Almanach de Liège

[1] For some of its predictions the Almanach de Liège used a hieroglyphic style, officially to cater for the illiterate but also to encode messages at another level, as communications between secret societies, which were booming in that era.

The Rosicrucians, for example, were well established in the Prince-Bishopric, even among the clergy – a cleric attached to the prince-bishop's court probably lay behind the pseudonym 'Matthieu Lansbert'.

Some of these were specially bound copies sent by the Prince-Bishopric as diplomatic gifts to major figures in foreign courts.

Hawkers immediately denounce him as a bad citizen, and astrologers treat him as small-minded and a lying thinker.Even so, Enlightenment philosophers wanted to take advantage of the publication's wide circulation: Honest people who sometimes read Virgil, or provincial letters, draw on twenty times more copies of the almanach de Liège ... than of all the good ancient and modern books.

[4] During the reign of William I of the Netherlands, in the run up to the Belgian Revolution, the Matthieu Lansbergh later became a daily newspaper spreading the liberal then unionist ideas of Paul Devaux, Joseph Lebeau and Charles Rogier – in this form, it was later renamed Le Politique.