Bernard de La Monnoye

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Bernard de La Monnoye (born June 15, 1641 in Dijon , † October 15, 1728 in Paris ) was a French poet, scholar and member of the Académie française .

life and work

La Monnoye attended the Jesuit college in Dijon, studied law in Orléans and was a lawyer at the Parlement in his hometown as early as 1662 . Out of a tendency to learned literacy, he gave up his profession and joined a circle of like-minded people. He contented himself with the position of a conseiller-correcteur in the financial administration (1672-1696) and wrote poems with which he won the poetry prize of the Académie française five times (1671-1683), so that they no longer had to ask him to run. In 1687 he became a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Ricovrati of Padua .

Around 1700 La Monnoye entered into a competition with Aimé Piron (1640-1727), the father of Alexis Piron , in the writing of poems about the biblical Christmas events , so-called Noëls (Christmas carols), in the dialect of his homeland ( Bourguignon-Morvandiau ). While Piron soon gave up, he put poem after poem and published the results in 1700 and 1707 (1720 with the dictionary added). In a pre-romantic turn to the people, he established the literary nature of the dialect in France. In the texts, there is often a distanced, satirical, if not subversive, view of what is happening, so that the choice of language can also be understood as a device against censorship. He was attacked for this and wrote an apology. With his appreciation of the vernacular, several years before similar efforts of the doctor Camille Falconet , Count Caylus or his young friend Jean Bouhier and long before Johann Gottfried Herder or Justus Möser , he was successful. Several editions were published (including translations), most recently in 2002 with a Romance foreword by the dialectologist Gérard Taverdet.

In 1707, at the age of 66, La Monnoye went to Paris, where he made an impression as a provincial with extensive knowledge and was accepted into the Académie française (seat no. 30) in 1713. When the speculative bubble created by John Law burst in 1720 , he was ruined and relied on the support of the Duke of Villeroy and Madame de Caylus . He died in 1728 at the age of 87. Two years earlier, his wife Claudine Henriot (* 1652), with whom he had been married since 1675, had died.

Works (selection)

  • Les Noëls Bourguignons . Edited by François Fertiault . Lavigne, Paris 1842. Locard-Davi and C. Vanier, Paris 1858. (with French translation and short biography of La Monnoyes)
    • Les Noëls bourguignons. Textes en patois et leur traduction . Edited by Gérard Taverdet. Université pour tous de Bourgogne, Chalon-sur-Saône 2002. (French translation by Fertiault)
  • (Eds.) Jean Bouhier and Bernard de Montfaucon : Lettres pour et contre , sur la fameuse question, si les solitaires, appelés Thérapeutes, dont a parlé Philon le Juif, étaient chrétiens. Paris 1712.
  • (Ed.) Ménagiana . 3. Edition. Paris 1715.
  • Lettres inédites de Bernard de La Monnoye à Nicolas Thoynard, 1679–1697 . Ed. Émile Du Boys. L. Téchener, Paris 1890.

literature

  • Philibert Papillon (1666–1738): Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne . Vol. 2. Dijon 1742, pp. 61-79.
  • Gabriel Peignot (1767–1849): Nouvelles recherches littéraires, chronologiques et philologiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Bernard de La Monnoye, avec des notes renfermant quelques détails relatifs à Dijon et à la Bourgogne . 1832. (online)
  • Joachim Rees: The culture of the amateur . Weimar 2006, pp. 334-340. (on the "literary colonization of the peuple ")
  • Franz Josef Hausmann : "A forgotten celebrity of the 18th century: Count Caylus, scholar and man of letters". In: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 53, 1979, pp. 191-209. (on the role of the people in Caylus)
  • Pierre Rézeau: "157. Le dictionnaire dialectal: l'exemple français". In: (Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann , Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta , eds.) Dictionaries. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. An international handbook on lexicography (= handbooks on language and communication studies , 5). Second part of the volume. Berlin. New York 1990, pp. 1467-1475. (on Falconet, p. 1468)

Web links
personal data
SURNAME La Monnoye, Bernard de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Monnoye, Bernard de La
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French poet, scholar and member of the Académie française
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1641
PLACE OF BIRTH Dijon
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1728
Place of death Paris