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 garden of the Palais Royal, on the first outbreak of the month of July, 1789, preserved in his style, which was frequently very brilliant, something of his early character.  It was the sarcastic genius of Voltaire descended from the saloon to the pavement.  No man in himself ever personified the people better than did Camille Desmoulins.  He was the mob with his turbulent and unexpected movements, his variableness, his unconnectedness, his rages interrupted by laughter, or suddenly sinking into sympathy and sorrow for the very victims he immolated.  A man, at the same time so ardent and so trifling, so trivial and so inspired, so indecisive between blood and tears, so ready to crush what he had just deified with enthusiasm, must have the more empire over a people in revolt, in proportion as he resembled them.  His character was his nature.  He not only aped the people, he