On February 12, 1786, a letter to the editor appeared in the Affiches du Beauvaisis that described how readers interacted with the newspaper. The anonymous writer explained to the editor, “Your weekly papers are a sort of literary arena, where every athlete should have the right to present oneself, to choose an adversary and to combat them, without however, straying from the bounds of decency and one’s public and private honesty.” He expressed his disagreement with a letter to the editor in the previous week’s newspaper, but he assured the editor that he intended only to combat his interlocutor in the press and to adhere to sociable norms of civility and honest conduct. 1 Newspapers like the Affiches du Beauvaisisformed a collective space that invited participation. In conceptualizing the newspaper as an arena, this writer reflected a sense of the affiches as a site for the horizontal exchange of ideas where writers could grapple with new information and with one another.