HANDWRITTEN NEWS. Manuscript diary addressed to... Lot 91

[HANDWRITTEN NEWS]. Manuscript diary addressed to M. de la Granville, Captain in the Régiment de Bretagne In French, handwritten on paper, 278 letters in all France, Paris, January 1, 1740 to June 15, 1742 (except 49 letters sent from Holland (The Hague) from December 1, 1741 to June 7, 1742) I + 546 ff. preceded by a flyleaf and followed by 3 blank leaves and a flyleaf, several highly legible cursive hands, some passages crossed out (censored?), enclosed: typescript statement of letters (5 leaves). Bound in 18th-century brown calf, 5-ribbed spine cloisonné and fleuronné, red leather title-pieces with dates "1740/1741/1742", triple cold fillet framing the boards, turned marbled paper countersleeves and endpapers, roulette on the edges. Upper and lower spine brittle, boards rubbed, small leather loss on upper headpiece. Size of binding: 238 x 180 mm; size of leaves: approx. 225 x 160 mm. Interesting set, bearing witness to journalism under the Ancien Régime, at the start of the War of Spanish Succession (1740-1748), during the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774). A collection of "Nouvelles à la main", the name given to Gazettes distributed by hand, usually secretly, to defy censorship. These were the first experiments in journalism, starting as early as the 16th century. Moureau offers the following definition: Nouvelles à la main" is a handwritten collection of articles giving current news in chronological order (F. Moureau, "Pour un dictionnaire des nouvelles à la main", in Rétat (ed.), Le journalisme d'Ancien Régime, Lyon, 1982). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lords and people of responsibility or social status commonly had their own "gazetier" who provided them with copied and compiled "news" in handwritten form, 4 to 8 pages long (hence the name "Nouvelles à la main"), in return for payment of a sort of subscription. These little gazettes compiled information obtained from sources who collected secrets and rumors from the Court and places of power and finance, with news from abroad, news from France and the Court, but sometimes also miscellaneous facts. These "gazetins" were sent to "subscribers" by post: the police kept a close eye on both editors and readers. But it's true that the information in the "Nouvelles à la main" was not intended for a particular reader, but for distribution to many. but for distribution to several subscribers. In the present case, the typed list attached to the manuscript specifies that these news items were received by M. de la Granville, breaking with the reader's usual anonymity in similar collections: one delivery bears the following address on the back: "Monsieur de la Granville capitaine au Régiment de Bretagne, a Douay" (fol. 116v). Full details in the downloadable catalog.