The stagnation within was fully credited, but the current was without.
The press, in the half century which had preceded the Revolution, had been the echo, well organised and calm, of the thoughts of sages and reformers.

From the time when the Revolution burst forth, it had become the turbulent and frequently cynical echo of the popular excitement.
It had itself transformed the modes of communicating ideas; it no longer produced books--it had not the time: at first it expended itself in pamphlets, and subsequently in a multitude of flying and diurnal sheets, which, published at a low price amongst the people, or gratuitously placarded in the public thoroughfares, incited the multitude to read and discuss them.

The treasury of the national thought, whose pieces of gold were too pure, or too bulky, for the use of the populace, it was, if we may be allowed the expression, converted into a multitude of smaller coins, struck with the impress of the passions of the hour, and often tarnished with the foulest oxides.

Journalism, like an irresistible element of the life of a people in revolution, had made its own place, without listening to the law which had been made to restrain it.
Mirabeau, who required that his speeches should echo throughout the departments, had given birth to this speaking trumpet of the Revolution, (despite the orders in council) in his _Letters to my Constituents_, and in the _Courrier de Provence_.

At the opening of the States General, and at the taking of the Bastille, other journals had appeared.