Antoine Léonard Thomas

Antoine Léonard Thomas by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725–1802)

Antoine Léonard Thomas (born October 1, 1732 in Clermont-Ferrand , † September 17, 1785 in Oullins ) was a French rhetorician and poet of the Enlightenment.

Thomas was famous for the eloquence of his speeches to important figures in French history, such as the Marshal of Saxony , the Chancellor of King d'Anguesseau , the Admiral of the French fleet Duguay-Tronin , the Duc de Sully , Marshal of France, as well on the philosopher René Descartes . The speech on Marc Aurel is considered to be his brilliant achievement . The Académie française awarded him the rhetoric prize ( Prix ​​d'éloquence ) in 1739, 1760, 1761, 1763 and 1765 . He also received the Academy Prize for Poetry in 1762.

Thomas was habitué of several Parisian salons , which were run by financially independent women and in which writers, musicians, scientists and members of the nobility frequented. He was protected by M ^me Geoffrin , who gave him a pension and a legacy of 1,275 livres .

Thomas and the Académie française

Thomas' acceptance into the Académie française turned out to be rather difficult. When he was under discussion as a candidate for a vacant armchair in 1763 , his application to the second candidate Jean-François Marmontel was withdrawn, much to the displeasure of his employer, the Duke of César Gabriel de Choiseul-Praslin , ministre français des affaires étrangères , who then dismissed him from his service.

However, he was determined as a candidate for the next free place, and so he had to wait three more years to finally take the armchair 30 in the successor of the historian Jacques Hardion (1686–1766). He gave his inaugural address on the subject of homme de lettres and citizens . In his speech he stressed that a homme de lettres must be independent. On August 23, 1770, he gave another speech to Marc Aurel, which, however, was not allowed to be printed by order of the French Chancellor. The following year, on the occasion of Loménie de Briennes' admission to the Académie française, he gave a speech in which he alluded to certain machinations of the Attorney General Séguier , which was received with applause by the audience. Séguier denounced him to the Chancellor, chancelier de France René Charles de Maupeou (1688–1755), who gave Thomas a ban on speaking in public. Thereupon some members of the academy showed solidarity with Thomas and put Séguier "in quarantine". His successor on the Fauteuil 30 was the French general and military writer Jacques Antoine Hippolyte Guibert .

The essay on women

At the beginning of 1772 Thomas published a 140-page text, the "Essay on the Character, Manners and Spirit of Women in Different Centuries". He begins there with a broad historical overview of the social history of women on the basis of biographies of famous historical women, and then poses the question that will move feminism and gender research two centuries later : If no woman has caught up with famous men, Is that due to upbringing or to nature ( Si aucune femme s'est mise à côté des hommes célèbres, est-ce la faute de l'éducation ou de la nature? ) According to Trouille, Thomas remains in his essay in the context of the traditional Gender stereotypes : he locates the inability of women to catch up with famous men in their nature, in their delicate nerves, their innate modesty and their sheltered life. Their inferiority to men in both the sciences and the arts is due to their natural impatience, lack of perseverance and inability to express strong emotions . The woman's power of imagination may be similar to a mirror that reflects everything but does not create anything new. Their natural role is that of the woman and mother and not an exposed position in public. He considers the tendency of women in Parisian society of his time to interfere in politics or to expose themselves publicly to be unnatural.

On the other hand, he recognizes and regrets the oppression of women over the centuries.

Even before the publication of his study, when Thomas told his friends about his project, he was ridiculed by the influential Correspondance littéraire , which, in addition to Melchior Grimm, was also edited by his longtime friends Louise d'Épinay and Denis Diderot . Antoine Léonard Thomas was generally considered a "virgin" ( vierge ), and his suitability for such an investigation was publicly doubted.

In May 1771 Thomas publicly presented his essay on the occasion of the introduction of Abbés Arnaud (1721–1784) to the Academy, whereupon the Correspondance suffisiently recommended that the author , for the benefit of his investigation, be more intimate with the " heroines " of the salons in which he was wrong to let in. The book appeared in print in March 1772, and in the Correspondance of April 1 of the same year, Diderot was not very squeamish about the author in a book review. His slavery spread in the salons and the author was ridiculed.

criticism

The critic himself has excessive pathos and passion for his subject , which Diderot misses in the author. In a passionate and self-centered review, he paints the image of women as “the only being in this world who repays feeling with feeling and finds happiness in the happiness it gives us” (p. 14). Diderot locates the fundamental difference between man and woman, the tendency of women to hysteria , their tendency to increase affects and emotions to a degree “that a man will never experience” (p. 14), only in the natural biological physiological differences between the sexes. Her biological disposition determines her role as wife and mother, and both the upbringing by her own mother and the rules of society force her into a "bondage" (p. 26) from which he - Diderot - would free her, if only he could.

Louise d'Épinay takes the absolute opposite position. In her letter of March 14, 1772 to Abbé Ferdinando Galiani , she expressed her shock at the banality of Thomas' argument. The author regards the sympathy expressed by the author in the fate of the woman as hypocrisy. It is a fact, she explains in her letter, that men and women are absolutely equal in both their physical and intellectual abilities. As evidence, she cites the women of indigenous peoples ( les femmes sauvages ), who are as robust and agile as men. The alleged physical weakness of women is solely the result of upbringing and the cultural environment. In their opinion, women and men have had the same cognitive abilities since birth that allow them to be active in public.

In the course of the feminism debates of the last century, Thomas' text was occasionally reread. The American historian Mary Trouille, who focused her research on the role of women in the 18th century, sees Thomas as the proponent of a traditional role assignment of women, the tendency of women of his time to publicly interfere in politics, the traditional He considers it “unnatural” to mix up gender roles, and to bless the regeneration of society it is necessary for women to reconsider their role as mother and guardian of domestic virtues. According to Badinter, Thomas has the merit of formulating questions that are still virulent in the feminist debate. She draws the following conclusion: “Is the woman like the man, so that it is proper to treat her as a partner? Or else it always remains “The Other” ( L'autre ) endowed with all indestructible marks of difference, which at the same time arouse desire and fear. In the first case, equality is created by itself, otherwise it is difficult to achieve. "Recognizing and recognizing equality in difference is a nice idea, but isn't that also a nice utopia?" "

Works (selection)

• Poésis diverse. 1763.
• Odes sur les temps . [1]
• Uvres de Thomas. Belin, Paris 1819.
• Essai sur le caractère, les mœurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les différens siècles . 1772. [2]
• Essai sur les éloges. 1773.

Literary theoretical investigation into the genre of the award speech .

Literature and Sources

• Mary Trouille: Sexual, textual politics in the Enlightment, Diderot and d'Epinay respond to Thomas's essay on women. In: The Romantic Review. March 1, 1994.
• AL Thomas, Diderot, Madame d'Épinay. Qu'est-ce qu'une femme? In: Élisabeth Badinter : Un débat préfacé. POL, Paris 1989 full text (PDF; 15 kB)

Text from Thomas' Essai sur le caractère ... des femmes and the reactions of Denis Diderot and M ^me d'Épinay to the essai , introduced with a foreword by the French philosopher and sociologist E. Badinter.

• Melinda Caron: Conversation intime et pédagogie dans Les conversations d'Émilie de Louise d'Épinay. 2003. Chapter 2.4: Critiques sociales et pédagogiques dans la correspondance avec l'abbé Galiani . (Full text)
• Ferdinando Galiani , Louise d'Épinay : Correspondance . Vol. 3: March 1772 – May 1773. Edited by Daniel Maggetti. 1994.
• Denis Diderot : Reasons to mourn my old dressing gown. About women. Two essays - Translated from the French by Hans Magnus Enzensberger . New edition. Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-921592-76-2 .

Web links

Wikisource: Antoine Léonard Thomas  - sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Antoine Léonard Thomas in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Source for this chapter Académie française
2. ↑ De l'homme de lettres considéré comme citoyen
3. ↑ Essai sur le chactère, les mœurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les differens [sic] siècles .
4. ^ Mary Trouille: Sexual, textual politics in the Enlightenment, Diderot and d'Epinay respond to Thomas's essay on women. In: The Romantic Review. 1994, ISBN 0-7914-3490-7 .
5. ^ Foreword by E. Badinter. In: AL Thomas: Diderot, Madame d'Épinay. Qu'est-ce qu'une femme? Paris, POL 1989.
6. ↑ All direct quotations from Diderot from: Denis Diderot: Reasons to mourn my old dressing gown. About women. 2010.
7. ↑ Chapter 2.4: Critiques sociales et pédagogiques dans la correspondance avec l'abbé Galiani. From: Melinda Caron: Conversation intime et pédagogie dans Les conversations d'Émilie de Louise d'Épinay. 2003.
8. ↑ Élisabeth Badinter: AL Thomas, Diderot, Madame d'Épinay. Qu'est-ce qu'une femme? - Un débat préfacé. Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens POL, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-86744-146-3 .
9. ↑ Badinter 1989.