Censorship and press liberty in the Sister Republics: some reflections

In early 1798, the veteran Swiss journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan informed his friend, the abbe de Pradt: As for the public ... one must leave the continent in order to speak to it; for there is no longer anywhere where anyone can print a line against the Directory and its manoeuvres [...] Your continent horrifies me with its slaves and executioners, its baseness and cowardice. Only in England can one write, think, speak or act.' The situation he describes implies a strange inversion of revolutionary values. For press liberty was enshrined at the heart of the founding document of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The revolutionaries of 1789 were convinced that only freedom of expression could guarantee political transparency, safeguard against corruption, and ensure the political education of the people. Yet less than a decade later, Mallet was suggesting that the armies of that same revolution had snuffed out press liberty across the entire continent, reducing the states of Europe, presumably the Sister Republics above all, to repressive French puppets.