certain rule of the Directory. The Constitution of the year VIII,
which was imposed by a friendly Bonapartist coup d'état, omitted
all reference to the freedom of the press. Immediately about
seventy-five newspapers were suppressed in Paris, and many pro-
vincial newspapers were discontinued, leaving only a dozen ill
the capital and a few in each province. The record became worse
during the Empire. By 1811, only four newspapers were left in
Paris, and an average of one each in the departments. Official,
commercial, scientific and learned periodicals were tolerated, if
they contained no political news or comment. Napoleon's rigor-
ous control of the French press continued until his abdication.
The decree of dethronement of the French Senate, on April 2,
1814, referred to the harm caused by his autocratic control of the
press and his use of his press monopoly to circulate false news
and doctrines. "The press is an arsenal," said Napoleon, "to be
used by the trusted friends of the Empire."

After the fall of Napoleon, Talleyrand, who had served and
was to serve many masters (including Louis-Philippe fifteen
years later), proposed the doctrine of legitimacy to prevent
the partitioning of France. Legitimacy pleased Metternich, the
Austrian Chancellor and foreign minister who dominated the
Congress of Vienna; the prescriptive rights of hereditary suc-
cession appeared to be a simple argument against revolution.
This doctrine meant the selection of the Bourbons whom Ben-
jamin Constant called the famille incontestée; and Louis XVIII
was called to the throne of France from his exile in England.
He was then a gouty man of sixty; he had long been an indolent
dilettante; and was described by the Duke of Wellington as "the
most cautious man I ever saw." Met by abundant advice and a
flood of pamphlets as he entered France, he promised to grant
the nation a constitution (octroyer une charte); a government
like the English parliamentary system; and a free press. But he
declared that the press ought to be subject to the "precautions"
necessary to insure peace and social order. On June 4, 1814, the
treaty of peace with the Allies was announced and also the pro-
mulgation of the new constitution, the Charte Constitutionnelle.
But it was a grant of privileges, not an acknowledgment of rights:
Nous accordons, nous falsons concession were the opening words
of the Charte, following the wording of a patent under the
ancien regime. This formula and the phrase, "given in the 19th
year of our reign," were objectionable even to the strict Royalist
supporters of the monarchy. They were offensive to the Repub-
licans and Liberals who felt that the Charte should have been a
contractual recognition of the civil rights won by the Revolution.

Article 8 of the Charte "conceded and granted" that all
Frenchmen should have the right freely to express and publish
their opinions, subject to legal liability for abuses. This was the
language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French
National Assembly of 1789 in adopting the recommendation of
Talleyrand. He was familiar with the English common law doc-
trine of the freedom of the press and with the English concepts
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning with
Milton Areopagitica. Milton, despite his denunciation of the
licensing of books and pamphlets, approved the regulation of
publication, when writing harmed or even threatened religion or
the state. Freedom of speech and of the press, with liability for
the damages resulting from free utterance and publication, of
course, developed as the rule of the English common law.

The new freedom under the Charte Constitutionnelle of
Louis XVIII was undefined and unrestricted. Inevitably the

-12-