ABSTRACT
While both the gazettes and the affiches had a fairly narrow focus, the rest of the press took up a wide variety of subjects from science to poetry. Yet it is worth considering these periodicals together because, whatever the specific interest of a magazine, it was involved in examining part of the great seamless web of knowledge for the general elite. During the eighteenth century, the educated understood such categories as history, science, philosophy, geography, but ranged widely among them. One area possessed implications for another. Because of contemporaries’ broad interests, magazines that ranged widely over various fields may all be grouped together. Another rather different factor that encourages considering these journals together was the manner in which they, unlike the local affiches, appealed to, and were perceived as belonging to a national market. Moreover, they conversed with one another and assumed that readers could follow the various ends of these dialogues without explanation.l For the sake of convenience, we may call these literary-philosophical journals, or, because they had a much greater tendency than either gazettes or affiches to publish long pieces, discussion journals.
