Jean Luzac

Jean Luzac (1746-1807) was the most influential newspaper editor in the western world in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution. His newspaper, the Gazette de Leyde, published in the Dutch town of Leiden, served as Europe's 'newspaper of record.' Its readers included Louis XVI, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and all the influential rulers and diplomats of the day. Universally respected for the quality of its information, the Gazette de Leyde supported the American revolutionaries and the Dutch 'Patriot' movement of the 1780s. Luzac was critical of the violence of the French Revolution, however, and he had to abandon the editorship of the paper in 1798, under pressure from the pro-French government of the Batavian Republic. He died in a gunpowder barge explosion in Leiden in 1807.