French Influences on the Nineteenth-Century Chilean Press: The Case of the Pioneering Crónica Roja, 1860-90

This study analyzes the beginnings and development of the Chilean crime or police story, later known as the crónica roja, a Latin American branch of contemporary literary journalism. While the held belief is that this new Chilean genre was influenced by the fait divers and the chronique judiciaire that appeared in nineteenth-century French print journalism, in fact, a more complex cultural mediation took place. After considering the particular historical and cultural features of both French and Chilean societies at the time, taking special note of their respective journalistic traditions and the manner in which the French press entered Chilean print culture, the study compares the narrative treatment of criminal actions reported in three Chilean newspapers, El Chileno, El Mercurio de Valparaíso, and La República, against Le Petit Journal, a popular French daily well known in Chile. The historical and comparative analysis shows that French faits divers criminels and chroniques judiciaires share more similarities with the Chilean folletín crime books than with the country's more famous crónica roja. The reasons are twofold. First, the French texts' sensationalist tone and penchant for narrative detail did not have a place in the logic of the informative journalism that began imposing itself in Chile at the fin-de-siècle. It was a logic the Chilean folletín could largely ignore given its different editors, format, and target audience. And second, the Chilean press began adopting a moralizing and didactic tone in its crónica roja more in line with the rationale of its elite readership, which equated criminal activity with the lower classes, than with its growing populist audience, which favored these more sensationalist narratives.