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Chapter 2
“We can understand nothing rightly unless we perceive the manner in which the revolution in communication has made a new world for us”.1 This would be a banal statement had it not been made in 1901, a dozen years before the birth of Marshall McLuhan, when few imagined what future the technical networks reserved for the industrial society still in construction. Its author is Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929), who is considered one of the founders of modern American sociology.
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Communication is the mechanism by which society organizes itself, Cooley believed, and the mechanism thanks to which human relations exist and develop. It is a double mechanism: there is physical or material communication, concerned with transport, participating in the physical organization of society; and psychological communication, a veritable agent of social organization, including symbols and all the apparatuses that make possible their conservation and transmission. The field of communication has as much to do with facial expressions, attitudes, gestures, tones of voice, and words and styles of writing as it does with printing, railways, telegraph, and telephone — in short, it is everything that may result from the mastery of space and time.2 This “new world of communication” entails a fundamental change in mentality: in Cooley’s terms, enlargement of mental perspective, and mental animation, the product of frequent exposure to novelty. This is because the use of new means of communication fulfills four functions: expressiveness, or the range of ideas and feelings these means are equipped to convey; the permanence of record, or the overcoming of time; swiftness, or the overcoming of space; diffusion, or the access to all classes of men. But this innovation
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has a price. New dangers lie in wait for individuals subject to the increase in the “intensity of life” produced by the circulation of ideas and images: superficiality and the strain caused by difficulties in understanding and assimilating all that is new. The risk therefore exists of a rupture of the personality: depression, suicide, or madness.
Cooley did not neglect the observation of what he called “primary groups,” such as the family and youth, or neighborhood groups, where people develop face-to-face relations based on association and cooperation. These relations remain essential because within them is formed, through the process of communication, “human nature,” “sentiments… such as love, resentment, ambition, vanity, hero worship, and the feeling of social right and wrong” — in short, all that makes possible “sympathy,” that is, an “imaginative contact with the mind[s] of others,” an entering into and sharing of the mind of someone else.3 Cooley was disturbed at the vulnerability of primary groups to the effects of mounting urbanization. But he was also able to assess the capacity of neighborhood and family to adapt and redefine themselves in the face of the new conditions of modern anonymity.
Resolutely optimistic despite the tensions and ambiguities that characterize the means of modern communication, Cooley’s reforming spirit saw in the “new communications” an instrument for attaining an era of moral progress. With the advent at the world level of a common sentiment of belonging to humanity and the infinite growth of justice, communication would destroy the old social order and build a new one in which people would increase their “sympathetic” contacts.
We must remember the origin of this conceptual framework. Before developing his first hypothesis on the meaning of the new mode of social organization made possible by communication, Cooley had made two studies, one for a railroad regulation commission recently created under the Interstate Commerce Act, the other for the Federal Census Bureau. The first bore on the search for ways by which railways might cut down accidents, the second on the social significance of street railways. His first book, published in 1894, took as its title The Theory of Transportation.4 In fact it was his Ph.D. thesis, defended before a committee at the University of Michigan, which counted among its illustrious professors at the time two other leading figures on the American academic scene: the social philosopher John Dewey and the social psychologist George H. Mead. In the history of American social science, all three were representatives of the tradition of critical reform, sharing the hope of seeing communication serve the renewal of democracy.
This first attempt to map the sociological territory was of interest for at least two reasons. First, when Cooley formulated the distinction be-
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tween physical and psychic communication, he brought to light the difficulty of articulating the various levels of analysis. His trial-and-error procedure augured the split between the two poles that was to recur time and again in the history of theories of communication in the technical age.
Marx’s unterbau/uberbau social structure
This is a split that Marx himself tried to resolve at the level of his global theory of society by proposing the dichotomy between economic infrastructure and ideological superstructure, producing a vision of a pyramid cut into sections, or instances; its interpretation was to be a permanent source of argument among his followers, and it long deferred sufficient consideration in Marxist analyses of culture and symbolic practices. Sometimes taking refuge in the symbolic, sometimes in the material, placing sometimes one, sometimes the other in the foreground and rarely treating them at the same time, this tendency of communication theory was to recur and even intensify as two conceptions grew apart: one that limited communication to the exchange among individual psychologies and the other that refused to think of the individual subject outside of his or her social relations. The two were rarely combined. But for Cooley, sociology was not worth its name unless it tried to define itself as the study of “personal relations, at the same time in their primary aspect and their secondary, as groups, institutions and processes.”
The second interesting aspect of Cooley’s work is that it allows us to perceive how the study of communications, from its first stammerings, was invested with the hopes of a social revolution. In Cooley we see one of the first theoretical manifestations of this communicational millenarianism. Endowed with a redemptive function, communication offers the promise of a new communion, or a new community. This should hardly surprise us, since a work published in 1852 under the title The Silent Revolution had already predicted a new social harmony to be attained thanks to “a perfect network of electric filaments.”5 This millenarianism would later underpin a number of discourses on the new “informational agoras.” Like the tendency to bipolar analysis mentioned above, it too is therefore constitutive of the history of communication, its theory, its doctrines, and their uses.
Saint-Simon
In the emergence during the nineteenth century of a belief in the salutary determinism of techniques of communication, the disciples of the philosopher and economist Claude Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), precursor of positivist social science, played an essential role. The doctrine of Saint-Simon, who deeply influenced Auguste Comte, is even more crucial in that from among his disciples emerged both inventors of commu-
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nicational utopias and great builders of the means of communication. In France they were the pioneers of railways and trans-Atlantic steamship lines, and were closely linked to the great enterprises of the Suez and Panama canals, which revolutionized world geography. They were undoubtedly the first to formalize the notion of “network,” as a way of conveying the rupture about by the new techniques of trade and circulation of goods, messages, and people.
From the very beginnings of the railway, the Saint-Simonians endeavored to calculate the moral and social consequences of the arrival of this new network. From an international point of view, the work of the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier (1806-79) entitled Le système de la Méditerranée (The system of the Mediterranean), published in 1832, remains the most daring. This future president of the international jury of the Universal Exposition of 1867 was convinced that “the railway is the symbol of universal association.” Seeing it as a means to reconcile the West and the East around the Mediterranean, he designed an imaginary network by which this new trait of universal union could be transmitted. Tracing his project of a “European Confederation” by means of rail, the author takes us successively to Spain, France, Italy, Germany, European Turkey, Russia, Asia, and Africa, and with the seven-league boots of networks, he jumps the Bosporus to the Persian Gulf, from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, from the Elephantine to Alexandria, and so forth. As for the impact the railway could have on Russia, he wrote: “If there exists one country where the railways should have a civilizing influence, it is Russia. Everything slumbers among the inhabitants of this country, who die after having vegetated rather than lived, without going beyond the sight of their ancestors’ hovels, resembling mollusks whose shells are fixed to a rock. In the political realm, the most effective means to awaken them from their somnolence would be to place near them examples of an extraordinary movement, to excite them with the spectacle of prodigious velocity, and invite them to follow the current that will flow to their door.”6
But the destiny of most of the disciples of Saint-Simon also shows how short is the distance separating certain communicational utopias from pragmatism as soon as their creators gain power. Converted to businessmen or governmental advisors, the Saint-Simonians grew further and further away from their youthful ideal of socialism, and turned into ardent defenders of free trade and industrialism. The apostle of “universal association,” Michel Chevalier, became a professor of political economy at the University of Paris, and as advisor to Emperor Napoléon III in the 1860s, he invented “Pan-Latinism.” This doctrine, conceived as a response by the imperial state to Washington’s Pan-Americanism, legiti-
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mated the intervention of French troops in Mexico (1862-67) to defend the emperor Ferdinand-Joseph Maximilian (who would be executed in 1867), placed on the throne by Napoléon III. As in Napoléon Bonaparte’s intervention in Egypt, the expeditionary force was backed up with a corps of scientists and engineers-“our barbaric civilizers,” as they were called in 1862 by the president of the Mexican Republic, Benito Juarez.
It remains true that, shorn of its early utopian aspirations, Saint-Simonianism left its imprint on the construction of social science. Social science, in this perspective, was to be founded on the same positive and objective principles as physical science, and was to apply the same methods: it would be both a “science of observation” and a “science of organization.” In publishing in 1821 the first volume of Le système industriel (The industrial system), Saint-Simon had laid the foundation of his “new science of man” by means of the concept of “system.” The concept was meant to reflect the quest for explanatory models of the social totality in an instrumental perspective: How should exploitation of the planet by industry be organized? How should we think and act in order to deploy “the law of progress” — that “fundamental law of historical development”? Saint-Simon thought that only a social doctrine that proposed a general concept of society, organized it and made it intelligible, could move society from a “critical state” to an “organic state.” In the critical state, all unity of thought and action ceases among men, and society is no more than an agglomeration of isolated and competing individuals and personal interests. In the organic state, all activities are ordered around a definition of the goal of social action: society becomes one.
What is the nature of the nascent industrial society? What is the significance of social change? This enigma, which the American Charles H. Cooley tried to resolve on the basis of “communication,” the Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798-1857) had already tried to answer in the 1830s, even before the great epoch of industrialization, when he theorized the “social dynamic” and development of industrial society.
At the foundation of his thought was the idea that the social organism only succeeds in finding harmony and stability via the division of labor. The more a society grows, the more its constitutive parts differentiate. This division of functions, fulfilled by more and more differentiated but interconnected organs, united in their purpose but diverse in the means they employ, is the golden rule of stability in a society — as well as a source of disorganization. In a society imagined as a “system” — the
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whole greater than the sum of its parts — where social equilibrium is the result of the individuality of work and of cooperative effort, the danger lies in an excessive division of tasks, an exaggerated specialization.”7 These are the hypotheses, inscribed in an organic conception of society, which would furnish the recurrent frame of reference in the debate on industrial society as a “mass society,” and more particularly, on the question of whether mass communications has the ability to assure the bonds between individuals that allow for the maintenance of an integrated and stable system of social control.
These conceptions — of the laws of evolution and of the social order as an organism — would be extended by the British thinker Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who would carry to their logical extremes notions such as growth, structures, functions, or systems of organs, and further develop the complex analogy between society and organism. Unlike Comte, who saw a degree of planning as necessary for change, Spencer was a militant of laissez-faire8, in this closely associating himself with the search for legitimation of a bourgeoisie then rising to the position of command in the industrializing process of his country. Spencer, in a context dominated by the evolutionary theses of Charles Darwin, displayed in its full force the tendency to organicize or “biologize” the social. Under the auspices of positivistic tradition in sociology, there began to emerge, starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of communication as the regulatory principle counteracting the disequilibria of the social order.”9 This conceptual matrix would later reach its high point in the functionalist sociology of mass communications; the “religion of progress,” so dear to the first positivists, would in the following century metamorphose, by various stages, into the “religion of communications.”
The influence of Darwin and Spencer made itself felt in the last years of the nineteenth century, particularly in two domains that one way or another are concerned with thinking about information and communication.
Veblen and leisure
The first is that of the sociology of leisure, associated with Thorstein Veblen and his masterwork Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899.10 In this book, Veblen, who was also influenced by American pragmatism, develops his theory of conspicuous consumption: the meticulous search for quality in food, drink, home, services, ornaments, clothing, and amusements is not so much to satisfy real needs as to elevate or express social status, to maintain social prestige. Functionalist sociology of the twentieth century was to see in this theory a decisive contribution to the concept of “latent function”: a function that, in contrast to the avowed “manifest function,” is neither willed nor generally recognized in its social and psychological consequences.”11 The critical school, on the
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other hand, interpreted Veblen’s thesis as the first paradoxical expression of a sociology of culture combining positivism and a demystifying approach. Veblen, who was close to the Jean-Jacques Rousseau-ist ideal of the primitive, denounced the barbarism of modern times — “barbaric civilization,” the barbarous character of a culture given over to ostentation and to advertising. At the same time, this man who despised the culture he was analyzing in its most banal phenomena — from the sports referee to lawns to nineteenth-century interior decoration - suggested no recourse for individuals other than an attitude of acceptance of what existed. His central concept was “adaptation,” the adjustment to the new Darwinian world of natural selection in production and industrial technology. Science, conceived as the universal application of the principle of causality in opposition to archaic, animistic forms of thought, is the instrument of progress. The new forms of “life” to which one ought to adapt all refer back untiringly, in Veblen’s thought, to the sphere of economic consumption.12
The voguish ideas launched by the science of the social organism also marked the first analyses of modern geopolitics, which started to theorize the new spatial dimension of international exchanges. Its precursor was the German Friedrich Ratzel, author of a voluminous treatise on “political geography” published in 1897.”13 His research threw up new spatial concepts, such as spatial representation (Raumvorstellung), life space (Lebensraum), concentration (Zusammenfessung), frontiers (Grenzen), and world power (Weltmacht). With his notion of “circulation” in the sense of transmission of information, he was one of the few people to perceive the structuring role of the new networks of telecommunications, to which he devoted a chapter in his treatise. “Space (der Raum) is power,” postulated Ratzel, whose thought would later be echoed in the organicist thinking of the Swedish geopolitical analyst Rudolph Kjellen in a 1916 work entitled Staten som Lifsform (The state as life-form). Both were trying to lay the foundations of strategic policy in the analysis of the geography of nations. “Position” (die Lage) was, after space, the second key concept in their approach. Space or territory was a matter for the state, an imperfect organism whose development is governed by laws regulating the functions of gestation: birth, growth, and strengthening. In order to grow, the state needs the necessary space (Lebensraum). In this conception of the state as a living being, “circulation” is a capital factor: it “vitalizes” territory, channels pressures, orients defensive re-
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actions, gives a concrete meaning to breadth, form, and situation. It links together internal and external political spaces.
This first exploration of the concept of space coincides with what the French geographer Roger Brunet has identified as the “spatialist ideology,” which he sees as a correlate to biologism. Both would prove fertile sources for the legitimation of expansionism, as is demonstrated by the later use history made of the notion of “life space” or, more subtly, “natural borders.” Vital space became one form of the animal territorial law, justifying war, conquests, and encroachments; “natural” space meant the necessary mastery over resources and supplies, which legitimated efforts to control the spaces on which the state “depends,” whether they be oil wells, copper mines, or uranium deposits.”14
The last decade of the nineteenth century thus saw the formation of modern imperial doctrine. It is useful to recall that in the elaboration of his political geography, Ratzel had himself been influenced by a work by U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Written in the years when a naval armaments buildup and a “big Navy” policy reflected America’s rise to industrial power, this book had been preceded by two other works that also placed U. S. expansion on the agenda as a necessity: Our Country (1885) by Josiah Strong and Manifest Destiny (1885) by John Fiske. Mahan did not beat about the bush: “Arrested on the South by the rights of a race wholly alien to us, and on the North by a body of states of like traditions to ours, whose freedom to choose their own affiliation we respect, we have come to the sea. In our infancy we bordered upon the Atlantic only, our youth carried our boundary to the Gulf of Mexico. Today our maturity sees us upon the Pacific. Have we no right or no call to progress in any direction?”15
U.S. Marines raising the American flag at Guantanamo.
The response was not long in coming, furnished by the events of 1898: the arrival of U.S. naval vessels in Philippine waters, the landing of Marines in Cuba, and the annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam. The strategic idea of Mahan was the following: “The due use and control of the sea is but one link in the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates; but it is the central link, which lays under contributions other nations for the benefit of the one holding it, and which history seems to assert, most surely of all gathers itself riches.”16
In 1902, Captain Mahan was elected president of the American Historical Association, an honor never before granted to a man in uniform. This geography of world power developed by Mahan, Ratzel, and Kjellen contrasted at the time with that of another pioneering approach to geography represented by a Frenchman, Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), who had been banished from France in 1872 for having taken part in the
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Commune. Between 1875 and 1894 there appeared 19 volumes of his Nouvelle géographie universelle (New universal geography). In contrast to the great majority of his contemporaries in the “beacon societies of progress and civilization,” where geographers played a not insignificant role in the preparation of European expansion, Reclus had, in producing his atlas, initiated more egalitarian relations with scientific circles in countries that would much later be called “developing.” He relied upon a vast network of local researchers, including several Latin Americans, and incorporated their knowledge into a new vision of the planet that recognized its profound inequalities. This was particularly true for the three volumes devoted to Latin America, where the young geographer Reclus had begun his career by producing a study of the region of Santa Marta, Colombia. At the end of his New Universal Geography, the French geographer wrote in 1894:
I wanted to make my story live, showing for each country the traits that characterize it, indicating for each group of humanity the genius peculiar to it. I would say that everywhere I feel at home, in my country, with my brother men. I do not believe myself carried away by a sentiment other than that of sympathy and respect for the inhabitants of a common nation. On this planet that turns so quickly in space, a grain of sand amid immensity, is it worth it to hate each other? But in placing myself within this view of human solidarity, it seems that my work is not complete.17
In fact, Reclus was faithful to the grand themes and beliefs of the anarchist movement of which he was a theoretician, along with the Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), his companion in militancy. Human solidarity and universal fraternity, which Kropotkin called “the natural principle of mutual aid,” was according to him stronger than the Darwinian principle of struggle for existence. While Reclus, in his books, was attentive to new networks of communication, Kropotkin went much further in his vision of the impact of these technologies: he saw in electricity a means of reconstituting lost community. In this he prefigured a current of thought centered on the theme of technical civilization.
At the turn of the century, other founding fathers of social science developed their own perspectives on the specificity of the changes taking place, and left a heritage of key concepts that would later help to structure the sociology of mass communications.
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For example, the German Ferdinand Tönnies advanced the debate on mass society by proposing that we distinguish between two theoretical constructions, one representing the society that Europe was in the process of leaving, and the other, that she was entering: respectively Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or “community” and “society.” The former is by nature affective and existential, characterized by informal social relations. The latter is a distant relative of that complexity envisioned by Comte in his notion of division of labor. It is rational by nature, constructed around a contract accepted voluntarily by its subjects, each party agreeing to certain obligations and accepting sanctions if the clauses of the contract are not observed. The individual must face an impersonal, anonymous, and competitive system.18 For Tönnies, these two poles were not mutually exclusive; mass society, urbanized and industrialized, did not imply the end of “primary groups,” but their redefinition. Rather than representing structures and institutions, the two poles expressed two dimensions of social action. In any case, Tönnies avoided attributing positive value to one or the other.This heuristic tool developed by Tönnies gave rise to several contradictory interpretations, some of which went to the extreme of overlooking what had inspired it. This realization would come later when the sociology of mass communications was confronted, after World War II, with intercultural relations between so-called developed or modern societies and those referred to as traditional.
Ferdinand Tönnies
The German sociologist, in the manner of other contemporaries like the American Charles H. Cooley, or his compatriots Georg Simmel and Max Weber, or the Frenchman Emile Durkheim, insisted on the ambivalence of change and on the contradictory character of the new world, which was seen to be just as capable of bringing more freedom and pluralism as of engendering more dehumanization, anonymity, and fragmentation, as well as more state oppression and bureaucracy. They all thought that people should confront the growing process of social differentiation and the establishment of new social relations in modern cosmopolitan society. They believed that, even if a process of homogenization was under way, the “theory of zero level,” as Cooley called it, had no basis whatsoever. In other words, they opposed the idea that pluralism and the search for equality necessarily brought about a leveling down, or the triumph of the “lowest common denominator.”
The idea of the degeneration of society did, however, have some defenders: the “psychopathologists,” who far from being ambivalent, developed
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a binary vision in which the pole of “mass society” was afflicted with all sorts of defects.
Whereas a sociologist such as Simmel saw a complex tissue of multiple relations resulting from continual interaction among individuals, in which society and the social were conceived of as production and process, the philosopher and psychopathologist Gustave Le Bon, author of a key work, Psychologie des foules (Psychology of crowds), published in 1895, saw “the delirious crowd” and “mental contagion”: mass society produced “automatons no longer guided by their will.”19 An implacable enemy of the principle of equality and champion of the national heritage against cosmopolitanism, Le Bon interpreted the rise of “mass society” and the “dangerous classes” (the intrusion of masses into the city) as a mortal threat to elites and property owners. If one did not want to resign oneself to being submerged by the tide of uncontrolled violence, it was urgent to channel it “like an engineer masters a torrent.” While Simmel was interested in the perpetual process of social production — in “sociation,” as he called it — and intervened directly in the debate on the “woman question” and the rise of the women’s movement in imperial Germany, linking the question of modernity and that of femininity,“20 Le Bon could find nothing better to do than to rail against the sentimentality of crowds, which”one observes also in the case of beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution such as women, savages, and children.”
T.R.Malthus in 1834
Aristocratic fear of the rise in power of the common people, in its modern version, had a strong antecedent in the theories of the English pastor Thomas R. Malthus, author of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).21 In this work, which originally was conceived as a reply to the socialist doctrine of William Godwin22 (just as Le Bon directed many of his writings against his socialist contemporaries), Malthus imputed to the “laws of nature” the misery and unhappiness of inferior classes of people, for whom he proposed, as the only way out of their state of poverty, a reduction in their rate of proliferation.”23 Malthus, who died in 1834, aligned himself clearly with the interests of protectionist landlords who since the compromise of 1689, the fruit of the “Glorious Revolution” governed Britain alongside the bourgeois minority. He did not perceive or refused to admit the irresistible rise of this new manufacturing bourgeoisie, which was settling into power after 1846 with the abrogation of the Corn Laws and the triumph of free trade. It was in this process precisely that Spencer rooted his sociology of the social organism. Our willfully summary correlation between theoretical views and class interests is important to understanding what happened later, after World War II, when the sociology of communication and the sociology of population lent each other support in their approaches to poverty. It is not insignifi-
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cant that the father of structural-functionalist sociology in the United States, Talcott Parsons, saw Malthus as a precursor because he was the first to formulate a theory of the regulatory function of institutions and of social equilibrium.24
In the debate in the 1890s in which Le Bon took part, the very status of public opinion was at stake. France had only recently consecrated the exercise of freedom of the press, thus taking its first steps toward “mass democracy,” with large-circulation papers, the appearance of new political organizations of social solidarity, the gestation of modern public opinion and also a major test, the Dreyfus Affair. This political and legal controversy, over the condemnation and deportation of a French captain of Jewish origin who was wrongly accused of espionage after a campaign of anti-Semitic hysteria, divided the country into two camps. Defending Dreyfus, who became a symbol and a pretext, was the League of the Rights of Man, founded by republican intellectuals; its opponent was the League of the French Nation, which took the side of the army and the church. One of the climaxes of the long polemic was the publication of “J’accuse” by Emile Zola in the paper L’Aurore (1898). This controversy marked the emergence in France of the intellectual class as an actor in the public space — a group that in the following decades would in its majority occupy the left of the political spectrum.
It was in this context of political turmoil that the work of Gabriel Tarde, a precursor of modern social psychology, gained importance. Tarde was contested by Durkheim, who in the name of sociology’s autonomy as a discipline criticized him for drifting into psychologism. developed his early hypotheses on the relation between the media and the formation of opinion in opposition to the conception of the mob as subject to “criminal suggestion.”25
Tarde made his mark by developing the notion of “public[s] inclined to imitation.” Imitation, he said, is the rule of sociability, but contestation also exists. Between the two poles emerges the possibility of “invention” and the spread of “new ideas.” The rise of the press and sensationalistic reporting has enlarged the group of actors in the formation of public opinion. Contrary to what Le Bon argued, the era of masses assembled in crowds and infusing frenzy throughout the body social was already a thing of the past: the era of publics had arrived. Publics are the “social groups of the future.” The crowd is a primitive phenomenon determined by “action in the eyes of others”; the public is a cultured and civilized phenomenon, determined by “consideration of the outlook of others.” One cannot be part of more than one crowd at a time; on the other hand, one may belong to several publics, dispersed and fragmented multitudes, but “mentally united.” There lies the difference separating intolerance
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from tolerance. While Tarde posed the problem of the conditions of existence of the new mass democracy, which he linked to the new means of mass communications, Le Bon had a more static view of the “collective” as the state of a crowd that is “impulsive, irritable, incapable of reason and critical thought, agitated by their overemotionalism.”
The theory of Gabriel Tarde would not lead to a French school; the status of social psychology, countered by a hegemonic sociology, remained precarious in the absence of institutional support. On the other hand, it would help form the foundation of the study of attitudes and public opinion in the United States.26 As for the theses of the anti-Dreyfusard Le Bon, they were to become prominent in military circles on the eve of World War I, particularly in the French military academy. His Psychology of Crowds would long remain bedside reading for warriors of all nationalities27, well after World War I. Psychopathology managed to be at the same time a reference point for Marshal Foch, General De Gaulle, and Adolf Hitler, who went so far as to plagiarize it in Mein Kampf.
In the elaboration of internationally shared schemas of analysis, the universal expositions occupied an important place. Above and beyond the spirit of the imperial times that inspired them, they fulfilled a historical function of mediation.
Their role as places of international exchange manifested itself above all through various meetings, colloquia, lecture series, and conventions on the margins of these events. This was all the more true after 1878 when the organizers of the Paris exposition decided to institutionalize this type of gathering.
In the first place, the exposition was the occasion for searching in concert for legal norms and techniques felt to be worthy internationally. Thus the London exposition of 1851, by making apparent the difficulty in measuring and comparing products, gave rise to a convening in Brussels, under the presidency of the Belgian Adolphe Quételet, of the first international statistics congress. Its deliberations resulted in the creation in 1875 of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, and, ten years later, in the foundation of the International Statistics Institute. At the Vienna Exposition in 1873, a congress on industrial copyright proposed the first international convention on patents. A congress on literary copyright was organized at the Paris exposition of 1878 under the presidency of Victor Hugo. Eight years later the International Union was created in Berne for the protection of works of literature and art; an agreement was signed by ten states. During the international exposition of
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electricity in 1881, the Ampère unit was adopted as the basis of a universal electrical language. In contrast to nonspecialized expositions, where most sovereign nations participated, only sixteen nations were represented there to lay the groundwork for the new electrical science and industry: Germany, the United States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Holland, the United Kingdom, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The universal exposition was also a place of exchange for a broad variety of social organizations. In 1862, at the London exhibition, workers’ delegations took part and discussed numerous questions relating to forms of association (cooperatives, trade unions). It was no coincidence that the address of the Paris workers’ delegation would serve, two years later, as the headquarters for discussions about the statutes of the First International. In 1876, in Philadelphia, feminist organizations were allowed to take part. In 1889, in Paris, several leagues of universal peace and freedom were particularly active. In 1893, the World’s Fair in Chicago included a Board of Lady Managers constituted on the basis of equality with the heads of other departments at the Fair. In addition to organizing their own pavilion, this board launched a women’s congress.28 Chicago also featured conventions on the international role of the press, on religious congresses, and more. An International Feminist Congress took place within the Paris exposition of 1900.29
Finally, the expositions were occasions for societies of experts and scientists to evaluate the state of their disciplines: geographers, economists, psychopathologists, doctors, chemists, architects, meteorologists, ethnologists, and others. Thus in 1889 Gabriel Tarde participated, with the Italian Cesare Lombroso, in the second international congress of criminal anthropology. In 1900, at the International School at the Paris exposition, the Scottish professor Patrick Geddes, another pioneer of thought on “technical civilization,” gave a lecture called “Elements of Progress in the Exposition: Neotechnic Elements.” A number of scientists, thinkers, and researchers lent their direct help to the organization of these expositions. In 1855, the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon drafted a report in which he proposed the organization of a “perpetual exposition.” The geographer Elisée Reclus was associated with the Paris exposition of 1900, for which he conceived a terrestrial globe in relief, 26 meters in diameter. In Chicago, the German Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of classical ethnology and a precursor of functionalism, was in charge of the anthropological exhibits. New forms of circulation of knowledge, new synergies between experts and industrialists, new modes of interdisciplinarity, new types of relations between science and art, and industry and art, gradually ap-
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peared. It was an era, too, when magazines such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1859) and Scientific American (1845) were building a readership for popularized science.
How did the participants in these congresses evaluate the universal expositions under whose umbrella they took place? Here is one writer’s reaction to the 1889 exposition: “The results of the congresses from the viewpoint of work accomplished are very real in certain cases: one may arrive at an understanding on common endeavour, on the rules to follow in nomenclature, on steps to take and research to do. In other cases, the congresses provided precious information, which, along with that already possessed, made it possible to sum up the subject as a group, or contributed to the completion of an enquiry.”30
Brazil Flag - Ordem e Progresso
But this new type of international contact was also a source of new forms of unequal exchange. In the name of modernity, the model of urban management developed by the architect [G-E.]Hausmann for Paris was exported to Buenos Aires, to Santiago de Chile, and to Rio de Janeiro, in a Brazil that chose in 1889, date of the overthrow of the emperor and the foundation of the republic, to inscribe on its national flag the motto of Auguste Comte’s positivism: “Order and Progress.”
European criminal anthropology exported its conception of the profile of delinquency and normality to all of Latin America. Cartesian models of teaching emigrated to Latin American shores, and the “bovaryste elites,” as the Brazilian Celso Furtado called them, lived to the rhythm of the Parisian theatrical season. Meanwhile the “Orientalist” anthropologists, grouped likewise in an expert society at the end of the century, invited the “Orientals,” in the course of a universal exposition, to see themselves through the mirror offered them by the civilized West. Indian and Pakistani researchers have since demonstrated the role played by expositions — in close collaboration with local schools of art and museums — in the degradation of Indian art and crafts. In the decade from 1882 to 1892 there were at least seven major exhibitions featuring Indian arts and crafts, with venues in Lahore, Calcutta, Delhi, London, Glasgow, Paris, and so on. These expositions were systematically organized to promote the trade in Indian art manufactures by advising or guiding artisans or supplying them with designs.31 The Journal of Indian Art (1883) and later The Journal of Indian Art and Industry were created for this purpose; the main responsibility for the production of the latter fell to Rudyard Kipling, the director32 of the Mayo School of Art, one of the four institutions founded in India around 1872 by the British authorities to train natives in “industrial art.”
The Exposition of 1900 marks the peak of the ascending curve of great universal expositions. Here is the harsh opinion of a French economist
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writing in 1902: “More and more, universal expositions have lost their original character and become enterprises for pleasure. Interest in industry and commerce is only a pretext, and amusement is the aim. On the other hand, the specialized expositions remain serious and many of them are followed by important discoveries…. So it was with the electricity exposition which brought important progress for the telephone…. The universal exposition has had its day and no longer answers real needs; it will now be necessary, in order to benefit a country’s commerce, to have recourse to other, less expensive but more productive, means.”33 In addi tion, he added, the creators of scientific knowledge were establishing more institutionalized forms of cooperation.
Other observers were more attentive to the cultural metamorphosis this crisis represented. In fact, the ever-larger part played by the logic of spectacle in the “universal exposition” formula brought out for the first time the tension between entertainment and high culture — but it also stimulated thought about the popularizing of science through pedagogy. It was in France, “mother of arts and letters,” during the expositions of Paris — that “capital of the nineteenth century,” in Walter Benjamin’s expression34 — that this tension began to be felt as early as 1889, year of the centennial of the Revolution and the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower. It would intensify in the 1900 expositions, which remained open for 205 days. Apart from the numerous games and attractions, there were cycling and automobile races, marksmanship contests, aeronautic contests, and fencing matches. Sporting competition became a popular attraction, fifty years after the exposition of London had launched the aristocratic “America’s Cup.”
In 1889, entertainment was internationalized, with the major attraction being Colonel Cody, alias Buffalo Bill, and his troupe of “redskins.” Here is how a journalist of the magazine L’Illustration in May 1889 saw the effect provoked by the “Napoléon of the prairies”:
A painter would be disarmed by the ardent tonalities. As for all those semi-naked beings, agile and galloping on their horses, whirling bareback on their mounts, they give a fantastic impression, an extraordinary fantasy…. How can the theater match such realities? If schoolchildren had to choose between a masterpiece of Corneille or Buffalo Bill, they would cry unanimously: “Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill!”35
What is novel in the mode of production established by modern capitalism? This was a question that Marx, from the 1840s on, never stopped
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trying to answer: money is a medium, the agent of communication par excellence, the perpetuum mobile; its nature is to cross borders.36 Time was to confirm these observations, which would outlive even political regimes that proclaimed themselves heirs to the author of Capital.
Indeed, Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism is not far from the one proposed by the anthropologist Georges Balandier on the eve of the third millennium. “Money,” he writes, “expresses the essence of societies where almost everything can be translated into commodity terms; moreover, it informs a social and cultural universe where information is the energy indispensable to more and more numerous activities, and it designates perfectly the exchange relations in a world of communication and the rapid multiplication and intensification of exchanges of all kinds. It fully suits societies of this type: by the market, it regulates; by distribution, it hierarchizes; by investment, it grows. It appears as a generator of order. This occurs also on the terrain of the imaginary, in places where desire, fantasy, and play meet. The adventures of capital are converted into stories, fragments of myths and epics of a certain modernity.”37
In an effort to combat this ascendancy of money, the International Association of Workers38 was founded at a meeting at St. Martin’s Hall in London in September 1864. One passage of the organization’s by-laws reads as follows: “The emancipation of labor, being neither a local nor a national problem but a social one, embraces all countries in which modern society exists, and requires, for its solution, the theoretical and practical cooperation of the most advanced countries…. The Association is established to create a central point of communication and cooperation between workingmen’s associations in different countries aspiring to the same end, to wit: mutual assistance, progress and the complete liberation of the working class. The General Council will function as an international agent between different national and local groups, in such fashion that the workers of each country may be constantly informed of the movements of their class in other countries…. To facilitate communications, it will publish an international bulletin.” (This was to be The International Courier, published by the London Branch of the IAW.) A new collective actor had appeared on the international scene.
But this first profession of generous faith in the international character of the demands made by the new class thrown up by industrialization would quickly run into the snags provoked by national and local differences, and other kinds as well. This pioneering organization, which tried to weld together the working classes of Europe and the United States, would disappear in 1874 after a triple failure: the Franco-Prussian War, the defeat of the Paris Commune, and divisions among the different components of the working-class movement (Marxist and non-Marxist). The Communist Manifesto
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of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, first published in German in 1848, had already been through a dozen different editions in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as several editions in English and in French, and versions in Russian, Polish, and Danish. The Second International saw the light of day at the Congress of Paris in 1889 under the auspices of the social-democratic current.39 The Third International40 was founded in Moscow in 1919. All these stages merely signaled the profound divisions in the working-class movement. And, in one way or another, they were all pregnant with meaning for the evolution of different modes of representation in the international space and, within it, communicational space - opened up by the capitalist mode of production.
Very few of the participants at the first meeting of the International Workers Association in London would have been able to foretell the destiny of that phrase which made of the workers’ societies in a few European countries the beacons of emancipation: “Emancipation of labor… requires the theoretical and practical cooperation of the most advanced countries.” This disinterested offer by the workers of the “modern societies” also held surprises. The occasions would not be lacking for a rhyming of universalism and ethnocentrism.
What questions were posed about the systems of communication under construction during the second half of the nineteenth century, in the milieus of this new form of social network that was nascent socialism? We may note at least three.
The first concerns the definition of “public service,” which in turn refers back to the much vaster issue of the nature and role of the state. This was a question that divided the workers’ movement between partisans of an “evolutionary” conception of social change and those who espoused a revolutionary vision and for whom the destruction of the state machine put in place by the industrial bourgeoisie was seen as a prerequisite for any change. This debate was formulated for the first time in a report on the public service drafted by the Belgian socialist César De Paepe(1841-90), who advocated an “antiauthoritarian communism,” and it was presented before the International Association of Workers in 1874. The notion of “communication” in his contribution was limited to the railways, the post and telegraph, and the road system.
The author distanced himself from the two great currents of ideas that dominated economic discussion of the day: laissez-faire, which tended to abandon public services to private initiative, transforming them into
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businesses, and the interventionist school, which tended to place them under the control of the state. He noted also that the positions were less sharply distinct than was customarily supposed in opposing socialists and economists of the status quo: “In both camps, we find, alongside bourgeois economists who are partisans of the maintenance of the capitalist and working classes, socialist economists who want to abolish bourgeois and proletarian.”41 For De Paepe, public service was based on the acknowledgment of the utilitarian character of an activity, a usefulness that “wouldn’t exist if one waited for private initiative, either because it would be diverted from its true destination or because it would constitute a monopoly that would be dangerous to abandon to private interests.”42Thus “public service should be doubly public: 1) in that it is accomplished by the direct or indirect cooperation of all; 2) in that it has for a direct or indirect purpose the benefit of all. The true public service is thus at once public both by its subject and its object.”43
De Paepe here revives a polemic begun by Proudhon in his book Des réformes à opérer dans l’exploitation des chemins de fer (Reforms to be adopted in the operation of railroads) and pursued by the anarchists. At first, and in this book particularly, Proudhon believed that the major and minor roads, canals, rivers, and so on should belong to the state and be maintained at its expense; as for the railways, the state should take charge of the construction of the lines and embankments and conserve eminent domain over the track; then, taking into account conditions relative to fares, the state should abandon the operation to individual companies destined to be transformed one day into workers’ cooperatives. In another work, however, Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle (General idea of the revolution in the nineteenth century), Proudhon removed one by one from the state all its prerogatives, and then suppressed it altogether as a useless mechanism. In contrast to Proudhon, De Paepe foresaw the dangers in abandoning public services — which “constitute for the most part a monopoly de facto, in other words, a privileged situation which favors speculation, {and} exploitation of the public — to companies, even if they are composed exclusively of workers,” because, he asserted, “we must not forget that the modern capitalist aristocracy, too, came out of the Third Estate; let us not forget that before being what they are today, the great financial barons (or, if not them, at least their fathers or grandfathers) were workers, placed in a privileged position.”44
In defining public service as “public at once by its subject and its object,” in posing the question of citizen participation, in proposing a new conception of the double role of the local district and the state and in combining political decentralization and economic centralization, De Paepe was aware of offending both the Manchester liberals for whom the
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state should be reduced to the army, the courts, and the police, and, in De Paepe’s own words, “the Jacobins of all shades [referring to the centralist tradition of the French Revolution] for whom the state is the be-all and end-all, the god Pan which gives life and motion to everything, for whom the state is the body social itself, and who do not understand that one may be born without a ticket of entry from the state, and depart this world without a state-issued passport.”45
To our knowledge, this is one of the first critical reflections on the relation between public service, civil society (not reduced to its workplace activities), and the state.
The second question that mobilized socialist circles is that of the creation of their own newspapers or periodicals. What model of the press should they adopt in order to reach a public wider than socialism’s own circle of activists? How should they define themselves with respect to the mass press, with its criteria of commercial success and its different formulas for capturing a broad readership?
Maxim Gorky, Russian writer
To answer these questions required them to ask about the dramatic force of the popular serial, and more generally, about mass culture as a culture of entertainment, which was just then being born. The subject was particularly thorny since Marx and Engels had, in The Holy Family, heaped anathema on the Saint-Simonian novelist Eugène Sue, author of Mysteries of Paris, The Wandering Jew, The Seven Deadly Sins, and so on. This serial production, which some condescendingly called “illiterate literature,” was suspected of alienating the people. While the dailies of Catholic persuasion appropriated the serial formula, careful to offer the populace what it was accustomed to while “subverting” its contents, the socialist paper L’Humanité, founded in 1904 under the editorship of Jean Jaurès, relied only secondarily on this genre. It almost never offered unpublished feuilletons — which it could not afford in any case, given its perpetually precarious financial situation. Most of the very few original serial novels published before World War I in L’Humanité are, in the opinion of Anne-Marie Thiesse, historian of popular literature, “of mediocre composition or else their militant orientation is discreet.” Which led her to the lapidary judgment: “The extreme poverty of the socialist feuilleton in the country which gave birth to the genre is a fact concealed by the diversity of original novels that appeared in L’Humanité.”46 The fiction section of the paper was fueled above all by a large number of foreign novels in translation: Russian novels (Tolstoy, Gorky), works by socialist Americans (Upton Sinclair, Jack London), detective stories
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(Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe), or popular stories, in addition to serialized realist or naturalist novels of the nineteenth century: [Honoré de] Balzac, [Gustave] Flaubert, and above all [Émile] Zola.
Thiesse concludes:
This policy regarding the feuilleton had no great success with the general public…. Did it reflect the confusion of intellectual editors about a popular column they did not know what to do with? We may also see in it the absence of thought on the social problem of reading among the working and peasant classes. Between the attempt to make the masses appreciate classical culture and the temptation to turn to proven recipes of the commercial novel for the “People,” French socialists could not find their way, any more than they knew how to create a product appropriate to the uneducated public that had to be won over to revolutionary ideas.”47
Thiesse’s verdict may be too summary, but it has the merit of signalling a tension that was to prove constant in the cultural strategies of forces claiming adherence to socialism, and not only in France. If we seek a more nuanced judgment, we must nonetheless recall the shrieks uttered by doctrinaire nationalists when they read the works of Tolstoy and other foreign authors. We may cite as an example an article that appeared in Le Figaro on July 29, 1892, under the signature of the novelist Maurice Barrès, champion of the national heritage and the fatherland. Entitled “The Quarrel Between Nationalists and Cosmopolitans,” this profession of faith stigmatized believers in the nation as a contract or a voluntary association and denounced the invasion of cosmopolitan ideas, while defending poets belonging to the classical French tradition against Romantics who admired Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Maeterlinck.
‘Iskra’ (The Spark). Founded by V.I.Lenin, apx.1900
Elsewhere, in czarist Russia, a third question gradually took shape: that of the relation of the press to the building of a revolutionary party. It was after 1895-96 and the famous strikes in St. Petersburg that a mass workers’ movement allied with social democracy appeared and, with it, the need for a working-class press. This was the beginning of the Leninist doctrine of the press, for which a paper is not only an organ of propaganda and a collective agitator but also a collective organizer. This role fell to Iskra (The spark).
One of the most significant polemics on the role of the revolutionary press dates from 1901-2. Lenin’s initiative, faithful to his conception of “democratic centralism,” gave rise to numerous objections, notably on the part of L. Nadiejhdine and B. Kritchevski, who reproached Lenin for making of the movement’s paper an instrument of unification from above. Refusing to convert themselves into “party inspectors,” these two
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journalists, both active in the opposition to the czarist regime, confronted the future founder of the Communist Party with the idea of a press that would be the product of strong local organizations, the result of the “progressive march of the obscure daily fight, as opposed to propaganda.” This would be, in short, a press that, unlike Iskra as they saw it, would take into account “the ordinary things of life.”
This brought them a stinging response from Lenin: “All political life is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The art of the political activist lies precisely in finding and taking a firm grip of the link that is least likely to be struck from your hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.” Anticipating the indignant reaction of these critics to his very directive proposals, he added a footnote: “Comrades, I call your attention to this outrageous manifestation of”autocracy,” “uncontrolled authority,’ ’supreme regulation, etc. (all terms that the two polemicists had applied to Lenin in their articles). Just think of it: a desire to possess the whole chain!!! Send in a complaint at once. Here you have a ready-made topic for two editorials in your review.”48
These prerevolutionary years were decisive for the formation of a certain conception of the use of the media: the means of mass communication as tools of agitation and propaganda. World War I would bring the question of propaganda out of its revolutionary hideouts and raise it into an affair of state.
. C. H. Cooley, Social Organization, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901, p. 65.↩︎
. Ibid., p. 61. See also, by the same author, Sociological Theory and Social Research, New York, Henry Holt, 1930 (with an introduction by R. Cooley Angell).↩︎
. On the work of C. H. Cooley, see L. A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971; L. Belman, “The Idea of Communication in the Work of Charles Horton Cooley,” Journal of Communication Inquiry l, no. 2, Spring 1975.↩︎
. L. Belman, ibid.↩︎
. J.Carey and J. Quirk, “The History of the Future,” in Communications Technology and Social Policy, ed. G. Gerbner et al., New York, John Wiley, 1973.↩︎
. M. Chevalier, Le systeme de la Mediterranee, Paris, Le Globe, 1832, p. 47. On the notion of network (reseau) see P. Musso, “Aux origines du concept moderne: Corps et reseau dans la philosophie de Saint-Simon,” Quaderni, no. 3, Paris, 1988.↩︎
A. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, Paris, 1830-42.↩︎
H. Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, New York, D. Appleton, 1898. The author produced the four volumes of this work between 1876 and 1896.↩︎
See the analyses of M. L. De Fleur, Theories of Mass Communications, New York, D. McKay, 1966.↩︎
T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Modern Library, 1943 (original edition 1899).↩︎
R. K. Merton, “Manifest and Latent Functions: Toward a Codification of Functional Analysis in Sociology,” in Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1951, 2d edition.↩︎
T. Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture” (1941), in Prisms, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1981.↩︎
F. Ratzel, Politische Geographie, Munich, Oldenburg, 1897. For exegeses of this work, see A. L. Sanguin, “En relisant Ratzel,” Annales de Geographie, September-October 1990; and G. Mercier, “Le concept de propriete clans la geographie politique de Ratzel,” ibid.↩︎
R. Brunet, “Usage de l’espace,” Non!, Paris, July-August 1981.↩︎
A. T. Mahan, quoted in *American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection**.* Selections from Congressional Hearings (1902), ed. H. F. Graff, Boston, Little, Brown, 1969, p. ix.↩︎
Ibid., p. viii.↩︎
E. Redus, Nouvelle geographie universelle, Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1894, vol. 19, pp. 794-95. See also M. Fleming, *The Geography of Freedom: The Odyssey of Elisee Reclus**,* introduction by G. Woodcock, Montreal-New York, Black Rose Books, 1985. By P. Kropotkin, see in particular Mutual Aid, introduction by G. Woodcock, Montreal-New York, Black Rose Books, 1984.↩︎
F. Tonnies, Community and Society, trans. C. P. Loomis, East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1957. In the original German: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1887.↩︎
G. Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, Paris, Alcan, 1895. (In American translation: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, New York, Viking/Compass, 1966.) See also S. Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in the Late Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981; S. Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, Trans. from French.↩︎
See the dossier devoted to the work of G. Simmel published in Les Cahiers du Grif, Paris, Editions Tierce, no. 40, Spring 1989.↩︎
T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), London, Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1973.↩︎
William Godwin, proponent of anarchism, was married to feminist Mary Wollestonecraft. Their daughter, Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, wrote Frankenstein (1818).↩︎
A. Mattelart, “Une lecture ideologique de l’Essai sur le principe de population,”L’Homme et la Societe, no. 15, January-March 1970.↩︎
T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1937.↩︎
G. Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. E. C. Parsons, New York, Henry Holt, 1903. First French edition, 1890.↩︎
K. Lang and G. E. Lang, “The ‘New’ Rhetoric of Mass Communication Research: A Longer View,” Journal of Communication 33, no. 3, Summer 1983.↩︎
R. A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic, London, Sage, 1975. See also the thesis of J. Van Ginneken, Crowds: Psychology and Politics 1871-1899, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, 1989.↩︎
Ministere du commerce, de l’industrie, des postes et des telegraphes, Exposition internationale de Chicago en 1893. Reports published by M. C. Krantz (ed.), Congres tenu a Chicago en 1893, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1894.↩︎
Exposition universelle de 1900, international feminist congress held at the Palais des Congres. Report presented by Madame Vincent: “Le travail des bonnes,” Paris, 1900.↩︎
E. Monod, L’exposition universelle de 1889, Paris, E. Dentu, 1890, vol. 2, p. 283.↩︎
K. K. Mumtaz, Art and Imperialism: The Impact of British Rule on the Arts and Crafts in India, Pakistan Study Group, Monograph Series no. 1, 1980. See also W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art, London, 1959.↩︎
Rudyard Kipling’s father. John Lockwood Kipling, was the school’s first principal. Rudyard also worked there but whether in the capacity of ‘director’ or in a more junior role (he was still quite young) I am unsure. SPKB↩︎
G. Gerault, Les expositions universelles envisagees au point de vue de leurs resultats economiques, Paris, Librarie societe du recueil general des lois et des arrets, 1902, p. 204.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXeme siecle. Le livre des passages, Paris, Le Cerf, 1989.↩︎
Rastignac, “Courrier de Paris,” L’Illustration, no. 2411, May 11, 1889, p. 394.↩︎
For an analysis of the theme of communication in the works of Karl Marx, see Y. de La Haye, ed., Marx & Engels on the Means of Communication: A Selection of Texts, New York, International General, 1980.↩︎
G. Balandier, Le desordre, Paris, Fayard, 1988, p. 228.↩︎
Probably refers to the ‘International Workingmen’s Association’ (IWA)↩︎
Voir C. Weill, L’Internationale et l’Autre, Paris, Arcantere, 1987.↩︎
C. De Paepe, Les services publics, Brussels, Bibliotheque populaire, J. Milot Editeur, 1895, p. 22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 11.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid., p. 27.↩︎
Ibid., p. 146.↩︎
A. M. Thiesse, Le roman du quotidien. Lecteurs et lectures populaires a la Belle Epoque, Paris, Le Chemin Vert, 1984, p. 117.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 118-19.↩︎
V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done? (1901-1902),” Lenin about the Press, Prague, In ternational Organization of Journalists, 1972, pp. 95-96.↩︎
