| Summary: | From the death of Charles II to the war of Spanish Succession: the horizon of war and his prognostics in the French-speaking Press. This contribution questions the fundamental link between journalism of political analysis and war when the death of the King of Spain was likely to tip Europe into a generalized conflict. While seeking whether the confrontation seemed inevitable to journalists in 1700-1701, this paper demonstrates how war was constructed as imminent in the press and how the press can be a privileged observatory to size the processes of analysis specifically used in the beginning of the 18th century. Finally, though the Mercures did not show what could be the feeling of the people of the time about war, they show to what extent war could be the subject of written pieces and debates even before it was declared. As such, these periodicals have helped to build and disseminate a sense of omnipresence of war in the society of the 17th and 18th centuries - a construction that is still widely efficient nowadays.
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