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This article shows the role and importance of newspapers and journalists in cultural exchanges between France and Brazil in the nineteenth century. On both sides of the Atlantic the rise of the modern press brought about profound changes in the production, diffusion and reception of culture. After a review of the flow of French and Brazilian “€œcultural mediators”€ in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, the article looks at the transmission of information and images which took place in journals and other periodicals. These exchanges reflect not only the birth of a media culture but also the development of a global media system. From the first half of the nineteenth century, throughout the world, the press can be considered the most important arbiter of culture by introducing a new “media era”€ and by giving birth to the globalization of information, which is the origin of the media world we know today.