THE ROLE OF THE

PRINT MEDIUM
IN THE RISE OF
DEMOCRACY
To understand the role of the print medium in the rise of democracy, we
have to look at the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries –
periods the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the Age of Revolution” and “the
Age of Capital”. Beginning with the French Revolution in 1789, in which
the monarchy was overthrown and the First Republic installed, democracy –
at least as a concept – grew rapidly in popularity, aided by the parallel rise in
the sophistication and spread of the print medium, particularly in the form of
the daily newspaper. This occurred against the background of industrial
capitalism – the culmination of a fusion between the Industrial Revolution
and the capitalist economic system, which was centred in Britain but spread
throughout most of the European continent. Eric Hobsbawm writes that the
history of the nineteenth century is “primarily that of the massive advance of
the world economy of industrial capitalism, of the social order it represented,
of the ideas and beliefs which seemed to legitimatize and ratify it: in reason,
science, progress, and liberalism.”

It is important to appreciate this industrial-capitalist setting in which print

and democracy developed. Industrialization – which began in the eighteenth
century and continued with ever-increasing vigour into the nineteenth
century – had as profound an effect on European society as the invention of
agriculture eight millenia earlier. Never before had Europe undergone such
sudden and radical change – as Norman Davies writes in his monumental
history of Europe:

“There is a dynamism about nineteenth-century Europe that far

exceeds anything previously known. Europe vibrated with power as
never before: with technical power, economic power, cultural power,
intercontinental power. Its prime symbols were its engines – the
locomotives, the gasworks, the electric dynamos.”

One of the many things affected by the Industrial Revolution was the
medium of print. In 1804 a German printer, Konig, figured out how to use
the steam engine to power the press, allowing him to print 400 pages per
hour. The London Times asked Konig to invent a double press, and by 1827
the paper was printing 4 000 sheets per hour on both sides. In 1886 Ottmar
Mergenthaller perfected a linotype machine that could do the work of seven
to eight hand compositors, the result being an explosion of literary and
graphic material as the number of pages in newspapers rose and circulation
soared. Book publishing also expanded, with fiction, biographies, technical
books and histories being published alongside educational texts and literary
classics. These books not only spread new ideas of religion and classical
humanist values, but also ideas about democracy and nationalism, scientific
discovery, collected facts (as in dictionaries and encyclopedias) and political
propaganda.
Although aided by these printing technologies of the nineteenth
century, the advent of the press actually began at the dawn of the eighteenth
century. In London, the first daily paper, the Daily Courant, appeared in
1702. The Evening Post followed in 1706, the London Journal in 1725 and
The Craftsman in 1727. Within the next forty years the Daily Advertizer, the
Westminster Journal, Lloyd’s Evening Post, the St James’s Chronicle, the
Middlesex Journal and the Morning Chronicle had all been launched. In
1771, the London Press won its right to publish Parliamentary proceedings
and debates, and after this time the Morning Post appeared in 1780, the
Times in 1785 and the Sunday Observer in 1791.
In ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’, Jurgen
Habermas connects the growth of the press with the development of public
political dialogue. In industrializing countries, a new political order was
coming to life, one in which the bourgeoisie sought to control public policy.
The emergent press provided a means of articulating the bourgeoisie’s
political views, resulting in the creation of ‘public opinion’ – that is, the
construction of views which had legitimacy through the fact that they were
held by ‘the people’. The newspaper was praised as “the great medium of
communication”, and it was “on the basis of the information which it
supplies that a public opinion rests.” It was during this time that newspapers
took on what journalist and academic Julianne Schultz calls “a central and
enduring role in public life.” It was a crucial role in the promotion of a
democratic system – as Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times,
stated in a 1974 address:

“Governments as well as citizens need a free and inquiring press.

With a volatile, pluralistic electorate, and a complex bureaucracy, a
free press provides an indispensable feedback system from governed
to the governing.”

As distributors of the product of information, the press made the political

figures on which they reported accountable to the people, as well as
providing the ordinary citizen with a channel through which he could
express his individual opinion. As Eric Hobsbawm explains, “The individual
bourgeois who felt called upon to comment on public matters knew that a
letter to the Times or the Neue Freie Presse would not merely reach a large
part of his class and the decision makers, but, what was more important, that
it would be printed on the strength of his standing as an individual.” There is
thus a clear symbiosis between the print medium, particularly in the form of
the daily newspaper, and the establishment and maintenance of democracy.
It is worth citing some historical evidence of this symbiosis, ranging
from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. To begin with,
it is no coincidence that in France, the Revolution that installed the First
Republic also gave rise to the press. Papers flourished in Paris and the
provinces, to the extent that almost every prominent politician in France
seemed to have his own journal – generally two to four pages long,
appearing once or twice a week, and containing a few items of foreign news,
garbled versions of Parliamentary proceedings and leading articles giving
the political views of the editor. Writing during the 1848 Revolution in
France, when King Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of the Second
Republic, the poet Georg Weerth wrote to his mother: “Please read the
newspapers very carefully – now they are worth reading…This Revolution
will change the shape of the earth – and so it should and must! Long live the
Republic!” One of history’s most prominent enemies of democracy, Adolf
Hitler, wrote in his book Mein Kampf, “Was it not the German press which
knew how to make the absurdity of ‘Western democracy’ palatable to our
people?” Finally (and much more recently), in a document entitled ‘Free
Press Essential To Democracy’, Ramos-Horta – a press freedom pioneer and
the new foreign minister of East Timor – stated “A truly independent or
democratic East Timor will be dependent on us having a truly independent
and democratic media.” Clearly, the connection between the press and
democracy is strong.
The interdependence between the press and democracy obviously
relies on a culture of newspaper reading, whereby the citizens of a
democratic state actively read and take into account the information and
opinions presented to them in the daily press. Such a culture began in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century coffee-houses, where newspapers were
readily available to and avidly read by the bourgeoisie. When a twenty-year-
old Frenchman, Cesar de Saussure, visited London in the 1720s, he said that
in some of the coffee-houses “men will sit smoking and reading
newspapers…talking so little you can hear a fly buzz.” Later in the century –
by which time many coffee-houses were selling wine, punch or ale as well
as chocolate, coffee and tea – C. P. Moritz, a German pastor also visiting
London, noted “Near the Change is a shop where for a penny or even an
half-penny only you may read as many newspapers as you will. There are
always a number of people about these shops, who run over the papers as
they stand, pay their halfpenny and then go on.” As early as 1712 the British
Mercury was saying that “About 1695 the press was again set to work, and
such a furious itch of novelty has ever since been the epidemical distemper,
that it has proved fatal to many families, the meanest of shopkeepers and
handicrafts spending whole days in coffee houses to hear news and talk
politics.” The spread of the printed word, together with growing literacy and
a popular interest in political affairs, contributed to what Richard Tarnas,
author of ‘The Passion of the Western Mind’, calls “a new cultural ethos
marked by increasingly individual and private, non-communal forms of
communication and experience, thereby encouraging the growth of
individualism.”
The growth of individualism was significant because, in a democracy,
it is the individual who ultimately holds political power, by determining the
outcomes of referendums and elections through the process of voting – a
situation very different to that imposed by monarchical or totalitarian
systems where there is simply the leader and the masses. Growing literacy
and the spread of the printed word enabled people to think for themselves,
form their own opinions and, therefore, to participate effectively in public
political dialogue. At the same time, the setting of the coffee-house
physically brought people together to discuss politics; in a sense, it mirrored
Parliament itself in that it was a designated place for people to exchange
ideas and debate their merits, according to what they knew from the books,
papers and pamphlets available at the time. It was a sign, says science writer
Margaret Wertheim, of “genuinely democratizing trends”. By providing a
public venue for the dissemination of news and mail, coffee-houses served a
similar social function to the Internet today, with its online news services
and its open discussion boards. Indeed, literary scholar Brian Connery says
that these venues “served as laboratories for experimentation” with many of
the freedoms that would be enshrined in laws and constitutions later in the
century – including freedom of the press, freedom of association and
assembly, and freedom of speech. The Constitution of the United States – a
document designed to safeguard democracy and liberalism – contains the
statement “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press.” Without the vital ingredient of a free press, a genuine
democracy cannot exist.

In summary, there were a number of factors that led to the rise of democracy
through the medium of print. The first is the technologies of the Industrial
Revolution, such as the steam-powered printing press invented by Konig. As
John Street, author of ‘Mass Media, Politics And Democracy’ writes, “The
move from the hand-operated press to the production-line system allowed
for a greatly increased circulation, and with this the possibility of a mass
readership, ‘popular’ press.” The second factor is the blooming of coffee-
house culture, tied in with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consequent
advent of public political dialogue, which the open, political nature of
coffee-house culture complimented. Coffee-houses served democracy not
only by giving everyone access to newspapers and encouraging open
political discussion; its disregard of social divisions was also highly
democratic in nature – as Margaret Wertheim writes, the coffee-house was
“a place where, as one seventeenth-century polemicist put it, ‘a worthy
Lawyer and an errant Pickpocket’ could meet on equal footing.” These
factors, together with intellectual movements and uprisings by the lower
classes, helped spread and in some cases realize democratic ideals. Ideas
such as political accountability and elected Heads of State could only be
realized through the daily newspaper, and as people’s literacy improved, and
the circulation of daily newspapers increased (the circulation of the London
Times, for example, moved between 50 000 and 60 000 in the 1850s and
1860s), so the soil of Europe became properly fertile for the seeds of
democracy to grow.