Weekly Enlightenment: The Affiches de Bordeaux, 1758-1765.

Previous studies of the Affiches, a genre of newspaper in late eighteenth-century France, have stressed that they were fundamentally conservative and circumspect. The Affiches ignored the philosophes, and on the rare occasions that they were mentioned, they were generally condemned. In the early years of the Affiches de Bordeaux, however, quite the opposite was true. It regularly covered all sorts of supposedly forbidden subjects, including detailed military and political news, it consistently praised philosophes by name, and it published banned literature. Even anodyne-sounding pieces were sometimes extracts from banned works. The articles in the Affiches de Bordeaux were frequently copied from other newspapers, including illegal foreign ones. Some of its articles were of a relatively conservative cast, but a wide eighteenth-century public in Bordeaux had easy access to Enlightenment ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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