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Liberty of the press. A letter addressed to the National Assembly of France, by Robert Pigot, Esquire, late of Chetwynd in Shropshire, and published by their order, with notes and supplement afterwards added, and offered to the consideration of every Englishman

Contributions

Robert Pigott
author
Printed for the booksellers in London (Robert Pigott)
publisher

Related resources

has translation
Liberté de la presse, très-respectueuse Adresse a l’Assemblée Nationale de France, présentée par Robert Pigot (sic), Ecuyer Anglois: L’impression de cette Adresse a été ordonnée par l’Assemblée Nationale translation

Notes

Pigott's unconventional views on press freedom in England were widely discussed in France. He thought that the English model should be rejected by the French, claiming that English journalists and writers were not as free as many in France believed. Despite the absence of censorship, the British government had plenty of other resources at its disposal to intimidate and harass writers.

"Robert Pigott, a landowner and eccentric who quit Britain in favour of long-term residence on the Continent and moved to France out of sympathy for the Revolution, compared British and French press liberties in a pamphlet published in 1790, which he addressed to the French National Assembly. According to Pigott, "if the liberty of the press has once triumphed in England, and to which we owe all our rights, it is no longer the case". Tracing the eclipse of British press freedoms back to the American War of Independence and beyond, Pigott saw the contemporary conjuncture as fulfilling Montesquieu's prediction that Britain's constitution would inevitably become corrupt".

See Simon Macdonald, 'English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France', in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.36, no.1 (2012), pp.17-33.

See also Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution (OUP, 2009), p.108.