Jean Luzac was a Dutch lawyer, journalist and professor in Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 and History, of Huguenot

Huguenot

The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...

 origin. He was the most influential newspaper editor in the Western world in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

, and his second daughter Emilie

Emilie Luzac

Emilie Luzac was the second daughter of Jean Luzac, book seller and publisher, and Anna Hillegonda Valckenaer...

 married his fellow Patriot Wijbo Fijnje.

His newspaper, the Gazette de Leyde, published in Leiden, served as Europe's newspaper of record

Newspaper of record

Newspaper of record is a term that may refer either to any publicly available newspaper that has been authorized by a government to publish public or legal notices , or any major newspaper that has a large circulation and whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered professional and...

. Its readers included Louis XVI, Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

, 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

John Adams

John Adams was an American lawyer, statesman, diplomat and political theorist. A leading champion of independence in 1776, he was the second President of the United States...

 arrived in the Netherlands, he immediately paid Luzon a visit, to provide him with full reports of the constitutional debates in America. Shortly after this Luzac published a Dutch translation of the Massachusetts Constitution

Massachusetts Constitution

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the fundamental governing document of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one of the 50 individual state governments that make up the United States of America. It was drafted by John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin during the...

 which effected public opinion about the American War of Independence in the Netherlands.

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

Batavian Republic

The Batavian Republic was the successor of the Republic of the United Netherlands. It was proclaimed on January 19, 1795, and ended on June 5, 1806, with the accession of Louis Bonaparte to the throne of the Kingdom of Holland....

. He died in a gunpowder barge explosion in Leiden in 1807.