Je me félicite de vous avoir proposé l'établissement d'un Papier Périodique, non pas tant par rapport à moi-même, que par les avantages que vous en retirerez. Je vois que plusieurs d'entre vous, Messieurs, m'encouragent par leurs Souscriptions. - Gazette du Commerce et Littéraire pour la Ville et District de Montréal, Mercredi, 3 Juin, 1778
"It pleases me to have proposed to you the establishment of a periodical newspaper, not so much for what it would bring to me as for the advantages that you would reap from it. I see that several among you, gentlemen, are encouraging me with your subscriptions."
With those optimistic words, Fleury Mesplet launched Montreal's first newspaper. It was entirely in French, there were only four pages, each measuring just 23 centimetres by 30, and its name merely hints at The Gazette's. Nonetheless, it is the newspaper to which the one you now hold in your hands can trace its origins.
Mesplet was born in Marseille in 1734 and trained as a printer in Lyon before emigrating to London in 1773. There he met Benjamin Franklin, the distinguished American polymath and man of affairs who was acting as a kind of ambassador for the restive American colonies.
Franklin seems to have inspired his new, liberal-minded acquaintance to seek his fortune across the Atlantic, and the following year Mesplet emigrated yet again, this time to set up shop in Philadelphia.
The American Revolution broke out in April 1775, and all along it was hoped that Quebec, in British hands for little more than a decade, could be induced to join in.
Indeed, an American army captured Montreal the following November. The Continental Congress dispatched Franklin to the city to persuade Montrealers of the advantages of independence. His task would be easier if it were backed by pamphlets, posters and the like prepared by a skilled, French-speaking printer, and so Franklin prevailed upon Mesplet to go as well.
Franklin didn't know it at the time, of course, but his action would make him a kind of godfather to The Gazette. In The Gazette's offices today, flanking a commemorative bust of Fleury Mesplet, there is one of Benjamin Franklin.
Alas for the Americans, their mission to Montreal failed. Mesplet arrived some weeks after his mentor, for his boats nearly capsized near Chambly and much of his equipment was lost. By the time he got here, on May 6, 1776, Franklin had pretty well despaired of success and would return home a few days later. The occupying American soldiers soon skedaddled as well, the last of them just a day ahead of the Redcoats returning up the St. Lawrence.
Mesplet, however, was stuck. He would not abandon his printing equipment, and in any event his money, issued by the Continental Congress, was worthless.
He managed to overcome the suspicions of the re-established British authorities and, unlike Franklin, soon found he had much to offer Montreal. He was the city's first printer, and over the next several years he was in constant demand to print a wide variety of work: mainly religious material but also schoolbooks, legal documents, almanacs, contracts, even a primer of the Iroquois language. The step to founding a newspaper was an easy one.
Mesplet was not the editor of the Gazette Littéraire (which soon became the paper's less cumbersome title); skilled though he was as a printer, his formal education was limited. He was wise enough, however, to hire as editor a feisty lawyer and fellow Frenchman four years his junior named Valentin Jautard.
For that matter, the Gazette Littéraire was not really a newspaper, in that it carried no news and very few advertisements. Instead, it was a journal of ideas. Its mainstays were literary and philosophical material, poetry, letters, even amusing anecdotes.
Often, readers were confronted with concepts and viewpoints that were humanist, skeptical, radical, even revolutionary - in a word, Voltairean.
The paper condemned ignorance and superstition, especially among the clergy, questioned the feudal nature of society, debated the virtues of expanded liberties and implicitly upheld the individual as the proper measure of all things.
The Gazette Littéraire operated out of a shop on Rue Capitale, near the waterfront. Under Mesplet and Jautard, its back room became an outpost of the Enlightenment, home for a kind of debating society for what intelligentsia the small town of Montreal could then boast.
When the death of Voltaire himself became known in the colony that fall, the two men founded the Académie de Montréal in his memory. The challenge they represented to the establishment was exciting - and dangerous, too.
Matters came to a head in the spring of 1779. Jautard, who wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, attacked the legal basis of some judgments handed down by a local judge of dubious rectitude, René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville. Hertel barred Jautard from his court, but on May 27 he and Mesplet showed up anyway.
It was the last straw. Hertel wrote in protest to the governor, Sir Frederick Haldimand, who proved only too happy to act. The Americans were still fighting for their independence, and Mesplet and Jautard were altogether too revolutionary for the governor's liking. On June 4, they were arrested and clapped behind bars in Quebec City. There was no trial. Taking them out of circulation did the same for the Gazette Littéraire: it instantly folded. It had lasted just a year.
The life of the two men in jail was no picnic. Their health suffered, especially during the cold and damp of winter. Furthermore, they were held arbitrarily, at Haldimand's pleasure, as if habeas corpus had never existed - precisely the sort of abuse guaranteed to outrage a good Voltairean.
More than three years later, with the American war over, Mesplet was quietly released; Jautard was allowed to go five months later, in February 1783. It was as arbitrary a conclusion to their confinement as had been its beginnings.
Unsinkable as ever, they set about to revive their newspaper - and that will be the subject of another column soon.
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