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privileged groups, a court, a parliament, a capital, whose gossip, discussions, or debates they
reproduced; they ended up directing opinion almost as they wished, modeling it, and imposing the
majority of their daily topics upon conversation.
We shall never know and can never imagine to what degree newspapers have transformed, both
enriched and leveled, unified in space and diversified in time, the conversations of individuals, even
those who do not read papers but who, talking to those who do, are forced to follow the groove of
their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues.
Parliaments before the press differed so profoundly from those after the press that they seem only
to have their name in common. They differ in their origins, the nature of their mandates, their
functioning, the extent and the efficacy of their action. Before the press, the deputies to the Cortès, to
the Diets, to the Estates-General could not express opinion, which did not yet exist; they only
expressed local opinions of a very different nature, as we well know, or national traditions. . . .
The old parliaments were groups with heterogeneous mandates, each organized around distinct
interests, rights, and principles; the new parliaments are groups with homogeneous mandates (even if
contradictory ones), concerned with identical preoccupations and conscious of their identity. Besides,
the dissimilarity of the old deputies was due to the peculiarities of their original modes of election,
which were all based on the principle of the inequality and the electoral dissimilarity of various
individuals, on the eminently personal nature of the right to vote. Strength of numbers was not yet
known or recognized as legitimate; and for this very reason, in the deliberations of assemblies thus
elected, no one considered a simple numerical majority as having the force of law. . . .
Universal suffrage and the omnipotence of parliamentary majorities were only made possible by
the prolonged and accumulated action of the press, the sine qua non of a great leveling democracy (I
am not speaking of a democracy limited to the ramparts of a Greek city or a Swiss canton).
The differences just indicated explain another, namely the sovereignty inherent in parliaments after
the press, which those before the press never had thought of claiming. . . .
The monarchies before the press could and were supposed to be more or less absolute, intangible
and sacred because they embodied national unity as a whole; after the press, they can no longer be so,
because national unity is created outside them, and better than it was created by them. They can
subsist, however, but they are as different from the old monarchies as present-day parliaments are
from former ones. The monarch of old had the supreme merit of constituting the unity and the
conscience of the nation; the monarch of today can no longer have any justification except in
expressing the unity created by the continuity of a national opinion conscious of itself, in conforming
to this opinion and bending with it without submitting to it.
To complete our discussion of the social role of the press, is it not to the great progress of the
periodical press that we owe the broader and clearer delimitation, the new and more prominent
sentiment of nationality that is the political characteristic of our present period? Is it not the press that
has caused the growth of our internationalism at the same time as that of our nationalism, which seems
to be its opposite but may only be its complement? If growing nationalism has replaced decreasing
loyalty to become the new form of patriotism, should we not credit this change to the same terrible
and productive power? It is surprising to see that as nations intermingle and imitate one another,
assimilate, and morally unite, the demarcation of nationalities becomes deeper, and their oppositions
appear more irreconcilable. At first glance one cannot understand this contrast of the nationalistic
nineteenth century with the cosmopolitanism of the previous century. But this result, however
paradoxical, is actually very logical. While between neighboring or distant peoples the exchange of