Le Mercure Galant: a French forerunner of modern journalism
Part 1: The Affair of the Poisons and Donneau de Visé
This series is adapted from a term paper I wrote last year. It has been edited for clarity and length. I’ve also incorporated a new pictorial layout into the blog format. Enjoy—JVN
The year: 1679. The location: the Palace of Versailles, France. The incident: a heinous murder connected to the dark arts. In fact, several of them.
A mysterious woman known only as “La Voisin” has been accused of engaging in a wide variety of heinous activities almost too horrific to believe: Satanic rituals, poisoning multiple people at the behest of members of the Court, and burying the unwanted remains of aborted infants in her back yard. The scandal—known to posterity as the Affaire des Poisons—has reached the highest reaches of government, as even King Louis XIV’s official mistress, the Madame de Montespan, is one of the accused.
As the shock of the Affaire that radiates across France and Europe begins to settle and its novelty begets imagination, a new play is advertised in a newsletter that circulates among the Court and is especially popular with the ladies. Entitled La Devineresse ou Les Faux Enchantements, the play promises to deliver on the public’s sudden taste for the gory, grotesque, and bizarre. It is but the latest in some of the most amusing, engrossing, and avant-garde literature and journalism to appear in France’s newest aristocratic periodical—Le Mercure Galant.
Founded by historian and playwright Jean Donneau de Visé, the Mercure Galant was a magazine published for consumption by the French Court during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” and his successor, Louis XV. In the Preface to the inaugural January 1672 issue of the Mercure, de Visé writes,
“This book must have something to please everyone, because of the diversity of the subjects with which it is filled.”
True to de Visé’s claim, the Mercure’s content spans the spectrum from both news and royal propaganda, to scientific discussion and fictional short stories, all underlaid by a promotion of galanterie, or norms of civilized behavior. Indeed, the Mercure encompassed all of these genres and more, its characterizations defying an easy explanation for the periodical on the whole.
Ultimately, the Mercure is perhaps best thought of as a prototype of the contemporary “human interest” magazine: it included courtly news and gossip, reviews of plays and music, and reporting on the latest fashion and luxury trends to emerge each season. It allowed space for reader contributions in the forms of songs, poetry, and letters. It also included heavier, more intellectual fare: it played host to the “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns,” a debate among the French intelligentsia on whether contemporary intellectual achievements surpassed those of Classical Antiquity.
In short, the Mercure provided a platform for the emerging ideas of the Enlightenment to be debated and gain a popular foothold, ideas which have influenced Western culture to the present. For this reason, looking into the history of the Mercure may provide valuable insights about how the “Modern” ideas of the Enlightenment began to dawn on France toward the end of le Grand Siècle, the Great Century, of Louis XIV.
Donneau de Visé: a biography
Jean Donneau de Visé, publisher of the Mercure, was born in France in 1638 to a family of Belgian origin. Most of the men in his family, who were of minor noble rank, adopted military careers for which they had won a large amount of fame since the sixteenth century. Young Donneau was different, however, and from what can be ascertained from the few records of his early life, he seemed bent on a career in the priesthood.
However, he appears to have fallen in love with a girl from a poor family, prompting him to leave the clerical path in his early twenties and turn his attention to arts and letters. He married this young woman some time later, prompting a prolonged separation from his father and brothers.
De Visé’s “big break” in the literary world came in 1663 with his publication of Les Nouvelles Nouvelles, a collection of short stories. From this point he began a rapid rise in the Parisian literary scene, establishing the playwrights Molière and Thomas Cornielle as his rivals, the latter whom he later befriended. De Visé published multiple satires and attacks on Molière’s work, especially deriding the latter’s play L’École des Femmes.
As with Cornielle, however, de Visé’s relationship with Molière eventually morphed from one of animosity to friendship, and the two collaborated on a series of dramatic works presented between 1667 and 1669. De Visé achieved success in his own right with his well-received plays performed in some of France’s most famous theatres: Les Amours de Vénus et d’Adonis, Les amours du Soleil, and Le Mariage de Bacchus et d’Ariane.
The ever-ambitious de Visé, however, longed for still more success. Sensing an opportunity at a time when only four newsletters of variable quality served the Kingdom of France, de Visé launched Le Mercure Galant in January 1672. The Mercure was published in three-month increments up to 1675. Publication ceased for awhile but resumed again under the title Le Noveau Mercure Galant in April 1677. This time, it was printed monthly. Due to the increased workload put on de Visé, Corneille signed a contract with him as co-editor, and this partnership was maintained until Corneille’s death in 1709.
Despite his increasingly ill health and eventual total blindness, de Visé continued his writing and publishing activities until his death in 1710, including authoring Louis XIV’s Mémoires and several more plays, some better-received than others. He had been granted two annual pensions by the King and an apartment in the Louvre, where from 1691 he lived out the rest of his days.
“The Mercure Galant was a milestone of the history of the press in France, and it actually constituted the beginning of modern journalism. Certainly, it was at times very superficial, very subjective and partial. But its importance and success lie in the fact that it was entirely geared to the public it wanted to reach—and this public was large, as there was something in the Mercure Galant to satisfy every taste.” (Christina Abdella, 1969)
In the following installment, we’ll examine the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns and how it influenced de Visé’s nascent, though revolutionary, style of journalism.