International audience Anxious over the hostility to the Hanoverian dynasty and over the growing politicisation of the lower ranks that prevailed in 1718, the Whig government commissioned the poet Ambrose Philips and other staunch defenders of the Glorious Revolution to start a bi-weekly essay periodical The Free Thinker which would educate the readers and turn them from a mere ignorant, unruly opinion into a public spirited, well-informed public opinion judging political and religious events with its reason. The Free-Thinker and its editors thus criticized the shortcomings of this opinion composed of women and mecanics who expressed their flawed views orally and loudly. By contrast it vindicated the advantages of free-thinking, based on reason, education and politeness. It also stressed the value of the periodical press in providing readers with lectures on history, politics, the law or philosophy and on the true meaning of words. The periodical therefore sought to instruct readers into becoming competent citizens. The Free-Thinker seems to have been one of the early theoreticians of public opinion and to have presided to the birth of public opinion, decades before the late eighteenth century.However, analyzing the Free Thinker reveals how difficult it was for the Free Thinker to reach its aim. By defining free thinking along Newtonian lines, namely the liberty to develop intellectual enquiry in a providentialist world order and by equating public opinion with the strict adherence to Whig ideas, The Free Thinker was faced with contradictions. Its political tone and bias occasionally made it hard to distinguish it from mere opinion. Its hostility to any form of opposition to the Whig government combined with the editorial control the periodical exercised on its correspondents also suggests that the Free Thinker was still uncertain about the degree of intellectual independence it could allow their correspondents. It thus contradicted its own lectures on the necessity to develop one's reason. All these elements suggest that the Free Thinker was a transitional paper which longed to create an enlightened public opinion, but which dreaded it would unleash the force of subversion again.