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scattered readers of manuscripts copied by hand and existing in perhaps a dozen copies, they, unlike
the present-day readers of a newspaper or even, sometimes, of a popular novel, were not aware of
forming a social aggregate. Was there a public in the Middle Ages? No, but there were fairs,
pilgrimages, tumultuous multitudes dominated by pious or belligerent emotions, angers or panics. The
public could begin to arise only after the first great development in the invention of printing, in the
sixteenth century. The transportation of force over distance is nothing compared to this transportation
of thought across distance. Is not thought the social force par excellence?—think of Mr. Fouillée’s
idées-forces. Then appeared, as a profound innovation with incalculable effects, the daily and
simultaneous reading of a single book, the Bible, produced for the first time in thousands of copies,
and to the united mass of its readers this gave the sensation of forming a new social body, detached
from the Church. But this nascent public itself was not yet anything more than a church apart,
coinciding with that church, and it is the weakness of Protestantism to have been a public and a
church at the same time, two aggregates ruled by different and irreconcilable principles. The public
as such only began to assume a definite form under Louis XIV. But although at that time there were
crowds as torrential as at present, and as sizable, at royal coronations, the great holidays, and the
demonstrations provoked by periodic famine, the public was scarcely anything beyond a narrow elite
of “gentlefolk” (honnêtes gens) reading their monthly gazette, reading books, a small number of
books written for a small number of readers. And the majority of these readers were in Paris, if not at
court.
In the eighteenth century, this public grew rapidly and became fragmented. I do not think that there
was a philosophical public distinct from the general literary public before Bayle, because I do not
apply the term public to a group of scholars—united, it is true, despite their dispersion in various
provinces or countries, by their preoccupation with similar investigations and the reading of the same
writings, but so few in number that they can keep up an active correspondence and draw from these
personal relationships the principal sustenance for their scientific communion. A special public does
not take shape until that time—difficult to specify—when men given to the same study were too
numerous to know each other personally and felt themselves bound only by impersonal
communications of sufficient frequency and regularity. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a
political public arose, grew, and soon overflowed and absorbed all the other publics—literary,
philosophical, and scientific—just as a river absorbs its tributaries. Until the Revolution, however,
the life of the public has little intensity of its own and only acquires importance through the life of the
crowd, to which it is still connected, and through the very lively activity of the salons and cafés.
The true advent of journalism, hence that of the public, dates from the Revolution, which was one
of the growing pains of the public. . . .
The revolutionary public was above all Parisian; outside Paris its influence was weak. Arthur
Young, in his famous journey, was struck by seeing the public newspapers so little circulated even in
the cities. Of course, this observation applies to the beginning of the Revolution; a little later it would
be much less true. Until the end of the Revolution, however, the absence of rapid communication
posed an insurmountable obstacle to the intensity and propagation of the life of the public. How could
newspapers, arriving only two or three times a week and then a week after their publication in Paris,
give readers in the south of France that feeling of immediacy and awareness of simultaneous
unanimity without which the reading of a newspaper does not differ essentially from the reading of a
book? It remained for our century, through its perfected means of locomotion and instantaneous
transmission of thought from any distance, to give all publics the indefinite extension of which they
are capable and which contrasts them so sharply with crowds. The crowd is the social group of the