In the first part of our analysis, we investigate the sentiment expressed in the texts of periodicals. Specifically, we ask the following questions:
- (i)
Sentiment over time: How did sentiment develop over time? Did historic events influence the emotions of authors and, if so, to what extent?
- (ii)
Sentiment of narrative forms: Did sentiment depend on the various narrative forms? For example, was a selfportrait more positive than a dream sequence?
- (iii)
Sentiment of topics: How have the different topics been perceived in the 18th century? Are important social issues for the Age of Enlightenment, such as religion, more emotionally discussed than other matters?
We conduct this analysis for each of the five languages contained in our dataset and compare individual results.
Computing sentiment. Using the respective sentiment dictionaries described earlier, we compute the sentiment score s of each text passage in our dataset with s=(Wp−Wn)/(Wp+Wn), where Wp is the number of positive words in a text passage and Wn is the number of negative words in a text passage. Hence, the sentiment score is a value ranging between −1 and +1, where values close to −1 are considered as negative, values close to +1 as positive, and where values close to zero indicate a neutral sentiment.
To assess the applicability of sentiment dictionaries, we compute the coverage of sentiment words (i.e., the fraction of words in the dictionaries that are actually contained in issues), respectively for each language. For French, Italian and Spanish, we report a coverage ranging between 71% and 76%, suggesting that the dictionaries extracted on modern texts are also suitable for languages of the 18th century. In case of German and Portuguese, the coverage is lower with 36% and 25% respectively. However, we argue that this observation is due to the limited number of issues for these languages. Specifically, we cover 72% of negative and 79% of positive words for French, 33% of negative and 41% of positive words for German, 74% of negative and 81% of positive words for Italian, 23% of negative and 31% of positive words for Portuguese as well as 69% of negative and 75% of positive words for Spanish.
Sentiment over time. We first investigate the development of sentiment over time, following the intuition that temporal proximity to certain events, such as political unrest, impacts the emotions of authors. We report mean sentiment of text passages per year in which issues were published in the respective languages in Fig. 2. Overall, sentiment varies over time for all of the five languages. For German, Portuguese and Spanish, the mean sentiment is slightly negative, indicating that German, Portuguese and Spanish periodicals express more negative emotions. The overall mean sentiment is −0.18 for German, −0.19 for Portuguese and −0.13 for Spanish. In contrast, for French and Italian periodicals, mean sentiment is slightly positive throughout the years with an overall mean sentiment of 0.03 and 0.19 respectively.
In contrast to our initial hypothesis, we observed that no general statements can be given regarding the evolution of sentiment over time. Rather, sentiment is tightly connected to the individual periodicals, each of which has typically been published over short periods of time. We now discuss the particularities of each language in the following paragraphs.
For French periodicals (cf. Fig. 2a), we observe three peaks where sentiment is, on average, more positive compared to the remaining years. The first one of these peaks in 1728 is related to the publication of La Spectatrice, the first French spectator periodical presumably written by a woman. Therefore, the more positive sentiment in this year may be caused by the discursively created “female voice”, not daring to express criticism as directly as her male colleagues. The second peak in 1753 is related to the publication of Le Spectateur moderne. Of this periodical, only one issue has been preserved and, hence, the peak for 1753 might not be representative. The positive peak in 1786 is caused by the publication of the first issue of Les Chiffons, an entertaining and satiric social critic. For the former two periodicals, it was the first issue of the respective periodical and we hypothesize that the authors may have used a milder tone to attract new readership.
Due to the very small quantity of text material, the sentiment over time for German periodicals (cf. Fig. 2b) is strongly depending on the individual periodicals. Each year represents only one periodical or even only one or two issues of one periodical. In this case, we note the negative sentiment in the year 1752, in which the third issue of Die Zuschauerin was published. This periodical focused on the role of women in family and society and presumably used more negative portraits and examples in the issue published in 1752.
In case of Italian periodicals (cf. Fig. 2c), we observe a particularly positive sentiment in the years 1786, 1787 and 1788 in which the periodical Donna galante ed erudita was published. This periodical mainly addressed the positive aspects of fashion, healthcare, theatre, and women. On the other hand, we speculate that the slightly more negative sentiment in the year 1765 is due to the Il Caffè authors’ critical attitude towards politics and economy.
The Portugal of the 18th century faced economic, social and political problems due to the reign of terror, fear as well as political and religious persecution. Further, censorship was widespread. The Portuguese periodical O Anonymo was published from 1752 to 1754, describing this situation with a lot of criticism, suggesting the negative mean sentiment of Portuguese periodicals (cf. Fig. 2d). The hopeless situation began to change with statesman Marquis of Pombal, who introduced many reforms based on the ideas of the Enlightenment during the second half of the 18th century (Dill 2015).
For the Spanish periodicals (cf. Fig. 2e), we report a negative sentiment for 1735, the first year in which a Spanish periodical was published. We argue that this is due to El Duende crítico, a critical periodical similar to a pamphlet (López 2002) and published in the course of this year. The temporary and slightly more positive sentiment for the year 1762 may be caused by the publication of El Pensador, a moderate critic of the Spanish society and protégé of the Spanish King. Similarly, the slight increase in sentiment in 1765 seems to be related to the first publication of El Belianís literario a periodical that focused on literary critics. However, as this periodical is a satiric critic, making use of exaggerated praise or criticism, our sentiment analysis might not correctly infer the expressed sentiment and results may be inaccurate. We further address this issue in the limitations of our work. Another notable year for Spanish periodicals is 1785, for which the mean sentiment is most positive. This could be due to El Censor, the most famous Spanish spectator and one of the most durable publications with extraordinary literary quality (Guinard 1973). It was one of the most critical spectator periodicals and therefore had problems with censorship. During its life in press (1781−1787), El Censor was prohibited twice through censorship, which led to an interruption of the publication each time. After the second break, it was again published in 1785 (Guinard 1973). As El Censor was the only Spanish spectator published in this year, we argue that the positive sentiment may result from strategies of the authors to avoid further problems with censorship by means of a lighter tone or better concealing of criticism, such as satire or indirect criticism. One could also argue that the negative sentiment in Spanish periodicals stemmed from an increased criticism of Spanish authors due to the slow progress of the Enlightenment in Spain. However, we argue that this is a common prejudice (Astigarraga 2015) and perhaps the more negative tone of the Spanish spectator press may be related to an inner cultural conflict between conservatives and progressives in Spain during that time (Von Tschilschke 2009). In this conflict, the spectator periodicals were a medium chosen mainly by the progressives in order to spread their reformist ideas.
Sentiment of narrative forms. As spectator periodicals deliberately avoided news, they had only limited subjects to address. In order to add variety to their texts, they embedded the same moral messages into different narrative forms, allowing authors to address the same subjects from different points of view. For example, to illustrate the importance of female virtues, the authors can use a General Account on a vicious women punished for her misconduct just as well as an Allegory representing female virtues. In other words, the message would be the same, but the sentiment could vary. In consequence, the different narrative forms are likely to vary in sentiment. To determine whether there are any trends in polarity for the specific narrative forms, we investigated them separately in our analysis.
To assess if the sentiment of a narrative form is more positive or more negative relative to the language mean (cf. Fig. 2), we standardize sentiment scores: From each sentiment value we subtract the language mean and divide by the standard deviation of the respective language.
In Fig. 3 we illustrate the mean standardized sentiment of each narrative form for each of the five languages contained in our dataset. Note that not every text passage is annotated with a narrative form. Thus, it is easily possible that all narrative forms have a sentiment that is more positive or more negative than the language mean. We observe such a case for German, for which all narrative forms have negative relative sentiment. The apparent discrepancy is resolved by the fact that text passages without annotation have positive relative sentiment.
Overall, results vary across languages. In case of French, Italian and Portuguese periodicals, the majority of narrative forms convey a more positive sentiment as compared to the language mean, while the majority of narrative forms in Spanish periodicals expressed a more negative sentiment.
Focusing on the differences across languages, we note that Utopia is rather negative compared to the language mean, for both French (mean standardized sentiment equals −0.22) and Spanish periodicals (mean standardized sentiment equals −0.14), whereas it is positive for Italian periodicals (mean standardized sentiment equals 0.10). Investigating on that, we conclude that this observation might have multiple reasons. On the one hand, Utopia was not only used to annotate the strict literary definition, which describes nearly perfect and high quality societies (i.e., we would expect a positive sentiment for this narrative form). Instead it was also used to annotate fanciful narrations. Such narrative forms are frequent in Spanish periodicals, including El Duende de Madrid comprising a complete fanciful narration in which authors of published discourses were represented as goblins in a darker setting, potentially explaining the negative mean standardized sentiment for Utopia in Spanish periodicals. On the other hand, for French periodicals the Utopia annotation is more accurate to the literary definition, but French periodicals also include dystopic narrations, explaining the negative sentiment for French. The authors of Spanish periodicals seem to have used dream sequences for such dystopic narrations, reflecting the rich literary heritage of Spanish satiric dream narrations of the baroque period (Gómez Trueba 1999) and explaining the more negative sentiment of Dream Sequences for Spanish. Regarding the more positive sentiment for Utopia in Italian periodicals, we conclude that these utopias mainly comprise dialogue series between Odysseus and various animals in the Osservatore veneto (Fuchs and Ertler 2014). Here, similar to utopias of French and Spanish, negative examples are shown, however, due to the transformation of the moral instruction to Circe’s IslandFootnote 5, it is integrated into a harmonious scene. The moral instruction then takes place based on a striking, pleasing and nonviolent language. Some of the utopias integrated in other Italian periodicals include positive visions of the future. Overall, it turns out that utopias in the Italian periodicals are not used to scare, but to instruct in a pleasant way. Thus, the positive sentiment captures the overall positive atmosphere which is apparently a characteristic of the Italian periodicals.
The narrative form Letters or Letters to the Editor have a more positive sentiment across languages, with the exception of German periodicals. Here the mean differences are 0.06 for French, 0.22 for Italian, 0.36 for Portuguese and 0.02 for Spanish. These results are surprising to us since readers, though generally polite, also expressed their honest opinions and did not always agree with the spectators in their letters. In fact, the positive sentiment for this narrative form might be an artifact from the sentiment dictionaries we used. In the 18th century, correspondence was still a very formal act, often related to rhetoric conventions (Vellusig 2000) and the dictionaries might not be able to assess correct sentiment due to their creation on modern texts.
We also note that the Selfportrait is more positive than Heteroportrait for Spanish periodicals, suggesting that authors of the periodicals as well as their correspondents tend to present themselves in a positive way, whereas they use others as examples for bad behavior. This might be related to a general human tendency of blaming others and not oneself for your own mistakes (Shaver 2012; Weiner 1995).
Sentiment of topics. We now investigate how different topics had been perceived in periodicals. For that, we standardized sentiment in a similar fashion as in the previous study on narrative forms in order to overcome the general sentiment biases of languages (cf. Fig. 2). This allows us to infer whether or not the sentiment of topics is more positive or negative compared to the language mean.
In Fig. 4 we depict the mean standardized sentiment of each topic contained in our dataset for each of the five languages. Again, sentiment varies significantly per topic over all five languages.
In the case of French periodicals, Germany and Switzerland are among the most positive topics, while, for example, Superstition and Law had been perceived more negatively compared to the French mean. For German, we find that Other Countries, followed by Happiness and Structure of Society are among the more positive topics, whereas topics related to interpersonal relationships including Love, Family as well as Image of Men are more negative compared to the language mean. For these two languages, we observe that French periodicals wrote more positively about Germany but German periodicals wrote more negatively about France. This may be due to the fact that French culture was dominant in arts and literature during the 17th and 18th century which, hence, was discussed polemically by other countries in Europe. Regarding Italian periodicals, we report more positive sentiment for Spain and Foreign Societies (Fuchs and Ertler 2018). The topics Passion and Philosophy comprise a more negative text for Italian periodicals when compared to their language mean. Among positive topics for Portuguese periodicals we find France, Image of Men and Love, while negative topics include Image of Women, Law and Culture of Conversation. Finally, Charity, Structure of Society and Other Countries are more positive topics for Spanish periodicals compared to its sentiment mean. Notable negative topics for Spanish include England, the Apologetic of Spain and Morale.
Analyzing the results of French in more detail, we find it surprising that the topic Image of Women has a positive mean standardized sentiment, whereas the topic Image of Men has a negative mean standardized sentiment. The discussion of gender roles is one main topic of many enlightened authors and women were often considered a deviation of the male norm (Honegger 1991; Steinbrügge 2016). Therefore, and keeping in mind the close reading experience, it would have seemed more logical to us to find a negative sentiment value for Image of Women. However, considering the plethora of different French periodicals, this observation turns out to be potentially caused by the quantitative dominance of Jean-François de Bastide’s voluminous periodicals Le Nouveau Spectateur, Le Monde comme il est and Le monde. One main topic of these periodicals is the Love discourse (Fischer-Pernkopf et al. 2018), which of course accompanies a more positive sentiment on the opinion of women.
For Italian, we observe that the topics Politics and Structure of Society were generally shown in a gloomy light. For example, northern Italy is governed by foreign rulers who were not perceived in a positive way, although the Italians knew how to negotiate with them. The fact that Charity and Fortune convey a negative sentiment may be explained by the description of charitable actions, which often included the example of tragic destinies. These charitable actions are often connected to the criticized structures of society and the differences between city and countryside, which becomes particularly visible in the Venetian periodicals comprising the Gazzetta veneta and L’Osservatore veneto by Gasparo Gozzi or the Gazzetta veneta by Pietro Chiari. The Italy of the 18th Century often looked hopefully at other foreign countries due to its own backwardness. After all, it was important to imitate the foreign, supposedly more progressive societies, explaining the more positive sentiment for the topic Foreign Societies. Also notable is the positive sentiment of the topic Religion, since a certain criticism of religion is present in Italian periodicals. Especially the church representatives were sometimes criticized quite harshly. Nevertheless, the need of caution had to be stressed, in order to prevent becoming a victim to censorship. Subsequently, rhetorical methods can only be perceived at a closer look, rather than on the surface as our results suggest.
The fact that among Spanish periodicals topics such as Image of Men and Image of Women, Culture of Conversation and Manners and Costumes have a negative sentiment could be due to the fact that those were the main areas of criticism for the Spanish authors, as direct criticism of Church or the Monarchy were not allowed (Von Tschilschke 2009). Hence, social interaction and in general the society were in the center of the enlightened attention in Spain. The comparatively negative sentiment of the topic Apologetic of Spain seems to be due to the fact that many spectator authors were among the adversaries of the Spanish apologists. As a reaction to criticism on Spanish literature from inside and outside the country, the apologists started defending the Spanish culture no matter what. In opposition to that, the authors of El Censor, El Apologista Universal and El Corresponsal del Censor started ridiculing the apologists (Guinard 1973). Notably, as the inflexible stratification of society (Ertler 2004) was one reason of the discontent of enlightened authors in Spain, we would have expected a more negative sentiment for Structure of Society and Critics on Nobility.