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"the newspaper holds to be true whatever is probable. we start from that." So declares Étienne Lousteau, who has just been named editor of a new paper for which his friend Lucien Chardon de Rubempré, the central figure of Lost Illusions, will be the theater and literary critic (Balzac 2001, 357/1988, 360).1 Lucien has shown his mettle in an initial theater review (of a play remarkable mainly for furnishing an opportunity for two young actresses to display their legs) that wows the veteran journalists. Journalists, theater critics, novelists, and poets gather at the after-party, during which Lucien reads his review to applause and envy, and a quick decision is made to welcome him into the guild of journalists. Talk then turns to journalism itself. It is initiated by the remark of a German diplomat about a comment by the Prussian general Blücher when he arrived on the heights of Montmartre in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, in response to his comrade Saaken, who proposed to burn Paris: "Don't you dare. France will only be destroyed by that"—meaning the intelligentsia gathered in the great city (318/320).
To the German diplomat, newspapers mark the destruction of authority. Informing the mass of the people would sow revolt and defeat legitimate rule. The journalist Claude Vignon agrees: newspapers are an evil, though one the government could make use of if it hadn't instead decided to fight against it. Émile Blondet, another journalist, calls newspapers "poison shops," and Vignon piles on:
The newspaper, instead of being a sacred mission, has become an arm for the political parties; and from that it became a commercial enterprise; and like all commercial enterprises it knows neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as Blondet puts it, is a shop where one sells to the public words in whatever color it likes. If there were a journal of hunchbacks, it would prove morning and evening the beauty, the goodness, the necessity of hunchbacks. A newspaper is made not to enlighten but to flatter opinions. Thus all newspapers will in due course be cowardly, hypocritical shameless, mendacious, murderous; they will kill ideas, systems, men, and will thrive from doing so.
(320/322)
Vignon, well launched on his tirade, goes on to say:
We...