This article questions the critic’s special status in the emerging literary press by tracing the critic, author, and reader’s constitutive links. It takes Jean Loret’s Muse historique as its starting point. This literary entertainment, which brings together the primary characteristics of periodical writing, draws an initial portrait of the honest critic who places himself in opposition to the erudite critic. A detailed analysis of the various French Mercures, starting with the Mercure galant, then allows us to understand the progressive evolution of the worldly critic: sometimes confronted with the figure of the censor who serves as a foil, other times with problems of personal interest and publicity, the critic first defends the specificity of his voice and the value of his remarks by adopting a civil and worldly behavior, thus ultimately defining himself as a social actor. The Mercures that succeeded the first Mercure galant also show that very quickly, the figure of the critic seeks to dissociate himself from the author and that the editors emphasize the need to adopt a neutral tone. An overview of this corpus clearly shows that the origins of the worldly press testify to a gradual shift between literary practice and media communication.