Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution. In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensed Affiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of the Affiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.

Marc Fumaroli, Chateaubriand: Poésie et terreur (Paris: Fallois, 2003)

Has the time come to revive François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), author of Atala and René, the novels that defined romanticism in France and, above all, of the immense Mémoires d'outre-tombe (“Memoirs from beyond the grave”), perhaps the most ambitious of all French autobiographical projects? What does an eighteenth-century provincial nobleman's son, author of fanciful tales of encounters with North American “noble savages,” apologist for medieval Christianity, and unsuccessful proponent of a Bourbon restoration after 1815, have to say to twenty-first-century readers? The first important study of Chateaubriand's career, the nineteenth-century literary critic Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire, written in 1849, firmly assigned the great romantic author to an earlier phase of French letters. Commenting on the just-published posthumous Mémoires, Sainte-Beuve admitted that the work revealed Chateaubriand's “immense talent as a writer,” but damned the work by saying that “he reveals himself in all his egotistical nakedness.” The distinguished French literary scholar Marc Fumaroli has now set out to reverse these verdicts on the man and the Mémoires.

A previously unknown document reveals the authorship of the most important manifesto produced by the Dutch patriot movement of the mid-1780s and shows that it was originally written in French. This document was published in France in 1788 and may have influenced the drafting of the revolutionary Declaration of the rights of man in 1789.