Historical and Political Background
At first, necessity dictates to look back into the older history of the struggle over press freedom, which has raged within Europe for many centuries. Only a few decades after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century, first steps were taken toward controlling the production of printed matter. Germany was at the helm of this development (Eisenhardt 1970). Initially, these attempts at controlling print were undertaken by clerical institutions with occasional support of the Pope. Governing bodies, however, soon followed. While the church was mainly preoccupied with moral values and with keeping the faith âpure,â the state focused on maintaining public order, keeping governmental secrets, and on ensuring external security. In the long term, these goals turned into guiding principles.
The primary means of control was (preâ)censorship accompanied by further measures and punishments in the course of the sixteenth century. Since printing quickly spread to other parts of Europe, controlling the new technology also became a central issue in these regions (for France, see Bibliothèque Nationale de France 2015). National and regional particularities emerged early on during this process. This can be seen in the example of England, where the Stationersâ Company functioned as a selfâregulating body for the printersâ guild (Siebert 1965, pp. 64â87).
This control system comprised all kinds of printed matter, including early forms of newsprints that had been published since the early sixteenth century, and it was fully developed when the first periodicals began to appear, first in Germany (1605/09), then in the Netherlands (1618/1620), in France (1631), in Spain (1641), in Italy (1643), in Sweden (1645), and in England (1665). Russia only followed decades later (1703). Surveillance of the press, at first, was not questioned but justified by the absolutist state with its monopoly of power. The gradual reduction of censorship initially took place in England where the legal and political situation had developed differently from that on the continent since the Middle Ages. The English press experienced a first (albeit short) period of freedom as early as 1640 during the Puritan Revolution (Siebert 1965, pp. 165â201). With the Press Act of 1662 (renewed in 1685 but not renewed in 1695), England had factually achieved press freedom. Therefore, England became the âmotherlandâ of freedom of the press, and the press could rise to become the âfourth estateâ on a par with the executive, judicial, and legislative branches (Conboy 2004, pp. 109â127). In other countries, the establishment of press freedom took much longer: in France, it occurred during the revolution of 1789, and in the unified German Empire, after all, almost one century later. However, in these latter cases, censorship had not been enforced as strictly as intended. The Netherlands adopted a constitution as early as 1815 that legally established press freedom. A comparatively high level of tolerance resulting from its Protestantism allowed for the release of publications that would have been banned elsewhere. Freedom of the press was also included in the constitution of the newly formed Belgium in 1831.
The role of the press has always been closely connected to the respective political system. As long as absolutism dominated all of Europe, the press was under strict control of the state authorities or, at best, enjoyed very limited independence. Only in countries that had managed to restrict the absolute power of the ruling class and that were, thus, able to boast, at least in part, a system of checks and balances (as in England) could the press claim some level of independence. Even in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Europe was mainly composed of kingdoms (i.e. monarchies as the predominant form of government). However, these were mostly constitutional monarchies in which the ruler could no longer exert absolute power but was bound by a constitution and the law.
Nonetheless, the intensity of this bond varied depending on the guarantees and rights of participation that were included in the constitutions that had been formed during the nineteenth century (Lehnert 2014). Up until the 1850s, the Habsburg Empire was characterized by a ârelapse to neoâabsolutismâ (Olechowski 2004, pp. 333â446). Leaving Switzerland and its earlier established republican tradition aside, only France, after its failed attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy, can be considered a republic (the soâcalled Third Republic) during the period in question.
Press Freedom and Its Guiding Principles in the Late Nineteenth Century
Decontrol and Liberalization: Latitude and Limits
With regard to press freedom, the late nineteenth century in Europe, seen as a whole, was an epoch of decontrol and liberalization. A first push into this direction occurred in the revolutionary wave of 1848 that spread across a number of countries. Press freedom was one of its foremost goals, and it seemed to be within reach, at first, in Germany and Austria as well as in France where the hitherto existing forms of censorship were abandoned. The newly formed panâGerman parliament agreed upon a constitution in 1849 that was the first to proclaim a guaranteed freedom of the press. This constitution was never implemented, however, since counterârevolutionary forces managed to regain the upper hand. Only in Switzerland, in its Federal Constitution of 1848 (Art. 45), did press freedom remain in place, and it was included, for the most part left unchanged, in the new constitution of 1874 (Art. 55). In the German federal states, on the other hand, the press faced new forms of regulation. This included the levying of deposits, the ban of colportage, stamp duty and taxation of advertisements, as well as legal barriers (Kohnen 1995). In the Habsburg Monarchy, the same occurred with the printâorder of May 1852 (Melischek and Seethaler 2006, p. 1554; Olechowski 2004, pp. 350â357).
A wave of liberalization set in at the beginning of the 1860s. Its reason lay in the Austrian constitution of 1861 that was followed by a general press law one year later (Olechowski 2004, pp. 450â468; 2006). This new law did away with such obstacles as preâcensorship while also limiting obligatory concessions, reprimands, and forced deposits. The Basic State Law of 1867 was the final step toward constitutionalism and guaranteed press freedom among basic rights of state citizens (Olechowski 2004, pp. 469â472). Nevertheless, the legal situation in the Habsburg Empire was difficult as the empire had been split into two parts after the AustroâHungarian Compromise of 1867, which had created a dualâmonarchy with both halves divided by the river Leitha. But not only Hungary possessed special rights from that point on; the press in the Austrian crown countries also required s...
