Something from the routine of some tired civic authority in 2026? No - a meeting of actors (and actresses) of Comedie-Française in about 1785, ready to look at the letters from their provincial colleagues.

You see, in 18th century France, acting profession and theatre in general were undergoing great metamorphosis. A hypothetical actress in, say, 1720s was a member of a troupe that worked as a sort of cooperative - the income was divided between members, and decisions were taken collectively, each person getting to vote (yes, women included). Later generations even dubbed those early troupes “little republics”. That sounds nice on the surface, but this actress also had to make do with theatres repurposed from small-town tennis courts, with the precariousness of contracts with each town’s theatre that lasted no more than a couple of months, and with the dangers of having no guaranteed wages at all. The income shares mentioned were the only money she could hope for, and if the run went badly… well, tough luck.

Suppose, however, that her equally talented granddaughter went into the same profession and started by treading the boards in Lyon, Bordeaux, or just some small garrison town. This young woman would have found herself in a very different world. For one thing, the “small republics” were no more - she was an employee, the director (or, as happened surprisingly often, a female directrice) was her employer, and they were bound by a contract. The contract usually lasted about a year, and traditionally terminated before Easter. If she was good enough, she could continue in the same troupe for another year (after the prescribed two-week Easter pause); if she was really good, she could even receive a better offer from elsewhere… though, if that was her goal, she’d have to start the search as early as the summer of the preceding year. Unlike her grandmother, she would have guaranteed wages, which would be paid to her every two weeks - which must have been a relief.

However, while the thespian world had grown in complexity and respectability over the two generations, some aspects of it hadn’t changed after all. For one thing, actors were still bound by the same legal stigma as they had been two generations ago: they were essentially excommunicated by the Church, they could not hold public offices, and even inheriting property could be a problem. Moreover, unlike most trades - from drapers and goldsmiths to wig-makers - the actors had no official guild to defend their rights and arbitrate their disputes. Therefore, even as early as 1730s, they started to apply for that to the highest echelon of their profession: the Comedie-Française. Its senior actors were usually willing to help, even though, at that point, their help was largely of an unofficial kind. However, in 1757, the Crown’s advisors entrusted them actors with advising on provincial disputes, and the regulations of 1766 went further and formally charged a committee of the Comédie-Française with judging those.

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The disputes in question could vary in subject. Say, we are back to our young actress at the end of the century, and her Cleopatra has just died a rather different death from the one in the script. She was hired to play the queen of Egypt in Lille; the audience took one look at her on opening night and heckled her without mercy - relentlessly, from the first act onward, and (as far as the surviving record of just such a case allows us to judge) without much interest in whether she was actually any good. The next morning, the worst-case scenario comes true: her director fires her for “lack of talent” and refuses to pay her wages.

What can she do? She cannot sue him - for one thing, actors could not testify in traditional courts.

So she writes to the Comédie-Française.

This is precisely what one Madame Marion, the unlucky Cleopatra in question, did historically - and the royal troupe found in her favour. An audience’s displeasure, the actors ruled, does not invalidate a signed contract; a director who engages a performer assumes the commercial risk of his own casting decisions.

He paid her, too.

Another popular topic of complaint was casting. Each contract technically defined the performer’s emploi - literally their “line of business” - binding them to a specific type: kings, noble fathers, young lovers, soubrettes, you name it. The contract further specified whether an actor held their roles en chef (exclusively) or en partage (in alternation with a rival). However, contracts could be imprecise, and directors could be sloppy - or just plain unscrupulous. Hence, casting ended up being the subject of roughly a quarter of all the letters sent to the famous royal theatre. The “judges” of Comedie-Française were very precise on the subject: the contract’s exact wording governed everything. Delaval of Nantes lost his protest in 1779 because his contract never said en chef; Desroches lost in 1784 for the same reason; Mademoiselle Duclos, whose 1774 contract did say en chef for lead soubrettes, was fully entitled to refuse to share them.

A lot of rulings were very protective of the actors’ interests. Sick actors, it was decided, must continue to be paid until their contract expired - even, in one case, an actor who fell ill on the road to a new engagement and never arrived at all. A married actress could not be dismissed or docked for pregnancy, as one director discovered when he tried it on an actress called Madame Mailland; an unmarried actress might have her salary suspended late in the term, but could be neither fined nor fired - moral outrage was not a valid reason to break a contract. In 1788 the judges even ruled that travelling performers had an implicit right to a daily allowance of three to six livres, contract or no contract.

Of course, directors won regularly too - the judgements upheld their control of repertory and casting wherever no exclusivity clause said otherwise, and could endorse stiff penalties against performers who abandoned their troupes. What the “tribunal” offered was consistency, and it applied that consistency with a striking evenhandedness: men and women were held to identical contractual obligations and given identical standing to complain, which is rather more than most institutions of the age managed.

Technically, the rulings were issued “only as opinion.” However, in practice, local merchant courts routinely converted them into binding judgments, and, when the directors in Bordeaux tried inserting clauses into their contracts to escape the Comédie’s jurisdiction altogether, the judges simply declared such contracts invalid by custom.

However, in a twist of dark irony, the actors of the royal theatre in the capital enjoyed far fewer protections than they could offer to others. The royal patronage, unchanging since the days of the Sun-King, came with strings attached - and, sometimes, these strings could look more like chains. The company answered to the four First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, aristocrats with absolute power to override anything the actors decided.

The most egregious example of that happened in April 1765, in the affair of an actor who had refused to pay the surgeon treating him for a venereal disease and then lied about it under oath. The troupe, anxious for its fragile respectability, paid the surgeon themselves and voted to expel the colleague; however, his daughter deployed her influence with the Duc de Fronsac and the ever-helpful Duc de Richelieu, and a royal order arrived commanding his reinstatement. Then Mademoiselle Clairon - the greatest tragedienne of the age, who had already teamed up with a lawyer in 1761 to publish a pamphlet against the excommunication of actors - together with Lekain, Molé, Brizard, and Dauberval, refused to perform the patriotic hit Le Siège de Calais alongside the perjurer.

The state’s response was to arrest the stars and lock them in the For-l’Évêque prison.

A compromise was eventually patched together - the disgraced actor pensioned off, the others released - but Clairon had seen quite enough of being treated as royal property, and in 1766 she walked away from the stage at the very peak of her fame.

Her life, both before and after that moment, was a fascinating subject of its own - and it will be certainly discussed in a future article…

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Now, you might assume the person wielding arbitrary royal power here was a duke, a minister, or at the very least an intendant. You would be wrong. It was his employer - a woman, a former courtesan, and the orphaned daughter of a provincial pinmaker.

Her name was Marguerite Brunet, though France came to know her as La Montansier; and her story is a useful antidote to the comfortable assumption that people who claw their way up from the bottom of a rigged system will, upon arriving at the top, feel any particular urge to un-rig it.

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Brunet was born in Bayonne in 1730. Her father, the aforementioned pinmaker, died when she was five; at around sixteen she moved to Paris, where an aunt introduced her to the capital’s demimonde of kept women and their aristocratic keepers. By the brutal standards of that trade, she did well: her clientele came from the highest ranks. In 1750 a lover, newly appointed as a colonial intendant, took her to Martinique; when that cooled, she moved on to Saint-Domingue and reinvented herself as a marchande de modes - a fashion merchant. By 1753 she was back in France with a new name, “Mademoiselle Montansier”, and a clear-eyed strategy: cultivate the courtiers who might prove useful later.

Her first attempt at the theatre, made only in her thirties (practically retirement age for an actress of the period), was as a performer, bankrolled by a wealthy young lover, the marquis de Saint-Contest. She debuted in Dunkerque and Nantes playing mothers and queens, and the audiences were not kind. The problem, apparently, was her accent: the actor Fleury, who later worked for her, described her as méridionale - southern - “in accent, in gestures, and in sentiments”. Delightful at a dinner table; fatal in classical verse.

However - and this is where she parts company with most failed actresses of the age - Montansier simply changed sides of the curtain. She formed her own troupe, took it to Amiens, Caen and Nantes in 1766, and two years later pulled off the coup of her life: the theatrical privilege of Versailles itself, plus the right to entertain the court wherever it travelled.

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A word about privileges, then - because this is where one needs to understand the context a bit. Provincial theatre under the old regime was a peculiar world. A privilège was an exclusive royal licence: whoever held it for a town or province enjoyed a legal monopoly on performances there, rival troupes were simply barred, and municipal authorities lost their traditional say over which players visited them. Better yet, the holder could levy the quart des spectacles - literally a quarter of the gross takings - on any acrobat, marionettist or minor foreign troupe in their territory. Some collected it even in towns they never visited, starving them of entertainment altogether.

This was the system Montansier used for her own advantage. Through the late 1760s and 1770s she snapped up privileges across Brittany, Normandy, Picardy and Anjou, building something like the Live Nation of the ancien régime and running it with her lover and lifelong partner, the actor Neuville. Her political cover came from the most powerful women in France: first Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry, then Queen Marie-Antoinette, who provided the support, permission and land for a brand-new playhouse in Versailles; the king and queen attended its opening night in 1777.

This was the empire in which poor de Verteuil learned what a labour dispute looked like. Mind you, royal favour cut both ways: shielded by the queen, her troupe staged French parodies of Italian operas at court in 1787, trampling the Comédie-Italienne’s exclusive rights. Monopolies, it turned out, were sacred when they were hers.

Despite her ruthlessness, Fleury remembered her as “a charming woman”, fair to her employees as far as her temper allowed, though “not the least in the world a friend of order”; her days belonged to the theatre, her nights to the gambling table. When a Rouen audience threw a letter onto the stage in 1787 demanding the removal of several actors, she responded with a masterly contrite letter in the local press, bowing to the authority of “the Public” and pleading for patience with a single tenor - good tenors being “rare, very rare”. She knew precisely which audiences could be coerced and which had to be courted.

Then the Revolution arrived, the powers that be changed, and the tools of oppression were, if anything, sharpened. Montansier moved to Paris, opened a hugely successful theatre in the Palais-Royal in 1790, and in August 1793 - of all possible moments - inaugurated opposite the Bibliothèque Nationale a playhouse so magnificent that Parisians dubbed it the “Théâtre des Trois Millions”. However, a monument to luxury at the height of the Terror attracted attention of the worst kind. Hébert’s news-sheet accused her of financing her new theatre with highwaymen’s loot, while and on 13 November 1793 Chaumette denounced her to the Paris Commune with the creative charge that the theatre had been funded by Marie-Antoinette so that it might catch fire and burn down the national library. The next day, the sixty-three-year-old Montansier and Neuville were in prison.

She survived - released in September 1794 - and spent years suing for compensation. However, the pattern of her life now ran in reverse: the woman who had once wielded arbitrary power was reduced to petitioning it. An opera house opened in 1801 to woo Bonaparte failed (he refused to attend - the surrounding streets were too convenient for assassins), and by the end of 1802 she was in prison again, this time for debt. Her old Palais-Royal theatre, meanwhile, was out-earning the Opera itself - so naturally Napoleon evicted the troupe in 1806, on the grounds that it offended the dignity of the Théâtre-Français next door (which was a rather nebulous charge) and that it was a notorious haunt of prostitutes (that was less spurious - the Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès was keeping one of its actresses; as you can imagine, his motives were not strictly artistic.)

She married Neuville at last in 1800, at seventy; he died soon afterwards. Of her own death my sources say nothing - though she lived long enough to see the Bourbons return, and to write to Louis XVIII requesting a yearly benefit performance to support her old age, citing nearly fifty years of service to the French stage.

She signed herself, with perfect accuracy and no false modesty whatsoever, “the doyenne of the theatre directors of all France”.

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And yet that is precisely how the opéra-comique was born.

The story of this genre - which would eventually conquer Versailles, produce some of the eighteenth century’s most beloved music, and outlast the very monarchy that tried to suppress it - begins not in gilded salons but in the ramshackle booths of the Foire Saint-Germain and the Foire Saint-Laurent, the great seasonal trade fairs of Paris. These théâtres de la foire - literally, fairground theatres - had always been licensed to put on acrobatic shows, animal turns, and brief comic sketches as a way of luring customers to the commercial stalls.

Their great opportunity came in 1697, when the official Italian acting troupe in Paris made the catastrophic error of staging La Fausse Prude - a play widely understood to be a satire of Madame de Maintenon, the king’s morganatic wife. The play was banned, the company disbanded, and the Italian actors sent packing into exile. This left Paris with only two official theatres: the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum - and so, apparently, did Parisian audiences. The fairground performers promptly seized the Italians’ abandoned repertoire of short, irreverent farces heavy on song, dance, physical comedy, and what contemporary accounts politely term “lively imagination and fantasy.” The public loved it. The official theatres did not.

Now, the Comédie-Française was not merely irritated by this upstart competition; it was genuinely threatened by it. In the first half of the century, the grand old institution was playing to houses that averaged roughly four hundred spectators per evening in a hall that held thirteen hundred (not exactly a roaring success by anyone’s measure). The fairground theatres, meanwhile, were packing them in. The Comédie-Française responded in the time-honoured fashion of monopolists everywhere: it lobbied for the competition to be shut down.

And shut down it was - or rather, the authorities tried. In 1707, a decree forbade the fairground actors from performing plays with dialogue. Very well; they were reduced to monologues. Then another decree banned them from speaking at all. Very well; they would perform à la muette - in silent pantomime. But here is where the actors showed the kind of obstinate ingenuity that would define the genre they were in the process of inventing. They had enormous scrolls covered in song lyrics written in huge letters lowered from the flies above the stage, and the audience read the words and sang them out loud, set to well-known popular tunes called vaudevilles. These performances were called comédies à écriteaux - literally, “plays with signs”.

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In 1709, the Comédie-Française escalated matters further. Its actors actually hired their own theatre carpenters to physically storm and demolish the fairground stage. It was rebuilt in eight days.

The turning point came, as it so often does in ancien régime France, through a combination of financial desperation and bureaucratic horse-trading. The Opéra, staggering under enormous debts, decided in 1712 that it was willing to sell the fairground performers a licence to use singers, dancers, and stage sets - in exchange for a staggering annual fee that eventually reached 35,000 livres. Legally permitted to perform musical theatre at last, the fairground troupe adopted the name opéra-comique around 1714-1715. The term initially meant something quite specific: a play composed entirely of vaudevilles - those borrowed popular melodies - strung together one after another, with new words fitted to old tunes. It was not, at this stage, what anyone would call musically sophisticated. However, it was enormously entertaining, and it had the enormous advantage of being familiar. Everybody already knew the tunes.

The man who did most to give the early opéra-comique its literary respectability was Alain-René Lesage, who had previously written for the Comédie-Française itself. His Turcaret (1709) - a sharp, cynical satire on ruthless financiers in which there are no sympathetic characters whatsoever - had been a success there. But then Lesage, exhausted by the internal intrigues of the official actors, defected to the world of opera-comique. He also had the good sense to publish the fairground repertoire in ten volumes between 1721 and 1737, which means we actually know - and his contemporaries knew - what these pieces looked like.

In 1762, the government engineered the merger of the Opéra-Comique with the Comédie-Italienne, finally elevating this scrappy fairground entertainment to the status of an official, Crown-supported royal theatre. One critic described it as the moment the opéra-comique received its “letters of naturalization” - a peculiar turn of phrase, given that the genre had originated entirely within France’s own borders. What he presumably meant was that it had finally been admitted to polite society. Indeed, it was admitted all the way to Versailles itself: by the 1770s and 1780s, opéra-comique largely dictated the theatrical seasons at the royal court.

By the end of the ancien régime, the opéra-comique was flourishing while the “real” opera - the grand tragédie lyrique - was, by most accounts, quietly dying.

Granted, the ancien régime itself was also quietly dying, which would bring its own set of complications for everybody involved. But that, as they say, is another story.

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Whether or not it was the case, he clearly had ambitions for his son, and arranged an apprenticeship with a goldsmith for him. It was the most prestigious trade a young man working with his hands could enter. However, the young John dreamed of adventures, not labouring in a workshop, however prospectively well-paid. At only sixteen, he rebelled against his father’s wishes, and joined the army. His superiors soon saw his bravery as well as his education - in 1780, when he was sent to India with the 42nd Regiment of Foot, he did so in the rank of a lieutenant. A gifted autodidact, he had taught himself Latin and Ancient Greek. Later, he will also master fluent Arabic, Portuguese… and, what would turn out to be incredibly important to his future, French.

In India, John fought in the Second Anglo-Mysore War up to its ending in 1783. Then, likely to many people’s surprise, he suddenly resigned from the army.

His reasons for that were so astonishing that, had a fictional character in a historical novel exhibited them, critics would have raised their eyebrows. He had spent a lot of time in close contact with the locals, and it led him to realize that the British colonial efforts were much more barbarous than anything the native Indians could muster. Moreover, he developed such an appreciation towards the local culture that he even converted to vegetarianism.

It must be said, however, that personal grief must have played a role in it. He was very young when he had married a woman named Louisa - about whom we know nothing, except the fact that she gave him two sons and was devoted enough to accompany John to India (which, in the days before Victorian era, was not usual, much less expected, from the officers’ wives). Neither do we know the cause of her death - although, if we were to choose the most likely cause, the climate and the unusual (for Europeans) diseases of the subcontinent were probably the reasons for Louisa’s demise.

Year 1784 saw John, now a widower with two children, in London. The polyglot warrior was now a polyglot political journalist.

He had seen, in the colonial service, many instances of what his contemporary (and fellow Scotsman) poet Burns had called “man’s inhumanity to man”; and, for that matter, man’s inhumanity to other creatures. It was time to persuade the world.

John soon found work in a newspaper called British Mercury. It supported Charles Fox - the most radical (by pre-French Revolution standards) of major Whig politicians, who, among other things, defended the American colonies’ struggle for independence against his own country.

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Like many British radicals of the decade, John was interested in the ideas of French thinkers who wanted to reform (no one then spoke of overthrowing) the absolute monarchy. He even shared the same circles with Brissot - possibly even spent time with him - when the future leader of the Girondins visited London in 1784.

In the spring of 1790, John took a momentous decision: he left his safe (well, relatively safe - the increasingly conservative Pitt the Younger was now the Prime Minister, after all…) career in London and moved to Paris. There, he took part in the founding of a newspaper called The Universal Patriot - fittingly, it was written in English, but printed in France, and aimed at reporting on the political developments in both countries. In September 1791, he became one of the poets who presented the recently-elected National Assembly with an ode celebrating freedom.

In the same year, John Oswald wrote a startling tract called Cry of Nature - it not only argued that compassion and kindness towards animals are good natural impulses that had only been numbed by the cruel society people lived in, but even that vegetarianism (that he himself espoused) should be a part of that kindness.

It was around the same time that he began his journey into serious political controversy. During a visit home, he spoke at the Society for Free Debate - a London-based political club - that the Parliament was a “monstrous” thing, corrupt and only serving the interests of the most privileged of the privileged men. The country should, he argued, follow the French example, and elect something like the National Assembly, supported by local assemblies in the provinces, without any of the property-based restrictions on voting that prohibited most men from having a voice in the elections. For the time (he made his speech in the end of 1790), it was a very radical notion. Honestly, even among the literal Jacobins across the Channel, the ideas of a direct democracy would only become mainstream no earlier than 1792.

Oswald was not the only foreigner in Paris in those years: Étienne Claviers, one of the creators of the assignats - the new paper money for the new country - was from Geneva; plenty of Belgians who failed in their own efforts to oust the Prince-Bishop of Liege and establish a new republic there came to France; the Prussian Johann von Cloots defended the project of the ‘universal republic’ in his speeches there. And, well, let’s not forget the ladies: Helen Williams, the radical English poetess, even took part in organizing the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.

After some time, John Oswald started addressing the Jacobins with petitions to help the British radicals who were being persecuted by Pitt. He even proposed that the revolutionaries supported societies beyond the Channel that were sympathetic to their cause. However, his suggestions were defeated; the leaders of this most famous of political clubs argued that intervening in the affairs of a country France was not at war with would be a dangerous folly.

In August, the situation changed somewhat; while things like armed support or financial help were still denied, the French agreed to send an official brotherly address to the radical clubs in Britain. Apart from the greetings and words of support, the address included a complete account of the recent proceedings of the National Assembly, as well as copies of the papers of Louis XVI that confirmed his secret dealings with the Austrians (dealings that, had any ordinary man been implicated in them, would have been called high treason).

Two weeks after this decision, John Oswald received an offer of French citizenship, and accepted it gladly.

Thanks to John Oswald’s prior military experience and evident dedication to the ideals of the new republic, he was appointed a commander in the new French Revolutionary army. It is said that he had organized a dance for his battalion to celebrate the execution of Louis XVI (sources are silent as to whether it was a proper ceilidh).

An official club for the English, Scottish, and Irish allies of the revolution had been officially created on the 7th of January, 1793. It agreed to meet at the place unofficially named ‘Hotel de White’ (no relation to the supremely snobbish White’s gentlemen’s club in London; the hotel was simply owned by a wine merchant called Christopher White). All kinds of people were members - from lawyers and chemists to fiery playwrights and such singular personalities as Edward Fitzgerald (dubbed ‘Citizen Lord’), a great Irish nationalist who wanted not just to liberate his country, but to turn it into a democratic republic. Oswald became the club’s secretary.

In May 1793, Oswald took command of the Parisian battalion of pikemen, later designated the 14th battalion of Paris, and joined the fighting in war against the royalist uprising in the Vendee. He had distinguished himself in several engagements.

He died at Thouars on 14 September 1793. He was only thirty-three years old. His brave adolescent sons, who followed him into the army, died with him, killed by grapeshot.

Oswald did not live a long life, and the republic to which he had pledged himself outlived him only by a little while. His name, however, remained awe-inspiring to the people of later decades, who struggled against the injustices of the Victorian world, while modern defenders of animal rights credit him as one of the founders of their philosophy.

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The stranger from the East Coast, one Canning Woodhull, was handsome, well-spoken, and, according to his own stories, well-connected. He also claimed to be a physician, and even helped to cure Victoria’s fever. When he asked to marry her soon after, it must have seemed a gift from God both for the family and for the girl herself. Yes, Victoria was only fifteen years old, while Canning was well into his twenties. However, teenage brides were not a rarity in those days (though, yes, fifteen was considered unusually young). Besides, Victoria herself might have been delighted that her bright future was about to begin - did her new husband not promise to take her to the exciting city of San-Francisco, after all?

Well, Canning did fulfil that promise. Unfortunately, he had fulfilled none other. The young bride soon discovered that her husband actually had no real medical practice, and therefore no steady income. What he did have was a whole range of of bad habits. An early biographer wrote: “Her captor, once possessed of his treasure, ceased to value it. On the third night after taking his child-wife to his lodgings, he broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute. Then for the first time she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication.”

Still reeling from the heady years of the Gold Rush, San-Francisco was growing famous for the strongest liquors in the country, the prettiest courtesans, and the most powerful guns. In other words, it was the most suitable place for Canning Woodhull to indulge his many vices. Soon, Victoria gave birth to her firstborn, a boy she had romantically named Byron - only to find out soon that her child had been born mentally deficient. Canning tried to shift the blame to his young wife, giving her endless explanations about her young age being the likely cause. Victoria had no great political ideas in those years - her chief concern was survival - but she was still dismayed by the way husbands could claim their children’s health defects was the fault of the mothers and not, say, of their own blatant drinking habits.

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Her years in San Francisco had been spent trying to earn enough money for subsistence and the care for the little Byron, since Canning showed no wanting to work. Some evidence claims Victoria had been lucky enough to get some roles in sentimental plays that were put up in second-rate theatres. Some said that she earned her living in a far more unpleasant way - as a cigar girl in a port tavern in a particularly unsavoury section of the harbour, one that was known as Barbary Coast (and also as the play that invented the concept of a topless waitress).

Victoria had never especially missed her harsh mother and rapacious father - but she did miss her little sister, the sweet Tennessee, who was fourteen by now. Finally, unable to cope with the longing to see her again, Victoria insisted that they move back to Ohio, where she, at least, would not be separated from her family anymore. Canning was not overjoyed at the idea, but he grudgingly agreed. After all, there was no danger - her family was not the kind that could or would protect her; and even if it were, what can they precisely do, now that she was legally bound to him?

Upon returning to Ohio, Victoria found out that her little sister was being exploited by their father as a little star medium charging great sums for communing with spirits (needless to say, these sums were channeled into the adults’ coffers). For a while, there was nothing Victoria could do either for Tennessee, for herself, for Byron, or even for her own newborn younger child - a healthy little girl she called the exotic name of Zulu Maud. All she could do was to join the family enterprise, and try to make the best of it. However, her so far miserable luck was about to turn.

The battles and hardships of the Civil War had left deep scars across the States. Wherever the family went - the city of Chicago, Arkansas, Missouri - they found both sorrow and a yearning for someone to alleviate it. No force on earth could bring dead husbands and brothers back to life, but people were willing to pay for the consolation of hearing messages from them again.

By the time the Woodhull-Claflins arrived in St. Louis, the sisters have made enough money to operate out of a respectable hotel. It was there where Victoria had met Colonel James Harvey Blood.

He was a brave, five-times-wounded war hero, a man with a deep and genuine interest in spiritualism, and also someone whose reputation for responsibility and integrity won him the post of the city auditor in St. Louis. He entered Victoria’s hotel room mostly out of curiosity, after having heard about the new sensation - and, as he later recalled, had been struck immediately. Not so much by her beauty - or, at least, not the kind of sweet, dimpled, delightful beauty that her sister Tennessee was famous for. Victoria was usually described as someone who was more reserved and less obviously lovely, whose looks were veritably transformed whenever she felt any sort of passion, be it anger or love or joy (and she felt passions strongly and often).

It did not take a long time for the usually careful Victoria to start a whirlwind affair with Colonel Blood. There was a way out of her situation, he told her soon - he himself had managed to obtain a divorce from his own miserable first marriage, after all; sure, it is difficult to do at the wife’s initiative, but not impossible. Surely she might at least try?

It turned out that James Blood, like many spiritualists, believed in astonishing things that people in faraway European countries rather associated with dangerous secular philosophies. That a marriage had to be driven by love and destiny, for example, and not by considerations of property; that, souls being by nature sexless, it also had to be a union of equals. Some contemporaries even described him as “an extreme radical of the most uncompromising sort” - and no wonder; after all, he did also believe in things like women’s right to education.

Plenty of young men of various eras used this kind of talk to coax idealistic ladies into their beds and then evade responsibilities, that much is true. However, James Blood had not been one of them. He genuinely loved Victoria. Once she had obtained divorce from Canning, Blood proposed the following: he would resign from his post in the town administration - staying there, out of everyone’s way, seemed cowardice anyway, now that the world was in turmoil after President Lincoln’s assassination - while she could leave her two children in the care of her own siblings for a while, until the new couple could send for them. Then they could leave St. Louis together, marry at the first opportunity (the opportunity ended up coming in Dayton, in her home state of Ohio), and travel through their vast country to start a proper new life together. Pittsburgh, for example, could be a very fine new home for them. Her spiritualist talents would be in high demand there.

Feeling truly young and in love for the first time after years of drudgery, Victoria agreed. However, while Pittsburgh sounded good - as did the prospect of a kind of rugged honeymoon with James, since the journey was going to be long - she couldn’t help but wonder - perhaps, it is the will of the spirits beyond the veil that her destiny awaits her in New York?…

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Nothing in Victoria’s birth could have prophesied her destiny. To paraphrase a line from a very different story in a very different genre, “if there was a bright centre to the universe, her birthplace of Homer, Ohio in 1850 was the furthest place from it.” It was a town of roughly three hundred inhabitants, living by small trade and surrounded by great pale fields that seemed to stretch into infinity.

Compared to the shack where Victoria Claflin - as was her maiden name - had been born, however, Homer’s Main Street with its cheap storefronts was Champs-Élysée. The house was so shabby and rickety that local children made wagers on who would make a greater noise by merely running along its porch.

By doing this, the daring boys risked the wrath of Victoria’s parents, and they were not people to be trifled with. The one-eyed Buck Claflin, whom one historian had ironically described as a “one-man crime spree”, was obsessed with money-making schemes; these usually involved misdemeanours ranging from counterfeiting to arson. His wife, the mother of his eight children, was called Roxana - however, despite this alluring Persian name, she was in fact an ill-tempered woman prone to religious zealotry. It must be noted, though, that Roxana was famous for her brilliant memory; who knows what could have become of her had she not been born in the circumstances where she could only apply this gift to memorizing the whole of New Testament?

Victoria’s formal education consisted of a total of three years of elementary school, which she attended between ages eight and eleven. There, classmates mocked her as “the little queen”. It seemed ridiculous to them that this dirty child of a petty criminal could share a name with a monarch, not to mention talk of dreams stretching far beyond the fields surrounding Homer.

She left it rather soon, if not in the manner she might have imagined.

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Buck Claflin had purchased a gristmill and found he was having a difficult time running it. So, one day he decided to rid himself of the burden by burning the mill to the ground one stormy night in an attempt to pocket five hundred dollars in insurance money. The arson, however, was discovered, and the fire was the last straw for the residents of Homer, which had put up with the rogue in its midst for more than a decade. The Claflins were ran out of town, and had to make their way to their relatives in a place called Mount Gilead (also in Ohio). There, Buck had another supposedly genius idea for getting rich quick - this time, in involved his daughter Victoria and her sister Tennessee.

These were the grim years, and a new craze was sweeping the country: namely, spiritualism. This trend was also influenced by such different forces as the Second Great Awakening (a religious movement that argued that one could speak to God without the intercession of a cleric - and if God, why not the dead?) and the spread of the telegraph (if the words of the living could travel on air, why not the words of the departed?).

However, Buck was likely concerned not with the cultural underpinnings of the new craze as with the fact that it could bring him a lot of gold. After all, he likely knew the story of the famous sisters Fox - they started as modest, small-town mediums. Within a year after starting, though, the Fox sisters were exhibiting their powers onstage before audiences that paid seventy-five cents each to see them, and in June 1850 they were set up by P. T. Barnum at his hotel in New York City, holding demonstrations three times a day at a dollar per person.

So, Buck thought, he had daughters too; and, out of them, two showed the greatest promise for the enterprise: Tennessee was adorable and quick, but it was Victoria whom he hoped to to the star of the show. She, after all, seemed to have a true gift, or at least a believe in it. For example, at twelve, she predicted a fire so precisely she was briefly suspected of setting the blaze.

Buck took advantage of his good fortune and hung out a sign at a Mount Gilead boardinghouse, establishing Victoria, fourteen, and Tennessee, seven, as mediums, for one dollar per visit. Then he gave the older daughter one of his few pieces of advice that were actually good: “Be a good listener, child.”

However, the adolescent girl’s life was soon to be turned upside down by an arrival of a well-spoken stranger - and, unlike in popular fiction of the time, not for the better…

King Francis, however, had heard of what was afoot. He welcomed the Duke of Suffolk as an envoy, and claimed that he knew Brandon come to marry the Queen Dowager. One can imagine how blood drained from the nobleman’s face when he realized their plan was discovered. He claimed he had no such intention - indeed, he would not even think of anything so audacious.

Then Francis astonished him again.

Truth be told, the young French king made him understand, such an outcome would not be displeasing to him. Indeed, such a marriage was an acceptable compromise as far as Francis was concerned, because it would enable him to send Mary home without running the risk that she would be used against him. Yes, he won’t be able to wed her to one of his dukes (or to take her into his own bed), but at least she would be neutralised as a political asset.

So, it was not the French king - Mary’s captor and her country’s rival - whom the couple would be in danger from, but the English one - Mary’s brother and Brandon’s friend. Yes, Henry gave his sister that promise; however, there was no guarantee he was going to treat it seriously. Especially not when dealing with a clandestine marriage conducted abroad and without his consent.

There was something in the tangle of negotiations for Mary’s release, however, that she knew could placate him. For all his chivalric dreams, Henry VIII was a man who quite liked material wealth. And there was a jewel beyond price - a legacy of her short-lived first marriage - that could just fit the bill…

The jewel in question - The Mirror of Naples - is one of the most famous jewels of history... and no one knows exactly what it looked like, We do know, however, that it was worth a fortune. The diamond was a table-cut gem, as wide as a "full sized finger" and having a pearl dangling from it the size of a pigeon's egg.

No wonder Mary thought that her brother would have quite liked to have it in his collection. It was one of the jewels presented to her by King Louis during their short marriage… except it was presented to her as a part of the royal jewels collection, now that she was the queen consort of France. Which she wasn’t anymore, and therefore had no legal right to the gem.

She had, however, plenty of less-than-legal opportunities. So, Mary ended up quietly smuggling the Mirror of Naples, hidden among her belongings when she departed from France with her new husband, Charles Brandon.

It seemed that her gambit had worked - upon landing in Dover, she found out that her brother Henry VIII awaited the couple at Birling House, with a great and honourable retinue. There, he graciously accepted her explanation that she had been entirely responsible for what had happened in France. The powerful Howards, who had hoped to seize the opportunity created by the King’s rage to break Brandon’s friendship with Henry, were disappointed of their prey, and constrained to feign courtesy… which probably deceived no one.

However, the pair was not forgiven unconditionally. Mary was required to pay £2,000 a year for the next twelve years, or until the sum of £24,000 had been discharged, while the Duke had to forfeit the wardship of Elizabeth Lisle, and they were jointly bound in the huge recognisance of £100,000 to give up all the plate and jewels which the Queen Dowager had received.

Unfortunately, one of Mary’s last actions as Queen Dowager before she left France - another part of the price for her and her new husband’s peace - had been to seal a contract transferring all her jewels and other possessions to her brother, which left her in theory penniless. In practice it made her dependent on King Francis for the payments from her dower lands - which (at first, at least) he maintained in full. That state of things made her husband dependent upon her for the bulk of his income, which was a rather unpleasant situation for a sixteenth-century man.

The financial situation resolved thanks not the the leniency of a brother, but to the politics of a statesman. Like many of King Henry’s financial matters, this affair was left to be managed to the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. The latter was too intelligent to alienate the king’s sister, and made sure that the repayments of the debt were but slackly enforced. According to one account, out of the staggering sum, only £1,324 had actually been paid by 1521.

The legendary gem must have indeed helped to smooth things over between the willful sister and the stubborn brother: less than a year after Mary’s return, Brandon could be seen participating in October and November tournaments at court, Mary herself was referred to as one of the ladies adorning the event.

Now you are likely curious: what was the Mirror of Naples like? Is there a museum where we can see the jewel that paid for the life of a duke and the freedom of a queen? Well, unfortunately, there isn’t. The Mirror was noted in the inventory of Elizabeth I's jewels after she died. It was likely recut into smaller diamonds later by the new dynasty for whom Henry VIII and his sister alike were but ancient bones.

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Perhaps Henry never envisaged being held to such a promise – or had any idea of just how soon he would be called on to make good his word.

In August, dressed in ash-coloured and purple satin and chequered cloth of gold, Mary underwent a proxy wedding ceremony at Greenwich, with the Duc de Longueville standing in for Louis. (Longueville’s role-play extended to the bedroom, where Mary was formally undressed and ushered into bed and, after Longueville had touched her with his naked leg, the marriage was deemed to have been consummated.) The royal couple exchanged several letters, ritually expressing their married affection, their burning desire to see each other. And on 2 October – furnished, as Henry instructed his ambassadors, ‘with all things appertaining to so great a princess’ – Mary set sail from Dover.

Her old friend and admirer, Charles Brandon, had been the other starring figure of Mary’s arrival in France; he and the other leading jousters having come to France disguised, in grey cloaks and hoods, in the best tradition of chivalric romance. They made sure the honour of their country was more than upheld at the jousts to celebrate the wedding: jousts in which Mary stood alone on ‘a goodly stage’ to welcome the knights as they ‘wondered at her beauty’. Her husband, though, ‘was feeble, and lay on a couch for weakness’.

Louis was not destined to rise from that couch much - or even to outlive the year. However, instead of a sudden freedom, widowhood brought Mary new dangers - and almost made her a hostage to the new King Francis’ ambitions.

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Tradition prescribed that the young widowed queen went into forty days’ seclusion: dressed in the white of royal mourning; secluded in a darkened chamber lit only by candlelight. The now-widowed Mary was not an exception. Underneath the picture of mournful tranquillity, however, currents ran fast and deep. There was a practical point to the term of forty days, more than a month. That time would tell whether or not the dowager queen was pregnant. The question was of urgent concern to Louis’s existing heir, Francis, whose rights to the throne would be superseded by any son of Louis.

Louis was buried at St Denis on 12 January 1515, but the Queen did not emerge from her seclusion to attend the ceremony. By custom she remained at Cluny, and wore the traditional white which was the royal mourning of France. For this reason she was known thereafter as ‘la reine blanche’ – the white queen. She had been married just eighty-two days, and the period of mourning was forty days, so the designation was not an unfair one.

It would seem that nothing should have been easier for Henry than to bring his widowed, childless sister home. However, difficulties arose for the oldest reason in the world - namely, money. Although Louis’ councillors had confirmed that in the event of her widowhood she would be at liberty to return to England ‘with her servants jewels and effects’, and that the French would reimburse the costs of her travel to Abbeville, there remained the question of her dowry. This could be offset against the million crowns which Louis had acknowledged that he owed the King of England, provided that Francis was willing to accept that debt. There was also the problem of the jewellery which the late king had so generously given to her. Had he bestowed these upon her as his queen, in which case they should remain to her successor, or as personal gifts, in which case she was entitled to take them with her?

The situation was complicated by Francis’s unwillingness to let her go. This was not because he found her attractive (although he may have done so) as because she represented a major political asset. A beautiful royal widow, not yet twenty years old, was obviously ripe for remarriage, and Francis was very unwilling to surrender that advantage to the King of England. As Sir Thomas Spinelly reported to Henry VIII on 6 February, the Dukes of Savoy and Lorraine were already being proposed, and although Mary was rejecting all such overtures, as long as she remained under his control she was vulnerable. Francis seems to have been particularly concerned that once she was back in England, Henry might marry her off to one of his, Francis’, enemies.

Trapped in the Hotel de Cluny, Mary felt isolated and vulnerable, cut off from her own people. Her English servants had been dismissed after Louis’ death, and replaced with French women, whom she did not trust. This action had possibly been taken by another influential woman in the game - Louise of Savoy, Francis’ mother.

So, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was tasked with becoming Henry’s special envoy to negotiate with the French court. He arrived in Paris on 31 January - and insisted on seeing his old friend, who was now the widowed queen of France, the same day. As it turned out, she had an idea on how to extricate herself from this near-captivity - but using it was sure to enrage at least one monarch…

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Namely, the nouvelles a la main - or, simply put, handwritten newsletters.

Since you will not have the resources of, say, your counterpart from Part 1, your sources are going to be rather modest. No diplomats or heads of state are going to entrust you their secrets; instead, you would have to keep your ears open in popular cafes and bribe maidservants from the servants’ quarters of the houses of the great and good. Just make sure not to believe everything you hear. Note the example of Marie-Anne Doublet, this proprietress of a semi-legendary newssheet. When her employees brought her the raw news from the sources above, she wrote them down in two columns: credible news and dubious rumours. Then she, as later centuries would have called it, fact-checked both by discussing them with her circle of trusted and well-informed friends (they jokingly called themselves her “parishioners” - as though she were a priestess of some new religion). Only afterwards did the worthy news get written down.

Mind, her articles were often written with far more liberty than a proprietor of, say, the respectable Gazette de Leyde would have allowed himself. Even crowned heads were not immune; for example, one of these news sheets wrote about counterfeit French coins with Louis XVI's portrait "decorated with the headdress that the Eternal [God] gave to Moses," and another praised Frederick the Great's successor for abstaining from orgies and touching women since ascending the throne.

No wonder the powers that be had once tried to have Mme Doublet committed to a convent. Thankfully, they failed. Hopefully, you will be just as lucky!

You cannot compete even with the early printing press in terms of the volume of production - however, you will be able to compete with it in terms of speed. After all, your newsletter can be finished on Sunday, copied on Monday, and the first copies of it sold of Tuesday. You don’t need to send your writings to, say, the faraway Avignon to be printed. Besides, don’t underestimate the power of fans - the copies of your copies might end up circulating outside Paris, or even outside the country.

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News are unlikely to be your paper’s only attraction. Look at the Bachaumont newsletter, for instance. Its content is often worldly, gossipy, spiced with witticisms about actresses and men about town, reviews of plays, books, and art exhibits, sympathetic to Voltairean Enlightenment. Or look at the author of the Metra, whoever they are. Sure, he or she are known for their starling anti-clericalism… but they also combine a manuscript news service with a printed literary bulletin known as the Correspondance secrete.

However, don’t imagine a state of perfect freedom. The police of the kingdom is not stupid. It is aware of the existence of most nouvelles, and frequently vets them too. The police had ways of tracing and pressuring manuscript nouvellistes just as they do with the publishers of printed newspapers.

In other words, be careful - I wouldn’t want you to be reduced by these people to frivolous topics and empty flattery for fear of your life…

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Now, what are the pamphlets? You’ve likely heard the word; but what does it actually signify? For starters, it’s not a synonym of a periodical: they are not regular publications, but rather one-off responses to particular events. That fact gives them the kind of sharp topicality that a regular newspaper relying on subscriptions might not always possess. They can be very long indeed, but more usually they take the form of thin octavo booklets, quite distinct from books and magazines. And - attention, this part is important for you - they are cheap to produce. You don’t need to spend your hard-earned livres on leasing a proper establishment of your own and buying a printing press. There are dedicated existing printers of pamphlets who can help you. Yes, their type would be likely second-hand and their press would be looking like something that was broken thrice and then cobbled together… but think of the expense you’d save!

Now, of course the public is willing to overlook the clumsy production because the topics you’d be acquainting them with would be sharp and urgent. Which topics would that be… well, what is the political crisis du jour?

• Are the Jesuits being expelled from the realm? Write about their shocking dishonesty and patchy track record in advising kings; or take the other side and decry the expulsion as a destruction of great patrons of learning;

• Are the Parlements of whatever provinces pitting themselves against the royal power? (It happens surprisingly often). Take the side of these brave souls guarding the kingdom against royal caprices… or remind the public that their members are all wealthy noblemen are usually guarding themselves against the need to pay taxes.

• Is there a new royal mistress? Well, that topic never gets old. Granted, the young Louis XVI is somewhat disappointing in that regard (he seems to have no interest in touching even his own wife), but most of the ladies who had warmed his late predecessor’s bed are still fresh in people’s memories. A vivid biography of one of them, perhaps? Expose the corruption of the court, the rot in the heart of Versailles? A worthy topic - but the kind of pill people swallow better when it is sweetened with tales of fleshly delights and luxurious gowns. (Some things never change).

• Is it any time after 1787? You simply have to write in defense on calling the Estates-General. Someone has to - after all, the actual powers at the top prevaricate as usual, and might need just a little push in the form of the public opinion. Or a big push.

I might sound flippant, but I really am quite serious - it is to the pamphlet writers of the last three decades that we owe the wide spread of such concepts as “citizen”, “liberty vs. despotism”, “the rights of man”, and even “republicanism.” Yes, there had been great and earnest tomes discussing them all, but is an average person on the street likely to read several volumes of Encyclopedia (and these aren’t cheap!), or to gulp down a few pamphlets (and these actually are).

As for production… no, don’t print it here in Paris. First of all, it would be hard to find a printer willing to take it on, and second, the city guild of printers and booksellers is keeping a dead medieval grip on… well, printers and booksellers.

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Frankly, you better send the text out to be printed in Avignon - it’s a French city alright, but due to one old quirk of medieval history, it is still considered to be technically a Papal enclave. Yes, you’ve heard that right: the Catholic Church is a more lenient and less censorious overlord than the French monarchy you were born under. And then people are asking why do you need the whole Estates-General thing…

So, onto distribution. The simplest method is doing that through peddlers (Colporteurs): these people crucial for disseminating popular literature (as well as new decrees and judicial memoirs… a surprisingly well-selling genre!) in both cities and the countryside. They also evade the police easily, since they have no fixed premises.

But suppose a few booksellers grew interested in your oeuvre. They would quietly refer to it as a “chestnut” - an industry code for illicit publications. They would insert requests for such things on separate, unsigned scraps of paper, or mark dangerous titles with a cross.

Books are "married" (sheets of one stuffed into another) to conceal them, or hidden in the bottom of crates or packing material. Think of all the tales of intrepid smuggling you’ve ever read. Well, you’ll be doing something like that now, but with pamphlets. Due to the expenses associated with all of these difficulties, it is not unknown for forbidden pamphlets to cost quite a lot (though, mind you, still within the reach of skilled workers).

Now, supposed you do actually want to own your own regular publication. What then? Well… you can always write it out by hand. No, I am not joking, and in the next article I am going to tell you how you are going to manage it.

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Good news: you have a bit of money. You also live outside France proper. You see, your great-grandparents were Huguenots (French Protestants) who fled France to evade the persecutions of the so-called Sun King. Good thing they’ve managed to land on their feet, otherwise you wouldn’t have the cash for the printing press right now.

Your location means you can live without fear of the censor - or the Bastille - whatever you write. However, what exactly are you going to write? Now, that’s a question. The French public is hungry for well-informed articles on political matters, both at home and abroad. These people are heartily sick of court gazettes writing about that time the Royal family had gone to Mass (again).

How are you going to get the news in question?

Option one: bribe some low-ranking secretary at a foreign embassy (or, better yet, a few). These guys are paid peanuts, they would gladly tell you what they know… though, how reliable that would be is another question. Disgruntled army officers can also work.

Option two: maintain a paid correspondent in Paris (or Brussels, or Vienna, or Saint-Petersburg… or all of these, if you have the budget for it!). That would be more expensive, but not as expensive as you might think - you won’t be their only source of income, so they won’t expect you to pay them a proper full salary. You can economize, too: tell your Hamburg correspondent to gather news from all the Baltic states, for instance. In exchange, these people would send you regular digests with the top local news, which you would then have to turn into editorial gold.

Option three: go all the way to the top. It’s been known for the King of Poland, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson alike to supply newspapers with exclusive information. However, for that, you’d already have to have some standing, and besides… you don’t really think any of these people would be an impartial source, do you?

Now, your news gathered and your articles written (no fancy headlines, mind you - you’d have to live for more than half a century longer to see those), how do you put them together? You can’t do it yourself. You’ll need six or even eight people working together to set the type and print your issue. They’d expect decent treatment from you too - one or two days off straight after the new issue had been printed, good wages, and retirement pay. By the standards of the century, it was one of the better industries to be working in.

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How do you get your ready copies into the hands of the subscribers? And you need a lot of subscribers, mind you - the golden age of advertising has not yet arrived, so you are unlikely to get more than 3% of your income from ads.

To take the copies to the border, you can use your country’s regular postal service (maybe negotiate a proper contract with them, while you can - you are going to be using them a lot, after all). After that, dedicated agents and distributors in France would take over (though, of course, you’d need to agree with them beforehand too). Actually, there is this bookseller in the capital by the name of David (probably no relation to the future revolutionary painter… probably). His Bureau general des gazettes etrangeres sells the papers in Paris both by subscription and through street vendors, and even ships the copies bound for the French provinces. He even issues regular prospectuses listing all the newspapers he handles, their prices, and the days on which they arrive. Just because your kind of journalism is illicit, it doesn’t mean it’s shoddily organized!

Now, your first issue out, you can relax… for three days, because after that, your readers would be expecting the next one. Good luck!

What if you hadn’t had the good fortune of living beyond the grasp of the Crown, though? What if you were actually born in the very heart of the realm, in the capital? Well… in that case, your choice would be either illicit pamphlets or handwritten periodicals - both of which I will explore in the next article…

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The story of flight in France begins with the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, from Annonay in the Ardèche region, who ran a renowned paper-making factory. They were the pioneers of hot air balloon technology. Their "Montgolfières" were innovative large globes crafted from sackcloth, lined with layers of paper, and encased in an outer netting from which a basket was suspended. The principle was simple yet revolutionary: filling the globe with heated air, which, being lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, would cause it to ascend. Their initial successful test flight on December 14, 1782, paved the way for a public demonstration in Annonay on June 4 next year.

The Academy of Sciences, upon being informed of this groundbreaking invention, decided to sponsor a test flight, backed by government funds. Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier traveled to Paris to build a new balloon with the assistance of his friend, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer. Réveillon, not one to pass an opportunity for commercial promotion by, even contributed decorative elements, such as zodiac signs, to the balloon's exterior.

However, a formidable rival of the inventor soon emerged: Jacques Alexandre César Charles, a distinguished "physicien" (scientist). He had quite an advantage before the pioneers: unlike the Montgolfiers, Charles grasped the potential of "air inflammable" (hydrogen), understanding that it could be controlled with valves and would be significantly more effective than ordinary hot air. His "Charlières," constructed with the help of his students, were made of rubberized silk. To finance their ambitious endeavor, they shrewdly sold advance tickets to their launch at three livres each, quickly filling the subscription and depositing the funds… no, not at a bank, but at the fashionable Café du Caveau.

On August 27, 1783, despite a pre-launch spat with Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier (whom Charles refused entry to protect his secret), and even heavy rain, the unmanned hydrogen balloon soared perfectly into the sky. It landed forty-five minutes later, nineteen miles north of Paris, near the village of Gonesse, where it terrified local peasants who mistook it for a monster. They reportedly attempted to subdue it with pitchforks or stones, only to be pacified when a curate discovered a notice requesting its return to Paris. Its triumphant recovery in Paris provided an opportunity for Parisians to mock the ignorance of country folk.

The rivalry between "Montgolfières" and "Charlières" fueled public debate. It was a rare coffee house that was not abuzz with the rumours of the opponents’ experiments. At first, it seemed like the Montgolfiers, with their larger, man-carrying balloons and support from the Academy and government, had won - they have performed a significant experiment at Versailles on September 19, 1783, before the king, queen, and court. This flight carried a sheep, a rooster, and a duck in a wicker basket, intending to test the viability of living creatures enduring flight. While the rooster tragically broke its neck, the sheep and duck survived, captivating the public imagination.

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The first manned flight, however, had been accomplished by neither side, but instead, like in any good sports movie, by a dark horse - or, rather, a pair of them. From the Bois de Boulogne, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François-Laurent d’Arlandes embarked on it while auspended in a basket beneath a seventy-foot-high hot-air balloon. They waved their hats to a massive crowd, ascended, crossed the Seine, and landed safely five miles away twenty-five minutes later. Their success was met with "general enthusiasm," and Parisians celebrated them as heroes, even opening a subscription for a monument at their landing site.

Just ten days later, on December 1, 1783, Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert undertook their own manned flight. Charles ceremoniously invited Montgolfier to cut a ribbon, releasing a trial balloon as a gesture of reconciliation between the two implacable rivals.

The event led to widespread celebrations, ballads, and Charles being carried on shoulders as a popular hero. The balloon itself was paraded through the streets by torchlight, attracting cheers. The king himself recognized these achievements, granting Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier membership in the Ordre de Saint Michel and awarding pensions to Charles, Pilâtre, and the Robert brothers.

The success of these flights ignited a profound "craze" for balloons. Balloon designs permeated Parisian culture, appearing engraved on prints, inlaid in furniture, sewn onto hats, designed as puffed-up sleeves, combed into coiffures, baked into candy, and carved as toys. Spectators reacted with intense emotion, gasping, freezing with fear, applauding, cheering, weeping, and sometimes fainting. One woman - she might have been a market vendor - had even felt she had witnessed "the birth of creation," seeing matter rise from chaos. However, the church expressed concern, viewing ballooning as "diabolical" for potentially undermining faith in miracles like Christ's ascension.

The prospect of a Channel crossing soon captivated public imagination. Jean-Pierre Blanchard, an inventor who had previously attempted to build a "flying boat," and failed (leading to the birth of a satirical play about his efforts), had found a courage to try again. He adapted his design for hydrogen balloons and successfully impressed authorities to secure permission for a flight from the Champ de Mars in March 1784. On January 10, 1785, Blanchard, accompanied by American Dr. John Jeffries, achieved the first Channel crossing, landing near Calais, France, an event that caused great acclaim in Paris. Some people even claimed that transatlantic flights were surely next. Well, they’d have had to wait a century and a half, but the enthusiasm is rather admirable.

Not one to be left behind, Pilâtre de Rozier attempted a Channel crossing in the opposite direction on June 15. However, something went terribly wrong. The balloon caught fire and crashed three miles from Boulogne, killing both Pilâtre and his companion, Pierre Romain. This devastating incident meant that balloons now had "martyrs as well as their heroes".

Despite the declining public fervor, the ballooning phenomenon left an indelible mark. It reinforced a burgeoning faith in science and human reason, demonstrating that "man had conquered the air" and that the natural world was amenable to human mastery, fostering a collective belief that in the coming new era, anything was possible.

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Will I shock anyone if I tell you that the vague and fuzzy nature of these units of measure led to them being manipulated by landowners and merchants alike to the detriment of poor peasants? I suspect not.

It was not for nothing that one of the Cahiers de Doléances - literally, lists of grievances - presented to the monarch in 1789 was simply asking for an honest system of measurement.

The desire for a uniform decimal measurement system became a central pillar of the "regeneration" efforts following 1789, and the ideas promising clarity and equality.

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Scientists, already working on reforms since 1787, were tasked by the Constituent Assembly in 1790 to lead this ambitious project. Initially, a commission including figures like Lavoisier and Laplace considered basing the unit of length on the length of a pendulum beating the second at 45 degrees latitude. However, after the English government declined to collaborate, the commission revised its decision in March 1791, opting for the "terrestrial meridian" as the reference.

Different teams were dispatched to conduct experiments and even expeditions to the purpose: Borda and Coulomb for pendulum measurements, and crucially, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain to measure an arc of this meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Lavoisier and René-Just Haüy were tasked with determining the weight of water for the unit of volume, which would become the kilogram.

The measurement expedition, though it launched in 1792, faced immense difficulties. Delambre, working on the northern section from Dunkerque to Rodez, faced arrests and logistical nightmares alike. His orders, initially signed by Louis XVI, made him a target - some misunderstandings even led him to being accused of being a royalist agent by the locals. As a result, he only managed to complete his initial measurements around Paris by early March 1793. Méchain, operating in the faraway south of France - a world unto its own - and later even in Spain, tragically died of yellow fever before completing his segment.

Despite these ongoing and incomplete measurements, the National Convention, driven by the urgency of external and internal wars, provisionally established the metric system in August 1793. This move was seen as a "new means of cementing the unity of the Republic". New measures were named meter, gravet (the future gram), and cade (the future cubic meter). Lavoisier and Haüy continued their work on the kilogram, and the production of physical standards began.

However, the political turmoil continued to impact the project directly. In August 1793, the Royal Academy of Sciences, the very institution driving the metric reform, was suppressed. Even more dramatically, Lavoisier, a key figure in the research, was arrested in November 1793 and subsequently executed on May 8, 1794 - though, unlike some popular assumptions claim, that had nothing to do with the Republic’s supposed animosity towards scientific inquiry; his sad fate came about because he was a former tax collector (fermier général).

The adoption of a metric system was a major event, and one making surprising waves in popular culture - a large public information campaign to promote its benefits was launched, involving chansonniers, poets, and playwrights. Despite these efforts, the adoption was slow, with the physical standards for weight and length not ready until June 1799, only becoming obligatory in December 1801.

Napoleon's 1812 decree permitted the use of old measures, encouraging a de facto return to old habits (like frankly many of his decrees did for many aspects of life, including much more visceral ones, such as his banning of no-fault divorce a decade after the Revolution legalized it or reinstating slavery in the colonies). However, by that time the convenience of the new metric system born during the revolution was too self-evident, and it remained the sole system taught and used by administrators.

Say what you will, but I am certainly grateful to the Jacobins for supporting the metric system. Not sure I am quite as grateful for the kilogram - at least I rarely feel this way when I step on the scales…

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Eighteenth-century newspapers would have appeared alien to a modern reader. If you were to open one of the hottest, most sought-after news sheets of the day, then instead of dynamic headlines, subheads, or illustrations, you would find columns of crowded type recounting long-forgotten events in a style akin to a dull research paper. Yet, to contemporaries, these dense texts were "passionately exciting reports".

Although 18th century is notorious for its flood of printed word - some laudable, some not so much - the production of these journals was inherently limited by the wooden hand press, a technology largely unchanged since Gutenberg's era, which lacked the capacity of Victorian power-driven machinery.

Newspaper printing was a demanding profession, too. The eight workers at the Gazette de Leyde kept a rigid schedule, working twenty hours on printing days (from 8 A.M. to 4 or 5 A.M. the next day), followed by at least a four-hour shift for cleaning and redistributing type. It was quite gruelling: the entire eight-page issue of the Gazette de Leyde, typically comprising two four-page sections (the ordinaire and a supplement), represented at least three man-days of typesetting work due to the minuscule "petit romain" and "petit texte" type used.

However, it would not be fair to omit the fact that these men’s (and sometimes women’s - printing business was one of the few sectors still considered suitable for female apprentices) jobs provided a regular income, often leading to long-term employment and benefits like retirement pay, a stark contrast to most trades of the era.

News acquisition was a dance as complex as any reel in the assembly rooms. Editors like Jean Luzac of the already mentioned Gazette de Leyde relied on a mix of sources: professional correspondents, manuscript newsletters (nouvelles à la main), diplomatic and political contacts, other newspapers, and even stories from interested private parties. Correspondents, often engaged in other activities, were paid regular sums for dependable news. Pascal Boyer, the Gazette de Leyde's Paris correspondent from 1781 to 1789, was an experienced newsman with good social contacts, frequenting government institutions and potentially having sources within key political bodies like the Parlement de Paris. Governments, too, were expected to supply information about wars and public affairs. However, due to slow communication and limited financial resources, editors faced challenges in verifying information by cross-checking with multiple observers.

War news was a priority for most papers - they always sold like hot cakes, even if they were often presented as dry catalogues of units and posts involved. That style only became "more voluminous and often more emotional" during the French Revolution. The Gazette de Leyde notably treated parliamentary discussions as newsworthy, elevating the status of assemblies over monarchs - which does not seem radical to us today, but was seriously skirting the edge of the permissable back then.

If the English press was rather infamous for its irreverence, in 18th-century France, the prevailing assumption was that subjects had no right or need to know what their rulers were doing or, sometimes, even what the laws of their country were. However, French kings, despite their absolute power, had rather paradoxically clumsy administrative tools for implementing their will. Many officials had purchased or inherited their offices tasked with such matters, making them difficult to remove even if they refused to obey royal edicts.

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Censorship was a key tool. Most European newspapers were either government-sponsored or government-controlled court gazettes, which were precensored and heavily focused on court ceremonial. The Gazette de France, for example, would report on royal family attendance at Mass or court presentations, but rarely on actual political conflicts, presenting the king's will as omnipotent. Such court gazettes were typically cheaper and reached their audience quicker, often having higher circulations in their home states than foreign competitors.

However, maintaining rigid press controls within France was complicated by the existence of sovereign states with less restrictive press policies, particularly the nearby Dutch Republic. The Netherlands in particular were brimming with the French-speaking descendants of Huguenots who escaped there during the harrowing persecutions by the government of Louis XIV a couple of generations ago - and many, like the publishers of Gazette de Leyde, still retained their contacts back home.

Several independent publications challenged the dominance of milk-and-water court papers:

• The Dutch-printed, French-language Gazette de Leyde stood out as Europe's newspaper of record. It provided a detailed chronicle of political events across Europe, often printing news suppressed domestically. Daringly, it even openly linked the assassination attempt on Louis XV to the king's mishandling of religious disputes and was sympathetic to the French parlements' resistance against royal authority. Notably, Jean Luzac, its editor, never allowed favors or bribes to influence its editorial policy, distinguishing it from many contemporaries… granted - he had a lucrative second career and could afford it!

• The Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques managed to avoid censorship in France for much of the 18th century, providing extensive coverage of confrontations between the parlements and the crown. However, being a religious publication, it had quite a bias of its own!

• Other international gazettes, like the London-based Courrier de l'Europe, were often tightly controlled by the governments that subsidized them, leading to a reputation for servility and incomplete, pro-ministerial reporting on French affairs. Similarly, the Prussian-controlled Courier du Bas-Rhin, while lively, adopted a pro-Prussian line in international affairs.

Beyond printed newspapers, manuscript newsletters (nouvelles à la main) thrived, at least in big cities. These handwritten bulletins offered quicker delivery and the lure of being free from censorship, although police surveillance was still a reality. They often contained personal anecdotes and gossipy comments about public figures that printed gazettes avoided, resembling the scandalous "paragraphs" of the English press. However, they could be quite costly, hard to distribute, and harder to produce. They also lacked the verifiable credibility of printed gazettes, often relaying unverified rumors.

The flexibility of pamphlets also allowed them to evade censorship more easily. They could vary in length, style, and topic, serving as crucial vehicles for political opinion and often providing factual background for readers or even sparking other publications. Indeed, the suspension of censorship just before the Estates-General convened in 1789 led to a "flood of pamphlets" expressing the ideas of Enlightenment throughout France.

The fragmented and controlled nature of 18th-century news dissemination meant that truly comprehensive and objective reporting, especially on domestic political matters in France, was a rarity. It took the revolutionary upheavals of 1789, including the suspension of censorship, and the continuous open sessions of the National Assembly, to fundamentally transform the journalistic landscape, leading to a new era of press freedom… and quite a lot of other things with their own set of challenges.

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