Feuilleton

Under the Consulate, and later on, the Empire, Le Moniteur Universel, which served as a propaganda mouthpiece for Napoleon Bonaparte, basically controlled what the other twelve Parisian publications could run.

Julien Louis Geoffroy found that what might not be written in an editorial column might appear with perfect impunity on a lower level on the rez-de-chaussée, the "ground floor" of a journal.

The feuilleton, which dealt ostensibly with literature, the drama and other harmless topics, but which, nevertheless, could make political capital out of the failure of a book or a play, became quite powerful under the Napoleonic nose.

[4] In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig wrote of how the Neue Freie Presse's feuilleton, "in the lower half of the front page, separated sharply from the ephemera of politics and the day by an unbroken line that extended from margin to margin", had become the leading arbiter of literary culture in fin de siècle Vienna, such that a feuilleton writer's "yes or no... decided the success of a work, a play, or a book, and with it that of the author".

[11] In the novel The Glass Bead Game (1943) by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse, the current era is characterised and described as "The Age of the Feuilleton".