In the middle of September 1870, Paris was besieged by the Prussian army. The siege was part of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71)Footnote ¹ and lasted until the end of January 1871. During most of that period, Paris was meant to be totally isolated since the enemy cut off all the traditional means of transportation and communication – railways, roads, telegraph, bridges, etc. Yet, communication with the exterior world did not stop completely. Our article provides an overview of the illustrated press' activities and, more specifically, its attempts to communicate with the outside world during the siege of Paris. Using the illustrated press published in Paris and London, we show that, in such situations, alternative forms of distribution and diffusion of the news take place. An examination of four weeklies – The Illustrated London News and The Graphic in London, and L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré in Paris – shows that these periodicals found various strategies which allowed them to circulate news inside and outside the fortifications of ParisFootnote ² and beyond the surrounding Prussian army. This alternative distribution of news satisfied the needs of London periodicals for information coming from within Paris. At the same time, efforts by Parisian papers to send news beyond the walls of the French capital were evidence of the willingness of the illustrated press to assert a notion of national identity in the midst of an immanent foreign threat.

The definition of French collective identity was very much centred on the capital of France, since, within the context of the modern nation, Paris was the centre of accumulation for financial, political and cultural resources. This was so much so that from the mid-nineteenth century, French people ‘had become to question the role of the capital: was it profitable or excessive, favourable or unfavourable to the Nation?’Footnote ³ The imbalance of power, particularly political power, between the capital and the rest of the country was a cause of concern, if not of resentment, from people living in the provincial urban and rural areas. There was little sympathy by those people towards Paris during the siege. Still, the symbolic and political importance of that city within the context of the pending military invasion undoubtedly played a pivotal role in defining the ultimate achievement of the French national identity.Footnote ⁴ Baron Haussmann, the préfet de Seine, only expressed aloud what others were thinking when he declared that Paris was ‘the head and heart of France’.Footnote ⁵ During the four months of its siege, all the eyes, including those of the papers' editors in many countries, were turned toward the capital. The construction of this identity within the city under siege and the larger systems of communication and transportation in development were thus intimately integrated with the state's military apparatus, but also the newspapers' production and distribution.

To discuss these issues, this article first outlines the production context of the illustrated press at the time with a brief examination of the organization of labour amongst some of its workers (artists, engravers, draughtsmen). It then details some of the strategies of news distribution during the Franco-Prussian War, stressing the presence of an ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ readership of the illustrated press, and the resulting notion of the national against the foreign ‘other’ or ‘international’. The article also examines the development of alternative news circulation in and out of Paris during the siege, particularly the balloon and pigeon posts. This discussion of alternative systems of communication provides tangible evidence of the fact that news circulation remained a priority through the war, albeit via complex means. While research has documented the use of balloon and pigeon systems of transportation and communication during the war,Footnote ⁶ less has been said about the extensive use of the system by emerging networks of media organizations at the time. The article concludes by taking a step back from the immediate discussion to investigate some of the larger implications for visual culture during this period and its relation to nationhood and media systems. It analyses the interplay between the drawing, its engraved representation and its photographic replication in relation to the circulation of information from a besieged capital during a period of crisis.

The urban nature of the illustrated press and its production

Most major newspapers, including illustrated ones, are produced and published in cities for various reasons. Newspapers are first and foremost commodities that require capital investors who are expecting profit.Footnote ⁷ Such investors are easier to find in urban environments. Moreover, the diversity of people, organizations and events in cities furnishes a significant part of news material.Footnote ⁸ In addition, nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers needed a large and diversified labour force including not only editors and reporters, but also draughtsmen and engravers. Engraving was performed in workshops and the labour-intensive process had to draw on the labour pools available mainly in larger centres.Footnote ⁹

The process of illustration production in 1870 newspapers relied entirely on engravings. In the process of production of important papers such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic, or L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré, large teams of craftsmen laboured, and draughtsmen and engravers often worked on the same picture at the same time. As soon as one section of the drawing was reproduced on wood, it was sent to the workshop where it was engraved while the draughtsman drew another section. In fact, engraving was very much based on specialities: some artists specialized in drawing skies, other foliages, yet other personages. Since several engravers worked simultaneously on the same drawing, often the artist did not see his drawing as a whole before it was published. At the end of this labour process, the engraver in chiefFootnote ¹⁰ bolted all the pieces together and engraved the lines to make the parts of the picture look like a whole. This system, which was a type of assembly line, although the name was not coined, seemingly did not produce the most artistic engravings, but it had the advantage of being very rapid, the most important element for a newspaper, be it a daily or weekly.Footnote ¹¹ Only large cities with pools of labour resources could provide enough labour to support such a rapid process of production.

The modern city provided the appropriate social, cultural and economic environment for the development of newspapers. As well, cities provided communication and transportation infrastructures facilitating the distribution of newspapers and diffusion of information. In Paris, the annexation by Haussmann in 1860 of suburban areas situated beyond the fortifications established the modern city's geographical boundaries and significantly enlarged the potential pool for newspapers, although, as Marchand notes, the préfet had neglected to plan a transportation system to link these new arrondissements to the centre of the city.Footnote ¹² By 1870 the city's population had grown to over 1.85 million inhabitants, an 85 per cent increase from 20 years earlier. During these 20 years, many transformations had occurred. Indeed, when the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was appointed préfet de Seine in June 1853, Paris was three years behind London in terms of modern services such as sanitary systems, boulevards and railroads. In 1846, France had only 3,806 kilometres of railroads, while Germany had 5,000 and England 6,000.Footnote ¹³ In 1870, according to Livet France had 17,444 kilometres of railroads.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, the French railroads had not been developed according to a planned system and did not contribute to the unification of the country. Napoleon III gave Haussmann the mission to aerate Paris and render the city more attractive and, most importantly, to unite and unify its many arrondissements.Footnote ¹⁵ The emperor wanted the préfet to create a network of transportation that would link the various parts of the city, and most importantly the railway stations which had been built, until then, on the spur of available and cheap land outside the centre of the capital. The results of that appointment was, as we know, that between 1853 and 1869 the urban plan that Haussmann developed called for the destruction of many insalubrious areas of the city, and the construction of large boulevards bordered by bourgeois edifices. What he had not achieved, however, before he was forced to step down in early 1870, was to build large boulevards that would link all the railway stations.Footnote ¹⁶

These transformations were largely the result of a rise in the availability or ‘democratization’ of finance and credit through the Second Empire which brought with it increased investment schemes for business and more flexible purchasing power for many individuals in France.Footnote ¹⁷ These factors, mixed with the increasing mechanization of production, brought about a new social focus on the commodity as merchants sought to publicize their wares, and rising surplus wealth made activities of consumption into a bourgeois pastime. The proliferation of newspapers, including illustrated papers, throughout this period was thus the result not only of the economies of scale offered by the urban environment, but also the new financial and commercial environments directing the flows of capital. This was particularly true for Paris which monopolized the major part of political, economic and cultural activities in France.Footnote ¹⁸

By 1870, the city of Paris was recognized as an international cultural and economic capital. The city hosted Universal Expositions in 1855 and 1867, having attracted some 5 million and 11 million visitors, respectively. Harvey notes that the rulers of Paris intended the city to be an exemplary world capital. In this spirit of the international sublime, the themes of Paris' 1855 and 1867 Expositions celebrated ‘the coming unification of the world through monetization and commodity exchange’.Footnote ¹⁹ Given the city's economic and cultural status by this point, it commanded significant international attention. As Schwartz points out, however, the press and numerous related texts of the period played a significant role in ‘rhetorically constructing’ the city's image, both to its own population as well as to readers in other countries.Footnote ²⁰ From the mid-1850s, in addition to the regular written press, several illustrated periodicals were published in Paris – and in many other capitals – with mass distribution that, in fact, far exceeded that of the dailies, including Emile de Girardin's famous La Presse, which sold for one sous.Footnote ²¹ All illustrated newspapers, even the cheapest like The Penny Illustrated Paper, showed plenty of images of such spectacular events as universal expositions or wars between two powerful countries. As a result, the press, either as weekly or daily publications, was a significant catalyst in the economic activities of the city's expanding commercial sector, as well as in the cultural identity of the city and its central role in the nation. Images were particularly important in that strategy.Footnote ²²

Cities not only provided the best conditions for such a type of production, but also large pools of likely readers,Footnote ²³ although the main papers were also counting on populations in the rural areas as well as in foreign countries to buy their product.Footnote ²⁴ Hence, one of the most important elements in the distribution of news, nationally and internationally, was the means of transportation of the papers, usually more developed in cities. In 1870 in European countries, following decades of development of transportation and communication networks, cities were reinforced as the nodal points of flows of communication, goods and capital. It was, in fact, the ability to concentrate wealth and power within the cities while executing command over the territory of the state for the extraction of resources that contributed significantly to the growth of capitals such as Paris.Footnote ²⁵ Instrumental to this growth was the presence of financial and corporate interests, including those of the press industry, which integrated corporate and national interests across state borders.Footnote ²⁶ With the massive rebuilding of modern Paris under Haussmann as the préfet de Seine, the city's grands boulevards became an identifying feature of Paris' urban system. These wide streets connected the various areas of the city to each other as well as to many key transportation points such as railway stations. Moreover, many newspapers located their offices on these boulevards, as they did on the Strand in London, to facilitate both the circulation of their products – through access to roads and railways – and the sale of their publications in kiosks or on the streets, which began in 1854 in France.Footnote ²⁷ As Schwartz notes, ‘Newspapers integrated themselves into the fabric of boulevard spectacle by turning not just their products, but also their offices into centres for the immediate consumption of news.’Footnote ²⁸ In this sense, papers, including the weeklies, produced for large readerships, developed a new type of consumption, based on rapidly out-dating news stories mirroring the rapid movement and change in the city itself.

The relationship of the modern city and its press to the rest of the nation as well as to the international world was, in turn, important in the development of national identity. Indeed, as Sinnema states, the content of nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers was based on a dialectic ‘interior/exterior’ attached to the representation of ‘Us/Others’.Footnote ²⁹ The ‘interior’, ‘Us’ or the ‘national’ was seen as desirable because it was close to the readers' daily experiences and was, then, axiomatic in the organization and preservation of a readership with certain attributes.Footnote ³⁰ Still, the ‘exterior’, ‘the Others’ or the ‘international’ was necessary as an alternative for national isolation in addition to meeting the interests of some readers. The ‘exterior’ also contributed to the expansion of readership in other countries. However, in the case of besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, since all communication with the exterior world was cut off, the democratic process of distribution of information was in danger given that the means to diffuse news of the city to outside sources or, likewise, to receive external news inside the city, had been eliminated. Thus, an imaginative use of an already existing technology was called for.

Strategies of news distribution during the war

For a while after the blockade, newspapers continued to circulate through various means, in some cases through official diplomatic channels. They sometimes reached Paris through people who escaped the Prussians' vigilance at the gates of the fortifications, or via official diplomatic channels. For instance, English papers such as The Times and The Daily News were expedited to Washburn, the American ambassador in Paris. Some of their articles were then translated and published by Parisian papers. One of the ways to get such news in besieged Paris was, therefore, through the appropriation of already published information by foreign papers that could reach the capital. However, the Prussians soon discovered these stratagems. Bismarck threatened the ambassador to suspend his supply of foreign newspapers if he continued to put them at the disposal of French journalists. Washburn was therefore constrained to cut off any access to these papers, thereby eliminating the very last source of information Paris received from outside its walls.

Yet, to provide exterior content in their publications, both the English and French illustrated press were in need of international news. Yriarte's comments clearly expressed this need when the columnist from Le Monde Illustré found some issues of The Times in Paris in November 1870. He exclaimed: ‘I have to confess that newspaper reading has never been as moving as those three issues brought by accident into this city, shut by a blockade, where we do not know anymore whether Abdul-Medjid still reigns on Byzantium and whether the Duke of Aoste is king of Egypt.’Footnote ³¹ On the one hand, the French were eager to know about military activities that occurred outside Paris, but they also missed receiving international news, since they were completely disconnected from the external world for up to four months.Footnote ³² On the other hand, the London illustrated periodicals were eager to receive information from Paris, although they had access to news coming from the French provinces. After all, as an English reporter said: ‘Paris which is more than France is pronounced to be in danger.’Footnote ³³

Indeed, the goals of the Illustration and other weeklies were clear: to provide the readers ‘with facts which will give our subscribers a daily written history, with pen and pencil, of current events’ as well as being able to ‘go back over the most important events with more information’.Footnote ³⁴ The constraints of war, the urgency to disseminate the latest developments of battle and the desire to depict visually some of its most important events acted as catalysts to use alternative means by which images and text were circulated. Though these means were developed for political and military purposes, the pressures to out-manoeuvre the enemy in a game of information warfare was also instrumental to the use of the innovative application of the visual technologies of the day alongside already existing transportation technologies and practices – some of which were already considered obsolete prior to their revival in the war effort.

Alternative means of circulation of images and texts

The newest and fastest technology of communication of the time was the telegraph. While it was relatively easy to send text by telegraphy, the technology did not enable the transmission of images. The problem was then to have text and images arrive, if not at the same time, at least within a span of time that would allow the publication of illustrations and texts related to a specific event in the same issue. Although this may seem quite obvious nowadays, it was not always possible during periods of war. On several occasions, a paper had to apologize for having to postpone the publication of some engravings until the following week. Under the circumstances, some artists succeeded in sending their work rapidly. When French periodicals informed their readers that the engravings were from a sketch or a drawing made ‘on the spot’, and the English papers wrote that they had ‘arrived by balloon post’ (which of course meant the same thing since it was the only way for foreign artists to correspond with their papers during the siege), the readers were assured that they had authentic information. These inscriptions implied that the engravings were genuinely illustrating an event as it occurred. For such an exploit – because it was indeed an exploit during this very intensive war – different strategies for transport had to be developed. In ‘normal’ time, the postal system was efficient and usually reliable as long as the artist brought his material to the post office himself; intermediaries could indeed be erratic.Footnote ³⁵ But during the siege of Paris (and of other strategic cities such as Strasbourg and Metz), other means had to be found since some artists were trapped in the capital for several months. Jackson explains the situation of one of them, Jules Pelcoq, who worked for The Illustrated London News during the siege.

This quote and the general observations about the illustrated press to this point highlight both the importance of transferring accurate informationFootnote ³⁸ and the immense effort and resource that went into co-ordinating such activity. Given the stated objectives of the papers to ‘make history’ and to provide a review of events, significant currency was assigned to the eyewitness account of events, even if the final product was sometimes, especially during the siege, an interpretation of a photograph of another artist's sketch. The human eye could capture the drama, emotion and action of a moment the rudimentary photographic equipment of the day could not. It was the revival of the balloon and pigeon and the coming of microscopic photography that allowed the link to history's witnesses throughout the ordeal.

Innovative uses of diffusion and adoption of a technology are based on a complex process involving multi-causal elements. There is a general agreement that rapid technological development and expansion is related to the market, or more precisely, as Marx argued in Grundrisse, to the process of exchange, since communication and transportation technologies accelerate the speed of circulation of capital. There may also be little objection to the fact that technological development has its own dynamic, in the sense that one innovation leads to another, but this dynamic is controlled by the developers. Yet, these processes do not entirely account for what happened during the siege of Paris. Indeed, though there was no doubt some economic, as well as social, pressure, to find a way out of besieged Paris, the new use of mostly old technologies was specifically based on political incentives. The members of the government who were blocked in Paris needed to remain in contact with those members who were in other cities in the country.Footnote ³⁹ This was all the more important given that the provinces were resentful about the tremendous development of the capital between 1853 and 1869 and its extreme political and economic importance and role on the national and international levels. In this environment, communication was crucial to maintaining government control in a national context. Diffusionists assert that the points of pressure from the market may be diverted by specific needs of some users who adopt the technology in ways that may be unexpected.Footnote ⁴⁰ Undoubtedly, the siege of Paris accentuated the needs of the French government, cut off from the rest of the country, to find means to establish external contacts. Here politics, more than economics, brought the French to use balloons and pigeons in innovative ways and to experiment with microscopic photography.

The balloons were a French technology of transportation and had been in existence for almost a century when the Franco-Prussian War was declared.Footnote ⁴¹ Since the siege of Paris brought the destruction of all means of transportation and communication by the Prussians, the French were forced to innovate. They had to find a way to transport some politicians and important dispatches out of the city, as well as to communicate various types of information, including personal letters, from inside Paris to the people in the provinces and elsewhere in the world. So there were strong political pressures to develop unconventional means of transportation and communication. The telegraph, as used in combination with balloons in the American example, was of no use to the French in this situation, since the enemy had cut the telegraphic lines early into the siege. Thus, other means for relaying information were called for. Balloons had been used at the 1867 Universal Exposition for pleasure flights over the city and their use remained fresh in the memories of many in the capital. Nonetheless, most of the remaining balloons were described as ‘sieves’ and unfit for flight.Footnote ⁴² Once an initial balloon sailed successfully out of the city on 23 September 1870, the French minister of posts established a Balloon Post and contracted balloon pilot Eugène Godard to manufacture balloons for subsequent flights.Footnote ⁴³ In turn, two of the city's primary transportation hubs, the Gare d'Orléans and Gare du Nord train stations, were converted into balloon factories and pilot training schools.

The balloons, while useful for moving information out of the city, were trickier to use for return flights. To compensate for the lack of two-way travel by balloon, the French then decided to use three complementary technologies. Two of these were old technologies of transportation: the balloon and the pigeon. The third, microscopic photography, was a new means of communication, developed for the 1867 World Exposition in Paris. This technology required a special machine to project it on a wall, a machine that the Prussians seemingly did not possess. These three technologies used together allowed the Parisians quite an impressive amount of communication with the outside world.

The balloons were built and driven by specialists, though pilots were far from having total control of a flight and were often forced to land in unexpected places.Footnote ⁴⁴ Most of the aeronauts who were navigating the balloons were sailors, who were used to manipulating cables, and were thus transformed into either postal or military aérostiers. Although most of the individuals who travelled as passengers by balloons were either politicians or specialists related to military activities, journalists and artists were also among the travellers. Balloons could also be used for private individuals' purposes. Some wealthy individuals rented the service to go out of Paris in a ‘rush’, for business or personal matters. All balloons were launched from inside Paris during the night so that they were more difficult to locate. Despite a few trials, no balloons returned to Paris; given the lack of precision in flight and technical control, it was too risky to have one come back and land inside the capital when the enemy was camping just outside the fortifications.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, the journey back was executed by pigeons which were carried in balloons to a specific site, loaded with microscopic photographs, and sent back home. Pigeons and balloons transporting microscopic photographs were, then, two essential elements of the French system of communication during the siege of Paris. The use of the pigeons and microscopic photography became a feedback mechanism for the one-way transportation provided by the balloon.

Pigeons had been used to send messages for decades, if not centuries. Nevertheless, in 1870, with well-developed postal and telegraphic systems and transportation infrastructures, pigeons were more the concern of amateurs than of politicians and journalists. Some raised racing pigeons, while others kept them either for the pleasure of seeing them come ‘home’, or for food. When the Prussians gradually eliminated lines of communication during the siege of Paris, pigeons raised for leisurely journeys and not specific missions assumed greater possibilities for communication purposes. They were mobilized for military duties for the defence of the nation and for keeping in contact with the outside world. Pigeons, however, were useful only under two conditions. Since they were trained to return to their homes and not to carry messages to some specific place, they could only bring back messages coming from afar. Moreover, some means had to be found to send messages in huge quantities but still be transportable by pigeon. This is where microscopic photography assumed significance.

In two articles entitled ‘Aerial post’ published on 7 and 14 July 1871, and signed by W. de Fonvielle, L'Illustration explains that 354 travelling pigeons were sent by balloons during the siege but that only 60 came back, due to the rigour of the 1870–71 winter, the vigilance of the Prussian hunters and the very small number of racing voiliers in the pigeon houses of Paris at the beginning of the siege. In total, pigeons carried some 250,000 messages throughout the siege. The film containing these messages only weighed 2 grams and could be attached to one pigeon.Footnote ⁴⁶

The content of these dispatches included everything from official documents, bank mandates and private telegrams to reporters' articles and drawings and answering-cards (today called postal cards). This is this means of communication and reproduction that The Illustrated London News' and The Graphic's reporters and artists used to send their dispatches. It was also used for the reproduction of whole newspapers specially produced in a smaller format, with microscopic characters and on a very light paper. Dailies like Le Gaulois, Le Journal des Débats, Le Petit Journal or Le Siècle produced some issues in this format to be sent to the French provinces.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is however no indication that illustrated papers like L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré did the same. Photographing all the dispatches was a tedious task, as it was necessary to reproduce each dispatch between 6 and 35 times, with an average of 20 times, to make sure that at least one copy would reach its destination. The film was rolled into a cylinder made of pigeon feathers, supple and waterproof, and tied on to one of the pigeon's feet.

The balloon service lasted from 23 September 1870 until 28 January 1871, a little more than four months. During that period, 64 balloons were launched;Footnote ⁴⁸ at least 19 crashed either by accident or were shot down by the Prussians. Altogether, the balloons carried 3 million letters of which 2 million were distributed.Footnote ⁴⁹ After the beginning of the siege, balloons were one of the few means available to foreign special artists to deliver their sketches and drawings back to their papers. A very few could use the Prussian postal coach, but many were sent by balloon as the illustrations identified as ‘from balloon post’ in The Illustrated London News and The Graphic testified. The Graphic, for one, showed great admiration for the ingenuity of the French:

In short, the ability of the French, in combining the three technologies of transportation and communication at their disposal, allowed not only them, but also foreigners who had decided to remain in Paris in spite of the imminent siege by the Prussian army, to keep in contact with the outside world despite the Prussians doing everything in their power to isolate them completely. Since there was a tension between the provinces and the capital, it was essential to keep the provinces related to Paris, at least in some minor ways. Bordeaux and Tours were particularly involved in these political exchanges. The points of pressure here were obviously political and military, but also in some ways economic for business had to go on with the provinces, and social since the system also carried personal information.

The illustrated press and the means of communication it employed served to maintain a national focus amongst the provinces throughout the war. As the capital of France and the centre of an empire, Paris performed significant management functions in the control of business and government apparatus both within its domain of power and externally on an international stage. This was made possible via the development of various means of transportation allowing the formation of networks across vast spaces, even those occupied by the German army. Through the balloon and pigeon posts, along with regular post, telegraph and railways outside of Paris, communication continued throughout the siege. As such, the city represented the ultimate interiority of the nation's existence as it was the central node of this complex network – and the siege of the city presented the possibility of a collapse of the nation, but not necessarily of the network. Just as the maintenance of connection with the international exterior remained important throughout the war, the same can be said of Paris' contact with the rest of France. That balloons and pigeons were used to co-ordinate the transfer of news, supplies and individuals in and out of Paris and other cities demonstrates the command and co-ordination functions fulfilled by the city in the interest of maintaining national control.

Paris was by this time a European capital. The flow of foreigners and capital through the city as well as the concentrated power in the urban centre precipitated the demand for communication throughout the siege. And according to Dagron, they could prescribe a measure of success to the system; the delivery was rapid when no impediments came into the balloon's journey. For example, a photographer sent a message by pigeon from Poitiers to Paris, a distance of 300 kilometres, requesting more photographic material. Five days later, he received the necessary products by balloon in Poitiers. The pigeon had taken only 12 hours to cover the distance between Paris and Poitiers. As Dagron noted, ordinary telegraphy and railway delivery would not have done better.

Of course, not all journeys went so well. For instance, an article entitled ‘Les curiosités du télégraphe’, written in Le Monde Illustré by Charles Boissay,Footnote ⁵¹ describes the flight of the balloon Ville-d'Orléans, transporting Roller and Bézier, respectively engineer and gunner. The balloon left Paris for Tours, 200 kilometres away, on 24 November 1870. After a 15 hour flight it landed at Mount Lid in Norway, some 1,650 kilometres from Paris. Once on the ground, the accompanying bag of dispatches followed an incredible journey. In Boissay's words:

This example encompasses the variety of all the technologies of communication and transportation available in 1870. It also reveals the ingenuity of nineteenth-century people to overcome what appeared as ‘invincible’ obstacles. That given the journey these dispatches travelled it only took one week for Tours to get the information and for Paris to receive the acknowledgment is a feat. Though balloons' journeys often went wrong, their mission was considered successful because of elaborate networks of alternatives available for transmitting dispatches once outside the city of Paris.

Although many dispatches were lost, for various reasons, the distribution of information was impressive as the many engravings identified as ‘by balloon post’ published in the two London illustrated newspapers show. As for the Parisian papers, at least a third of their engravings were illustrating events occurring in other cities like Strasbourg, for instance, which had been bombarded by the Prussians. Though these ‘exterior’ representations were usually published with some time lag, they did provide the readers with some news from a city that had been entirely blockaded by the enemy.

Circulation of information in perspective

So balloons and pigeons were necessary means of distribution of information for both England and France during the Franco-Prussian War. Still, the process that allowed the circulation of information during the war needs be examined in a wider context and be inserted in the socio-cultural conditions of which the illustrated press was a part and to which it, likewise, contributed. This process, and the conditions within which it occurred, namely under political, military and economic pressures, were in fact good topics for news content. All four papers used in this study depicted pigeon breeders, the system used for them to carry dispatches or balloon fabrication, departure or flight. This highlights three elements of the visual press during the war. First, the presence of the eyewitness account was crucial to relaying the credibility of the material to the reader. The fact that illustrations in both Paris and London papers often noted whether an engraving was done ‘on the spot’ or had ‘arrived by balloon post’ shows that it was important to inform the readers about the ‘authenticity’ of the first-hand experience of the artist and of what they were seeing. The papers continued to send artists to foreign postings despite dangerous and complicated conditions in which these artists worked. Even though it was possible to produce an image simply based on an article's textual description, eyewitness accounts were desirable and desired. This suggests that the visual depiction by a witness was afforded particular currency. True, photography was employed to transport the artist's drawing in a compact and lightweight format that would otherwise be impossible to attain; all the same, the drawing depicted the dynamic of a movement that the camera was not yet capable of capturing. It also added the personal touch of the artist.

The fact that the newspapers chose to cover the very apparatus they employed to communicate the news is unique in some ways, but not necessarily surprising coming from papers which claimed that one of their objectives was to educate the public and make history. That balloons and pigeons were used to communicate with the outside world through Paris' blockade is noteworthy in and of itself – both for the ingenuity and the size of the overall production, particularly from the French perspective, and for explaining the process by which the press was obtaining true and accurate content. In addition, the process may have served to build trust and credibility with the audience while providing insight into the spectacular nature of news gathering. This would have been particularly true from the British perspective.

These editorial practices were part of a process of construction of nationhood within the context of the French memory when coming from the Parisian papers, and of projecting a French image as ‘the Other’ in the case of the London papers. The interior versus exterior dialectic inherent in the illustrated press can be identified, in the case of the Franco-Prussian War, through a number of distinct avenues by which this occurred. First, there was a defined interiority to the city of Paris itself as the French capital remained isolated throughout the siege. Still, the city's population was able to claim a degree of normalcy by way of its continued communication with the international community. Indeed, the communication with the outside world was for Parisians a morale booster throughout an otherwise destitute period of war. By virtue of its growing status as an international city (through trade, colonial expansion, scientific research and cultural development), the identity of the city transcended the immediacy of the siege's constraints and re-embedded itself within the exterior context of the international world – although the siege itself was the result of international ‘relations’ of another sort.

Likewise in London, the city's own interior perspective was contrasted against the exterior threats of the continent's geopolitical activities. Howard points out that ‘Paris was the first great urban community to experience the ordeals of wartime shortage and regimentation.’Footnote ⁵² This phenomenon was, in itself, newsworthy as a spectacle of war. At the same time, however, the London press strived to claim credibility and currency by way of first-hand visual depictions of the war and, in particular, the siege. By maintaining artists and reporters in Paris, the illustrated newspapers could provide their readership with a credible, interior perspective of the situation while maintaining distance through the actual material separation from the foreign ‘other’. As Schwartz points out, these practices of first-hand witness in the construction of the immediacy and realism in reporting became the basis from which the press exploded in circulation, readership and advertising revenue in subsequent years.Footnote ⁵³

The context of news distribution during the Paris siege extended to more specific political matters. Indeed, the operation of a balloon post and the mobilization of resources to maintain such a system could not be achieved during a time of war without the express involvement of the government. To assume that the transfer of information would not be subject to the government's scrutiny or control and censorship would certainly be naïve. Indeed, press censorship existed in France up until 1881, a full decade after the war.Footnote ⁵⁴ While the balloon and pigeon posts were co-ordinated at the government level, the extent to which the press' activities were integrated with government and military operations through this period deserves further research attention. Within the present discussion, however, we might highlight the fact that the distribution of information during the war was much more than a topic for media news or an opportunity for media financial interests. Given the rising power of the media industry and the intricate interrelations of communication and transportation technologies and expanding corporate influence on the international scene, information flows were integral to co-ordinating power within an international context. In some ways the illustrated press obscured these relations. The excitement of being afforded observer status in the activities of crisis was sufficient diversion away from the larger issues that might have affected the distribution and consumption of this information.

This actually highlights the weaknesses of Sinnema's interior versus exterior dialectic. While the concept may be useful in fleshing out initial social constructs and interactions between the depictions in the illustrated press and social identity, it certainly falls short in developing a cohesive notion of international integration of domestic identities, economies and cultures. Given the tremendous growth of the press following the war and the developing international links between media organizations through international press agencies, there was significant corporate development in the media sector that transcended notions of national identity. This, of course, is not the ultimate purpose of Sinnema's discussion, but the fact remains that a study of the illustrated press, with its artistic attributes alongside industrial division of artistic labour, must contextually be placed in the media activities of a period and extended beyond simple analysis of pictorial depictions on the page.Footnote ⁵⁵

Complexity of discussion is also crucial to outlining one final aspect of the visual culture developed during this period: its relationship to movement. The circulation of information, commodities and people through the networks of modern society became the crux upon which social organization came to depend to expedite the exchange of information when other networks were unavailable. Most significant to this is that information warfare, while not necessarily termed as such, became a strategic element of battle. That the French prioritized the production and circulation of visual media through the war indicates the significance they afforded to direct communication with a larger cross-section of the population both at home and abroad. While the country itself was near collapse, the ability to build upon a cohesive understanding of the national identity remained crucial to the future ability of the government to maintain control of its own population, both in heart and mind as well as within physical order.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, 1870 was the year when Havas, Reuters and Wolff formed a cartel to divide the information market into three distinct regions.Footnote ⁵⁷ The vitality of the urban hubs to each of these networks was crucial in the corporate development of communication channels and media production. The lessons learned in refining these elements of information warfare and the importance of the city may be outcomes of the Franco-Prussian War. This is important in understanding the development of the press within the power structures of modern society.