The feuilleton, which dealt ostensibly with literature, the drama and other harmless topics, but which, nevertheless, could make political capital out of the failure of a book or a play, became quite powerful under the Napoleonic nose. Geoffroy started the first feuilleton in the Journal des Débats. Julien Louis Geoffroy found that what might not be written in an editorial column might appear with perfect impunity on a lower level on the rez-de-chaussée, the "ground floor" of a journal. Under the Consulate, and later on, the Empire, Le Moniteur Universel, which served as a propaganda mouthpiece for Napoleon Bonaparte, basically controlled what the other twelve Parisian publications could run. A consular edict of January 17, 1800, made a clean sweep of the revolutionary press, and cut down the number of Paris newspapers to 13. The feuilleton was the literary consequence of the Coup of 18 Brumaire (Dix-huit-Brumaire).
A page from the Finnish newspaper Helsingfors Dagblad (1889), showing a "ground floor" feuilleton.
0 kommentar(er)
