Striving to beguile and benefit the affluent among the middling class, Temple Bar roamed the journalistic world. Information about local, imperial, French, and American newspapers filled many paragraphs.

1. [Jerrold, W. B.]. “The Father of the French Press.” 1 (1860–61): 38–44.

Denominated Théophraste Renaudot the father of French journalism. Before France had a press, newsmongers scribbled for their rich patrons and “hawkers of scandalous and seditious news sold their illegal bits of paper.” Renaudot, a physician, wanted to start “a political organ” with the truth. With the supposed blessing of Armand de Richelieu, the Gazette de France began in 1631. Denis Sallo's more literary Journal des Savants followed in 1665 and Jacques Loret's Mercure Gallant, “social” or “little journalism,” in 1672. Many periodicals emerged in the early 1700s, some “clandestine” that criticized the throne. In 1860 French evening gazettes were “gray little papers” with “scraps of news…lively criticisms on opera or drama…quotations of the Bourse…divers facts,” advertising, and serial romances but not politics because government considered the subject disruptive.

2. J[errold, W.] B. “Madame Doublet's News-Saloon.” 1 (1860–61): 473–82.

Envisioned the eighteenth-century salon of Madame Doublet as a place where “all the clever and daring thinkers and gossips of her day…met to supply the news that the government press dared not print.” News was put in two registers, “one for facts, one for mere rumours,” both more intriguing than the Gazette de France.