Jean Luzac

Jean Luzac (Leiden, 1746–1807) was a Dutch lawyer, journalist and professor in Greek and History, of Huguenot origin. He was the most influential newspaper editor in the Western world in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution, and his second daughter Emilie married his fellow Patriot Wijbo Fijnje.

His newspaper, the "Gazette de Leyde", published in 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" supported the American revolutionaries and the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s. When John Adams arrived in the Netherlands, he immediately paid Luzon a visit, to provide him with full reports of the constitutional debates in America. [S. Schama (1977) "Patriots and Liberators, Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813", p. 60.]

Luzac was critical of the violence of the French Revolution, however, and he had to abandon the editorship of the paper in 1798 for six months, under pressure from the pro-French government of the Batavian Republic. He died in a gunpowder barge explosion in Leiden in 1807.

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