Judicial Ordeals, February-March 1830

Abstract

While the ministers impatiently awaited a horoscope favorable to their coup, they accelerated their campaign against journalists in the courts. In Paris and in the provinces, February and March were marked by a great variety of political press trials. Nearly all the possible applications of the press codes were employed: Outrages to individuals, attacks on the “government of the King” (a phrase conveniently indefinite), attacks on the King’s prerogatives, and with the appeals of two Breton Association cases, the charge of “hatred and contempt of the government of the King”. Other cases involved the alleged intimidation of printers and their right to refuse service to liberal journalists. The small weekly or monthly opposition papers of smaller cities, were rallying points of provincial opposition. They were now being constantly harassed by royal prosecutors and prefects in an effort to reverse a rural electoral shift to the Left which had been growing since Villèle’s fall.