Julien Louis Geoffroy

He took orders and for some time was a mere usher, eventually becoming professor of rhetoric at the Collège des Quatre-Nations.

On the death of Élie Fréron in 1776 the other collaborators in the Année littéraire asked Geoffroy to succeed him, and he conducted the journal until its closure in 1792.

An enthusiastic royalist, he published, with Fréron's brother-in-law, the abbé Thomas Royou [fr] (1741–1792), a journal, L'Ami du roi (1790–1792), which possibly did more harm than good to the king's cause by its ill-advised partisanship.

[2] An attempt to revive the Année littéraire failed, and Geoffroy undertook the position of theatre critic of the Journal des Débats.

His scathing criticisms had a success of notoriety, but their popularity was ephemeral, and the publication of them (5 vols., 1819–1820) as Cours de littérature dramatique proved a failure.