Emory University
during the fall semester of 1995 released me from my teaching duties and
made it possible for me to write drafts of several chapters. A sabbatical
leave granted by Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 1998
enabled me to finish much of what remained. I am grateful to my home
institution for its support, and to Patsy Stockbridge in the Department
of History for her help in preparing the final version of the manuscript.
I also wish to acknowledge the able assistance of Johanna Rickman in
helping to track down lost citations and references.
I would also like to thank professional colleagues inside and outside the
field who took time to read various parts of the manuscript. Where they
did not succeed in purging it of factual errors or interpretive lapses, it was
not from want of trying. Especially deserving of my thanks are Thomas
E. Kaiser, who over the years has been an unfailing source of intellectual
stimulation and insight, and Elise Wirtschafter, who took time away from
a Guggenheim fellowship to read and comment on the manuscript in full.
I owe a substantial debt to Dena Goodman, whose work has helped guide
my thinking about Enlightenment salons and refined my understanding
of Jürgen Habermas. Her close reading of the introduction and chapter 6
raised questions I may not have answered, but her criticisms did save

xiii
xiv Acknowledgments

me from error at various points in the manuscript. I am also grateful to

Paul Monod for his detailed comments on the first two chapters, and to
Howard Kaminsky and Gary Kates for their critiques of chapters 3 and 4.
At Emory my thanks go to members of the German Studies Roundtable
and the Vann Seminar in Premodern History, to whom I presented papers
related to this project. My Emory colleagues Walter Adamson, Martina
Brownley, Geoff Clark, and John Sitter also read parts of the manuscript
and encouraged the book along in different ways. Mark Bauerlein pro-
vided a close reading of several chapters and did his best to polish my
prose. At Emory I also learned much from graduate students I have
taught over the past decade in my seminar on the public sphere, who
pressed me to refine my ideas at critical points.
William Beik and Timothy Blanning originally invited me to contribute
this volume to the series for which they serve as general editors. I am
deeply grateful to them for their patience, encouragement, and sugges-
tions, as well as to my editors at Cambridge University Press, Elizabeth
Howard and Sophie Read. The constant support I have enjoyed from my
parents, Herman and Helen, and my brothers, Edgar and William, has
meant much to me. My deepest debt is to Barbara, for the joy she has
given her husband, and to Sarah and Peter, for the pleasure and pride
they have brought their father. I dedicate this book to the three of them.
 Introduction
What is the public sphere?

“Public” has a long history.1 In Roman antiquity the adjective publicus

could refer to a collective body of citizens or subjects (as in res publica)
and its property. The Romans also contrasted publicus with the domain
of the private household to denote public spaces like streets, squares,
or theaters. Publicum, the noun form, had a more specifically political
meaning and referred to the area, property, or income of the state. This
association of public with the state gained renewed currency in early
modern Europe, the classic age of dynastic state-building, and this link
persists today: candidates run for public office, state agencies are housed
in public buildings, state parks are public property.
Yet there is another, more recent meaning of public. We use it in the
sense of audience, as in speaking of the public for a book, a concert, a
play, or an art exhibition. Reading public, music public, theater public –
such usages began to appear in the seventeenth century and had become
common by the eighteenth. Unlike earlier meanings, these were unrelated
to the exercise of state authority. They referred rather to publics whose
members were private individuals rendering judgment on what they read,
observed, or otherwise experienced. A burgeoning print culture provided
one medium through which these publics made their opinions known;
new or expanding arenas of sociability like coffeehouses, salons, and ma-
sonic lodges were another. These publics arose in the context of an ex-
panding culture of consumption where cultural products were available
to those who could pay for them, regardless of formal rank. The com-
modification of literature wrought by the popularity of the eighteenth-
century novel, the cultural amenities available to patrons of fashionable
resorts like Bath in England or Bad Pyrmont in Germany, the evolution
of theaters from courtly into commercial institutions, the entertainment
districts lining the boulevards of Paris or clustered in the pleasure gardens
1 On the history of the term “public,” see Lucian Hölscher, “Öffentlichkeit,” in
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischen-sozialen Sprache in
Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. IV
(Stuttgart, 1978), 413–67.

1
2 The rise of the public

of London’s Ranelagh and Vienna’s Prater, all exemplified the expanding

networks of print and sociability characteristic of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. They heralded the arrival of “the public” as a cultural
and political arbiter, an entity to which contemporaries increasingly came
to refer as a sovereign tribunal. Friedrich Schiller wrote in 1782 that
“the public is everything to me, my school, my sovereign, my trusted
friend. I shall submit to this and to no other tribunal.” London’s The-
atrical Guardian affirmed the public’s sovereignty over the stage when it
declared in 1791 that “the public is the only jury before the merits of
an actor or an actress are to be tried, and when the endeavors of a per-
former are stampt by them with the seal of sanction and applause, from
that there should be no appeal.” In 1747 the French art critic La Font de
Saint-Yenne, the first to call for the establishment of a public museum in
the Louvre, justified his proposal on the grounds that “it is only in the
mouths of those firm and equitable men who compose the Public . . . that
we can find the language of truth.” In the political realm “public opin-
ion” acquired agency and legitimacy, even in the eyes of a theoretically
absolute sovereign like Louis XVI, who wrote that “I must always consult
public opinion; it is never wrong.”2
Focussing on England, France, and the German-speaking lands, this
book is about the growing importance of “the public” in eighteenth-
century life. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the political dimensions of this
process, and serve as case studies of the importance that “public opin-
ion” acquired in Enlightenment political culture. The succeeding three
chapters on the evolution of reading, writing, and the stage investigate
the possibilities as well as the dilemmas posed by the expanding audience
for literary and theatrical works. Finally, Chapter 6 on salons, Chapter 7
on taverns and coffeehouses, and Chapter 8 on freemasonry, examine
the new modes of sociability that accompanied the rise of the public in
Enlightenment Europe. This book is necessarily selective in the kinds of
publics it examines. I have not looked at other areas, such as painting or
concert life, where contemporaries also accorded “the public” a new sig-
nificance and wrestled with the question of how to shape or even define it.3
2 Quotes taken from Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Fricke and H. Göpfert
(Munich, 1959), V:856; Leo Hughes, The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-
Century London Audience (Austin and London, 1971), 5; Thomas E. Crow, Painters
and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London, 1985), 6; John
Hardman, French Politics 1774–1789: From the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the
Bastille (London and New York, 1995), 232. On public opinion as “tribunal” see Mona
Ozouf, “‘Public Opinion’ at the End of the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History 60
(1988), 9–13.
3 These subjects have been examined recently in several stimulating works. On painting
and the public sphere in the eighteenth century, see Crow, Painters and Public Life, as well
as David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-
Century England (New Haven and London, 1992). On musical publics, see James
 Introduction 3

Nor, on the whole, does this work explore the public spheres of plebeian
popular protest and sociability that social historians have done so much
to illuminate.4 To do so would entail writing a completely different book,
and for the most part the public sphere treated here was inhabited by
men and women with sufficient property and education to enjoy regular
access to newspapers, novels, and other products of eighteenth-century
print culture.
As a comparative work of synthesis, this book builds on a body of
French, German, and Anglo-American scholarship that has grown enor-
mously over the past two decades. Inspiring much of this scholarship is the
work of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Jürgen Habermas.
Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in
1962, and in a few years became one of the most widely discussed works
of social and political theory on the West German intellectual scene.5

H. Johnson’s Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995), and John Brewer’s
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997),
chapters 10 and 14.
4 The works of George Rudé and above all E. P. Thompson were pathbreaking in this
field. See Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and
England, 1730–1848 (New York, 1964); Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century:
Studies in Popular Protest (New York, 1971). For Thompson, see his Making of the English
Working Class (London, 1964), as well as the essays republished in his Customs in Common:
Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993). On urban popular protest, see
also William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution
(Cambridge, 1997); Günther Lottes, Politische Aufklärung und plebejisches Publikum: Zur
Theorie und Praxis des englischen Radikalismus im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1979);
Andreas Griessinger, Das symbolische Kapital der Ehre: Streikbewegungen und kollektives
Bewusstsein deutscher Handwerksgesellen im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1981).
On both rural and urban contexts see Andreas Würgler, Unruhen und Öffentlichkeit:
Städtische und ländliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1995).
5 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur einen Kategorie der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962). Habermas’s book acquired an
almost canonical status on the German New Left and was an important theoretical text
for the German student movement of the 1960s. Its early reception can be understood
in the context of German domestic politics of the period, above all disenchantment with
the advent in 1966 of the so-called Grand Coalition between the two leading German
parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The
SPD–CDU coalition convinced many on the left that they had no oppositional voice in
the German parliament, and that any authentic opposition had to situate itself outside
existing governmental structures. Also important for the reception of Habermas’s book
was the media campaign waged against the German student movement by the Springer
publishing house in the Bildzeitung, the sensationalist right-wing tabloid. The critique of
the mass media developed by Habermas in his Structural Transformation resonated on the
German New Left, because it seemed to provide a strategy for creating an autonomous,
extraparliamentary sphere of political action outside the bureaucratic institutions of the
state and immune to the manipulated consent of monopolized mass media. Habermas,
however, grew increasingly uneasy with the violent drift he detected on the student left,
and by the summer of 1968, as the German SDS became increasingly radicalized (and
to Habermas, uncritically utopian), the break between Habermas and the radical left
was open. For the debate between Habermas and the German SDS see Habermas, “Die
Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder,” and Oskar Negt, “Einleitung,” in Die Linke Antwortet
4 The rise of the public

Its impact outside of the German-speaking world was belated, however,

since French and English translations did not appear until 1978 and 1989
respectively. Hence in Anglo-American scholarship the book long enjoyed
a kind of cult status, the exclusive preserve of a relatively small group of
scholars able to read the German original. The publication of the 1978
French translation paved the way for its broader reception until finally,
almost thirty years after it first came out, it appeared in English.6
Although The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is
Habermas’s most historical work, it addresses a question that would be
central to his concerns as a philosopher: what are the conditions un-
der which rational, critical, and genuinely open discussion of public is-
sues becomes possible? For historical and theoretical insight he turns to
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the ideal of what
Habermas calls the “bourgeois public sphere” arose in its classic form.7
Habermas understood this public sphere above all as a realm of com-
munication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible
forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print
culture in the form of newspapers, political journalism, novels, and crit-
icism. He acknowledged that the presumed openness and egalitarianism
of the bourgeois public sphere were, from its inception, belied by class
interest, and that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it would lose
its critical function as it became absorbed into mass-consumer culture.
Yet he still believed that the norms of the public sphere could be salvaged
and remain a model for open, critical, and rational debate.
Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere was the historical product of two
long-term developments. The first was the rise of modern nation-states
dating from the late Middle Ages, a process that went hand in hand with
the emergence of society as a realm distinct from the state. The modern

Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 5–32. On the general political context see
Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London and New York,
1991), 78–98.
6 The French edition was published as L’espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme
dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, trans. Marc B. de Launay (Paris, 1978). The
English translation: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
7 For a discussion of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, a good place to begin
is Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Calhoun, ed.,
Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992). Insightful anal-
yses can also be found in Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward
a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and
Theory 31 (1992); Margaret Jacob, “The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A
European Perspective,” Eighteenth Century Studies 28 (1994); and Anthony J. La Vopa,
“Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of
Modern History 64 (1992).
 Introduction 5

state, with its monopoly of force and violence, would become the sphere
of public power, while society came to be understood as a realm of private
interest and activity. The Middle Ages had known no such distinction,
for the medieval “state” did not exercise anything like sovereignty in the
modern sense. The administrative, military, judicial, and fiscal functions
we associate with the modern state were instead exercised at various levels
by seigneurs, towns, the church, guilds, and other “private” individuals or
corporations. Seigneurs, for example, were not merely private landown-
ers, since their rights of property included rights of administration and
jurisdiction over their peasants. The relationship between seigneurs and
their peasants was thus both political and social in nature. But as terri-
torial states consolidated their authority during the early modern period,
they steadily absorbed many of the political functions that had previously
been exercised as rights of lordship by nobles, towns, ecclesiastical corpo-
rations, and so forth. These powers were now carried out by a sovereign
state whose authority was more sharply defined vis-à-vis its subjects. This
consolidation of state authority was most visible in the absolutist regimes
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where sovereignty found
symbolic expression in what Habermas calls the “representative public-
ness” of court ritual and display. The pomp and grandeur of the absolutist
court sought to underscore the distance between sovereign and subject
and focus attention on the ruler as the sole embodiment of public author-
ity. But just as court ceremonies were meaningless without an audience
to observe them, so did the absolute monarchy’s claims of public authority
presuppose a private body of subjects under royal rule. In making the state
the locus of sovereign power, absolutism also created society as a private
realm distinct from it. It was within this private social realm, the embryo
form of modern “civil society,” that the bourgeois public sphere would
emerge.
The rise of capitalism, the second development framing the formation
of the bourgeois public sphere, further disjoined state and society. Society,
though subject politically to the state, acquired growing autonomy and
self-awareness through the integrating forces of mercantile capitalism.
The expansion of national and international markets hastened the flow
of information as well as the circulation of goods, as communication net-
works grew wider and denser through improvements in transportation,
the growth of postal services, and the newspapers and commercial sheets
circulating in response to the heightened demand for information rele-
vant to foreign and domestic markets. Although governments themselves
promoted these developments in the interest of fostering trade and en-
hancing revenue, the social and economic integration created by expand-
ing networks of communication and exchange reinforced the growing
6 The rise of the public

independence of society. In the eighteenth century this new sense of au-

tonomy found expression in the emerging science of political economy,
with its idea of market society as an autonomous sphere of exchange sub-
ject to its own laws. It reached fruition in the early nineteenth century
in the Hegelian antithesis of state and society, which distinguished be-
tween a political realm dominated by the state and a private one in which
individuals associated freely and pursued their own interests.8
At the same time, argues Habermas, as the market replaced the house-
hold as the primary locus of production and exchange, the sphere of
family and household changed accordingly. The eighteenth century saw
the emergence of the new, bourgeois conception of the family as a sphere
of intimacy and affection. Aristotle’s classical model of the household had
viewed it as a sphere of coercion and necessity, inferior to the freedom
exercised by the male citizen in the polis. The Aristotelian household
was coercive owing to the absolute authority exercised by the patriarch
over the women, children, and slaves who made up the household. It was
a sphere of necessity since its chief function was to provide basic needs,
namely biological reproduction and the production of goods, which in
turn provided the male citizen with the leisure and independence neces-
sary for his full participation in the political life of the polis. In the Middle
Ages the noble household retained a similarly broad range of functions,
since the rights of property comprised in noble lordship included domin-
ion over one’s peasants. The noble household was a unit of production
but also a sphere of domination.
In the early modern period, however, capitalism and the rise of the
state began to strip the household of these older functions. As the market
replaced the household as the primary site for the production of goods,
and as the territorial state increasingly absorbed administrative and ju-
dicial functions once exercised by the household, the household was in-
creasingly privatized. Although losing many of its coercive and productive
functions, it also gained greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state and the world
of labor. What resulted was the new model of the bourgeois family, for
which the domestic sphere was primarily as a sphere not of production
and domination but of intimacy and affection. Private and thus shielded
from outside intrusion, a refuge from the coercion of the state and the
necessities of labor, the bourgeois family was conceived as an enclave of
humanity distinct from the hierarchies of birth and power that governed

8 On this process see more recently Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society
in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and
France (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994). Habermas’s own analysis draws on the
theoretical insights of the Austrian medievalist Otto Brunner. See Brunner, Land and
Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, translated with an introduction by
Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, 1992), especially ch. 2.
 Introduction 7

social and political relationships outside it. Its ideals of companionate

marriage prescribed bonds between husband and wife that were emo-
tional and not simply economic in nature. It deemed children as objects
of love and nurturing, with the family as a nursery for the acquisition of
moral education.
Habermas recognized that these ideals were to some extent an ideo-
logical construct. More recent historians of marriage and the family have
been relentless in highlighting the gendered dimensions of “bourgeois do-
mesticity,” and the eighteenth century no doubt had its share of tyranni-
cal middle-class fathers ruling over dysfunctional middle-class families.9
Coming out of a Marxist tradition that was still relatively unconcerned
with matters of gender, Habermas at any rate focussed instead on prop-
erty relations as the main source of inconsistency in bourgeois ideals of
the family. On the one hand, argues Habermas, the norms of intimacy
and love that developed within the privacy and autonomy of the bour-
geois household were universal ideals, human qualities that transcended
rank and class. On the other hand, because the protected sphere of the
bourgeois family owed its relative autonomy to the possession of prop-
erty, the exclusion of the unpropertied belied the universality of bourgeois
domestic ideology. This contradiction would later emerge in the tension
between the bourgeois public sphere’s universal ideals of openness, in-
clusion, and equality, and its de facto exclusion of those who lacked the
property and education to participate in it.
Still, Habermas refused to dismiss the norms of the bourgeois fam-
ily as an ideological fiction. Their universality provided the moral basis
for the ideal of a socially transcendent public that would challenge the
legitimacy of the hierarchical, asymmetrical relationships on which the
social and political order of the Old Regime was based. Originating in
the privacy and “interiority” of the bourgeois family, these norms en-
tered the broader public arena through the eighteenth-century literary
market. This literary public sphere, at least in the beginning, was fun-
damentally a-political. Exemplified by periodicals like the moral weeklies
of Addison and Steele and later by the sentimental novels of Samuel
Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the young Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, it mapped out an autonomous private realm through its
preoccupation with the world of family, love, courtship, and sociabil-
ity. The literary public sphere developed in tandem with institutions
of sociability like coffeehouses, reading clubs, and salons. As an arena
9 Lynn Hunt has observed that French novels of the mid-eighteenth century “portrayed
a family world in disarray, whether in novels by women in which wives confronted the
abuses of husbands or in novels by men in which tyrannical fathers were opposed by
rebellious or sacrilegious sons.” The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1992), 23.
8 The rise of the public

where private individuals engaged in rational and critical discussion,

it soon moved beyond a non-political literary world and extended its
purview to political matters. Habermas views this process as having oc-
curred first in England, where he finds evidence of a politicized public
sphere already in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Variants then developed on the continent, epitomized by the publica-
tion of the Encyclopédie in France (1751–72) and the emergence of po-
litical journalism in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire during
the 1770s. By the eve of the French Revolution, enlightened journal-
ists and critics throughout Europe had assumed the mantle of “pub-
lic opinion” (opinion publique in France, Publizität or öffentliche Mein-
ung in Germany) in demanding a fundamental transformation of the old
order.
The bourgeois public sphere, then, arose within the private domain of
the family but would ultimately acquire a political charge. As a realm of
discourse and debate, argues Habermas, the public sphere rested on three
assumptions. First, the dictates of reason and not the authority or identity
of the speaker (or writer) were held to be the sole arbiter in debate. As
a realm of communication that claimed to disregard status, the public
sphere was in principle inclusive: membership was not based on rank,
though it did presume education since full participation depended on
one’s ability to engage ideas presented in books, periodicals, and other
products of print culture. Second, nothing was immune to criticism. In its
mature form, the public sphere claimed the right to subject everything to
scrutiny – art, music, and the world of letters, but also religious beliefs, the
actions of government, or the privileges of elites. Hence for Habermas the
public sphere was inherently oppositional in its thrust, since its critical
range extended inexorably to individuals and institutions traditionally
exempt from scrutiny. Finally, the bourgeois public sphere was hostile
to secrecy. Publicity was a cardinal principle of the public sphere, and it
ran counter to the absolutist notion of politics as an arcanum, a “secret”
or “mystery” to which none but rulers and their ministers should be
privy. The Prussian King Frederick II affirmed the absolutist principle of
secrecy in a decree from 1784:
A private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judg-
ment on the actions, procedures, laws, regulations, and ordinances of sovereigns
and courts, their officials, assemblies, and courts of law, or to promulgate or
publish in print pertinent reports that he manages to obtain. For a private per-
son is not at all capable of making such judgment, because he lacks complete
knowledge of circumstances and motives.10
10 Quoted in Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 25. On secrecy and
absolutism see Andreas Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunika-
tion in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1994), 34–74.
 Introduction 9

For Frederick, the affairs of government were necessarily opaque and

incomprehensible to everyone outside the king and his inner circle (he
himself went so far as to arrange the abduction and beatings of foreign
journalists who thought otherwise). The ideology of the public sphere,
on the other hand, assumed that private persons could deliberate ratio-
nally on public affairs and that indeed, the collective judgments of “public
opinion” could make government more rational. But for public opinion to
be rational it had to be informed, and an informed public opinion
depended on a greater degree of transparency in government. It also re-
quired that debate on public affairs be open and relatively unconstrained
by censorship.
These norms, argues Habermas, found mature expression in the crit-
ical spirit of the late Enlightenment (here he especially emphasizes the
importance of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy) and challenges to the
traditional order unleashed by the French Revolution. They would be-
come basic tenets of nineteenth-century liberalism and its ideal of civil
society as a sphere of freedom. For Habermas, however, the “heroic” age
of the liberal-bourgeois public sphere was relatively brief and ultimately
fell victim to the social and political transformations of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The impoverished masses of early industrialism, lacking the property
and the education on which participation in the bourgeois public sphere
was premised, highlighted the limits of its universal claims. Moreover,
the ideals of the bourgeois public sphere presupposed a separation of
state and society that proved increasingly untenable during the course of
the nineteenth century. This separation was undermined on one side by
the socially interventionist welfare state, and on the other by the growing
power of corporations and unions that were ostensibly “private” but in-
creasingly assumed a quasi-public character. As the boundaries between
state and society eroded, the privacy of the family was steadily invaded by
the intrusion of the state and quasi-public institutions. As the family lost
its remnants of autonomy, it was reduced to a passive domestic domain
subject to intrusion by outside forces and vulnerable to the manipulative
forces of the mass media and the “culture industry.” Just as the family
shrank into an arena of passive consumption, so too did the public sphere
lose its critical edge and surrender to the dominion of advertising, public
relations, and mass-consumer culture.
Here Habermas’s apparent pessimism followed in the tradition of
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, his Marxist mentors who like-
wise emphasized the role of late-capitalist mass culture in fostering passive
conformity and assent. Yet Habermas had somewhat more faith in the
enduring critical potential of the bourgeois public sphere and the Enlight-
enment ideals on which it was based. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1947), published amidst the rubble of war and genocide, Adorno and
10 The rise of the public

Horkheimer had focussed on the darker side of Enlightenment rationality

as a source of technocratic control and domination. Fifteen years later
Habermas was more inclined to emphasize the democratic, emancipa-
tory potential of the Enlightenment. Although recognizing that the public
sphere of the Enlightenment had failed to live up to its own norms, he
nevertheless believed it offered a model of open, critical debate whose
moral promise transcended its ideological origins.

If historians, and especially historians of eighteenth-century Europe, have

engaged the insights of Habermas’s book with special vigor, this is in
large part due to its ability to integrate seemingly disparate approaches
to the field. The public sphere linked the private and the public. Its dis-
cursive range extended from the domestic realm to the literary market-
place, modes and institutions of sociability, and arenas of political debate.
By exploring the public significance of private discourse and sociability,
Habermas’s model connects the social with the political. It encourages
historians to link, say, discourses on family and marriage with those on
government, or the communicative practices of reading societies and sa-
lons with social and political structures. For these reasons the quantity
and range of scholarship inspired by Habermas’s book has been broad,
extending from intellectual and cultural history to the history of politics
and institutions.
That said, it is also clear that important aspects of his interpreta-
tion must be modified and in some cases jettisoned outright. One is its
chronology. It is difficult to sustain Habermas’s view that the eighteenth-
century public sphere of debate and criticism emerged first in the literary
realm and was only later politicized. In England, political journalism was
flourishing well before the sentimental novels and moral weeklies that
Habermas associates with the literary public sphere had become popu-
lar, and in France the idea of “public opinion” as a sovereign political
tribunal was already being articulated in religious controversies of the
1720s and 1730s.11 This is not to deny the political significance of seem-
ingly non-political literary practices, but rather to question the temporal
priority Habermas assigned them.
More fundamentally, Habermas’s model employs a rather conventional
Marxist framework that most historians today would find dated. Few, for
example, would assign the bourgeoisie of the Old Regime the kind of so-
cial cohesion and class consciousness that Habermas does. His emphasis
on the bourgeois character of the public sphere works best for England,

11 On problems with Habermas’s chronology in the German context, see Gestrich, Abso-
lutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 28–33.
 Introduction 11

where historians have in recent decades rediscovered the importance of

the “middling sort” in eighteenth-century English social and cultural life.
It is also true that participation in the eighteenth-century public sphere
presupposed a relatively high level of literacy and education, which was
most commonly the possession of those with sufficient property to afford
it. But the fact that the propertied dominated the public sphere did not
make it bourgeois. The readers of eighteenth-century novels and period-
icals, the people who belonged to reading societies and masonic lodges,
attended theaters, or sat in coffeehouses, included substantial numbers
of nobles. And in France and the German-speaking lands at least, those
members of the middle class who participated most actively in the culture
of the public sphere were generally not the rising, economically dynamic
bourgeoisie of Marxist lore. Most middle-class men of letters in France
came from professional backgrounds, and their income derived not from
manufacturing or commerce but from offices received or purchased from
the crown. Similarly, middle-class German men of letters tended to be
university professors, territorial officials, or pastors – professions tied
more to a princely absolutist milieu than a commercial or manufacturing
one. In this book, therefore, I have preferred the term “Enlightened” to
“bourgeois” public sphere. The former conveys the historical specificity
of the public sphere examined here in that it refers not just to any public
realm, but to one arising out of conditions specific to the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries.
Beyond the fact that nobles as well as members of the middle classes
participated in the institutions and practices of the Enlightened public
sphere, calling the public sphere bourgeois poses other problems.12 It im-
plies a certain teleology, at least in the context of the eighteenth century,
by conjuring up images of a class struggling to burst the bonds in which
absolutism and a feudal order had shackled it. In the process it assigns
the public sphere a role that was implicitly oppositional and thus impla-
cably hostile to the traditional society and institutions of the Old Regime.
There is no question that the Enlightened public sphere had oppositional
(or what Habermas would call emancipatory) features. It fostered more
inclusive practices of sociability, and by widening the sphere of discus-
sion and debate it did have the potential to challenge the prerogatives
of traditionally dominant institutions and elites. But to focus solely on
the subversive dimensions of the Enlightened public sphere overlooks the
resilience and adaptability of Old Regime society and institutions, which

12 For a discussion of this problem see the exchange between Keith Baker and Roger
Chartier in “Dialogue sur l’espace public: Keith Michael Baker, Roger Chartier,” Politix:
Travaux de science politique 26 (1994), 10–13.
12 The rise of the public

were quite capable of recognizing the communicative potential of the

public sphere. Not just oppositional groups but also the crown and other
traditional institutions appealed to “public opinion” to mobilize support.
Moreover, if the practices of sociability nurtured in salons or masonic
lodges tended to dissolve boundaries that had traditionally distinguished
noble from bourgeois, the impact was not necessarily subversive. To the
contrary, one might just as easily see the social intermingling of noble and
bourgeois as having contributed to a process of social integration, fusing
the propertied classes of society into a new elite by creating new criteria
for social distinction and exclusion based on education and taste. In this
respect the Enlightened public sphere betrayed a fundamental paradox:
while bridging the social and cultural divide separating noble and non-
noble, it simultaneously widened the distance between propertied and
plebeian.
In a general sense Habermas was aware of this paradox, which he at-
tributed to the tension between the public sphere’s universal ideal of
humanity and the system of property relations in which it was embed-
ded. Yet despite his apparent recognition that the public sphere never
really lived up to its own norms, those who have charged him with ide-
alizing the public sphere have a point.13 Part of Habermas’s problem is
that he takes his history from Marx but his moral philosophy from Kant,
and it is sometimes difficult to know which hat he is wearing. Habermas
the Marxist describes the public sphere as a process of bourgeois class
formation; Habermas the Kantian enshrines it as a normative theory of
communication. Habermas the Marxist identifies the public sphere with
capitalist social relations; Habermas the Kantian adopts its norms as a
moral imperative. Habermas the Marxist sees the public sphere as hav-
ing been compromised by its bourgeois origins; Habermas the Kantian
views it nostalgically as a kind of pure, prelapsarian condition only later
corrupted by capitalist sin.
But if, as Habermas sees it, capitalism was the public sphere’s
pallbearer, it was also its midwife. Capitalist market relations per-
vaded the Enlightened public sphere, which evolved hand in hand with

13 For an early critique see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience:
Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al.
(Minneapolis and London, 1993), which originally appeared in German as Öffentlichkeit
und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit
(Frankfurt am Main, 1972). See more recently, Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Polit-
ical Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas
and the Public Sphere, who notes the failure of Habermas to explore sufficiently the exis-
tence of competing “counter-public” spheres (e.g., working-class publics).
 Introduction 13

commercialized forms of leisure and cultural consumption.14 The de-

velopments in print culture that Habermas identifies with the public
sphere, such as the growth of reading and writing publics, the rise of
novels, newspapers and political journalism, or the emergence of literary
criticism, were inseparable from the commercialization of letters. Simi-
larly, the proliferation of public spaces where people socialized or sought
entertainment – coffeehouses, pleasure gardens, public theaters, and the
like – was marked by the kind of “culture-consumption” that Haber-
mas associates with a later era. Accordingly, I have described some of
the cultural tensions created by this process of commercialization and
viewed them not as a later excrescence but as a constitutive part of the
Enlightenment public sphere.
Habermas has also been criticized for ignoring the question of gender.
The feminist critic Joan Landes has insisted that the norms of the pub-
lic sphere were intrinsically masculinist, resting on gendered distinctions
between a (male) public realm and a (female) private one.15 She views
the French Revolution as having marked the triumph of this masculinist
discourse by enshrining in law a distinction between the public-political
world as a natural male preserve and a private domestic sphere where
women fulfilled their natural roles as wives and mothers. Revolutionary
legislation did in fact withhold voting rights from women, and in the
Terror political organizations like the Society of Revolutionary Repub-
lican Women were indeed suppressed. Hence Landes concludes that
the public sphere, far from emancipating women, perpetuated a pub-
lic/private dichotomy that sanctioned their political subordination.
14 On the eighteenth century as a consumer revolution, see John Brewer, Neil McKendrick,
and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-
Century England (London, 1982); Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987), 17–35; Daniel Roche, The History of Everyday
Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge,
2000), 54–80, 221–49. On the public sphere as a site for the development of a consumer
culture, see Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the
Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical
Review 101 (1996).
15 Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution; Landes, “The Pub-
lic and the Private Sphere,” in Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering
the Subject of Discourse (New York and London, 1995), 91–116; Landes, “Introduction,”
in Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford and New York, 1998). For other works
emphasizing the gendered nature of the public sphere, see, for example, Nancy Fraser,
“What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Seyla
Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism As Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Min-
neapolis, 1987), and, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere; and
Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, 1996),
206–7.
14 The rise of the public

Landes’s critique was strongly argued and helped stimulate debate on

the place of women in the eighteenth-century public sphere. But her view
of the public sphere as necessarily masculinist has not, on the whole, won
widespread assent. For one thing, such an argument tends to undermine
its own premises: in claiming that Habermas’s public sphere was by its
very nature exclusionary, it implicitly invokes the standards of inclusive-
ness and universality that the ideology of the public sphere proclaimed.16
Others have observed that Landes not only ignores Enlightenment writ-
ers like the French philosopher Condorcet, whose universalistic concep-
tion of humanity envisioned a society in which women would exercise the
same political rights as men; her critique also rests on a fundamental mis-
reading of Habermas.17 The public sphere was not the sphere of political
power, as Landes seems to assume, but a private social realm. Women did
not of course gain political rights in eighteenth-century Europe – nor, for
that matter, did most men. But as a sphere of sociability and discussion
distinct from the realm of state power, the public sphere was character-
ized by a high degree of female participation. As readers and authors, as
a conspicuous and sometimes dominant presence in theater audiences,
salons, and debating societies, women had a role and visibility without
which many practices and institutions of the public sphere would have
been inconceivable. Legitimizing their participation were Enlightenment
notions of sociability that considered the mingling of the sexes crucial to
the progress of civil society. “It is not therefore arts, sciences, and learn-
ing, but the company of the other sex, that forms the manners and ren-
ders the man agreeable,” wrote the Scottish physician William Alexander
in affirming the historical role of women as a civilizing agent. Theodor
Gottlieb von Hippel’s On Improving the Status of Women (1792), a work
that condemned the French Revolution for failing to grant political rights
to women, asked rhetorically: “Where are those private social groups that
can exist for any period of time without the company of women?”18 In this
16 Habermas makes this point in the preface to the 1990 German edition of his book, in
response to Carole Pateman’s feminist critique of contractual social and political theories
in The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988).
17 On this point see Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life,” 14–20. See also Keith
Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a
Theme by Habermas,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 202–3; Daniel
Gordon, “Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Pub-
lic Opinion,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992), 899–900; Lawrence E. Klein, “Gender
and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Studies
29 (1995), 97–109.
18 William Alexander, The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time,
3rd ed. (London, 1782), I:iv–v, as quoted in Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment
Debate on Women,” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985), 121; Theodor Gottlieb von
Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women, translated and edited with an introduction by
Timothy F. Sellner (Detroit, 1979), 170.
 Introduction 15

book I have tried to do justice to women’s participation in the Enlightened

public sphere, while also recognizing that the norms sanctioning this par-
ticipation were often ambiguous. The belief that civil society depended
on women as a moral and civilizing force rested on notions of sexual dif-
ference that could justify banishing them from the political arena. But in
sanctioning women’s activities as readers, writers, and sociable beings, it
also gave them tools and venues for challenging that exclusion. Moreover,
the domestic sphere to which propertied women of the eighteenth cen-
tury were supposedly consigned was much more porous and public than
the modern-day stereotype of “bourgeois domesticity” would have us
believe. Their households were places where women read, wrote, enter-
tained friends and relatives, and discussed politics, religion, and literary
works in salons or at dinner parties. These households were, in short, part
of social and communicative networks that did not sever but connected
the public and the private realms.19
The legacy of the public sphere, then, was ambiguous. It was neither
inexorably emancipatory nor inherently repressive, and if it was not ir-
redeemably masculinist, neither was it unqualifiedly feminist. The am-
biguities of the eighteenth-century public sphere are still with us, which
explains why Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
continues to engage scholars in fields ranging from history, literary crit-
icism, and music to sociology, feminist theory, and political science. In
our day, the computer and the internet have wrought a revolution in
communications riven with the same contradiction that marked the En-
lightened public sphere – expanded networks of information on the one
hand, but also a growing gap between those who enjoy access to it and
those who do not. And overall, the boundaries between the public and
the private seem today even more unstable and elusive than they did when
Habermas published his book almost forty years ago. The problem of just
where to locate those boundaries pervades our political discourse, be it
in the jeremiads of cultural critics who bemoan our notorious preoccu-
pation with the private lives of public figures, debates over the legality
of abortion or the public financing of election campaigns, postmodernist
manifestoes that criticize the very idea of “the public” as a strategy for
marginalizing minorities, or in the fears spawned by a global capitalism
that seems ever more immune to public control and accountability. For
these reasons, what the philosopher John Dewey called “the public and
its problems” will continue to provoke analysis and debate.
19 Amanda Vickery makes this valuable point in her “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?
A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Histori-
cal Journal 36 (1993), and in her recent study, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives
in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), 9.
Part I

Politics and the rise of “public opinion”:

the cases of England and France
1 The peculiarities of the English

Foundations of English exceptionalism

“For a long time, and especially since the beginning of this century, there
has been no country where more has been written about political af-
fairs than England.”1 August Ludwig Schlözer, the German historian
and journalist who made this claim in 1776, was well acquainted with
English political culture. As a professor at the University of Göttingen,
which was located in the territory of Hanover and founded by George
II, Schlözer was himself a subject of the German dynasty that had ruled
Britain since 1714. A convinced Anglophile and an ardent admirer of
British political institutions, Schlözer considered the rebellious Ameri-
can colonists selfish ingrates.
But if Schlözer was anything but an impartial observer, he was right
to consider English political culture unique in fundamental ways. Its rel-
atively free press, party structure, and parliamentary system fostered a
degree of political contestation – outside as well as within formal insti-
tutions of government – that had no counterpart among the major states
of the continent. The vibrancy of England’s political public sphere grew
out of the turbulent struggles of the English Revolution, a period when
censorship all but collapsed, political pamphlets flooded the publishing
market, popular petitions and the circulation of parliamentary speeches
proliferated, and coffeehouses arose as venues of political discussion.
Despite the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis
of 1679–81 (so named after efforts in parliament to exclude Charles II’s
heir, the Catholic James II, from the succession) was marked by a resur-
gence of political activism at all levels. Mark Knights has estimated that
the crisis generated between 5 and 10 million printed pamphlets within a
three-year period, a time also when thousands of English subjects signed
petitions and counter-petitions (or “addresses”) supporting or opposing

1 Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts, 1 (1776), 373.

19
20 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

James II’s exclusion.2 The crisis would occasion the birth of England’s
party system, as well as fundamental debates over which institutions or
groups truly represented the will of the nation.
England’s incipient public sphere was institutionalized in the decade
that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, which deposed James
II and brought William and Mary to the throne. Critical to this pro-
cess of institutionalization was parliament’s failure in 1695 to renew the
Licensing Act of 1662, which had provided the basis for the crown’s cen-
sorship powers and regulation of the book trade. Under the Licensing
Act censorship had been exercised by various authorities, including the
two secretaries of state (historical and political works), the lord chan-
cellor (law), the earl marshall (heraldry), the archbishop of Canterbury
and the bishop of London (theology), and the chancellors of Oxford and
Cambridge (philosophy and medicine). In addition to requiring govern-
mental inspection of every cargo of books, pamphlets, and newspapers
from abroad, the Licensing Act had limited the number of printing houses
to twenty. As Lois Schwoerer and Paul Monod have each shown, the lapse
of the Licensing Act in 1695 was not the result of any principled com-
mitment to freedom of the press on the part of parliament. It stemmed
rather from the impossibility of enforcing censorship in a period that was
so highly politicized, and neither Whigs nor Tories were willing to accept
censorship when either was out of power. At any rate, the lapse of the
Licensing Act in 1695 effectively dismantled the machinery of Stuart cen-
sorship. Equally important, it also removed all limits on the number of
printers licensed to publish and sell newspapers, books, and periodicals.
The result was a proliferation of publishing firms, the number of which
had risen to seventy-five in London and twenty-eight in the provinces
by 1724. The British press became among the freest in Europe, with a
vibrant market of political journals, pamphlets, and newspapers.
Also crucial for the institutionalization of a political public sphere was
the Triennial Act of 1694. While the Stuarts had preferred either not
to summon parliament or to allow years to pass without calling general
elections, the Triennial Act mandated that elections were to be held at
least every three years. The effects were immediate and dramatic: be-
tween 1694 and 1716, when the Triennial Act was in effect, ten general
elections were held (four alone between 1692 and 1702). More than two
decades of incessant electioneering mobilized a substantial segment of
the population that over time became accustomed to public participation
2 Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994), 168, 227–
305. On popular radicalism in the English Revolution, the classic study is Christopher
Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London,
1972), 17.
 The peculiarities of the English 21

in the political affairs of the nation. In this overheated political climate,

Whig and Tory leaders developed well-oiled propaganda machines en-
listing newspapers and journals under their respective banners. Political
clubs and party organizations gathered regularly in London’s vast net-
work of coffeehouses and taverns to plot strategy or celebrate election
victories and politically fraught anniversaries (for example, the birthday
of William III for Whigs, or Restoration Day for Tories). The frequency
of elections kept party rivalries at a high pitch. Daniel Defoe noted that
“the certainty of a new election in three years is an unhappy occasion
of keeping alive the divisions and party strife among the people, which
otherwise would have died of course.”3
In this highly partisan atmosphere, the two parties developed their own
distinctive ideologies and political styles. Tories came to stand for High
Church Anglicanism, the monarchical principle of hereditary succession,
opposition to standing armies and continental entanglements, and on the
party’s fringes, Jacobitism (i.e., support for the restoration of the exiled
Stuart pretender). Whigs associated themselves with the Protestant suc-
cession, fierce opposition to the Jacobites, and toleration for Protestant
dissenters. War, a phenomenon whose role in the expansion of a political
public sphere both then and later cannot be overestimated, further inten-
sified the political climate. The enormous fiscal demands occasioned by
Britain’s struggle with France during the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–14) forced the crown to summon parliament every year, making
partisan debates and maneuvering an almost daily fixture of parliamen-
tary life. Issues of war and peace were hotly contested, and although
newspaper reporting on parliamentary debates remained prohibited up
to 1771, both parties employed the press to publicize their positions. All
of this served to draw a broader public into debates over national issues,
politicizing and at the same time educating it.
It used to be fashionable to discount the modernity of eighteenth-
century British politics. This agnosticism developed in reaction to tra-
ditional Whig narratives, which had viewed the eighteenth century as
yet another phase in the nation’s triumphant progress toward constitu-
tional liberty and world empire. Revisionists like Sir Lewis Namier mini-
mized those very features of eighteenth-century British politics – parties,
elections, constitutional struggles – that Whig historians had deemed
so glorious and unique. Namier instead highlighted the aristocratic, oli-
garchical features of Hanoverian politics and the dominance exercised in
parliament by a relatively small number of powerful families. Pointing to
the narrowness of the franchise, a supposedly apathethic electorate, and
3 Quoted in J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in
the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979), 1.
22 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

the continued influence of the crown in parliament, Namier’s interpre-

tation downplayed the significance of ideological and electoral conflict.
In the 1980s, a second wave of revisionism raised more doubts about the
modern and “progressive” dimensions of Hanoverian political culture.
J. C. D. Clark, the most outspoken representative of this trend, portrayed
eighteenth-century England as a profoundly traditional social and polit-
ical order in which the crown, the Anglican church, and the aristocracy
continued to hold sway up to the Reform Bill of 1832. Rejecting Whig-
gish notions of English exceptionalism, Clark concluded that England
was not essentially different from the absolutist regimes of the continent.
It is true that in the decades following the accession of the Hanoverian
dynasty (1714), British politics became in some respects less vibrant and
open. The relative stability that marked the ascendancy of the Whigs
under George I (1714–27) and George II (1727–60) rested to a great
extent on the oligarchical control and patronage exercised by the crown
and a handful of aristocratic politicians. Tainted by its association with
the failed Jacobite uprising of 1715, the Tory party sank into an electoral
decline that guaranteed one-party rule up to the accession of George III
in 1760. Moreover, the repeal of the Triennial Act in 1716 prolonged the
life of parliament from three years to seven and thereby sharply reduced
the frequency of parliamentary elections. The intent, if not the effect, was
to heighten the political influence of local patrons, dilute the impact of
voter initiative, and weaken the effect of popular participation. The extent
to which the measure discouraged electoral challenges to incumbants is
attested to by a sharp decline in the number of contested seats between
1705, when 65 percent of the counties represented in parliament had
contested elections, and 1765, when only 7.5 percent did.4
Another sign of the shrinking popular base of electoral politics after
1714 was a decline in the size of the voting franchise relative to the pop-
ulation as a whole. In 1715 the electorate in England and Wales may
have totaled some 300,000 voters, or 23.4 percent of adult males. By the
late eighteenth century this franchise had increased by 40,000, but since
the corresponding population had grown at an even faster rate the pro-
portion of adult males who could vote had declined in real terms to 17.2
percent.5 Much of this decline reflected the lack of any systematic enfran-
chisement of Britain’s growing urban population. Of the sixty-eight
English towns having populations of 2,500 or more in 1700, seventeen
were unrepresented in parliament. Rapid urbanization further heightened
4 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge,
1976), 6.
5 H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York,
1995), 32.
 The peculiarities of the English 23

the disparity, as the number of towns having no parliamentary represen-

tation rose to forty in 1750. Critics routinely contrasted these unrepre-
sented urban centers with the rural, sparsely populated “rotten boroughs”
that sent one or more representatives to parliament.
Finally, even though the British crown was ostensibly more limited in
its powers than most of its continental counterparts, it retained consid-
erable influence in parliament through the pensions and patronage at its
disposal. The crown and its ministers could improve the prospects of
a parliamentary supporter by supplying offices, commissions, and con-
tracts that the MP could in turn distribute to politically influential sup-
porters. During the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole (1721–42), the high
water-mark of “Whig oligarchy,” almost every job at court and in the civil
service, armed forces, and church was controlled by the ministry. With
this kind of patronage, governments could and did build formidable po-
litical machines. A conservative estimate holds that under the Walpole
regime, for example, 27 percent of all MPs were ministerial clients.6
Longer parliaments, Tory electoral decline, a contracting electorate,
underrepresented urban constituencies, the crown’s ability to control par-
liament through patronage and preferments – these explain why scholars
like Namier and Clark could look so skeptically on the pieties of Whig his-
toriography. Their work remains a salutary warning against the dangers of
transposing modern notions of representative government onto the eigh-
teenth century. There is no question that, in the last analysis, Hanoverian
Britain was governed by a narrow oligarchy of wealth and birth. In 1754,
294 out of 558 members of parliament were the sons of MPs and around
400 were relatives of other past or present members. In the early 1800s
one out of four members was married to the daughter of an MP, and in
1807 more than 234 MPs representing constituencies in England, Wales,
and Scotland owed their seats to some form of aristocratic patronage.7
Yet the fact that Hanoverian government was dominated by an oli-
garchy did not mean that this political elite was impervious to the opinions
of those it governed. Scholars have increasingly challenged Namierite in-
terpretations in emphasizing the continued vitality of electoral politics in
Hanoverian Britain. Linda Colley showed, for example, that Tory opposi-
tion to post-1714 Whig hegemony was by no means as weak and disorga-
nized as was once believed, while Nicolas Rogers and Frank O’Gorman
have questioned the stereotype of a pliant and lethargic electorate. Rogers
noted that in urban constituencies having at least 1,000 voters, seats were
6 Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), 232.
7 Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–
1832 (London, 1997), 107; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New
Haven and London, 1992), 154–55.
24 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

contested more often after 1714 than they had ever been.8 Finding a
similarly high number of contested elections, O’Gorman argued that the
“unreformed” Hanoverian electorate was more socially inclusive than is
often assumed. Analyzing the occupations of voters in six constituencies
between 1768 and 1831, O’Gorman broke down the electorate into the
following groups and percentages:
Gentry and professionals 13.6 percent
Merchants and manufacturers 5.8 percent
Tradesmen (retailers) 20.5 percent
Skilled artisans 39.5 percent
Unskilled laborers 14.2 percent
Agricultural occupations 6.4 percent
Clearly this was not an electorate based on universal male suffrage (though
something approaching it could be found in some constituencies), but
neither was it as narrowly based as it is sometimes portrayed.9
However broad or narrow the franchise, the rituals of electoral politics
drew large numbers of people into its orbit. British elections may have
ultimately served to sustain the power of a parliamentary elite, but their
effective conduct and management depended on the loyalty and work of
local clients and canvassers from much more modest social backgrounds.
To the extent, moreover, that elections provided a conduit for propaganda
on behalf of a candidate or party, they generated a steady flow of informa-
tion and communication between political elites and those they governed.
Candidates used the press extensively to advertise rallies or publish ad-
dresses to constituents. In 1768 a candidate in Essex distributed 33,700
pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads, and in the Middlesex election of that
year John Wilkes circulated 40,000 handbills among a constituency of
3,500 voters.10 Both during and between campaigns, those standing for
election were expected to engage in regular, face-to-face contact with
their constituents. If the common people were deferential – an assump-
tion that E.P. Thompson did much to revise11 – a sense of reciprocity
informed their deference. They expected a candidate to be accessible,
approachable, and to seek their support in person. In 1733 William Hay,
an election agent for the duke of Newcastle, warned the duke that one of
his parliamentary clients might lose the upcoming election owing to his

8 Nicolas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford,
1989), 390–91.
9 Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 390–91; Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The
Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), 199–233.
10 Dickinson, Politics of the People, 45.
11 See, for example, his classic Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), and
Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975).
 The peculiarities of the English 25

failure to cultivate his constituents in person: “He has not been around
the Town since he went with your Grace, nor I believe asked a single man
for his vote: and I am firmly persuaded that half the voters that have been
lost have been lost by this unpardonable negligence: the people are af-
fronted by it.” In 1784 an election agent for Sir William Milner, who was
campaigning for a seat from York, privately criticized the candidate for
his unapproachability: “He has, I fear, too cold and ungracious a manner
to make great or lasting conquests over the affections of a populace, that
must be at least treated as equals – and pro hac vice [for that matter] as
superiors. The hearty shake, and the familiar bit of conversation must be
attended to.”12
As highly visible and often prolonged affairs, electoral rituals sub-
jected candidates to sustained public scrutiny. By bringing constituents
together in various informal venues, they also fostered discussion and the
exchange of political gossip and information. “Treating,” the common
practice whereby candidates feted voters with alcohol, food, and even
accommodation at local inns and taverns, was a perquisite of electoral
participation and an important arena of sociability during and between
campaigns. On the days leading up to an election, voters – usually at a
candidate’s expense – drank, supped, or breakfasted together. On polling
days they often marched to the hustings in procession, and after the votes
had been tallied they attended celebration dinners hosted by the candi-
date. After Charles James Fox’s successful campaign for his Westminster
seat in 1784, his managers staged five celebration dinners each attended
by 700–1000 supporters.13 These were all occasions for discussing the
merits and flaws of a candidate or his opponent, and for debating issues
of local or national importance.
Hence focussing too narrowly on rotten boroughs or restrictive fran-
chises misses the significance of Hanoverian elections. They generated
a regular and sustained flow of political information between rulers and
ruled, as well as periodic, face-to-face contact. All of this gave Hanove-
rian politics a measure of public exposure and transparency that simply
did not exist in the absolutist states of France, Germany, or Austria. A
more prosaic feature of Hanoverian political culture, namely the rise of
organized lobbies, also stimulated the circulation of information through-
out the public sphere. While some in the eighteenth century, like today,
tended to see lobbies as a source of corruption and secret influence, orga-
nized interest groups were as much a part of Britain’s expanding public
sphere as its newspapers, journals, and coffeehouses. Commercial and
manufacturing lobbies proliferated in eighteenth-century Britain, partly

12 Above quotes taken from Dickinson, Politics of the People, 30–31.

13 Ibid., 47.
26 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

as the product of a burgeoning capitalist economy, partly as a response to

the government’s increased reliance on excise taxes to finance its military
needs. Government attempts to impose uniform duties on commodities
ranging from beer and spirits to candles and carriages led manufacturers
of the affected commodities to join together to push for the repeal or low-
ering of the excise. During the course of the century trade organizations
were formed that levied dues on their members to defray the expenses of
lobbyists who then pressed their case before parliamentary committees.
Regional manufacturing associations such as the Midland Association of
Ironmasters and the West Riding Committee of Worsted Manufacturers
became powerful lobbying interests. The expansion of Britain’s overseas
empire spawned commercial lobbies as well, such as the Virginia Mer-
chants and the Society of West Indian Merchants.
By the end of the century, parliamentary lobbying had become stan-
dard among commercial and manufacturing interests, which broadened
the public sphere in several respects. For one, lobbies were an important
source of the statistical data and reports that made their way into the pub-
lic domain via petitions to parliament and the press. Government officials,
especially those concerned with colonial affairs, found lobbies to be a use-
ful source of statistics and specialized information on matters of trade and
commerce. Conversely, lobbyists played a key role in opening up the po-
litical domain to public scrutiny by pressuring the government to release
official documents relevant to their particular trade or business. Hence,
while lobbies undoubtably increased the influence of vested interests in
government, they also served to make government more transparent by
generating and obtaining statistical data and reports. Lobbyists, like those
who agitated for parliamentary reform later in the century, became adept
at employing newspapers and pamphlets to influence opinion inside and
outside parliament. The Excise Crisis of 1733, which was provoked by
the Walpole ministry’s attempt to introduce taxes on wine and tobacco,
was a harbinger of how potent the combination of lobbies and the press
would become. Here representatives of the affected trades published their
protests in pamphlets, handbills, and printed sheets of statistics, all de-
signed to influence opinion both inside and outside parliament. By the
second half of the eighteenth century, trade and manufacturing groups
were regularly relying on local and national newspapers to push for the
passage of new bills or the repeal of old ones. In the process, the growth
of lobbies broadened the stage of extraparliamentary political action and
debate by transforming local interests into national ones. When, say, a
General Chamber of Manufacturers was formed in 1785 to influence
the fiscal policies of the Pitt ministry, the political consciousness of local
manufacturers was expanded as they became integrated into a broader
community of interest.
 The peculiarities of the English 27

Politics and the press

The aristocratic elite that dominated parliament during the era of Whig
ascendancy (1714–60) was not a monolith. It was divided by intense
personal rivalries and ideological fissures, many of them predating the
Hanoverian accession, which provided a wedge through which dissident
political voices could mobilize an extraparliamentary public in moments
of crisis.
During the 1720s and 1730s, the emergence of a “Country” or “Pa-
triot” opposition to the Walpole ministry was the chief manifestation of
these divisions. Articulated by dissident radical Whigs in league with a
Tory party now effectively consigned to the political backbenches, this
opposition criticized the domination of parliament by the court and its
ministers. Several opposition demands, such as shorter parliaments, the
replacement of the standing army with a citizen militia, the curtailment
of crown patronage, and the elimination of rotten boroughs, became fix-
tures of later eighteenth-century political radicalism. In other respects the
Country opposition looked more to the past than to the future. Much
of its Tory support, for example, lay in a declining petty squirearchy,
whose economic position had been undermined by taxes on land levied
to fight France during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).
But if disaffected segments of the landed gentry constituted the hard
core of the Tories’ political base, the party’s exclusion from court and
high office also made it the natural ally of an urban constituency that felt
politically excluded and underrepresented. With no patronage at their
disposal and little chance of toppling Walpole’s Whig machine through
electoral means, Tory leaders like Lord Bolingbroke appealed “out-of-
doors” – i.e., beyond parliament – to disaffected urban groups who saw
the Walpole regime as dominated by a corrupt clique of stock-jobbers
and financiers. Implicit in this strategy was the conviction that parlia-
ment had grown too corrupt, too vulnerable to manipulation by agents
of the crown, to serve as the voice of the nation; one had to appeal beyond
formal institutions of power to an extraparliamentary public capable of
forcing reform upon a recalcitrant government.
Here Bolingbroke and his Country allies employed the tools of po-
litical journalism to mobilize an extraparliamentary opposition. One of
their weapons was The Craftsman (1726–46), the most famous and best-
selling opposition paper of the Walpole era. Subjecting Walpole and his
government to an endless stream of invective, The Craftsman enjoyed at
the height of its popularity a print run of some 10,000–12,000 copies
per issue. It lashed out at the land tax, stock speculators, the standing
army, long parliaments, and the corrupt consequences of “Robinocracy”
– the term it applied to Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry. The paper above all
28 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

denounced the insidiousness of ministerial secrecy and demanded greater

publicity and openness in government. The Craftsman took its title from
its avowed aim of exposing the “craftiness” that permeated the politics
of the day: “It shall therefore be my chief business,” wrote Bolingbroke
in the inaugural issue, “to unravel the dark secrets of Political Craft, and
trace it through all of its various Windings and intricate Recesses.”14
This language of exposure and publicity fills the pages of The Craftsman:
“We have trac’d Corruption through all its dark lurking Holes, and set its
Deformity in a true Light. We have pleaded the cause of publick Virtue,
against the Misrepresentation of Those, who have endeavor’d to bring it
into Contempt.”15 The rhetoric and tactics of the Country opposition did
much to broaden the sphere of political debate beyond the world of the
court and parliament. During the Excise Crisis of 1733, papers like The
Craftsman showed how the power of the press could be put to effective
political use by helping to mobilize extraparliamentary agitation against
Walpole’s scheme to tax wine and tobacco. The opposition also refined
other extraparliamentary tactics during this period, such as petition cam-
paigns and the formation of electoral clubs and societies that instructed
their MPs how to vote on a particular issue. These techniques would later
become a staple of British radical politics, and it is no accident that the
term “publick opinion” – hitherto rare in English usage – began to gain
currency during the 1730s.
Still, Bolingbroke and the Country opposition of the 1720s and 1730s
never succeeded in sustaining mass support for a comprehensive pro-
gram of political reform. One obstacle was the inherent conservatism
of the Tory party, whose bedrock Anglicanism and hostility to religious
non-conformity cut off the party from a potential source of political dissi-
dence. Moreover, the oppositional tactics crafted by Bolingbroke and his
allies functioned as instruments of factions within the political elite, even
if these tools would later be adapted more broadly by popular radicals like
John Wilkes. They were designed to arouse or manipulate opinion from
above, not express it from below. What emerged during the latter half
of the eighteenth century was an extraparliamentary sphere of political
action that was increasingly national in its focus, more autonomous vis-
à-vis political elites, and organized from below. The continued growth of
political journalism encouraged these developments. During the decades
that followed parliament’s decision in 1695 not to renew the Licensing
Act, London became renowned for the number, variety, and circulation of
its newspapers. Its first daily paper, the Daily Courant, began publication

14 The Craftsman, 1 (1726), 6.

15 Ibid., dedication.
 The peculiarities of the English 29

Table 1 London newspapers, 1746–1790

1746 1770 1783 1790

Dailies 6 5 9 14
Bi-, Tri-weeklies 6 10 7
Weeklies 6 4 – 2
Total 18 19 – 16

Source: Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain
and France, 1620–1800 (London and New York, 1996), 10.

in 1702, although the most widely circulated London paper of the

period was the tri-weekly Post-Man with an average circulation in August
1712 of 3,812 copies. By the late 1720s, weeklies like the London Journal
and the Craftsman were selling about 10,000 copies per issue. In 1746
the city had eighteen newspapers, including six dailies, six tri-weeklies,
and six weeklies. Table 1 above gives a quantitative profile of London
newspapers during subsequent years of the century. Provincial newspa-
pers also grew in number. Norwich was the first provincial town to have
its own newspaper (1701), followed by Bristol (1702), Exeter (1704),
Shrewsbury (1705), Yarmouth (1708), and Worcester (1709). In 1735
some twenty-five provincial newspapers were being published in England,
and by 1782 the number had doubled.
As British political journalism expanded, so did the number of those
for whom the reading of news became a habit. This rise in readership
is evident from figures based on the stamp duty levied on newspapers
beginning from 1713 to 1801:16
1713 2.5 m
1750 7.3 m
1760 9.4 m
1775 12.6 m
1801 16 m
Although it is not possible statistically to determine with any precision
the social status of newspaper buyers, the bulk of this expanding reader-
ship most likely came from the middling and upper ranks of society. The
price of newspapers, which rose from an average of 2d in 1725 to 6d in
1797, would have made them unaffordable to those below the level of
skilled artisans. Not that one necessarily had to buy newspapers in order

16 Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (London and
New York, 1996), 12.
30 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

to read them: they were readily available, for example, in the London
coffeehouses that had become so abundant by 1700. But it was not simply
cost but also demand that made newspaper reading primarily a middle-
and upper-class pastime. The financial and commercial revolutions of
the early eighteenth century, and above all Britain’s development as a
colonial power, made newspapers and commercial sheets an indispens-
able source of information for investors whose economic interests were
directly affected by the vicissitudes of war and colonial trade.
Wars in particular fueled a demand for information. To a consider-
able extent, the precocious development of a political public sphere in
Britain was the handmaiden of colonialism and the wars it engendered.
More than any other kind of event, war aroused public opinion and stim-
ulated the growth of political journalism. A London pamphlet published
in 1760 noted the “inundation of political pamphlets, which flows with
such a rapid course from the press, whenever we are engaged in a war.”17
The economic stakes of war were high for Britain, with its far-flung em-
pire and a volume of overseas trade that grew in annual value from £10.4
million in 1700–09 to £28.6 million in 1765–74.18 Intensifying the impact
of war was the broad segment of society that invested in Britain’s colonial
project. In Bristol during the first three-quarters of the century, for ex-
ample, investors in overseas trade included grocers, bakers, apothecaries,
tobacconists, and widows. Because colonial issues were paramount in ev-
ery war fought by Britain during the eighteenth century, the conduct and
outcome of these conflicts directly affected the material interests of large
numbers of British subjects.
Not surprisingly, military success became an important index of a gov-
ernment’s legitimacy and efficacy. The economic stakes of war fueled
patriotic sentiment, and the fact that Britain’s chief military and imperial
rival was Catholic France also brought deep-seated Protestant sympathies
into play. Leopold von Ranke’s nineteenth-century insistence on “the
primacy of foreign policy” is no longer in fashion among historians, but
one could in fact argue that military and diplomatic events triggered al-
most every domestic crisis and political cause célèbre in eighteenth-century
Britain. In 1742 it was not the machinations of the Country opposi-
tion that brought down the Walpole government but popular outrage,
inflamed by the press, over the Walpole’s ministry’s perceived failure to
prosecute war against Spain with sufficient vigor. Britain’s participation in
the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), which aroused suspicions
17 Israel Maudit, Considerations on the Present State of Affairs in Germany (London, 1760),
as quoted in Manfred Schlenke, England und das friderizianische Preussen 1740–1763: Ein
Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Politik und öffentlicher Meinung in England des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Freiburg and Munich, 1963), 55.
18 O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century, 177.
 The peculiarities of the English 31

that the crown was sacrificing British interests to its own Hanoverian
ones, sparked another vociferous press campaign, and the subsequent
popularity of William Pitt the Elder rested largely on Britain’s military
successes during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Issues of war and peace
were also the occasion for John Wilkes’s rise to national political promi-
nence in 1763. His notorious attack on George III in the 45th issue of
the North Briton followed the government’s ratification of the Treaty of
Paris, which Wilkes denounced as a betrayal of British interests. Later on,
the disastrous and divisive American War of Independence provided an
important impetus to the campaign for parliamentary reform launched
by Christopher Wyvill’s Association movement.
Hence Britain’s engagement in almost constant warfare between 1739
and 1782 meant that the press, for most British subjects the chief source
of information on military and diplomatic affairs, assumed an ever-larger
role in political life. A London pamphlet from 1761 claimed that “the
political principles of most Englishmen are entirely under the influence
of pamphlets and newspapers.”19 By the 1760s, an increasingly aggres-
sive press had provoked fears among some observers that its independent
role threatened the delicate balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and
democracy on which the British constitution was putatively based. These
critics feared that the press, as a self-appointed “fourth estate,” was usurp-
ing the traditional role of the House of Commons as the appropriate arena
for canvassing and articulating the opinions of the nation. In his Political
Considerations on the Present Crisis (London, 1762), J. Marriott observed:

Every act . . . other than by way of petition to parliament, and through the con-
stitutional channel up to the throne, does greatly tend to distress government in
critical times. In such times it is very dangerous to create and introduce a fourth
estate, as it were, of a democratical kind into the constitution, and which is there-
fore more liable in its nature to be played off as an engine against government by
the arts of any able set of men who have a private interest in inflaming others not
quite so wise as themselves.20

Such fears were rooted in an older constitutional discourse that viewed

the political stage as a relatively narrow arena circumscribed by the in-
stitutions of crown, Lords, and Commons. These concerns reflected the

19 A Letter from a British Officer Now in Germany (London, 1761), as quoted in Schlenke,
England und das friderizianische Preussen, 74–75.
20 Quoted in Eckhart Hellmuth, “The Palladium of All Other English Liberties: Reflections
on the Liberty of the Press in England during the 1760s and 1770s,” in Hellmuth, ed.,
The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, 1991), 486. On criticisms of the press as a fourth estate see J. A. W. Gunn,
Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political
Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983), 273.
32 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

belief, widely shared by most Whigs and Tories up to the early 1770s, that
journalistic reporting of all substantive proceedings and debates in par-
liament should be prohibited. Accordingly, up until 1771 it was deemed
a violation of parliamentary privilege for newspapers to publish debates
and speeches beyond the king’s address to Lords and Commons at the
opening of a session. Printers who violated this provision were fined or
even jailed.
Neither the crown nor members of parliament were defenseless in the
face of a hostile press. Although the lapse of the Licensing Act had effec-
tively eliminated prepublication censorship, limits on press freedom con-
tinued to exist. In 1707 fears of Jacobite conspiracy had led parliament to
approve a statute making it high treason to attack the principle that only
a Protestant could succeed to the throne. The statute was enforced in
1719, when the Jacobite John Mathews was hung for publishing a pam-
phlet calling for the restoration of the Stuarts. The Stamp Tax of 1712,
the prototype for the infamous American Stamp Act of 1763, was also de-
signed to winnow out anti-government pamphlets and newspapers. The
1712 tax and its successors were not especially effective. Printers were
often able to evade the measure by publishing in formats different from
those specified by a stamp tax. Where the tax was successfully imposed,
however, it did render smaller papers financially more vulnerable and
hence more susceptible to governmental bribes and subsidies.
A more significant curb on the press were Britain’s libel laws, which
broadly applied not only to slanderous works but to any publication
deemed injurious to the public peace. Under this definition any attack
on parliament, the king, or his ministers could be construed as seditious
and subject to libel litigation. A large number of prosecutions for sedi-
tious libel occurred during George I’s reign and were directed mostly at
Jacobite tracts. Walpole’s administration successfully prosecuted numer-
ous cases of libel against publishers of papers like The Craftsman, and
under George III seventy prosecutions for seditious libel were carried out
between 1760 and 1790.21 Even when unsuccessful, libel prosecutions
could take a financial toll on those targeted. Larger opposition papers
with solid financial backing were able to absorb the costs of government
harassment, but smaller papers were more vulnerable and the threat of
libel proceedings doubtless created self-imposed limits on press criticism.
Government prosecution or harassment of course ran the risk of adding
to the notoriety of a paper and thereby increasing sales. A critic of The
Craftsman claimed that its editors deliberately “write something every
now and then for which they hope [to be prosecuted], otherwise the
21 Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press in England (London, 1949), 41.
 The peculiarities of the English 33

Paper is supposed to have lost its Poignancy.”22 Government crackdowns

on hostile journalists could also backfire politically, as shown by the ham-
fisted attempts of the Grenville ministry to muzzle John Wilkes in 1763.
For these reasons, the crown and its ministers usually found it more
effective to employ the same journalistic weapons as their critics. In-
stead of seeking to stifle press criticism through arrests and harassment,
governments preferred to subsidize the publication of newspapers and
pamphlets that presented government policies in a favorable light. Sir
Robert Harley, secretary of state and chancellor of the exchequer during
Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14), had pioneered the use of the press as a
government tool. In 1704 Harley began subsidizing Defoe’s Review as a
mouthpiece for his ministry, and his journalistic payroll came to include
Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele, and an array of lesser writers. Walpole
spent an average of between £5,000 and £10,000 annually on press sub-
sidies, prompting The Craftsman to complain disingenuously that “we
have seen some great Men stoop so low, as to colloque with common
News-Writers and Journalists, in order to obstruct all avenues to Truth,
and induce them, by Bribes, to serve their corrupt Purposes with ficti-
tious Intelligence and false Representations.”23 The Westminster election
of 1749, when the court party financed the circulation of 227,500 elec-
toral letters and broadsheets in support of its candidate, illustrates the
extent to which the government sought to exploit the political potential
of print. Lord Bute, one of Wilkes’s favorite ministerial whipping boys,
counteracted the journalistic gibes of his critics by financing the publica-
tion of two newspapers and hiring a network of coffeehouse spies to sound
out public opinion. Similarly, during the War of American Independence,
the North ministry employed the pens of writers such as Samuel Johnson
to parry the attacks of anti-war pamphleteers and journalists.

Radicalism and extraparliamentary politics after 1760

The 1760s were a watershed in the emergence of extraparliamentary
opinion and activity as an autonomous force in British politics. This new
departure was partly the culmination of more than two decades of war-
fare, which by spurring the growth of the press and stimulating public
interest in national affairs had enlarged the extraparliamentary politi-
cal arena. It was also the product of the shifting party alignments that
followed the accession of George III in 1760. In line with his desire to
22 Liberty and the Craftsman: A Project for Improving the Country Journal (London, 1730), 4,
as cited in Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins
of the Modern English Press (London and Toronto, 1987), 150.
23 The Craftsman 2, December 9 (1726), 12.
34 Politics and the rise of “public opinion”

be a “patriot king” who governed above party, George III brought To-
ries into his new ministry and thereby ended almost a half-century of the
party’s exclusion from government. The effect was ironically to destroy
the Tories as a cohesive political force, for political rehabilitation stripped
them of their decades-old identity as the party of the Country opposition.
The Whig–Tory framework that had traditionally defined parliamentary
contestation now dissolved into a handful of shifting factions and yielded
a succession of weak and divided governments. With the Tories no longer
compelled to appeal out-of-doors as compensation for their banishment
from government, dissident political voices outside of parliament lost a
traditional sponsor within Britain’s political elite and were thus thrown
back on their own resources. In the course of the decade, this extraparlia-
mentary opposition developed its own identity as an autonomous force
demanding radical constitutional reforms.
It consisted largely of disaffected elements within the middle and lower-
middle classes of London and other urban centers. The high levels of tax-
ation occasioned by the Seven Years War and later by the war in North
America highlighted the discrepancy between the financial contributions
of these urban groups on the one hand, and their inadequate represen-
tation in parliament on the other. These small tradesmen, merchants,
professionals, and manufacturers had come to believe that because they
bore a disproportionate share of the fiscal burdens of war, government
should be more responsive to their interests and opinions. Nurturing their
growing sense of social and political autonomy was the dense network of
clubs, masonic lodges, patriotic societies, trade associations, and other
mutual-aid organizations that had proliferated in urban England during
the previous two decades. Unlike the political clubs of the Restoration and
early eighteenth century, which had been linked closely to the two major
parties and mostly run by aristocratic politicians, these associations devel-
oped independently of party leadership and initiative. Beyond providing
conviviality and an outlet for charitable activities, they supplied moral
and economic support to members faced with sudden illness, unemploy-
ment, or debt. As such, they provided a social and economic cushion
to a middle and lower-middle class ever more dependent on credit and
vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Britain’s expanding but volatile market
economy.24
The Wilkes affair was the cause célèbre that galvanized this extraparlia-
mentary public and politicized its associational networks. The son of a

24 See John Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics,” in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer,
and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-
Century England (Bloomington, 1982), 217–20.
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