Antoine Sabatier de Castres

Abbé Antoine Sabatier de Castres (born April 13, 1742 in Castres , † June 15, 1817 in Paris ) was a French journalist , writer and publicist and supporter of a countercurrent to the Enlightenment.

origin

Antoine Sabatier was born in Castres , a small town in what is now the Tarn department in the Midi , in 1742 . The family provided magistrates for several generations. According to Jean Sgard's Dictionnaire des journalistes, the parents themselves were small merchants (“marchands”). According to Voltaire , they are said to have been wig makers. Antoine was designated for the clergy. However, he was expelled from the Castres seminary because of a penchant for secular literature after receiving the tonsure there. Sabatier was legally entitled to the title Abbé just as little as a title of nobility.

Literary development

After being expelled from the seminar, the young Sabatier tried with some success as a playwright and writer in Toulouse . A first comedy “Les Eaux de Bagnères” and a number of epigrams, epistles, madrigals and revealing verses date from this time . Encouraged by these successes, Sabatier successfully asked Claude Adrien Helvétius for support in letters in 1765 . Helvétius invited the young author to Paris and granted him a scholarship of 1200 livres over two years.

Sabatier sought access to the salons in Paris and wrote eulogies for Voltaire and Jean Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert , who however rejected and rejected the young author. At the same time Helvétius stopped his support. A note from d'Alembert's letter has been preserved that Helvétius chased the little stray, who had arrived from Castres in wooden shoes ("sabots"), out of the house like a lackey. In the early Parisian years, a volume of revealing poems and anecdotes was created in 1767, Les Quarts d'heure d'un joyeux solitaire, ou contes de M. *** , but also an appreciation of Spinoza and two novellems in the style of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie or The new Heloise .

After the loss of Helvétius' scholarship, Sabatier looked for new patrons, whom he found among the opponents of the philosophers. Supported by the conservative literary critic and publicist Élie Catherine Fréron , Sabatier published in 1771 the "Tableau philosophique de l'esprit de M. de Voltaire", a one-page disclosure report on the supposedly malicious literary and social practices of the Patriarch of Ferney. Sabatier, derisively called "Sabotier" by Voltaire, developed in the following years into an apologist of the Counter-Enlightenment, who smelled the poison and fanaticism of the "philosophers" everywhere.

The three-volume lexicon of authors Les trois siècles de la littérature francaise, ou tableau de l'esprit de nos écrivains depuis Francois Ier , published in 1772, is the logical extension of the attack on all free-spirited authors in France over the past three centuries and does not spare the former patron Helvétius either. A fourth volume of Les trois siècles followed in 1779 . However, due to the biographies it contains, the work is an important source for the lives of the smaller French authors. Other major publications were Les síècles paiens in 1784 , a lexicon on mythology and cultural history of antiquity, and in 1804 a compilation of passages from the works that were friendly to religion and monarchy J.-J. Rousseau's Le Véritable esprit de J.-J. Rousseau .

During the French Revolution

Although Sabatier found access to the Society of Thirty because of his philosophical interests and contacts , he emigrated immediately after the storming of the Bastille and from then on lived in Hamburg .

End of life

During the restoration, he received an annual pension of 2000 francs for his services to the Ancien Régime . Sabatier died in 1817 and was last cared for by the Charité sisters .

Works

Selection:

• Les Eaux de Bagnères , Toulouse, 1763
• Les Quarts d'heure d'un joyeux solitaire, ou contes de M. *** , Paris, 1765
• Tableau philosophique de l'esprit de M. de Voltaire , Crammer (unknown), Geneva (unknown), 1771
• Les trois siècles de la littératurefrancaise, ou tableau de l'esprit de nos écrivains depuis Francois Ier , three volumes 1772, expanded to four volumes 1779
• Les síècles paiens, ou Dictionnaire mythologique, héroique, politique, littéraire et géographique de l'Antiquité , nine volumes, 1784
• Vie polémique de Voltaire; ou histoire de ses proscriptions avec les pièces justificatives , an X [1801/02]
• Le Véritable esprit de J.-J. Rousseau , three volumes, 1804