Involving the public in his enterprise": the first letters of readers in the French press

In 1631, Renaudot invited the public to correct the mistakes in his Gazette; this proposal never materialised. Other periodicals, such as the Mercure Galant, did open their pages to contributions from their readers. But these were not "letters to the editor" as we know them. If we adopt a strict definition, we clearly see that the phenomenon did not develop in France before the 1750s; first with Marmontel's Mercure de France, then, to a wide extent, in other newspapers such as the Journal de Paris. In the greater context of the encyclopaedic movement, the letters to the editor became a means to question authority in all its forms, and the place where a kind of collaborative journalism flourished, for better or for worse.