Journal des sçavans

Timeline

1. 1665Paris · ParisDenis de Sallo, a councillor of the Paris Parlement, launched the first issue of Journal des sçavans under a pseudonym, weekly gathering summaries of new books, news of experiments, church and court affairs, and notices of famous scholars' deaths. By compressing Europe's "Republic of Letters" into a regular printed periodical, Paris beat London to an academic journal by two months, and it immediately touched on sensitive nerves among censors and the Jesuits.
2. 1665–1666Paris · ParisOnly about three months after its founding, the journal was suspended for offending censors with its critical tone and religious and judicial topics, and Sallo left his post. In early 1666 Jean Gallois (Abbé Gallois) took over and revived it with a more cautious tone, while the structure of book reviews and scholarly chronicles was retained. The revival proved that a regular academic journal could survive royal censorship, turning a one-off experiment into a replicable institution.
3. 1666–1680Paris · ParisAfter the Paris Academy of Sciences was founded in 1666, Journal des sçavans did not become its official organ, but in the same city it provided book reviews, summaries of discoveries and news of the international scholarly world, complementing the experimental-report format of London's Philosophical Transactions. Colbert's state sponsorship of science, together with this regular journal, made Paris one of the two centers of European scholarly information in the later 17th century, and the journal model was soon imitated in Amsterdam, Leipzig and elsewhere.