ss were, to the legal assemblies, what free air is to confined
air. Whilst the air of these assemblies became vitiated, and exhausted
itself in the circle of the established government, the air of
journalism and popular societies was impregnated and incessantly stirred
by an inexhaustible principle of vitality and movement. The stagnation
within was fully credited, but the current was without.

The press, in the half century which had preceded the Revolution, had
been the echo, well organised and calm, of the thoughts of sages and
reformers. From the time when the Revolution burst forth, it had become
the turbulent and frequently cynical echo of the popular excitement.

It had itself transformed the modes of communicating ideas; it no longer
produced books--it had not the time: at first it expended itself in
pamphlets, and subsequently in a multitude of flying and diurnal sheets,
which, published at a low price amongst the people, or gratuitously
placarded in the public thoroughfares, incited the multitude to read and
discuss them. The treasury of the national thought, whose pieces of gold
were too pure, or too bulky, for the use of the populace, it was, if we
may be allowed the expression, converted into a multitude of smaller
coins, struck with the impress of the passions of the hour, and often
tarnished with the foulest oxides. Journalism, like an irresistible
element of the life of a people in revolution, had made its own place,
without listening to the law which had been made to restrain it.

Mirabeau, who required that his speeches should echo throughout the
departments, had given birth to this speaking trumpet of the Revolution,
(despite the orders in council) in his _Letters to my Constituents_, and
in the _Courrier de Provence_. At the opening of the States General, and
at the taking of the Bastille, other journals had appeared. At each new
insurrection there was a fresh inundation of newspapers. The leading
organs of public agitation were then the _Revolution of Paris_, edited
by Loustalot; a weekly paper, with a circulation of 200,000 copies; the
feeling of the man may be seen in the motto of his paper: "The great
appear great to us only because we are on our knees--let us rise!" The
_Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens_, subsequently called the
_Revolutions de France et de Brabant_, was the production of Camille
Desmoulins. This young student, who became suddenly a political
character on a chair in the ga