Fleury Mesplet

Fleury Mesplet (January 10, 1734 – January 24, 1794) was a French-born Canadian printer best known for founding the Montreal Gazette, Quebec's oldest daily newspaper, in 1778.

Biography Mesplet was born in Marseille, France, and was apprenticed as a printer in Lyon. He emigrated to London in 1773 where he set up shop in Covent Garden. Both were arrested in 1779 for sedition, and imprisoned for three years; on his release, Mesplet was $5,000 in debt but quickly dealt with his creditors. In 1785, he published La Gazette de Montréal, now the Montreal Gazette, the successor to the suspended Gazette Littéraire.

In total, he published some seventy or eighty works, in French, English, Latin, and Iroquois; ten of these ran to more than a hundred pages, and another seven were almanacs.