France, the Mercures Galants, and other Parisian
journals in vogue, confined themselves to singing
the praises of their king, and larding their
columns with the chit-chat of Versailles, Marly,
and Fontainebleau.

Things continued very much in the same way
throughout the first half of Louis the Fifteenth's
reign; but already notions of moral emancipation
and enlightenment were beginning to
dawn; Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau,
and Grimm had begun to stir up the public
with their bold and novel theories; the
Encyclopædia was in course of publication, and by
1750 the press had shown the first signs of its
budding power. Twelve gazettes were being
published, weekly, in London at that period,
and the freedom of their tone roused the French
papers to emulation. But the Parisian
journalists dared not yet attack the ministers, as
was being done in England by Churchill, Wilkes,
and others; they contented themselves with
assailing the Jesuits, and they could do so with
more impunity, as they were backed in their
warfare against the hated society by all the
parliaments of France. By degrees, however,
the gazetteers took courage; stray shafts were
shot at times against the farmers-general of
taxes, whose shameless extortions were
reducing the lower classes to beggary; after the
farmers-general came the turn of the disreputable
magistrates of the period, who made a
traffic of justice, and sold their decisions to
the highest bidder; after this it was the beardless
field-marshals, like the Count de Clermont
and the Prince de Soubise, who were turned
into ridicule; and at last the papers directed
their pungent wit against youthful prelates, like
the Cardinal of Rohan, who were setting such
strange examples of godly living to their flocks.
So long, however, as they kept within these
bounds, the gazettes were but little molested.
Louis the Fifteenth, the most thoroughly
selfish monarch that ever reigned, cared for not a
soul on earth but himself and his " favourite"
of the moment. The attacks on farmers-general,
magistrates, and bishops, only made him laugh,
and the sharper they were the more he relished
them. Every one knows the answer he made
to Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, when the latter
complained in the fiercest anger of a satire of
Voltaire's against the Church: "you wish me
to place the Church under my protection," he
said; "but really, my lord, I think the Church
is quite old enough to take care of itself."

But much as he might enjoy the discomfiture
of his worthless judges, and his equally worthless
clergy, Louis the Fifteenth felt no inclination
to laugh when the papers, emboldened by
impunity, began to shoot at him, at his court,
and at the bungling of his ministers. The Duke
of Choiseul received orders to act then, and
Monsieur de Sartines, the lieutenant-general
of police, put a speedy stop to the
nuisance. A man named Boctoy was condemned
on the 29th of March, 1767, to imprisonment
for life, for having published at Nantes two
pamphlets, called " Le Royaurne des Femmes,"
and " Les Troubles de la France." René
Lecuyer was, in 1768, set up in the pillory,
whipped, and then thrown into prison for ten
years, for a squib in the Journal des Rieurs upon
"Queen Cotillon" (Madame de Pompadour);
and just at this time a hundred years ago, three
poor wretches were hanged at Reims for some
disrespectful allusions, in a local gazette, to
his Majesty the King; the gazette being at the
same time burned by the hands of the executioner.
These severities were accompanied by
edicts that enforced laws already made long
before, but which had gradually been allowed
to fall into abeyance. It became a felony,
punishable with death, to publish any book,
paper, or pamphlet, not previously revised by
the Commission of Censors; these censors were
seventy-nine in number, and were divided into
ten classes, each of which had a separate branch
of literature to superintend. Moreover, the
number of licensed printing offices was limited
to thirty, and the printers were made responsible
with their lives and fortunes for all that was
published by them.

This was falling from one extreme into the
other; and, as always happens, the excess of
rigour defeated its own end. The evil checked
in one direction burst out in another, and with
redoubled force, because it became impossible
to control it. Authors who had anything of a
seditious nature to write, sent their manuscripts
to be printed in London, Amsterdam, or Geneva,
and the books returned across the frontier with
all the extra savour of forbidden fruit. On the
other hand, secret printing offices were set up
in the cellars of private houses, for the accommodation
of pamphleteers, libellers, and poetasters,
and not all the efforts of Messrs. De
Choiseul and De Sartines could stop the flow of
rebel songs that daily sprung up, no one knew
whence, and circulated through the country by
thousands. The only thing to be done, was to
wait until some wretched bard was betrayed
for a reward (which occurred pretty frequently),
and then, after putting him to torture to make
him denounce his accomplices, to hang him.
But this was of but little practical use. The
survivors only grew more cautious, and new
rhymers took the place of the dead.

Louis the Sixteenth, who was really a good
prince, and desired the welfare of his subjects,
tried to put some order in all this, but he went
the wrong way to work; for instead of abolishing
the " censure," and so uprooting the evil,
he only tried to extend its powers, and to
make its action more effective. Turgot
recommended him to place the press under the
common law, and to tolerate free discussion so
long as it did not degenerate into abuse; but
Turgot was no more listened to on this than on
other points; the gazettes continued to be very
meek in their tone, from necessity; whilst the
pamphlets, on the contrary, abandoned
themselves to a recklessness of invective and a
licentiousness of speech which pass all belief. It is
not astonishing that Louis the Sixteenth fell as
he did, when we see the things that were