This thesis is concerned with the Revolutionary press in the provinces and Paris as it relates to the local female community. It aims to show that the Revolutionary press was a vehicle for community information both aimed at and originating from literate women who had access to printed material. That is to say, literate women used their local papers to advertise themselves and their wares, express their views on a subject, to seek answers to questions and also to refute false information which was circulating about them. In addition, local information which was relevant to women could be publicised in the pages of a newspaper and it would be read. Finally, when describing women in news reports these periodicals employed a stock of phrases and literary or linguistic devices to present a specific picture of the females in question. The way in which women were depicted was intended either to unite the Revolutionary community against a female foe or to exalt a particular woman as a beacon of Revolutionary virtues. The approach to the sources will be one of considering newspapers and journalistic rhetoric as being engaged in the process of creating their own view of the world from the raw material of actual events, views which promoted the political loyalties or the ethos of a particular journal. Since it aims to examine continuity and rupture between the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary press, the time-scale for this thesis is 1780-1800. This allows for comparisons and contrasts to be made and the thesis will show that although the provincial press contained many of the elements found in their pre-Revolutionary predecessors, the cultural changes engendered by the Revolution meant that new elements of journalistic language and new subjects for discussion developed or emerged. This work is located in the existing body of literature on the French regional and Parisian press in the eighteenth century, particularly the work of Jeremy Popkin, Hugh Gough, Jean Sgard, Gilles Feyel and Pierre Rétat. It is also linked to works on the wider world of contemporary print, for example by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier and to the literature by Olwen Hufton, Sarah Maza and Joan Landes on the experience and roles of eighteenth-century French women. Its place in the midst of all this literature is that of drawing together the strands of Popkin's, Gough's, Sgard's and Feyel's work to argue that the Revolutionary newspaper was an instrument not simply of general information for a particular community or section of the population but also of communication on subjects which were of importance to, or which were deemed by editors or government officials to be of importance to women.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:538260 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Rowan, Victoria Joanne |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/37080/ |
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