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(esprit public), there were only local minds aroused separately by their own fixed ideas or passions.
But through his administrators the king was aware of these diverse states of mind; he assembled them
in his person, as it were, and in his own summary knowledge of them, which served as a basis for his
plans, he thus unified them.
It was a fragile unification, an imperfect one, to be sure, which gave to the king only a vague
awareness of what was general in local preoccupations. His person was the only area of their mutual
penetration. When the Estates-General were convened, a new step was taken toward the
nationalization of regional and local opinion. In the mind of each deputy these opinions met, and
found themselves similar or dissimilar; and the entire country, its eyes on its deputies, interested to a
small (infinitely smaller than today) degree in their work, then created the unusual (at that time)
spectacle of a nation aware of itself. And this intermittent, exceptional consciousness was very vague,
as well as slow and obscure. The meetings of the Estates-General were not public. In any case, for
want of a press the discussions were not published, and, lacking even postal service, letters could not
make up for this absence of newspapers. In short, it became known through sometimes distorted news
passed from mouth to mouth, after weeks and months, from travelers on horseback and on foot,
wandering monks and merchants, that the Estates-General had met, and that they had considered such
and such a subject—and that was all.
Note that the members of these assemblies, during their short and infrequent meetings, themselves
formed a local group, the site of an intense local opinion, born contagiously from meeting man to man,
from personal relationships, from reciprocal influences. And it was owing to this superior, temporary,
elective local group that the inferior, permanent hereditary local groups composed of relatives or
traditional friends in the towns and fiefs felt themselves united in transitory alliance.
The development of the mails by multiplying first public then private correspondence, the
development of highways by multiplying new contacts between people, the development of permanent
armies by making soldiers from all the provinces fraternize with each other, and finally the
development of courts by drawing the aristocratic elite from all corners of the earth to the
monarchical center of the nation—all had the effect of gradually developing the public mind (l’esprit
public). But it remained for the printing press to extend this great work to the fullest. It was for the
press, once it had reached the stage of newspaper, to make national, European, even cosmic, anything
local which, despite its possible intrinsic interest, formerly would have remained unknown beyond a
limited range. . . .
Let us try to be more precise. In a large society divided into nations, subdivided into provinces,
fiefs, and cities, international opinion, arising every now and then, has always existed, even before
the press: beneath international opinion are national opinions, still intermittent but already more
frequent; beneath national opinions are the almost continuous regional and local opinions. These are
the superimposed strata of the public mind. But the proportions of these diverse layers have varied
considerably with regard to importance and depth, and it is easy to see how. The farther back one
goes into the past, the more local opinion is predominant. The work of journalism has been to
nationalize more and more, and even to internationalize, the public mind.
Journalism both sucks in and pumps out information, which, coming in from all corners of the earth
in the morning, is directed, the same day, back out to all the corners of the earth, insofar as the
journalist defines what is or appears to be interesting about it, given the goals he is pursuing and the
party for which he speaks. His information is in reality a force which little by little becomes
irresistible. Newspapers began by expressing opinion, first the completely local opinion of