CHAPTER 2: POLITICS' NEW CLOTHES Print became the dress of political reality for a growing number of Europeans in the seventeenth century. At least in comparison with the previous period, a veritable information revolution was under way. Modern analogies can be misleading. But the replacement in the seventeenth century of the earlier more desultory system of political communication was surely as difficult to ignore at the time, among those paying the closest attention to technological innovations, as the impact of electronic media has been in our own. Let us consider some important facts. For one thing, the circulation of one-time printed battle reports in pamphlet or broadsheet form, manifestoes concerning treaties, truces and successions, accounts of important weddings, funerals and entries, legal proceedings, as well as critical commentary was accompanied in many cities by the first regular newspapers. And after the first regular newspapers emerged in Strasbourg and Wolfenbüttel, they were soon followed in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Genoa, Milan, Turin, Naples, Bologna, Barcelona and hundreds of smaller centers. In Germany, no less than two hundred newspapers were undertaken across the century. In England, some 350 titles of news publications of all kinds appeared in the period from 1641-59 alone. And even where newspapers did not appear, production of printed news of other sorts more than doubled. Wide differences in literacy levels 2 determined wide variations in diffusion. But the general impression of jurist Ahasver Fritsch in Jena that news publications "get into the hands of everyone," was exactly echoed by engraver Giuseppe Mitelli in Bologna. 1 Indeed, in late seventeenth-century Italy, as in the Britain of Joseph Addison a half-century later, the coffee-house politician, the poor soul who passed his life engrossed in the political trivia of the time, was already the object of raillery. "You who after silly tales are lusting /Anxious to hear rumors and reports,/ Quickly, run and look at the gazettes,/ And see if the news is good, fine, or disgusting"—wailed a Paduan pamphleteer. 2 While the critics bewailed the obsession with printed news that appeared to be a fashion of the times, deeper changes were occurring beneath the sometimes gaudy surfaces of the various urban societies. In Italy, just as in France, Holland, Germany and England, to name the main places so far covered in the historiography, the diffusion of new texts for thinking about power, authority and government administration challenged some basic assumptions. 3 It raised questions about the boundaries between private life and the holy circle of sovereignty and legitimacy. 4 It contradicted apologies for monarchical absolutism that situated rulers in a one-sided dialogue with the ruled. And to the protagonists and witnesses of the political disturbances that challenged encroaching administrative control, it contributed a means of communication. In Naples it informed suggestions about radical constitutional change. And in 3 Messina, the first revolutionary newspaper, published by the provisional government, defied the Spanish monarchy. To be sure, the connection between what circulated in the press and what circulated in the minds of audiences was not obvious; nor was it direct. 5 Still less was it uniform. Stories about a rain of blood in Argentina or about a fetus in Cologne that screamed audibly from within the womb, or any number of other accounts designed to spice up the otherwise rather dreary fare, excited as much scorn among the more discerning as they did wonderment among the more credulous. 6 The same went for stories about battles never fought, celebrations that never occurred or rulers who never ruled quite in the way the press described. In case readers did not already guess that information was often deliberately manipulated by the protagonists of many of the stories for the specific purpose of diverting attention or producing admiration, they were continuously told this, occasionally in so many words, by the writers themselves. What is more, the information revolution affected political life as much by what was said as by what was not, as much by direct statements as by subtle inferences, as much by the quality of the information as by the artfulness of the invention. The more the fabric of political reality came under scrutiny, the more its precise texture seemed to fade from view. And in some quarters, expectations for more accurate pictures of the civic world were overshadowed by convictions that the construction of events was just another negotiable aspect of the discourse about power. And if the skepticism that, among some readers, eventually took the 4 place of scorn, did not reach to the very marrow of political beliefs, at least it contributed to more profound forms of skepticism due to other causes. The Information Revolution From what has been said so far, there might be good reason to wonder that any sort of information revolution at all occurred in Italy or elsewhere, even in the limited early modern sense that has been suggested here. The official attitudes examined in the last chapter continued throughout the seventeenth century to regard the distribution of political commentary of any kind as a highly delicate government concern. Officials in Venice, Rome and Florence subjected manuscript newsletters to strict regulation because of possible benefit to military rivals or detriment to popular sentiments. 7 They refused to issue printing licences even for works that spoke well of the government, when such works might provoke vulgar tongues by the mere utterance to sully the names of the great, or when excessive praise might be its own refutation—as Antonio Cartari found out when his encomium of Pope Innocent XI was banned in Rome. 8 They worried that works rebutting criticism might provide enough information about an adversary's argument to furnish ammunition to future critics—that was the case of Antonio Diana's work on ecclesiastical immunities, which was to be reprinted in Florence in 1672. 9 They worried that works published by members of the political elite might give the impression of having been endorsed by the whole 5 group. That was the case of Venetian nobleman Gian Francesco Loredan's story of the life of Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein. 10 And responding to particularly acute crises in the distribution of power, governments occasionally put a tourniquet on the circulation of political material of any sort—as the Genoese government did in 1611 in the wake of yet another dispute between the new and the old nobility. 11 True, none of these governments' concerns was strong enough to cause political information to disappear. We have already seen that the newsletter networks, through which state secrets leaked to the outside world, were protected by powerful patronage structures and strong incentives guaranteeing a steady supply of new recruits into the industry. An irresistible demand made other sorts of manuscripts also a widespread form of clandestine publication in Italy—as late as the early eighteenth century, when Antonio Magliabechi turned the Medici library into the hub of a distribution system stretching across the peninsula. 12 Rather than vice-versa, clandestine manuscripts often appeared to imitate printed works, as did a Roman satire on Pope Urban VIII that claimed to be "printed for Marforio"—i.e., one of the two legendary statues that served as political bulletin boards in Rome—"in the shop of Pasquino"—i.e., the other. And a print- like format could suggest prudent withdrawal of a salacious manuscript from the legitimate marketplace, as in the case of this work advertized by the Venetian newsletter copyist Paolo Angelelli: "Scene of the noble whores and the whorish nobles. Delightful entertainment for the present Carnival, 1670," which 6 he claimed to be "printed" in "Calicut, with licence and privilege," available for 20 ungari to anyone desiring the entire volume of one hundred fifty manuscript pages. As he explained, "Noble whores are the prostitutes, servants . peasants and similar worthless people married by nobles, who cuckold their husbands. You will see first of all a Pesaro who married a whore of his nephew. A Foscarini knifed by a Molino her husband. A Cornaro who took his messenger boy's streetwalker for his wife. ." 13 Copied out numerous times by hand, the work sold just like a printed pamphlet. In the case of printed material, entrepreneurial ingenuity and the black market ensured that censorship systems would never obtain the results intended. Those censors who did not actually collaborate with the printers and writers complained about being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of material in circulation. 14 And theories about press control began to change along the lines of notions about information control in general, examined in the last chapter. To Paolo Sarpi's admission that total press control was "impossible," Fulgenzio Micanzio, his successor as consultant to Venice, added that it was useless, since it served to publicize the works being censored. 15 "In fact, many unnecessary books would otherwise simply be forgotten," he advised the Senate, "that survive because prohibition excites the desire of many to see what is so scandalous about them. ; and books that ordinarily might be read by few people end up being read by many." 16 No wonder that adventurers of the pen like Ferrante Pallavicino and Gregorio Leti exhorted fellow-writers to 7 procure censorship whenever possible in order to achieve popularity. And in making such exhortations they were only repeating a fact already well known to printers such as the Bulifon family in Naples, who recorded the rise in book orders following the prohibition of a work and connived with friendly importers in neighboring cities to bring in by stealth what they could not bring in by law.