“A Simple, Short, and Exact Account of the Facts”?

Abstract

This article examines how material constraints thought to stifle political news' production in France actually encouraged a small number of Jansenist priests, their lay defenders, and book-trade workers to develop new printing methods and a sophisticated print distribution system that enabled them to skirt policing in the production and distribution of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (1728–1803). The existence of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques outside the official book trade liberated its authors to include content that no other paper could. The dense religious dispute about which it sought to inform readers, coupled with its uninitiated target audience, encouraged its authors not just to report the news but also to explain it in highly partisan terms. In so doing, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques provided many readers with an initiation into news reading. While the news reported concerned a religious controversy, it worked to reshape how readers thought about religion and politics in early eighteenth-century France.