Journal of European Periodical Studies, 7.1 (Summer 2022)
ISSN 2506-6587
Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence
The Journal of European Periodical Studies is hosted by Ghent University
Website: ojs.ugent.be/jeps
The Travelling of News in 1848:  
The February Revolution, European News Flows, 
and the Finnish Press
Heli Rantala and Heidi Hakkarainen
To cite this article: Heli Rantala and Heidi Hakkarainen ‘The Travelling of News in 
1848: The February Revolution, European News Flows, and the Finnish Press’, Journal 
of European Periodical Studies, 7.1 (Summer 2022), 13–28
13
The Travelling of News in 
1848: The February Revolution, 
European News Flows, and the 
Finnish Press
Heli Rantala and Heidi Hakkarainen
University of Turku, Finland 
hemara@utu.fi
ABSTRACT
This article explores media coverage of the European revolutionary turbulence of 1848, 
particularly the outbreak of the February Revolution in France. By utilizing several 
European newspaper repositories, the article sheds light on the role of newspapers in 
the spread of revolutionary news in the European media space across various political 
borders and language barriers. In our case study, we examine how information on the 
February Revolution travelled to the Grand Duchy of Finland, an area situated at the 
crossroads of different communication networks, that was influenced by the reactionary 
politics of Russia but still culturally connected with Sweden. Benefitting from digitized 
collections of Finnish, Swedish, Austrian, German, and British newspapers, this article 
provides a transnational perspective on the mid-nineteenth-century European media 
landscape. Instead of trying to encompass a comprehensive outlook on news reporting 
during the European upheaval in 1848, we are focusing on the emergence of early 
reports of the outbreak of the February Revolution in various countries, and looking 
at how the circulation of news was extending or going beyond national boundaries, 
as news about the revolution arrived in Northern Europe and at the borders of the 
Russian Empire.
KEYWORDS
newspapers, Europe, February Revolution, 1848, news circulation, Finland
14
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
Introduction
The European revolutions of 1848–49 affected practically the entire continent. 
Revolutionary movements broke out throughout Europe, and even the countries that 
did not experience revolts on their own soil were affected by the turmoil, at least via 
news reports or political reforms introduced in response to the threat of revolution. 
The outbreak of revolution in Paris in late February 1848 drove the revolutionary wave 
that swept across Europe eastwards from France.1 The experience of revolution as an 
unstoppable upheaval or an epidemic was related to the rapid speed at which the news 
spread throughout the continent. 
Extant research on the 1848–49 revolutions has investigated this wave-like 
spread of revolutionary turbulence from different perspectives, and in various national 
and transnational contexts. The body of research addressing the upheaval in Europe is 
rich and diverse, and includes seminal studies on the topic, such as Jonathan Sperber’s 
The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (1994) and anthologies Revolutions in Europe, 
1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (2000) and Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform 
(2001), as well as a large number of studies on different aspects of the revolutions and 
their impact within different national settings.2 Moreover, recently, there has been a 
growing interest in the resonance of and reactions to the European revolutions at the 
global scale, including studies on the transatlantic dimension of 1848.3 
This article draws specifically on the literature that examines the role of the 
press in creating the revolutionary wave that swept across Europe in 1848. Whereas 
early-twentieth-century historiography focused on the political consequences of 1848 
and deemed it a failed revolution, in the second half of the twentieth century, interest 
in the interconnectedness between the revolution and the media started to grow.4 Since 
then, a body of historical research has investigated the role of the press in generating and 
mobilizing the revolutionary wave of 1848.5 Moreover, scholarship in the fields of media 
history and communications studies has acknowledged the major role of the 1848–49 
revolutions in the history of the press and mass media. Not only were printed media 
heavily involved in the spread of the revolutionary wave, but the European upheaval 
also had far-reaching consequences for the ways in which information was valued and 
circulated in the second part of the nineteenth century.6 
1 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, in Revolutions in Europe, 
1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–8 (pp. 1–3).
2 See, for example, Istvan Deak, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848‒1849 
(London: Phoenix Press, [1979] 2001); 1848: The Year of Revolutions, ed. by Peter H. Wilson (London: 
Routledge, 2006).
3 See, for example, Kurt Weyland, ‘The Diffusion of Revolution: “1848” in Europe and Latin America’, 
International Organization, 63.3 (2009), 391–423; Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 
and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
4 The historian A. J. P. Taylor famously described 1848 as ‘a turning point in history when history failed 
to turn’. Quoted in Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World 
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 217.
5 See, for example,  Claus Møller Jørgensen, ‘Transurban Interconnectivities: An Essay on the Interpretation 
of the Revolutions of 1848’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 19.2 (2012), 
201–27; Strandmann, p.  3; Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 116 and passim; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 
1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), p. 360 and passim.
6 See, for example, Frank Bösch, Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 
1400 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp.  73–76; Jane Chapman, Comparative 
Media History: An Introduction – 1789 to the Present (London: Polity Press, 2005), pp.  43–68; Rolf 
Reichhardt, ‘“Das größte Ereignis der Zeit”: Zur medialen Resonanz der Pariser Februarrevolution’, in 
Medienereignisse der Moderne, ed. by Friedrich Lenger and Ansgar Nünning (Darmstadt: WBG, 2008), 
pp. 14–39; Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Media and Revolutionary Crises’, in Media and Revolution: Comparative 
Perspectives, ed. by Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 12–30.
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
15
Despite this interest in the role of the press in the rise of the revolutionary wave of 
1848, our knowledge of the various routes of communication remains fragmented, and 
the media mechanisms that transmitted news across different political borders deserve 
more attention. This article contributes to the field by examining media coverage of 
revolutionary turbulence in 1848, and the circulation of news from the continent’s urban 
centres to northern Europe and the borders of the Russian Empire. The article utilizes 
new possibilities provided by digitized newspaper archives, which enable the tracing 
of news flows beyond national boundaries. The focus of the article is on the routes and 
temporal rhythms of communication rather than revolutionary incidents as such. More 
specifically, we investigate how and at what speed information about the outbreak of the 
February Revolution was transmitted via European newspapers to Finland, which was 
an autonomous part of the Russian Empire while still being connected to the Swedish 
press. This situation meant that Finnish newspapers occupied a unique position, being 
situated between two different public spheres and information networks. By examining 
this case, the article highlights the transnational nature of mid-nineteenth-century 
European print culture.
Methodology
In recent years, scholars have been increasingly interested in text circulation in historical 
newspapers. In the United States, the Viral Texts Project has examined the process 
of reprinting different types of texts in American nineteenth-century newspapers 
and magazines. In addition, the Oceanic Exchanges project is interested in global 
information flows in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century press. 
The outcomes of this project include a case study on the global spread of one news 
item from 1904, which highlights the importance of transnational mass communication 
networks, such as the transatlantic telegraph and press agencies, for the rapid circulation 
of information.7 However, during the outbreak of the revolutionary wave of 1848, these 
developments were in their early stages: an extensive transnational electric telegraph 
network did not yet exist, and the network of news agencies was not as developed as it 
would be in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, this article aims to shed light on 
an era in which the technologies and journalistic networks and practices that accelerated 
the circulation of news in the modern era were still developing. 
Our methodological approach combined distant and close reading of digitized, 
full-text searchable newspaper repositories, to trace how news of the February Revolution 
travelled across national borders to Finland in the spring of 1848. These collections 
included the National Library of Finland Digital Collections, Svenska Dagstidningar, 
The Times Digital Archive, British Library Newspapers, and Austrian Newspapers 
Online (ANNO), as well as some physical collections of Russian, French-, and German-
language newspapers at the National Library of Finland. The cross-searching of several 
national archives enabled us to rethink the methodological nationalism, or nation-
state bias, that has not only affected our ways of understanding and archiving the 
7 Mila Oiva et al., ‘Spreading News in 1904: The Media Coverage of Nikolay Bobrikov’s Shooting’, 
Media History, 25.3 (2019), para. 4 of 39.
16
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
nineteenth-century press, but has also shaped the ways in which the memories of the 
1848 revolutions have been nationalized and commemorated in national contexts.8
At the same time, the growing use of digitized newspaper archives has resulted 
in new methodological challenges, that relate to the selection and availability of sources 
in digital format.9 For example, in our case, it is important to note that not all material 
published in the spring of 1848 has been digitized. Furthermore, full-text searchable 
digital archives have been under methodological discussion in recent years, as embedded 
keyword search engines are widely used and accessible but under-theorized research 
tools, involving pitfalls that can lead to biased and misleading conclusions — as well as 
offering possibilities for novel research questions and insights that would be impossible 
to achieve using paper or microfilm format.10 
Distant reading, a term coined by Franco Moretti in 2000, has been associated 
with the digital turn and the use of (large numbers of ) digitized source materials — that 
is, big data.11 Nowadays, instead of having a single meaning, distant reading covers a 
variety of approaches in which computer-based methods are used to assist with the 
analysis of a digitized source corpus or corpora. In our study, distant reading involved 
text-mining large digitized newspaper repositories via keyword searches. We used the 
interfaces and search engines provided by the archives to cross-search the electronic 
newspaper repositories (scanned with Optical Character Recognition [OCR]) for the 
keyword ‘revolution’, which has the same spelling in English, German (‘Revolution’), 
and Swedish (‘revolution’). This enabled us to locate news reports delivering information 
on the outbreak of the February Revolution. 
However, keyword searches, which are underpinned by the quality of the OCR 
text and the search algorithms, are not fully reliable, as the results always contain false 
positives and false negatives.12 Moreover, the results need to be contextualized. Therefore, 
we supplemented the keyword search with browsing and close reading those news items 
dealing with the February Revolution that were published in the Finnish press. To trace 
temporal differences in the travelling of news between different countries, we tracked 
down references to international press sources that were provided in newspapers that 
reported on the revolution. To ensure that we could manage the results, our timeline 
8 See Jørgensen, p. 202. On intersections between digital turn and transnational turn see Lara Putnam, 
‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, The 
American Historical Review, 121.2 (2016), 377–402. On the nationalization of the history of the 1848 
revolutions see Axel Körner, ‘The European Dimension of the Ideas of 1848 and the Nationalization of 
its Memories’, in 1848 – A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848, ed. 
by Axel Körner (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 3–28.
9 See Helle Strandgaard Jensen, ‘Digital Archival Literacy for (All) Historians’, Media History, 27.2 
(2021), 251–65.
10 On the main methodological concerns related to digitized newspaper repositories see, for example, Tim 
Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Lost the Plot’, Cultural and Social 
History, 10.1 (2013), 9–23. 
11 See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013).
12 For recent methodological discussions related to the use of keyword searches in digitized newspaper 
archives, see Bob Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital 
Newspaper Archives’, Media History, 19.1 (2013), 59–73; Hieke Huistra and Bram Mellink, ‘Phrasing 
History: Selecting Sources in Digital Repositories’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and 
Interdisciplinary History, 49.4 (2016), 220–29; Johan Jarlbrink and Pelle Snickars, ‘Cultural Heritage as 
Digital Noise: Nineteenth Century Newspapers in the Digital Archive’, Journal of Documentation, 73.6 
(2017), 1228–43. 
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
17
was short and focused on the spring of 1848. This enabled us to combine the methods 
of close and distant reading.13 
The keyword searches provided a starting point for the actual analysis of news 
flows, and highlighted the growing presence of the theme of revolution in the Finnish 
newspapers. Moreover, in the case of Finnish-language newspapers, the situation was 
complicated because there was no Finnish equivalent for the term ‘revolution’ in 1848. 
Instead, Finnish-language newspapers mostly used the word ‘kapina’ [‘uprising’ or 
‘revolt’] to refer to all kinds of revolutionary movements. Therefore, in the case of the 
Finnish language, one cannot rely on a keyword search alone, as contextual reading of 
newspapers was needed to trace the ways in which the newspapers were writing about 
revolutionary events.
13 For example, in the case of Finland, where all nineteenth-century newspapers and journals have been 
digitized, it is possible to analyse the features of the whole press; see Jani Marjanen et al., ‘A National 
Public Sphere? Analyzing the Language, Location, and Form of Newspapers in Finland, 1771–1917’, 
Journal of European Periodical Studies, 4.1 (2019), 55–78. For more on combining distant and close 
reading of British periodicals, see Melody H. Beals, ‘Close Readings of Big Data: Triangulating 
Patterns of Textual Reappearance and Attribution in the Caledonian Mercury, 1820–40’, Victorian 
Periodicals Review, 51.4 (2018), 616–39. 
Fig. 1 Example of an issue. Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, no. 473 (24 February/7 March 
1848), National Library of Finland. Photo: Heidi Hakkarainen.
18
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
Fig. 2 Front page of the Finlands Allmänna Tidning (23 March 1848), National 
Library of Finland.
By adopting this mixed-method approach the article provides a new, transnational 
perspective on the mid-nineteenth-century European media landscape. Below, we 
first examine how news about the February Revolution started to spread from Paris to 
Western and Central Europe, and focus on the journalistic structures that enabled the 
spread of information in 1848. Then, we follow the travelling of revolutionary news to 
northern Europe and to Finland in particular.
The Emergence of the February Revolution of 1848 as a Media Event
The era that led to the outbreak of revolutions in the spring of 1848 was characterized 
by various social and political tensions. Moreover, this era saw the development of new 
journalistic structures, which played an important role in reporting the events that 
unfolded unexpectedly and with great speed in February 1848.
Despite national differences, the European press of the 1840s shared certain 
established information networks and journalistic practices, which had taken shape 
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
19
during and after the French Revolution.14 Newspapers usually did not have professional 
editorial staff — only a few journalists who edited the news based on letters delivered 
by mail. In addition, newspapers produced news using accounts from other newspapers, 
extracting and citing news that had already been published.15 Copying and republishing 
news from other newspapers was a common practice and a distinctive feature of the 
nineteenth-century press, both inside and outside Europe, including in the United 
States.16 By the 1840s, the volume of the press had increased significantly, amplifying 
the demand for material on a daily basis. 
The significance of the press was closely intertwined with the new role of reading 
and increased literacy in modernizing societies. The rise in print culture shaped not only 
new ideas, but also political emotions. Historian Martin Malia has suggested that the 
history of uprisings, especially the memory of the 1789 revolution in France, changed 
people’s outlooks in the early nineteenth century, which led to a permanent anticipation 
of revolutions between 1815 and 1914. Although the European upheaval of 1848 was 
an abrupt and uncoordinated chain of events, there were extant cultural scripts for the 
unfolding of a revolution.17 Furthermore, media and press historians have emphasized 
that the importance of print media was recognized and harnessed during the French 
and American Revolutions in the late eighteenth century.18 Consequently, by 1848, 
practices had already been established regarding the use of the press for theorizing, 
managing and organizing revolutions. 
European liberals had started to consume widely read publications, such as Il 
Risorgimento in Italy and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in the German states, which 
contributed to the publicity of the revolutions.19 The press thus benefitted the self-
organization efforts of the middle classes and supported transnational trans-urban 
interconnectivity — printed media supported not only new kinds of national discussion 
and self-understanding in various countries, but also the dissemination of knowledge 
and ideas across national borders, as international flows of information connected 
European urban centres in an unprecedented manner.20 However, the spread of news 
occurred at different speeds and via various routes, depending on local context, as the 
following paragraphs will show.
The 1848–49 revolutions were not organized by a single party but were a chain of 
rapidly evolving events, that spread from the Italian peninsula in January to France in 
February, and to the German states and other parts of the Habsburg Empire in March 
1848. The urban centres of Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna were the main stages of the 
uprisings, but smaller turbulences also occurred in various other parts of the continent. 
Many countries, including the Russian Empire which contained Finland, remained 
14 For more on the impact of the French Revolution on newspapers and media history, see, for example, 
Jeremy D. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca: 
Cornell University Press, 1989).
15 Holger Böning, Periodische Presse: Kommunikation und Aufklärung. Hamburg und Altona als Beispiel 
(Bremen: Edition lumière, 2002), pp. 121–27.
16 See Ryan Cordell, ‘Reprinting, Circulation and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers’, 
American Literary History, 27.3 (2015), 417–45.
17 Malia, pp. 215, 235.
18 Bösch, pp.  62–67; Chapman, pp.  11–42. For more on the impact of the French Revolution in the 
German-language press, see Französische Revolution und deutsche Öffentlichkeit: Wandlungen in Presse 
und Alltagskultur am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. by Holger Böning (Munich: K. G. Saur, 
1992).
19 Bösch, p. 73.
20 On transurban interconnectivity in 1848, see Jørgensen, pp. 201–17.
20
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
untouched by the immediate unrest.21 Especially in those countries where censorship 
had been abolished, such as France, Austria, and Prussia, the press became an important 
vehicle for reinforcing revolutionary movements, and helping them to grow into an 
international phenomenon. In regions where unrest and subsequent revolutions did not 
occur, the press spread news about the events in Europe in various ways, depending 
on aspects of geopolitics and established information and communication structures. 
The February Revolution in Paris was the key event for inspiring other revolutions 
and uprisings in various European countries in the spring of 1848. A full-blown 
revolution took over France in less than a week, as demonstrations in the streets of 
Paris against government restrictions eventually led to the abdication of King Louis 
Philippe on 24 February, and the founding of the Second Republic on 26 February. 
Moreover, as had occurred in 1789, the revolution in France promoted a rapid increase in 
the number of political newspapers discussing the ongoing turbulence.22 The invention 
of the high-speed press in the 1840s enabled information to spread at a new level — for 
example, the newspaper La Presse printed as many as three editions on a single day.23 
As La Presse rapidly increased its circulation to approximately 78,000 copies in March 
1848 and was frequently cited abroad, it became one of the main publications that 
accelerated the spread of news within and beyond France.24 
The February Revolution in France was a huge sensation, reaching the first 
international newspapers within days. For instance, on 25 February, the Times in 
London stated that ‘the French Government was prepared to put down a riot, but it 
has succumbed to the power of a revolution’.25 When publishing news of the king’s 
abdication the following day, the Times started its report by clarifying how it had received 
information from Paris: through correspondents and other newspapers as well as via an 
electric telegraph.26 Later British publications, when reporting on the spread of riots 
in Europe, used continental newspapers as sources.27
As newspapers relied on one another to distinguish valid information from 
rumours and fabrications, they created shared journalistic practices that revealed 
uncertainties relating to news production. For example, mail distribution services 
between different countries and the transnational infrastructure of postal routes were 
vulnerable to disruptions stemming from political unrest.28 When political unrest such 
as the February Revolution occurred, the lack of information created a high demand for 
news, which exploded the market for newspapers. Furthermore, a distinctive feature of 
news reporting in 1848 was that newspapers paid a great deal of attention to people’s 
emotional responses to the outbreak of the February Revolution, which ranged from 
fear and fury to hope and excitement.29 For example, reports from Austria documented 
21 See Sperber, p. 114; Strandmann, pp. 1–2. See also Sperber, pp. 105–111; R. J. W. Evans, ‘Liberalism, 
Nationalism, and the Coming of the Revolution’, in The Revolutions in Europe,  1848–1849: 
From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2000), pp. 9–26; Malia, pp. 217–18, 241; Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A 
New History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 155–57; Jürgen 
Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 543–47.
22 Strandmann, p. 3.
23 Bösch, p. 73.
24 Reichhardt, p. 19.
25 ‘The French Government’, The Times, 25 February 1848, in The Times Digital Archive in Gale Primary 
Sources [accessed through licence 2020–21]. All quotations from The Times are from this database.
26 ‘The Abdication of Louis Philippe’, The Times, 26 February 1848. 
27 ‘Effect of the News of the Revolution on Germany’, Caledonian Mercury, 6 March 1848; ‘The European 
Revolution’, Liverpool Mercury, 24 March 1848, in British Library Newspapers in Gale Primary Sources 
[accessed through licence 2020–21]. Subsequent quotations from this database will be marked ‘(BLN)’.
28 See, for example, ‘The French Revolution by an Eye Witness’, Glasgow Herald, 3 March 1848 (BLN).
29 See, for example, ‘German Papers’, Morning Post, 7 March 1848 (BLN); Reichhardt, pp. 16–18.
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
21
an affective charge relating to the revolutionary news that arrived in Vienna in the wake 
of the March Revolution on the thirteenth of that month.30 As the international press 
tried to capture the emotions evoked by revolution, it became a vehicle for the spread 
of the revolutionary wave, thus demonstrating the unprecedented affective power of 
the early nineteenth-century press.31
The circulation of news about the sudden outbreak of the February Revolution 
depended on an international network of news production, which became visible as 
newspapers deliberately started naming their sources to gain credibility.32 This was vital in 
a situation in which information reached different regions in an uncoordinated manner, 
and at different speeds.33 News about the February Revolution arrived in German-
speaking Europe on 26 February through the Kölnische Zeitung, which benefited from 
the carrier pigeon route established by the newspaper agency Havas, and Paul Julius 
Reuter, to connect the cities of Paris, Brussels, and Aachen. As we will see in the 
following section, in addition to French sources, German and British newspapers were 
often cited in Scandinavia and Russia.
Between East and West: News Flows to the Finnish Press
In this section, we will take a closer look at how news from the continent reached 
Finland. There are several factors that make the Finnish case particularly interesting 
in the wider European context. Among these factors are Finland’s remote location in 
the northernmost part of Europe, its position in the Russian Empire, and its bilingual 
publishing sphere. Before proceeding to the news reports, we will briefly present the 
overall situation in Finland, in terms of communication networks and newspaper 
printing activities.
Finland had functioned as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire from 1809 
onwards. Its press was fairly independent from Russia, however, and it was situated 
geographically and culturally between Russia and Sweden. Due to Finland’s shared 
history with Sweden, the country’s dominant literary language was Swedish, although 
the majority of the population were Finnish-speaking peasantry. As an administrative 
unit on its own, Finland did not follow Russian censorship practices, and set its own 
degree of censorship. However, Finnish officials did have to bear in mind that overly 
radical statements might harm the position of the Grand Duchy. The Russian emperor, 
Nicholas I, feared a revolution throughout his reign, having turned Russia into a 
surveillance society in which the public sphere was actively monitored by censors and the 
secret police.34 It is thus no surprise that the empire shut itself off from the ‘Springtime of 
the Peoples’.35 In this unprecedented politically sensitive situation, Finnish newspapers 
delivered information on the revolutionary turbulence.
30 See Ferdinand Kürnberger, ‘Die Wiener Revolution. Fragmentarisch berichtet’, Sonntagsblätter, 19 
March 1848, Austrian Newspapers Online, Austrian National Library [accessed 2020–21]. Subsequent 
quotations from this database will be marked ‘(ANNO)’.
31 See Weyland, p. 395. Compare with Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta, ‘Medien und Emotionen in der 
Moderne: Historische Perspektiven’, in Die Massen Bewegen: Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne, ed. 
by Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006), pp. 13–41.
32 Reichhardt, pp. 16–17, 31–32.
33 See, for example, ‘Frankreich’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 February 1848; ‘Frankreich’, Grazer 
Zeitung, 26 February 1848; ‘Frankreich. Paris, 14. Februar’, Bünner Zeitung, 26 February 1848 (ANNO).
34 Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 67; Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence 
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 377. 
35 David Saunders, ‘A Pyrrhic Victory: The Russian Empire in 1848’, in The Revolutions in Europe 1848–
1849: From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 135–55 (p. 135 and passim).
22
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
Newspaper publishing began in the Finnish territory during the 1770s. In the 
early decades of the nineteenth century, publishing activities were modest. By 1848, 
eleven newspapers were being published in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Of these, 
eight were Swedish-language newspapers and three were Finnish-language publications. 
The so-called official newspaper, Finlands Allmänna Tidning, was the main source of 
foreign news in Finland, but in 1848, other newspapers started publishing foreign news 
on a more regular basis.36 This change was clearly motivated by the need to follow the 
political turbulence in continental Europe.
Due to its remote location, Finland was one of the end points of news flows in 
Europe. In the late 1840s, Finland had still not implemented innovations to speed up 
the spread of news. For example, while railway routes connected many European cities, 
the first internal railway line in Finland was not opened until the early 1860s. Moreover, 
the first electrical telegraph connection between Helsinki and Saint Petersburg was 
opened in 1855. Finnish newspapers usually received their news from other newspapers, 
including Russian, French-, and German-language newspapers published in Saint 
Petersburg, Swedish papers, and English-, French-, or German-language publications. 
Finland was connected to continental Europe via two communication networks and 
postal routes: one via Stockholm and another via Saint Petersburg. 
How long did it take for news of the February Revolution to be published in 
Finland? Our research shows that, while British newspapers were reporting on the 
revolution in Paris within days, the first reports in Finland were published on 11 March, 
by three Swedish-language newspapers. The news did not appear in Finnish until 17 
March. However, when it comes to the speed of information flows, one should not 
compare Finland directly to Britain or other countries situated in close geographic 
proximity to France. It is quite obvious that information travelled faster to Britain 
— via mail or by other means — than to Finland. Rather, when evaluating the speed 
of information flows to Finland in 1848, we should also take a closer look at Russian 
and Swedish newspapers, and their practices for reporting on the events of that year.
The French-language Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, published by the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs, played a major role in publishing news from the world outside 
Russian borders.37 On 7 March, the newspaper wrote that, because post from Paris was 
interrupted, only scattered information was available about protests in France; the issued 
dated 8 March cited a 25 February Times report, in a statement that the unrest in Paris 
had become a revolution [‘Le gouvernement, dit le Times, était prepare á étouffer une 
émeute; il a succombé à une revolution’].38 The next day, 9 March, the German-language 
St. Petersburgische Zeitung dedicated almost the entirety of its foreign section to France, 
stating clearly that the ‘rioting and unrest are over — the Revolution has begun’ [‘Der 
Krawall und die Emeute sind vorüber — die Revolution hat begonnen’].39 As Finnish 
editors usually had command of German and French, both newspapers would have 
been accessible to them as sources of information.
36 Päiviö Tommila, ‘Yhdestä lehdestä sanomalehdistöksi 1809–1859’, in Suomen lehdistön historia 1: 
Sanomalehdistön vaiheet vuoteen 1905, ed. by Päiviö Tommila (Kuopio: Kustannuskiila, 1988), p. 223; 
Juhani Paasivirta, Suomi ja Eurooppa. Autonomiakausi ja kansainväliset kriisit 1808–1914 (Helsinki: 
Kirjayhtymä, 1978), p. 146.
37 Louise McReynolds, The News Under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 19–21.
38 ‘Paris, 23 Février´, Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, (24 February) 7 March 1848; ‘Les gazettes anglaises’, 
Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, (25 February) 8 March 1848, National Library of Finland. Russian 
newspapers were dated with two different dates, of which the first — here in brackets — referred to the 
date of the Julian calendar. On the report from The Times see note 26 in this article.
39 ‘Das Ausland’, St. Petersburgische Zeitung, (26 February) 9 March 1848. Microfilm, National Library of 
Finland.
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
23
Since news from continental Europe usually reached Sweden before Finland, 
Finnish editors could also use Swedish newspapers when writing their own reports. It 
seems that during the first days of March, Swedish newspapers gradually became aware 
of the political upheaval in Paris. Aftonbladet, one of the leading Swedish newspapers, 
reported on 1 March 1848 that a rumour concerning the alleged illness of King Louis 
Philippe was not true. According to Aftonbladet, the rumour had appeared in the 
Düsseldorf Zeitung, but the ‘Parisian papers’ had not confirmed it.40 This example shows 
that newspapers had to rely on reports from other publications, and that the confirmation 
of news was sought from several sources. Two days later, on 3 March, Aftonbladet 
published its first news report on the upheaval in Paris, referring to the events that 
took place on the evening of 22 February by the title, ‘Great Mass Movement in Paris 
and a Cabinet Shakeup’ [‘Stora folkrörelser i Paris och ministerförändring’]. According 
to Aftonbladet, the news from Paris was ‘extraordinarily interesting’ [‘utomordentligt 
intressanta’].41 
The first Finnish newspapers to publish news of the Paris Revolution were 
Helsingfors Tidningar, Borgå Tidningar, and the official newspaper Finlands Allmänna 
Tidning. These were Swedish-language publications. Finnish newspapers did not usually 
take a direct stance on political issues, especially the official paper, which hesitated 
to express any sympathy for the European revolutionary movements. Some Finnish 
scholars have argued that Finlands Allmänna Tidning was so cautious in its policy that 
it actually delayed the first news report on the outbreak of the revolution in Paris. Due 
to this delay, Finlands Allmänna Tidning was not the first paper to publish the news, as 
was usually the case with foreign news.42 
It should be noted that these three newspapers relied on different sources. While 
Helsingfors Tidningar and Borgå Tidningar based their reports on information from 
the St. Petersburgische Zeitung, Finlands Allmänna Tidning referred to the ‘latest news’ 
coming ‘directly’ from London and Paris (dated 25 February), which were outside the 
sphere of the Holy Alliance.43 Therefore, it seems that Finlands Allmänna Tidning had 
been waiting for the mail to bring the latest newspapers from Britain, France, and/or 
Sweden before publishing the news. 
The February Revolution and the Finnish Press 
When signs of political unrest were spotted in Scandinavia, specifically in Denmark, 
Russian officials ordered that the Swedish-Finnish border be shut down. During the 
spring and summer of 1848, Finns were banned from travelling abroad. In March 1848, 
Governor-General Mensikov, a high-ranking official in the Russian administration, 
who was in charge of issues relating to Finland, instructed Finnish officials to be 
more efficient in monitoring the press. According to these instructions, newspapers 
were to publish only foreign news that had already been published in the Journal de 
40 ‘Utrikes’, Aftonbladet, 1 March 1848, Svenska Dagstidningar, National Library of Sweden [accessed 
2020–21]. Subsequent quotations from this database will be marked ‘(SD)’.
41 ‘Stora folkrörelser i Paris och ministerförändring’, Aftonbladet, 3 March 1848 (SD). Aftonbladet was 
published in the evening, which often gave the paper the advantage of being able to publish news first. 
See Karl Erik Gustafsson and Per Rydén, A History of the Press in Sweden (Gothenburg: Nordicom, 
2010), pp. 75–76. Since the database of Swedish newspapers is not a complete collection and several 
newspapers are missing, we have not been able to confirm whether Aftonbladet was the first paper to 
publish this news.
42 Paasivirta, p. 146.
43 ‘Utrikes’, Borgå Tidning; ‘Utrikes’, Helsingfors Tidning; ‘Tidningar från utrikes orter’, Finlands Allmänna 
Tidning, 11 March 1848, National Library of Finland Digital Collections [accessed 2020–2021]. 
Subsequent quotations from this database will be marked ‘(FNL)’.
24
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
St.-Pétersbourg.44 Despite these guidelines, Finnish newspapers continued to deliver 
information about the events in continental Europe, obtained from Western papers 
such as the Times, the Globe, and the Journal des débats.45 Indeed, these newspapers 
apparently wanted to highlight the fact that they were not only publishing news from 
Russian sources, which, obviously, had been approved by Russian censors.
The editors of Finnish newspapers balanced the will to report on political 
turbulence with the need to avoid expressions that could have been interpreted as 
open support for the revolutionaries. On 15 March, Helsingfors Tidningar published an 
overview that reflected on the meanings and possible effects of revolutions in general, 
briefly referring to the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 in France. According to the 
newspaper, political revolutions could be understood as momentary states of illness, 
such as fever. At the same time, social revolutions were said to have more permanent 
effects.46 The newspaper did not provide an opinion on the nature of the ongoing 
turbulence in France; only time would tell the real meaning of the current revolution. 
This way, judgement on the character of events was left to readers of the newspaper. 
On 23 March, Finlands Allmänna Tidning stated that, according to ‘an unverified 
rumour’ [‘ett ännu obekräftadt rykte’], Chancellor Metternich, the leading figure of 
European conservative politics, had been dismissed.47 Within days, several other Finnish 
newspapers reported the same news.48 In Russia, news of the revolution in Vienna and 
the exile of Clemens von Metternich in London was omitted from the headlines of the 
St. Petersburgische Zeitung. Instead, the anti-revolutionary manifesto of Nicholas I, in 
which the tsar directly addressed his subjects, was published in German on the front 
page of the issue dated 28 March. It was the first direct commentary on the revolutions 
in German-speaking Europe, and the first narrative to link these events with the French 
February Revolution, as part of a larger movement that was threatening Russia.49 
Reporting foreign news based on Swedish sources continued to be an important 
way of importing information about the European uprisings into Finland. Brief news 
pieces often laconically reported the latest developments in countries affected by the 
uprisings; much had to be read between the lines.50 In July 1848, the Finnish-language 
newspaper Suometar published a report on the workers’ revolts in Paris and, drawing on 
Swedish sources, translated a declaration by Louis Eugène Cavaignac into Finnish, thus 
bringing some contemporary republican rhetoric to Finnish speakers.51 Suometar also 
published a report on the Frankfurt Parliament and tried to find Finnish equivalents for 
the new concepts of a constitutional monarchy [‘säännöllinen ylivalta’] and democratic 
republic [‘rahwaallinen tasavalta’], adding the original Swedish words in parentheses.52 
It was a challenge for Finnish-language newspapers to translate this kind of political 
news. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Finnish written language was still in the 
44 Paasivirta, pp. 141–42, 146–47.
45 For example, Borgå Tidning, 5 April 1848; Finlands Allmänna Tidning, 12 April 1848; Finlands 
Allmänna Tidning, 20 April 1848 (FNL).
46 ‘Ögonkast. 9. Franska Revolutionen 1848’, Helsingfors Tidningar, 15 March 1848 (FNL).
47 ‘Tidningar från utrikes orter’, Finlands Allmänna Tidning, 23 March 1848 (FNL).
48 ‘Utrikes’, Åbo Tidning, 28 March 1848; ‘Utrikes’, Åbo Underrättelser, 28 March 1848; ‘Utrikes’, 
Helsingfors Tidningar, 29 March 1848; ‘Utrikes’, Ilmarinen, 29 March 1848 (FNL).
49 ‘Das Inland. Von Gottes Gnaden Wir Nikolai der Erste, Kaiser und Selbstherrscher aller Russen u.s.w. 
u.s.w. u.s.w. verkünden Jedermann’, St. Petersburgische Zeitung, (16 March) 28 March 1848. Microfilm, 
National Library of Finland.
50 ‘Bonderörelsena in Tyskland fortfara. Mycken [sic] opposition visar sig mot konungens av Preuβen 
förklaring at han vill ställa sig i spetsen för Tyskland. Furst Metternich är I London.’ ‘Utrikes’, 
Helsingfors Tidningar, 15 April 1848. See also ‘Utrikes’, Ilmarinen, 15 March 1848 (FNL).
51 ‘Ulkomaalta. Ranskanmaalta’, Suometar, 28 July 1848 (FNL).
52 ‘Ulkomaalta. Saksanmaalta’, Suometar, 7 July 1848 (FNL).
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
25
process of being standardized, and lacked many abstract terms.53 As ‘revolution’ was 
among the terms still missing, incidents of revolution in Europe had to be explained 
using existing words, such as ‘kapina’, mentioned previously, or ‘meteli’ [‘clamour’]. 
However, as events unfolded, attempts were made to provide a Finnish translation for 
the term ‘revolution’. The revolutionary year of 1848 and the need to translate news 
into Finnish were important drivers for this development in the conceptual vocabulary 
of the language.54
Through foreign news reports, contemporary politics were also discussed in 
Finnish newspapers, although without references to domestic issues. Of the Finnish-
language newspapers, Suometar was especially active in following European incidents.55 
On 24 March, for example, the newspaper informed its readers about the latest incidents 
in the German states. According to the newspaper, in several German cities, inhabitants 
were ‘demanding complete freedom of the press’, as well as other reforms that would 
‘awaken the trust of the subjects’ in the government, and prevent uprisings.56 On 14 July, 
it published a collection of reports from continental Europe, including summaries of 
incidents from Prussia and Austria. According to the newspaper, the workers (‘työrahvas’ 
in Finnish) were restless.57 Printing this kind of news, even in terse sentences, was not 
without risk. In the eyes of the officials, all signs of workers’ movements were alarming.58 
It should be noted that, at this point, there was no parliamentary life in Finland. The 
tsar had summoned the four-estate Diet only once in 1809, and its absence was a 
delicate issue.
In early May 1848, Finnish censorship officials were reminded of the instructions 
given to them in March, namely that the monitoring of the press should be more 
efficient. During the autumn of 1848, the University of Helsinki was subjected to 
increased surveillance measures, as, after all, the educated youth were most likely to 
support revolutionary sentiments.59 In the following years, Russia’s reactionary politics 
reached the Finnish publishing field. In 1849, Finlands Allmänna Tidning was placed 
directly under the governor-general’s surveillance. The following year, publishing 
activities in the Finnish language were forbidden, except for religious texts.60 All of 
these actions can be seen as Russia’s answer to the ‘Springtime of the Peoples’.
Conclusions
In this article, we have traced the spread of news of the February Revolution from 
Western and Central Europe towards the northern and eastern parts of the continent 
and to Finland in particular, by drawing on full-text searchable digitized newspaper 
repositories from several national collections. Our aim was twofold: to shed light on the 
process of news circulation and its speed, as well as to highlight the close connection 
between communication media and political upheavals. News about the February 
Revolution in Paris arrived in Finland via two routes: through Saint Petersburg, and 
via the ‘western’ route through Sweden. In Finland, the revolutionary year of 1848 did 
53 For more on the formation of Finnish political vocabulary, see Käsitteet liikkeessä. Suomen poliittisen 
kulttuurin käsitehistoria, ed. by Matti Hyvärinen and others (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003).
54 For more on the formation of the Finnish translation of ‘revolution’ from the perspective of conceptual 
history, see Risto Alapuro, ‘Vallankumous’, in Käsitteet liikkeessä: Suomen poliittisen kulttuurin 
käsitehistoria, ed. by Matti Hyvärinen et al. (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003), pp. 519–68.
55 Heikki Kokko, Kuviteltu minuus: Ihmiskäsityksen murros suomenkielisen kansanosan kulttuurissa 
1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampere University Press 2016), pp. 115–18.
56 ’Ulkomaalta. Saksanmaalta’, Suometar, 24 March 1848 (FNL).
57 ’Ulkomaalta’, Suometar, 14 July 1848 (FNL).
58 Paasivirta, p. 158.
59 Ibid., pp. 148, 154–55.
60 Tommila, pp. 167–68, 171–72.
26
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
not bring about any political reforms, nor did public demonstrations in support of the 
revolutionaries occur. Still, Finland was not isolated from the revolutionary turmoil. The 
circulation of news not only increased the presence of contemporary European politics 
in Finland, but also shaped new political language along the way.
Although the Springtime of the Peoples was a failed revolution in the political 
sphere, news reporting about the 1848 revolutions not only circulated through the 
already established transnational journalistic networks, it also changed and shaped 
the European media space as it spurred on further technological developments in 
communication and news circulation. While carrier pigeons were being used to deliver 
messages about the outbreak of the revolts in the spring of 1848, both during and 
after the revolutions, in subsequent decades new telegraphic links were established 
across the continent and beyond. By the 1860s, the transatlantic cable linked Europe 
to the United States, facilitating a new global communication network for quickly 
spreading information.61 Moreover, due to the professionalization of journalism and the 
establishment of journalistic organizations, such as the news agency Reuters in 1851, the 
press was becoming increasingly institutionalized.62 At the same time, governments and 
policy-makers became increasingly aware of the significance of strategic communication 
processes and practices for managing public opinion.63 Despite the challenges deriving 
from its remote location and Russian reactionary politics, even in Finland the spring 
of 1848 was marked by the new kind of journalistic activity brought about by other 
European newspapers.
Heli Rantala is an Adjunct Professor (Docent) and a Research Fellow in the Department 
of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests focus on 
the cultural history of the nineteenth century, intellectual history, and literary culture. 
She has published in Finnish and English on various topics in this field, including the 
history of concepts, history of historical thought, and Finnish press history.
Heidi Hakkarainen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural History 
at the University of Turku, Finland. She has studied the nineteenth-century press from 
several perspectives and her research interests include nineteenth-century studies, 
digital history, and history of emotions.
Bibliography
Alapuro, Risto, ’Vallankumous’, in Käsitteet liikkeessä: Suomen poliittisen kulttuurin 
käsitehistoria, ed. by Matti Hyvärinen et al. (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003), pp. 519–68
Andrew, Christopher, The Secret World. A History of Intelligence (New Haven & London: 
Yale University Press, 2018)
Beals, Melody H., ‘Close Readings of Big Data: Triangulating Patterns of Textual 
Reappearance and Attribution in the Caledonian Mercury, 1820–40’, Victorian 
Periodicals Review, 51.4 (2018), 616–39
61 See Bösch, p. 73; Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet 
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 89–117. 
62 Jörg Requate, Journalismus als Beruf: Entstehung und Entwicklung der Journalistenberufs im 19. 
Jahrhundert Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 
pp. 117–20; Briggs and Burke, pp. 110–17.
63 Osterhammel, pp. 543–47, 712–23; Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: 
The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 77–96.
Journal of European Periodical Studies 7.1
27
Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke, Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet 
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)
Böning, Holger, Periodische Presse: Kommunikation und Aufklärung. Hamburg und Altona 
als Beispiel (Bremen: Edition lumière, 2002)
Böning, Holger, ed., Französische Revolution und deutsche Öffentlichkeit: Wandlungen 
in Presse und Alltagskultur am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich: K. G. 
Saur, 1992)
Bösch, Frank, Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 
1400 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015)
Bösch, Frank, and Manuel Borutta, ‘Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne: Historische 
Perspektiven’, in Die Massen Bewegen: Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne, ed. 
by Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 
2006), pp. 13–41
Chapman, Jane, Comparative Media History: An Introduction — 1789 to the Present 
(London: Polity Press, 2005)
Cordell, Ryan, ‘Reprinting, Circulation and the Network Author in Antebellum 
Newspapers’, American Literary History, 27.3 (2015), 417–45
Deak, Istvan, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 
(London: Phoenix Press, [1979] 2001)
Evans, R. J. W., ‘Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Coming of the Revolution’, in The 
Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and 
Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2000), pp. 9–26
Gustafsson, Karl Erik, and Per Rydén, A History of the Press in Sweden (Gothenburg: 
Nordicom, 2010)
Hitchcock, Tim, ‘Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Lost the Plot’, 
Cultural and Social History, 10.1 (2013), 9–23
Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977)
Huistra, Hieke, and Bram Mellink, ‘Phrasing History: Selecting Sources in Digital 
Repositories’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary 
History, 49.4 (2016), 220–29
Jarlbrink, Johan and Pelle Snickars, ‘Cultural Heritage as Digital Noise: Nineteenth 
Century Newspapers in the Digital Archive’, Journal of Documentation, 73.6 (2017), 
1228–43
Jensen, Helle Strandgaard, ‘Digital Archival Literacy for (All) Historians’, Media 
History, 27.2 (2021), 251–65
Jørgensen, Claus Møller, ‘Transurban Interconnectivities: An Essay on the Interpretation 
of the Revolutions of 1848’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 
19.2 (2021), 201–27
Judson, Pieter M., The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press 
of Harvard University Press, 2016)
Kokko, Heikki, Kuviteltu minuus: Ihmiskäsityksen murros suomenkielisen kansanosan 
kulttuurissa 1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2016)
Körner, Axel, ‘The European Dimension of the Ideas of 1848 and the Nationalization 
of its Memories’, in 1848 – A European Revolution? International Ideas and National 
Memories of 1848, ed. by Axel Körner (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 3–28
Malia, Martin, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World 
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
Marjanen, Jani, Ville Vaara, Antti Kanner, Hege Roivainen, Eetu Mäkelä, Leo Lahti, 
and Mikko Tolonen, ‘A National Public Sphere? Analyzing the Language, Location, 
and Form of Newspapers in Finland, 1771–1917’, Journal of European Periodical 
Studies, 4.1 (2019), 55–78
28
The Travelling of News in 1848: The February Revolution, European News 
Flows, and the Finnish Press
McReynolds, Louise, The News Under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-
Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)
Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013)
Nicholson, Bob, ‘The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Perspectives of Digital 
Newspaper Archives’, Media History, 19.1 (2013), 59–73
Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth 
Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
Oiva, Mila, Asko Nivala, Hannu Salmi, Otto Latva, Marja Jalava, Jana Keck, Laura 
Martínez Domínguez, and James Parker, ‘Spreading News in 1904. The Media 
Coverage of Nikolay Bobrikov’s Shooting’, Media History, 25.3 (2019)
Paasivirta, Juhani, Suomi ja Eurooppa. Autonomiakausi ja kansainväliset kriisit 1808–1914 
(Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä, 1978)
Popkin Jeremy D., ‘Media and Revolutionary Crises’, in Media and Revolution: 
Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington, Kentucky: University 
Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 12–30
—, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution. Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca: 
Cornell University Press, 1989)
Putnam, Lara, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and 
the Shadows They Cast’, The American Historical Review, 121.2 (2016), 377–402
Reichhardt, Rolf, ‘“Das größte Ereignis der Zeit”: Zur medialen Resonanz der Pariser 
Februarrevolution’, in Medienereignisse der Moderne, ed. by Friedrich Lenger and 
Ansgar Nünning (Darmstadt: WBG, 2008), pp. 14–39
Requate, Jörg, Journalismus als Beruf. Entstehung und Entwicklung der Journalistenberufs 
im 19. Jahrhundert Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck 
& Ruprecht, 1995)
Roberts, Timothy Mason, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American 
Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009)
Ruud, Charles A., Fighting Words. Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)
Saunders, David, ‘A Pyrrhic Victory: The Russian Empire in 1848’, in The Revolutions 
in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut 
Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 135–55
Sperber, Jonathan, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1994)
Strandmann, Hartmut Pogge von, ‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, in The 
Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans 
and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 
pp. 1–8
Tommila, Päiviö, ‘Yhdestä lehdestä sanomalehdistöksi 1809–1859’, in Suomen lehdistön 
historia 1: Sanomalehdistön vaiheet vuoteen 1905, ed. by Päiviö Tommila (Kuopio: 
Kustannuskiila, 1988), pp. 77–265
Wenzlhuemer, Roland, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and 
Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Weyland, Kurt, ‘The Diffusion of Revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America’, 
International Organization, 63.3 (2009), 391–42