L’Esprit des journaux was what we would today call an aggregator, filled with reprints from other publications, running sometimes to more than 400 pages. It played an important role in the exchange of new and even revolutionary ideas across Europe, extending its reach even to Moscow. It is no surprise, however, that it should have appeared in the Liège region, in the worthy line of the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Diderot and D’Alembert, in a place where the right conditions were present, especially an absence of censorship and a group of dynamic printing companies. Resolutely modernist, l’Esprit des journaux covered the sciences, politics, medicine and economics, and appealed to all social classes as an example of the popularisation of academic knowledge.

“This Esprit des journaux was a sort of newspaper (we say this not as an insult) that stole and compiled good articles from a number of French newspapers, and which also translated things from the main English and German newspapers, and added a few articles of its own, edited by its staff,” wrote Sainte-Beuve. Popularising magazine? Plagiarist? Anthology? “Aggregator”? Was it fraudulent? With hundreds of pages in each issue (250-400 at various times), filled with articles lifted from the major newspapers in Europe, l’Esprit des journaux was all those things at least part of the time. At any rate, there is no doubt that it would appear as a sort of UFO today, since magazines that seem to be in the same line, such as Reader’s Digest or the abovementioned Courrier international, cannot match up with their illustrious ancestor, except by a general concern for intelligent popularisation of academic or scientific material. “In the 18th century, two great periodicals appeared in Liège: the famous Journal encyclopédique, which started in January 1756 in order to popularise Voltairean views, and l’Esprit des journaux, which survived being tormented by a number of regimes and eventually lasted remarkably long, almost 50 years, with few interruptions,” explains Daniel Droixhe, coordinator for the discussions held in a colloquium devoted to the portmanteau publication, which have just been published . “The first was relatively widely known, but the history of the second is still a little obscure.”  Let’s begin with what we know for sure. The paper was founded in1772. L’Esprit des journaux stopped publishing in 1818, because of a crisis that occurred in the printing business in Liège, at which time the intellectual activity of the province was moving to Brussels. L’Esprit des journaux is without question one of the most representative of the anthology-type of publications that borrow most of their matter from European periodicals, including some material produced for the paper, the amount of which is uncertain. “The English press,” as Muriel Collart, researcher for the Study Group for the 18th century at the ULg, confirmed, “occupied a variable but always important place in this publication; on average 14% of the articles were from British newspapers; this number went as high as 22% in 1780 and as low as 9% in 1786. Statistically the Critical Review was l’Esprit’s favourite source, not far ahead of the Monthly Review. Next in line were the English Review, Gentleman's Magazine, Universal Magazine, the Analytical Review, the British Register, Town and Country Magazine, the London Review and European Magazine.” This relative dominance of British papers should not be surprising since England at the time was a model with regard to its parliamentary system and its intellectual and literary life. Italy had not even been united by Garibaldi, and was of less interest.