Étienne Pasquier

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Étienne Pasquier.
Portrait of Thomas de Leu .

Étienne Pasquier (born June 7, 1529 in Paris , † August 30, 1615 there ) was a French lawyer and man of letters.

Life

Pasquier came from the educated Parisian bourgeoisie and studied law in Paris and Toulouse as well as in Bologna and Pavia , where he perfected his legal education as well as his humanistic education and dealt with the Italian literature, which at the time was considered exemplary. But here, too, in northern Italy, which was being fought over between France and Germany / Spain, he became aware of his identity as a Frenchman.

Back in Paris in 1549, he was admitted to the bar at the Paris Supreme Court, the Parlement . In addition to his apparently non-absorbing activity as a lawyer, he associated with authors from the group of poets La Pléiade , a. a. Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay , and published various smaller texts in which he frequently questions the idealistic Neoplatonic ideal of love advocated by Italian humanists, to which he opposes a more sober view that is widespread in France.

Above all, however, Pasquier pursued the theme of France, more precisely that of the development and identity of the French nation. He did not see their roots, as was customary until then, with the Romans or the Franks or even the legendary Trojan Francus , but with the Celtic Gauls . Its main goal was to demonstrate that France was an exemplary constitutional and cultural independence, which had already existed with the Gauls, was revived after the interlude of the Roman era and then continuously developed by kings, intellectual elite and people (see also Celtic ideology ). He presented these ideas, which bore nationalist traits, in the historical-philosophical text Recherches de la France (1560) (German: "Research on France"), with which he also propagated the idea that the interests of the nation, which had grown organically over the centuries, had priority over the changing particular interests and in particular the religiously motivated partisanship with which Catholics and Protestants divided the country and even drawn foreign powers into their conflict.

With his idea of ​​the primacy of the interests of the nation, Pasquier was one of the first “politiques”, that soon growing number of non-denominational intellectuals and political minds who tried to pacify France in the face of the religious wars that broke out in 1562 , but only in 1598 when the Protestantism turned to Catholicism converted new King Henry IV .

In 1564, Pasquier made a name for himself with a brilliant plea for the traditional, typically French Parisian university, the Sorbonne , and against the ultramontane- oriented Jesuits who had just founded the new Collège de Clermont . With his scolding of the quasi-unpatriotic Jesuits, he had found a topic that should occupy him again and again, e.g. B. 1602 with the sarcastic Catéchisme des Jésuites , from which Blaise Pascal later took some inspiration for his Lettres provinciales (1656–1657).

In 1585 Pasquier became (certainly thanks to the success of his research ) Attorney General at the Royal Court of Auditors, which he remained for two decades. This post, too, obviously did not completely absorb him, because in addition to various smaller, often polemical texts, from 1586 he published many volumes of literary letters that were supposed to rival those of the Roman Pliny or the Italian Claudio Tolomei .

From 1588 to 1594, Pasquier was a deputy for the city of Paris at the intermittent meeting of the Estates General in Blois . He was friends with the essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne .

With his career he was a typical representative of the new official nobility, the noblesse de robe , ie a stratum between the upper bourgeoisie and the older nobility, the noblesse d'épée, consisting of the royal judicial and administrative elite and their families .

Recherches de la France. (1596)

For contemporaries and posterity, he was above all the author of the research , which, after the first edition in 1560, appeared again in 1565, 1596, 1607 (as well as posthumously 1621ff) in revised versions with new chapters.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sarah Bakewell: How should I live? or The Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63969-2 , p. 96
  2. ↑ Edoardo Costadura: The nobleman at the desk: On the self- image of aristocratic writers between renaissance and revolution. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-4845-5046-5 , p. 31
personal data
SURNAME Pasquier, Etienne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French lawyer and man of letters
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1529
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1615
Place of death Paris