News about Justice. Telling Crime Stories in Eighteenth-Century Europe

During the early modern age, news narratives about famous court cases allowed the European governing elite to demonstrate the singular effectiveness of the judicial system in punishing criminals and affirming the rule of law. The theatre of the courtroom, as we might call this form of propaganda, had been the product of a dominant culture that sought to deliver a highly-controlled, self-serving message about its right to exercise juridical power over a passive and receptive audience.1 However, in the central decades of the eighteenth century, thanks to a booming information market, that same dominant culture could no longer control the narratives emerging from the traditional theatre of the courtroom, and the formerly passive and receptive audience grew active and contentious. The representation of justice became all the more conspicuously mediated by competing modes of communication.