A feuilleton (; a diminutive of , the leaf of a book) was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. The term feuilleton was invented by the editors of the French Journal des débats; Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, in 1800. The feuilleton has been described as a "talk of the town", and a contemporary English-language example of the form is the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker. In English newspapers, the term instead came to refer to an installment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper. History The feuilleton was the literary consequence of the Coup of 18 Brumaire (Dix-huit-Brumaire). A consular edict of January 17, 1800, made a clean sweep of the revolutionary press, and cut down the number of Paris newspapers to 13. 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. Geoffroy started the first feuilleton in the Journal des Débats. The idea caught on at once. 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. The original feuilletons were not usually printed on a separate sheet, but merely separated from the political part of the newspaper by a line, and printed in smaller type. Geoffroy's own feuilleton dealt with the theatre as he was a trenchant drama critic. By the time of his death in 1814, several other feuilletonists had made their mark, with Janin taking over from him. Feuilletonists featured in other papers included Théophile Gautier, Paul de St. Victor, Edmond de Biéville, Louis Ulbach and Francisque Sarcey, who occupied the "ground floor" of the Temps. Adolphe Adam, Hector Berlioz, and Coutil-Blaze wrote music-laden feuilletons. Babinet, Louis Figuier and Meunier focused on science. Bibliographical feuilletons were done by Armand de Pontmartin, Gastave Flanche, and